Dear reader.
Saint Ira, our sage from the near north performing in the latest University Revue, ” where are my humanities’?
As your recall our sage for the near-north, Saint Ira (late of Tolmie), had some very sagacious things to say about the state of stately homes in the UK. Those great piles that Evelyn Waugh described so colourfully in “Brideshead Revisited’. Those great Mansions built upon the blood, sweat and corpses of West Indian and American slavers. He suggested in the emotionally charged dialogue of “Black lives matter” it would not be a bad idea to bulldoze the lot and thus cleanse the British isles of its wicked colonial past. And it was suggested by the editor that the same could be done for those homesteads that were built over the ashes of the indigenous Australians who were cleansed from the fertile western district so that wool could be King .
Very upmarket houses in Brighton.
Ira points to the ongoing destruction of stately and less stately homes as an absolute tragedy, a tragedy that pales into insignificance against the wanton destruction and incalculable cultural wealth lost by the bludgeoning bloody minded mining companies, and suggests its an effing catastrophe,
He writes;
Prince Andrew recommends Brighton for the nightlife and ready availability of nymphettes.. (Sorry wrong Brighton)
Brighton, Victoria has some houses designed by well regarded architects of the 1920’s, 30’s and fifties.’Developers’ knocked one down recently and built units. Now they are trying to do it again. There are huge local objections and all work has been stopped.These houses are all in terribly fashionable Brighton which naturally houses allsorts of influential people whose seaside vote the pollies worry about.
Convincing ‘influential people’ that the desecration of Aboriginal sacred sites by mining companies is a level of intolerable vandalism infinitely more important than Brighton’s houses and should be a priority amongst those people who really care about the history of this country.
Future generations will look back on this wilful destruction with absolute horror.. Accept it or not, we are presiding calmly over the wanton destruction of our equivalent of the glorious caves at Lascaux, Egyptian tombs and monuments and Stonehenge.
The dismissive, troglodyte attitude of our mining companies to anything that might impede the pursuit of profit must be curbed. Successive governments have allowed them to plough through regardless. Just think: are there other (unknown) sites that they have possibly already destroyed …? Not that they would, of course… they are all honourable men…
The only remedy for this must be fines so massive that they never do it again.
Now, which caring pollie has the guts to introduce a bill suggesting these massive financial reprimands…?
Government advisor on brilliant Federal initiative to de- fund Humanities from Australian Higher Education.
Sadly, we know this answer to Ira’s question, sadder still, that we’d have liked to ask a leading anthropologist and historian, but as funding has been withdrawn from humanities based faculties in the latest round of cuts, we are unable to find anyone with the depth of wisdom to provide an answer.
Happy though, that it has been suggested by the humanities department at Latrobe university, now reduced to a new super department of economics, that the answer is 42.
Douglas Adams.
Tragically, Douglas Adams aint around to tell us what that actually means.