My Years of Freedom

Some I entered a short story contest for Adult Literacy - using the usual arts bureaucracy sort of language the contest was '...for the creation of exciting, inspiring and challenging stories to support and encourage adult learning, and to highlight the fact that "It's never too late ... to learn to read".' I did not expect, but would have welcomed the cash, to win. And here you can find out just why my story lost.

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By all accounts Charlie had led a hard life. He was born in 1965 in a
small nothing of a rust coloured falling down town in outback
Queensland. His Father worked as a truck driver at the local coal
mine. He worked long shifts doing dangerous work. Over the years the
stress and the drink took hold of him. One day the thunderbolt
struck. He was promptly fired after causing an accident on the work
site. Having made a bit of cash, betting on a horse race, he was well
and truly drunk at the time of the accident.

Charlie's family was forced onto relief, onto the dole. The family's
average everyday rural poverty was transformed into a desperate
struggle for survival. As the amount of money coming into the house
lessened so the threats and the bullying and the violence
increased. Charlie hated living in his own home, he hated living in
fear, but mostly he hated the fact that he was too young and little
and so could not protect his mother.

One small mercy was that Charlie's father would spend as much time
away from the family home as possible. He would try to scrounge up a
demoralising days work here and there, often getting paid in rum or
beer. Maybe helping a local cocky shore up a lazily leaning
fence. Sometimes going off to help muster cattle, or digging a trench
for an irrigation scheme. To make ends meet his mother grew
vegetables, and looked after some of the local kids. His father would
shoot feral animals, cashing the pelts in for the bounty the state
government offered. The children gorged themselves with thin rabbit
stew on such days.

There was never enough money. There was never enough food to feed the
growing children. There was never enough of anything. Whenever
Charlie's dad had more than a couple of bob he would shoot off down
the pub to drown his sorrows; in the selfish manner of the weak men
with families who drunkenly wallow in self-pity and self loathing. One
long humid steaming summer days eight hour long drinking session ended
with a fist fight. Inflated, ranting male drunken froth pride wounded
over some trivial slight. Charlie's father was arrested for the king
hit. A punch caused by nothing which in turn caused the victim to fall
with a sickening thud. The back of his skull shattering when landing
on the stone guttering of the footpath in front of the local hotel.

Before the sun set on that day two more isolated rural families were
plunged deeper into merciless poverty due to that one single,
mindless, drunken punch.

Before the father left the family home, before he started his stretch
in a cold hard cell, he had got Charlie's mother pregnant. The
pregnancy went well in the first trimester, nothing beyond the normal
nausea and aches and pains and cravings. With the terror of the house
being locked away, it was like a dark storm cloud had dissipated. For
Charlie it felt like the first rains that break a desiccating
drought. The heart lifting sensation of the cooling wind carrying the
smell of the coming rain. The far off rumble and flashes of
lighting. Charlie's mother seemed as happy as he ever remembered her
being. She had more time, now that the demands of her husband had
disappeared, to spend on her children. She would often be found
working in the small vegetable garden round the back. She could be
found feeding and fussing about the dozen or so chooks that a
neighbour kindly donated to the family. The kindness extended to the
effort of building a chook yard from old bits and bobs found around
the property to protect the precious birds from the senseless blood
lust of the dingoes and foxes and wild dogs.

And then one day, a month or so before the due date of her child
everything went wrong. The drought breaking rain become a raging
tempest. Charlie, being the eldest of the three children in that small
rusty dusty house, tried his childish best to save her life. With no
telephone, he yelled at his younger brother to run the mile and a half
to the nearest property to get help. By the time assistance came
Charlie was already hugging his dead mother, soundlessly sobbing
without end, unable to even articulate his grief. His little boy tears
mixing with the dark deoxygenated blood that poured without stopping
from out of his mother. His little boy innocence poured out of him,
tears and snot and sweat mixed with the blood that searched out and
found the many tiny cracks and joins in the hand made floor and
dripped onto and mixed with the rusty dry dirt so full of the
heartache and betrayal of the history of this land. His breathless
brother sweaty and covered with dust, his infant sister sitting in the
blood, slapping her hand and crying for reasons she was too young to
understand.

It would be decades before he saw his sister again. He never spoke
with his brother again after that day, the younger brother had been
killed in a car accident.

Needless to say that with such a shocking start to life Charlie had
very few chances as he grew into adulthood. He was separated from his
brother and sister. They were all sent to different foster
families. Not knowing where his siblings were, Charlie was shuttled
from agency to agency, sent to a series of unsatisfactory foster homes
and brutal or indifferent schools. He spent most of his time angry,
fighting with teachers, fighting with the other students, fighting the
bullies, preying on the weak. He banged his head against the brick
wall education system. So the young Charlie, alone in the world, was
overlooked and misplaced and eventually given up on by the
system. Soon he was not bothering to show up for school. He had
dropped out of school more or less completely by the time he was
fourteen. He could read a bit, but only with difficulty and he was not
able to write more than his name.

At a young age he, like his father before him, found himself locked
away in the a cold in the winter and stinking hot in the summer
Victorian era prison. He had tried to rob a bottle shop. He was
arrested when an off duty police officer unluckily entered the bottle
shop at the time Charlie was demanding of the publican's nephew all
the money in the till. Charlie was twenty five years old, and he was
stuck away in prison. He had lost all contact with his sister and
brother. He had refused to even speak to his father when he was
paroled, and Charlie's father was only too happy to ignore and reject
his troubled son. Charlie no longer even knew how to get in contact
with any uncles or aunts. By any sort of reckoning, unless something
was to seriously change in his life and quickly, he was destined to
a life of poverty, drug abuse and petty crime, and most likely an
early death.

His luck, however, was about to change. Who could imagine that a stint
in prison could be a life changing and life affirming event? As luck
would have it he was housed in the same block with a tall, strong,
handsome and charismatic aboriginal elder. Not many of the prisoners
knew his real name they all called him 'Goanna'. He laughed his rusty
rough as the outback eroding dust laugh when questioned about his
name. 'Everyone calls me Goanna, cause I used to like to fuck every
woman I met. See the goanna has two dicks, and all the ones in my mob
they would say I fuck like a goanna. Name sorta stuck. One day I met
up with this nice white girl, she was sweet, and we had a good time
together. Until her racist dad found out about us. The bastard was a
local cop. I was eighteen, and she was only seventeen, so the bastard
did me on statutory rape charge. That was years ago, but if you are a
black man and you catch the eye of the police, well let's just say I
have been in and out of gaol ever since.' He slapped the green
custodial painted walls and laughed. 'This place is my country now,
and this mob is my mob. Eh?'

One day Goanna, who was also a member of the Communist Party took
Charlie aside. Standing over the younger man, he said, "Mate. Blokes
like us, we're shit, our lives are shit. We're shit. We got nothing,
we got nothing in our past, and our future is more of the same,
eh. Past, future, present it is all fucked. We just got shit, eh? Our
life is a constant struggle everyday. You just wanna drink and drug it
all away eh? You only get one chance. How do you think you can make a
better life for yourself, eh?'

Charlie thought, and after a little while he replied, 'We gotta get
ourselves a whole heap of money, I reckon.'

'How you going to do that boy? Eh, how you gonna do that?' Charlie
mouthed words, but no sound came out. 'You gonna rob a bottle shop, or
a bank? That will just bring you back here.' The silence of Charlie
was answer enough for Goanna. 'Books eh. Books are the weapons you
need boy, books are the tools which will allow you to build a better
life. You want me to teach you to read?"

Charlie thought for a moment, He remembered how mother would sometimes
read from an old tattered fairy book to him at bedtime. She had wanted
him to go to school, to stay in school. Who knows how things would
have been for me if she had lived. I owe it her, to her memory. 'What
the fuck have I got to lose, I've got five years in this shit mound,
what else am I to do with my time? What the fuck else...'

With Goanna working with him and urging him on, and picking him up
when he fell Charlie quickly built up his confidence and
abilities. And soon he made his teacher smile. When the screws found
out what was happening they saw to it that Goanna was moved to a
different wing of the prison. Charlie tried to write him letters, but
his spelling and his handwriting was atrocious, and his grasp of
grammar was not much better. So he redoubled his efforts, it was not
enough to be able to hunt and peck at the words and struggle to make
sense of sentences, he had to gain fluency. He had to work
harder. After a few months Charlie was able, with pride, to send and
receive letters to his friend and mentor, Goanna.

I first heard this amazing, inspiring story in an interview with the
local ABC radio station on the National Day of Literacy. Charlie spoke
with passion about the story of his life. I felt the need to track him
down and hear his story and to write it down. He was joy to be
with. We had many long conversations. Charlie, not his real name,
would not let me use a tape recorder, or even to take shorthand
notes. I would franticly scribble in my notebook after our
meetings. So there may be mistakes, and misquotes in the story, but
even it is not exactly the story of Charlie, there are plenty of
stories of men and women who have overcome the odds and turned their
lives around. Almost all of these positive results were the result of
education. Charlie is but one of many. Granted more people fall by the
wayside, but we can feel a certain reverse schadenfreude when we are
able to hear about the victory of the true battler.

I will leave the final summing up to Charlie. I have done my best to
accurately capture his words.

It seems absurd to say, but those years in prison were my years of
freedom, the time when I was most free. I devoured everything I got my
hands on. I attacked learning with all the hunger of a sailor in a
knock shop after a long stint at sea. I read the Bible, a book which
was easy to get in prison. I read tattered, battered dog eared and
smudged old westerns, I read the letters to Penthouse which circulated
around the prison uni like currency. The Salvation Army officer who
came to visit us got me copies of classics like Plato and
Shakespeare. I stayed off the drugs and the harsh gaol house grog. I
got my hands on a dictionary, and using Malcolm X as my guide I copied
out every damn word of that book. How much I learned from that effort,
I can never say, but it was my infinite university in a small
room. All the knowledge of the world can be found in a good
dictionary.

With my new found skills I became a hero among the prisoners. I was
able to make a few dollars and pouches of tobacco, to earn some prison
respect by writing out letters for criminals to their family. I wrote
heart felt love letters to wives, girlfriends or boyfriends. I
modified angry replies for Dear John letters. I also wrote letters to
lawyers and social workers. Too many times I found that the prisoners
often drew the short straw, as they were not able to read, and so were
not able to fully understand the intricacies of the cases against
them. I am proud to say that I was able to help quite a few of these
sad broken men, many of whom were suffering from mental illness and
should not have been in prison. This lasted until the authorities
understood what I was doing and how I was helping the inmates. For
many of the cases against them were weak, and being ignorant the
accused ones were able to be intimidated into accepting gaol terms
that they did not deserve. The prison staff used the fact that I was
able to get my year twelve diploma as a weapon against me and my
fellow inmates. The governor organised for me to be paroled early. It
seems funny now, but I was sad to leave the prison, I felt I was doing
good work, that I had found my calling.

I was thrown back into the world, with a new set of clothes, and
$75.40 in an account that my 'wages' for prison work had been
deposited. After a few months of confusion and despair, caused by
adjusting to being free and at not seeing my prison friends, I roused
myself. My life of freedom began by my going to the local library and
pouring over records. Soon I was able to happily track down my sister,
and sadly I learned about the death of my brother.

I enrolled in and graduated from the local university. Now I fly
around the world and I work talking about the problems caused by
illiteracy, and advocating for prisoners rights. I have a family and a
future. I will try to instil a love of books in my children. Goanna
was right, books are the tools we need, the tools that can allow us to
lead the life we want to lead. Books are weapons that allow working
people to fight back, not just for ourselves, not just for our
immediate families, but rather for all of the poor and vulnerable and
oppressed the world over.

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I am in the fortunate group of people who are able to read and write. I learned to read in school, as a child, so I have no real understanding of the depth of problems for those who are not as lucky as I have been .

I do know that for years adult literacy was a very important goal and organising tool for a revolutionary proletariat. Too important, I think, to leave to the arts administrators and the beauacrats and time wasters at DEEWR, but that is apparently our fate in the current age.

Not, as I said, being unable to read, on hearing of this contest my mind at once jumped back to the half remebered fragment of a reading of the biography of Malcolm X. He spoke of reading the dictionary in his time in jail, and transcribing all the entries. This was the revolutionary edge of adult literacy I had in my mind when writing this piece.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader as to how well, or how poorly I hit my target. The winners can all be seen here.

The shitty shadow play

A friend whom I have never met, but only through the inernet, Ian Milliss wrote this article for the 250th anniversary issue of Art Monthly. Our digital dialogue has allowed me to develop respect and some sort of affection for his views and opinions. This article made me think about stuff, and I was at first going to reply with a witty internet sized one liner, but the more I thought the more words and ideas were vomited forth. So I guess you should read his article first, to get some context. Or not.

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The shitty shadow play of a shitty world, so a pal of mine in Canberra called the art scene and the local artists. This is caused by the global fordism of art, as Ian so clearly points out. The idea that Disney will buy out the museyrooms is a dystopian fantasy that sadly can become true, if we do not keep on guard. (One only has to look over the history of the cinema, and the banal state of publishing in the Anglosphere, to see the danger will are facing.) Indeed David Walsh refers to MONA as a subversive adult Disneyland, and much as I admire and appreciate the gallery one has to ask the question, how subversive a can a Disneyland, adult or otherwise, become. Is the goal of art to titillate and 'shock' with walls of vaginas, and smears of poo? Or is the goal of art to, in simplistic terms, try to make us better people, to try to make us see the world though the eyes of pure childhood playfulness anew? We have only a tenuous grasp on life, and we should not settle on facile blandness.

The mass production of art combined with, not a lack of talent, but rather a lack of ideology. Indeed ideology seems to be a dirty word these days, but to me it is nothing more than an attempt to bring things together, and attempt to make sense of the contradictions of internal world versus external world. A gathering together of threads, going way way back to the PIE *weid- meaning to see.

Too many people, schooled as they are in the vapid world of witty one liners and the constant fear of any authentic activity take ideology to mean little more than impractical thinking about things. Not really understanding that there is more to life than the constant one sided pragmatic jumping from one crisis to the next with not understanding as to how all things are interconnected and come together. Art is seen as apart from politics, apart from our interpersonal relationships, apart from the choices we make as consumer. Of course like all things human ideology can become perverted, and can become a hindrance to thinking and activity, but this is why the critical activity must also be turned inward, one must constantly question oneself. So when new experiences, new ways of seeing arise they must be integrated into one's ideology.

We can see this negative understanding of ideology clearly in recent critiques of the green party, who are constantly assailed for having principles and a policy they are not willing to throw overboard at the first opportunity. This can be summed up with a quote from Michael Danby, the federal member for Melbourne Ports, reported in the cesspit of pretend pragmatism vexnews

'The Greens have discredited themselves with many inner-city voters I talk with every day by voting with the Liberals on asylum seekers. Frankly I’ve been struck by the magnitude of the criticism I hear of their self-indulgent and viciously ideological position on asylum seekers, that is costing lives.'

While I do not like to see the Greens on the side of the LNP, it is wrong and a misunderstanding to say the Green Party voted with the liberals. They voted as they saw fit, in a way that they felt was true to their positions and policies. On the other hand the liberals in a choreographed display of populist vengeance (who can forget the staged spectacle of Joe Hockey and his histrionic welling up at the idea of  sending unaccompanied children to Malaysia, while at the same time cynically supporting the idea of turning back boats) voted in a way that would bring maximum disruption to the government, regardless of any ideology the LNP may have.

But I digress, for it is late and I am tired and a bit tipsy.

Art should be part of this trying to make sense of the world, and while I do not disagree with the idea that the world is in many ways unknowable and in constant flux,  one has to also admit that the world is repeatable and in many ways can be known. This can be seen in the simple act of cooking dinner, I apply heat the water boils, I apply a knife to the carrot and it cuts, I add yeast to flour and the dough rises.

One day art in the future will dissolve, and this process is beginning,. This can be readily seen with our street art, as well as the space created by the internet. When this day comes art will be simply a part of everyday life, and there will no longer be a need for the priestly caste of critics to mediate and tell us what is pure and what is impure. Conversation will become inclusive. The conversation will no longer be the purposeful obfuscation using silver dollar words. The conversation will no longer spew forth from one sided two faced confusers with a weak grasp of the ideas of thinkers such as Derrida. The weakness and shallowness of these types of posers support their ideas with a firm grasp on the language and tropes of the arts bureaucracy and ways to job the system. Everyone will be an artist precisely because there will be no artists in a festive echo of Lenin's idea that one day the lowest clerk will be able to run the affairs of the state. Art and humanity will be free and human activity will be seen for what it can be, a type of play, a thing of joy, and not a hammer with which to batter the other in vain attempts to gain control and dominance. Art will be enjoyed for it's 'spiritual value', not it's exchange value. Art will become integrated into life, and indeed ones life itself will become art. To me this should be the aspiration of all artists. 

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

Gallifrey Falls!

Dream Factory Manifesto

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How can we speak of a dream factory?

Socialism?

Capitalism?

Classless Society?

What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.

What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.

Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.

Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?

Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.

We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.

Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.

Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.

Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.

Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.

Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!

I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.

Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.

He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.

No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.

Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.

Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.

Do not be wishy-washy.

If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.

If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.

To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.

Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.

A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.

Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.

So Many Particulars

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One part Lucian, one part Brecht, three parts Arrian. And as Oscar would say 'all garbage all the time.' However it tickled my fancy, so read it or ignore it as you wish, I have already moved on.

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Euoi, Euoi, Saboi!
The ecstatic raging followers
Of the loud roaring, ivy wreathed
God chanted and danced, and the songs
Reverberated the forest glens
And quiet coverts of the wide flooding
High banked river Indus. Icy cold
Waters tumbled from glaciered vast
High mountains. Closer to the world
Encircling river than the laughing
Shouting drunken god the myriad
Companions did march. Strong Herakles
Cursed and kicked the barren ground before
The most steadfast Sogdian rock.
Macedonian soldiers grew wings,
Flew up the cliff face in the murky night,
And so conquered what stymied Herakles.

Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The conquering god-king Alexander.
Not the wide fast flowing rivers,
Not the lazy streams flowing to marshes,
Not the dizzying gorges, not the cloud
Gathering mountains, not the howling
Jangling deserts, not the walls of island
Proud Tyre, not the mysteries of sand
Blown trees of the oasis of Siwa,
Not the massed cedar built long boats
Of purple clad Phoenicia,
Not the fire worshiping magi,
Not the mud built bitumen mortared
Walls of Babylon, of Susa,
Of Persepolis, not the seven walled
City of stars Ekbatana, not the
Rabbis of Jerusalem, not the Gates
Of Persia, not the battle fleeing
King of Kings, not the tattooed
Boulder hurling liberty loving tribes,
Not the craggy walls of ancient Thebes
Where only darling Pindar's house remained,
Not the foot stamping naked Buddhists.
Nothing could stop, no one could stop
The god-king Achilles reborn.

Naught but the sorrow of the hosts, the ones
That marched and fought and explored and said
Finally this far and no further,
For we are tired and our dear ones
We miss, our wives, our children, our aged
Fathers and mothers. For we have been
From home for as long as Menelaus
Before the walls of windy Illius.
This far we go and no further.

Only thus was Alexander stopped.

Poetical Manifestations

This document is not a well thought out plan or campaign. It is not a
critique or any sort of guide. It is a ramble shambles, a sort of
hobby horse of the kind one often finds drunkenly stumbling along the
queen's briar patch of a highway. It is at best a handful of poetic
fragments that vanity wishes to be recorded. It is at best derivative
and repetitive, and yet...

The revolution MUST be made by the shattered scattered broken remains
of the present capitalist militaristic system. Peace is not the absence
of war, peace is no longer opposing the progressive.

What the thirty years since the Thatcher Reagan era has killed is the
very idea of cooperative spirit. Substituting a broken down ladder of
aspiration.

And now our society is made up of monads randomly colliding the void.

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1. Sound over Sense. Meaning is lost and disjointed. After years of
writing technical documents I have learnt that precise language is
no stop to misunderstanding. Why bother. 'All things counter,
original, spare, strange;'

2. History states what is. Poetry shows what should be.

3. Fear not contradiction. The small petty minded feed upon tiny
glitches, slips of the tongue. Ignore them, they are of no
consequence. 'The wise contradict themselves'

4. The pedant abhors errors. The seer adores error. 'Errors are the
portal of discovery.'

5. Aspective not Perspective. Hills mock the straight line.

6. History is the contemporary. The Ever When. The All at Once.
Economics is home-life. History and Political Economy must be
the domain of the poets. These things are too important to be left
to historians, or even worse politicians. '...a higher thing than
history'

7. Reserve the right to use any word needed. If the word or conceit is
archaic or poetic, so be it. If the reader needs to consult a dusty
old reference book, how can this a bad thing? Art should allow,
should force the reader to make links.

8. Think not of Euclidean lines, but rather the Mandlebort set.
Think of frost crystals forming on the window pane. (How long
is the coast of Tasmania?)

9. Creation is the tension between what the author meant and what the
reader understands. 'I go back to the top of the slide'

10. Truth is always progressive. Art is always progressive. Beauty is
always revolutionary, as Beauty must be the truth. The truth is
constant revolution. 'The cold knife thrust of the syllogism'

11. Socrates knew only of Eros. The great daemon that conveys and
interprets. Old the creative, the vegetative urge that comes
before and causes all things. The lighting that steers all things.
Plato is fit only to be mocked.

12. DIY becomes Do It Ourselves. We must band together. For protection
from the capitalist culture mongers, to extend experience and
knowledge. Truth is always social. Beauty is always social.
'O Multicolored mind, deathless'

Bairnsdale - Sale - Traralgon

More travelling through Gippsland Victoria quiet and nightmare dark history and i can never wake up from. like a vampire it infects me and slowly drains me dry. from a letter written 1846 by a squatter Henry Meyrick. the quote was found on wikipedia.

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging … For myself, if I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that not less than 450 have been murdered altogether

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Gloaming growling wind
Grey oligarchies
Solitary

Barnacle sale paragons

And what is the great bourgeois dream?
Nothing less than something for nothing
Gold from death from tossed aside lives
Sleazed extorted used discarded.
The great alchemical dream of gold
From base nothingness. As the chairman
Of the Chamber of Commerce admitted
In the Fin Review, I chanced to glance
At one pot clouded Friday afternoon,
In fact we resent paying wages.
Worship of the criminal
Of the strong man who takes what he wants.
Something for nothing. To diddle
Staff out of money to offer poor
Service at best to place the onus
On the outsider the customer
Anything else. Enterprise translates
To pure theft and nothing else no honour
No social good no care no forward.
Something for nothing. Something for nothing.
The bourgeois dream taught to our children.
Climbing the ladder of aspiration
Living the life of ownership
We have lost more than optimism
Grasping after wealth after things
We have lost the cooperative
Spirit for the home owner lives in dread
Fear of it all failing crashing down.
And this fear makes all weak and confused.
Something for nothing. Responsibility
Falls to the individual
While producers laugh cashing cheques
The hungry are allowed to starve
The weak are thrown aside those who are ill
Deserve to die they are not pure of heart.

Asbestos lead cadmium coal
Let the workers chew on that
Let the workers spit out gold.

Is this how we are to teach our children?

Compassion suits the poor
Greed is the strong Christian man.
The world is too small to share.
When uncle Toby was vexed
And his dinner spoiled
From a simple fat buzzing fly
He let the fly out the window
This world surely is wide enough
To hold both Thee and me.

Misty foggy clean evening tide
Osiris to my right hand side
Saggy telephone lines beside
The wide highways black glinting
The oncoming car headlights.

Slack sloughing Orion to the front
And off the my right side.

Mimic English names Avon River
And you can guess the rest.

The telephone is out of range
The petrol stations are all closed.

Late rising lazy old dying
Crone wan moon mother sickle.
And then I read Malcolm died.

Disappointment

Capital tends to corrupt and demean all things - in this we have sold our house to get away from the ownership society, which was nothing but a right wing con to take our money from us, and to make working people too fearful to revolt, and to try to make the concerns of the ruling class the concerns of the slaves.

---

Death comes when the tide is low.

Morning of disappointment and delay
Family sorrow and disappointment.

Mud babies made mawkish delays
And confusions of names 
Placed into the homeless
Busted penniless womb.
An embryonic effigy.

Child of placental error
Mother of freedom.

Always must one smooth away
Impressions left of sleep
And never musty messed up
Pick up that which has fallen 
Nor shall one ever eat any beans 
Or pulses or expose irrational numbers.

One must break from heartier costumes.

Disappointed at the flooding 
Of the tides 
    Pit of the stomach
    Homeless
    Helpless.

Living in spare rooms
Living on kindness.

Diptera.
A large black fly buzzes
Erratic kitchenware.

A wilderness of disappointment
With the present state of affairs.
Disappointment with the sexual act
Disappointment even with the ocean.

Tiny fish school 
A stream and flow
The tidal pale.

Washed up 
Vomited out
Ejected the sea
In her smooth white hand
This white smooth piece
Of pitted whale bone
Vertebrae elaborate 
Of design and texture.
Pouted sand pitted a silent
Terror of months years decades
Held cold dark pressure.

The tiny child hand
Reaches the wet sandy
Beach explores both
Nose and tongue.

Loud lout snore thing 
Shifting of gears
Top to bottom 
Snoring snares 
To catch unawares.

Fancy 
Dreads dance up on
My mind creek 
And crack dissipate.

Tinkling stars of spirits
Annotated parade of tourists
And their dogs.

IWD

Next year marks 100 years of International Woman's Day. The text of the poster says:


"8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery
and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!".


From a recent report by Australian Bureau of Statistics:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show that while woman have taken on more paid work, they still do about two thirds of the housework, while men do two-thirds of paid work.


or as was written in 1844

"The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women's progress towards freedom, because here, in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation."

From the Sydney Morning Herald today:


In a separate study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Australia lags behind countries including Rwanda, Sweden and Cuba and is on a par with Afghanistan, coming an equal 32 in the percentage of women holding lower house or single house seats in parliament.

---

Walk Against Warming

It was an interesting weekend. Obama gave his speech for winning the
Nobel peace prize. A speech, he wrote himself, and a speech which
nodded in the direction of King and Ghandi. A speech which then
admitted that, as President, as Commander In Chief, he lived in a real
world, one in which evil exists. Tired and banal words wrapped up in
some sort of archaic morality in which we are to accept war as a
rational activity. Could non violence have stopped Hitler? This is
hard to say as it was never tried. Did the West get itself wrapped in
duplicity and counter duplicity, leading to an uncontrollable
situation resulting in World War Two? I am no professional historian,
indeed I am but a small insignificant person, no more than a speck in
the relentless cosmos that is (for all practical purposes) infinite in
time and space, but this does seem a likely scenario to me.

Did non violence in India face down the greatest empire the world has
ever seen, one on which the sun never set?

Did non violence in the United States overturn 100 years of terror and
lynchings?

So we can argue left and right if Hitler could have been stopped with
non violence or not. While a pleasant diversion for speech makers and
cocktail party chit chat this is of course this is an argument which
has no answer. We can, however, safely say that Hitler and the Axis
Powers stood firmly within that rich tradition of racism and bogus
moral superiority, of violence and war as methods of diplomacy, which
we call Western Civilization. A tradition more honoured in the breach.
A tradition the West shows no glimmer of backing away from.

So as the first weekend of the Cokenhagen talks wound round and round
we took the kids off to the Walk Against Warming Rally at the grounds
of Parliament House. A fair crowd (some 1500 according to the papers -
so maybe more like 3000 in real life) for quiet old Canberra showed
up, which was heartening, we spoke to some vegan activists, and some
of the various socialist newspaper sellers. King Coal showed up. Two
stilted birds added a note of the festival to the rally and of course
scared the little ones.

The papers wailed as 900 climate change activists were arrested in
Copenhagen, and hollered as 900 were arrested in Queensland in a police
crackdown on drunken behavior. One arrest due to the political passion
of struggle against mindless consumption. Another arrest for the pure
and simple experience of over consumption, sanctified by our current
age. With the same amount of arrests, I know which paddy wagon I would
like my children to be riding and singing old timey unions songs in.

So I wrote a short poem.

Peeling paint.
Melting ice cream.

Maggie chases the galah across the
Glowing early morning twilight.

Walk again.
Nohopenhagen mumble of words words
Words stress dance the whirlwind
Stage.

Peace to War Inert Award Ceremony.


Bright blue cloudless
Contrail widening
Sky.

Deep green manicured
Lawn of Authority.



Brown frail hills
Roll treeless desiccation
Across the shimmering
Distance.

Bright red police car
Of a thin blue line
Of repression of Black
Skin of dispossession.
Army of occupation.




Pure white parliament
Power obsoleted the pale
Sandy bland smoothness
Of the new.



Byrds of a feather
Suffer together.

The elected trick evening drone
On and on stinkly blue
Glowing and radiating your
Turn will a-come. Whistle
Blowing marchers
Whistle blowing
For action
Until blue in the face
Of climate change crap of
The other party, upset
Unsettled
At being labeled
Pour diddums denyers like
Some sort of anti-semite.
Ole King Cole
And a cheep olde soul
Was Kev,
Fattened with public monies
Destroyed of climate
Science crap main political
Faction opposition, loyal
That is. Black gold.

The whole world in his hands.

Tyme of alto buildings

Same sex marriage laws

In response to the weak attempt by the ACT government to pass
legislation to create equality in marriage arrangements, and Kevin
Ruddocks threat to overturn the legislation a day of action was
planned. So we went to the rally held in Garema Place at 13:00
Saturday Nov 28.

Mourning of Intoxication.

Dawn of Father Light, restraining corrupting.
Night brings only shades and our imaginings.
'Tis the wide son of the further that breeds crimes.
'Tis the desiccating sun that is our times.

Dawn Kouros embodying light and reason
Well proportioned, naked, the despotic pose 
Becomes freedoms step, a motion forward. 
Weight on both feet,
Rigid arms straight down, 
Hands into fists clenched.
Like the young recruit fresh faced, no body hair,
Without fear marching into battle, the first time,
So Apollo Kouroi straight ahead looks
Into the future, into history. With dawn
Comes the armed brotherhood,
The Rule of the Father.
With the evening comes love 
And the bosom of family.

Up with the six A.M. kids
Eggs coffee a soiled nappy.

At night the pool extends to the verandah
The hard vane trauma of firtoomunch wotka.

Dog barking, magpie swooping
Hazy smoke, smokie hazing

Dust storm of inconsiderate drivers
Road side fresh five ybuck fruitiers.

Crimson red carre pechschwarz carre
Grunanlage publick park car
A white truck, a motocykill.

Battle swap, petrel sanction, varchar wishie,
Washy restaurant, Icy higher, furniture
Swap sharp az god in dandy is good az new.
Medical clinique, apothecary,
Spawning returning goods, eclectical
Grounds for divorce droning across the back
Blox of bel canto, pitiless infanta
Protesting the hari whipping window 
Upon the open weir a hoarse an iamby
Kinny kinnt kin all tight top curled wooly.
Dear telephone tower principessa tour.
Rocky Point parks constriction construction.
Puffed out shirt sales on the Lake of Artifice.
Trailing personal trailer load becomings.
Crane and wight and read all over. Fair off
Arod the bank of sluggish light and earning
Spill away fooky craven members sty.
The rest indies fail falling on a green
Gabba one chained pop top humid swinger
Tweedy yearns inna sweep cleaning row now.
Popping huevos rancheros splatter oil.
And then he, and then he, and then he said...
Tirty tree degrees already. Get it?
Frijoles refritos. Deep fried tofu.
Parlement parlez-vous of open green space
Mighty zonal tuba mirum mighty
Trumpt blast and triangles, plucked violins
Strings of gutted canine black as your hat
Dig doggie dog long side bitey bite machs.
Color full grate feetie and them have formt
Round and round and go around again about.
Psalm three retort public park land and hand.
The Artes Centre slouching haggling miners.
Tin red lead bauxite hard water carne wash.
One da hell de krista kollage. C.C.
C.C.C.P - dunna tempt thieves. ((or rapist)
Walking home the police advise; (walk in pairs,
Stay in the light, avoid paths with heavy growth,
Keep your hemline just below the knees.)) 
Don't take any wooden nickels. Keep an eye
On your drink. Alert not alarmed. Blame the victim. 

---

A series of speakers spoke about the recent laws passed in the
ACT. Laws that, while mild in themselves, have caused both the Liberal
and the Labor Governments to use the extraordinary powers the
commonwealth has over the territories to repeal the legislation. So we
are of course then faced with the very unedifying spectacle of
watching the Labor Party (once a member of the Socialist
International, once a leader of the non aligned pact) siding with the
Christians to repeal laws and curb human rights within the ACT.

Dies Irae

Kevin Ruddock has aligned himself, and therefore the ALP, with not
just Christians of any old sort, but the most vile type of Christians,
the ones who use the 'Word of God' to oppose the rights of others. The
type of Christian who is happy to see women die rather than have
abortions, or even contraception, the type of Christian who would
rather millions of children in the Third World die of easily cured
disease than have one blow dried hair on one perfumed Christian head
upset. The type of Christian who is happy to find forgiveness in their
heart for the assorted adulterous liars, pedophiles, confidence
tricksters, war mongers and out right hypocrites, who happen to be of
the same faith, while the poor child forced to crime or drug addiction
by soul destroying poverty (the type of poverty Jesus urged his
followers) and alienation should be dealt with by the full weight of
the law.

These are the same type of Christian who allow years of sexual and
physical abuse against children to pass uncommented on, but feel that
their morality is being attacked when two men or two women chose to
marry, and so will organise as a political force to oppose the rights
of those unlike themselves.

Kevin Ruddock and his pals line up with the insurance companies and
finical institutes to fleece countless homosexual couples, so that
even after the finality of death the greedy will attempt to steal the
funds of the deceased, and the deceased can have one final humiliation.

Or maybe Ruddock, and his illustrious predecessor John Coward, are
caving in to the terrorists. For if the terrorists so 'hate the
freedoms' of the West, maybe it is a good strategy to lessen freedom
and even to curtail rights in some instances, if only to keep the
terrorists from launching attacks on our soil.

Or maybe it is just simple fear and bigoted loathing that motivates
such activities.

Lacrymosa

A series of speakers discussed various issues and problems raised by
the legislation and the various parties responses. Amnesty
International feels that marriage rights are a human right. I have no
reason to disagree. A speaker from Gender Agenda spoke about the
problems that all marriage laws face, first and foremost in Australia
begin that there is no legal definition to define a Man or a Woman. A
member of the local Quaker groups spoke movingly about equality that
ended with an epiphany on her fathers death bed, that in the end all
that matters in this world is love. Trust the Quakers to say the right
thing, after all it takes them 100 years to make a decision and when
they do they are 100 years ahead of society. There were several other
speakers, and i must apologise for not noting them in this essay as i
had to attend to my three young children.

So to all the religious out there who will be appalled; I was in fact
thinking of the children, as I want my kids to grow up full of an
actual love, not blindly informed by the everyday hatred and narrow
mindedness that is palmed off as love in our current incarnation of
Christendom. Rather the type of love that knows that if Jesus were to
return, he would not be a well dressed bourgeois, but rather he would
be the ragged hobo that so many walk past and over holding tight to
their wallets, muttering 'get a job' under their minty breath, he
would be close to the hookers and junkies and AIDS sufferers. The
Others that those who falsely masquerade as Christians feel the need
to, at best, ignore and to mock and humiliate as a matter of course.

Anything that can extend human rights must be seen as a positive, as
it extends democracy, and the extension of democracy benefits
everyone, even those who abhor democracy. Indeed one of the hallmarks
of our current age is the suppression of democracy, mainly in the name
of security, but parallel with that there has been going on for many
years now a bald faced full frontal attack on all aspects of working
class culture and identity. Only by pushing the bonds of what freedom
and human rights are will society progress.

If my neighbor wants to marry a lounge suite, how could that in any
way affect my love and familial relations? If my neighbor marries one
of his or her own sex how is that even my concern? The only reason to
deny same sex marriage rights is outright bigotry, or if one is so
insecure about their own relationships that they feel the need to deny
others the same rights. And when governments make bigotry policy we
can see why the One Love group seeks to make 2010 a year of action.
And when governments make discrimination law, we must support this and
similar campaigns, as it will only make our world more luxuriant and
better for all.

The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette

Was looking after the little girl (soon to be three) on a damp cold wet early spring sort of day. (woke up to the baby crap of the century!!) we watched a short doco about this painting on telly. i was thirsting for an opportunity to be even more derivative - and so this is what i came up with.


The location of the beer garden in the painting is very near to where the French army buried the many massacred after the suppression of the Paris Commune.


The painting itself is an attack on all that came before. The very idea of painting outside, the way colour is used (there is no black for example), the eccentric perspective, the play of light. It is a very radical piece, and one that does not mention the squalor beneath the surface, the poverty of the lives of his models. Renior was concerned with Beauty, In this way he was able to forget the many dead buried just near this working class locale.

---

The afternoon yellow light sun 
Falls through the trees, through
The leaves, through the thin woody 
Sprays, the strong wooden boughs 
Dividing and quavering the light.
The afternoon light yellow falls
On the corner of the table, 
Flashing an emerald green. 

Ambiguous sunny Sunday afternoon
Of carefree dance and sparkling
White wine like electricity garden.

As the crouching stalking domestic
Cat follows and chases the small 
Brown mouse or twittering yellow
And gray bird, until she loses 
Herself in the thick scrub and 
Wild grasses of the set aside 
Nature reserve. As the young child
Chases the bouncing balloon caught
In the light breeze, or the teasing
Wagtail, until the child loses itself
In the wild grasses and thick scrub
Of the reserve over the fence.

Even so do the dancers of late
Afternoon carefree yellow
Sunlight youth forget 
Themselves,
Their day to day cares,
The endless listed payments,
Pointless busy work waste.

Even so 
Do beer garden dancers
Forget themselves,
Their history.

Pounding Allen

Allen Ginsberg and Ezra Pound. The old and the new. The racist and the Buddhist met in Italy. Many people have told this story. This is my version.

---

 
High High High Hare

Queen Jane visits uncle Ez
In Venice.

Playing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
For him.

1967 
Viet Nam
    A dozen or less
    Months afore 
    Police riot
    Daley windy city.

Who prophets from War?
Cherchez la cash...

Depressed
    Down. Silent.
    Sad. What is a life?
    A handful of 
    Moments, maybe a chiler 
    Or twain.

    What is a life?
    A gutful of lies.
    A phraud.

Very sad to look back...
Il poeta
Too late
Too late...
    I arrived 
    The certainty 
    I know nothing.

He rolled a spliff
She called him
    A big lovable dog
    Hairy with sloppy kisses.
Want to wash your hands?
Do you need any money?
He replied.
    And he passed on the pot.

Hare Hare
Krishna Krishna
    Deepening
The sorrow
    Fading aquamarine.

And after all this 
I understand I am 
A MORON.

Follow the money.
NOT the jews (not Naomi).
Stupid suburban prejudice.
But...
    Follow the money.
    Who profits from war?
    Bankers Usurers Parasites.

War
Profit
Litany.

...or shells fragmented to 1000s
Of flesh piercing needles.

One Hundred Lies One Should Hear Before They Die.

Three poems submitted and not one accepted. With each closing door comes an open window. The 'theme' was CUSTOM/MADE and the contest was to write about the writing process, near as I can tell. I think I hit the mark pretty close.

---

One hundred times the artist bounces
The red rubber ball.

One hundred times the child dances
Round the cherry tree.

One hundred times old man speeches bring
Forth endless slaughter.

100 odes, 100 lyrics,
100 tales, 100 novels.
All is bent, pulled, twisted into the
Pliers of societies fires...

The whole world hurtles a future
Of unimaginable violence
And seriousness is spat out
The hard tasteless shell.
Enthusiasm is slapped down
An old diseased whore.

Praise be to the processed.
All Honour to the bland.