Sustainable Industry Expo

Judy Atkinson	Lyndon Terracini
Robyn Francis	Bob Ellis

My name’s David Hallet and on behalf of the Big Scrub Environment Centre I’d like to welcome you to this evening’s Sustainable Culture Forum. This is the second year of the Northern River’s Sustainable Industry Expo which the Big Scrub did for the first time last year. And on this lovely damp and cool winter’s evening changing season’s here in winter it’s lovely to see some people out. There are five speakers speaking here tonight. Bob Ellis is with us - he’s just gone to get some other electronic technical things from the car which we all need to carry these days. I shouldn’t say this we should all turn our mobile phones off and other hight tech things.

There’ll be five speakers speaking tonight. They’ll each speak for about 10 minutes. There’ll be plenty of time for questions and discussion after that. The topic for the forum tonight - there’s two subjects but they’re both basically the same - is how can we nurture cultural diversity and harness the media for social, cultural and environmental benefit.

The five speakers that will be speaking tonight are Professor Judy Atkinson, Robyn Francis, Lyndon Terachene, Bob Ellis, and Russel Eldridge. And they’ll be speaking in that order and, like I said, we’ll have questions afterwards.

Before we start I should particularly, if you could please give some thanks to the Big Scrub, and particularly to David Gillian who’s put a lot of work into getting the forum and the other aspects tonight - please put your hands together. David Gillian.
(much applause, teenage girls screaming, tears)

Before we come to the first speaker - Professor Judy Atkinson - David asked me to read just a couple of short poems to start the night. I looked through my poetry and much of my poetry seems to be about what happens when we don’t have sustainability. So something along the lines of something after that that still has something of the beauty of the land left in it. This first piece of the two I’m going to read is the epilogue of a longer poem called Icons of a Dying Century. And the end of it goes:

When all the Kennedy’s fall from the sky
When King Charles III is the apple
of his dead mother’s eye
When we all taste the same
as we’re genetically modified
When Comedy is God
And God is a Joke
And the president is a flag wrapped around just another
naked bloke
When rationalists rule as
Consultants tan their shadow of progress
That wipes the land
So we shuffle off into the blue
Of the last EFTPOS desert queue
The computers burn our eyes like the Nullabor sand
The file is loading as security cameras scan
We see
A final embrace
In the rear veiw of the van
As man versus machine becomes
Machine versus man.

As I said another piece which the Heritage centre here in town asked me to write about Lismore a few years ago which is, as I said, still has some of the beauty of the land… This poem is called The Northern Rivers:

It is spoken through the old stones
Which are the broken teeth
On the craggy lips of an old volcano
It is whispered in the creeks
That fall from the forest to the sea
In the mists of the mountain birds that feather our fiery (??)
as we climb the trail
To feast upon the view
They are folk song lines
How the cedar trees fell
And the farms did swell
across the valley
How a hundred villages grew
In the leap of water
From the rock to the river mouth
By the turn of the century
By the wheel of the river
Grew a town where the loggers first did camp
Grew a city, a university, cabins (?), theatres and festivals
of whales and flowers and beef
and blues and dance and food
The river festivals
The Rainbow Region

It is silent in the shadows of the forest
It is the vale of bat wings which blackens
the twilight into deep night
The gold of fruit
The beat of farm and (?) fleet
It is the passing of the winter whales
Where the fisherman stands wet
and poised upon his lonely rock
It is the old mountain
Where the sun first touches the land
And the rivers spill to sand
Into a sea of Southern Crosses
And reflections of an ancient, green land.

While I’m think of it on this grand stage just a few words that I penned last week which has something not to do with sustainability. This short poem is called Ignore the Ignorant:

War on poverty means
Kill the poor
War on drugs means
Expensive drugs
War on terror means
War on truth
Defence means
Attack
Tax cut means
Nothing
Freedom of speech means
Kerry and Rupert
Democracy means
George W. Bush
America means
Australia
‘Big Brother is watching you’ means
We are all watching Big Brother
Good news means
Bad news
And very bad news means
Great news.

The first speaker on our Forum tonight - Sustainable Culture Forum - is Professor Judy Atkinson who is head of the college of Australian Indigenous Peoples at Southern Cross University. Judy has worked as the State Women’s Co-ordinator for ATSIC in Queensland and has undertaken a variety of (?) consultancies for State and Federal Government. Would you please welcome Professor Judy Atkinson.

Professor Judy Atkinson

ATSIC doesn’t come with any kind of credentials. It actually lasted for 11 months and 21 days. And I did get something on the agenda and I’ll talk about that. First of all I’d like to acknowledge that I stand on Widjabee land which is part of the Bundjalung Nation. And I’d like to introduce myself as coming from those three “I’s” - Indigenous, Invader, Immigrant. And I do that deliberately because as an aboriginal woman and given an aboriginal heritage I also acknowledge that one of my great-grandfathers came out on a prison hulk and ended up in Grafton and cut down the Cedar trees around here. And somehow he spawned a grandfather of mine who ended up in Queensland. He married a Jiman woman and they had 13 children. My mother’s parents came out from Germany so I also have an immigrant heritage.

I think all true stories are part of what makes us as a nation and it’s important we look at ourselves as a whole nation, or maybe as a whole community in a region like this. It’s interesting to me that John Howard’s got a scriptwriter who is said to have some link to the Northern Rivers region - when he talks about, just recently, his bleeding heart, and what to address the issue of actual violence. He talks about a ‘cry from the heart.” Well that particular video was launched in this region and the people who were part of that video were actually today in a course I’ve been running at Southern Cross University.

Southern Cross University. Have you ever had a multiple personality disorder? Well I’ve actually got it. I’ve just walked out of a Masters unit which we’re running nine til five over six days. Twenty three aboriginal people sitting around really looking deeply at the issue of violence.

The book that came out of my thesis - Trauma Travels: recreating the songlines - I think is a really important concept. It’s what I want to talk about now very briefly if I can.

First of all, this week the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples - and it is the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples, we’re indigenous people before we are Australians - was named Gnibi (pronounced ‘genbe’). And Gnibi was the Widjabee word for the Southern Cross. The Southern Cross never was in the sky before Cook sailed the coast of this country. It was Black Swan flying across this landscape here - Gnibi. The Black Swan signified the wellbeing of this country. One time lots of swans were around this area until the trees were cut down and the river systems were polluted and the water was muddied.

So I guess it’s important that we learn to listen to each other. And in the language of Bundjalung people the world for listening is gunna - to hear, to listen, to think, to feel, to understand. In the language in the Northern Territory, Miriram Rose calls it Dadirri, and what we’ve been doing today is listening to one another in contemplative, reciprocal relationships. And the Pitanjara people have another word for listening. It’s a word that says listening and wanting to listen. Stanner said that one of the most important activities for aboriginal people as he could see it - he’s been called Australia’s leading anthropologist - was the business, the activity, the profession of ‘uniting hearts and establishing order’. White fellas came here and they looked at what black fellas were doing and they figured they were a bit crazy because they were sitting around and singing and dancing and just talking to each other. They were actually building relationships, one of the most important things we could do with each other as people. They weren’t busy building ships and tanks and guns and things like that, they were building relationships; repairing relationships. And the word for that - and there’s no actual word that describes a healthy community; there’s no actual word in any of the languages for health - the closest word is similar to ‘wellbeing’: Punyu - being strong, happy, knowledgable, socially responsible, to take a care, beautiful, clean, safe, both in the sense of being within the law and the sense of being cared for. I actually don’t think any of us have that capacity - or very few of us - have that capacity today. What interested me on the 11th September, when the twin towers fell down, was that there were a group of kids on the Lismore streets who went crazy and there was an increase in the charge rates.

Those kids were hurting. When they saw the media attention on what happened in New York they went out and took out their anguish, their stress, on the streets.

I just want to quote from some people that I’ve been working with who’ve been in rehab, been in prison, been in mental health institutions. After we had sat for quite some time talking to each other we reviewed what we’d done over about six years of the PhD story. This is a quote from one of them, and these kids are all being called bad kids, mad kids, in some way:

“What I saw was there were a group of kids all sitting together playing under
a big tree. Happy kids, good kids, clean kids, pure kids. One at a time they’d
all get up and go away. Some for a few minutes, some for hours, days. When
we all get back together we’re all different. We’ve changed. The laughter has
gone. Our innocence. The very protection of our childhood has been stolen.
We feel ‘not good enough’, even ‘dirty’. Our competence has gone, replaced
by self-doubt and insecurity.”

The reason why I mentioned my great-great-great grandfather who was a timber-getter in this region, or a timber fella or whatever you want to call it these days, was that there was a trade route that went up from the Bundjalung nations up to the Bunya Mountains and up into the Jiman Countries… And one of my staff today is driving back from Boggabilla and… I guess I’m learning two things here… A couple of weeks ago a young woman was killed out at Moogabilla. Her throat was cut and she was brutally sexually mutilated and stuffed under a cattle grid. Racism is alive and well in Australia. There’s been no attention to that white violence on that young aboriginal woman. And the trauma trails that our people have followed are replicated in things that happen each day. But the media, and the Prime Minister, and Ruddock, are focussing more particularly on the violence that we are perpetrating on ourselves.

So I just want to talk about a couple of kids that I worked with for a few years. Their names are Dobbie and Willy, and they were both 10 years old when they walked into my office. Dobbie looked about six or seven, he was small and skinny, he was bright, active. He cased the room in about two minutes, the grounds, the buildings. He was interested in everything. He had the keenest intellect of any child I’ve ever sat with. He asked a hundred questions. He expected quick answers. Real answers. And he was very bright and active. He’d been expelled from every school in the region that he lived in. He’d left home and was living under a cardboard box when somebody found him. He was then in the care of the Department of Family Services. He was a really clever kid. Within ten minutes he’d got 50 dollars out of my bag - and that was his survival mechanism. He was on a fast track to juvenile detention and prison.

On the other hand Willy who came into the same room with me, he was overweight, almost three times the size of Dobbie; he wouldn’t come near me, his head was down; retreated to a place where he could be by himself. He never spoke unless I first spoke to him; showed no enthusiasm - well, not in activities. He spent most of the weekend throwing a pebble into the pond where we were working.

Dobbie’s earliest memory was being taken off his mother. About three years of age. He thought he’d never see her again. As a young boy he witnessed many instances of violence upon his mother and others. He ran away and when he was found he was living in a cardboard box under a deserted house.

Dobbie’s still alive but the system has lost him. When I went back to try to find him they had literally lost his file and nobody knew where he was. He would have been about 16 or 17. Eighteen now. I’d worked with him since 1995.

Willy was taken from his mother at the age of two because she was in domestic violence; placed in foster care where he was sexually abused. He was returned to his mother at six years of age. At school he was not coping too well and he was referred to me because he was suicidal.

The behaviour of Dobbie and Willy were labelled by professional workers as hyperactive, destructive, violent, self destructive, withdrawn, depressive - and they were the normal childhood ways of coping with extraordinary, stressful experience.

As I said, I lost Dobbie. Willy killed himself a couple of years ago. He hung himself.

Australia was colonised - not through a settlement, but through an invasion. And it was established as a penal colony that invasion. And there was the subjugation of indigenous people, and the creation of culturally unsafe learning, educational and living environments. And over the generations there’s been much abuse of women and children. Incarceration of our people. And we today are building more prisons. The creation of cultures of violence and poverty: Queensland says it needs five new prisons in the next three years, NSW needs three.

I just want to go onto where we can go from here. But first of all I just want to say this: Alice Miller, looking at what makes truly violent societies says that “a truly violent individual, such as Hitler, or a truly violent individual, such as a psychopath who has killed multiple people, has these ingredients in their life: First, being profoundly hurt as a child. Being prevented from expressing the pain of that hurt. Having no other human being in which that person can confide those true feelings. Having a lack of education or knowledge, therefore being unable to intellectualise the abuse.” And I think the most critical thing for a person, like myself, as a parent, is having no children on whom we can repeat the cycle of abuse. And I remember this as a contentious issue. But I know as a mother, having being institutionalised and abused quite severely, and then going on to get into a domestic relationship that was violent, and having children… A lot of my anguish as I look back to my children. I remember a two year old of mine doing a beautiful drawing on the wall and coming out and looking at that drawing and just screaming at her what a stupid little child she was to do that to me. I guess it’s important that we own these parts of ourselves.

I want to talk very briefly about a young man’s pain. This young man remembers his mother’s pain. She was put into Cootamundra’s Girls’ Home. And he names the pain that he then went through in the place where he was placed as loneliness, depression, confusion, hiding the real problems, barriers to build up a protective wall; hurt which triggered substance abuses. By the time he was ten he was diagnosed alcoholic. He was hooked, by the time he was seven, on prescription drugs - which is the second biggest industry in the world next to the military industry. It’s really interesting that Dobbie typifies the terrorist type of ‘out there’ - active anger as violence that we’re looking at - which feeds the military industry. And Willy feeds into the biggest epidemic that we’ve got at the moment - depression. It’s the pharmaceutical industries that are making money from our depression.

I better get into some positive stuff.

So this young fella that I’d worked with in prison came out five years ago. And the term that Howard talked about - “cry from the heart” - was actually his video. And he’s actually sitting up there in a masters course at the moment. And what we did today, and in the last five days, is we looked at teaching tools, stories, story maps, learning circles, art and cultural narratives, reflective discussion and practice, experiential learning, adventure learning, self-directed learning. More importantly: community learning. And what we did in the course is we actually allowed people - and these are workers, aboriginal workers that live and work on a day to day basis at crisis levels in this community, this region. We allowed people in an education institution to grieve. And the things that they work with on a day to day basis… I wish that the VC had come down and come into my class - half the class was sitting on the floor today, painting. We were expressing the things we saw in other people through music. We were shedding old skin and growing. We were deconstructing the whole learning environment. And what I want to finish with, I guess, is, if I had to say where we should be going as a region, we would need to understand that education - coming from the Latin educare - is the teacher. And there is great healing power in art. There is great healing power in story. There is great healing power in music. And the most important thing is that we need to do is to truly, deeply, learn to listen to each other.

I want to finish with a quote:

When a person experiences self as an integrated whole that encompasses the
body, the emotions, the mind and the spirit, this state of health as experienced in
that person as a pervasive sense of wellbeing can only occur through connection
with other selves. And those selves are not just humans but non-humans that are
part of our environment. Without you, there can be no me.

Without my totemic self as an Emu, the ancestral self as Wombat, the part of me that’s been given to me by my old people at home which is our Night Eagle - these are the things that make me who I am.

To become whole the Self needs to be experienced and expressed from the inside
and recognised from the outside. Hence the critical context for any community
that is well, apart from the health and healing aspect, is the interpersonal Self/
Other relationship.

And that actually encompasses that the only way we can become a whole healing community is to understand that we can transform the stories that have been given to us and been enacted on us by others as they’ve come to this country. We can transform them. In the same way that animals transform their pain in the natural environment on a day to day basis, we need to transform our own pain. Animals do not kill in the way that we humans kill.

.........

The next presentation in the forum will be by Robyn Francis. Robyn has an international reputation as a leading permaculture designer and educator and is, of course, the founder and manager of Nimbin’s wonderful Jambah Gardens. She’s also a fine musician and singer and songwriter, and Robyn has a passion for cultural ecology. Please welcome Robyn Francis…

Robyn Francis

I had a very interesting lecture and teaching tour of the US in 1986. It was quite interesting - I was a bit terrified of going to the US. One of the most valuable things that came out of that visit was identifying… Well, it gave me an opportunity to really identify an Australian culture. I’d always viewed us being just a little America. And that really brought home to me that we are special and that we are different.

One interesting incident that occurred during that visit - I was invited to dinner… A couple of couples. The guys were down one end talking cars and bloke stuff and I was stuck with these women who were talking about ‘shopping’; and I’m not much of a ‘shopper’ myself. They eventually got around to ‘washing clothes’, and I was sitting there like a stunned mullet and saying nothing and I thought I’d better contribute something to this conversation. So I said, “It’s got me intrigued that it looks like the only way you dry your clothes is with electric clothes dryers.” And they looked at me shocked and said, “Why? How do you dry your clothes?” And I said:

“Well, we use solar clothes dryers.”

“Wow! How do they work?”

And I went through all the different models of retractables, the old prop lines, the Hills Hoist, and one of them from the deep south says, “I remember my mom saying somethin’ about washin’ clothes and hangin’ ‘em so you don’t get more crinkles in ‘em. Do you know how to do that?”

And I said, “Well, sure. We can hang clothes so they don’t get full of wrinkles.”

“Wow. Each time you come back to the US you’ve gotta give us some workshops on solar clothes drying, and hanging clothes with no crinkles.”

Now, Bill Mollison has always said that the Americans are the ones who most need aid. And that really brought it home to me, that little incident. And I suppose at Jambah Gardens I get to host thousands of people from all over the world. A lot of them are young people really concerned about the world we live in and they are looking to participate in being a part of the solution and making changes in their lives and the world at large. And it’s quite amazing at times the level of ignorance of really practical survival skills.

When we look at culture - and one of the things with Permaculture is it’s more than just a gardening system - it’s really a design system for a sustainable culture. It embraces all aspects of culture. Not only in the built, the physical, that natural environment, but what we call the invisible structures: our social relationships and our social structures, and how we use legal and economic systems to support a good social and environmental ends. Culture is really something that arises out of the relationship of people with each other, and people with their environment.

One of the things that Permaculture really heavily draws on, besides contemporary natural sciences and technologies, is the wisdoms of indigenous and pre-industrial traditional cultures which have sustained themselves for millenia. There we really find the true keys to sustainability.

One of the things I think we’re really lacking in our society is not only a sense of self, but a sense of community, and a sense of place. If we have no sense of place, of the landscape that we live in. If we have no knowledge of the stories of how it came into being, the rivers and the spirits that live there. If we don’t know the plants and the animals and their stories. If we don’t know the seasons and the weather patterns and cycles - we can have no sense of place. And without a sense of place it’s difficult to develop a sense of community. There is no glue in contemporary society - it’s something we’ve really got to work hard to build. And without community, a sense of security in terms of belonging to a community or a body of people, how can an individual really feel secure.

Our society is very much a product of the media. It’s driven by media. It’s the media who tells us what we should look like, what we should wear, what we should think. How it drives conversations. I mean, I find it quite debilitating when I go down to the city and meet up with people and I can’t hold a conversation with them. I really don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re talking about all sorts of amazing trivias, all sorts of trendy things that are happening that have got absolutely no relationship to real life.

When we look at traditional societies they’re cultural expression embodies incredible volumes of information. When we look at the myths they’re not just pith stories, they’re giving us incredible information; geological information, ecological information. They’re giving us important directives for how we conduct ourselves with each other and the organisation of society which helps to provide that community glue.

Our media and our arts have lost a lot of this. I mean there’s still a lot of it there, there are many artists that are doing good work. There are many people within the media who are struggling to get information out. Until we can really start to address these things, if we want to change society generally, if we want to shift towards sustainability - first the question is what is sustainability. It’s certainly not sustaining what we have now. If the energy peak of the glut of cheap fossil fuels that have driven what we enjoy right now peaked in 2000 and now we are going to be moving down the energy descent. It’s going to be a rude shock for all of us, and it’s not being talked about. And to ride this energy descent with some level of integrity and cohesion we really need to change the way we think. We can’t affect any change until we change our thinking patterns, and from that we will change our behavioural patterns. And Albert Einstein said, We cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. We need a paradigm shift. The media and the arts have got an immense role to play in this.

Back in 1982 one of the power stations in NSW went down. And, you know, there was rotational power cuts in the suburbs, and someone _____________ going. There was a massive campaign on the media - on the radio, on the TV, in the papers, for people to save energy. Switch off the light and this and that and the other. Now, people responded. People responded so well that energy consumption reduced so much that when they got their power station back on track they had a massive counter campaign to get people to use more energy again to justify their power station. So you started getting all these very strange ads that showed someone rubbing their hair, and towel drying it, and looking totally stressed out and frazzled: Save energy? Use electricity! - And someone smiling and bending and looking absolutely glamorous with their electric hairdryer. What was interesting was that energy consumption dropped so dramatically in NSW simply by people thinking a little bit more about what they were doing. And when we start to apply this across the board, not only with the electricity that comes in the home but the resources that we’re bringing into the home, the garbage we’re creating, what food we’re eating, our responsibilities to the _______ animals, and we start to think where the food coming from and the cost of that. And buy more locally and support organic produce. Support good enterprises that are providing your needs, And created by real people rather than huge multinational corporations. Then we will really see a change starting to occur.

So today the issue is really more than just sustainability. It is survival. And to change, people need good information so they can make informed decisions about their lives. They need to be motivated. I would like to see people motivated not just by fear, but by love. By a passionate love of life, to a celebration of the incredible individual and cultural and community diversity and natural diversity that surrounds us. Let us move with the arts and with the media into a new era of good information, shared in a very creative way, through our art of music and dance, our song, our poetry. Let’s allow our passion to really come through.

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The next presentation will be by Linden Terrachini. Of course Linden is a man very well known around these here parts as a singer, actor, writer, director, and producer. Linden Terrachini’s the artistic director and founder of Northern Rivers Performing Arts - NORPA - and also the artistic director of the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music.

Linden Terracini

Cultural sustainability is probably a strange term, really. I guess when I was thinking about it I was thinking, well, how can you interpret that? For me it’s about addressing culture and place. I guess the starting point I begin from is that we often hear governments and ________ referring to regional Australia, regional NSW, regional Queensland, and so on, and I would suggest to you that none of those places exist. It’s in fact a common term government’s use to ghettoise a particular area. They can’t quite categorise it, they don’t know what to do with it, so they’ll call it That Place Over There called Regional Australia.

When I say it doesn’t exist I mean that every single town and every single city has its own culture. Just in our region, for example, the culture of Nimbin is very different to the culture of Lismore. And the culture of Lismore is a very different culture to the culture of Byron. And the culture of Byron is a very different culture, to the culture of Casino.

So in terms of making art, art needs to come out of culture. Without the culture you can’t make art. So, initially, it comes to identifying what the culture is at that place. And if you refer to it as this great blob out there, then you actually can’t be specific about anything. So what I’m trying to do in the work that I’ve created at NORPA, and certainly with the Queensland Biannual Festival of Music, is to create work - original work - that reflects the culture of that place.

So, for example, recently in the QLD Biannual Festival of Music, I commissioned Philip Dean to write the text for a musical and John Rogers to write the music called Bobcat Dancing. We did that in Mt Isa. Because Mt Isa is a heavy machinery town. And virtually everyone in that town has a connection to machinery. It’s about a drifter who comes to town and finds he has magical powers and he can repair these machines. And a lot of the people who’ve arrived in Mt Isa have arrived by accident. So it naturally touched a lot of chords in people’s lives. So 18,000 people, out of a town of 22,000 people, came to see that show. Because it was reflecting the culture of their place. They identified with that piece tremendously. And some of the pieces that we’ve done here - the Mercenary, for example, the opera by Paul Robovski, ________ wrote the text - is about, well it’s based on the New Italy settlement, very near Woodburn. Faces in the street, Conversations at the _____ Hotel, the adaptation they did with Peter Weir’s film The Cars that Ate Paris, were all about different aspects of the culture of this place.

So for me, it’s vitally important that we do that. Robyn mentioned about telling our own stories, and that’s really, I suppose, another way of saying it. It’s about telling stories of our place, so that they resonate with people here. And if they then resonate on a national level, internationally, well that’s a bonus, that’s wonderful. And if people come from other places to come and see the work that you’re creating here then that’s fabulous.

What I find curious at the moment is the proliferation of various festivals in different towns where cultures are actually imposed on the place. At the moment everyone wants to have a chamber music festival God knows why. I guess having a rock music festival is past so you have a chamber music festival, you have people with more money to spend… But it has nothing to do with the culture of the place. What happens is a bunch of people come into town, they play some music, which you can hear at the next town, and then they leave. And yeah, it’s a nice concert. And people go out and say yeah, that was good, wasn’t it? But it doesn’t leave any legacy in that place. It doesn’t mean anything to that place.

In Winton, during the Qld Biannual Festival of Music, I spoke to the council out there - and I don’t know how many of you have been to Winton - it’s a pretty lonely, desolate place. It’s as flat as this table as far as you can see. I spoke to the Mayor of Winton, and I said if we were to do something here I’d like to build a musical fence. That would be a permanent installation. Incredibly they said, OK, fine. Do it. So we did! We built this musical fence. It’s a permanent installation in Winton. The people of Winton helped to build it. Then they came along, and played. It’s become an incredible thing in that community. There is no other permanent installation - the musical fence - anywhere else in the world. The only one you can see is at Winton. So the people there are incredibly proud of that fence. They physically helped to build it. I sent up Graham Leek, who’s a wonderful percussionist, to build resonators across the top, and there’s high-tensile wire in it. It sounds wonderful. It’s like a giant stringed instrument.

The point is, in Winton, the fences go further than the horizon. So everywhere you look there’s this fence that goes forever. And so it seemed to me that that would be something that would resonate with the people who live there. They see those fences every day. But they were seeing them as a different sort of object. Nevertheless ‘fence’ is so much a part of their everyday lives that I figured that if we made that a musical instrument people would probably connect with it. Which they did.

They’re just a couple of examples, I guess, I what I’m talking about. I think it’s of vital importance to us to try and identify the culture, or the different cultures of the place that we live in. And if we can reflect that in an artistic way and make that relevant to people that live here. As I said, if people outside the area we live in are touched by that as well then I think that’s a wonderful thing and I think that then leaves a legacy for other people to relate to and to strive for. Just imposing a culture on a place I don’t believe works and it never has and I don’t think it ever will. And I think we’ve been seduced into thinking that all sorts of musics are better than the ones we’re making ourselves.

I really don’t have anything more to add to that other than that’s what we’re trying to do at NORPA. Next year we have a big piece that will be out on the streets called The Flood. It’s about the culture of this place. I hope that you find it’s relevant to your lives as well. That’s what we’re trying to do, and we’ll keep doing it. My belief is that’s the way we can have cultural sustainability. That’s what our stories are about and that’s what our lives are about.

The next presentation will be by Bob Ellis. Bob’s from Sydney but he was actually born in Murwillimbah and moved into Lismore when he was four years old. Bob Ellis, of course, is very well known as a journalist, a playwright, an author, a social commentator, and a political speech writer. Would you please welcome, speaking on the media, Bob Ellis…

Bob Ellis

I’ll speak for 11 minutes so do not at any point become dismayed.

I knew a State Parliamentary policy advisor called Carl Doon, who was thirty years old. He’s Palistinian born but grew up in Baghdad in the 80’s as the son of an academic. I asked what life there then was like. “Better than Sydney now,” he said. “Better even than Melbourne.” I asked him why. “Well,” he said. “There was conversation. Wonderful combatic intellectual conversation in coffee shops, the tea shops, wine bars…”

“Wine bars?” I said. “You can alcohol in Iraq?”

“Everywhere in Irag,” he said. “Every hour of the day. It is a wine culture. Some of our best poems are about the delectable, drousy, some time rowsing effects of wine. Our national drink - araq - is like Ouz.”

“Your National drink?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But most prized as a drink is a glass of imported Dimple scotch. Iraqis travelling overseas -“

“Iraqis can travel overseas!?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “I mean there was no danger of them not wanting to come back.”

“Where,” I said. “Did the average Iraqi educated male go for entertainment?”

“Well,” he said. “The Baghdad Ballet rates near the Bolshevik. I found it a trifle boujous, too much Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet. Of course, we all grew up on Shakespeare. And Dickens, and Agatha Christie, and P.G. Woodhouse and D.H. Lawrence. Every writer was an Anglophiliac, they paraded English literature as the Romans did with Greek literature and Greek drama. Saddam Hussein’s favourite novel was The Old Man of the Sea. And the translations of T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings were every bit as good as the originals. And very influential on local poets. Let me read one to you:

Is it Iraq?
Blessed is the one who said, “I know the road which leads to it.”
Blessed is the one who utters the four letters, IRAQ
Iraq, nothing but Iraq
Distant missiles will applaud
Soldiers armed to the teeth will storm us
Miniarettes and houses will crumble
Palm trees will collapse under the bombing
The shores will be crowded with floating corpses
We will seldom see our Tiataria Square
Our books, eulogies and photographs
Restaurants and hotels will be our roadmaps
And our home in the paradise of shelter
McDonalds, KFC, Holiday Inn
And we will be drowned like your name

- TAPE CHANGE -

… Be treated by the Americans as if we were fanatical peasant buffoons! I mean we invented algebra and geometry and ______! They could get to the moon! And they should be ungrateful.”

How many of his own people, I asked, had Saddam Hussein killed?

“Oh, quite a few, he said, between six and 25,000. But they were in what amounted to civil wars and the famous chemical attack on the Kurdish village may - I’m not sure - been done by the Iranians. Saddam was a thug, and a grubby dictator, and widely disliked because he was, for the first 20 years of my day, the chosen local puppet thug of the Americans! But he was the first Middle Eastern dictator thug to actually give something back. To build hospitals and schools and free universities _______. In my father’s course, in architectural engineering, ninety percent of the students were women! He built himself luxurious palaces, he acknowledged his sons, he lived well, but he gave something back. A welfare state. And Arabs migrated to Iraq because there was a better life there. I mean, my uncle was a beuracrat in the department of fair trading! Which policed food stands. And so on. No one I’ve spoken to believes there was such a department _______ in Iraq - but there was.”

“Do they,” I asked. “Rape women and murder their boyfriends?”

“No!” He said. “He may have behaved rudely. He may have made pompous, drunken suggestions, but that is almost certainly not true. No Iraqi concerned with his dignity and his social position, no Iraqi drinks!” Or do they?

And so on. He talked for quite a while. Now, I ask you. How much of this did you know two days ago? Despite worldwide broadcasts, media, active, 24 hours a day, on 10 channels, and obsessed these last 15 months with Iraq. This is a measure of what can be hidden from you, but what is.

Did you know for instance, that on 9/11 the Bush’s family Lawyer, James A. Baker, the former Secretary of State, was in a conference room in Austin, Texas, with Osama Bin Laden’s brother? And they watched together the crumbling towers on television, discussed God-knows what. And this Bin Laden and three of his sisters, who live in California, were eight days later let out of America, uninterrogated. They may have been innocent of any wrong doing, and ignorant of any relevant knowledge of their brothers’ whereabouts, or his plans, but it makes you wonder why, say David Hicks was worth keeping behind Razor wire and they weren’t.

And thus it is that news is managed. Managed in different ways. One way is to make sure it doesn’t go to air. On Channel Nine, on Sunday, for instance - Australia’s top-rated news program - eight minutes are advertisements, eleven minutes sport, two minutes road accidents, one minute a murder, two minutes a celebrity story - Nicole and Tom are divorcing - and about 90 seconds a political story. Even during an election. In 1998 the Sunday program was cancelled during the election and the Commonwealth Games put on instead! Lest Weasely inadvertantly say something useful to his cause.

There are subtler truths than this. The World Today - a fine program - used to be on at noon on 2BL and 1pm on Radio National. So everyone in their lunchtime could tune to it. Today it’s no longer on at 1pm. The office worker audience thereby is cut back by 70 percent. Late Night Live used to be repeated at 5pm so commuters driving home from the office could hear it on the way. Now it’s 4pm. Nobody much can hear it. Funny that.

And in the Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, Patty McGinnus, Miranda Devine, _________ achieved print, while Margot Kingston’s merely online. And Bob Ellis and Mungo McCallum nowhere anymore to be seen. And it’s not that anyone actually reads McGinnus, or Devine or Henderson right through, but the space they occupy is not there, day after day, for people who might write other opinions and, unlike those three, are willing to publicly debate them.

And so the journalism of common decency is either not printed or squeezed into a few clanky, blustered sentences in the letter pages. The imprison of children, the salination of the continent, the warming of the globe, the illegal unsanctioned murder by shock and awe - another way of saying terrorism - forty thousand innocent Shakespeare-literate Iraqis and teenage conscript soldiers. The continued American use in its present desert war of napalm, or something very like it. The torture of prisoners, the breach of treaties, the new found policies of breaching treaties and users littler nuclear weapons. The disenfranchisement of Florida Blacks, the drowning out of by loud music on Oscar night of Monica Moore, the refusal by all right wing commentators to debate in the public forum what they believe: that children are expendable, that Afghans are terrorists, that John Howard should get forty thousand dollars worth of accomodation in one night - the Bali Bombing victims’ families not a cent, though 9/11 victims’ families get five million dollars for each person dead or injured. The weekly assaults on the ABC by men who for their radio news go to no other network, are airbrushed, sidelined, placed on hold, invisibly located to the bottom of page two, or on a LateLine so late, that nobody watches, or on a 7:30 report that is strangely unlike Fox news not repeated in the daytime. Or ever again. And what we know is chosen for us. And what we do not know is more and more. And it’s a pity. Because all tyranny begins like this. And this is a constant in history - with an incompetent ruler covering up, attacking those people like David Kelly who criticise him, closing down or hemming in broadcast institutions, appointing to the boards of newspapers people he likes, reducing the numbers of newspapers making sure some are not carried by newsagents. Attacking dissident columnists like Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson as dated grumblers with sexual difficulties. Boycotting public debates and shows like Australia Talks Back - branding people as oddball, as cranky people as sensible, as Bob Brown, Ken Livingston, and Carmen Lawrence and _______________________. Finding sexual fault with every female politician to the left of the DLP, and every black politician they can find. Doing the equivalent of turning off the microphone, cutting off the electricity, with every public meeting where it might be said with eloquence that the emporer has no clothes. All his friendships are suspect, all his lies as big as any since Hitler claimed Polish armies were invading Germany, and so started World War II.

Tyranny begins with a slow and subtle stifling speech. And it goes thereafter to Patriot Acts and Terrorist Encouragement acts, and imprisonment for five days without access to a lawyer or a phone, and the cancellation of socially unproductive public meeting time, and the cancellation of elections. And the arrest for sodomy, or conspiracy to assassinate opposition leaders. And then the targeted assassination of opposition leaders and the bulldozing of widows’ houses, and the bombing of their cities because they might have weapons that their bunker-busting salesmen once profitably sold them. However there is no evidence that they do.

And it progresses to where we are now. And it’s a pity. Tyranny begins with incompetence and progresses to where we are now and ends, as it has in Iraq, and Afghanistan and Liberia, and Oranda, and in AIDS-plagued South Africa.

In Holocaust. And it’s a pity.

A final Iraqi poem:

Baghdad wakes up from a dream
Naked
She washes her beauty with dew
And twilight blueness
She goes inside to God
And comes out carrying the Sun
And some mint tea from Basrah
The banks of the Tigress are still asleep
The informant forgot his report on the table and is gone
The report says
The wine is bad
He lies about everything
Even about the wine

........

The final speaker this evening at the forum is Russel Eldridge. Russel is the editor of the Northern Star and has previously worked on the Sydney Morning Herald and the Johannesburg Star. Russel is a writer and is on the committee of the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. As I remember the last time he was on this stage he was waving a sword above his head and was playing the treachorous political character of Macbeth.

Russel Eldridge

When I was asked to be part of this panel I was sent an idea of what I should talk about. A couple of days ago I got another list which had a different topic for me. So I thought, bloody hell, I’ll choose a third one. But they’re all on the same idea, really.

When I gave some thought to this I thought: should I just accept diversity as being a good thing? Should we all just pat ourselves on the back here and then go home. So I wrestled a bit with it, and I came up with a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers.

Just a few things that crossed my mind - and these are not judgements, these are questions. For example, _______ tonight extolled the virtues of some tribal societies as models of sustainability, and yet many of those very societies have plundered their environment to unsustainable levels. The Maori people of New Zealand caused so many species extinctions that by the 17-1800’s they’d degenerated into bloody rival clan warfare as the resources dwindled. Australia’s original inhabitants, on one hand had this incredible sustainability over aeons, and yet they changed the flora and fauna of Australia. They changed the climate. Extraordinary. And were these cultures diverse? Not necessarily. Tribal societies rely on homogeneity, and cultural practices, spiritual beliefs, social morays, dietary practices, to attain social cohesion and ensure their survival. You step outside the mainstream of _____ tribal societies and you’re history.

What about some of the other great eras that are better known to us? The Renaissance Dutch and the Renaissance Italians. Were they any less creative because they were homogenous societies? On feral animals ____ - don’t they bring diversity as well as extinction? Questions, not judgements. ______ biodiversity. I then thought about globalisation.

A few months ago I was sitting on a sand dune in the great far desert of Rhajastan, next to my camel, with the wind from the desert whisking past me and the sand dunes stretching out toward the Pakistan border. I was in a state of exotic bliss. And out of the sand dunes toward me a small boy struggled. He arrived panting at my side with an esky over his shoulder. He opened it and took out a coca-cola and a packet of crisps and offered to sell them to me. I was there for exotic diversity. I didn’t want this. But I had imported my culture by my very presence. I was blurring the lines of his exoticism. I was bringing homogeneity to India by bringing coca-cola demands - not that I was going to drink one - but ‘I’ in my type.

These are the things that came to my mind. You can’t have it both ways. What about globalisation in the sense that we talk about speaking as one human voice. Let’s talk about universal human rights and so on. And then we complain that the world is becoming homogenised. Can’t have it both ways. The increase in education through peoples of the world, the exchange of ideas, these all by their nature will blur the differences that make culture distinctive.

I tried to find some sense of direction in this thinking, and I thought maybe it’s all about evolution; the increasing pace of change and technology. History shows we haven’t learnt very well from our mistakes of our ancestors, but that may be because in past eras change took place over longer periods of time and was less discernible. Within the lifetimes of the people sitting in this room tonight we have seen dramatic and measurable change. We’ve seen social and environmental destruction on a grand scale. We now have the experience within a single lifetime to view detrimental change brought about by the upsetting of the balance of things.

So this new ________ sense of history has maybe brought about a new consciousness - not only that we cause massive change, but that we have the capacity to do something about it.

We’re beginning to understand the ecological balance to ensure our survival. Some of that balance is achieved by listening to many shades of opinion. Perhaps there’s an element of post modernism in it. We subscribe to ________ points of view. We may on the one hand accept the world as a global village, but many of us don’t want one Dubbya Bush Mayor, thankyou. Or one of the banks controlling our technology. Or one Rupert Murdoch controlling our discourse. I say many of it don’t want it, but unfortunately many more of us take it and accept the benefits and ignore the consequences. The world run by the Murdochs and banks and Bushes and global agribusinesses will probably be sustainable, but not in the form that many of us would enjoy.

What about the internet? Isn’t this the great saver? The democratisation of news? Superhighway. No traffic cops. Don’t be too hasty. Research shows that the internet has an extremely low credibility rating, and the top 20 most visited sites for news and information are all owned by large international media corporations.

Is there hope? Yes, of course there’s hope. For a start with the mass media we’re not dealing with some great X-Files conspiracy group. The world is run less by conspiracy and more by incompetence and sheer amassed greed. There’s not that many intelligent people pulling the trigger.

The ‘mass media’. What’s the mass media? The mass media is owned by people like you and by me by us. Our banks, our superannuation funds, they invest in media companies and they expect a high return, thankyou, on their investment, so they can keep you as a customer. Argument for ethical investment. But the mass media will follow trends. So if enough people demand something, the investors and media companies will follow suit. There’s a rule in the mass media: follow the crowd.

Are there alternatives? Well of course there are. I’m an optimist. Look at the growth of alternative media. We know what’s happening in cross-media ownership laws in Australia, but there are two basic metro newspaper owners in the country, anyway.

Somewhere in the literature crossing my desk regarding this forum was the comment that we need community media as an antidote to the politically and economically driven mass-media. Well if politics and money are not a concern, what’s stopping anyone from starting an alternative newspaper?

Nothing.

And, indeed, we’ve seen its growth in this very community, in our region. Twenty years ago the people of this district basically had to turn to the Northern Star for their news. Now there’s a community newspaper in every town. Or at least a leaflet. These play a vital role in filling in the gaps which the large media can’t get to. That is a reflection of media diversity in action.

Not long after I joined the Northern Star in 1984 I started reporting on rainforest protests among the environmental actions to preserve North Coast forests. This so enraged timber companies, and timber-industry advertisers, plus the editor’s conservative sensibilities, that the editor issued a delegation from local business people, the result of which was to then ban any stories about rainforests unless he personally approved them. He then went out so far as to join a bunch of timbergetters touring the forest and wrote a long feature supporting logging. I still remember the intro - I think every journalist working remembered the intro to the story was:

The chainsaw howled like a wounded animal.

The spectrum of opinion was understandably very narrow. But look at the Northern Star now. We have Paul Reckitt writing columns about compost, dogs, and about farting. We have Dianna Morrissey swanning about the country among the literati. We’ve had Mungo McCallum’s unashamedly pro-Labour raves. Regrettably we haven’t had Bob. And under my editorship the paper took an official stance against Australia’s involvement in the Iraqi war. Ninety-five percent of the letters I received were in favour of that stance. From a community where 20 years ago I led a protest through the streets of Lismore against aerial spraying, and the Mayor who was said to remark, “We should line them all up and shoot them.”

It’s the same community.

We’ve had major businesses and corporations threaten and actually withdraw their advertising as recently as this year. Because we had changed the level of service they provide. Major corporations. I have a lawyer’s letter lying on my desk today because a property developer is unhappy with a story we wrote. And I’m addressing another letter to the press council from someone who’s complained over a community campaign we ran.

It is said that the media holds up a mirror to society. But that shouldn’t just be a mirror for the wealthy and influential to preen themselves in front of. Sometimes it should be a mirror that shows peoples’ scars and bruises. A mirror that catches some in the community of executing a shameful or foolish deed.

And the media has to be a forum for the exchange of ideas. Our letters pages crackle with arguments over whether the Bible sanctions homosexuality; whether Ballina’s rates are too high. Whether the Richmond Valley Council should fence a pond that drowned a toddler. That eating meat is a moral sin. Or whether the Lismore city council should erect a cultural precinct.

I hope I can speak on behalf of the Northern Rivers Echo and the Byron Shire Echo which are doing the same thing.

The charge for the media is to provide an outlet for all the voices in the community. That is diversity. Communities can only thrive is there is vigorous, unshackled public debate on issues which affect them. The other day I received a letter from someone sneering at the inarticulate expression of a previous letter-writer. I published the letter and wrote a tag on the end saying, “These letter columns are open to all voices.” And think of the guts it took someone with a limited written expression to put pen to paper on an issue they felt strongly about. That is one small example of how the media can help sustain communities.

Some once said a successful newspaper is a community talking to itself. I would suggest that in our area with the diversity of media, and the openness of the columns to all our readers, we have a community talking to itself. And that can only be a healthy thing in the long term.

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