You had me at .8 Degrees Celcius

I hope I can be forgiven if I’ve come to envisage climate scientists in the guise of Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mocking Bird – resolute, visionary, dutiful to children and devastatingly handsome. For, as I’m sure climate scientists know all too well, their work is more important than any commission in human history. They have been pilloried, indicted and ignored. Yet their meticulously tested, peer-reviewed findings form the basis for our very survival. They are demonstrably nothing short of heroic which, in this surface-fixated world, necessarily casts them as someone like Atticus/Peck. For it is down to Hollywood to enshrine the climate scientist as heroic. Through its familiar telling he will toil away in isolation for decades, his evidence-based data elided from government reports, his figures recanted and his credibility attacked. A more visionary director will cast this savior-scientist as a woman, and she will also rail to protect her children and, as her story unfolds, their children. Their foe will be coal barons, energy corporation CEOs and corrupt, criminally negligent governments failing to act in the face of their evidence of dire global warming. They will hammer out the best records modern instrumentation can produce, but they will reach a point, the script pivot, when they realize they have to act, and the obstruction to their work will mean they know exactly how to go about it, more effectively than any of the eco-warriors incidentally making appearances. The fight they then wage should be cast in epic, biblical terms. They will storm ineffective UN climate conventions like Christ in The Temple Mount. Fanciful right? Actually the development of this script by the world’s preeminent creative minds is more important that the handing down of the next alarming IPCC projections. What is needed with urgency is a dramatic shift in public sentiment about climate change and the catalyst will be story. People need to be convinced about the science and it is in the nature of our present public realm that this best comes from Hollywood – or at least an infrastructure of cultural production with similar resources, creative brilliance and luminous star vehicles. Habermas was right when he historised the decline of rational-critical debate in our public sphere. He described the crumbling of government response to public demand against the sinister infiltration of lobbyists and vested interests increasingly commanding the ear of our elected representatives. He might have added to his analysis the corruption of the democratic electoral process through corporate campaign funding. Nor did he foresee the additional, pernicious influence of the deceitful shock Jock, paid off by these same interests and wielding unfettered, oracle-like power over the tenor and character of public debate. From here we watch these machinations from the NRA in the present US gun debate with jaw-dropped disbelief. Yet our fossil-fuel moguls are taking their cue from such operatives. The increasingly frightening findings of climate scientists – a rise of 4-6 degrees by the end of the century - can have little purchase within the collapsed public sphere of neo-liberalism. We have succumbed to a carefully choreographed public realm in which galvanized political sensibility depends entirely on the visibility granted to an issue as embodied by the stories of individuals. Violence against women in India thus assumed global significance through media capture and galvanizing of public sentiment over a vicious attack on a young medical student. The chronic rate of third-world infant mortality death due to malnutrition, the tragic acceleration in civilian deaths under modern warfare, the shocking cruelty of industrialized animal production, these and many other issues in need of urgent intervention and concentrated reform, swim in and out of collective consciousness. It all depends, too too much, on media interest and its own reliance on human-interest stories and its entrapment in the 24-hours news cycle. And so it is with climate change. Surely the destruction wrought in lives and property ranks it in human history as of befitting of public attention as the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, resistance to national-socialism or the boycotting of apartheid. But it will take the large-scale machinery of storied dream-scapes to finally shift public sentiment on climate change, for it has come down to emotion and affect, not fact and data – those things need to be repackaged within the most persuasive cultural form available to us and that is presently narrative film. The task before us is an imaginative engagement with environmental and social collapse. The obstacle is that we’ve learnt since the cold war to coexist with imminent apocalypse. We’re also adept at witnessing children starving over our TV dinners comprised of tortured animals. We’re highly skilled in denial and indifference. The best storytellers need to explain climate change to us in terms we are not already habitually inured to. Another end-of-the-world blockbuster isn’t going to sink in past the adolescent audience demographic. Every one of us on the surface of this besieged planet understands what J.D. Salinger meant when we wrote, ‘It’s a perfect day for Banana Fish': or what Lou Reed felt when he rasped, ‘Oh such a perfect day, it just keeps me hanging on’. Set as context must be the resource wars triggered by energy crisis, the loss of viable food production, the contracting cycle of extreme weather disasters, the entrenching grief and trauma from hurricane, fire, flood and famine. But we also stand to lose something so precious, so written through our shared psyches we haven’t considered the impact of its theft. We will lose the sustaining nostalgia of benign summer days. Can we really ‘adapt’ to the loss of campsites under river gums, the delight of toddlers running under sprinklers, lying through lunchtimes with our lovers on soft park lawns or drifting off to sleep on warm sands. When these sustaining individual experiences provided by nature are gone we will not think of it as ‘adaptation’: the feeling will conduit into public sentiment as profound, unbearable loss. And so just following the worst heatwave on Australian records I charge our most visionary story-tellers to set out all the embodied dimensions of climate change for us. Only then will the business-as-usual membrane burst and the public insist on government action on climate change.

We are Guardians for the Future

Whenever my 14-year-old asks me if she can get a ‘stretch’ earring, a piercing or a tattoo I tell her I am the guardian of her 40-year-old self who might not like living in the future with the permanent choices her 14-year-old self made. From the moment I decided to carry my girls I have mitigated against every threat to their future. I steered clear of alcohol during the pregnancies, and drugs during their births. I slathered them in sun block and plonked hats on their curly heads. I buckled their squirming bodies into every seat they were transported in, took their little hands across every street, rinsed the pesticides off their fruit, rubbed salt off their chips, and more recently chased off a risk-taking boyfriend and blockaded their screen time. Like every other Mummy I am focused on their futures, a place I never doubted they would thrive in. Since the first warnings by climate change scientists I have taken refuge in a business-as-usual bubble. I have surrounded myself with an Orwellian membrane of half-awareness and gone on rushing from pillar to post to provide a future that deep down I’ve known for years is in doubt. I have signed a hundred online petitions and hoped against hope that Obama would come through in his second term and force real and concerted action on climate change. The fact that he hasn’t and won’t. The US still hasn’t ratified Kyoto. I took my 14-year-old aside a few weeks ago and apologised to her. What for, she gruffed. Because my generation has done something terrible to yours, I said. We used up the planet, we changed the climate and trashed it, and all because we wanted more stuff than we could possibly find room for. When you are my age there will be more storms, less places to grow food, more wars because oil supplies have peaked, and so much of the species, the beauty, the sheer wonder and inspiration of this planet will be lost forever. It was the hottest December day on record and we looked down the empty street. This is the future, I said. People holed up indoors to survive more and more days of extreme weather. Urmph, she said. When the latest findings of climate scientists came out last fortnight, just as Doha was coming to its negligent close, I knew then sorry doesn’t quite cut it. A report released by the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists, announced that the planet was on-track for the worst-case-scenario projections of the IPCC, of a rise in temperature of between 4 and 6 degrees by the end of the century. They found emissions have increased 54 per cent since 1990. A World Bank-commissioned study also warned that a 4-degree leap was possible this century – even if current pledges to cut emissions are met. Meanwhile at the latest UN conference on climate change Government heads finished a marathon meeting in Doha, Qatar, where they extended the Kyoto Protocol which proposes a set of measures many climate scientists have argued will be ineffective in halting rising greenhouse gas emissions. For me the failure last fortnight to grasp the latest findings of peer-reviewed climate scientists, and act decisively to stop burning fossil fuels was my moral ‘tipping point’. These reports are beyond alarming and frankly terrifying. They condemn our children and grandchildren to eke out a miserable existence, buffeted by violent weather, on a planet blighted by drought, fire, flood, no longer able to supply their basic needs. Already we see this nightmare of food shortages playing out in Africa as crops fail due to drought. As a mother I have a duty to protect my children’s rights and as a citizen it is my duty to protect the rights of the next generation. They are entitled to thrive, as have we, under a ‘benign cycle of sunshine and rain’, and within climatic conditions that secures their basic needs. As a historian I like to think that if I had been faced with the moral questions of past times, such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the rise of national socialism, civil rights and apartheid, I would’ve had the foresight to grasp their significance and act. I now feel certain that the problem of climate change poses a moral imperative beyond anything faced by humanity and the time to act is now. By any standard it is wrong, unconscionable, unfair and negligent to continue to go about my life in the Business-as-usual bubble that we seem to have taken refuge in. On Monday last I took a bike lock to Parliament House and bolted myself to the members’ gate. The police came and after cordial exchange called for Search and Rescue who would not wait for a key to materialize and angle grinded the lock. I was banned from the Parliament House precinct for a week and from the CBD for 72 hours. On the way home I picked up a new lock. For Doha made clear that governments are either incapable of acting to regulate the fossil fuel industry, rendered impotent by the over-indulgent hand of neo-liberalism, or they believe none of them will lose their jobs if they continue with the business-as-usual approach. They are taking their cue from us. We are not in safe hands. For our children’s and their children’s sake the time has come to hold governments to account. When the full impact of climate change is massing on the horizon I hope to be able to look my girls and their children in the eye and tell them I did everything I could. This piece first appeared on The Drum 28 December 2012.

Bucket Refills and Slim Pressures

When my girls were little the first letter they identified was M. Everywhere we went their familiarity with the letter was readily confirmed, for every couple of blocks we could count on a large yellow M arching over a MacDonald’s Drive in. “M” they would cry out, and I would affirm, M for Mummy, in what neurologists identify as the classic learning processes of repetition and immersion. I never said M for MacDonalds for I do not view that business as a good corporate citizen. Indeed, I think it has played a large role in the current epidemic of obesity, it has entrenched an ethics of snacking on animals produced under abhorrent factory farming conditions, and its business practice is dependent on deforestation particularly of the Amazon. But they soon spotted the colourful playgrounds and found out from playmates that yellow M signified a place for kids to have parties and eat ice-cream and chips and visit a clown. As I watched these associations come together in their ingenuous minds, it irked me. It may not have been the most considered parenting but I told them Ronald MacDonald was an evil clown who really only wanted to trick people with their playgrounds to sell them unhealthy food that, if they ate too much of it everyday, in the end could even make them sick. I told them Ronald MacDonald only wanted to make lots of money and didn’t care about anything or anyone else. I figured it was MacDonald’s insidious indoctrination against mine, and that as their mother I had a right to counter their clown, playground, party message with a bit of the ugly underbelly of multinational corporate food production. I didn’t factor in that MacDonalds is unavoidable. When family and friends offered to take them they reacted with fright. In the end I had to take them and show them it wasn’t a scary place so they didn’t develop Maccas phobia, and I was delighted when they thought everything but the ice-cream and chips tasted like cardboard. Now those girls are older and once again MacDonalds is playing a role in their social development. For after school they hang out with friends at Maccas, and if not Maccas they might drop into 7/11 and sit in a circle in the park with a pile of junk food in the middle. At their age I used to pinch money from my Mum’s purse, sneak around to the MilkBar with friends and buy lollies to gobble soundlessly in the dark at our regular Midnight Feasts. But this was before Maccas and 7/11 came to our shores and things are different, principally larger, as in portions. 7/11 holds a Slurpie Night where kids are encouraged to bring in containers up to the size of a bucket, each, to fill for free. At the movies kids can get buckets of popcorn. All-you-can-eat Buffets are standard fare in the ‘burbs. Meanwhile overeating is just now being recognized as part of the eating disorder spectrum. Many have ventured that overeating is encouraged pervasively in the present food consumption mileau, for the simple reason that the more people eat, the more food corporations profit. However, the standard advice for parents when it comes to their children’s eating is to put healthy food under their noses and say nothing about it. No pressure. This makes good sense when it comes to family meals, but how should parents respond to the insidious patterns of overeating that have crept into the day-to-day social rites of older kids and adolescents? There is a clear disjunct between the parenting advice of no pressure and the pressures kids are under to overeat. I was confronted to learn my daughter had filed in a questionnaire and selected ‘Always’ under ‘My Mother pressures me to eat certain foods’. Here’s an example of that ‘pressure’. When she came home with a friend and a family-sized packet of chips and a tray of donughts to take in over a movie I confiscated their stash explaining that they were asking too much of their pancreas’, and that this was simply too much to eat in one sitting on a regular basis. I might have slipped in a few lines about large food corporations and why they now sell chips in packet-sizes that weren’t available when I was their age. Is that pressure or guidance? Since she relayed her questionnaire response it’s clear that she’s experienced that advice, as I’d considered it, as her ‘mother pressuring her to be slim’. Or, I wonder was there another way to frame that question? Is it reasonable for parents to explain to their kids the corporate pressures and consequences of overeating? Presently we’re advised to say nothing. I wonder if that aids and abets Macca’s evil clown.

The Model, the Maiden, Youth and Beauty.

It isn’t every Saturday night that your home fills with the casting call for Australia’s Top Model. 40 of them tettered in my door on platform porn star heels last weekend. A number of them arrived with bags and changed here into outfits their mothers might not have approved. In little numbers as high as the fold of their bottoms, with elasticized panels of lace from the Supré 3X small-sized party range – perhaps their entire range – these girls struck me as the fashion industry’s bread and butter. This may not be the correct appraisal of a mother hosting a birthday party, but it is the way our perceptual relations are primed. Every one of us recognizes model proportions when we see them. They are at saturation level every time we traverse the urbanscape. It is akin to recognizing a royal. The heels were soon discarded (having contributed a paltry sum to the Chinese young labourers of the worker’s paradise) for they are simply too painful to wear beyond an hour. But the attenuated length of leg to trunk was still a shared trait. As was the ratio of shoulder to hip in perfect agreement, if not for a slight overhang of their exquisitely articulated collarbones. Their feline heads were poised on Nefertiti necks. Their hair was sleek and shiny like the duco of a luxury car. Their skin was as consistent and luminous as unbaked meringue and their eyes brimmed with a disarming mix of supple unguarded clarity. ‘Nates’ is how Nabokov would’ve described their bottoms. Unlike the jutting protuberances of Marilyn Munroe’s day, those parts that define the human body as female have been, since Twiggy, understated. Coltish and built for speed these girls pranced about to Sia like, well, they were Titaaniiuum. This was hardly the opening of an international film festival. How is it that such a critical mass of model qualifying looks flocked this suburban event. We all know these physical proportions and attributes are a genetic rarity. In any ordinary crowd one or two women might carry these traits and they would stand out in a mottley gang roughly assembled like this. Unless they were 13. Then they would be the norm. The problem is they would also embody femininity as determined by the fashion industry. Logically there can be only two explanations for this. Models are 13 – I give you the winner of Dolly’s recent cover competition. Or we now define beauty by not just youth, which is understandable, but extreme youth, virtually childhood, which is unforgiveable. It is one thing to note that children on the cusp of puberty embody a distinct beauty. It is another to, within profit-driven industries, claim that as beauty’s sole manifestation. It is highly unusual, biologically improbable, to continue through life unformed. Some months ago my daughter’s pediatrician told me she was a notch above being dangerously underweight and that in this condition her bones could not mineralize and she won’t carry the body mass to commence puberty. I looked over her lithe form, glanced over at the fashion covers on the waiting stand, recognized the ideal in the room and washed over ice cold. In 3 or 4 short years she and her girlfriends will take form as women and maybe one of them will still get into her Supré 3X party frock, elasticized or no. She may, like so many models, not be genetically ‘blessed’ but more likely have an eating disorder. Victoria Beckham’s most recent show paraded a string of waifs so sunken and hollow that telltale flint of bone stuck out from the inside of their elbows. They looked like they should be trailing drips. We could shrug off this macabre ideal of extreme youth only realized thereafter by extreme dieting as just a bit silly. Most of us do resign as adults to the physical reality that our bodies are constantly changing and that they met the current ideal of beauty before they were fully formed. We know it is an impossible to attain and cruel ideal. But I fear for that roomful of girls reveling in having effortlessly attained the ideal. That very shortlived approximation is what makes them so vulnerable. They may not know it but the kids who enter into this age a little plump or with a rash of pimples may have learned a very tough, yet empowering lesson before it’s too late. Because no one tells their flawless friends they won’t stay this way. Everywhere they look this profoundly delimited femininity smiles invitingly. When all those proportional ratios reconfigure it becomes a bewildering experience. They will think they are to blame, that they must be eating too much and the spiral of short-lived diets, binge-starve cycles and obsessive exercising could begin. In an effort to fit in, that prime motivator of adolescence, to an ideal of beauty that is literally a transient fashion, rather than take form as women, some of them will trash their meringue complexions to look like they have fatal diseases. Most culpably a handful of them will.

Telstra automated reminder calls

It’s Saturday morning and the week has been our hardest. Our 10-year-old was sent away from another specialist who can find no physical cause for her now 5-month illness. Her teenage sister is not coping in ways I’m not at liberty to describe. We are exhausted, sick-at-heart, and after a fitful night of administering painkillers and turning over and over the logistics of a family in crisis, we finally together sink into the solace of sleep and that is where we mercifully stay into the morning. For it is Saturday and we are sleeping in. We are catching up on lost sleep. We are resting and recovering. We desperately need it. At 8.20am the phone jangles right through the house and I make a dive to silence it before the family I have coaxed into sleep most of the night is woken. All our friends and family know not to call before at least 10am. Who can it be? Could it be another emergency? It is a recorded message from Telstra, reminding us that our bill is overdue. They had rung at the same time six times during the week. Since our daughter has been too unwell to go to school, they woke her, each time, after sleep interrupted already with pain. When she needed to be resting. When it was critical in fact to her well-being. The recorded lady rang again this morning, which happened to be one of the few mornings our daughter has felt well enough to go to school on time. They didn’t wake us as such, but we were slowly gathering up lunches, homework, coordinating meetings with piano runs, and so on. Is there anyone, at all, who has time to take a call at 8.30am on a weekday? Actually there is. The recorded lady has time. She can prompt frazzled families, as she did ours, through a maze of options until she graciously declines your credit card number, which she incorrectly deems incorrect, and – this is the bit that most underscores the sheer corporate arrogance of Telstra – she could refuse to let us hang up. That’s right. Even when we hung up on the recorded lady and her supercilious prompts our line wasn’t available to us. It was busy. With the recorded lady. Saturday morning was our limit with Telstra. We will go to the enormous inconvenience of discontinuing our service with our ‘telco giant’. Enough is enough. I wondered about other families who might have been up all night pacing with a newborn, trying to find a teenager who’d texted they couldn’t get home, managing care for a elderly parent with dementia, still arguing about who should’ve washed up - and who knows what other permutations of familial calamity Telstra is blithely intruding on. Who knows is the pertinent question here, because I’m guessing the suits that came up with the policy of ‘Collection Calling’ at 8.30am, and again around dinnertime, don’t know precisely how difficult family life can be. I’m guessing their wives might have a better idea, but they themselves have none. For they themselves are cocooned in their corporate masculine identities, so safely ensconced in the public realm they don’t actually know what goes on in the private homes they blunder into at ungodly hours. Indeed it is breathtaking that the evening time they chose to call is routinely called, by some immoderate mothers ‘c#$* O’clock’ or, more moderate mothers, ‘the witching hour’. Does anyone but the Telstra boardroom need reminding of what’s actually going on at 8.30am in most families? They might have enjoyed an uninterrupted shower under their bonus-sized showerhead, picked up a bit of toast waiting on the granite kitchen island before they settled into their chauffeured limo. That might be an unfair characterization of the Telstra management elite, but I am struggling to find ways to account for the hauteur of a group of men who would dream up, endorse and implement the policy of morning-rush and evening-scurry Collection Calls. While the entire Telstra workforce is sleeping in on Saturday morning their recorded lady is waking up hundreds of families, in who knows what circumstances, and ‘providing them with the option to request an extension on their bill’. That is how their Philippine complaints centre operator described it to me. There’s another startling and very descriptive asymmetry – the Telstra suits sleep in undisturbed, while young women in the Philippines take the flak from irate customers like me. That strikes me as iniquitous, so I asked for the CEO’s, David Thodey’s, home number. It wasn’t forthcoming. Of course if we don’t want to be harassed by Telstra we should just pay our bill on time, right? This week it wasn’t quite on the tipetty-top of our list of priorities. My guess is the very families Telstra is harassing have unpaid accounts for a range of reasons we could calibrate into a list of common family pressures. The higher reaches of the complaints food chain did try and explain to me that Collection Calls was a service Telstra offered to customers because they didn’t want to cut them off. They were good enough to explain to me Telstra has to take care of its ‘business side’. Testra offers a vital service which extends the reaches of human communication. It has just axed 650 staff, particularly from rural call centres. It has posted a rise in net profit to 3.5 billion dollars. 30 per cent of its shares are held by foreign investors. Its top executives have recently received bumper bonuses of 11 million dollars. David Thodey pocketed a $2 million pay rise in 2011. Yet it is obliged to maintain its ‘business side’ by imposing a policy of Collection Calls on harassed families. The words ‘business side’ intimates that Telstra has other sides. I very much doubt it. Most infuriating is that we had paid the bill.

The anti-intervention movement and violence in remote Aboriginal communities

There is no subject more inflammatory than violence against children and sexual violence, the abuse of innocence, universally sickens and abhors. The vulnerability of Aboriginal children has been central to settler imaginings of Aboriginal people. They were early and routinely said to be victims of infanticide, cannibalism, the ‘terrible rite’ (sub and circumcision), ceremonial disfigurement and child bride capture and later the more banal crimes of poor hygiene and inadequate discipline. These confections, all based on hearsay and speculation, became commonplace, and they drove the Protection and Assimilation administrative regimes, which did untold damage to Aborigines, ‘for their own good’. Given this record, the Northern Territory Intervention and its newer incarnation Stronger Futures should be viewed with deep suspicion. These latest administrations are imposing another assimilationist regime, this one informed by the very neo-liberal economics that are presently tipping over European economies like dominos. With wearying repetition, the government wants the extensive Indigenous land holdings of the Northern territory, because a new frontier is well underway, of mineral extraction. Yet non-Indigenous Australians are faltering with this campaign. They know there is acrimonious disagreement among Aboriginal leaders on the question of the Intervention. They are reluctant to take sides, wary of the colonial strategy of divide and rule and preferring to stay with another colonial staple – that Aborigines are an undifferentiated entity rather than a diverse and contemporary people. Most discordantly they know this time the violence in remote communities is both real and fetishised. This has made it a political no-go zone. Because of the opportunising of the Howard, Rudd and Gillard Governments on the exposure of that violence and the racist identification of it as particular to Aboriginal peoples, along with people’s reluctance to shame Aboriginal women and demonize Aboriginal men, it has entered the category of the unspeakable. Those who oppose the Intervention and Stronger Futures omit it and even excuse it. Recently an activist referred to the young men who broke into a campervan outside Alice Springs and gang-raped the tourists inside. She said they were trying to get home. She said ‘You can see why these boys get into these things’. Actually, I can’t see how stealing a vehicle to overcome a lack of transportation bears any relation to rape. The anti-intervention movement has encountered stalling and evasion from the same people who readily galvanized against Howard’s anti-Wik 10 point plan and marched in droves for Reconciliation. Yet facing up to, rather than minimalising, violence against women and children in remote communities, is key to resisting the racial discrimination these latest forays into Indigenous administration have imposed. For this violence is manifestly not Aboriginal. It is everywhere endemic to our society. It is male and the perpetrators are a minority of men. Family violence is first and foremost about gender, not race, but it is more pervasive and extreme in communities where masculinity is in crisis. That crisis is identifiable, around the globe, with communities afflicted with inter-generational disadvantage, and all of the self-destructive behaviors that consistently impact on people enduring the most entrenched socio-economic alienation. Those men, consistently and manifestly, have prehistories of violent subjection, often racial, sometimes colonial. But returned soldiers and institutionalized men are also susceptible. We humans are inordinately efficient at perpetrating violence and paradoxically incapable of enduring it. But gender plays a role here to, for a minority women coping with trauma are more likely to be self-destructive, whereas a minority of men are destructive to the people around them. Violence in remote NT communities is more visible. The collusion of silence to uphold high-stake reputations, the surrounding infrastructure of services and amenities, all conspire to keep it under wraps in the rest of the country. Some have claimed Aboriginal men are customarily more violent to their women and children. Violence has spiraled in some communities because of the coupling of socio-economic disadvantage with the kind of self-destructive behaviors that ‘customarily’, in all human societies, go together with a crisis in masculine identity: particularly alcohol and substance abuse. It is Orwellian to identify pornography with Aboriginal men. As Rosalie Kunoth-Monks recently, patiently, explained, you won’t see Aboriginal people posing in pornographic material. She drew attention to a descriptive cultural disjunct. If anything, porn, most of which has undersold the ideals of libertarianism and sunk into the myopia of misogyny, is an assimilative apparatus to gender relations that I’m afraid have charactised non-Indigenous society as far back as the First Fleet. I’m talking here about the eroticizing of the power asymmetry between men and women and men and children. There is only one solution to male violence, and it applies wholesale across all communities around the world, whenever expressions of masculine identity become, with a minority of men in that community, inextricably bound up in the abuse of power. The women in that community and the non-violent men who support them, should be supported in their demand for the removal of violent men from their homes, communities and lands, until they can guarantee they will cease to pose a danger. Ironically, the exiling of violent men was able to be enforced by the entry permit system that was disbanded under the Intervention. This removal should not be enforced as a criminal matter. These men need to rebuild their lives so they can return to where they are needed most, their homes, families and communities. Before the Intervention women in some remote communities were working together in an attempt to deal with violence. They are not passive victims waiting for whitefellas to rescue them. We need to go back and look at what was already working. We need to empower the Aunties for if they and their men are disempowered, by top-down imposed administrative regimes that humiliate and discredit them, the violence can only worsen. A version of this article first appeared as ‘Some Hard Truths about the Intervention’, in The Age, 2 July 2012.

Monogamy 2

There is a universal truth to all long-term sexual relationships that is never openly discussed. This widespread sexual malaise lurks behind all our frenetic sexual questing, and provides a feast for all the opportunists who snout in the resulting trough, from philanderers to pornographers to Bettina Arndt. It is simply this. At some point every sexual relationship loses ignition. This simple unavoidable and bewildering fact is a hidden infirmity, that in our solution-compelled world we imagine we can resolve without first fully understanding. We can’t. Once sexual ignition dissolves, for some after 3 years, for others after 10 years, for a rare handful years later, it thereafter makes rare appearances between the sheets. Many turn to what are quaintly termed ‘marital aids’, ranging from lingerie to fantasy to toys to DVDs to acts that give that kick purely because they are transgressive. What do I mean by ignition? Ignition is the roar of the engine. The overtake of all senses and thought processes by the overwhelming need to get into your lover. Combustion might flash when the inside of a knee shows as it’s crossed under a bar. It might spark within the first frank gaze of longing, the flick of a tongue, the wrench at a belt buckle. And when it ignites every last one of us is clawing, thrashing, convulsing and doing flamenco hands with our feet. When it mutually ignites sex becomes a head-on-collision. It is, we’ve all said it, The Best Thing Ever. Ignition is what we all want. But most of us have loved someone enough to stay all the way to the point when it is lost. Most of us has grieved it, some quietly, at the risk of making our beloved feel we have lost ‘attraction’ even though objectively we know that doesn’t make sense. Some of us sensibly talk it through knowing in doing so we destroy that entirely unbidden mechanistic jolt that by its nature can never be contrived consciously. Some of us endure rounds of counseling thinking ‘intimacy’ is lost, even though objectively we know that also doesn’t add up. Ignition is something outside of words or cultural contrivances of any sort. I am a social constructivist, yet I think ignition is something we will never explain or manufacture. Ignition is essential, yet like all the biological things we do with our bodies, we have built elaborate social rituals around it, from monogamy to conjugal visits to viagra. We can hypothesise into the next millennium about why ignition is lost – children, overwork, domestic inequity, impotence - but for now we haven’t yet faced up to the fact that we all try to survive in sexually exclusive relationships without it. This is a very tough call. Margaret Mead wasn’t the last to observe that the institution of monogamous marriage depends of wide-scale prostitution. But that doesn’t tell us much about how women cope, who aren’t prostitutes that is. Couples that survive the loss of ignition have invested so much of their lives in their sexual interdependency – children, mortgages, love – they hobble along without it, since there is too much at stake to overthrow on such a seemingly facile premise. Make-do sex rules. Some replace it with other things and though technically sated they live with a certain hollowness. Speaking, as I have all the way through, from experience – extrapolating outrageously in fact - those of us that find a way through the loss of ignition settle for sex without it because losing all the things invested in a life partnership is a far worse prospect. Besides, enduring love may not turn the key, but it can be immensely, ecstatically sating, and the glow goes on for days. This kind of sex oils the machine. It’s great, and we accept it doesn’t roar. But the loss of ignition is part of life so long as we construe our lives around monogamy. Monogamy can’t sustain ignition. Generations ago I suspect ignition was less central to ideas of sexual success, and successful relationships. Its loss may have been experienced as part of the maturing of a relationship from which, once endured, new things could be built. Is it a matter of just growing up and getting over it? I for one think we humans weren’t meant to be sexually exclusive, and building our lives around monogamy has been disastrous for too many, particularly when children are involved. How many more broken bodies do we need to hurl onto the count before we acknowledge it’s not working, it rarely has and it rarely will. Perhaps the problem isn’t the loss, which we should openly accept as part of the pact of monogamy – though preferably not on Bettina Arndt’s website as something mean-spirited women inflict on men. The problem is we repress the loss of ignition and don’t know how to tolerate it and move on to something else. That something might be polyamory, or it might be some cherished understanding that binds a couple closer. I think after decades of sexual questing we can safely say it isn’t anything the sex industry has been able to resolve for us. This article first appeared as ‘The Disaster of Monogamy – we should acknowledge that it rarely works’, Opinion, The Age, 1 November 2011, p. 15, HYPERLINK "http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-disaster-of-monogamy--we-should-" http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-disaster-of-monogamy--we-should-acknowledge-that-it-rarely-works-20111031-1ms42.html

Monogamy

It was the tip of the nose that did it, and not just for me. The wife of Democratic New York Governor Eliot Spitzer stood by his side on 12 March 2008, as he attempted to salvage his reputation by resigning from office. Looking rent to the core of her frail and neatly suited being, she stood quietly as her sexual allure was effectively trashed by her own husband before millions of viewers. Pale but keeping it together with what must have taken an iron will, it was just the tip of her nose that give away how utterly humiliated, dejected and betrayed she felt. So poignant was the picture, it inspired the television law drama series The Good Wife (2009) which replayed that interview with a cathartic reprise. She smacks him one out of sight of the cameras and didn't it feel good. Men like Spitzer make us collectively angry. He not only abused public funds - some $80,000 - to pay exhorbitant escort fees, he caused distress to the very people he is charged with protecting from the slings and arrows of life, etc.  Yet the Spitzer story was somehow different to the Clintons' and a blur of public figures whose unfaithful marriages have undergone the same flayed-alive, overexposure. Sometimes it takes a critical mass to disperse the fog of unquestioning. I saw the carcass of the Spitzer marriage being flung atop a mass of corpses too high to see over. I needed to step back to get perspective, and once I did I saw a heap that, like most heaps, looked like a monumental waste. It's no surprise Sptizer’s call-girl has done very nicely for herself, with a Playboy shoot, a single release and a sex-advice column in the New York Post. Spitzer's wife, Silda Wall, has also capitalized on the media attention, releasing a book, ‘Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer’. She has said, 'The wife is supposed to take care of the sex. This is my failing; I wasn't adequate.' Bettina Arndt would agree. It is men who suffer a 'sex-starved' subsistence in heterosexual monogamous marriage. Women deprive men, women dismiss men, women shame men about their natural urges. Women are, all over again, Female Eunuchs and God's Police. Whatever sexuality we managed to reclaim during the sexual revolution, we are now content to consign to history and worse, impose our desultory, lack-lustre, bed-death on the men we love.  Eric Anderson also discerns a gender abyss between men and women's sexual needs in his recently released book, ‘The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating’. This study of 120 partnered undergraduate men found that 78% cheated, and unlike Arndt who attributes men's infidelity to sexual neglect, Anderson blithely puts it down to men wanting to have sex with other women. He and Ardnt advocate rethinking monogamy, and I agree.  It may just be the surveillance and exposure of our once private lives that has brought us to this point of realisation, but monogamy clearly isn't working and in the end it's kids who are getting most hurt by the trashing of perfectly functional relationships all because we have lazily failed to pay attention to the self-evident – sexual exclusivity is a cruel and repressive ideal few attain. Long term monogamous sexual relationships at some point lose ignition. Most soldier on without it, but a critical mass can't live without it. Rather than hurt the partners they love, and destabilise their kids, they lie. Increasingly the absurdity of the institution, its inherent sexual repressiveness, is being questioned. What concerns me is this nasty turn toward correlating monogamy with women's sexuality, as though it suits us because we have lesser, read deficient, read inferior needs. By all means let's rethink monogamy, but why that entails blaming women for the failings of an institution that arguably hasn't left us overly sated and all-over-rosy either, isn't clear. Aside from entrenched, habitual misogyny, it is hard to explain why the voices of women are either missing or stereotyped in the debate to date. Arndt has so alienated women over decades of overexposure in male-appointed editorial column space I'm astonished any have contributed to her 'research'. I for one refuse to have another Saturday morning trampled by her myopic ravings and haven't read a word she's written in over ten years, anymore than I would listen to Alan Jones, or watch Andrew Bolt. Certain men, who may not have taken ‘Gender, Sexuality and Feminism’ in their undergraduate years at a guess, will flock to her website seeking solace, making her sample self-selected. I wonder if any have ever asked themselves what they might do better to make their wives want them again – Cut their nails? Brush their teeth? Read the kids a story? Make eye contact? Instead it is all about women’s lack of testosterone. It's easy to blame, and harder to think with rigour on a question that does indeed cause untold numbers of men AND WOMEN real distress, either because a central part of their well-being is daily undermined by living unsated, or because their entire lives, their emotional and financial security, things they have worked most of their adult lives to build, and that of their children, has been thrown asunder on the tissue-thin premise of sexual possession and its betrayal. The keystone of the institution of monogamy is sexual possession. Its origins lie in the securing of agnatic bloodlines for property inheritance. Over centuries it has cast a long shadow disproportionately over women's lives because we are the only ones in the reproductive dyad who can prove with certainty our children’s parentage. The Father could be anyone, and nothing cuts deeper for men, as it would for women. It has made them a little insecure about women’s sexuality and that’s putting it mildly. It is thus women who have endured real suffering Bettina, such as violence, incarceration, lobotomies, impoverishment and social stigma. Indeed the body count for adulterous women over the centuries and the horrific state of many of their corpses is testament enough to the gender asymmetry in heterosexual monogamous marriage. Sexual possession has no place in modern relationships or familial configurations. It is like religion. For some, for a time, it provides an ideal to live up to that gives structure and purpose. To have mutual satisfaction over a lifetime with the person you love is not just ecstatic, it is a triumph given all the impediments to good sex a couple can face. But for monogamist fundamentalists, sexual possession provides the rationale for violence against women and children. The children of monogamy fundamentalists face a clear and present danger when their mothers repartner; in two recent cases, of being left to drown at the bottom of a dam, or of catapulting to their death off the Westgate Bridge. There is much at stake here, and we have reached a critical moment in this nascent debate. Let's not squander the opportunity to create better relationships, and perhaps defuse one highly volatile fuse for violence against women and children, by letting gender bias and misogyny creep into the discussion. This article appeared in The Hoopla, 9 January 2012, http://thehoopla.com.au/monogamy-its-over-lets-talk-it

Samantha Brick and Beauty Determinism

Samantha Brick is what we might call a Beauty Determinist, but she is far from alone. She created a sensation last week by insisting in London’s Daily Mirror that every minor encounter, every passing glance, not to mention catty confrontation, was invariably about the visual impact she has on all and sundry as a beautiful woman. There soon followed a number of spoofs by wily journalists who couldn’t resist letting rip with Brick’s unassailable narcissism, her puffed up self-portraiture, and her self-evident self-delusion. But could it be true that the visual has come to take up so much of the pie-graph of feminine identity? Putting Brick’s personality disorder to one side, the 5000 comments tacked onto her piece and its viral contagion suggest she might have pushed one or two unaccustomed buttons to do with women’s visual status. From her many photos Brick is passably pretty. Combined with height and blondosity, and a certain ratio of hip to breast, this is all it took for her to be, at one time, considered a stunner. But that would still leave her as nothing special for the simple fact is the vast majority of women posses a combination of enough beauty attributes to appear lovely in their youth. For all of us it passes. Clearly the attention Brick once commanded took on a significance soon outlived by her years, but she nevertheless continued to see all through the prism of beauty. This sets her apart in only one sense. Most attractive women are perfectly aware of their visual impact. After all even beautiful women have got eyes and can judge against prevailing standards. They also become expert readers of perceptual relations. For their safety depends on them developing a refined radar because of unrelenting sexual harassment. That’s right. Any hostility directed at beautiful women usually comes from men, a surprising number of whom toggle between the impulses of attraction and assassination. Like Samantha good-looking women know they possess an asset with particular exchange value. Unlike Brick however, as they get on with their lives and see it falling away, achievements outweigh the importance once given to their looks. However it pans out, we all negotiate our status as spectacles. And for all this plenitude of pulchritude women still manage to get on extraordinarily well together. They mostly celebrate each others’ attributes, tut-tut insecurities and see beyond surface affect to the character and spirit that animates their friend’s visage to moments of incandescent gorgeousness. It’s part of how we cherish each other. In that sense Brick described herself as a deeply lonely woman. Whilst some women see-saw between a sense of entitlement and failure in terms of their approximation to beauty ideals, Brick is a remarkably blithe spirit. Somewhere in her psychic attic she’s stashed her own Dorian Grey portrait, disintegrating in the half-light, while she marches out into the full glare, insisting that by putting her best face forward it should be met with universal indulgence. Her feigning of Cinderella-like subjugation by ugly-sister-surround, surely had a tipping point, namely her obliviousness to the ways she clearly alienates others. But Brick exposed not only an unhinged vision of gender relations, but the hypocrisy surrounding feminine beauty. Women make spectacular careers from a self-appraisal of the exchange value of their visual appeal – usually as entertainers, but occasionally as public figures. The critical point is they must never, ever, openly acknowledge that they can see with their own eyes that they are beautiful and knowingly capitalize on its social value. To do so would make them calculating. If they let on they know they hold a certain undefined asset as beautiful women that they can work to their advantage, they would be accused of ‘trading on their looks’. That old adage, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is in actuality a warning to women. Beauty is visualized externally. It is bestowed from outside. Beauty cannot be self-made. That is why it is ultimately a powerless designation. The irony of this of course is the truckloads of cash a critical mass of women are willing to spend on lotions that, tellingly, make no difference to the ‘evenness of tone’, ‘firmness’, etc, of their fingertips. Each new technology that aids the contrivance of beauty is abhorred, even though we gave up the ethical ghost on self-modification centuries ago. Brick proudly documents the lengths she goes to in order to, paradoxically, piss off all the women in her life. That’s fine. A whole genre of chick lit is devoted to the surreal absurdity and shrieking expense of women’s largely ineffectual efforts to be more beautiful. What doesn’t wash down with the fat-burning capsules, however, is declaring you’ve actually pulled it off. That’s because we know the very premise of beauty depends on a multitude of half-truths and contradictions. Most confronting was Brick’s claim that she determines the reception of her looks. Beauty is something that inheres in her yet that she works up into a declaration to the world. The button she pushed was her contradictory, yet correct, acknowledgement that she has absolutely no control over how she is perceived. She attributed that to women’s innate jealousy. In fact it inheres in the very definition and operation of feminine beauty. Liz Conor is the author of The Spectacular Modern Woman.

A Riot of Consumption

A Riot of Consumption

You deserve it. You deserve a tropical holiday, a luxury car, designer sneakers, the latest igadget, a weekly pedicure, Miranda Kerr’s breasts (to have or to hold) and a thousand gorgeous possessions to place around your home and body. Anything money can buy and money can buy anything. All of these things will come to you as if by magic, not because you earned it but just because you’re worth it. And without these things you’re worth nothing.

The memory of Mark Duggan, the man whose shooting by police sparked the initial riots, has been trashed in a literal free-for-all. In a bewildering turn of events, the usual expression of street level mayhem turned into something unprecedented. The rioters turned their rage on the palaces of dreams, and souvenired from the aisles of exquisite temptation.

Not exactly of Will and Kate’s circle, the young people involved, it is by now well rehearsed, are without prospects with time on their hands. Most are cocooned in miserable housing estates with the despair and disenfranchisement of intergenerational welfare pressing in on their hungry, unbridled souls.

The commentariat have got them pegged. They are angry at the austerity measures, they are disillusioned at the MP rorting scandal, and the insidious involvement of the Metropolitan police in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. They are the ‘children of Thatcher’, on the wrong end of the widening gap between wealth and poverty. They are dragging themselves throughthe long days of their lives with no sense of a place in the world. Over and over again they are told that they give nothing and take too much.

But they are something else too. They are consumers and consumption has become fundamental to the expression of their identities. They are besieged by advertising and daily goaded with beauty, luxury, celebrity and finery. The rally cry of the London riots sets it apart from any protest event in human history. What Do We Want? Stuff.

While consumption aims to incite a permanent state of dissatisfaction – only momentarily sated by the splurge - and there have always been shoplifters and pilferers from every socio-economic strata who have flouted its contract, what we are seeing here is in essence an unparalleled and violent response to the deceit of the consumer accord.

The contract, and it underpins our economy, no longer holds for these looters. With renewed purpose the feckless security guards will while away their days imagining the underside of shopper’s clothes. There will be more of them, and more police standing by, because kids know that only a critical mass and a balaclava is needed to get stuff free.

It’s not as though corporate consumption presents such a compelling moral order they feel obliged to kneel under the vaulted ceilings of its temples. They may not believe that it’s immoral to take excessively marked up things from stores manned by underpaid staff, made in third world countries at irreparable cost to the environment.

Is there any political content to their destruction and theft? We witnessed an uprising of the demographic most targeted by advertising – childless young adults with less financial constraints than families juggling mortgages with disposable incomes. Only they don’t have that last thing do they?

They are enmeshed in welfare, sometimes generations of dependency with little prospects for employment. In the economic backwaters of the mega-metropolises access to a reasonable education has not improved their life prospects. They are living an unrelenting stalemate.

The disjoint between the despair of welfare and the plenitude of consumption may well be impossible to sustain daily. The promise of gratification has become a screeching imperative. And they know it is also a lie. The advertising that encircles their every move is not a pledge that life will get better; it taunts their deprivation and it has goaded them into violence.

Worse, consumption, not welfare, instills entitlement. What are the good things in life for them? What makes up their dreams? A qualification, a meaningful job, financial autonomy? Dreams are now things we buy. Our Rapid Eye Movement has become an acquisitive, unrelenting survey over a saturated surface of superfluous stuff. Every facet of our lives is enmeshed in the acquisition of goods, most of which we don’t want anymore within a few short months. It is as senseless as, well, looting.

Where the materials are sourced, and by whom, who profits from it, how the labor is remunerated, how much it damages the environment, all of these ‘means of production’ are invisible. They need to be. They bear a remarkable similarity to looting.

There are no consequences for consumption. Under an ethical milieu that thrives from divesting all sense of responsibility the logical conclusion is surely to resist actually paying up.

There was a time when the disenfranchised organized, say as workers. How do the permanently unemployed organize? They may not have a manifesto, but there is no doubt what is being targeted here. They are not kicking in police stations, prisons, parliaments, embassies or even heads, they are kicking in shopfronts. Could it be that consumption, an organizing principle of our lives, has failed them?

There are clear issues to address here. Police violence and racism. Education and employment. Housing and social inclusion. And though it’s not chic critique to say it of course parenting matters. Of course they feel universally unvalued. But I wonder if their parents have much time to show love, and how, under a cloud of exhaustion and sadness they overcome the alienation they feel towards their own kids when they behave badly. How do you tell your kids you believe in them when they are destined to ‘die in the ditch of welfare’, as Noel Pearson had put it. ‘Family pressures’ means unraveling relationships. There’s no respite from poverty.

But there is something else too that hasn’t been given enough thought. Telling kids hundreds of times a day that they are entitled to an abundance of beautiful, enhancing, pleasurable things that they are unlikely ever to be able to afford, and that to be without amounts to failure, is nothing more than taunting the disadvantaged.

(This piece first appeared on The Drum, ABC online, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2836576.html, 12 August 2011

Writing on the Wall

This wall is in response to the campaigning by the 'big polluter' mining companies against the Gillard government initiating a price on carbon. It is intended to be ironic.

Writing on the Wall

This wall was in response to the Black Saturday fires in February 2009, in which 173 Victorians lost their lives.

Writing on the Wall

This wall scored the performances of Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop as opposed industry ministers in 2009. (8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours play, was the demand won by the Stonemasons and building workers in 1856)

Writing on the Wall

This wall was in response to Prime Minister John Howard's call for an inquiry into the feasibility of a local nuclear industry and a debate on the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia in mid 2006.

Writing on the Wall

This wall was a remembrance to a 13-year-old Somali girl who was gang raped, and then stoned to death after she reported it to al-Shabab, in the southern port of Kismayu, in late 2008.

Writing on the Wall

This wall commented on the common backing by the Labour and Liberal parties for the proposed Gunns' Pulp Mill, in the Tamar valley, Tasmania in late 2006. To avoid forestry becoming an election issue the parties stitched up a bipartisan deal changing the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement. It made logging, that the courts had found to be illegal, legal. The mill would have consumed 4.5 million tonnes of forest per year. In addition secret dealings between the Tasmanian Lennon government and Gunns had been revealed.

Writing on the Wall

This wall responded to revelations on ABC's 'Four Corners', in October 2008, of the infiltration of environmental groups by packaging corporation Amcor. It created a covert group, the A-team, in cahoots with the CFMEU, and stacked the Victorian Labor party's environment policy committee influencing Labor party forestry policy.

Writing on the Wall

This wall was inspired by the documentary Outfoxed, which exposed the bias, undue influence and corruption of Rupert Murdoch's media empire

Writing on the Wall

This wall was in response to then PM John Howard signing off on logging more old growth forests.

Writing on the Wall

This wall was on the release of Tarantino's 'Kill Bill' in 2003.

Writing on the Wall

This was the second Graffiti wall. The first read, 'Jeff Kennett Needs His Bottom Smacked'. This one was at the height of the Wik Native Title Dispute in which then PM John Howard propogated much of Pauline Hanson's racial sentiment, to reclaim the National party constituents haemorraging to her One Nation party. Thanks to Tasmanian conservative senator Brian Harradine, Howard's bill, which required amending the racial discrimination act, Howard's 10 Point Plan passed in 1998.