Nothing will change until we confront the real sources of power.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th November 2013

It’s the reason for the collapse of democratic choice. It’s the source of our growing disillusionment with politics. It’s the great unmentionable. Corporate power. The media will scarcely whisper its name. It is howlingly absent from parliamentary debates. Until we name it and confront it, politics is a waste of time.

The political role of corporations is generally interpreted as that of lobbyists, seeking to influence government policy. In reality they belong on the inside. They are part of the nexus of power that creates policy. They face no significant resistance, from either government or opposition, as their interests have now been woven into the fabric of all three main parties.

Most of the scandals that leave people in despair about politics arise from this source. On Monday, for example, the Guardian revealed that the government’s subsidy system for gas-burning power stations is being designed by an executive from the company ESB, who has been seconded into the energy department(1). What does ESB do? Oh, it builds gas-burning power stations.

On the same day we learnt that a government minister, Nick Boles, has privately assured the gambling company Ladbrokes that it needn’t worry about attempts by local authorities to stop the spread of betting shops(2). His new law will prevent councils from taking action.

Last week we discovered that G4S’s contract to run immigration removal centres will be expanded, even though all further business with the state was supposed to be frozen while allegations of fraud are investigated(3). Every week we learn that systemic failures on the part of government contractors are no barrier to obtaining further work, that the promise of efficiency, improvements and value for money delivered by outsourcing and privatisation have failed to materialise(4,5,6). The monitoring which was meant to keep these companies honest is haphazard(7), the penalties almost non-existent(8), the rewards stupendous, dizzying, corrupting(9,10). Yet none of this deters the government. Since 2008, the outsourcing of public services has doubled, to £20bn. It is due to rise to £100bn by 2015(11).
This policy becomes explicable only when you recognise where power really lies. The role of the self-hating state is to deliver itself to big business. In doing so it creates a tollbooth economy: a system of corporate turnpikes, operated by companies with effective monopolies.

It’s hardly surprising that the lobbying bill – now stalled by the Lords – offered almost no checks on the power of corporate lobbyists, while hogtying the charities who criticise them. But it’s not just that ministers are not discouraged from hobnobbing with corporate executives: they are now obliged to do so.

Thanks to an initiative by Lord Green, large companies have ministerial “buddies”, who have to meet them when the companies request it. There were 698 of these meetings during the first 18 months of the scheme, called by corporations these ministers are supposed be regulating(12). Lord Green, by the way, is currently a government trade minister. Before that he was chairman of HSBC, presiding over the bank while it laundered vast amounts of money stashed by Mexican drugs barons(13). Ministers, lobbyists – can you tell them apart?

That the words corporate power seldom feature in the corporate press is not altogether surprising. It’s more disturbing to see those parts of the media that are not owned by Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere acting as if they are.

For example, for five days every week the BBC’s Today programme starts with a  business report in which only insiders are interviewed. They are treated with a deference otherwise reserved for God on Thought for the Day. There’s even a slot called Friday Boss, in which the programme’s usual rules of engagement are set aside and its reporters grovel before the corporate idol. Imagine the outcry if Today had a segment called Friday Trade Unionist or Friday Corporate Critic.

This, in my view, is a much graver breach of BBC guidelines than giving unchallenged airtime to one political party but not others, as the bosses are the people who possess real power: those, in other words, whom the BBC has the greatest duty to accost. Research conducted by the Cardiff school of journalism shows that business representatives now receive 11% of airtime on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news (this has risen from 7% in 2007), while trade unionists receive 0.6% (which has fallen from 1.4%)(14). Balance? Impartiality? The BBC puts a match to its principles every day.

And where, beyond the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, a few ageing Labour backbenchers, is the political resistance? After the article I wrote last week, about the grave threat the transatlantic trade and investment partnership presents to parliamentary sovereignty and democratic choice(15), several correspondents asked me what response there has been from the Labour party. It’s easy to answer: nothing.

Blair and Brown purged the party of any residue of opposition to corporations and the people who run them. That’s what New Labour was all about. Now opposition MPs stare mutely as their powers are given away to a system of offshore arbitration panels run by corporate lawyers.

Since Blair’s pogroms, parliament operates much as Congress in the United States does: the lefthand glove puppet argues with the righthand glove puppet, but neither side will turn around to face the corporate capital that controls almost all our politics. This is why the assertion that parliamentary democracy has been reduced to a self-important farce has resonated so widely over the past fortnight.

So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics. I haven’t given up yet, but I find it ever harder to explain why. When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the three main parties stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?

www.monbiot.com

References:
1. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/10/gas-industry-employee-energy-policy
2. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/10/planning-law-changes-help-bookmakers-minister
3. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/08/g4s-expand-contract-freeze-government-work
4. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/05/privatisation-public-service-users-bill
5. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9742685/Total-chaos-after-pet-dog-counted-on-translators-database.html
6. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jul/22/disabled-benefits-claimants-test-atos
7. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/07/government-outsourcing-problems-g4s-serco-a4e
8. http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2013/jul/17/ifg-government-outsourcing-privatisation-skills
9. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/09/financial-transparency-privatised-nhs
10. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/rail-privatisation-train-operators-profit
11. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/07/public-sector-outsourcing-shadow-state
12. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jan/18/buddy-scheme-multinationals-access-ministers
13. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jul/24/lord-green-hsbc-scandal
14.http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/breadth_opinion/content_analysis.pdf
15. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/us-trade-deal-full-frontal-assault-on-democracy

The Dalliance of the Eagles
by Walt Whitman

SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.

Comments by our Poetry Editor Ira Maine

That’s what the new rules being smuggled into trade agreements are delivering.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5th November 2013

Remember that referendum about whether we should create a single market with the United States? You know, the one that asked whether corporations should have the power to strike down our laws? No, I don’t either. Mind you, I spent ten minutes looking for my watch the other day, before I realised I was wearing it. Forgetting about the referendum is another sign of ageing. Because there must have been one, mustn’t there? After all that agonising over whether or not we should stay in the European Union(1), the government wouldn’t cede our sovereignty to some shadowy, undemocratic body without consulting us. Would it?

The purpose of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is to remove the regulatory differences between the US and European nations. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago(2). But I left out the most important issue: the remarkable ability it would grant big business to sue the living daylights out of governments which try to defend their citizens. It would allow a secretive panel of corporate lawyers to overrule the will of parliament and destroy our legal protections. Yet the defenders of our sovereignty say nothing.

The mechanism is called investor-state dispute settlement. It’s already being used in many parts of the world to kill regulations protecting people and the living planet.

The Australian government, after massive debates in and out of parliament, decided that cigarettes should be sold in plain packets, marked only with shocking health warnings. The decision was validated by the Australian supreme court. But, using a trade agreement Australia struck with Hong Kong, the tobacco company Philip Morris has asked an offshore tribunal to award it a vast sum in compensation for the loss of what it calls its intellectual property(3).

During its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges, Argentina imposed a freeze on people’s energy and water bills (does this sound familiar?). It was sued by the international utility companies whose vast bills had prompted the government to act. For this and other such crimes, it has been forced to pay out over a billion dollars in compensation(4).

In El Salvador, local communities managed at great cost (three campaigners were murdered) to persuade the government to refuse permission for a vast gold mine which threatened to contaminate their water supplies. A victory for democracy? Not for long perhaps. The Canadian company which sought to dig the mine is now suing El Salvador for $315m – for the loss of its anticipated future profits(5).

In Canada, the courts revoked two patents owned by the US drugs firm Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the company had not produced enough evidence that they had the beneficial effects it claimed. Eli Lilly is now suing the Canadian government for $500m, and demanding that Canada’s patent laws are changed(6).

These companies (and hundreds of others) are using the investor-state dispute rules embedded in trade treaties signed by the countries they are suing. The rules are enforced by panels which have none of the safeguards we expect in our own courts(7,8). The hearings are held in secret. The judges are corporate lawyers, many of whom work for corporations of the kind whose cases they hear. Citizens and communities affected by their decisions have no legal standing. There is no right of appeal on the merits of the case. Yet they can overthrow the sovereignty of parliaments and the rulings of supreme courts.

You don’t believe it? Here’s what one of the judges on these tribunals says about his work. “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”(9)

There are no corresponding rights for citizens. We can’t use these tribunals to demand better protections from corporate greed. As the Democracy Centre says, this is “a privatised justice system for global corporations.”(10)

Even if these suits don’t succeed, they can exert a powerful chilling effect on legislation. One Canadian government official, speaking about the rules introduced by the North American Free Trade Agreement, remarked, “I’ve seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law. Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day.”(11) Democracy, as a meaningful proposition, is impossible under these circumstances.

This is the system to which we will be subject if the transatlantic treaty goes ahead. The US and the European Commission, both of which have been captured by the corporations they are supposed to regulate, are pressing for investor-state dispute resolution to be included in the agreement.

The Commission justifies this policy by claiming that domestic courts don’t offer corporations sufficient protection because they “might be biased or lack independence.”(12) Which courts is it talking about? Those of the US? Its own member states? It doesn’t say. In fact it fails to produce a single concrete example demonstrating the need for a new, extra-judicial system. It is precisely because our courts are generally not biased or lacking independence that the corporations want to bypass them. The EC seeks to replace open, accountable, sovereign courts with a closed, corrupt system riddled with conflicts of interest and arbitrary powers.

Investor-state rules could be used to smash any attempt to save the NHS from corporate control, to re-regulate the banks, to curb the greed of the energy companies, to renationalise the railways, to leave fossil fuels in the ground. These rules shut down democratic alternatives. They outlaw left-wing politics.

This is why there has been no attempt by our government to inform us about this monstrous assault on democracy, let alone consult us. This is why the Conservatives who huff and puff about sovereignty are silent. Wake up people, we’re being shafted.
www.monbiot.com

References:
1. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/eu-speech-at-bloomberg
2. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/obamacare-trade-superversion-subversion-threat-state
3. http://www.mccabecentre.org/focus-areas/tobacco/philip-morris-asia-challenge
4. http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2013/06/transatlantic-corporate-bill-rights
5. http://democracyctr.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Under_The_Radar_English_Final.pdf
6. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/05101823898/eli-lilly-decides-it-was-not-greedy-enough-now-suing-canada-500-million.shtml
7. http://democracyctr.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Under_The_Radar_English_Final.pdf
8. http://www.citizen.org/eli-lilly-investor-state-factsheet
9. http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2012/11/chapter-4-who-guards-guardians-conflicting-interests-investment-arbitrators
10. http://democracyctr.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Under_The_Radar_English_Final.pdf
11. http://www.thenation.com/article/right-and-us-trade-law-invalidating-20th-century?page=0,5
12. http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2013/october/tradoc_151790.pdf

by Quentin Cockburn

I understand people devote their lives to savouring the exquisite crystalline beauty of cut glass.  They talk of beakers, goblets and carafes dripping with silver.  They delight in adorning the flasks with those little medallions, not dissimilar to the breastplates we awarded to leaders in the aboriginal community.  They savour through trained nostrils the bouquet of an elegant shiraz sipped from long stemmed glasses.  Tumblers brimming with brandy, elegant sherry glasses for Bristol Cream, Tio Pepe and Pimms.  They talk of Stuart and Waterford, Lalique and Murano.  It is incomprehensible to me, a foreign language borne by a sort of knowing exclusivity.  I don’t care about the vessel, it’s the contents that really count.  I have been known to drink from jam jars, vases and the odd tankard, pewter preferably, as this is unbreakable and robust, a riposte of all that is fine and decorative.

However, on my frequent stays in Melbourne I am entrusted with the task of helping mother find replacement glasses for those that suffered breakage during the preceding week.  Gone is the crystal set bequeathed at her wedding, which is apt I think, as the husband has gone too.  The smaller sherry glasses, once regular, are irregular, and the other wine glasses, an assortment of the thin, the elegant and exquisite have long been exorcised from the sideboard.  Now its a utilitarianism in keeping with the wisdom of age.

Foremost in our search is that for the perfect whiskey glass.

Mother and I are regular.  On Thursdays, (pension day) it’s to that purveyor of fine liquor,  Dan Muphys, for a bottle (or two) of Johnnie Walker.  On Mondays, depending on when I get into town its a reconnoissance at Aingers, (the Auction House) and the Abbotsford Salvos Shop.  Both, like Dans’, are places of worship.  At Aingers they are friendly in a family sort of way.  We cruise the aisles, in amongst the detritus of deceased estates, almost as much a homage to Sandy Stone as Johnnie Walker, and then find another replacement whiskey glass, usually out the back amongst the odds and sods.  The article we choose is inscribed in the ledger of bids,  we put a value on it.  Sometimes up to ten dollars for a good set and then we go home and  await the call.  It’s exciting stuff.  I then hurry off on a Wednesday en route to the printers, exchange a greeting with the beautiful Paula, and return to mother, glasses in hand, a celebratory drink, and the another for good measure.

Yesterday, post Ainger, we ducked inside the Abbotsford Salvos shop. Mum found six beautiful long stemmed glasses, the price, neatly inscribed, $1.90 each.  She placed them in her basket.  Admiring the bookshelves and their assortment of Barbara Cartland, Max Bygraves and Reg Varney biographies she paused, and put the basket down upon a sofa.  This was unwise.  You’d think she’d learn.  I heard the crash and deducing the likely cause made my way towards the bookshelves.  She’d put the pieces back in the basket, ‘Hmm… Only three broken’?,  ‘Yes’!, she replied triumphantly!..  ‘I need six for my party, but this will do’!!  ‘How about we leave the basket here, (the evidence) and we make our way blithely to the counter’.

‘Excellent suggestion’.  And so, familiarity and good cheer our keepers, made our way onto the street.  Not whiskey tumblers, but wine glasses, and as the afternoon was upon us, we tested the glasses.  The Sav Blanc, a rhapsody in translucent greens and the glasses, the survivors, were found to be good.

WA, Desert Art and the Australian Landscape Tradition.
by Quentin Cockburn

WA: “everything BIG” as Borat would say.  And everything NEW.  New buildings, new roads.  This is a mining state, and a veritable ‘gold rush’ is underway.  Money is to be made, and making money is the name of the game.  Anything getting in the way of profit is taboo.

Kings Park, on an escarpment overlooking the picturesque Swan River Estuary on the Western edge of the city is an oasis.  This park is a gallery exhibiting WA’s most valuable and precious resource – its native flora.  This was the only, the singular exhibit that said environment matters.  And on the skyline, dominating, is the largest Perth City building, all steel and black glass, with massive naming and logo above.  It reads ‘BHP Billiton’

Big (and new) were the roads that coursed between the coastal developments, Kwinana, Mandurah, and Busseltown, and Big (and new) were the trucks that thundered past, some filled with timber, others petrol tankers, road trains, and utes.  It’s a mining and resource state and don’t you forget it!

It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of Western Australia.  We were down the bottom end, though I was told the drive East to Esperance, was at least another ten hours.  The trip North to Broome, an incomprehensible 2500 kms, and further north, the speedo flicks over to the thousands.  Distance, not tyranny but curse, Australia’s curse.   There is a luxuriance of distance -distance to develop, to mine, and transmigrate beyond the fringes. The physical being out of sight, out of mind.

It’s hard to get a sense of the distance, and yet as we cursed and fumed amidst the interminable roundabouts between Busselton and Bunbury, we had an inkling that someone, perhaps from the the English post war traffic management roundabout school had had a say. .  To turn the expanse into digestible, frustrating, episodic vignettes.
________________________________________

I never quite dug the Papunya desert paintings.  Or perhaps it’s easier to say that dots didn’t appeal to me.  If you wanted dots I would say, go talk to Yayoi Kusama, or those french blokes, the pointilists like Seurat and Signac.  I am of the great and noble landscape tradition, the mud school, the heroic, sun bleached entabulature to an emergent nation, golden summers, showers, and that sort of thing.  Not an indiginee to be seen, and only much later, almost as an act of contrition ‘painted in’ as compulsory addenda, a signature to every Drysdale as high art recognition, and Jolliffes ‘Outback’ to the lower end

But landscape is intuitive.  I believe that landscape and environment craft, mould, and distill perceptions about us.  Tony Abbot is from Sydney; destiny is ruled by an autocracy and determination of will, part Rum Rebellion, part Manifest Destiny.  Unswerving un-yeilding.  Gina Rhinehart is from Western Australia, vast, incomprehensible, enigmatic, and powerful.  You see what I mean?

Sitting in the comfortable chair of our Tiger Airlines flight 774 Cecil remarked, “look at these”.. It was not (to my disappointment) the hostess but the pattern of salt pans that decorated the scene below.  From thirty thousand feet I got the dot painting as a perfect representation of travel and attachment to a vast landscape.  The salt pans, spread below us in a mosaic of perfect symmetry, and between the brilliant edges, the paddocks and scrub, established an interplay of simple colour.  It, as all form and movement.  I now knew what the first Australians understood, that the patterns and circles defined place and country.  I then realised what I owed to the traffic management school the infernal miasma of roundabouts affected the same result.  A sympathetic homage perhaps?  ‘An infernal nuisance.’ came the dull reply.

Annus Mirabilis
by John Dryden

Night came, but without darkness or repose,
A dismal picture of the gen’ral doom:
Where souls distracted when the trumpet blows,
And half unready with their bodies come.

Those who have homes, when home they do repair,
To a last lodging call their wand’ring friends.
Their short uneasie sleeps are broke with care,
To look how near their own destruction tends.

Those who have none sit round where once it was,
And with full eyes each wonted room require:
Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place,
As murder’d men walk where they did expire.

Some stir up coals and watch the Vestal fire,
Others in vain from sight of ruin run:
And, while through burning lab’rinths they retire,
With loathing eyes repeat what they would shun.

The most in fields, like herded beasts lie down;
To dews obnoxious on the grassie floor
And while their Babes in sleep their sorrows drown,
Sad parents watch the remnants of their store.

While by the motion of the flames they ghess
What streets are burning now, and what are near;
An Infant waking, to the paps would press,
And meets, instead of milk, a falling tear.

Comment by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

Constantly on TV we are shown horrifying  images of people driven from their homes either by war or natural disasters.  John Dryden, Poet Laureate, was born in about 1630, moved to London, where he survived the English Civil War, The Restoration, the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666.

What this poem brilliantly evokes for me is the mind’s absolute incomprehension in the aftermath of a disaster which has not only destroyed the individual’s own home, but the entire neighbourhood. Everything that was familiar has gone, and people who lived next door, or down the road, simply have ceased to exist.

Those who remain are left stunned, consumed by disbelief, sitting or poking aimlessly in the ash, purposeless, traumatised, shell-shocked.

The Fire was 450 years ago.  The reaction to the fire, as recorded in the poem, is precisely the reaction we see regularly on our television screens.

Everything changes, but every thing remains the same…

And here we are back with our dispatch, this from 2 November 2013.  
ADDED BONUS  a Buffy Saint Marie postscript.
AND some great music!   (and use google translate if you need)

Egun on nire lagunak
My family arrived in Australia in 1958 . As I’ve mentioned before, we were part of the first post-WWII wave of boat people. We initially lived in Moe, pronounced Mah-oo-wee, in Gippsland (Victoria). Not far from Moe there was a chicken farm said to be “the biggest chicken farm in the Southern Hemisphere”. A plethora of “ best, biggest, longest, thickest, weirdest and so on, in the Southern Hemisphere” kept being referred to in newspapers and discussions. In a humorous book on post war Australia that I can’t recall the title of, there was a chapter titled “The Southern Hemisphere” illustrated by a George Molnar cartoon of a fellow sitting in a large halved globe (the bottom half in case you’re wondering). The book was published around the same time as Nino Culotta’s ‘They’re a Weird Mob’. Having arrived in Australia from another Southern Hemisphere country (via my Northern Hemisphere country of birth), I had my serious doubts about these claims , I would not have been at all surprised if Argentina or South Africa for that matter boasted an even larger chicken farm. The Great Australian Cringe was alive and well. We ‘New Australians’, as long as we retained a trace of a wog accent, were forever being asked how we liked Australia and any hint of criticism in our response, however well intended or naively delivered was not very graciously received. I soon learned not to argue with such unproven boasts: If Australians wanted to feel good about having the largest chicken farm in the Southern Hemisphere, who was I to deflate their supercilious  pride? It’s not good to be a wet blanket. It earns you no gratitude. The ‘go back to where you came from’, or its less polite form ‘If you don’t like it… fuck off’ mentality were much in evidence then and sadly remain with us today. A bit problematic and somewhat ironic when many want to apply the same sentiment to those that have been here all along.

Some years ago on the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) radio network, after 5 p.m. when normal ‘traffic’ ceased, there was what was known as the ‘Galah Session’. People on cattle stations used to socialize on their short wave radio, whenever there were no occasional medical emergencies being dealt with. During the period of self determination suddenly a large number of radio licences were obtained by Aborigines who joined the Galah sessions (mostly in Pitjatjantjarra). On occasions radio conditions were such that you’d hear those people whose boats were going to be purchased by the present Australian Government. A large number of Indonesian fishermen could be heard talking to each other in Bahasa Indonesia. Their signals were rather weak. The Pitjatjantjarra signals on the other hand were loud and clear. A ‘cow-cockie’ was famously overheard to say to his friend on another station: “Geez Bob, can you hear them foreigners?”

When we returned to Australia from our much enjoyed two year sojourn in Canada in 1971, as Wendy was walking down the ship’s gangplank carrying a guitar, a wharfie sang out “Gissa chune on ya banjo luv”. That’s when we knew we were back home. Many Australians have experienced a return from exotic and amazing places overseas to feel that they’re back home and that Australia isn’t so bad and really a great place and that there is absolutely no need to claim the largest chook farm in the Southern Hemisphere in order to be a proud Australian. It’s a nice a place…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFacWGBJ_cs
Mind you in 1970 the Canadian Government paid for a television advertising campaign promoting tolerance and multiculturalism. The advertisements featured Canadian singer Buffy Saint Marie….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqaEdk4Jsko
In Australia the mining industry spent around $20million to convince a majority of Australians that taxing the super profits of large multinational mining companies was a bad idea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CREUOpaVYJQ
Fair enough I say, how could we ever expect foreign investors to invest in the largest chook farm in the Southern Hemisphere, if their super profits are liable to be subjected to extra taxes? As for multiculturalism and tolerance, we’ve got to get our priorities right, we certainly don’t want to see a reason for the revival of the Great Australian Cringe. Nah, what we want the most is the largest chook farms in the Southern Hemisphere, then truly will we be The Lucky Country, The Country of the Fair Go, The Clever Country. The greatest country in the Southern Hemisphere, the land down under…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYR4rM6Y4v4

Australia often ‘punches above its weight’. In sport, in medicine and many other fields.
Some great music has emanated from this sunburnt country….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWwVRxixrXw …Pigram Brothers ‘Saltwater Cowboy’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdl60MfTBY … Powderfinger ‘These Days’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZGQd1KR8xY … Billy Thorpe ‘Rock me Baby’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbqH4FjiXac ….Black Sorrows ‘Chained to the Wheel’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxteU1qWLDA ….Buddy Knox Band
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kpc1tlZlGg …. Lajamanu Teenage Band ‘Wiyarpa Wanti Jalu’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmLVxRS_Sxs ….Wildflower ‘Galiwn’ku’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhgDqY7_RGs ….Gurrumul ‘Gopuru’

We have much to embrace, much to celebrate. Why can’t we extend this to include the first Australians? And not by Closing the Gap, but Bridging the Gap.

How much richer we’d all be? How much less likely our cause to cringe? How much lesser the need to invoke the largest chook farm in the Southern Hemisphere to be proud to be Australians?

Zergatik egin behar da, beraz, esan nahi dugu?
Hurrengoan arte,

Frank

(won’t keep you in the dark…. Google translate from Basque…. Just tried it, is never quite the same when you translate anything back)

POSTSCRIPT “THE MELTING POT”
Fascinating…. Just looked up Buffy Sainte-Marie quotes because Wendy remembered what the song she sang in those advertisements in Canada (back in 1970) that I referred to in the latest Dispatch was.
It was called ‘Melting Pot’ and I chose not to use it because it was all about tolerance and equality (like Closing the Gap and getting ‘Real Jobs’) rather than celebrating diversity… so on you tube I couldn’t find the song (did Buffy have it removed?), has she changed her tune?
So cop the quotes!!!!

“Here the melting-pot stands open — if you’re willing to get bleached first.”

“I enjoy the bridges among cultures.”

“I believe that people do want to know each other. I think it’s always about the deep longing for respect.”

“Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what ‘was’ and ‘were,’ we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.”

“Language and culture cannot be separated. Language is vital to understanding our unique cultural perspectives. Language is a tool that is used to explore and experience our cultures and the perspectives that are embedded in our cultures.”

As we have Buffy Sainte-Marie talking”Melting Pot” Cecil and Quentin are in the Melting Pot Glass Studio in Margaret River WA.  Coincidence?
Check their work here
Awesome.

Place names in Australia 2
bu Ira Maine

Place names are odd things altogether.

There’s a place near Macedon (Vic.) on the Calder Highway where there used to be a hugely successful sausage factory.  In the end the place was closed down because the authorities found that the management were adding sawdust to bulk out the recipe.  In the sample tested, one end of the sausage was found to be entirely made up of sawdust.  The management’s defence was that it was hard to make both ends meat.  Believe it or not, that town is now called Woodend.

Then when one of the maintenance crew slipped and had a section of his buttocks sliced off, customers immediately began to complain that they were getting behind in their orders.

Slightly South West of Ballarat, before anywhere in the district had a properly recognised European place name, there was a French butcher making a good living creating wonderful pates and ketchups for the diggers.  What he would do, not being familiar with English, was simply roll up to a farm with his horse and cart and call out “Mort?” (the French for ‘dead’) and offer his butchery services.  At least half of his fees, and sometimes much more, were paid in meat, which he would promptly take home and turn into salamis and ketchups.  He would then sell these gourmet creations at the Linton Market.  People loved these creations so much that they couldn’t wait to taste them.  In order to prevent them being nibbled by kids  on the way home, the Frenchman would always give each  child a nice rib or chop bone to nibble on.  The kids would instantly take off down the road to where a huge old rusty tank lay discarded by the roadside.  The remarkable thing about this tank was that, if hit, not with a piece of wood or a stone, but with a suitable piece of bone, it gave off this extraordinary ringing sound which went on and on reverberating in a most entertaining fashion.  To this day the whole area is still called “Pittong” in memory of that sound.  Oh, and the place where the Frenchman made his ketchups? Why, Mortchup, of course.

Before I conclude, there is just one other odd place name I feel is worth mentioning which might serve to point out how language changes.  Walking out with a young lady, until quite recent times was referred to as  ‘courting’.  This usage of course has now fallen out of fashion.  But when I was a country kid in post war Ireland this word was pronounced,  not as ‘court’ but as ‘coo-ert’. Country people are much slower to change than city slickers so old  ways of pronouncing words remain.

Commonly too, a neighbour might come to the door and ask; “Have you e’er a cup of sugar to spare?’

And the reply might be;  ‘Sorry, I’ve ne’er a bit in the house.at all.’

Again,18^th century English in 1950’s Ireland!

In the 19^th century when young Irishmen found themselves carving out lives in the Western District of Victoria, their biggest problem was the almost complete absence of women.  The Government had promised boatloads of pretty girls to whom the lads might ‘pay court’.  None arrived.  ‘Going courting’ was impossible.  There was ne’er a girl to be had.  In absolute frustration, a deputation of the lads marched out to the big wooden sign on the outskirts of town and tore it down. Nobody remembers what the old name was.  Everybody remembers the new name the lads nailed up in its place:
‘NE’ER A  COORT’.

The local council was hugely embarrassed by this and tried to pull the sign down.  Every morning, miraculously it reappeared.  Good Christian respectable citizens were appalled and insisted that something be done.  Pressure was brought to bear and a seemingly intractable situation became, overnight, tractable.  In a matter of weeks ladies of the most exquisite refinement began to be seen about the place.  With the young men placated, another attempt was made to reinstate the old town name, but by then the name itself had gained some reputation and tourists had begun to flock there to see it.  In a last ditch attempt at respectability, the Council, at its wit’s end, begged to be allowed at least to ‘gentrify’ the sign.    Grudgingly this wish was granted and to this day that gentrified town is known as Naracoorte.

Place Names in Australia
by Ira Maine

I think Australia should grow up into the 21st C by being more sophisticated.

Take ‘Uluru’ for instance.  Patently some Frenchwoman was ascending that rock in the middle of Australia, spotted a kangaroo and ejaculated, ‘Oooh, La Roo!’.  Some red-necked oaf, overhearing this, who’d never been past Bourke in his life, obviously thought this ejaculation the very pinnacle of sophistication and promptly used it by way of a name for the aforesaid and nearby large boulder.

And if that wasn’t enough why on earth are the ‘Bungle Bungles’ so called?  Isn’t one Bungle enough?  And, if you must have two why do it in this idiotic manner?  Why not call it ‘Two Mistakes’ and be done with it?  Infinitely more sophisticated, I reckon…Tell you what, it might stop Pommy tourists taking the piss.

When the Italians, God bless them arrived in Oz, our kids would stand on the side of the road as they drove past and shout out ‘a wog! a wog! a wog!’.  With a lamentable lack of imagination and absolute lack of taste the city fathers picked up this catch-cry and used it to name the town Wagga Wagga.  OK it’s spelled differently, but any idiot can see they were having their joke whilst covering their arses.  It is a constant embarrassment to us more sophisticated Australians and ought, in the interest of Advancing Australia Fair, to be changed.

There’s a town in NE Victoria called Benalla.  Now clearly this commemorates some important North African personage who did some great service for the town and needed remembering, but Ben Allah?  Anytime now, when the residents are, in good conscience,  fast asleep, the parachutes and the black ops helicopters, led by Bruce Willis, will descend in the dead of night, seize the Benalla diamond mines, oil wells and Council chambers, then nothing will ever be the same again.  Puppet governments, parking laws, enforced pedestrian crossings and all the horrifying paraphernalia of small town suburban Iowa writ large in NE Victoria.  I would suggest armed citizens’ uprisngs as a consequence; civil unrest and all that.  Not at all good for our sophisticated image abroad.

Fluffy Meadows might serve as an alternative name for Benalla, deliberately calculated to attract a more louche, a more fragile type of resident.  This might both raise the tone and keep the troops at a distance (but not too far).  The shops might  take on a more risque air, there might be Gentlemens’ Clubs, Mardi Gras, and people might, in a certain sense, begin to see that there’s more ways than one to have your assets seized.

There will be more on this anon…
promises Ira

Quentin and Cecil arrived in Perth WA at 12.45 am this morning.  Upon arising, around 7.30 am the day took an unexpected turn.

We’d blanked it out; The Melbourne Cup, that is.  We’d travelled 3000 kilometres to the other side of the country and as far as we were concerned, as seasoned international travelers, The ‘Cup’ ceased to exist.

But it defied us.  It’s palpable, it’s tactile, as soon as we stumbled onto the street we felt it.  First corner, an ‘On Street Bookie’, dressed to the nines, part Arthur Daley, part Spiv Property Developer (think Christopher Skase) his bag-man in black tie, the odds on the board, and amongst them women in high heels, (no, higher heels,) indescribable fascinators, office blokes immaculately dressed, the form guide in hand.  It was 7.30 in the morning, but they were off to a late start.  That three hour time difference to Melbourne means a lot in WA; there was a lot of catching up to do.  We met Ned in the Green room, the waitress was beautifully tattooed. I’m at that age when all women are beautiful, and the studs in her nose, her ears and the sailor tattoo on one arm, the damsel in the other, caused the conversational preamble to wander a little, and with it my eyes.

On the streetscape partially above our semi submerged winter garden I could see the ladies walking by, fascinators, suspenders, high hats, tight dresses, and a myriad of colour, walking the street Adelaide terrace, St Georges Terrace.  Through streetscapes once provincial, now boisterous in a sort of ersatz, baroque corporate standard, curtain glass walls, logos and the certainty, above all certainty that in Perth, land of the giants, business is big.  The BHPBilliton Building dominates, more ponderous than the sphinx rising above the others in a monolithic statement of absolute certainty, that mining, real estate and capital is all that counts.  That’s a sure-fire cert!!  And No Error!!!

But what was this?  In Kings park, the race broadcast blared across from the marquees, the punters were in full force, office parties, a real festival atmosphere, it seemed everyone in Perth was awash with ‘Cup Fever’.  To forget about the cup would be to wallow in a miserable sloth of self indulgence, the celebratory atmosphere was tangible, tactile and all pervasive.  In Bunbury, (90 minutes south of Perth) the streets were eerily silent, everyone it seems had taken the day off, and finally when we arrived in Margaret River, (bastion of the WA alternatives) the pubs were overflowing with people, the young, the middle and the elderly, all females adorned in fascinators, (this is what royal weddings teach you) and the celebration of, above all things, the absurdity of life, laughter, and taking a punt.  This is bigger than ANZAC day, bigger than the footy.  This is monumental I said to Cecil.  We looked about us, it was hard to hear oneself in the pub, not loud music just a exuberance borne by knowing how to celebrate,  and with that, a practiced tradition bordering on the erudite in combining good fun with drinking and great friends..

We walked around the pub in search of beauty, that here was in abundance, Cecil suggested to local, that the girls go to an awful lot of trouble, and the blokes it seemed, were on the casual side of casual  The blokes, the local reflected, well, the blokes, they just wanna get pissed.  There was Dostoyevskian wit in that, Cecil mused.  I could only agree.