We read with sympathy the Djab Wurrung who mourn the senseless loss of trees on the Western Highway expansion. We feel their frustration that an alternative route, or a compromise could not be found. And as a individuals working on the periphery of road design we can understand their frustration. Part of it, (though no excuse) has been the gradual hiving off of in-house design from Vicroads to external operatives, who are strongly guided by monetary return. To ensure that little projects get big and big projects get obscenely big. In a word, it’s lucrative. On cultural terms it’s the equivalent to demolishing Stonehenge, for a truck stop, or an entire planet, (Hitchhikers guide) for a preferred astral route, (no Pun intended). The irony is, after the trees are lost and the road, like our rivers, ‘super-straightened’, it will allow a bureaucrat, to arrive at a meeting with another bureaucrat fourteen seconds faster, or a truck hauling stuff destined for landfill to arrive somewhere between Adelaide and Melbourne in slightly faster time. The landscape, the surrounds, the ecology is immaterial. To compensate Vicroads might install an-art themed sound wall, or corten structural embellishment, to declare its cultural sensitivity, to launder their reputation, like money laundering through a corpus of officially designated artists and designers.
At the heart of the matter are two things; the more strident the cries of loss, and the echoes of a subject peoples who’ve we’ve systematically tried to erase for two hundred years is ignored, the anger just grows. It doesn’t matter if people talk rationally, about cultural heritage. When Bruce Pascoe champions the relevance of culture in the Australian landscape, non-one in power listens. Listening is skewed to those ‘inner urban elites’ that our kind represent. Like climate change and the culture wars it has been schism’d by that ‘great inertia’, the ‘Great Australian Apathy’, and value added by centuries of ‘Cultural Cringe’. 
The same unifying singular force allows us as a people to turn a blind eye to the blowing up of caves in Western Australia, the desecration of the Great (now lesser) Barrier Reef, our loss of entire eco-systems, and water. Fracking is just another example of the determination by ‘the market’ to displace anything that cannot be measured in strictly monetary terms. WE bugger up whatever the cost. And BECAUSE WE CAN!
But there’s no point in caterwauling against it. It’s futile, this and any other environmental issue is not ever going to be a Franklin 2.0.
First Australians must realise and recognise the value of MONETISING the ENVIRONMENT! For a start a White Shirt and Tie demonstrates RESPECT!
Australia has changed. Hadn’t you noticed? People are in public office not for universal themes of societal betterment and the ‘Commonwealth’ They’re in often for naked self interest. They’re either rorting the system or wanting entitlement, watches, investment properties, Cayman Island schemes, you name it. In the latest disclosure of Parliamentary interests I noticed aghast at how many backbenchers you’d never heard of had acquired upwards of ten, twelve, fifteen investment properties. As billionaires are a failure of the system, so dynastic back-bencherism is a failure of democracy. It’s all about feather- bedding, sinecurism, and the “quiet” kleptocracy.
In an emergent age of twitter fed jingoistic nationalism, they’ll stoke any fire to ensure that we look the other way. There is no consensus, the champions of the environment once the Liberal National Coalition are now determined to destroy it. To erase their legacy of awareness and the broader issues beholden to us in society. ‘The society’ in neo-liberal terms is a ‘dirty word’, now marginalised, fractionalised, and inept. As we were once a dynamic free thinking country of individualists and extroverts, we are now cowered, by debt, mortgages, and compulsory superannuation into being a sump of supine forelock tuggers, governed through fear, insecurity, and the boon of fully-franked dividends.
Maralinga, a White Shirt and Tie Moment!
It’s no good thinking in deep terms. Just as we are world leaders in killing women under the age of 55 in domestic violence, so we should accept that women must be allowed to kill men with equal immunity. Only by doing so will they achieve the respect they deserve. Similarly, when mindless, bloody minded desecration of aboriginal sites occurs we should demolish sacred white European sites. Perhaps the Shrine? The State Library? the Art Gallery or the MCG. Because at the heart of it until we as a society recognise the cultural value of ‘their stuff’ as being part ‘our stuff’, an undisputed priceless gift of shared inheritance, we’ve got Buckley’s of understanding their viewpoint. Great for the culture wars, but impoverishment for all future Australians.
