Omit Needless Words

It's been a fair while since I've posted anything serious on here. There are reasons for that, but it'll be changing soon, promise guv.

However, it just occurred to me that I never actually post much on here about what I have been doing. It's not like I haven't been keeping the usual level of ridiculous busy (and coming down from mad round-world travel), I just forget to mention it in anything other than Facebook status updates (when those aren't about building sentient robots).

So, here's a couple little websites I've launched this week that relate to larger stories.

Firstly, Cottonmouth. If you've been along to any of the Cottonmouth nights so far, hopefully you're as excited as I am about this one -- I'm on an excellent committee that grew from the WA contingent of the National Young Writers Festival last year. We've packed out the ace little bar we've been having it in, and (surprising to someone who has always considered watching spoken word to be something akin to gargling hydrochloric acid) we've had some pretty damn good readers. Some not so good as well, but we're working on that as we figure out exactly what the night is, and what it can be (and as I threaten people with Gantt charts). Anyway, it excites me. Check the website - there's audio and video (including some of me. ergh.). If nothing else, it forced me to write fiction, which was nice.

Secondly, and slightly less seriously, Novel Badges. Not going to say too much about this one, other than the fact that it grew out of some (possibly drunken) conversations three or four years ago, and we've finally done something about it. Buy some badges!

Plus of course there's still all the radio stuff -- my playlists, shows and interviews should all show up automatically in the sidebar over there, and thanks to my tragic geekery, you can restream any of it from the RTR website (in fact, you can restream any show from the last six months or so). I'm currently presenting Out To Lunch on said station every Monday from 12-3 (Perth time). Not quite so politic as previous involvement, but tune-spinning is always a fun break from the harsh realities of life outside the studio.

The next year promises much in the way of experiment with radio and podcast, particularly some fun ideas in relation to Cottonmouth. My little recording studio is slowly taking shape. Stay tuned/subscribed in your favourite reader.

Workwise, there's been the Laneway Festival site, the FTI redevelopment, and a bunch of others. Much madness abounding in future months on that front, including a website for (sort of) my old high school.

So there, that's a few things, and a reassurance that this blog ain't dead. Now leave me alone, I'm trying to write. Thank you for listening.

or: What Are Words Worth?

I arrived in Australia in the early nineties as a sprightly 13 year-old. What that kid knew of this country's history, just off the boat from the far reaches of Scotland, was something vague about boomerangs and convicts. I was excited about the fact that Santa Claus came in summer, and it seemed that he rode a surfboard.

It didn't take much time spent in the streets of Darwin to understand, even as a 13 year-old, that something in this society was fundamentally, sickeningly broken. In one of my first Australian history lessons, before I'd even learned about the Eureka Stockade, the teacher played a song to the class that was so unexpected that it changed the geography of the land beneath me - Archie Roach's They Took The Children Away. I knew then that what lay underneath, what Roach spoke in that song, which was then hardly being spoken at all, was the kind of past darkness that could corrupt and break the strongest of people. I knew it would need to be dealt with. I knew that would take bravery.

Well, I can say I knew those things now, but perhaps as a 13 year old, I just knew for the first time what it felt like to have a country and a government break your heart.

I swore my oath of Australian citizenship on Australia Day 2001, on the Centenary of Federation. Stephen Smith -- then an obscure backroom ALP machineman, years later an unexpected Foreign Minister -- shook my hand and gave me my certificate. In the years between, I watched Keating's Redfern speech, young still, but still captive to great rhetoric. Mabo changed the game, and there was a moment of hope. And then came Howard. And then came Hanson.

But though Howard's first five years before my citizenship were already clearly defined by a fervently ideological and partisan shift in governance in the country, it was not until the election of the following year that things became truly clear. Then came the moral darkness, signposted by Pacific solutions, mandatory detention and willing coalitions. My newly-minted passport weighed heavily in my hand, policy and public sentiment slowly killing my deep love for adopted homeland by a thousand tiny cuts.

In those years -- years of wasted opportunity defined largely by John Howard's strangely singular stubbornness -- the gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia widened. Not just gaps of economy or key performance indicators, but gaps of compassion, gaps of understanding, and gaps of opportunity. Things got worse. Obscenely, shamefully worse. Poll-driven politicians listened to the hip pockets of the suburbs, whose concerns lay far away from here. We, as a country, forgot something -- politics, and leadership, is not purely defined as sound economic management. Politics is morality. Leadership is bravery. Both can be honesty.

Final proof that eco-consciousness is penetrating into all corners of governance. This generally excellent Scientific American article (subscription only, sadly) on the rather misguided attempts by the military-industrial complex and the US government to replace its aging nuclear warheads with a more modern, "reliable" (but untested) arsenal, doing a little end-run around non-proliferation, contains a little nugget that made me spit my coffee across the table this morning.

The RRW1 [reliable replacement warhead] also would eliminate the need for some of the toxic substances often used in weapons, such as beryllium, a brittle, carcinogenic metal that reflects the neutrons released in a nuclear explosion and redirects them back to start a thermonuclear chain reaction. "Because of the release of the weight requirement, we are able to use materials that are heavier but more environmentally benign," says Livermore [a spokesman for the laboratory designing the nukes]... You replace [beryllium] with something that quite honestly you could eat and be healthy....

Gosh, that makes me glad. Do you think that last bit holds true after it's spent that long next to plutonium and uranium? I wonder if I'll have to unlearn my most reliable childhood rule: "never eat yellowcake".

The real question is, are they going to carbon offset the 100 kiloton blast?

(Related opinion piece on the free side of the paywall here).

Train rides home from TINA — I’ve had a few of these, over the years. I find myself using the long, slow decompression—the Hawkesbury expanses and the endless parade of central coast towns— to sort and filter the strange, singular experience. To put me back in balance as I’ve been spun in a thousand directions, seen a thousand different possibilities, felt the rare thrill of being in the company of decent people trying shit that sometimes comes off, sometimes doesn’t. Multiple, crazy random types of shit you’d never have thought of. It throws your life that little bit off the rails. And so, back to the train thing. See?

Newcastle on a long weekend in late September is an unlikely place to find the vibrant, throbbing heart of Australia’s creative culture, as ginger beer is an unlikely fuel. While convinced hallucinogens would save the world sometime in the midst of a mushroom frenzy in the mid 1980s, raveolosopher Hakim Bey wrote of the idea of the temporary autonomous zone, a space created for just a moment outside of the boundaries of society, outside of the normal rules of existence for its participants. In this space, strange and magical events might transpire — the boundless potential, freed from restriction of society’s norms, would translate into social and political possibility and change. And, sex. Lots and lots of sex.

For this one weekend, This Is Not Art throws up the perfect example of a TAZ, and the feeling is tangible. Walk more than a block from the festival’s hub on Auckland Street, and you’re in the real Newcastle — vacant shopfronts, crumbling buildings, bogans shouting well-considered insults from cars with a bass rumble so low you could be forgiven for thinking they were part of one of the Electrofringe gigs. This is a town still basking in the glow of the Pasha Bulker, a shipwreck a source of local pride and thrill. The locals don’t really know what to do with us strange blow-ins, with our asymmetrical haircuts and often questionable hygiene, and we don’t know what to do with them, so an uneasy dance down the ruins of Hunter St ensues, glowers at five paces all the way.

Remember how, when the liquor license reforms went through in WA earlier in the year, we were supposed to suddenly be drowning in Melbourne-style alley bars, freed once and for all from the grips of the hoteliers? Have you noticed any small bars showing up yet?

Let's take a little trip to parliament, and pull out this week's Hansard to see where we're at...

2674. Mr M.J. Birney to the Minister representing the Minister for Racing and Gaming

(1) Can the Minister advise the number of liquor licensing applications under the new small bar laws that have been rejected (either formally or informally) by the Department since the passing of those small bar license laws?

(2) Can the Minister advise the reasons for those rejections?

(3) Can the Minister advise how many new liquor licenses have been granted (or old ones amended) under the new small bar laws since they were passed through the Parliament?

(4) Is the department carrying out the will of the Parliament and the Government with respect to the small bar laws?

Mr E.S. RIPPER replied:

(1) Nil

(2) Not applicable

(3) Small bar licences granted - two.

(4) Yes

Two. What Birney didn't ask (and as such, Ripper didn't answer, as a good politician only answers what he's asked) is how many applications there have been for said licenses.

Off the record, informal conversations with those who have applied for the licenses suggest that the issue is not necessarily with the government dithering but with certain nameless councils not quite willing to get with a more modern, radical program. Certain nameless councils that have been far too cosy with entrenched business in their areas, at the expense of the creation and nurturing of culture. Certain nameless councils for which a parade of candidates flood my mailbox with campaign propaganda for a postal election, none of whom articulate policy on anything.

Welcome to our Creative Capital, where all you need to kickstart the city at a time of absurd prosperity is, well, good intentions and zero followthrough.