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

Environmental narratives

In writing about the past we aim to interest our readers, first grabbing their attention, then selling them our ideas. In a world where news bulletins are increasingly just entertainment and it is difficult to keep the media focussed on any issue for more than a day, writing prehistory is a big challenge. So we use vivid metaphor and unusual analogies, we cut extraneous matter and keep the story moving, we use images and phrases that will stick in the mind, we keep the author highly visible, we construct a story with beginning, middle and end, with problem, events and solution, in such a way as to make the reader feel satisfied at the end.

If we don't do these things the book won't be published, or if published will sink without a trace, however the more successful we are in presenting a story, the more what we are doing is presenting our own mental image of the past. As professionals we can read such works and strip out the details of the research on which it is based. What the saga of the Future Eaters shows among other things is that if you are really successful in attracting a big audience, that audience will simply take at face value all of the devices by which you have dressed up the story.

In 1996 John Howard having won an election by revealing no policies, and running against a Prime Minister demonised by the media, announced that in his Australia there would be no more political correctness. What he meant by that of course was that there would be no more disapproval of the most outrageous statements by shock jocks and populist politicians. He later expanded on one aspect of this by criticising the black armband view of history, by which he meant any historical account in which white Australians did anything bad to blacks. The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history.

Some of this was a deliberate attempt to attract any racist voters who weren't already voting National or Liberal into the fold, but it was also important for two other reasons. Following the Mabo and Wik cases, and with a Reconciliation program under way, and with a Republic debate, and a preamble to the Constitution to write, it was important to push Aboriginal issues back down. Any views suggesting Aborigines had owned land, used and cared for land, and had been badly done by over 2 centuries and continuing into the present, had to be discredited.

By chance, Flannery's book was released onto the fertile ground of debates about whether Aborigines had owned the land, whether they were custodians, what level of civilisation they represented, whether Australia was wasted on them and they were jolly lucky whites had arrived, with lots of pontificating by the likes of Geoffrey Blainey and Hugh Morgan. Here was respectability, an independent umpire, saying that not only were Aborigines not 'custodians' but in fact had caused a 'holocaust' when they arrived, caused massive extinctions, changed the vegetation and even the climate.

When it comes to extinctions and cause, Rhys best articulated the question - if humans hadn't arrived on the continent would megafauna have survived? Forget about humans contributing to the demise in a fence-sitting exercise - extinction or no extinction, that is the question. Put in that way my gut feeling is that we are unlikely ever to know the answer. The critical thing we have all been looking at is timing, but you are probably never going to know the time of extinction for sure for all species in all parts of the continent. Nor are you ever likely to be able to establish a human mechanism, that is, find evidence for one. If this is the case, then the answer to the question is always going to be in terms of probabilities. But really this is true of all questions about the past.

Rhys's question inspired me many years ago to try a what if scenario - what if the megafauna had survived? My slightly tongue in cheek approach considered the question in terms of development of a hunter-gatherer society, but one which remained a hunter-gatherer society. Jared Diamond in a sense carries out the same exercise much more boldly, and in effect concludes that Aborigines would have had much more chance of becoming farmers had they not bumped off all the large animals. Not being farmers meant they couldn't resist the British and were conquered.

Flannery is saying essentially the same thing in a different way - because Aborigines knocked off the megafauna they were forced to start burning the extra grass (one of the silliest propositions ever made in prehistory) and this changed the climate, so they were forced to carry on (barefoot and pregnant) doomed to be nomadic hunter-gatherers forever until conquered by the British.

Now the reaction to this sort of thing among the average One-Nation voting John-Laws listening punter won't be - 'Oh, I thought the Aborigines got beaten because they were dumb, now I know they were beaten because of a long historical process with inevitable outcomes resulting from geographic and ecological accidents, now I feel much more positive towards them'. It is more likely to be 'yes, always knew they brought it on themselves by being stupid'. I am reminded of a story in education. A school was introducing classes in Aboriginal studies to combat racism. Interviewed before the classes one student said he thought all Aborigines were bastards. After a long course looking at Aboriginal culture, society and history he was asked if his opinion had changed - 'yes, they are cunning bastards'.

Another critical strand in the politics of Australia in the last few years has been the battle over the environment.

Flannery's Australian environment is an artificial one in which human beings caused the extinction of a whole suite of animals which in turn caused extensive use of fire. It is an environment which can only be maintained by continued human intervention, work which we will have to pick up like a dropped olympic torch and carry on. This was again summed up brilliantly by Rhys when he asked whether we wanted to preserve what he believes is a humanly made landscape, or a landscape as it was prior to human intervention. The forceful presentation of theories about extinction and use of fire has led to them being adopted as fact, not only by the general public, but by people like the Forest Industry Association and the Farmers Federation, and even more dangerously by politicians like Wilson Tuckey, who, one has to keep reminding oneself, is the Minister for Forestry and Conservation.

Wilson believes for example, says frequently, and uses as the basis of policy, that there are more trees in Australia than ever before, that huge areas which are now treed were definitely once grass, and that Australian forests can't sustain themselves without human intervention (ie by chopping down trees). Foresters after clear felling old growth forests burn all the litter on the ground because this is what Aborigines did. Farmers want permission to clear 'scrub' because it isn't natural because it hasn't been burnt. And so on.

This is all pretty heady stuff - ideas and metaphors about the past are being used to determine the place of Aborigines in society and perhaps even more frighteningly (because it can't be reversed) to determine environmental policy for the future. I remember Sandra Bowdler once scathingly remarking at a seminar that all this stuff on megafauna wasn't real archaeology (I can't now remember what real archaeology was). We have now gone to the opposite extreme, and I find it rather frightening.

Finally we need to keep firmly in mind what science is and how it should work. When I was completing the book I was asked several times, by the kind of people who belong to the Gundaroo Book Club, and have, like all other Book Clubs in the country, studied the Future Eaters, what I was writing about. The reaction, when I said I was writing a book which demolished Flannery's arguments and disagreed with all his views, was one of stunned incomprehension. I was told, quite seriously, by intelligent people, that this wasn't possible because Flannery had told us exactly what happened in the past. How could I possibly disagree when we had already been given the facts? I have subsequently had this reaction from one or two reviewers. Just as frighteningly, another reviewer took me to task for daring to disagree with those eminent archaeologists Jones, Hallam, Tindale and Flannery. I have no quarrel with the term eminent archaeologist for the first three, but the proposition (from a Queensland professor) that once an eminent person had spoken, no debate was possible, is one that I knew had currency in Teheran and Rome and Beijing, but hadn't expected to encounter in science.

Flannery of course can't be held fully responsible for the views of his true believers. However he does seem to have picked up another attribute of recent politics. Political correctness has come to mean any view which does not accord with conservative orthodoxy. Those who hold such views are increasingly branded as the chardonnay set, the cappuccino crowd, latte set, chattering classes, champagne socialists, environmentalists, elites, experts. In America small-l liberalism is a term of abuse. All such people of course have left wing ideology. The right doesn't have ideology, it simply has the truth. In a similar way, some of those opposing Flannery's views of the world have been described for example as feminazis. I have been maligned by two reviewers, the level of their rage at my presumption something I only remember seeing previously in a review of David Marr's anti-religion book by a leading Anglican high church cleric.

It is at first sight very appealing to have a book about Australian prehistory as a best-seller. At other times such an achievement (for example with Mulvaney's prehistory) would have had marvellous spin offs in terms of public interest, student numbers, research support, museum activity and so on. In these times however, this popularity seems to me to be stifling further debate in the way that some religious texts can do.

Whether you agree or disagree with some or all of my ideas I would appreciate some support in the battle to let politicians and public know that archaeology is not a dead science post Future Eaters, but that debate is alive and well.' [This is a talk I gave to a workshop on megafauna extinction, shortly after my book 'The Pure State of Nature' was published]

Environmental narratives
extinction

29 August 2000
Category Environment
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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)

"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)