Having a new camera reminds me how much I try to capture, instead of simply enjoying, experience.  Photography as an art has its place, but coming around a bend in a road and witnessing a breath-stopping scene and whipping out the camera is questionable behaviour.

I’m not using the term ‘questionable’ in a pejorative sense, but in the sense of: it’s worth stopping and questioning what you’re doing.  The powerful effect a beautiful sunset or a stunning scene has on us, comes from the experience of it.  With a landscape, the experience is often bound up with the context, which can be the sudden coming upon it, or its juxtaposition, or the changing light.  To capture this as a still image, out of that context, can be nice and can help you store it with others, but it is usually a poor imitation of the original.  It it’s a sunset you’re watching, it’s not just the composition of the original, it’s not just the composition of light and colour and cloud shapes and reflection that awes you, but its ephemeral nature and that it is changing as you watch.  A photo of any one instant of this cannot capture all of these qualities.

It is also worth contemplating that the instant you capture in a photo, you miss out on as the photographer.  At that instant the camera’s LCD screen (on a digital) or viewfinder (on an SLR) goes blank.  It’s a Faustian contract.

None of this is to demean (or demonise) photography as an art or as a way of documenting events.  I love looking through old family albums (or old tins and cigar boxes) full of photos and being told the stories that go with them.  I also enjoy exploring to find previously undiscovered aspects of everyday objects and bringing these to light.  Or seeing horses in trees (see From the Kitchen #22).  And with my macro lens I can make visible many plants and creatures that are hidden to most people.

My new camera also reminds me of how many devices are made these days with bloated abilities,  Some call it convergence, but it can get in the way of easily using a device for its primary purpose and to the maximum extent of that purpose.  For instance, the camera will allow me to swap colours of objects or highlight one colour and make everything else grey, at the time of shooting.  But I can do that easily with software on my computer, and undo it.  I can use the camera as a voice recorder (without taking photos or movies), but I can also do that with my (bloated) mobile phone.  Some of the most memorable and most stunning or beautiful photos were taken with what was essentially a box with a lens in one side and a sheet of film in the opposite side.  When there are too many options, these can get in the way.

I’m not being a Luddite or simply old-fashioned.  There are, for instance, mobile phones that pack an incredible number of useful (or just for fun) applications, that are easy (even simple) to use.  My phone isn’t.  For instance, it takes eight separate key presses to navigate to and turn on the function that allows my phone to communicate with the hands-free monitor in my car.  I have tried (with the help of the manual – all fifty-two pages) and cannot find a quicker, simpler sequence.  Until I spend the time becoming familiar with all the functionality of my new camera, I won’t be able to quickly and easily use it for what I want to do.  I need to learn about the (to me) useless functions to know how to avoid them or turn them off.

I can say similar things about modern TVs, set-top boxes, DVD recorders, MP3 players, computer operating systems and programs, heating and cooling systems (what’s wrong with a thermostat control and an on-off switch?), office multi-function systems and pencils.  Actually, I think I’ve almost mastered that last one.

So, what I’ve done is loaded onto my 64 GB USB memory stick a browser, an office suite, software for my camera, an audio-editing program, a photo editing program, Sudoku, Scrabble, Skype, my five thousand photos, my email client and my GPS maps.  Now all I need to do is plug it into my new car’s onboard computer and I can view what I want, displayed on my windscreen and controlled by my voice.  I can find another number in Sudoku at each red traffic light, instruct the camera to take a photo of the numberplate of the car that just cut me off, order a pizza to be ready for picking up as I approach home and dictate my next blog post as I drive and try to explain to the police officer who just pulled me over why I was driving in the wrong direction up a one-way street.  “But officer, I was only going one way.”

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

If two cars are stationary at an intersection, both with crumpled bodies, that is a fact.  People looking at this would be unlikely to disagree about it.  Discovering a coherent truth about how the two cars came to be there in that way is nigh on impossible.  It depends on observations and memories and both of these are subjective and subject to errors, even deliberate falsification.

Some years ago I won a writing competition for my story ‘Dead’.  The judging was done without the judge knowing the writers’ names or any other information about them.  The story is a first-person account by a young, abused woman in a mental hospital, suffering hallucinations.  The judge was moved by the story; it ‘rang true’.  Was it the truth?  The answer to that is in the mind of the reader – each reader.  I am not a woman, have not been abused in that way and have never been a resident in a mental hospital.

How dare I then write the story as if I had actually had those experiences?  I’ve been asked that a number of times.  I wonder if writers of detective stories are asked how they dare, as few have ever been detectives or criminals and many creators of male detectives are women.  How truthful can a story of a little girl be, written by a forty-year-old woman?  Should a female writer ever have the temerity to write a male character?  Can a ‘black’ person write a ‘white’ character, or an Australian tell an authentic story from the perspective of a Chinese person or an African?

The truth in any story is in what it conjures for the reader – thoughts, images, memories, ideas.

What is a reader prepared to believe?  An account in a newspaper may, by default, be assumed to be truthful (depending on the reader’s level of cynicism).  If the account is hard to believe, that it is in a newspaper helps the reader to accept it.  If exactly the same account appeared in a work of ‘fiction’, the reader would be more likely to assume it to be a fabrication.  ‘Truth’, after all, is allowed to be stranger than fiction.

It is easy to confuse information and truth.  Information may be part of the truth and is fed to us by businesses, governments, work colleagues, friends, children …  “Why is there a broken glass on the floor?”  “The glass fell.”  Truthful; but is it the truth?  The truth may be closer to: “I couldn’t reach the plate of biscuits on the table.  I climbed on a chair.  I leaned over and pulled the plate towards me.  The glass fell.”  Or, more simply: “I knocked the glass over when I tried to get a biscuit.”  Same result, different accountability, different truths.

In biographical books and films, some ‘real’ characters are often rolled into one, for ease of storytelling or to make a point about the central character’s truth.  Simplicity may be more powerful than the whole truth.  Does this lie take away from the ‘truth’?

When writing ‘Dead’, I didn’t sit down and imagine what my character’s experiences would have been.  It was as if I was listening to her and writing it down.  The only part of the story I ‘manufactured’ or made up, was the ending.  She didn’t tell me how it should end, because she didn’t know.  The ending had to be believable, so I made it up.

More recently, my story ‘A Different Slant’ was commended in another competition.  It is a first-person account of a man who is not able to stand up straight and who shakes uncontrollably.  He describes what this is like and how he longs to be different.  The only thing I have in common with this character is gender.

Writing a character may require the writer to be in the skin of that person (or take dictation from them).  But what allows us to authentically be like someone else?  Humans are able to empathise, to imagine how it would be to be like someone else.  This must call on qualities we have in common, even a shared consciousness.  Research has shown that our brains cannot tell the difference between something experienced and the same thing imagined.  The brainwave patterns are the same, as are the physiological and emotional manifestations.  This is probably what makes role-playing in electronic games possible and exciting and what makes pornography popular.  And ain’t that the truth?

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

Some nights ago, I was walking my dog through the local streets.  As I usually do on such outings, I was musing on life, the universe and everything.  I looked up at the part of that universe I could see and immediately saw a very bright star where a bright star ought not to be.

As I stared at it to identify its position amongst the stars I know, it moved.  In fact, it was moving steadily.  Must be a plane, I thought, with its landing lights on.  But no, it wasn’t because, as it moved overhead, the brightness didn’t change and there were no flashing navigation lights to go with it.  It was obviously a satellite, but a brighter one than I had ever seen.  It was Iridium 66.

It brought back memories of a clear night in late 1957 when, in country NSW, we stood outside and saw Sputnik glide overhead, a faint ‘star’ on its way around the Earth.

Most of you reading this would be too young to have witnessed that first manifestation of what became the space race.  Sputnik was the first human-made object to be launched into a stable orbit around this planet and frightened the USA into regaining the upper hand in this aspect of the craziness known as the Cold War.  It led to men on the moon, robots on Mars and thousands of useful and useless objects whizzing around the Earth.  It has also led, of course, to GPS and Google Earth.

An impressionable nine-year-old watching this tiny light move across the sky, I was stimulated into a passion for learning about the stars and galaxies, planets and moons.  I ended up learning the positions and names of hundreds of stars.  I would spend dreamy hours lying on my back, staring up and trying to picture the three-dimensional arrangement of it all.  I struggled to get my mind around the immense distances involved.

This stretching of the imagination beyond things earthly led to my interest in science fiction and I devoured scores of books.  It also seems to have sparked my passion for reading about other cultures, in the form of folktales, sagas, myths and faerie-tales.

What all this musing and reading has taught me, is that most of what happens in this world is strange to us and almost all of what happens in the universe is unknown to us and probably unknowable.  This leads inevitably to humility or madness, as we strive to define our place in all of this and we search for relevance.

Struggling with the notion of possible irrelevance has led to the development of the bigger stories of creation and explanations of the metaphysical.  It also leads to trying to understand our relation to other living things and, in many cases, the hubris of our thinking we are superior.

Lying on a trampoline for a few hours on a clear winter’s night (wrapped in a sleeping bag), I would from time to time indulge in a meditation on the universe, watching the stars and occasional planet slide across my field of view.  Sometimes a meteor would shoot across, gone almost before I registered its path.  I would then contemplate how a grain of matter could create such brightness, rivalling stars billions of times its size.

Those stars may not be there anymore.  We wouldn’t know.  If the nearest star to us exploded or just went out, it would be almost 4¼ years before we knew.  With other stars it could be a thousand years or fifty thousand years or more.

We think of telecommunications as being instantaneous.  On earth they pretty much are.  When we have a human base on Mars, however, we will have to wait between twenty and forty minutes (depending on the relative positions of the planets in their orbits), for a response to anything we say.  I remember when international phone calls were a bit like that.  We would have to book a call to the Netherlands well in advance.  When I got to speak with my grandmother, the 2- to 3-second delays seemed like minutes and made for stilted conversations.

And what about those people who worry about someone eavesdropping on their conversations and emails?  At the time of Sputnik we had a phone on a party line.  This meant that calls were not directed to a particular house and anyone along the line could (and did) listen in.  And snail mail was vulnerable to being steamed open and read by the friendly lady in the local general-store-come-post-office.  She was the source of much interesting information about people in the community.

I still get a thrill lying outside and staring up at the night sky, contemplating the wonder of it all.  Apart from the number of satellites, little up there seems to have changed since 1957.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

The Australian language is changing before our ears.  Nouns and verbs are being increasingly substitution for each other and the subjunctive seems to have gone out the door.  If only it weren’t so.

We now frequently hear people on ‘proper’ radio (the ABC) say that there is “a divide” between A and B.  Recently, on the same radio station, a politician said: “We will division the proceeds fairly.”

Other examples are people being loaned money (instead of lent), or gifted money (instead of given).  The former seems to be entrenched usage, while the latter can still be rescued.  An increasing number of people now say that they have bought a plate of food to share, instead of ‘brought’, although they may have bought the ingredients from a shop.  They might tell their workmates next day that the visitation was a lot of fun.

We all know what these people mean, so communication is still possible.

Language is a fluid thing and is continually changing (maybe even continuously or constantly).  Our brains are able to adapt easily.  Pedants have more difficulty.  We may shudder at hearing someone say ‘aks’, perhaps assuming it to be an unfortunate Americanism.  Look up the word ‘ask’ in an etymological dictionary and you will find that the s and the k have several times swapped position in the word over the centuries.

We learn rules about the use of language in order to slow down the morphing.  Some of these rules are purely about aesthetics, such as the one that forbids you to thoughtlessly split an infinitive.  The rule against ending a sentence with a preposition was also one I grew up with.

It seems pointless to me to attempt to keep a language static through rules.  It is a human activity and subject to human foibles.  What I do feel sad about, is the erosion of subtlety and nuance when words are lost through neglect or carelessness.  For example, ‘unique’ is an absolute – it denotes that there is no other.  When someone says ‘almost unique’ they probably mean ‘rare’ or ‘extremely rare’; someone saying ‘quite unique’ probably means ‘unusual’.  I do bristle at one thing being ‘more unique’ than another.

The word ‘decimate’, apart from being overused, has shifted in meaning from ‘destroy one tenth’ to ‘destroy almost completely’ and the same meaning is often given to annihilate, although this word is also often used instead of ‘beat soundly’.  There is a whole group of words, including beat, destroy, annihilate, decimate, trounce, demolish, devastate, all with subtly different meanings.

Although English may now be an international language, it is not homogenous.  North American usage differs from Australian which is not the same as ‘proper’ English spoken in the UK.  Within Australia differences are increasing from place to place, mainly in the words used for certain objects: for instance bathers, trunks, swimmers, cossie.  Not surprising, given the size of the country.  I was (perhaps naïvely) surprised, when I was in England, that I could hardly understand people in places such as Leeds and Birmingham when they spoke in their respective local dialects.  I doubt they could understand each other between the two cities.

This is not limited to English; it is probably true in every language.  In the tiny south-west corner of the Netherlands, inhabitants of neighbouring villages cannot understand each other’s dialects, though they may live only five kilometres apart.

Divergence in languages adds richness to the human experience.  Knowing a second language gives me insight into other cultures and other ways of thinking and of seeing the world.  That is what makes precise translation difficult or even, in some instances, impossible.  ‘Don’t come the raw prawn with me’ does not translate well, even into British English, let alone Italian or Swahili or Pitjantjatjara.

Partly because of the almost global adoption of English, we are losing this language/cultural diversity.  It is a shame that we may also be losing the riches within the language we speak.  The confusion that leads to the misuse of words may come from problems in our education, from laziness or from both.  No longer learning about the roots of words leads to people saying things like: “In retrospect to this report …”.  However, this does not fully explain why well-educated politicians, business people and university lecturers are using the language incorrectly.  I shudder at the memory of hearing a high school teacher on radio saying: “I’ve given up learning the students grammar, because it bores them and doesn’t get them to speak any more better.”

As 4 me, Isle keap on wrighting good, and mayk shore I speek more better then other peepel, littorally.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

t’s good for you.  It’s bad for you.  It will kill you.  It’s been proven safe.  Don’t combine X with Y or Z.  Let’s not jump to conclusions until all the data is in.  It’s best to be cautious.

It’s a wonder any of us survives.

Almost every day there is something in the media that advises us that something we had thought was unhealthy is good for the heart or the brain or something else – in moderation.  Then, the next day, an expert is quoted, telling us that pregnant women, the elderly and those with a genetic predisposition to cardiovascular disease should avoid it.  The day after that, someone will tell us not to be overly concerned with what yesterday’s expert said.  Then we read or hear that something we’ve been happily eating or drinking for centuries is potentially dangerous.  The next day …

Often, a long bow is being drawn on both sides.  Spurious connections or extrapolations are being made.

One example is the claim by a well-known company that its instant coffee is a great source of anti-oxidants.  Actually, they don’t say so directly; on a large poster under an image of coffee beans and a steaming cup, they say that “coffee offers benefits as a naturally rich source of antioxidants”, below which is an image of jars of their instant coffee.  The inference is clear.  I once asked a representative of the company what happened to the antioxidants during the roasting and grinding of the beans and the chemical processes used to make instant coffee.  He said he had no idea.  On its web site the company claims the antioxidant chlorogenic acid is present in instant and brewed coffee [1], yet others say this is destroyed during roasting [2].

Governments can be guilty of false inference and extrapolation.  In 1984, anything extracted or produced from comfrey was effectively outlawed for internal use by being placed on the schedule of poisons [3].  This was based on research done on alkaloids found in related plants such as Paterson’s Curse, which had proven poisonous to mice if extracted, concentrated and injected.  It was not exactly the same substance as found in comfrey, but media reports created public concern.  Even if the substances were identical, for a human to be poisoned, s/he would have to ingest a large amount of the extract or eat kilos of raw comfrey.  Most people couldn’t stomach the required amounts and I can’t imagine anyone shooting up comfrey in a back alley.

What is also worrying is when a drug is withdrawn from, say, the USA market because of dangerous side-effects being discovered and the Australian authorities tell us not to be alarmed, not to stop taking the drug, because the reports from the USA are still being assessed.  Often the drug is not withdrawn in Australia until months or years later

Decades ago, while quite a number of people were asking whether there was any danger in frequent use of microwave ovens, governments, through their employees in health departments, told us there was no basis for concern, that people should go on using these relatively new devices as there was no evidence of there being any danger.  They were confusing lack of evidence of harm with evidence of lack of harm.  They are certainly not the same.

A similar scenario has developed in relation to mobile phones.

There is a paternalistic attitude in governments and authorities talking to us like that.  As the late Queensland Premier, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, used to say: “Don’t you worry about that.”  We are often treated as if we were children, being told we can’t have or do this or that and not to worry about it, because we wouldn’t understand.

It is also curious that, while it is expected that some people will have adverse reactions to any pharmaceutical drug, even that some will die as a result, non-pharmaceutical medicines (herbs, vitamins, minerals, etc.) are treated as potentially dangerous if one person develops a rash while taking ‘alternative medicine’ – it must have been caused by the ‘unproven’ medication.  Hundreds of people a year die in Australia from the ‘proper’ use of one range of prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs alone [4], but that is unremarkable because it is expected.

People are routinely prescribed drugs ‘in case it helps’, without being told of the known side-effects.  When the side-effects appear, they may be told that they don’t really need the drug – it was ‘just in case’.  Thus, someone with a low cholesterol count may be given a cholesterol-lowering drug (by a specialist) ‘in case your cholesterol goes up’.  When the patient develops difficulty breathing and becomes vague and forgetful, the specialist takes them off the drug because they probably don’t need it and, yes, those are common side-effects and were to be expected [5].

Governments, corporations and professionals seem to think it necessary to withhold information from the public, because they cynically believe that we wouldn’t be able to handle it.  With the amount of information available through the internet, much of the withheld information is available, but you need to spend the time to find it and know enough to sort the useful from the dross or the just-plain-false.  It is one way of taking personal control.  But we should not have to.  We deserve to be better and more honestly informed

1. See: www.nestle.com.au/Products/Drinks/Nescafe/Default.htm
2. For example: “Normally, coffee beans are roasted at a temperature of around 240 to 250° Celsius … Roasting leads to decomposition of chlorogenic acid.”  (Hiroshi Shimoda, www.skinnycoffee.com.au/blog/files/tag-tea.php)
3. For instance see: www.herbsarespecial.com.au/free-herb-information/comfrey.html
4. For instance see: www.virtualmedicalcentre.com/Treatments.asp?sid=78
5. This happened recently to someone I know well.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

Sitting here at my kitchen table, dog at my feet, mug of tea and shortbreads in front of me, I’ve drifted into thinking about connections – connections with people, places, pooches …

I have relatives in Europe and the USA, and possibly in South America.  There are people I know through travelling and writing and there are people I know through connections on the internet.  Some of these connections intersect, split and join in unpredictable ways.

This web existed long before the one formed by strings of zeros and ones now increasingly wrapping around the globe.  In the mid-seventies, in a camping ground in Budapest, I met someone whom I recognised from a photo I’d seen some years earlier, and he recognised me form the same photo, half-way around the world.  We had a mutual friend who had never been out of Australia.

More recently, with relatives visiting us from Europe, there were several instances of unforseen connections: the relatives talking with a waiter in a restaurant and discovering that his parents live near where our relatives now live; the relatives being introduced to acquaintances of ours, only to realise that they had already met, years ago, on holiday in Hong Kong.

When my wife and I drove around the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand, we came across someone about whom a friend in Melbourne had told us but, although she knew that this person lived in New Zealand, she did not know where.

Although the internet allows almost instantaneous connection with millions of people, it makes it no easier to really stay in touch.  Posting things on a blog is not staying in touch in any personal way.  ‘Letters’ still need to be written and sent, whether by email or snail-mail.  And letters need to be answered frequently enough for there to be meaningful contact.

In the mid- to late 1970s, I did the ‘blog’ thing on paper.  I wrote daily accounts of my thoughts and impressions as I travelled in Europe.  These were snail-mailed to someone in Australia, photocopied and snail-mailed to a number of family members and friends, much in the way a list service works these days.  When I came back (after a 3½-year absence), people said they’d read and enjoyed the unfolding account, but the physical absence for that period meant that I no longer felt connected to some of them, or they to me.

I came back with an address book full of contacts from my travels.  Most of them never heard from me again.  Maybe, if there had been email back then, they would have.  But then, I didn’t hear from most of them either.

With a presence on Facebook and Twitter because it’s my only way of receiving information from some writing groups, I keep getting requests from people like Millie Average, Amber Snorter and Abigail Missfit, to be allowed to ‘follow me’.  What possesses these people (if they are real people) to request me to let them read my non-existent posts?  What does this say about their connectedness with people in the non-digital world?

Writing a weekly blog such as this is interesting.  It’s not quite like having a story or a poem published in a book, other than (in the publication case) not knowing who reads it or how many do so.  There’s the possibility, and hope, that there will be responses from readers of the blog to stroke my ego.  If I think about why I do it, it’s partly for that, but mainly as a simple excuse to write as I please, without having to fit in with a publisher’s likes and dislikes.

Even if thousands were to read this blog and I had books published and selling well, I can still only have meaningful social intercourse with a relatively small group, and that means making an effort.  It is possible to stay home, sit at this table and write, post or publish it, and pretend this keeps me connected.  The only connection would be with myself and my thoughts and feelings.  Like much of what seems to go on in cyberspace, it would be a facsimile of connectedness.

Reading a lot of others’ work can also substitute for connectedness – I can delve into their ideas, but it is nothing like sitting down with someone over a cuppa and getting to know them through an exchange of words, smells, smiles and raised eyebrows.  Emoticons just don’t do it for me.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

Symbolism can be as important to Australians as it is to other societies.  You only need to look at the number of people in this country who will repeatedly debate whether we should become a republic, whether we should change our flag and whether we should (again) change our national anthem.  Some who are opposed to changing the flag argue that this would be a sacrilege to the memory of all those who fought (and died) under it in numerous wars.  But my understanding is that Australians did not fight only under what is now the Australian national flag (the Blue Ensign) – numerous other Australian and British ensigns were flown [2], as they were at the opening of the new Parliament House in Canberra in 1927.  Symbols can be powerful even when the historical data supporting them is confusing or inconsistent.  As the saying goes: any excuse will do if you need an excuse.

The arrival of the first eleven British ships bearing convicts, soldiers and hopeful settlers, along with their exotic plants and animals, is probably not an auspicious event on which to base the celebration of nationhood.

There are other examples of questionable symbolism.  The one most commonly used by the medical profession – a staff with two intertwining snakes – is said to be the staff of Aesculapius, the ‘father’ of modern medicine.  However, in ancient depictions of him, the staff bears a single twisting snake, not two.  Two snakes intertwining or forming a double helix is a more modern notion and could be based on a different ancient symbol: that of Kundalini and the belief in the body’s chakras.  A curious symbol for a profession of which the majority would poo-poo such a notion.

The symbolic cross of Christianity has its origins in a device used by the Romans to torture and execute people.

The Star of David was adopted by the Jews relatively recently (compared with a 5000⁺-year history).  Most sources put it in the Middle Ages.  In the twentieth century it also became the symbol for the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel [3].

The misuse of symbols can also be powerful.  The Nazis took an ancient symbol representing goodness and adopted it to represent the supposed superiority of the Aryan race, although it was already in use in Europe for this purpose in the nineteenth century [4].  I wonder whether anyone in Europe at the time correctly read that cynical use of the symbol.

People can be regarded as symbols of integrity, nobility and other virtues.  That’s what makes such an individual’s transgressions so shocking.  A political leader who lies; a priest who sexually abuses children; a judge or magistrate who breaks the law; a police officer who steals …

It is possible for things which initially have no symbolic value outside the group that uses them, to eventually take on a symbolic value to those outsiders.  Thus, in countries such as France, people are constrained from wearing certain clothing that identifies them as belonging to a particular ethnic group and school students may not wear jewellery that identifies their religious beliefs or affiliations [5].

So, what days could we celebrate in Australia that would truly symbolise who we are?  I could suggest the 27^th May, being the date in 1967 when Australians voted overwhelmingly to change the Constitution to recognise Aborigines [6]; or the 18^th June, when in 1962 the Federal Government’s legislation to give Aborigines the right to vote came into force; maybe the 3^rd June, when the High Court in 1992 made its decision in the Marbo case, marking a change in the way Aboriginal land rights are treated.  Another date could be the 3^rd December, when in 2007 Australia signed the Kyoto treaty (it may not have changed anything materially, but it was a powerful symbolic act, made more so by the long period of refusal to sign).  Perhaps we could find a suitable date to celebrate Franklin River Day, to mark the power vested in the people to prevent governments from acting against the will of the majority.  We could create many celebratory days that would be much more meaningful to us than India’s Independence Day.

***

PS.  The latest news from Metroville (see From the Kitchen #34) is that some of the new trains are refusing to stop at some stations, no matter how much their drivers plead with them.  The city government has said that it may have to move some of the stations to where the trains want to stop, if re-education of the offending trains is unsuccessful.  They are also sending drivers off to be trained in assertiveness.  Meanwhile, the passengers are being driven to distraction.

1.  The 26^th January 1930 was declared Indian Independence Day at the ‘Lahore session’ in 1929, even though true independence did not happen for another twenty years.  The Indian Constitution was formally passed on 26^th January 1950.  [More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Congress]

2.  [More information: www.itsanhonour.gov.au/symbols/otherflag.cfm]

3.  [More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David]

4.  ‘Aryan’ originally denoted Indo-Iranian people and languages and then Indo-European people and languages.  Only more recently was it to become more closely associated with Nordic/Germanic people as contrasted with Semitic people.  [More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika]

5.  [See for instance http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3619988.stm]

6.  Up to this time, the Constitution (Section 51(xi)) said: “In reckoning the members of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, Aboriginal natives shall not be counted.”  More than 90% of voters endorsed the amendments.  [More information: www.aec.gov.au/Voting/indigenous_vote/aborigin.htm]

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

Publisher: Melbourne Books, 2007

ISBN: 9781877096952

RRP $24.50,

This is a story that needs to be told again and again.  The avarice and self-serving attitudes of the principle character are depicted graphically and chillingly.  People like Douglas Aspine should be locked up as quickly as possible and ‘re-educated’, before they
can do more harm.

There seems to be a general feeling that most CEOs of large companies are primarily interested in their own enrichment and aggrandisement, with the fortunes of the company coming in second and everyone else (employees and the CEO’s own family) coming in a poor third.  There have been a number of excellent non-fiction books and essays in which this has been the theme, but this is the first fictional work I have read which explores it.  The author knows what he is writing about, being a chartered accountant who has worked for years in corporate recoveries and reconstructions.

I expected the protagonist to be a terrible human being and he is, but I hoped for some glimmer of salvation.  I found none.  Douglas Aspine lurches from one disaster to another, although he seems not to notice until well into the book.  As the reader, however, the lurching and the disasters were obvious, even predictable; although I wished they would not occur and I hoped that he would see sense after a while.  This was partly what made this a page-turner – the hope that there would be a turning point leading to a different outcome; the hope for redemption.

Although the inexorable journey of destruction that Aspine seems to be on was excruciating to me, it did not take away from the enjoyment of reading a riveting yarn.  There were, however, some aspects of the book that did diminish my enjoyment; these I would put down to possibly poor editorial intervention.

There are too many instances in the book of the author feeling he needs to take the reader by the hand to explain something that a half-savvy reader does not need to have explained.  For instance: “The shares had come on the market at $2.05, but now… were trading at a measly 40 cents, and a lot of punters had lost over eighty per cent of their initial investment” (my italics).

There were also too many clichés for my liking (“she [had] … legs that never seemed to end”), although the author may argue that this is part of the style.  The style reminds me of genre detective novels, where you expect the right clichés in the right places, but they seem out of place here.  There are also some typographical errors which niggled me and were another example of possibly poor editing.

All in all, I enjoyed the story and felt pulled along by my expectations, my hopes and the bloody-mindedness of the main character.  The ending was a surprise, but everything I had wished for.  I can recommend this book to everyone who hates the current corporate climate and to everyone who needs convincing that it stinks.

[For other books by Peter Ralph visit Corporate Thrillers by Peter Ralph

[First appeared in The Australian Writer, September 2008]

© 2008-10 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new review is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

Most discussion I’ve heard and read has been about the spectacular computer graphics, the amazing scenery, the fast-paced action and the violence.  Only a few people have mentioned the powerful underlying issues the film deals with: corporate greed; corporate-military collaboration; the treatment of ‘people not like us’ as inferior to us; the possibility of a strong connection of a people with their environment; the possibility of a planetary intelligence; connection with a numinous presence.

Maybe it’s that the film is a 3-D production – the visual feast blinds us to the deeper layers.  And a visual feast it truly is.  The interface between ‘flesh and blood’ reality and computer-generated reality is seamless and the scenery is breathtaking.

My wife pointed out to me how much the graphic elements of the film borrow from earlier designs: Lord of the Rings; Laputa, Castle in the Sky; and, of course, Roger Dean’s cover art for the Yessongs album by the group ‘Yes’.  But it has always been so and this is probably a good thing, as it gives viewers a number of familiar reference points.  Also, it is likely that in 2154 technology will have moved way past, for instance, the computer screens depicted in the film, but the familiar has us feel comfortable.  Such familiarity allows the artist/designer to move along, developing themes, stretching what people will go along with before they are pulled into something they cannot accept as plausible.

What I find sobering and sad, is that more than a hundred years into the future humans are depicted as still not having given up their greed and violence.  Maybe they never will.  There are people who believe that there will always be such humans, along with ones who abhor them and will do whatever they can to thwart them.  Maybe there will always be an ebb and flow of violence and peace; the undulations happening in both time and space.

Those of us who are on the side of peace and cooperation and ‘doing unto others as we would have them do unto us’, are very precious about our stance because, naturally, we are correct in this.  But what if those who would have their way with violence and terror are (also) right?  What if greed is the better motivator for human development?

We, the pacifists, talk of love and karma and being one with everything and, I declare, we are right in living out these beliefs.  However, I have seen many peace-loving warriors hit the greedy and violent over the head with their rightness – literally and figuratively.  Intolerance is ugly, whatever it is promoting.

Avatar depicts the violence perpetrated when those who want to get their hands on something they consider precious will do so at any cost.  Usually at someone else’s cost.  The precious commodity can be oil or gold or farming land or forest resources.  In our time it is also likely to be clean water.  (In the film, it is the wryly named ‘unobtanium’.)  There is an irony in this: those who ‘own’ what is being coveted often don’t regard it as precious in the sense of having a price on it.  It is, however, often a valued, even central, element of their culture.  It is not a tradable commodity to them, as it is to the outsider.  It’s removal, however, can cause the destruction of their society.

Some invaders have recognised that in the society they want to destroy, there may be something the removal of which will take the ‘soul’ out of that society.  The film clearly recognises this and shows how cynical the invaders can be about it.  It is the invaders cynicism that marks them as truly inferior to those they seek to vanquish.

What Avatar also strongly portrays is that, if you take the time and trouble to really get to know another people or another group, you start to be able to see the universe as they do.  Hurting them then becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.  By depicting others as less than human, even as no more than animals, you give yourself permission to mistreat them, although this begs the questions of whether animals should ever be mistreated.  Avatar also accurately depicts what can happen when a group that covets what another group has, sends in a spy to learn that other group’s weaknesses.  The spy can start to identify with the others and even become their champion.  The way the greedy group deals with this is to depict the spy as having become less than human by his or her identification with the others.  Any wisdom and insight that the spy brings back can thus be easily dismissed.  This has often been the case where a member of an invading ‘white’ culture has gone ‘native’ and then stood up for the indigenes, only to find that his or her testimony is ignored because it does not suit the invaders.

The wonderful device used in Avatar is to actually get in to another’s skin.  If we could all do that …

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]

The trains in Metroville were all painted bright yellow with green ends.  They had comfortable orange seats and doors that hissed when they opened and closed.  But they were mostly empty.  Metrovillians preferred to ride in their roaring cars to go to work and to go shopping and to take their children to school.

Over the years Metroville grew from a very large town to a small city and then to a very large city.  As it grew, more and more people drove more and more cars and eventually the roads were so crowded that every journey took four times as long as it used to.  Metrovillians complained to the city government, which built beautiful freeways in response.

Expensive consultants suggested that the city government should do something to convince people to use the yellow trains with their comfortable orange seats and reassuringly hissing doors.  Almost everyone laughed at the idea of trying to get Metrovillians to give up their roaring cars.  However, a few thought it worthwhile.  Then, because someone in the city government thought the real problem was that no-one in the government really knew how to run a train system, it was decided to sell the whole system to private enterprise.  Many companies were interested and the system was sold by auction to Disconnect.  Disconnect had never owned a train system, but they had owned a string of model train and hobby shops.

Advertisements appeared on TV, radio and billboards, extolling the virtues of going to work on Disconnect trains: reading the paper, talking with other people, reading a book, daydreaming, getting some extra sleep.  At first, Metrovillians were reluctant to change, but then a few did and they liked it.  They told their friends and colleagues and soon the trains were crowded.

Passengers complained about the overcrowding to the city government, which complained to Disconnect.  The company removed most of the beautiful orange seats and advertised that there was now much more space in the carriages.  They also ordered more trains but, when these were delivered, the wheels were the wrong shape and they couldn’t be used.

When petrol became much more expensive and as it also became cool to show concern for the environment, more and more Metrovillians became train users.  Despite most of the seats having been removed, the trains again became uncomfortably crowded.

The Metroville government decided that, perhaps, another company would be better at operating the trains.  They gave the system to a foreign company because it was called Metrotrain.  The fact that it had operated trains before was an advantage, even though it had never been able to get its trains to run according to a timetable.

Everyone in Metroville was excited about the change, especially when all the trains were painted a pale blue with wavy green stripes; along with images of comfortable orange seats painted at intervals along the inside of the carriages.

Metrotrain convinced the Metroville government that taxpayers should carry the cost of changing the wheels on the ‘new’ trains that had been sitting in storage.  The refitted new trains helped alleviate the worst of the crowding and Metrotrain asked its customers what they would most like to see changed to improve the service.  Metrovillians opted for the return of the beautiful orange seats.  The seats went in and the resultant sardine conditions led to half the seats being removed again.

Metrotrain still had problems with trains not running on time.  They sought to solve this by painting all the trains bright red with stylised blue and orange flames at the front, to give an appearance of greater speed.

Metrotrain was not making any profit and, according to its contract, the city government was obliged to pay it millions of dollars.  It then became clear, when accurate accounting was introduced, that many travellers were not buying tickets.  It was suggested by expensive consultants that staff be employed at stations, but this was considered by the city government to be too expensive.  A new set of expensive consultants suggested that a new, ‘smart’ ticketing system be introduced.  Metrotrain and the city government considered this a wonderful idea.  When the new system was finally installed and ready to use, it had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, forced prospective passengers to transfer five percent of their weekly wages to the system, overcharged them when they travelled and frequently locked everyone out of one or other station at random.

Most Metrovillians have returned to driving their cars.  The city government has bought the train system back from Metrotrain and painted the trains bright yellow with green ends.  The roads are choked but it is easy to find a comfortable seat on a train – if you can buy a ticket.

© 2010 Daan Spijer

[to receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan dot spijer at gmail dot com>]