By Brian Musgrove

On the night of Thursday 22 June 2006, as Australian Members of Parliament packed to leave the national capital for their winter recess, the Canberra Press Gallery received a phone call from the Prime Minister’s Office. Media apparatchiks were summoned to the PM’s residence, The Lodge, at 5.30am the following morning to capture ‘World Cup footage of the Prime Minister in front of his television set.’ They dutifully appeared ‘just in time to catch Howard whooping it up’ over an Australian goal against Croatia and ‘were gone, bundled back outside, by 5.45.’1 Subsequently, television networks carried vision of a track-suited John Howard leaping from his armchair and The Australian ran a photograph of the moment on its weekend edition front page (24-25 June 2006). It was a typical ‘pseudo-event’: a term that should, in its suggestiveness, replace the more anodyne ‘photo-opportunity’ to describe the collusion of the political classes and the media pack in peddling this sort of confection.

Howard’s World Cup summons to the press was merely the latest occasion in a long public relations campaign. For a decade, Howard – ‘such a control freak’ says political analyst Malcolm Mackerras2 – has micro-managed his public persona with the general and unprecedented co-operation of Australia’s mainstream news media. As one of the central symbols of that persona, the green and gold track-suit has both positioned Howard as the nation’s premier sports fan and laid the implication that he is something of a sports star in his own right: a bustling, healthy, can-do Aussie bloke. Howard is ubiquitously attired in the green and gold for his morning power-walk, a daily ritual which according to Matt Price has ‘morphed from national embarrassment into badge of success… the exercise regime is widely acclaimed and admired.’3 In Nick Cater’s collection The Howard Factor: A Decade that Transformed the Nation, a joint publishing venture of Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd and Melbourne University Press (2006), this portrait of Howard is jubilantly endorsed: ‘It’s faster than a trot yet not quite a jog. Much closer to a clip than a walk… as anyone who has wheezingly struggled to tag along knows, there’s nothing remotely languid about the Prime Minister’s exercise regime.’ Even writing about it leaves Matt Price breathless: ‘practically everything you need to know about John Howard can be garnered by observing his vigorous dawn constitutional. Iron discipline. Ferocity. Concentration. Energy. Doggedness. Power.’4 According to this, where the ethos and values of sport and politics converge, Howard is indeed ‘a player’.

In terms of this celebratory image of Howard the Sportsman, it is worth noting Matt Price’s credentials: senior Australian columnist, member of the Canberra Press Gallery, regular guest on ABC television’s Insiders political affairs programme. Price belongs to a very favoured media cohort, charged with the important task of keeping a balanced eye on politics. Thus, it is also worth noting what Price’s comments so splendidly indicate: practically everything you need to know about Australian journalism’s abandonment of critical practice and submission to official myth-making can be garnered from them. Price simply picks up Howard’s own spin-ball and runs with it.

Howard’s appeal to the national sporting mythos has been relentless; and it constitutes an attempt to fuse himself with the passions of ‘the people’, or to draw ‘the people’ into an identification with him. The trick is summed up in the opening remarks Howard made to a press conference on 19 June 2006, in which he announced himself as the public voice of Australian sporting fanaticism. Striding to the lectern, the PM effused: ‘Could I start by making a couple of comments on sport? I want to say what an extraordinary performance the Socceroos put up [against Brazil]. I, like millions of other Australians, watched the game’ – meaning that he savoured the moment with them all, as one of them. The Socceroos had ‘done the country proud’, he said, then continued: ‘And it’s been a long time since we’ve won a major tournament in golf in the US and congratulations to Geoff Ogilvie… I congratulate him on behalf of the sports-loving Australian public… also Lleyton Hewitt winning the Queen’s tournament to complete the trilogy of sporting activities overnight. Any questions?’5 Despite the small slippage here – a real sports connoisseur would surely use ‘trifecta’ instead of ‘trilogy’ – the point was clear: the PM was chief steward and spokesman of a nation that was deliriously successful on the paddock, court and fairway. In one of Howard’s most cherished sporting metaphors, Australia always ‘punches above its weight’ – on the playing-field, the battlefield, and in the sweaty ring of world diplomacy.

At one level, of course, this appeal to sports-loving Australians (and the wider message it conveys) is not so different from the opportunistic and routine stunts that politicians indulge in at election time: kissing babies, drinking beer in outback pubs, riding on tanks with diggers. At another level, it is difficult to think of any previous Australian prime minister whose recourse to myth, symbol and iconography has been so premeditated and systematic. Howard raids Australian Legend and the national image-bank daily and with alacrity; and the writers in Cater’s Howard Factor repeatedly praise this wily politician who can infallibly read the electorate’s moods and feelings and has ‘converted himself into a kind of patriotic father figure, and barely placed a foot wrong on the critical issues of cultural symbolism.’6 Indeed, most of the contributors to Cater’s collection – all journalists with the Australian newspaper – insist on Howard’s dexterity with Australian mythologies, his mastery of symbol and metaphor; and the book’s very title heavily suggests something compelling and unique, a frisson, a certain ‘je-ne-sais-quoi’ about the man and his mysterious ‘factor’. In short, he is ‘Australia’s most successful prime minister… who instinctively understands’ the people ‘like few leaders before him.’7 But there is nothing ‘instinctive’ about this highly contrived image; and lines like these, meant to sound like a profoundly struck chord, turn out to be little more than the muzak of political hagiography – a debased language, in which every detail is bent to the demands of myth and the cult of personality.

Arguments about the debasement of public language should be more common and cued by George Orwell’s still-valuable ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). In that essay, Orwell memorably remarked on the ventriloquism of public speech: ‘When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’, and as a result ‘political speech and writing [become] largely the defence of the indefensible.’8 In Australia today, Orwell’s complaint has been revived in books like Don Watson’s Weasel Words: Contemporary Clichés, Cant & Management Jargon (2004) and Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (2003). The latter argues trenchantly that public language – ‘the language of political and business leaders and civil servants… the language of power and influence’ – has been diminished (or ‘downsized’, as Watson ironically quips) to the extent that it functions in a precisely Orwellian way. A decadent language, eagerly practised by political classes and the mainstream media, produces intellectual paralysis: ‘As the powerful in legend turned the weak or the vanquished into stone, t
he
y turn us to stone through
language’, Watson writes, and they are committed ‘to neutralise expression and “vanish memory”.’ More importantly, Watson cautions against the consequences of an easy convergence of party political and media interests; against the disaster that awaits ‘when journalists ignore abuses of the public language by people of influence and power, and reproduce without comment words that are intended to deceive and manipulate. When this happens’, Watson warns, ‘journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes a kind of propaganda; or a reflection of what Simone Weil called “the superb indifference that the powerful have for the weak”.’9

The same pertains to myth as a highly problematic form of public speech and representation, and no analysis of contemporary Australian political language can ignore the resurgent uses and abuses of myth in public discourse. Mobilised politically, myth can be an intellectual scrap thrown to a public which ‘the powerful’ regard with ‘superb indifference’ or outright contempt: ‘myth-speak’ is the last rhetorical refuge of the cynic. Myth displaces history’s complexities with metaphysical assurances, and attempts to obliterate the fractious contradictions and pains of lived experience. In this sense, myth operates exactly as Roland Barthes theorised it fifty years ago: ‘myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and of making contingency appear eternal’, and this is ‘exactly’ the inner logic of ‘bourgeois ideology’ itself – ‘things lose the memory that they were once made’, or confected. Barthes argued that myth-speak is favoured by the political right: it is anti-revolutionary and a stasis-through-naturalisation – turning thought to stone and vanishing memory, as Don Watson writes of decayed public discourse. Importantly, myth effects the passage from ‘reality to representation’, from ‘economic’ being to ‘mental’ being, and in this process the dialectic of power-oppression disappears and the possibility of class struggle or resistance is anaesthetised.10

It is valuable to return to these critical ‘first principles’ in examining the political resurrection of myth-speak in contemporary Australian politics. In this regard, it is also valuable to recall Barthes’ observation that in the ‘vocabulary’ of bourgeois ruling classes ‘the universal exists… politics is already a representation, a fragment of ideology’11 – and myth-speak is a pure expression of power re-imagined as orderly and ordinary. So much so, Barthes concluded, that words like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalism’ become unutterable: all that is solid melts into air and ideology, the substance of myth, is everywhere.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell addressed the question of why the First World War created ‘a world of reinvigorated myth… That such a myth-ridden world could take shape in the midst of a war representing a triumph of modern industrialism, materialism and mechanism is an anomaly worth considering.’12 A similar question needs to be asked in Australia today: why, in a world of sophisticated technology, information richness, cultural diversity and political and economic complexity has myth-speak re-appeared so prominently in public discourse? In part, the answer lies in Howard’s ambition to supplant the nation’s relativities and diversities with a form of bourgeois capitalist universalism. But this is connected to a larger historical movement: the rise of fundamentalisms, which provokes the belief – articulated in the ‘with us or against us’ rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’ – that this is an age in which nations and peoples must radically embrace a particular universal imaginary. As Stuart Sim persuasively writes, Jean-François Lyotard’s libertarian prediction of the death of grand narratives was premature. Grand narratives are back, Sim argues, reprocessed as fundamentalisms, and ‘We live in a fundamentalist world because fundamentalists exert such a powerful influence on so many of our institutions – religious, political, and economic.’13 As systems that promise to explain everything, fundamentalisms and the myths that sustain them lay claim to the universal, vanishing the memory of history itself as different from the present. In this climate, Howard and the powerful media interests that back him have made a choice: to propagate a constellation of myths that is aligned with a particular conception of ‘America’ as universal, fundamental symbol. As he declared on a visit to Washington in May 2006, no nation in world history ‘has brought to bear the righteous force or generous countenance of the United States of America… With American leadership, we can build a better world – not just for us, but for all.’ And he condescended to America’s critics: ‘To the voices of anti-Americanism around the world, to those who shout “Yankee go home”, let me offer some quiet advice: be careful what you wish for.’14 The myths of American Exceptionalism, neo-conservative ‘new world order’ and ‘full-spectrum dominance’ breathe heavily in such remarks.

Howard has worked hard to construct a cogent field of interlaced myths, and the vocabulary of myth-speak permeates his public utterances. The guiding ideology that organises this field is certainly not Burkean: it is a spiritualised (‘righteous’) neo-conservatism wedded to the doctrine of ‘market fundamentalism’ – might, right, hyper-capitalism and America. To sell this package locally, Howard effortlessly appeals to national symbology: in 2006, justifying a $50 million handout to Ford, ‘an ailing American car company… to design petrol-hungry vehicles, many of which will be made only overseas’, he described the government funding as a measure to ‘help secure the future of… the iconic Ford Falcon’.15 The Adelaide to Darwin railway is another case in point. The rail-link was constructed by a consortium, funded with more than 500 million taxpayer dollars: a group in which Halliburton-Kellog Brown & Root was a major investor – US Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton CEO when the successful bid was won in 1997. This consortium was granted ownership and operation of the line until 2051. Howard re-cast the project as an epic of nation-building, and his opening address at the rail-link’s launch in 2004 praised it as ‘a great moment in Australian history’ and a lesson to the world that ‘there is absolutely nothing that Australians working together cannot achieve.’16 It was a Federation dream, a century in the making, and Howard habitually referred to it as his ‘Snowy River’ or the ‘steel Snowy scheme’ of the twenty-first century.17 As these examples show, Howard is ever-ready to wrap the realities of American capital in the fabric of Australian myth; to employ myth to move from economic to mental being and displace history – and business – from public discourse. This is one facet of his myth-speak in action.

In the examples above, Howard’s myth-speak works to conceal a potentially unpopular aspect of Australian-American relations. On other occasions, he readily reveals America as Australia’s symbolic twin. In a recent article in The Monthly magazine, titled ‘Little America’, Robert Manne capably demonstrates the Prime Minister’s ‘romantic attachment to American civilisation’ and his ‘vision of Australia’s future as ally of the great American Empire.’ Apart from the essentially Australian ‘fair go’ and ‘mateship’, Manne lists some of the shared values which Howard believes constitute an unbreakable (and spiritual) Australian-American fraternity: ‘the rule of law… the individual is more important than the state… robust but ethical capitalism… decency and hard work define a person’s worth’. Both countries have ‘grown from a pioneer society where adversity has been overcome and dreams pursued’; both believe in ‘the family, “the greatest social welfare system the world has ever devised

.”’18 There is
no doubt that Howard regards this kinship in fundamentalist terms: ‘We are societies that fundamentally see the value of people [in] their personal character and their commitment to the ideals and common values of their country… we are nations that are, I think, also united in our belief that an open free market… is the one that best meets the aspirations and hopes of our citizens’, he told Washington’s National Press Club in 2004; adding that ‘when I come to Washington I feel familiar.’19

Undoubtedly, this vision has been deepened by Howard’s attraction to neo-conservative politics. In a speech to the Australian American Association in Melbourne in 2003, he crowed that theories of American decline and ‘books having titles such as The End of the American Century’ could be seen ‘well and truly off’. The proof was the ‘the leadership of President Reagan, in bringing about the implosion and ultimate disappearance of the Soviet Union, and the liberation of tens of millions of people in eastern Europe from a tyranny that they never of course wanted… a remarkable triumph and a remarkable tribute to the strength and the reach of American power’.20 This myth is particularly cherished by the neo-cons who founded the Project for the New American Century, many of whom – Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle – were Cold-War veterans and are now Bush Administration insiders with whom Howard has consorted. To them all, America is indeed Reagan’s mystic ‘Shining City on the Hill’, and the myth – or delusion – that Reagan won the Cold War is an article of fundamentalist faith that underwrites their call for the exercise of American power, ‘right and might’, universally. Once again, the myth of how the ‘Evil Empire’ fell displaces historical complexities and attempts to humiliate America’s critics into silence.

However, it is not simply the case that Howard has been seduced by the myth of American power in its present form, or by the ‘special hospitality’ extended to him in Washington by his ‘soul mate’ (Howard’s actual words) George W. Bush. As a trainee Cold Warrior himself, in the 1950s, Howard’s thinking tended in the same direction anyway: his myth-speak about the majesty of the USA has a genealogy of its own. Michelle Grattan writes: ‘As a young man strongly interested in international relations, Howard was socialised in the Cold War era,’ when the Australian-American alliance ‘totally dominated Australia’s foreign policy.’21 According to his brother Bob, the young Howard was fiercely anti-Communist, exceeding their conservative mother’s views: ‘One example was the Communist Party Dissolution Bill. John supported Menzies over that, but our mother disagreed.’ Likewise, the future PM was deaf to the progressive attitudes of the Methodist Church – an institution frequently credited with morally fashioning him – and the opinion pages of its newspaper: ‘I don’t think I ever saw a copy of the Methodist in our house,’ Bob Howard recalls.22 Amongst other social justice stances, the Methodist ‘nervously monitored’ McCarthyism in America as ‘a new totalitarianism’,23 though the youthful Howard was apparently unmoved. But as Marion Maddox reveals in her fine study God Under Howard (2005), there was a very crucial fashioning force on the young Howard’s imagination. Bob Howard, again, remembers: ‘What we read was the Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post. I remember the Saturday Evening Post arriving, every second Tuesday, a smorgasbord of American consumer goods. It went on for years – log-cabin-to-the White House, kids selling lollies on the roadside – that sort of influence was more important than the church in shaping our family’s values.’24

If Howard is beguiled by America, it is not because his proximity to the events of 11 September 2001 or his friendship with Bush are switch-points: rather, as Maddox finds, it is because a mythic America is implanted in his consciousness. He was always-already an ‘Americanophile’, as Robert Manne writes; and Manne concludes that Howard can palpably discount Australia’s national interest in areas like the Free Trade Agreement, his acceptance of the doctrine of pre-emption, and the military deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq – and ‘it is the military dimension of the relationship’ with the US ‘that goes most deep’ with him. In Manne’s estimation, these military adventures were ‘grounded less in rational calculation and far more in sentimental dreaming.’25

The depth of Howard’s ‘sentimental dreaming’ is evident in the way in which he has even given Australia’s key myth, Anzac, an American accent. Howard’s attachment to and use of Anzac has been much commented upon; and as Anzac has an ‘omnipresence’, a ‘resonant aura of always-everness’, functioning as ‘the modern Australian dreaming’, it is perhaps surprising that Howard has consciously inserted an American inflection in the most ‘sacred’ of Australian myths. 26 ‘Often he refers to the Australian and American airmen who were shot down together in New Guinea’, Manne notes, ‘and who, because their bodies could not be separated, now share a common grave at Arlington cemetery’ in Washington.27 Equally, he reminds the Australian public of its debt to American protection in the Battle of the Coral Sea – an ‘intervention’ that ‘stood between us and potential military conquest’ by the Japanese.28 Howard stresses that Australia has stood with America ‘shoulder to shoulder’29 (one of Orwell’s ‘dummy’ catch-phrases) in every major conflict for a century – and that ‘great and noble purposes… have animated US foreign policy down the ages.’30 Howard constantly invokes the Great-War Battle of Hamel: ‘when on 4 July 1918… on America’s national day Australians and Americans first fought together… On subsequent occasions we have also fought in defence of our common values.’ These values are ‘the belief that the individual is more important than the state, that strong families are a nation’s greatest asset, that competitive free enterprise is the ultimate’ – fundamentalist – ‘foundation of national wealth’.31 This traduction, or pollution, of the Anzac myth by market fundamentalist cant requires severe inspection. It supposes the historic continuation of a tradition of natural justice, militarily visited upon those ‘evil’ foes of ‘goodness’ – and consumer capitalism – that drives the collective dreaming of the Great Democracies.

Young John Howard’s experience of the Saturday Evening Post establishes the guidelines of a particular fundamentalism. The images of kids selling roadside sweets, galaxies of consumer ‘goods’ and log-cabin-to White House dreams speak a powerful, interrelated set of myths: private enterprise, prosperity, class mobility and ultimate empowerment. For Howard, ‘America’ essentially signifies the market fundamentalist cash-power nexus, and all the other values which he claims Australia and the US have in common – individualism, decency, family, freedom – are contingent upon it. As a recent editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s flagship broadsheet, The Australian, stunningly – if inadvertently – revealed, Howard’s real and ‘lasting’ (timeless) achievement has been to acquaint the masses with a respect for money and power. Tirelessly mythologising Howard, the paper’s editorialists credited him with changing ‘the way Australians think about money’ and the universalist ability to reach ‘across class divides… to speak to all segments of society.’ (As Barthes wrote, a mythic projection like this renders words like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalism’ unspeakable.) The editorial proceeded: ‘Working men no longer resent the bosses in big houses… working-class families say they vote for John Howard because “the only way to look after working people is to keep the rich happy”… they will never be able to get ahead in a country with a stagnan

t economy and a host
ile business environment… Geopolitically, Mr Howard has turned Australia into a highly respected international player… much of this hinges on his close relationship with George W. Bush.’32 Australian ‘egalitarianism’ is supplanted by American ‘enterprise’: in the minds of The Australian’s editorial writers, Australia is indeed Robert Manne’s ‘Little America’, and what Manne dubs the ‘dominionisation’ of Australia by American values and politico-economic power is a fait accompli.33

In this regard, Howard’s American-inflected myth-speak is surely designed to ‘turn us to stone through language’, as Don Watson observes; to neutralise resistance, to vanish the memory of a world that was or could be different. And mainstream media re-iteration of Howard’s American-oriented myth-speak – especially strident in Murdoch’s News Ltd press – has certainly ceased to be journalism and become propaganda: a reflection of ‘the superb indifference that the powerful have for the weak’. Myth is also a form of interpellation, as Barthes understood: ‘it has an imperative, buttonholing character… it is I whom it has come to seek… I am subjected to its intentional force’;34 so the obsessive concern with ‘the people’ and the people’s reaction to Howard’s myth-speak can be critically read as an attempt to position ‘the weak’ in a particular set of power relations. Howard’s sure-footedness in matters of ‘cultural symbolism’ has made him a ‘patriotic father figure’, Nicolas Rothwell writes; and Paul Kelly, The Australian’s ‘editor at large’, intones that over time ‘Howard and the nation have moved closer together’, and his cabinet ministers (like him) believe ‘there is more wisdom at the local pub than in a university seminar.’ Kelly paints his own folksy, fire-side picture of the PM, but the colours come from Rothwell’s palette: ‘Howard chooses not to live in Canberra. He lives in Sydney and the symbolism is unmistakeable – he leaves Canberra to return to the nation’35 as a patriarch comes home to his extended family at the end of a long, hard yet rewarding day at the office.

This portrait of Howard the father-figure interpellates ‘the people’ as his children, and it betrays the cynicism behind the ‘sentimental dreaming’ of myth-speak. As a debased language, myth-speak displays the sublime indifference of the powerful for weak. In Howard’s political world, the ‘intentional force’ of myth is mobilised to realise a fundamental ideological tenet: that the fate of ‘the people’ is to suffer eternal contempt and to be forever patronised.

Notes:

1. Alan Ramsey, ‘So much for democratic principles’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24-25 June 2006, p.35.

2. Malcolm Mackerras, in David Humphries, ‘Howard’s power house’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24-25 June 2006, p.32.

3. Matt Price, ‘Getting Personal’, in Nick Cater, ed. The Howard Factor: A Decade that Transformed the Nation, Melbourne UP, Melbourne, 2006, p.56.   

4. Price, ‘Getting Personal’, p.55.

5. John Howard, ‘Cut and Paste’, The Australian, 20 June 2006, p.15.

6. Nicolas Rothwell, ‘Please Explain’, in Cater, ed. The Howard Factor, p.112.

7. Dennis Shanahan, ‘Two Howards’, in Cater, ed. The Howard Factor, p.31.

8. George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966, pp.152-3.

9. Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language, Knopf/Random House, Sydney, 2003, pp.1, 4-5.

10. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies, Paladin, Frogmore, 1973, pp.142, 138.

11. Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, pp.138-9.

12. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1979, p.115.

13. Stuart Sim, Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age of Dogma, Icon Books, Cambridge, 2004, p.7.

14. John Howard, in Steve Lewis, ‘PM backs “righteous force” of US’, The Australian, 19 May 2006, p.4.

15. John Howard, in John Garnaut, ‘PM gives Ford $50m to make petrol-guzzlers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6-7 May 2006, p.8.

16. John Howard, Address at the Official Opening to the Adelaide to Darwin Railway, Darwin, 17 January 2004, www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech647.

17. John Howard, in Linda Doherty and Chips Mackinolty, ‘They think they can, they think they can get the train to Darwin’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 July 2001, p.5.

18. Robert Manne, ‘Little America: How John Howard has changed Australia’, The Monthly, March 2006, p.24.

19. John Howard, Address to the National Press Club, Washington, 2 June 2004, wwwe.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech901.

20. John Howard, Address to the Australian American Association, Melbourne, 2 September 2003, www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech471.

21. Michelle Grattan, ‘John W. goes all the way with George W.’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 2001, p.10.

22. Bob Howard, in Marion Maddox, God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2005, pp.22, 20.

23. Maddox, God Under Howard, p.16.

24. Bob Howard, in God Under Howard, pp.20-1.

25. Manne, ‘Little America’, p.24.

26. Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology, St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2004, p.172.

27. Manne, ‘Little America’, p.24.

28. John Howard, Address to the Houses of the Parliament of Australia, Canberra, 23 October 2003, www,pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech545.

29. John Howard, in Grattan, ‘John W. goes all the way with George W.’.

30. John Howard, Address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Sydney, 18 June 2004, www,pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech921.

31. John Howard, Address to Parliament, 23 October 2003.

32. ‘Will he or won’t he? John Howard is in a position to secure lasting influence’, editorial, The Australian, 16 May 2006, p.13.

33. Manne, ‘Little America’, p.32.

34. Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, p.124.

35. Paul Kelly, ‘How Howard Governs’, in Cater, ed., The Howard Factor, pp.3, 10, 12.

Brian Musgrove lectures in literature and cultural theory at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, and is a member of the Public Memory Research Centre.

By Humphrey McQueen

The place of D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo in Australian creativity and criticism appears as paradoxical as the platypus. The Lawrences were in Australia for 100 days, spending only seventy-seven around Sydney where most of the novel is set, and where he completed the first draft within six weeks. Yet Lawrence has been praised for getting that strip of landscape right. The Bulletin conceded that ‘he has written a very beautiful book that is full of the sunshine and flowers of Australia’. The Professor of English language and literature at the University of Adelaide, Archibald T. Strong, recognised
one or two remarkably vivid and sympathetic pictures of Australian scenery, especially of Pacific coastal scenery, and of the blooming of the wattle in the Australian spring. He has been in Australia long enough to understand the spell which the Bush slowly, but surely, weaves around many who are at first repelled by its strangeness.
In advocating ‘The Genius of Place’ as one of The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1935), P. R. Stephensen acknowledged that ‘[v]isitors, such as D. H. Lawrence, have discerned a spiritual quality of ancient loveliness in our land itself’. The founder of the Jindyworobaks, Rex Ingamells, reveled in ‘the indestructible spirit of the place about which D. H. Lawrence has written in such a superb piece of natural description at the beginning of Kangaroo’. The acceptance of Lawrence’s eye for nature raises the first query about cultural regionalism: how could a tourist beat the locals?

The question is the more perplexing once we compare this praise for Lawrence with the assertion that only the native-born could paint the landscape. Frederick McCubbin headed a protest during 1913 to secure commissions for native-born painters who had stayed here, at the same time telling expatriates to return to soak in the atmosphere. In praising the colours of Arthur Streeton, Lionel Lindsay in 1916 argued for nativism:
The flat masses of gum leaves, with their metallic luster and elusive greys, their sheen and shimmer in bronze with blue reflections – how could eyes, accustomed to the rich distinctive greens of England, hope to render their difficult nuances?
The problem could only be solved by a native-born artist possessing the necessary genius, whose vision had never been disturbed by the schools of the old world.
This prejudice festered throughout the 1930s, by when Lindsay saw art ‘threatened everywhere by the same aliens, the same corrupting influences that undermined French art’.

The distance between the literary critics’ appreciation of the visiting author and the disparagement of foreign-born and expatriate painters is one instance of how easier it is for an experienced writer to paint pictures with words about a new place than it is for an accomplished artist to achieve tonal harmonies of an alien land with oils or watercolours. The technical demands are of different orders, despite pleasantries surrounding ut pictura poesis. The craft of writing is another kind of work. Lawrence’s ability to convey some aspects of a landscape through which he was passing should be understood in terms of the part played by every type of labour in the transition from experience to imagination. Lawrence could not have succeeded in portraying any segment of the Australian bush had he not apprenticed himself to the writer’s trade during the previous fifteen years. His poetry and imaginative prose had helped him find the words to express his responses to a fresh environment, though the sun was not new to him

Lawrence had been ‘south’ to Italy before 1914 and went there again on his way here, reaching Florence in November 1919. By March 1920, they had moved to Sicily where they remained until February 1922. Stephensen convinced himself that travel had taken Lawrence ‘out of the wet and stifling, local and insular, atmosphere of England’, which was such a miserable place that only an infusion of southern warmth and colour had allowed it any literature beyond Wycliff or Bunyon. The Italian half of Aaron’s Rod (1922) is indeed sunnier than the opening English chapters. Lawrence’s Italian years had prepared him for Australia’s climate rather as Mussolini’s fascists did for his creation of the Diggers’ leader, Kangaroo.

Thus, Lawrence was no modern tourist who had never been out of Nottinghamshire before being jetted into a Sydney January, but had enjoyed two years in the warmth around the Mediterranean. Lawrence thought Ceylon too humid, too soft, a moral failing he associated with its coloured population. The Lawrences arrived at Perth early in May, safely into autumn. They got to Sydney later that month and had left by mid-August, and so experienced only a winter, during which Somers bathed in the ocean. Had the Lawrences been in Sydney through a humid summer, would he have been able to write at all? He treated early August as the Australian spring, as if the wattle were a ‘host of golden daffodils’. For all his references to the fern continent, he had not learnt that some Australian natives have the sense to flower during the cooler months.

The mediating power of human labour on the landscape of the Nottinghamshire mining districts had helped to make Lawrence a regional author in Sons and Lovers. He carried that experience through later novels and travels. Thirroul abutted a mining community with its share of English immigrants. He was not as remote from Australians as he depicted his Somers character who declares them more alien to him ‘than Italian scoundrels, or even Indians’. (127)

The landscapes that Lawrence encountered here were not ‘primeval’ as he, Stephensen, and Ingamells used that word. The environment had been altered by human presences, to some extent through indigenous practices and more rapidly by settlers. Those changes were wrought by activities which we can sum up as ‘work’. Writing from Sydney to Katharine Susannah Prichard in July 1922, Lawrence confessed to some of the troubles he had faced in picturing the Australian component in his latest fiction:
I feel I slither on the edge of a gulf, reaching to grasp its atmosphere and spirit. It eludes me, and always would. It is too far back. It seems to me that generation after generation must people it with ghosts, and catastrophes water it with blood, before it will come alive with a new day of its own.
To create his alter ego in Richard Lovatt Somers, Lawrence could not wait for those ghosts to appear and so he summoned a version of his Dark God: ‘it seemed as if the aboriginal daimon entered his body as his slept, to destroy its old constitution. (143) With ‘black’ recurring six times in fifty lines, Somers asks himself: ‘Is this devil after all my god? Do I stand with the debbil-debbil worshippers, in spite of all my efforts and protestations?’ (165) Such dream-work can succeed for an individual visitor crafting a single novel: layers of experience and reflection are required to establish a regional culture.

The attachments that people develop towards a place grow tight because they remake themselves in the process of remaking it. John Shaw Neilson’s yacka as a bushman allowed him to sing for the endangered birds:
Man with his axe, his old contentious plough,
Grieves in the dust, a grey ungracious fellow;
He who has warred with Heaven, can he allow
Faint emperors in yellow.
The urge to versify one’s toil need not aspire to Neilson’s lyricism to be irresistible or revelatory. In no human activity can the physical be severed from the mental.

Lawrence’s essay ‘The Spirit of Place’ drew on the power of the soil to explain why the Puritan-Jesuit colonisation of the Americas had brought about ‘the transmutation from men into machines and ghosts’. The no
tion of blood and soil relied on a vulgar materialism summed up as
‘What you eat today walks and talks tomorrow’. The linking of race with food sounded convincing for as long as most supplies were sourced locally and blood was assumed to be the carrier of inherited characteristics.
And how in the name of heaven is this world-brotherhood mankind going to see with one eye, eye to eye, when the very blood is of different thicknesses on different continents, and with the difference in blood, the inevitable psychic difference? Different vision! … (148)
Oceanic transport of grains and the identification of the DNA as the node for inheritance have still not erased misconceptions about blood and soil as the determinants of national character. Such follies cannot be contained without recognizing how human labour mediates nature, including its human variant.

Stephensen did not mention the contribution of human labour to his environmental values, but set ‘place’ as their foundation stone. He called on ‘Cape York poets to make the Cape York people more aware of Cape York’, without realising that those locals, through their labours, were making Cape York available to the poets.   Ingamells similarly ignored how human activities alter landscapes and cultures, and how those actors remake themselves in the process of remaking their physical, social and poetic environments.

Stephensen might, for instance, have examined Jean Devanny’s 1936 Sugar Heaven as one aspect of the sugar industry. Despite the intensity of tropical foliage for its setting, Devanny’s novel is almost devoid of colour adjectives. She uses seventeen in the first seventeen pages but only seven during the next 300. In that opening section, she links the rich wine of the cane stalks to the blood squeezed from the workers. (pp. 11-14) Three pages later, she leads us through the colours of the landscape to have her protagonist, Dulcie, proclaim that the North is ‘heaven’. (17) Later, Devanny declares: ‘Here was drama! Here was colour! The great Painter, Life, was at work on the hitherto dull canvas of her existence’. (55) But that is the last we see of his palette.

Ingamells stressed that ‘the prime point of the Jindyworobak argument … concerns the accurate use of language’. He supposed that Lawrence had succeeded in portraying the bush ‘because he was a great writer and instinctively avoided incongruities’. This explanation in terms of innate genius sits uneasily with the Jindyworobak claim for environmental values. Some of what Lawrence accomplished in ‘the accurate use of language’ can be evaluated by examining Kangaroo for its language of colour, particularly ‘blue’ and ‘the rainbow’.

Havelock Ellis concluded his 1896 analysis of colour in poetry by remarking
that the aesthetic value of blue has not yet been fully developed in English literature; and there are signs that the English-speaking children of sunnier skies will find new scope in weaving into their work the colour of the sky and the sea, and the ideas of infinity and depth which it most naturally symbolises.
Ellis had drawn this expectation from his year in the late 1870s as a teacher in the bush beyond Scone, New South Wales. The novella that he later wrote about that time, Kanga Creek, did not match his promise. ‘Blue’ appeared four times in its fifty pages to describe eyes or clothes, but never as a metaphor for the metaphysical, or even for the heavens.

A concordance of Australian writing would be necessary to determine whether any writer had lived up to Ellis’s prediction before Lawrence’s arrival. John Shaw Neilson – known as a ‘Poet of the Colours’ – used ‘white’ more than any other colour term. The frequency of ‘green’ was followed by ‘blue’ which he often treated as a synonym for the sky. When he used ‘the blue’ symbolically he did so through his relations with birds, which he anthropomorphised. In the ‘The Gentle Water Bird’, God appears ‘terrible and thunder-blue’. In ‘The Blue Wren in the Hop-Bush’, the poet
… fears the blue light of his friend may set the world ablaze;
And the blue friend says, to mock me: ‘How slow of foot you are!’
And he puts into the broad sunshine his melody of blue.
‘The Whistling Jack’ takes blue as the symbol of nothingness. The bird justifies eating a baby chicken by reminding its human accuser of the slaughter along the Western Front:
You have defiled the sweet, green earth, and prayed into the blue,
For strength unto your God that you may other murders do,
The poet creeps away:
I did not wish to see
The heavens blue: for he had put such weakness into me.
Neilson repeated ‘red’ throughout his writing and almost always in association with murder, often in battle.

For a sometime painter himself, Lawrence recorded scant curiosity about Australian canvases. Perth did not have a public art collection to speak of. During the stopover in Adelaide, he called by its Gallery but did not comment on Tom Roberts’s ‘The Breakaway’ with its hot, dry sky. After a visit to the Melbourne collection, he came to associate the layered sky in the French Symbolist Puvis de Chavannes’ L’Hiver (Winter) with the Australian bush:
The gum trees are grayish, with pale trunks – and so often the pale, pure silver dead trees with vivid limbs; then the extraordinary delicacy of the air and the blue sky, the weird bits of creek and marsh, dead trees, sand, and very blue hills.
Lawrence appears not to have visited the National Gallery in Sydney where he could have seen the glare of Streeton’s ‘Fire’s On!’

The speed of Kangaroo’s composition encouraged Lawrence to raise his splash of colours to an aesthetic precept. Shortly after completing the manuscript, he heard about the attacks on James Joyce’s Ulysses, but did not have a copy. He assumed that he and Joyce shared a stream-of-consciousness approach to writing. He soon found that Joyce had spent years arranging his syllables and so that stream-of-consciousness applied to his protagonists, not to their puppeteer.

Lawrence’s storm of creative consciousness flashes through the following passages:
They were so blue and pure: the blue harbour like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly …
It was strange that, with the finest of new air dimming to a lovely pale blue in the distance, and with the loveliest stretches of pale blue water, the tree-covered land should be so gloomy and lightless.(19)
Lawrence’s resort to ‘blue’ intensifies the capacity of his imagery to summon infinity:
and above the ridge-top the pure blue sky, so light and absolutely unsullied, it was always a wonder … into a sky of such tender delicacy, blue, so blue, and yet so frail that even blue seems too coarse a colour to describe it, more virgin than humanity can conceive, the land inward lit up … (82)
Despite the frequency of Lawrence’s association of blue with transcendence, he never tied a colour to only one response.

A recent critic, W. J. Lillyman, has proposed a reading which rescues ‘blue’ from timeless universal, locating its symbolism alienated modernity:
the blue sky … is a symbol throughout post-romantic literature … to reveal man’s isolation … an example of … a ‘true modern symbol’ [that is] the sign of the absence, or the non-being of what was formerly believed to be the perennial divine reality. ‘Le ceil est mort’. (Mallarmé, 1864) They first reveal the anguish caused by an unmediated, unapproachable, swiftly receding deity.
Lawrence attempted to fill this social vacuum with his ‘Dark God’, while many of his contemporaries also drew comfort from one or other variety of mysticism, though he tied his spiritual quest to the flesh rather than a Soul.

One of these seekers was the Theosophist Annie Besant who had arrived in Fremantle on the same ship as the Lawrences. Although Lawrence had no direct contact with her, he dabbled
in the occult and dipped into Theosophist writings. In 1901, Besant and Charles Leadb
eater had published a Theosophist account of colour harmony, Thought-Forms, in which they associated ‘blue’ with ‘Devotion to a Noble Ideal’:
The different shades of blue all indicate religious feeling, and range through all hues from the dark brown-blue of selfish devotion, or the pallid grey-blue of fetish-worship tinged with fear, up to the rich deep clear color of heartfelt adoration, and the beautiful pale azure of that highest form which implies self-renunciation and union with the divine; the devotional thought of an unselfish heart is very lovely in colour, like the deep blue of a summer sky. Through such clouds of blue will often shine out golden stars of great brilliancy, darting upwards like a shower of sparks.
Any of these characteristics could be applied to some element in both Lawrence and Somers. A residue of social reform in this crediting anyone with a selflessness would have irritated Lawrence/Somers whose Noble Ideal was ‘freedom of the individual’.

Shadowing Lawrence’s complaints about the smothering of the individual by mechanisation was his quest for the ‘Dark God’ that did not dwell in villadom. When the Somerses first rent a house – ‘Torestin’ – on the North Shore (actually a picture of ‘Wyework’ at Thirroul), these contrary attitudes flare in a disagreement about the domestic colour scheme:
Before Harriett had even taken her hat off she removed four pictures from the wall, and the red plush table-cloth from the table. Somers had disconsolately opened the bags, so she fished out an Indian sarong of purplish shot colour, to try how it would look across the table. But the walls were red, of an awful deep bluey red, that looks so fearful with dark-oak fittings and furniture: or dark-stained jarrah, which amounts to the same thing; and Somers snapped, looking at the purple sarong – a lovely thing in itself:
‘Not with red walls’.
‘No, I suppose not,’ said Harriett, disappointed. ‘We can easily colour-wash them white or – cream’.
‘What, start colour-washing walls – ?’
‘It would only take half a day’.
‘That’s what we come to a new land for – to God’s Own Country – to start colour-washing walls in a beastly little suburban bungalow? That we’ve hired for three months and mayn’t live in three weeks!’
‘Why not? You must have walls’. (11-12)
Indeed, one must. And floors too it appears because, seventy pages on, after the Somerses have shifted south to ‘Coo-ee’, they spend the day, with help from Jack and Victoria Callcott,
tearing down the horrid rag-and-dirt screens … and … the dirt-grey thin carpet … Then they banged and battered this thin old patternless carpet, and washed it with soda and water … and afternoon saw Jack and Somers polishing floors with a stuff called glowax …(84)
The threatened whitewashing, like the actual waxing, followed a utilitarian approach to decoration. The colours of nature better suited the free individual, except that they tied one to a place, and that meant to its people.

The detachments – emotional, physical and intellectual – that had been keeping Somers from saying ‘Yes’ to the leader of the fascist ‘Diggers’, Kangaroo, were also expressed through colour. Kangaroo concludes with the departure of Richard and Harriet Somers. Their last day is filled with a longing to stay in the bush, and with reflections on the significance of their sojourn. Their connections to the place are suffused with colours:
The bush now and then glowed gold, and there were almond and apricot trees near the little wooden bungalows, and by the railway unknown flowers, magenta and yellow and white, among the rocks. (356)
Into sixty lines of type, Lawrence put twenty-three colour adjectives, as well as the word ‘colour’ five times, and such cognates as ‘rainbow’, ‘darkness’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘glittering’.

Once that rejection had happened, ‘[t]he coloured bubble had burst’. (133). When Somers is leaving, he sees:
Sydney lying on its many-lobed blue harbour, in the Australian spring. The many people, all seeming dissolved in the blue air. Revolutions – nothingness. Nothing could ever matter. (356)
Here, ‘blue’ is an expression of the void, the blindness in sight, thought and feeling that flows from the play of sunlight on the surf and then the harbour. Here is a source of that emptiness that Somers finds inside Australians. (131) ‘Blue’ as nothingness arches back to the misery that Somers had felt on arrival.

Even at its most exalted, ‘blue’ could not carry his responses to their zenith. For that, Lawrence relied on the rainbow:
Far back, in the east, was a cloud that was a rainbow. It was a piece of rainbow, but not sharp, in a band; it was a tall fume far back among the clouds of the sea-wall.
‘Who is there that you feel you are with, besides me – or who feel themselves with you?’ Harriett was asking.
‘No one’, he replied. And at the same moment he looked up and saw the rainbow fume beyond the sea. But it was on a dark background like a coloured darkness. The rainbow as always a symbol to him – a blood symbol: of this peace. A pledge of unbroken faith, between the universe and the innermost. And the very moment he said ‘No one,’ he saw the rainbow for an answer.
Many times in his life he had seen a rainbow. The last had been on his arrival in Sydney.
… the wharf looked black and dismal, empty. …. Black, all black … even the green grass … Yet over it all, spanning the harbour, the most magnificent great rainbow. His mood was so miserable he didn’t want to see it. But it was unavoidable. A huge, brilliant, supernatural rainbow, spanning all Sydney.
He was thinking of this, and still watching the dark-green, yellow-reflecting sea, that was like a northern sea, a Whitby sea, and watching the far-off fume of a dark rainbow apparition …. (155)
Lawrence had not placed this epiphany in its chronological order on the opening page. There, its metaphysics would have overpowered the mood he needed to establish about the newcomer as isolate.

To describe the steaming away from the wharf, Lawrence turns the streamers between ship and shore into a summation of his political and personal reactions to the love that he has refused:
So, this was the last tie, this ribbon of coloured paper. Somers had a yellow and a red one: Victoria held the end of the red streamer. Jaz’s wife the end of the yellow. Harriet had blue and green streamers. And from the side of the ship a whole glittering tangle of these colours connecting the departing with the remaining, a criss-cross of brilliant colour that seemed to glitter like a rainbow in the beams of the sun …
Only the criss-crossing web of brilliant streamers, red, blue, purple, white, yellow, green, went from the hands of the departing to the hands of those who would be left behind. (357)
By the final page, Lawrence has created the conditions for a rainbow made out of streamers, one no less laden with thoughts than that presented by nature on Somers’ arrival.

One measure of the colours that Lawrence lavished on the last pages of Kangaroo comes from comparing his departure scene with that in Henry Handel Richardson’s Australia Felix, published in 1917. Richardson had completed the draft in England before her return visit in 1912, during which she would have experienced the streamers but could not use them for a sailing set fifty years earlier. The emotional significance of such colours as Richardson chose is different from Lawrence’s because Mahony is heading towards ‘the dear old mother country – home’, and is several times gladder to be quitting Melbourne than Lawrence is sorry to be leaving Sydney. Instead of streamers, Richardson portrayed her characters waving handkerchiefs, damp with tears, or tied to canes but she made no mention of their colours – were they all white? As Mahony’s ship, called Red Jacket,
moves through Port Phillip Bay, the settlements are reduced to ‘whitely s
mudges’ before ‘the Dandenong Ranges, grown bluer and bluer, were also lost in the sky’. Mahony’s temples are ‘graying’ but his ‘faculties green’. Richardson used the Rip at the mouth of the Bay, with its ‘white lines of foam’ and churning ocean, as a metaphor for Mahony’s mental state. Here is excitement, but also menace, a forewarning of the wreck that her protagonist’s life will become, an end foreshadowed in the trilogy’s opening sentence of a man’s being buried alive.

The Boy in the Bush, which Lawrence rewrote after leaving Australia, was nowhere near as chromatic as Kangaroo. The final paragraph wins its effect from a restrained use of colour when the ‘pale blue ocean full of light’ is contrasted to ‘the silent grey bush’ in which the young Englishman no longer feels lost.

As Somers is leaving Sydney, he spies some Chinese on the dock, a sight which summons a tripled invocation of ‘darkness’:
He felt another heart-string going to break like the streamers, leaving Australia, leaving his own British connection. The darkness that comes over the heart at the moment of departure darkens the eyes too, and the last scene is remote, remote, detached inside a darkness. (357)
Lawrence extended synaesthesia beyond a merging of the senses to encompass politics. The rainbow of streamers formed a bridge, a pledge, just as the streamers were a bond among the white race. Crossing the Indian Ocean on his way to Fremantle, Lawrence had written of his distaste for the Ceylonese:
Those natives are back of us – in the living sense lower than we are. But they’re going to swarm over and suffocate us. We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip. Now we’re going to fail. But you don’t catch me going back on my whiteness and Englishness and myself. English in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England. ’
Within Kangaroo, Lawrence expanded on thoughts he had put in his Moby Dick essay:
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed. … What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-letting of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west…
This tangle of colours and places is a reprise of the streamers tying Somers to his white race, but they are not strong enough to hold him. Lawrence was alarmed not only at the upsurge of the coloured. He had been repelled by the European masses, just as Somers rejects both the ‘Diggers’ and the ‘Reds’ in Sydney.

Grace Cossington Smith began her engagement with a Modernist palette by creating ‘Sock Knitter’ (1915), an image of domestic security which nonetheless implied the violence of soldiering. She continued to shift between the realms of suburban safety and public menace. ‘Reinforcements’ (1917) and ‘The Prince’ (1920) presented city spaces that upheld the values of her class, threatened by the masses in ‘Strike’ (1917), ‘Crowd’ (1922) and ‘Rushing’ (1922). The pastel pinks in ‘Strike’ are challenged by the hammers carried by the workers. Elsewhere, Cossington Smith selected colours and tones to confirm her prejudices. In ‘Reinforcements’, she constrained the khaki of the troops with a foreground of brightly dressed civilians and high-keyed buildings behind. Even the presence of her beloved royalty was portrayed in brown and fawn, with the flags lost in shadow, unlike the festive streetscapes of Manet and Monet. Her 1922 pair were in dark brown, blue serge and tan.
What was gloomy in Cossington Smith was a brilliant red in ‘Yarra Bank Meeting’ (1923), once called ‘Strife’, by Patrick John Harford who glorified the social forces that Cossington Smith feared. His abstracted figures were of the anti-conscriptionist union official Fred Riley, and the Communist Party solicitor Christian Jolly Smith. Harford applied his craft as a stained-glass maker to this painting with its diagonal slash of red lightning. He had married Lesbia Keogh (1891-1927) whose poems grew from the struggles of girls in clothing factories, miles away from the voluntary sewing circles of Grace Cossington Smith along the North Shore.

The street scenes of Cossington Smith and the Harfords crossed the political and industrial conditions that the Lawrences encountered. He interpreted them in Kangaroo through the prism of the world class war between fascism and Bolshevism. That contest had informed the second half of Aaron’s Rod, passages in Sea and Sardinia, and his essays on Melville and Whitman.

Lawrence had characters in Aaron’s Rod gabble on about exterminating the brutes as the path back to sanity: ‘You’ve got to have a sort of slavery again. People are not men: they are insects and instruments, and their destiny is slavery’. In the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangaroo, Somers rails against ‘all the teeming human ants, human slaves’(150). Lawrence also hated the mob, but refused to surrender to ‘the vast mob spirit’ behind that hatred when marshaled by the upper classes: ‘He still believed in the freedom of the individual. – Yes, freedom of the individual!’ (227). Kangaroo’s lieutenant, Jack Callcott, knew that, in a war between classes, as between nations, ‘what you depend on is a general, and on discipline, and on obedience. And nothing else is the slightest bit of good’. (89) The majority could not afford the luxury of standing outside or above the conflict, as Somers decides to do in Kangaroo, before fleeing from one scribbling place to the next.

Lawrence opened Chapter XVI of Kangaroo by asking ‘And what is a mob?’, and answered with a contrary: ‘But the only way to make any study of collective psychology is to study the isolate individual’ (294). This paradox set him off through a ten-page essay on ‘the Dark God’:
But the mob has no direction even in its destructive lust. The vengeful masses have direction. And it is no good trying to reason with them. The mass does no act by reason. A mass is not even formed by reason. The more intense or extended the collective consciousness, the more does the truly reasonable, individual consciousness sink into abeyance. (298)
Lawrence continued that ‘men are reduced to a great, non-mental oneness as in the hot-blooded whales, and then, like whales which suddenly charge upon the ship which tortures them, so they burst upon the vessel of civilisation’. (301) In his essay on Melville’s Moby Dick, Lawrence projected the Pequod, with its polygot crew, as a ‘symbol’ for mechanical, ‘business-like Yankees’. The white whale was ‘the deepest blood-being of our white race’, in revolt against the false values of those maniacs.

Peter Scheckner in Class, Politics and the Individual suggested that Lawrence – through his characters – maintained a creative tension inside himself about on which side, if either, of the barricades he should take a stand. He could never commit his individuality to any cause, or deny his working-class roots. Kangaroo can be read as a study of these conflicts, in which Lawrence shifted around a Manichean opposition between the black debbil-debbil of the mob and the white whale of individualism. As fascinating as he made chiaroscuro in his prose, its tonalism did not allow him to paint his individuality. Lawrence chased after exotic landscapes against which he could contrast his Englishness. In Kangaroo, he realised the effects of place on people and of people on place through every colour of the rainbow.

Humphrey McQueen is a Marxist dinosaur, surviving as a freelance historian in Canberra. He is currently writing a history of builders labourers and their unions in Australia since European invasion. More details and a
selection of his writings can be found at alphali
nk.com.au/~loge27

John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Donnella
Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2004): Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy Order (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

By Tom O’Lincoln

Last year I walked in Sumatran rainforests. It was a delight, and yet … There were almost no birds, because people steal the eggs to scratch a living. Illegal logging is chronic, and before being exported to the West, the logs travel to a plywood factory south of the provincial capital of Padang. The factory employs poor people for paltry wages. It squats menacingly at the top of beautiful Bungus Bay, where fisherfolk say pollution has reduced their catches by 90 percent. Men drag long nets across the bay, but all they catch is bits of wood.

It gets worse. This is one of the places where forest-clearing fires got out of hand in 1997 and blanketed the region with dark haze; the haze blocked the sunlight which in turn killed the coral reefs. So the tourists stay away, leading to more economic desperation, putting more pressure on the forests, the sea, the air. And we are only talking about one region of economically and ecologically miserable Indonesia, which is just one part of a crisis-ridden planet. How can we can survive, and will it mean radical changes in the way we live?

These three titles tell us what we’re up against. Limits to Growth, an update of the Club of Rome forecasts, audits just how badly the planet is damaged, offeirng scenarios for coming decades. The End of Oil is a racy account of the energy business and its social and environmental impacts. Marx’s Ecology has been with us since 2000, an authoritative guide to the old man’s ‘green’ thinking

Limits to Growth
Some people dismiss the ‘Club of Rome’ as panic merchants. The right wing Cato Institute remembers their 1972 report this way:
The Club of Rome had just released its primal scream, Limits to Growth, which reported that the earth was rapidly running out of everything. The most famous declinist of the era, biologist Paul Ehrlich, had appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to fill Americans with fear of impending world famine and make gloomy prognostications, such as ‘If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.’
Seven years ago, by contrast, energy banker Matthew R Simmons reviewed the same report and remarked that ‘for a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.’
My reaction to the new volume is more like Simmons’. Everything in the new book seems to add up; nothing seems unreasonable. The authors don’t claim to predict the future. But they offer us some credible projections on which to base our own judgements. The outlook is grim:
It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past thirty years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but half-hearted responses to the global ecological challenge. We do not have another thirty years to dither. Much will have to change if the ongoing overshoot is not to be followed by collapse during the twenty-first century. (p. xvi)
The authors begin their main argument with a chapter on ‘exponential growth’. This might suggest a clash with Foster’s book, since Marx cut his theoretical teeth on demolishing Malthus’ theories, which said population must grow exponentially and therefore outstrip food supply. Marx’s reply was that different social contexts create very different population dynamics. Whereas Malthus blamed the poor for their own suffering; Marx blamed capitalist society.
After careful reading, I don’t think Limits to Growth is Malthusian in the strict sense. The authors’ charts do show exponential growth in population and industrial production (which may exhaust resources) and they’re certainly worried about population; but they also emphasize the social context:
… in pre-industrial societies both fertility and mortality are high, and population growth is slow. As nutrition and health services improve, death rates fall. Birthrates lag by a generation or two, opening a gap between fertility and mortality that produces rapid population growth. Finally, as lives and lifestyles evolve into the patterns of a fully industrial society, birthrates fall …(p.31)
So they recognize that ‘population problems’ are social problems. In fact, declining fertility is causing angst in 60-odd countries right now – which is one reason the United Nations expects the global population to plateau at around at 9 billion. The problem, the Limits to Growth team would still insist, is that the demands of 9 billion people may be enough to exhaust the planet.
The book asks just how serious is the depletion of sources of materials, taken together with the destruction or overwhelming of the sinks that absorb pollution. Forests, for example, are both sources and sinks: if you burn them you generate energy and release carbon, and at the same time you lose their ability to absorb the CO2 generated by industry and cars. The book traces demands on sources and sinks, considers the costs to humans, and throws up scenarios. These are complex, yet the lay reader won’t be daunted, because the authors take us through them in easy-to-read installments while beginning to suggest solutions.
Scenario One is the unlikely possibility of ‘business as usual’. If we do nothing differently, human welfare goes downhill fairly sharply in a decade or two. Under Scenario Two, if resources are more plentiful than we think, we may postpone the evil day for 20 years, but then the environmental costs catch up with us.
Later scenarios factor in pollution control technology, land yield enhancement, land erosion protection, resource efficiency technology. None makes the dilemma go away entirely. However, we can still achieve a reasonable lifestyle for all of humanity, if we act now. Along what lines? The headline answers in Limits to Growth are that we need to control population, control industrial production, and change the way we live. I think all three are deeply problematic.
Population control might seem like common sense. If there are less shoppers in Safeway, they will throw away fewer plastic bags; fewer people to keep warm in winter would mean less demand for energy. But when you look deeper, ugly problems arise. Thus the authors invite underdeveloped countries to take the lead in population reduction, because at least it’s an area where they can readily contribute. But impoverished third world people put less pressure on the planet per head than we ‘consumerist’ westerners do. India’s per capita ‘ecological footprint’ is less than 8% of the USA’s, so why is it up to Indians to have fewer babies? It’s not hard to see racist dangers along this path. The spectre of Malthus returns.
Moreover reactionary social policies are linked to reducing fertility, from forced sterilisation in India to China’s repressive one-child limit. To accept these policies legitimises the regimes that use them, yet reactionary regimes are more likely to take a slash-and-burn approach to the environment. In addition to infanticide and gender imbalance, the US National Intelligence Council reports another grim irony of China’s one-child policy: the Chinese are now madly industrialising and polluting ‘in a race to see if they can get rich before they get old. If economic growth cannot provide the capital to support its growing elderly population, China will be hard pressed to support its needs once the “one-child” generation dominates the labour market.’
Talk
o
f reining in industrial production has its dangers too, se
eming as it does to threaten workers’ jobs, which only opens up opportunities for the likes of John Howard to divide our side of politics. But there are ways to ensure both prosperity and environmental sustainability, as the authors emphasise: ‘The good news is that current high rates of throughput are not necessary to support a decent standard of living for all the world’s people.’ (p. 9, emphasis in original). How can do we do that? We’ll see a bit later.

The End of Oil?
Limits to Growth is a sober policy document. Paul Roberts’ The End of Oil offers something much racier. He has toured the planet, talking to Azerbaijani managers, Saudi ministers and renewable energy technologists, asking whether the world will run out of petroleum.
It’s not a new topic. In 1956 geophysicist M. King Hubbert predicted American oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Though derided by experts, he was right. Will the world as a whole reach ‘Hubbert’s peak’, and if so when? Harris thinks non-OPEC oil will peak by around 2015, and western rulers are nervous about depending on OPEC, particularly after the 2005 oil price spike.
No wonder Washington moved to seize Iraqi oilfields.. Roberts calls the 1991 Gulf War ‘the first military conflict in history that was entirely about oil,’ noting also that after the 2003 invasion, the Americans quickly secured the Oil Ministry while ‘hospitals, schools, utilities … were left to be burned and looted’. (p.105, 304)
He’s vaguer on the race for oil, gas and pipelines around central Asia and their connection to the 2002 Afghan war; and in fact Roberts doesn’t even come out clearly against these acts of imperial aggression. There’s nothing left wing about his book. It does however provide important facts about the economic and political sides of the environmental crisis.
Take politics. The Bush administration keeps pressing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, with more than the obvious agenda: ‘ANWR can be used as a bargaining chip in an energy debate with far larger political stakes …. strategists have long known that the Arctic wilderness carries a far higher emotional impact among voters than does fuel efficiency …’ (p. 299-300) Congress can only manage one ‘green’ vote each year, and with the reluctant acquiescence of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society they choose to protect ANWR rather than take the much more important step of imposing stricter fuel standards on car-makers.
The book summarises the global warming debate, surveying alternative energy strategies; and it’s convinced me big business won’t invest seriously in solar or wind power until some major shock gets their attention. The ‘renewables’ are too costly for the market to spontaneously embrace. Solar cells and wind farms are too decentralised to fit the dominant industrial paradigm, and neither guarantees power 24 hours a day. Of course there are technical fixes for all these drawbacks, they just need a lot of government-funded R&D of the kind George Bush is not going to sponsor.
But this doesn’t have to be an impasse, Roberts hopes, if governments use market mechanisms cleverly. The energy economy and its environmental consequences are an extreme case of ‘market failure’ — as documented by researcher Joan Ogden, who calculated the ‘hidden costs’ of oil, petrol and cars ‘from well to wheels’, including health, mortality, and global warming’s consequences such as weather damage to crops. The price tag was $2006 per car. These are real costs, it’s just that society pays them rather than energy companies, car makers or owners.
One solution is to tax petrol so prices reflect total costs. Another is carbon trading. Governments combated acid rain fairly effectively by allowing companies to trade ‘pollution credits’ in sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, so why not trade carbon? The problem, which Roberts skates over, is that it’s easy for our rulers to manipulate these mechanisms. Do we trust governments not to hand credits to cronies? And in the international sphere, market arrangements can turn very ugly.
For example, the Kyoto Protocol allows western governments and corporations to earn credits for investing in projects to cut greenhouse emissions in poor countries. That could mean they dump older technology on China, while the west introduces new, clean equipment. If the old technology is “cleaner” than existing Chinese factories and power plants, the west may get greenhouse credits while the Chinese are stuck with obsolete infrastructure that won’t perform when China’s turn comes to directly reduce emissions. Thus a seemingly benign environmental program can veil an imperialist agenda.
Or consider the Bisasar Road landfill in Durban, South Africa. Under apartheid, this site filled with toxic waste, causing cancer in surrounding areas. Upon coming to power, the African National Congress promised to clean it up. Then in 2002 the World Bank proposed to Durban’s mayor that the site be left alone so that methane could be siphoned off for emissions trading under the Bank’s prototype carbon trading program. The local government would make millions, and it might make a slight dent in global warming, but as what cost to the local people? The October 2004 Durban Conference declaration trenchantly criticised the underlying capitalist logic of pollution trading: ‘History has seen attempts to commodify land, food, labour, forests, water, genes and ideas. Carbon trading follows in the footsteps of this history. Through this process … the Earth’s abillity and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate.’
So we’re talking about capitalism and imperialism, in which case Karl Marx may have something to offer.

Marx’s Ecology
The San people of the Kalahari have no trouble whatever understanding the value of biodiversity. Until fairly recently … all their food, their clothing, their shelter, their medicines, their cosmetics, their playthings, their musical instruments, their hunting weapons, everything came from the productivity of their surroundings, the plants and animals on which they completely depended for a living. Why, then, is it so difficult for most of us in the industrialised nations … to grasp the significance of biodiversity?    (Niles Eldridge)
The answer that we’re estranged from nature. A simple yet profound insight, and more central to Karl Marx’s thought than most Marxists have realised. Reading the Communist Manifesto we pass casually over its call for ‘abolition of the distinction between town and country’. John Bellamy Foster explains its importance. He focuses on the issue of alienation, a concept that emerged in Marx’s early polemics. The rising capitalist order denied the poor their traditional right to firewood, an aspect of the wider ‘privatisation’ of common land into the hands of the rich. This was part of turning the working people into a wage-earning proletariat, but at the same time it destroyed all their relationships with nature not mediated by private property. The labourers were estranged from the products of their labour and their environment, with everything commodified, as the Durban Declaration notes.
Just as we lose control over capital (the fruits of our own past labour) which returns as an alien power to exploit us, so we are cut adrift from our relation with nature; the ‘subjection of nature’s forces to man’ becomes the seizure of land by an exploitative minority.
Capitalism drives millions into cities where they labour for capitalist employers; while those who remain on the land are likewise forced to work for capitalist farmers. Either way, people who used to gather and grow their own food, and the materials for their own clothing, begin to purchase these things through intermediaries. Today we buy things in supermarkets, seldom asking whence they came. This
threatens a crisis for humanity, becaus
e: ‘Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die.’ (p. 72) The emancipation of labour on the economic, political and social fronts becomes inseparable from restoring workers’ organic connection to the earth.
One consequence was a drastic disruption of the cycle of nutrients. In traditional society, these had returned directly to the soil as human excrement. In Marx’s time, harvested food began to be sold to the cities on a massive scale, after which vast amounts of excrement went into urban sewers, leading to one of the great environmental crises of the age. The land, for its part, became increasingly impoverished, to the point where people plundered old battlefields looking for bones to fertilise it.
Marx learned about this from Scottish economist James Anderson, and German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig – two ‘environmental gurus’ of the age. This breakdown had already begun to take on global proportions. Marx discussed how England exploited its neighbours’ land: ‘England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the soil.’ (p. 164). Britain went on to plunder the globe. The search for fertiliser likewise became global: in a bizarre scramble foreshadowing today’s imperialist race for oil, the United States seized 94 guano-rich islands, rocks, and cays around the world between 1856 and 1903. It was natural, therefore, for Marx to combine his concern for the environment not only with support for workers’ struggles, but also with those against imperialism and national oppression.
From his study of environmental and social questions, Marx arrived at what today we call ‘sustainability’:
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]. (p. 164)

A sustainable revolution?
Marx wanted a social revolution, which seems a long way from the concerns of Limits for Growth. Or is it? The latter’s authors call for a ‘sustainability revolution’, and they mean truly radical change.
Their sustainable society would be ‘interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion’ (p. 253) with radically negative growth for some: ‘Some games that amuse and consume people today, such as arms races or the accumulation of unlimited wealth, would probably no longer be feasible, respected or interesting. But there would still be games, challenges, problems to solve, ways for people to prove themselves [and live] perhaps more satisfying lives than any possible today.’ (p. 256)
So we need ‘new feedback loops, new behaviour, new knowledge, and new technology, but also new institutions, new physical structures and new powers within human beings … Visioning meaning imagining … what you really want. That is, what you really want, not what someone has taught you to want, and not what you have learned to be willing to settle for.’ (p. 270)
This seems a good starting point for dialogue between green and red revolutionaries.

Tom O’Lincoln has been active on the left since 1966, in the German SDS, at Berkeley and for many years in Australia. He is the author of Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era, and United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia. He maintains the Marxist Interventions website:
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/

By Robert Jensen

I want to begin by coming out: I am a man. More specifically, I am a white man. That’s important because it suggest two things regarding what I know about the world. First, I know some things that women don’t know about men. By definition, women are never in all-male spaces. Women don’t directly experience what men say about them when there are no women around. I do, and that means I know some things that women don’t.

Being a man also means there’s a lot I don’t know, that I have had to learn—and have to keep learning—from women and a feminist movement. In these remarks, I’m going to speak about the feminist critique of pornography and the feminist anti-pornography movement, from which I have learned much. But in doing that, I should acknowledge the irony of a man talking to a group of mostly women about the feminist analysis of pornography. I need to make it clear that I am not speaking for women. Instead, I see my role as speaking with women, and with the ultimate goal of speaking about the insights of this critique to men.

But even that is complicated, of course, because women do not speak with one voice about pornography, nor any other issue. There are pro-pornography women who would contest much of what I have to say. All I can do is acknowledge the women who have helped me come to understand the issue, tell the truth as I see it, and ask men to take seriously this critique of the domination/subordination dynamic that is so common in pornography and, indeed, in the world.

The minute one begins to make such a critique, one can expect this response: Feminists who critique pornography are really just prudes at heart. Pornography’s opponents, we are told, are afraid of sex. In one sense, that’s true. I am afraid of sex, of a certain kind. I’m afraid of much of the sex commonly presented in contemporary mass-marketed pornography. I am afraid of sex that is structured on a dynamic of domination and subordination. I am afraid of the sex in pornography that has become so routinely harsh that men typically cannot see the brutality of it thorough their erections and orgasms. I’m not against sex or sexual pleasure. I’m against the kind of sex that is routinely presented in contemporary pornography. I’m against that kind of sex because it hurts people in the world today, and it helps constructs a world in which people—primarily the most vulnerable people, women and children, both girls and boys—will continue to be hurt.

Pornographic sex

Let me describe one kind of sex that I’m afraid of. This is a scene from the film Gag Factor #10 released by J.M. Productions, which boasts that it pushes the envelope in pornography. The company website brags that this gag series, which is going on #17 as of March 2005, offers ‘The best throatfucking ever lensed.’ If you want a sample, the website has pictures and short video clips, under the heading ‘this week’s victim,’ with the promise ‘new whores degraded every Wednesday.’

In one of the 10 scenes from Gag Factor #10, released in 2002, a nagging wife is haranguing her husband and asking why he is so lazy. ‘Why can’t you do anything?’ she asks, going on to insult his intelligence and criticize him because he doesn’t read. She asks him if he even can read, and then suggests Henry Miller, from which she starts to read. The camera focuses on her mouth as she reads, then cuts to his eyes, which look increasingly angry. The film cuts to the woman on her knees as he yells, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ He grabs her hair and thrusts his penis into her mouth. From this point on, we hear almost exclusively from him: ‘Your teeth feel good you little bitch. Eat that dick. … Are you OK? Are you crying? I love you. I fucking love you. Open that mouth.’ He slaps her mouth with his penis. ‘Open wide. Choke. Open wider, wider. You’re so good baby. Put your mouth on my balls. You treat me so fucking good. That’s why I keep you here. Give me the eyes [meaning, look up at me] while I gag you. … Do you like to gag? Beg for it. Say please. Say please gag me some more. … Your throat is so good.’ At this point, she re-enters the conversation. She says, ‘Keep going.’ He says, ‘Good, that’s the fucking answer I was looking for.’ He then flips her over, putting her on the table with her head hanging over edge. She gags several times when he thrusts into her mouth. He holds her by the cheeks, spreading her face apart. She gags but he doesn’t stop. He allows her to catch her breath. Her face is unexpressive, almost frozen. ‘I want those tears to come out again, baby. I want to choke the shit out of you,’ he says. He grabs her hair and drives his penis into her mouth. He says: ‘Suck that dick. Convulse. I want to see your eyes roll back in your fucking head. Yes, I love it.’ He asks her if she loves it; she says yes. He ejaculates into her mouth and says, ‘Spit that cum out. I can’t hear you. What did you say? Don’t talk with your mouth full.’ He walks away and says ‘Don’t give me any more shit.’

Gag Factor is a type of ‘gonzo’ pornography, which is the roughest form available in the mainstream pornography shops and also the fastest growing genre. This scene is more overtly misogynistic than some, but it is not idiosyncratic. The sex and the language in what the industry calls ‘features’ typically is not as rough, though the message is the same: Women are for sex, and women like sex this way.

Empathy

I am afraid of the sex I just described to you. I’m worried about the physical and emotional well-being of the woman in that scene. I’m afraid of the way in which the men who use that pornography will act in their own lives, toward women in their lives. I am afraid of the world that such sex helps to create. I am afraid, and you should be, too.

If anyone wants to dismiss these concerns with the tired old phrases ‘to each his own’ and ‘as long as they are consenting adults’—that is, if you want to ignore the reality and complexity of the world in which we live—I can’t stop you. But I can tell you that if you do that, you are abandoning minimal standards of political and moral responsibility, and you become partially responsible for the injuries done as a result of a system you refuse to confront. I will defend that conclusion in a moment. But first, I want to make sure we come to terms with the scene I just described. We live in a world in which a woman can be aggressively ‘throat fucked’ to facilitate the masturbation of men. We all live in that world. We all live with that woman in Gag Factor #10. She is one of us. She is a person. She has hopes and dreams and desires of her own. We all live with that woman who finds herself making a living by being filmed in another kind of gonzo film called a Blow Bang, in which a woman has oral sex in similar fashion with more than one man.

In one of these films, Blow Bang #4, released in 2001, a young woman dressed as a cheerleader is surrounded by six men. For about seven minutes, ‘Dynamite’ (the name she gives on tape) methodically moves from man to man while they offer insults such as ‘you little cheerleading slut.’ For another minute and a half, she sits upside down on a couch, her head hanging over the edge, while men thrust into her mouth, causing her to gag. She strikes the pose of the bad girl to the end. ‘You like coming on my pretty little face, don’t you,’ she says, as they ejaculate on her face and in her mouth for the final two minutes of the scene. Five men have finished. The sixth steps up. As she waits for him to ejaculate onto her face, now covered with semen, she closes her eyes tightly and grimaces. For a moment, her face changes; it is difficult to read her emotions, but it appears she may cry. After the last man, number six, ejaculates, she r
eg
ains her composure and smiles. Then the narrator off camer
a hands her the pom-pom she had been holding at the beginning of the tape and says, ‘Here’s your little cum mop, sweetheart—mop up.’ She buries her face in the pom-pom and the scene ends. Dynamite is one of us. She is a person. She has hopes and dreams and desires of her own.
The women in the movement to end men’s violence have helped society understand that we have to empathize with the victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. We also need to extend that empathy to the women in pornography and prostitution. Now we are going to practice empathy, that most fundamental of human qualities. I want us to think of that scene with Dynamite. One woman and six men. After she has performed oral sex on six men, after six men have thrust their penises into her throat to the point of gagging, after six men have ejaculated onto her, the camera is turned off. Think not about the sex acts but about the moment when the camera shuts off. The men walk away. Someone throws her a towel. She has to clean the semen of six strangers off her face and body and from her hair. This woman, who is a person, who is one of us, who has hopes and dreams and desires of her own, cleans herself off.

Now, I want you to imagine that the woman in that scene is your child. I want you to think about how you would feel if the woman being handed a towel to wipe off the semen of six men were your child, someone you had raised and loved and cared for. How does that feel? Then imagine that woman is the child of your best friend, or of your neighbor, or of someone you work with. Then imagine that women is the child of someone you have never met and never will meet. Imagine that woman is just a person, one of us, with hopes and dreams and desires of her own. Forget about whether or not she is your child. She is a person; she is one of us. Imagine that you are the one handing her the towel. Look into her eyes. We need to dare to look into her eyes and try to understand what she might be feeling. You can’t know for sure what she is feeling. But try to imagine how you would feel if it were you.We are constantly told pornography is about fantasies. Those scenes I just described are not fantasy. They are real. They happened. They happened to those women. Those women are not a fantasy. They are people. They are just like us.

And after those scenes were put on videotape, the films were sold and rented to thousands of men who took it home, put it into VCRs or DVD players, and masturbated to orgasm. That also is real. Men fantasize when they masturbate, but the men who are masturbating are not a fantasy. Thousands of men have climaxed to the recording of those women being aggressively ‘throat fucked.’ Those orgasms happened in the real world. Those men’s sexual pleasure was being conditioned to images of women being aggressively ‘throat fucked,’ in the real world. Those specific women and those specific men are part of the world we live in. And that idea of what a woman is, and that idea of what’s men’s sexuality is—those ideas are also part of the world we live in. None of it is a fantasy. All of it is as real as we are.

So, I want to pose a simple question: What do we owe those women? What do we owe Dynamite? What is our responsibility to her, to her hopes and dreams and

Choices, hers and ours

At this point, some will think: ‘Whatever you or I may think of those activities, she chose to do that. She’s an adult. Who are we to condemn her choice?’ I agree; we shouldn’t condemn her choice, and we shouldn’t condemn her. We should empathize with her. And we should think not just about her choice abut about the choices of the men who pay for the tape and create the demand for aggressive ‘throat fucking.’ From research and the testimony of women who have been prostituted and used in pornography, we know that childhood sexual assault (which often leads victims to see their value in the world primarily as the ability to provide sexual pleasure for men) and economic hardship (a lack of meaningful employment choices at a livable wage) are key factors in many women’s decisions to enter the sex industry. We know how women in the sex industry—not all, but many—routinely dissociate to cope with what they do. We know that in one study of 130 street prostitutes, 68 percent met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that any meaningful discussion of choice can’t be restricted to the single moment when a woman decides to allow herself to be sold sexually, but must include all the background conditions that affect not only the objective choices she faces but her subjective assessment of those choices. What matters is not just what is available but how she perceives herself in relation to what is available. We know that in anyone’s life, completely free choices are rare, that every choice is made under some mix of constraint and opportunity.
I know, for instance, that in my large lecture classes when I give a multiple-choice exam, virtually none of the students believes that such exams are an accurate or meaningful way of measuring their learning. I know that many of them find such exams to be ridiculous, as do I. But all of my students ‘choose’ to take a test they know to be virtually useless (except for the data it provides me in a large cattle-call class so that I can assign grades at the end of the term). They choose to take that exam because if they chose not to—no matter how sensible and compelling their analysis of the exam’s flaws—they will not pass the course, and they will be denied something that is important to them, a college diploma. They could choose to reject the institution, and thereby give up that asset, but it would cost them. Their choice is free, but it is not made under conditions of complete freedom, given their limited power in the system. So, let us not be naïve about choice.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the specific woman who was used in that aggressive ‘throat fucking’ movie made a completely free and meaningful choice to participate, with absolutely no constraints on her. That could be the case, but it does not change the fact that many women in the industry choose under dramatic limitations. And so long as the industry is profitable and a large number of women are needed to make such films, it is certain that some number of those women will be choosing under conditions that render the concept of ‘free choice’ virtually meaningless. When a man buys or rents a videotape or DVD, he is creating the demand for pornography that will lead to some number of women being hurt, psychologically and/or physically. That is a fact in the world in which we live. So, men’s choices to buy or rent pornography are complicated by two realities. First, at any given moment, the consumer has no reliable way to judge which women are participating in the industry as a result of a meaningfully free choice. And second, even if the men consuming pornography could make such a determination about specific women in specific films, the demand for pornography that their purchase creates ensures that some women will be hurt. Given that conclusion, there is only one decision that men who claim to have even minimal standards of moral and political responsibility can make: They must not buy or rent pornography. Let me restate that in a personal way: You and I must not buy or rent pornography. You and I must not create the demand that creates the industry that creates a world in which vulnerable people will be hurt.

If we buy or rent pornography, we bear some responsibility for that world. We can try to pretend we don’t know that, but we can’t avoid that responsibility.

Justice and self-interest

That’s the argument from justice. It’s an argument that men, and the women who buy or rent pornography, should take seriously unless they want to abandon minimal moral and political standards. But it is fairly obvious that arguments from justice do not always move pe

ople who are in positions of power and pri
vilege. Maybe such arguments from justice should be enough to change people, but they often aren’t. So, arguments from self-interest are important, too.
Men should stop buying and renting pornography because it is the right thing to do. They also should do it because it is in their self-interest. To explain that, I want to tell a story from my experience at the 2005 convention of the pornography industry, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which I attended as part of a team working on a documentary film called Fantasies’ Matter. At the end of our first day filming at the convention, the film’s director/editor, Miguel Picker, and I walked out of the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas without saying much. We had just spent the better part of the day together on the exhibition floor, which featured about 300 booths visited by thousands of people. Miguel had been behind the camera, and I had been interviewing pornography performers, producers, and fans about why they make, distribute, and consume sexually explicit media.

We had spent the day surrounded by images of women being presented and penetrated for the sexual pleasure of men. All around were pictures and posters, screens running endless porn loops, and display tables of dildos and sex dolls. I had listened to young men tell me that pornography had taught them a lot about what women really want sexually. I had listened to a pornography producer tell me that he thinks anal sex is popular in pornography because men like to think about fucking their wives and girlfriends in the ass to pay them back for being bitchy. And I interviewed the producer who takes great pride that his Gag Factor series was the first to feature exclusively aggressive ‘throat fucking.’ Miguel and I had spent the day surrounded by sex for sale, immersed in the predictable consequence of the collision of capitalism and patriarchy. We had talked to dozens of people for whom the process of buying and selling women for sex is routine. When that day was over, we walked silently from the convention center to the hotel. The first thing I said was, ‘I need a drink.’

I don’t want to feign naivete. As a child and young adult, I used pornography in fairly typical fashion. I have been working on the issue of pornography since 1988. I have talked to a lot of people about pornography, and in very short and controlled doses, I have watched enough of it to understand how corrosive it is to our individual and collective humanity. But I had never been to the industry convention before; I had always found a reason to avoid it. As Miguel and I left the hall, I understood why. ‘I need a drink,’ I said, and we stopped at the nearest hotel bar (which didn’t take long, given how many bars there are in a Las Vegas hotel). I sat down with a glass of wine. Miguel and I started to talk, searching for some way to articulate what we had just experienced, what we felt. But all I could do was cry.

It’s not that I had seen anything on the convention floor that I had never seen. It’s not that I had heard something significantly new or different from the people I had interviewed. It’s not that I had had some sort of epiphany about the meaning of pornography. It’s just that in that moment, the reality of the industry, of the products the industry produces, and the way in which they are used—it all came crashing down on me. My defenses were inadequate to combat a simple fact: The pornographers have won. In the short term, the efforts of the feminists who put forward the critique of pornography, the sex industry, and men’s violence have failed. The pornographers, for the time being, have won. The arguments from justice lost. The pornographers not only are thriving, but are more mainstream and normalized than ever. They can fill up a Las Vegas convention center, with the dominant culture paying no more notice than it would to the annual boat show.
And as the industry has become more normalized, paradoxically, the content of their films becomes ever crueler and more overtly degrading to women. The industry talk is dominated by talk of how to push it even further. Make it nastier. Make it, in the terms of one industry observer, ‘brutal and real.’ That’s the way the pornographers and the customers like it: Brutal. Because brutal is real. And real sells. It is real, and that’s at the heart of the sadness. What was reflected on the convention floor was not just a truth about pornography, but a truth about gender and sex and power in contemporary culture, as well as a truth about the brutality of capitalism. At the end of that day, I was more aware than ever that the feminist critique of pornography is not simply a critique of pornography but about the routine way we are trained to be sexual, about the eroticization of domination and subordination. Feminism, as I learned it, is a full-bore attack on systems of illegitimate authority, of which male dominance is one, along with white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism.

And at that moment, all I could do was cry. It was a selfish indulgence, because at that moment, my tears were not for the women who are used and discarded by the industry, or the women who will be forced into sex they don’t want by the men in their lives who use pornography. The tears were not for girls and young women who bury their own needs and desires to become sexually what men want them to be. I wish I could honestly say that was front and center in my mind and heart at that moment. But the truth is that my tears at that moment were for myself. Those tears came because I realized, in a more visceral way than ever, that the pornographers have won and they are helping to construct a world that is not only dangerous for women and children, but also one in which I have fewer and fewer places to turn as a man. Fewer places to walk and talk and breathe that haven’t been colonized and pornographized. As I sat that, all I could say to Miguel was, ‘I don’t want live in this world.’ I think at that moment Miguel didn’t quite no what to make of my reaction. He was nice to me, but he must have thought I was going a bit over the top. I don’t blame him; I was a bit over the top. After all, we were there to make a documentary film about the industry, not live out a melodrama about my angst in a Las Vegas hotel bar.

The next day Miguel and I hit the convention floor again. At the end of that day, as we walked away, I made the same request. We sat at the same bar. I had another glass of wine and cried again. Miguel, I think, was glad it was the last day. So was I.

Two days after we left Las Vegas, Miguel called me from New York. This time he was crying. He told me that he had just come to his editing and recording studio and had put on some music. Miguel is not only a director and editor, but a very talented musician. He’s one of those people who understand the world through music. He told me that he had put on music that he finds particularly beautiful, and then the floodgates opened. ‘I understand what you meant in the bar,’ he said, speaking through his own tears.

I tell that story not to glorify two sensitive new-age men. Miguel actually is a sensitive person, though not very new-age. I’m not new-age, and I don’t feel particularly sensitive these days. I feel harsh and mean. I feel angry most of the time. I spend most of my days on political organizing. I don’t write poetry. I’m from North Dakota. People from North Dakota don’t write a lot of poetry. We shovel snow. I tell that story because it’s never been clearer to me that in the struggle over pornography, the sex industry, and men’s violence, it is not enough to be right and to make arguments solely about justice. The central insights of the feminist critique of pornography are, I believe, right. I think it is the most compelling way to understand the issue. If anything, that critique of pornography is truer today than it was when the founding mothers of the movement first articulated it in the late 1970s. But we live in a society
in which the pornographers have
won, in the short term. Their products are more widely accepted and available than ever. Much of the culture has bought the ‘pornography is liberation’ and ‘pornography is freedom’ lines. To the degree that an anti-pornography position can get traction in the dominant culture, it comes from right-wing groups that have co-opted the language of feminism—the political language of harm—as a cover for a regressive moralism that rejects the values of feminism. Those same right-wing groups typically resist a critique of the capitalist commodification of everything, an analysis crucial to understanding pornography.

At this moment, being right is not enough. We have to find ways to tap into the humanity of people, a humanity that is systematically diminished and obscured by capitalism and patriarchy, as well as the explicit racism in pornography. That’s the argument from self-interest that men must hear. Men get something very concrete from pornography: They get orgasms. For most men, it’s an extremely effective way to gain physical pleasure. But it comes at a cost, and the cost is our own humanity. To be a man in this sense is to surrender some part of your humanity. I speak from experience here: It’s a bad trade-off. No orgasm is worth that much. That’s why the experience that Miguel and I had on the floor is important. On that day, the concentrated inhumanity of the pornographic world overwhelmed us. I went onto the convention floor knowing a lot about pornography. I left the floor feeling it more deeply than ever before. We know a lot about the pornography industry and its effects. We know there is a compelling critique. We have to be willing to feel it, as well.

Feeling and thinking our way forward, together

I realize that this task is difficult: We have to help men understand the depravity of their own pleasure. We have to make them feel that sense of desperation, articulating it in a way that leads people to action not paralysis, hope not despair, resistance not capitulation. We have to make them face what pornography does to us all, men and women. For men, we have to make them face that to be a pornography user is to be a john, to be someone who is willing to buy women for sex, someone who sees sex as a commodity, someone who has traded his own humanity for an orgasm.

Those realities are not easy for women to face either. I can’t speak for women, of course, but I assume that it is not easy to be a woman and understand how pornography portrays women and their sexuality, and to know that men like it. Put bluntly, in pornography, women are reduced to three holes and two hands. In pornography, women are reduced to the parts of their bodies that can sexually stimulate men. Women are not really sex-objects (which at least implies they are human) but more fuck-objects, simply things to be penetrated. I imagine that is not an easy thing to face when you are faced with pornography all around you. I imagine it is not easy to realize that this is the world in which women learned to be sexual.

Men have some difficult realities to face. So do women. I understand how painful those realities can be, because I have struggled, and continue to struggle, with them, and I have talked to many other people about their struggles. Sometimes I feel like I know too much. Sometimes I wish that I didn’t have all these pictures in my head. Sometimes I wish I had never heard the stories of women’s pain that I have heard. But I never wish I were back where I was 20 years ago, because 20 years ago I also was in pain, albeit a very different kind. In some ways, that old pain was easier to mask, but it was impossible to escape. This newer pain might be more intense at times, but it is a necessary part of the process that has changed my life for the better. I don’t really like it, but I accept the need for it, because this pain can lead somewhere. It can lead to a long and difficult, but ultimately rewarding, process of trying to revision sexuality. It can lead to involvement in a political movement to change the world that, even if not successful in the short term, holds out the hope for not just personal but societal transformation. Confronting the violence and pain of the world, both outside and inside me, has led me to meet many amazing people whose friendship and love has sustained me through difficult times.

When we talk like this, one of the predictable rejoinders is that we are trying to impose strict sexual rules on others. As one prominent pro-pornography feminist scholar, Linda Williams, put it in a recent interview, ‘Really, who are anti-pornography activists to tell us where our sexual imaginations should go?’ I agree. No one can tell others where their sexual imaginations should go. Imaginations are unruly and notoriously resistant to attempts at control. But our imaginations come from somewhere. Our imaginations may be internal in some ways, but they are influenced by external forces. Can we not have a conversation about those influences? Are we so fragile that our sexual imaginations can’t stand up to honest human conversation? It seems that pro-pornography forces live with their own fear of sex, the fear of being accountable for their imaginations and actions. The defenses of pornography typically revert to the most superficial kind of liberal individualism that shuts off people from others, ignores the predictable harms of a profit-seeking industry that has little concern for people, and ignores the way in which we all collectively construct the culture in which we live. I have no interest in telling people where there sexual imaginations must end up. But I would like to be part of a conversation about the direction in which we think our sexual imaginations can move.

So, I am afraid of the sex that pornography creates because it hurts people. But I am not afraid of talking about an alternative to the cruelty and brutality of the pornography industry. I need that conversation. I can’t do this on my own. I’m not smart enough and I’m not strong enough. I need help. I know the direction I want to move, but I stumble on the way. I have made mistakes that have hurt others and hurt myself. I can correct some of those mistakes on my own, but none of us can do this completely on our own. So, can we start talking about how to move our sexual imaginations toward respect, toward empathy, toward connections based on equality not domination? Can we give up enough of our fear of the unknown to try to imagine together what that might look like?

This culture tends to talk about sex in terms of heat: Who’s hot, what kind of sex is hot. What if we shifted to a language of light? Sex not as something that produces heat, but something that shines light. Can we talk about moving toward the light? The light that is inside me and inside you. The same light that is inside Dynamite. I want to live in a world in which Dynamite can tell us her name, not the pornographers’ name. I want to live in a world in which we hear her about her hopes and dreams and desires, not the pornographers’. I want to live in that world not just for her sake but for my own, because it is that world in which I can find my own authentic hopes and dreams and desires.

We have given the pornographers far too much power to construct our sexual imaginations. It is our world, not theirs. It is our world to take back. This is not just about taking back the night, but taking back the whole day, taking back the culture’s imagination, taking back the way we see men and women and sex. If we do not, I fear that the light inside us will dim. Our hopes and dreams will be increasingly shaped by the pornographers. And our hopes for a desire based on equality, maybe even the dream of equality, may not survive. I am afraid of that.

We all need to work to make sure that does not happen. For Dynamite’s sake. For your own. For all of us.
——————————————-
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of
Texas at Austin, a founding member of the Robert
Nowar Collective, http://www.nowarcollective.com/, and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Routledge) and author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

By Verity Burgmann

Academics have a fatal character flaw. They think they are the best people to teach people things. This is a book with a difference. It takes knowledge from the streets back to the academy. It aims to learn from political campaigners in a range of contemporary movements. So, instead of seeking to show what academics can teach activists, Maddison and Scalmer have produced a book in the opposite spirit.

That is its main purpose, but it succeeds nonetheless in taking knowledge from the academy back to the academy. For those who have struggled with the theoretical debates around the study of social movements, the first chapter in this book on Theory and History is a most informative guide. It even manages to make entertaining its discussion of American sociology between the 1920s and 1950s, which promised to explain disorder and dissent, and observed reality with painstaking precision. The mood across the Atlantic was very different, as students yelled for Althusser on the streets of Paris and rebutted Touraine at Nanterre. The neat categories and cost-benefit analyses of the Americans were out of place in a society where change really seemed possible. ‘Theoretical labours had a practical point. Intellectuals sought to serve the movement.’ European theorists treated activists with respect and argued that political militants possessed real knowledge of the social situation. ‘They intervened in order to liberate that knowledge, promote reflection, and bring new social movements to complete maturity.’

Nowadays, according to Maddison and Scalmer, the tenured radicals of the contemporary academy largely ignore tactical questions. ‘They translate practical concerns into theoretical conumdrums. There are grants to win and papers to publish; theoretical accounts to fill out; vain enemies to puncture. The accumulation of knowledge has become an end in itself.’ Perhaps the ridiculous bureaucratic requirements of academia these days are designed deliberately to keep academics too busy for political engagement. However, that is only part of the story. There has been a retreat from political engagement on the part of academics; and at a most inappropriate moment in time. For instance, in the 1980s and 1990s, as ruling classes the world over were ensuring that class differences were becoming even starker, academics were busy debating the death of class.

This book revolves around a defence of the concept of ‘practical knowledge’: why it is important, how it is passed on. ‘It is a mode of acting and reasoning, a particular kind of relationship between theory and practice.’ How do you organise a demonstration? Contact the media? Sniff out a potential ally? These tasks require skill, knowledge and flair. They are the mechanics of successful campaigning. And yet lovers of abstraction rarely think about them. The field of ‘social movement studies’ falls almost silent in their presence.

In interviewing a range of activists, Maddison and Scalmer discovered a commonality of political tensions, despite the wide range of causes they were involved in. The eight tensions they explore in particular are the tensions between: organisation and democracy; unity and difference; expressive and instrumental action; revolution or reform; counter-publics and the mainstream; the local and the global; redistribution and recognition; and hope and despair. The tensions explored are not necessarily in opposition, and Maddison and Scalmer bring this out very effectively. And the examination of practical knowledge is enriched – dare I say it – by the reflections of the academy, but these reflections are skilfully interwoven into the text, interspersed with frequent use of the words of the activists themselves.

A particularly interesting tension explored is that between hope and despair. While academics write about cycles of protest and so on, this book engages engagingly with this literature but asks and finds answers to intriguing questions: how do you keep going in the bad times? It is so important that people do. Australian activists have offered much to the world. Australians formed the first democratically elected Labor government. Our unions were the first to use their industrial power to protect the environment. Jack Mundy coined the term ‘green ban’ and inspired Europeans to adopt the label ‘The Greens’ as a political noun. Tasmanians who defended the wilderness can claim to have established the first Green Party in the world. Australian radicals developed the ‘open source publishing technique’ that allows would-be journalists to post their own stories on the web, and is used by indymedia groups all around the world, at http://www.indymedia.org.

As African American anti-slavery and women’s rights campaigner Frederick Douglass wrote in 1849: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted either with words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.’ Academics have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. This book is a particularly valuable contribution to both interpretation and practical efforts at change.

Verity Burgmann is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the
University of Melbourne, and author of many books and articles on Australian left political history.

CONTENTS

Brian Musgrove. “`Myth-speak’: Politics and Cultural Symbolism in Contemporary Australia.”

Peta Stephenson. “Some Australian Others.”
A Review of Phil Sparrow, From Under a Leaky Roof: Afghan Refugees in Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005).

Evelyn Hartogh. “Retrieving Histories.”
A Review of Ten Canoes Dir. Peter Djigirr and Rolf de Heer, 2006, and Co-ordinating author, Nonja Peters, The Dutch Down Under, 1606-2006 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006).

Tom O’Lincoln. “Green and Red Revolution.”
Review article discussing John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Donnella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, Limits To Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2004); Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Company and the Rise of a New Energy Order (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

Verity Burgman. “Back From the Streets.”
A Review of Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006).

Humphrey McQueen. “Place, Colour and Sedition: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo: A Study in Environmental Values.”

Robert Jensen. “Just a Prude? Feminism, Pornography and Men’s Responsibility.”

ISSN: 1558 -6960

Articles are peer refereed.

Ten Canoes: Directed by Peter Djigirr and Rolf de Heer.
Cast includes David Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin, Jamie Gulpilil and Frances Djulibing, Filmed entirely on location in Arnhem Land, Australia.
A Vertigo Productions/Fandango Australia production financed by the Film Finance Corporation, the South Australian Film Corporation, the Adelaide Film Festival and SBS Independent, and supported by Bula’bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation. Released in Australia 29 June 2006.

The Dutch Down Under1606-2006: Co-ordinating Author Nonja Peters, University of Western Australia Press: Crawley, Western Australia, 2006.

By Evelyn Hartogh

Ten Canoes, the first Australian film in an Indigenous language, recently won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. The movie is unique in several important ways; not only is it a rare cinematic depiction of traditional Indigenous lives but it also was created in consultation and co-operation with the Yolngu people of the Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land. The film manages to balance both traditional Indigenous story telling methods and the dramatic structure which film-going audiences have come to expect. Dutch born director Rolf De Heer (Bad Boy Bubby, The Tracker) developed the movie with legendary Indigenous Australian actor, dancer and Australia Medal recipient David Gulpilil (The Proposition, The Tracker, Rabbit Proof Fence, Walkabout) who was initially inspired by a series of black and white photographs of the Yolngu that were taken in the 1930s by anthropologist Dr Donald Thompson. The photos provided the basis for a framing story in the film about the ancestors constructing bark canoes for magpie geese egg gathering in the Arafura Swamp. It is in the course of the magpie goose egg gathering that the main story of the movie is told, as an elder relates a story of the ancient ancestors to a younger man.

The main story is shown in colour and dramatic tension is increased by the moments when the film returns to the goose egg gatherers and the younger man’s impatience and anticipation of the story’s direction. The goose egg gathering story, which is a story of storytelling itself, is shown in black and white and reflects the content of Thompson’s photos, many of which depict many traditional activities that are no longer practised, due to the massacres, mistreatment and exploitation of the Yolngu peoples by the white invaders.   Although initially David Gulpilil wanted the movie to climax with these devastating conflicts, the story that eventually emerged is more concerned with honouring the history of his people prior to the white invasion. The traditional methods of building bark canoes had to be learned again by the cast, which was comprised of the descendents of the people in Thompson’s photographs. The film ended up being inspiring and life-affirming for the Indigenous community in Ramingining, bringing them back in touch with a history and culture which the white invaders had attempted to destroy.

A series of related projects sprang up during the film’s development including: Eleven Canoes that involved the young people of Ramingining in making video documentaries and developing and improving the media course at the Ramingining School; Twelve Canoes which is a website project about the environment, culture and people of Ramingining; Thirteen Canoes, an art exhibition; Fourteen Canoes, a book including the original Thompson photographs; Fifteen Canoes, a music conservation project; and many more projects which marry traditional knowledge with new technology (http://www.bulabula-arts.com/news/index.php).   All of these projects, in participation with Ramingining Aboriginal Artists’ collective Bulu’bula Arts, demonstrate the degree to which Indigenous Australians have been forced to rebuild their culture, while they are surrounded by negative stereotypes imposed by mainstream culture which act to deter a community’s ability to feel in control of their lives.

This movie demonstrates great compassion in the current context of John Howard’s refusal to acknowledge and apologise for past atrocities committed against Indigenous Australians including the white invaders’ role in stolen land, stolen children and stolen wages. What Ten Canoes shows is not only a way of living that the white invasion has tried to destroy but also the highly sophisticated ethical system of Indigenous groups, a binding factor for communities which is integral to their morale and sense of belonging. Popular misconceptions about Indigenous Australians tend to ignore their ability to function as successful groups and convey complex philosophical lessons in their storytelling. The positive message of this film, namely that despite the abuse by white people many stories have managed to survive, demonstrates the strength and resilience of Indigenous culture in the face of overwhelming persecution and exploitation.

The motivation for the story told in Ten Canoes comes from the need for a younger man to understand the consequences of his desires, and what may result should he choose to act upon these desires. As the group of men head off to the swamp to make canoes and collect eggs, they tease the young man Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, son of the narrator and co-writer David Gulpilil) about his crush on the wife of his elder brother Minygululu. Instead of chastising Dayindi, or simply telling him his desires are wrong, Minygululu tells a story of the ancients that reflects the young man’s current situation. The story, of course, deals with another young man Yeeralparil (also played by Jamie Gulpilil) who covets the youngest wife of his elder brother, and the multiple conflicts and tragedies that result from him attempting to defy the rules of conduct in his clan. This inner main story is told in an Indigenous language via the ancestors’ story of goose egg hunting, while that goose egg story is guided by David Gulpilil’s narration, making the narrative structure of the film a series of layers, not unlike the way Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is constructed. However, instead of being about a outsider travelling down a river and conveying both observations and the stories that have been heard, this is a story told by the insiders who desire to preserve not only their traditions but also their dignity.

The ancients’ story involves a rendering of traditional life, namely the social organization of the Ganalbingu (magpie goose people) clan including the different camps for young men, young women and the main camp of the adults and married couples. Yeeralparil’s desire for his brother Ridjimiraril’s wife is obvious to the clan. The elder wives ensure they are kept apart, lest Yeeralparil disrupts the social structure causing estrangement from his clan and therefore his death. What Dayindi learns from the story of the ancients is that his older brother’s life is more complex and demanding than he had initially perceived because his brother cannot just enjoy the youth and beauty of his youngest wife, but must also ensure the happiness and survival of his older, wiser wives as well. Envy is revealed to be a shortsighted and ignorant response to judging one’s life against another’s and the story also conveys the notion that the benefits of marriage are enmeshed with responsibilities that must be met before the privileges can be enjoyed. In the course of the main story one of Ridjimiraril’s wives disappears and the clan suspects she has been kidnapped by a neighbouring clan because of the recent visit of a stranger who was not entirely trusted by the group. The appearance of another stranger leads Ridjimiraril to suspect the clan is under threat of more kidnappings and he spears and murders the man before realising he is not the same stranger who appeared earlier. This murder triggers traditional payback by the stranger’s clan who demand the law is upheld because they have lost a valuable membe
r.
Yerralparil joins his brother as the oth
er clan uses their lawful right to throw spears to injure or kill the murderer or his nominated payback partner. Yerralparil knows that because he is younger he has a better chance of avoiding the spears, and more importantly to him, that if his older brother Ridjimiraril dies he will inherit his wives. Ridjimiraril is speared and the other clan is satisfied that the law has been upheld. As Ridjimiraril dies, his missing wife returns and she mourns her husband as he does his final death dance. This sequence of events is catalysed by envy, competitiveness, and suspicion, within the clan, whose disruptive influences are interpreted by their sorcerer as caused by a bad spirit. Indeed it is with a sense of bad spiritedness that such emotions cause tragedy and death in the clan and Dayindi learns that desiring to trade lives with another man can have far reaching consequences for the entire clan. What this story ultimately conveys is that an individual’s actions affect the entire group to which they belong, not just an individual’s life.

On the surface, this film may appear to play into the current fashion for the more ‘exotic’ elements of Indigenous culture such as the traditional art, dance, storytelling, cultural practices and crafts. However, the story’s theme of the consequences of envy and assumptions about other people’s lives, tells a deeply political message. Not only does the story show an approach to morality that integrates history with the development of ethics, but this depiction of Indigenous Australians also highlights the internalised racism generated by the stereotypes favoured by the mainstream media. The dominant images of Indigenous Australians are the extremes of the urban unemployed with drug and alcohol problems, or a patronising ‘noble savage’ approach which infantilises and simplifies a complex culture and virtually ignores the bloodshed wrought by the whites. In contrast Ten Canoes offers an ancient story that not only has resonances in today’s oppressive climate, but also is told in a way that situates the story as travelling down through the people and therefore connecting them with a past which has largely been romanticised or vilified by white culture.

The theme of envy is particularly pertinent considering the Howard government’s stripping away of funding to social services that act to support Indigenous communities that despite being the traditional owners of Australia, are virtually excluded from participation in mainstream culture and have had not only their country taken from them, but the wealth generated by Australia’s resources taken from them as well. Despite this continual theft there remains a widespread notion that Indigenous people live on ‘hand-outs’ and that their disproportionate representation in the prison system points to inherent flaws in their culture rather than persistent persecution by the white legal system. The content of Ten Canoes can be read as suggesting that Australia’s treatment of the Indigenous population not only affects them, but also affects the entire Australian community by encouraging envy, ignorance and divisiveness.

This film also is a watershed in incorporating the film’s subjects in the very creation of the story. Not only are the cast directly descended from the characters in the film, the actors were chosen according to their current kinship ties rather than by the audition process. Within the Yolngu there are internal divisions of Yirritja and Dhua that in turn also have their own sub-sections, and the kinship system for example prohibits marriage of a Yirritja man to a Yirritja women, with reference as well to the subsections these people belong to. In casting Ten Canoes, the community’s kinship system was respected by ensuring that the kinship relationships of characters conformed to the kinship relationships of the actors. Thus the movie in many ways reflects the current trend of ‘reality television’ – in a far greater way than such shows as the tasteless Survivor for example.

Survivor is good case in point regarding the actual lack of basis in reality in much ‘reality’ television. The stereotypical ‘exotic’ locations and the rich western contestants on the show act to perpetuate the history of European invaders as brave pioneers and also make light of the prevalence of third world poverty. The ‘contestants’ are depicted as brave and resourceful but, in actuality, they are simply taking an adventure holiday and can return at any time to their comfortable life in the rich first world. This inherent hypocrisy in Survivor was brilliantly exposed in a recent episode of (co-creator of Seinfeld) Larry David’s show Curb Your Enthusiasm when a ‘survivor’ was invited to a dinner party. Larry David then decides to invite an elderly Jewish friend who had survived a Nazi concentration camp in World War II, thinking the other ‘survivor’ attending had a similar history. The other guest was actually from the TV show Survivor and showed an amazing lack of perspective, and a massive sense of entitlement, by claiming their own experiences on the TV show were equal to the experiences of the Nazi concentration camp survivor. This is done for comic effect, but this storyline does highlight the difference between real ‘survival’ and the child’s play of such TV shows. While the contestants go through mild inconveniences, millions of Indigenous people in both Australia and the third world face a daily life of struggle and survival that does not earn them fame and fortune and is not something to be easily escaped.

While Ten Canoes shows a traditional lifestyle which would not be easy for many urbanised Indigenous Australians to return to, it does show that lost knowledge can be regained and there is much for the traditional owners to draw from in re-establishing dormant cultural practices. It is ironic that a white man’s photographs can provide the basis for reviving and celebrating the skills and daily lives of the Yolngu in Arnhem Land. Even more ironic is a Dutch director at the helm of Ten Canoes, since the Yolngu word for white person is ‘Balanda’ which comes from ‘Hollander’ as the Dutch were the first to have contact with the Yolngu.

2006 marks the 400th anniversary of Dutch contact with Australia and Nonja Peters, the Director of the Migration, Ethnicity, Refugees and Citizenship (MERC) Research Unit at the Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, has been the co-ordinating author in a collection of essays entitled The Dutch Down Under, 1606-2006. Arnhem Land itself takes its name from the voyages in 1623 of the sailing ship Arnhem and the mapping of what the captain believed to be a series of islands. In the book, references to Dutch encounters with the Indigenous population of Australia are sparse at best and tend to gloss over instances of violence, describing them in generalisations such as, ‘what contact was made, nearly always led to negative experiences on both sides’ (22). The specifics of these ‘negative experiences’ are not elaborated, while the contribution of Dutch ‘explorers’ to European ‘discovery’ of Australia is discussed in depth. The contributors make much of the fact that the Dutch were the first Europeans to settle in Australia (often due to being shipwrecked or being cast off their ship) and that evidence for this is based in instances of Indigenous people with fairer skin, fair hair, European facial features and the genetic diseases common to Europeans, as well as the similarity between many Dutch words and words in Indigenous languages (50).   The Indigenous language Nhanda, for example, is claimed to be contain 16% of Dutch words (49). Reports of European agricultural methods being used by Indigenous Australians in the early nineteenth century are also cited as suggesting Dutch co-habitation with local communities in many parts of Australia. Peters’ book is mainly an exercise in diplomacy and an attempt to redress the perceived lack of credit given to
the Dutch contribution t
o the colonisation (invasion) of Australia. The European mistreatment of indigenous people in Australia is placed firmly in the hands of the British and the most direct reference to this is in a cultural comparison between the Dutch and the Australians:

‘In both histories, as there probably are in all national histories, there is darker side: the slave trade in the case of the Dutch, the genocidal strategies against its indigenous peoples in the case of Australia.’ (221)

The impression in The Dutch Down Under is that despite ‘negative experiences’ the Dutch interaction with Indigenous Australians was peaceful and friendly for the most part and that they did not undertake the ‘genocidal strategies’ of later European immigrants. One of the most interesting linguistic comparisons is in the word ‘plokeman’ which in the Indigenous language of Watjandi means ‘blood brother’ and in Dutch means ‘scavenger’ (49). While these two meanings are only mentioned to further the case for the Dutch being the first Europeans to live in Australia, it is not hard to consider the implications of the notion of a ‘scavenger brother’ who takes any food, land or people they perceive as unowned or unguarded.

The Yolngu word for whites, ‘Balanda’, derived from ‘Hollander’, while not even being mentioned in The Dutch Down Under offers more evidence of the Dutch being most probably the earliest Europeans to encounter Indigenous Australians. Although the book is an interesting and informative study of Dutch immigration into Australia, the contributors display a conspicuous desire to distance themselves from any of Australia’s ‘genocidal strategies’ and interpret Dutch ‘explorers’ as benign pioneers and settlers during the colonisation (invasion) of Australia. However, it must be recalled that David Gulpilil’s early concept for the story of Ten Canoes involved incorporating a climax of one of the many historical massacres of many Yolngu by the Balanda.

Both the Dutch Down Under and Ten Canoes expose a great deal in what they leave unsaid. It is virtually impossible for the Dutch to lay claim to all the early exploration and colonisation of Australia without acknowledging the extent and impact of their ‘negative experiences’ with the Indigenous population. Nor is it possible to watch Ten Canoes without acknowledging that the history that is depicted in the film is largely unknown to most Australians, because it comprises many practices that have been dormant for almost a hundred years. Fortunately for Rolf de Heer and his Balanda crew the ability to be on the look out for crocodiles is still an ever-present skill among the Yolngu. While the Balandas stood in the swamp filming and working to bring this indigenous story to the world, the Yolngu made sure the Balandas made it out of the Arafura Swamp with all their limbs intact. Again the Yolngu showed an understanding that each individual’s actions will affect the entire group and that compassion brings far greater rewards than envy or distrust.

Evelyn Hartogh is a freelance writer and performance artist with a Masters in Creative Writing (University of Queensland 2002) and a Masters in Women’s Studies (Griffith University 1997). She writes about movies, TV and literature for LOTL www.lotl.com, The Australian Women’s Book Review www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr, Queensland Pride newspaper www.queenslandpride.com.au and Bizoo www.bizoo.com.au. Her website is located at www.empressev.net.