Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Not in my barbecue area

Well, another Australia Day in a harsh hot dry January. If only Arthur Phillip had delayed his arrival until a more pleasant time - April 26 perhaps, or September 26. But January 26, what was he thinking? Not about the future, that's for sure. Perhaps, like "Christmas in July', we could have "Australia Day in June".

There was a silly advert in the lead up to the 26th, whipping up enthusiasm for patriotism on Australia Day with the mention of barbecues and beaches. Is that really all it's about?

Or is it partly about our role in remembrance of all of the people who have lived in our backyard - not just Don Bradman, but of all the peoples and achievements and events of the Australian years since 1788, and the 40,000 or so years that preceded them. Scientists and teachers, farmers and nurses, philosophers and poets, film makers and writers, architects and engineers, soldiers and explorers. Oh and the Aboriginal people who loved and served this land not just in the millenia before 1788, but in the 221 years since.

And is it partly to do with recognising our responsibility as guardians of a fair chunk of the world's surface and a not inconsiderable number of unique and irreplaceable plants and animals? I saw an item the other day about people fighting to protect a Victorian beach from the mindless proposal to build a desalination plant. It was in the backyard (or at least just over the fence) of one leading protester, and the reporter asked him, as they always do, aren't you just being a Nimby (not in my back yard) and he replied, in style, "Well, if we don't look after our own backyard, who else will?"

A good reply. Not long after the first Australia Day (three cheers for King George the Third - our beginnings are essentially the reverse of America!) the governor had to stop people chopping down trees in the colony's backyard because the only source of water, the Tank Stream, was being polluted and lost. It has been a theme of Australia ever since - chop down the trees, wreck your own water supply. So all Australians need to be Nimbys, protecting the continent which is our backyard.

And is it to do with seeing our role as citizens of the world? Australia Day shouldn't just be a matter of looking inwards and alternately putting on black or white armbands, depending on our ideological position. There are plenty of countries that do that on their National Day, aye, and all the year round in some cases. We need to look outward, be good neighbours to the world. Not be the country that is recognised just for helping America destroy Iraq, or the one that gets confused with Austria or New Zealand, but one that sets a good example in being a world citizen. Perhaps the one that aims to be the first to be carbon neutral would be an excellent start, would set an excellent example.

And we can be world citizens in other ways. I helped save some of America's wilderness when I signed a petition the other day, to try to reduce some of the Bush regime's last minute rush to destroy even more of America. None of my business, I suppose, not my backyard at all, but if I can help I should. Got thanked (along with thousands of others) by Robert Redford, whose backyard it really was. Just starstruck enough to appreciate that, even at my age.

So next year, come 26 January, perhaps we can think more about our own backyard, and what is in it in addition to barbecues and beaches (with or without desalination plants). And what responsibilities we have, as well as our right to barbecue. And about the backyard of the whole world, and how we can help others say "not in my backyard". It's our backyard too.

Australia Day

23 January 2009
Category Values
1 comments

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Barbecue Area - the film

{ 12:34 PM, 26 January 2009 } { Posted by Frances }
David, this reminds me of a short film made in 1986 in which a group of aboriginal people land on a beach and claim the barbecue area as their own to the astonishment of the white folks. It's hilarious and a good one to watch on Invasion Day. See
http://www.creativespirits.info/resources/movies/babakiueria.html

Your piece also reminds me of a song by Judy Small that I heard her perform at Newstead Live! festival yesterday - Charlesworth Bay - about the despoiling of a natural area that was close to her heart, and how if she goes to holiday resort she now wonders "Whose Charlesworth Bay was this?" A very powerful song which may encourage people to defend the precious wild places close to them. You can read the lyrics at http://www.mysongbook.de/msb/songs/c/charlesw.html

[David says - Yes Frances, that's why I called the piece what I did, hoping someone would recognise the reference to the film. Was it really 1986?!
Don't know the Small song, but it sounds about right, and will look it up.]

Edited by mrpickwick on 26 January 2009 at 2:53 PM

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