After Clicking Done

"The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb tide."
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.


Already it's hard to imagine the pre-computer age in which I grew up; that our partying to dawn went unrecorded and uncrecognised; that the trails from the ancient past we thought we had moved beyond was not the beginning of an era but the end. There was a group of us in the 1980s, expats living in London, embarked on what we thought was a marvellous adventure; exploring the home country, everyting we did tinged with history. In Australia everything was new. Ancient history was 200 years ago with Captain Cook and the First Fleet. In those days there wasn't the same compulsory welcome to country, the same fascination or obsession with indigenous culture and indigenous politics; now the conservatives have lost the debate over saying sorry. Inept and incompetent as always, the conservatives have failed to communicate their many doubts, indeed perfectly justifiable doubts, on saying sorry; and instead look tired and old and racist; colonialists of the modern era. It wasn't like that then; we basically just didn't think about it. Aboriginal history was not taught in schools, and in the mono-culture suburbs of the 1950s in which we grew up; before multi-culturalism became the state religion and transformed the country, all our history was English, or European.

Lonely as, in that room I felt so tiny and awkward in, with the bank spreading up the steep hill outside the window, there, when my family bought the Britannica Great Books and the Brittanica Encyclopaedia, like so many other families of the era, suddenly there was a library of the world's greats I had to consume. Prior to that the only book in the house had been Gone With The Wind, which I read three times. Ashley, Ashley. Tomorrow is another day. The movie consumed us, and in a transgender moment Vivienne Leigh was everything I wanted to be, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful, the rustle of skirts and the fabulous mannerisms, and myself and my brother sharing the same bedroom, as was also normal in those days; we reached back to what really was ancient history.

My adventures, my great life adventure, was always related to alcohol and other things; the dancer from the dance in a tawdry time, blurring speach as we leached into each other, tiny gatherings of expats in rundown terraces in Vauxhaul, while outside the wind wept and the snow piled in corners, where the cold seeped into every bone in our bodies and we, from a far warmer place on the other side of the world, could never get warm. There was the endless struggle for money, five pound, fifteen pound, and as soon as we had the money in our hands, the next step in the dance. It was cosy. We were friends. We all came from the same place in a city which couldn't care less whether we lived or died, which would never give credit to Australians, which we could never crack. We partied and partied, our familiar accents, and talked about the Tate or whatever it was that we had done or explored that day, but most of all it was about survival, about not wanting to go home, about trying to build lives away from our homeland.

I was often comforted by friendship, faces I can barely remember now; there was Richard and Steven of course; but others too; Tim, who overdosed decades later in odd
circumstance; Kim the dyke I fancied like hell and who's friendship I held close, popping around during the day and talking and talking, it's hard to remember about what, now. Except the London streets, the Vauxhaul squats, the others in our gang, our desperate need for money, the things we were going to do with our lives; the great writer, the great artist, the great composer. We automatically assumed our destiny was greatness; that these rundown terraces between which we darted, sheltering from the filthy weather, the rundown cars we occasionally acquired, the depths of our feeling, we assumed that all this was for a purpose, all this experience specifically designed to augment, add depth, propel our destinies as artists.

A quarter of a century or more later; and I'm getting ready for work in Sydney, Australia. My son has just called me in to the loungeroom to watch the live broadcast of the shuttle heading towards the space station. It looked amazing; and that's the era we live in now; instantaneous communication, an astonishing age.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/whale-watch/evidence-challenges-japans-humane-whale-killing/2008/02/07/1202234066496.html

HE minke's back arches as gracefully as a dolphin's, but it is not about to make a free dive. Instead it is the last struggle of a whale on the end of a Japanese harpoon line.

The Australian Government has released evidence challenging Japan's claims that its hunt is the most efficient and humane possible. The images show "scientific research" that needed multiple rifle shots to finish off the mammal.

The Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, said there would be a diplomatic push to end what he said was the charade of scientific whaling, starting at an intersessional meeting of the International Whaling Commission next month.

As the customs ship Oceanic Viking's mission to gather evidence against whaling is extended in the Antarctic, the Government is being urged to fulfil its threat to take legal action against Japan.

A sequence of images taken by customs officers was released yesterday showing harpooned minkes, including two hauled up the stern ramp of the factory ship, Nisshin Maru.

Media claims that they showed a mother and calf were denied by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which said they were randomly taken sizes. "Both whales were female, and both were not lactating," it said.

But the images also showed a whale struggling on the end of a harpoon line under the bow of the catcher boat Yushin Maru, and then the same animal lifeless.

Its head clearly showed entry wounds in a hunt where a high powered rifle is used to finish minkes that are still alive after being hit by an explosive-tipped harpoon.



http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/stolen-not-sorry-the-hardest-word/2008/02/07/1202234066361.html

SHADOW indigenous affairs minister Tony Abbott urged his colleagues to demonstrate leadership on the apology to the stolen generations, telling them "sometimes we need to be better than our constituents".

But the remark, made to the Coalition party room meeting on Wednesday as he wrapped up the debate on the issue, jarred with several MPs.

Mr Abbott last night brushed aside concerns over his choice of words, explaining his intent was not to dismiss the views of the electorate.

"I was appealing to us to be our best selves," he told The Age. "To harken to our best values, not to give in to our doubts, fears and prejudices."

But despite the decision by the Coalition parties to back the apology, several Opposition MPs harbour deep misgivings.

West Australian Liberal MP Don Randall said it was hard to sign up to a contract without knowing what commitments it would make. Asked if he backed the decision of support in principle, he replied: "Um, yeah, I'm getting there."

Another Liberal from the West, Dennis Jensen, insisted that he shared the concerns of Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson about using the word "stolen". "I think separated is probably a better word than stolen, personally," he said.