david williamson..worth a read

A form of this article was delivered last month by David Williamson for the
16th Sir Rupert Hamer Lecture at Swinburne University.



Cruise ship Australia
12/10/2005
By David Williamson

If Australia were a ship, where would it be headed? The easy-going
assumption of aspirational Australia that the destination is unending
prosperity (and more cut-price deals) will not save us from the rocks of an
uncertain future. David Williamson reports.


Recently my wife Kristin and I attended a charity auction to raise money for
a worthy cause. I put in a low bid for a south sea cruise to Noumea thinking
that it would help escalate the bid, but to our surprise we were successful.
The cruise had to be taken within weeks and in the interim we convinced
ourselves it was going to be great fun - a well-needed rest. When we arrived
at the huge white colossus and lined up for cabin allocation our fellow
passengers gave us some misgivings. School holidays meant there were oodles
of children, and the adults didn't seem to be discussing Proust or George
Eliot. But we were given a much better cabin than originally promised and
all seemed set for a great holiday.

It soon became apparent, however, that all wasn't to be plain sailing. The
ship was stacked to the gunwales with John Howard's beloved "aspirational
Australians". The dinner conversation made this plain. They aspired to all
manner of things: to holidays like this, to new cars, to kitchen refits, to
renovations, to private education for their children, and to practically
anything made of plastic, wood or steel. The one surefire topic of
conversation that connected erstwhile strangers was price comparisons.


It seems that the worst thing that can happen to an aspirational Australian
is to hear that another aspirational Australian got a better price deal on
their plasma TV. Value for money was the touchstone of everything, including
standards of service. Any slight delay or perceived lack of utter servility
by our hard-working Filipino and Indonesian cleaners or waiters was angrily
pounced on and condemned. Any shore expedition that didn't totally live up
to expectations was subjected to withering criticism. Forget the fact that
the rugged mountains and meandering streams of one of our ports of call were
awesome; the coffee ashore was "ratshit" and the sandwiches "like
cardboard". Aspirational Australia really loves a whinge. It's the glue of
aspirational solidarity.


Not that our fellow passengers didn't have their good points. Warmth and
affection within families was genuine, and civility to other passengers was
the norm. These were by and large affable people. And why wouldn't they be?
Not for them the grinding poverty of most of the world, or the devastation
of tsunamis or hurricanes. The worst that seemed to have happened in most of
their lives was the occasional rip-off involved in a shoddy car service.


It struck me that this cruise ship was a kind of metaphor for Australia.
Cruise Ship Australia, all alone in the south seas sailing to God knows
where. And in fact, like Australia, many of the passengers didn't care where
we were headed. The cruise itself was the thing. The sunbaking, the chatter,
the eating, the very solid drinking, and the all-important on-board
entertainment. And what entertainment: we had shuffleboard, Uno tournaments,
jackpot bingo, trivia quizzes, funky jazz dance classes, quilting, scavenger
hunts, and if none of these appealed you could retreat to the "legends" bar
and watch replays of old rugby matches in which presumably Australia had
triumphed. (They must have been old.)


At night there were island deck parties with giant conga lines shouting
"Olé! Olé!" under the supervision of the lissom Shona, our activities
Oberführer. There were also the nightly shows in which well-drilled
Australian dancers did segments from American musicals. And if you wanted
something after that, there was always a big-screen, feel-good American
movie in which true love triumphed and gooiness flowed like treacle. Again,
like Australia at large, no Australian song was ever played, no Australian
movie ever shown, the trivia quizzes were all about American movie stars and
we were offered stetsons and boot-scooting. The only thing Australian about
aspirational Australia seems to be their accents.


Right-wing columnists and commentators have a habit of sneering at what they
call "elites". Elites are presumably those who are not aspirational
Australians. We are urged by the columnists to accept that all wisdom
resides in aspirational Australia and none in the ranks of the effete elites
with their wanky interest in art, films and their bleeding-heart concern for
the future of Australia and indeed the world. The pathetic "elites" should
accept the ballot box wisdom of the aspirationals and stop their whining,
say Paddy, Andrew, Piers and the boys. Perhaps if they spent time on a
cruise ship they might start to question this belief.


When we docked at Noumeau, the one must-see item on our list was the
marvellous Renzo Piano-designed Tjibaou Cultural Centre. It was offered as
an alternative tour to the shopping expedition or to a day at Club Med. Not
only is the building, with its soaring wood ellipses, one of the most
dazzling pieces of architectural design in the world, but it was full to
overflowing with the finest of Melanesian artwork. In one room alone, huge
carved totems from all the Melanesian countries vied with each other, their
styles wildly different and highly imaginative but stemming from obviously
common cultural roots. The statement of the way art evolves and
differentiates as the imagination flowers was striking.


Of the 2000 cruisers on board, barely 20 chose to see this magnificent
structure and half of that number were recently settled Hong Kong Chinese.
The rest were off lounging at Club Med with paper parasols in their
cocktails or trying vainly to find a bargain amidst produce made in China,
made overly expensive by the worst exchange rate in the South Pacific.


It was somewhere about then that I decided it was legitimate to "aspire" to
be non-aspirational.


The contrast with another recent cruise we went on couldn't be more stark. A
British cruise line took us from Hong Kong down through Vietnam, Cambodia
and on to Singapore. Excellent lecturers from Oxford and other major
universities gave talks morning and afternoon about the geography, history,
culture and art of the places we were about to visit. It was like a floating
university of the very best kind, and we had to arrive early and fight for
seats as hordes of ageing but fit and mentally alert English jostled for
front spots, many taking copious notes.


The hunger for knowledge was genuine and when we got out to see the things
we had learned about, there was no attempt to sugar-coat the experience. In
Cambodia, as well as the wondrous ruins of Angkor Wat we also saw the
horrendous S21 camp, formerly the Tuol Sleng High School where thousands
were tortured to death in former classrooms. The beds to which they were
strapped, and the torture instruments used, were still there. Blood still
stained the walls and floors and in the final room we saw a massive pile of
skulls. In contrast to the mindless hedonism of the Australian cruise we
were presented with a world of sharp and complex reality. Discussion at
dinner was a lively examination of what we'd seen and its implications. The
creative heights and the brutal depths of human potential resonated
powerfully in our imaginations.


On board the Australian cruise ship, by contrast, there was no inquiry into
anything. Certainly no questions were ever raised about why Cruise Ship
Australia was so materially blessed. The thought that our ability to spend
up big and drift on shouting Olé! Olé! might have little to do with our
intelligence and industry as a nation and everything to do with sheer good
luck never rose to consciousness.


And no one so much as mentioned the plight of the real aspirationals on
board, the Indonesian and Filipino crew members who were away from their
families on low-wage contracts for up to 10 months, or queried why they had
one kind of lifestyle and we had another.


The credo seemed to be that whatever we Australians had was thoroughly
deserved. Not perhaps because a small, manageable population came to inherit
a British concern for judicial, parliamentary and human rights in a land
that initially seemed limitless in its natural resources. A land of abundant
pastures for sheep, wheat and cattle, abundant water, and huge reserves of
coal, iron ore, gold and many other metals. A land in which the original
inhabitants could be reasonably easily pushed aside.


Except of course that first appearances were deceptive. In fact we'd
inherited a very fragile ecosystem; probably after Iceland, the most fragile
in the world. And the fact is, Olé! Olé!, we're all living on borrowed time.





Like a hedonistic cruise ship we're sailing through time - not to a
palm-fringed tropical island, but to a sobering destiny. We might not
suffer, and perhaps our children won't, but our gr0andchildren will
certainly live in a very different and less plenteous Australia.


Our golden soil is the oldest and most nutrient-leached in the world. What
nutrients there were were quickly used up by our early farming efforts, and
from there on we've relied on ever more expensive and increasingly
uneconomic doses of fertiliser to keep our wheat crop growing. In
south-western Australia, our most productive wheat belt, the crop is
literally grown on pure sand enriched by large amounts of fertiliser.


Our tree growth is the slowest in the world because the nutrients to feed
trees aren't in the ground but in the leaves, and yet we blithely cleared
every tree we could. And we're still doing it, causing massive and
increasing problems of salinisation as rainwater - rather than feeding
roots - goes straight down to the salt table, allowing an easy pathway up.
The frightening thing about salinisation is that it is almost irreversible.
The fertile valleys of Mesopotamia which once fed a thriving civilisation
are still poisoned with salt after 3000 years.


In fact we have used our soils as a non-renewable resource, living high on
the hog for a while but allowing wind erosion and water erosion to get rid
of half our topsoil in less than 200 years.


And our abundant water supplies are an illusion, too. The early years of
copious rain morphed into years of drought and it wasn't until recently that
the El Niño climate effect was discovered and we realised that flood and
drought will alternate forever in our wide brown land. With climate change
now well and truly upon us, the prime agricultural and urban areas are
getting less and less rainfall and already NSW has decided a huge
desalination plant, with its profligate use of energy, is the only way out.
This in a country which still uses 80% of its water for agriculture that,
when true costs of water are factored in, is marginal at most.


Some economists already believe that we'd be better to shut down our farming
efforts completely as they're a net cost to the country rather than a net
gain. At best they contribute 3% to the gross national product, and the
subsidies to rural areas to keep them viable already top this. John Howard
tells us we must preserve a rural lifestyle, and maybe he's right, but it
goes right against his long-avowed ideology of economic rationalism.


Our present prosperity isn't from farming; it's largely coming from our vast
coal, natural gas and iron ore deposits. Luckily a resurgent China is greedy
for everything we can sell them, so our cruise ship sails on. But coal and
gas and iron ore are non-renewable. Eventually, they run out. And if
President Bush finally concedes that the ferocity of the natural disasters
hitting his southern states might have something to do with all that extra
energy in the biosphere due to greenhouse warming, then our coal exports
might not be as welcome as they are now.


Cruise Ship Australia is in fact living off resources that took billions of
years to accumulate. We're eating up our past at a prodigious rate. Our
grandchildren won't have it nearly as easily as we have.


The normal counter to this argument is that technology will solve
everything. We can happily eat away our future, and the scientists will come
to the rescue with new clean energy sources that will save the day. Look at
all those gloomy prognostications of the '70s, such as the Club of Rome
doomsday scenarios, the argument goes; they haven't come to pass. Well, not
yet, but on most estimates there are only 20 more years of easily accessible
oil, and the present soaring oil prices have to be a harbinger of an energy
future not nearly as rosy as the one we've grown up with.


The problem is that the alternatives to oil just aren't there, or even on
the horizon. Wind, wave and solar energy can't provide nearly enough, and
even atomic energy can at best supply about 25% of the world's current power
needs. Hybrid cars may cut our fuel bills, but only until oil prices surge
further as they inevitably will. Coal is proving such a disastrous polluter
(try finding a patch of blue over any Chinese city) and greenhouse gas
generator, that its use may well be banned not too far into the future. The
much vaunted hydrogen technology has run into severe problems and is a very
long way off indeed.


Even if miraculous new technological fixes suddenly appear, they're sure to
have a downside. Technology has rarely solved anything. It can give us more
goodies in the short term, but it's invariably presented us with new and
ever more difficult long-term problems. Technology made the machines that
pump vast quantities of Earth-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
and the fanciful plans to liquefy it and pump it into the Earth are little
more than pipe-dreams. Technological production of chemicals has polluted
our biosphere comprehensively, and presented us with increasingly horrendous
clean-up and corrective costs. Nuclear power produces toxic wastes with
half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years. Anyone who blithely believes
in the technological fairy godmother has to be living in pixie land.


Aspirational Australia will doubtless party on, playing deck games and
comparing prices, but when the ship finally berths they may look out to see
a destination much bleaker than they'd imagined. I finished the cruise
thinking that the "elites" have an absolute right to avow that the things
that mean the most to them are the works of art and intellect that our
greatest creative minds and thinkers have produced, that intelligence and
intellectual curiosity are not some kind of abhorrent anti-Australian
behaviour, and that thinking seriously about the long-term future of our
country and our planet is not some kind of cultural betrayal.


If you believe in a wider set of values than accumulating material
affluence, wear it as a badge of honour next time some self-righteous
journalist uses the word "elites" pejoratively against you. An obsessive
focus on material acquisition, encouraged by governments who worship
economic growth and little else, have locked us into a probable long-term
disaster scenario for Cruise Ship Australia and for the planet as a whole.