(Recycled from the House of Love)
Today, as I write, high atop Mount Olympus, in the ruins of the Temple of Hera, the high priestess of the goddess Demeter and her acolytes are preparing to perform an ancient and solemn ceremony, igniting the sacred flame from the rays of the sun, commencing its epic journey through Greece and across the world to Sydney, Australia, forever to be remembered as the host city of the 2000 Olympic Games. Continue reading
(Recycled from the House of Love)
England, late 1790s. John Sherwood, and two other unemployed, impoverished men, are caught stealing a sheep to feed their families. They are all found guilty and sentenced to hang. Sherwood’s sentence is later commuted to life transportation to New South Wales; the other two go to the gallows. A few years later, Anne Lane, a young woman, is convicted of the theft of a gown and two children’s frocks. Her sentence: seven years’ transportation.
In Sydney in the early years of the 19th century, Anne serves out her sentence while John eventually receives a conditional pardon. They take up residence (there’s no record they ever married, but that was a luxury of the rich in those days) and live out their days together. Those two ‘hardened criminals’ are my great great great grandparents.
There’s no way of knowing, so far in the future, whether these two were guilty of these offences, but obviously the severity of the sentences was extreme to say the least. But, you know, that was how things were in those far-off, less enlightened days…
Fast-forward a couple of hundred years. Here are some recent sentences handed down against aboriginal teenagers in Australia’s Northern Territory, under the NT’s mandatory sentencing laws:
So many years, so few lessons learned. Multinational corporations can destroy the environment, avoid tax and treat their workers barely better than slaves in the quest for profit, and our governments are falling over themselves figuring out ways of locking people up for being poor, black, ignorant, marginalised, hungry or just plain bored. The federal government’s response: to suppress the UN report which points out that laws such as these violate human rights and our international obligations.
China is fast emerging as a greater respecter of human rights than Australia. It is a crime to be poor. The prison industry is expanding at a rate that would make most technology start-ups green with envy, just as the welfare state is being dismantled before our very eyes.
The fascists who are increasingly in control of this country (special mention must be made of the odious Richard Court, Premier of Western Australia, who is musing out loud on the possibility of re-introducing the death penalty, although he hasn’t said so far whether it will apply to sheep rustlers) are no better than the fascists who went before them: the landowners of 18th century England who sent my ancestors to Australia, the slave traders, opium barons, textile merchants, all these capitalists who’d treat their animals with more respect than their fellow humans. It always comes down to profit. If there’s a buck to be made, screw human dignity, civil rights, justice, decency. Property must be protected at all costs.
Welcome to the panopticon. Have a nice day.
(Recycled from the House of Love)
Picture it: Australia, 2000. Two queer boys, in love, in a tiny, two-man tent, pitched under a Banksia tree by a long stretch of white sandy beach. So far, so good. Now picture howling winds and driving rain. For a week.
Quite surprisingly, we didn’t even come close to strangling one another. I’ve seen plenty of relationships go down the gurgler under far less pressure than this, so I reckon we’ve done alright.
Those of you reading this overseas probably have a pretty utopian view of an Australian summer: you sit huddled around your single bar radiator with your slippers on and imagine broad white beaches, tall bronzed lifeguards, ice cold beer in the fridge and sizzling shrimp on the barbie. Well, summer this year hasn’t quite lived up to your expectations: we’re not quite huddled over the radiator, but the lifeguards are inside drinking cocoa and waiting for the rain to let up.
I suppose it’s global climate change at work, thanks very much to American capitalism, which has given us aerosol cheese-in-a-can, air-conditioned dog kennels, vaginal deodorants and the Exxon Valdez. I hope you’re all enjoying your 21st-Century lifestyles up there in Boise Hollywood, cos down here we’re wallowing in all the delightful consequences of decades of chloroflourocarbon pollution.
But of course every hole in the ozone layer has a silver lining: despite the fact that it’s been bucketing down rain since about November I’ve managed to get sunburned twice. Welcome to the 21st century, where we can burn tan in half the time it took in the old days. And when it rains, we read.
Back in our little tent at Sandon, despite the cramped conditions, the suboptimal weather and a narrowly-averted crisis involving almost running out of swizzle sticks right in the middle of cocktail hour, we managed to make the most of it. Brent, being Canadian, is accustomed to foul weather, hiking, roughing it and all that butch stuff. I, being me, am accustomed to eating good food and sipping on a cocktail while leafing through whatever reading matter is at hand. Brent comes fully equipped with a range of camping equipment — made entirely of lightweight Kevlarâ„¢ — which folds down to approximately the size of a handkerchief; I come equipped with a hat and 23 hardcover books.
While our 0.27 micron microfibre snow-resistant, UV-resistant, moose-resistant, double-gusseted, flame-retardant Kevlarâ„¢ home was buffeted by hurricane Betty, Brent flew about, madly hammering stakes back into the sand and lashing the tarp to anything that looked like it might resist the storm, while I sipped on a Pimms and read. As is my democratic right. We live in a free country, after all.
Well, sort of. Today I hear that the forces of right and might have been hard at work in Melbourne, where they have swooped on Polyester Books (one of my favourite bookstores) and seized just about every book in the store except the Women’s WeeklyTM Cookbook. How can this happen in a liberal democracy like Australia? Surely, along with those long languid summers and crystal clear seas, Australia is a fabulously mature and progressive country. I wish it were true. The sad truth is that we have one of the most oppressive regimes of censorship this side of Afghanistan, and lately it’s been getting worse, not better.
Take, for example, the recent news that the censors have banned the acclaimed French film Romance. Although it has been shown uncut in the US, the UK, Turkey and even Ireland, it cannot now be shown here. It can be seen by 16-year-olds in some Scandinavian countries, but it cannot be seen by 40-year-olds here. The Executive Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival says it’s “one of the most fascinating and articulate films to have dealt with female sexuality in recent times” but that cuts no dice with our censors. Why? According to Herald film critic Paul Byrnes, the film deals with female sexuality with gravity and intelligence. There’s a scene where a woman is (consensually) tied up with rope. There’s a scene of sexual assault.
As Byrnes points out, in this country it’s a simple matter to buy all the porno trash films you like, which “don’t take sex seriously,” but the censors won’t let adults watch a film which treats the matter of sex in an adult way.
It’d be laughable if it wasn’t such an insult to every adult Australian.
Coming back to this news after reading David Marr’s book (see over the fold for a mini-review) I can’t say I was surprised. While the xtians in this country aren’t nearly so rabid and outspoken as their north American cousins, they do wield an unreasonable amount of power. As he explains in the introduction:
I was writing about censorship, wondering why people still bothered, when it came to me that what’s at stake here is heaven. The enemies of books and magazines, of sex and music and drugs and television, of drink and dancing are Christians. And what they’re campaigning about is not this life but the next. … Ours is a very secular country but the churches remain the most resilient, most respected and best-connected lobby in the nation. Sin is their business. Heaven is their aim. Government is their partner. There’s a certain instinctive generosity in wanting to keep all us sinners on the train, but there’s also a bullying indifference here to those who count on living only one life — this one.
Free speech doesn’t exist in this country. Whether it’s subcultural books like those stocked by Polyester or films dealing maturely with sex, honesty loses out in favour of a culture of prohibition on knowledge. Whether its books, magazines, movies or the Internet, the government will do anything to restict what you can see and appease the Cardinals. The philistines win again. But like our little tent against the wind and rain, censorship can only resist the truth for so long. Eventually you have to pack up your little tent and feel the rain on your face.
It’s surprisingly refreshing.
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