Sunday, July 19, 2026

On the Trauma Caused by Hancock Mining, Gina Rinehart, Pauline Hanson, Colonialism, and the Residues of the White Australia Policy



Graphology Materialism 34: reportage


Public submissions concerning Hancock Iron Ore’s

amended application for the rights to use a helipad

built into the roof of their new headquarters

on Ord Street are open until the end of the month.

 

It’s now proposed that the chopper will track Thomas Street,

edging Kaarta Koomba which the imperial powers

call Kings Park, and that it (according to the applicants)

won’t sound much louder than a kitchen appliance —

 

part of a promo package aiming to get Perth City

counsellors onside. A previous Lord Mayor

‘emceed a private event’ for Gina Rinehart,

far-right poetaster of colonialism and mining.

 

That fact is potentially incidental to the issue

at hand, but an aviation-fuel stench hangs

over the process. At present, the billionaire

is hosting Pauline Hanson at a resort in Sicily,

 

just after the far-right leader spoke to a far-right

British podcaster and lamented the passing

of the White Australia Policy. Contemporary

materialists are at pains to distance

 

philosophical materialism from rampant

consumerist materialist values. They insist

that everything that is relates to the occupation

of space — directly or indirectly. If pitted against

 

religious mysticism, then ‘the material’ must be a ‘radical’

departure. Likely, they don’t understand how certain

mining entrepreneurs in Australia work materialism

through settlerism to suit a consumerist agenda.

 

How they differentiate between spirituality

by identity and creed, the value placed on

God’s relationship to an amenable historiography?

When down in the city, we stay near where the Bell 429

 

helicopter hopes — intends — to land, settle, take off. Those blades

will so easily slaughter words, lines, stanzas from the ecology

of thought, and interrupt patterns of wildlife

just managing to hang on despite the city’s pressure.

 

Oh, and ‘Sturt desert pea’ shades will waver over windows,

themselves chopped by shadow while filtering the sun.

 

 
            John Kinsella

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