On the Construct of ‘Whiteness’ and its Inherent Racism: Against the Anti-Immigration Marches in ‘Australia’

John Kinsella

‘Whiteness’ is essentially a pseudo-scientific imperial-colonial construct and an ideology. Or, given the ideology-driven nature of much of the science of hate/privilege/exclusion and self-validation via arrangements of ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, one might just say ‘scientific’ construct with ‘scientific’ inside quote marks. 

Whether drawn out of the Blumenbachian ‘Caucasian’ racialism (such as there being a so-called ‘white race’) or any other categorisation of separateness and uniqueness, there is no such thing as ‘whiteness’. People have many origins, many forms of being in the world, and for ‘whiteness’ to be separated off is a political move to create a power base against other ‘categories’. So-called ‘white people’ are not actually ‘white’ in a way that makes them somehow separate and definitely not ‘special’ — it’s a false category. For those who have experienced the toxicity and imposition of ‘whiteness’, it is understandable they might set it up as an antithetical force, something to be wary of and ‘resisted’, but ‘whiteness’ as ideology thrives on being perceived as separate. So it needs to be non-violently resisted, of course, but not valorised in that resistance. Such a disturbing slippage happens more easily than is sometimes realised.

Those who identify as ‘white’ in order to valorise themselves, to make themselves ideally separate, are using the construct as a device for control and suppression of ‘others’. We can’t let this happen. Even within poverty, ‘whiteness’ potentially becomes a means of differentiating forms of poverty in a desperate search for validation and empowerment when the real causes of poverty are being ignored, or feel beyond rectification. The grotesquely unfair distribution of ‘wealth’ across the globe and within different communities (and between different communities) and hierarchical movements of capital are the cause, and so much of that wealth-accumulation is at the hands of and controlled by those who encourage and enforce a ‘white ideology’ as an idealism and reality. ‘Whiteness’ is a meaningless word given horrendous power by capitalism and colonialism, by greed and false and specious ‘belief’. 

I believe in the rights of people to be who they are and I celebrate multiculturalism and pluralism. When I say that I think ‘whiteness needs to end’, I mean that the thinking that whiteness is somehow something separate, exclusive, significant in itself and ‘special’ needs to end. It is damaging and corrosive thinking and harms the world’s wellbeing. I personally found the recent anti-immigration marches in ‘Australia’ threatening, frightening, disgusting and worrying. And extremely wrong on every level. The disgust many anti-immigration ‘citizens’ expressed about the presence of overt self-labelling neo-Nazis in these marches reeked of hypocrisy — the very values that are being espoused around anti-migration and the covalent ‘re-migration’ are fascist ideologies that connect with core values of neo-Nazi ideology. Make no mistake, theirs is a racist, ‘white-ist’ ideology wishing to reify (to force, in fact) a new White Australia Policy. The ideals of 1901 Federation born out of white supremacy ideology, economic control, and a religiously-underpinned ‘secularism’ of theft of Indigenous country.

I feel we need to be many people and many persons in ourselves. I feel that we all have a right to live fairly and justly and equitably. And I know that in ‘Australia’ (a name that perpetuates Indigenous dispossession) all people live on Indigenous country and that needs to be respected in itself in all ways. 

‘Australia’ is not a ‘white country’ and never was. ‘Whiteness’ is an ideology of divisiveness. Too often, surveys for demographic stats — designed to ensure fairness and pluralism across identity difference — risk forcing an unintentional categorisation and sadly in turn actually reinforce a pernicious ideology of ‘whiteness’. This is one of the processes of rectifying injustice and supporting minorities that can potentially reinforce the control of the majority. As someone who feels that ‘majorities are by their nature oppressive of minorities, I feel it essential that any sense of a ‘white’ majority is deconstructed conceptually and dismantled as a reality. 

So, I argue for all of us to be different as we are in ourselves, and for ideas of a ‘white’ majority to be seen for the falsehood it is. There is no ‘whiteness’ outside the toxic construct of racists and bigots. The very same racists who opposed Black Lives Matters protests, which arose out of systemic violence in not only the USA but across ideologically ‘white’ colonial political structures around the world, who questioned the veracity of a united position against systemic racism, also claim a systemic plot against their ‘whiteness’ due to open and inclusive immigration policies. As always, the ideology of ‘whiteness’ adapts to suit its own needs, to push its own agendas of oppression, exclusion, exploitation and ‘uniqueness’.

Review of Refugia by Elfie Shiosaki

I had been writing on the nature of ‘invasion’ in a military sense when I came to read Elfie Shiosaki’s remarkable new book of poetry, Refugia. Her scholarly archival reading of the nature of ‘invasion’ with regard to the military enterprise that was the ‘settling’ of the Swan River Colony is a remarkable and insightful glimpse into the nature of colonial invasion. And this melds ‘in the stars’ with a profound utterance from self and country that stretches and breaks any idea of the colonial lyric into something much more powerful, much more traced out of country.

With an intense sensitivity to her ancestors’ presence and with a deep spiritual connection to country, Shiosaki considers the colonial impact of the Beeliar hydrology, habitat, spiritual and material architecture of Noongar custodianship in the context of colonial-settler-military overlays and attempts at erasure. In tracing early Noongar protest and attempts at a just agreement regarding this invasion, Shiosaki projects and injects Noongar knowledges (and where they make connection with more northern Yamaji knowledges as well) with the immensity of the cosmos, bringing the stars, black holes and water ways (and the ocean) into a contact that is both generative and cataclysmic. 

The reflections and inflections through the experience of the poet in trying to address and commune with wetlands and water pulses around patterns of short and long lines, and staggered-line dynamics on the open form of the page. We journey with the body and spirit of the poet trying to find redress, to find answers from country itself, across ‘bend’, ‘break’, bud, the three sections of the work. Three non-colonial and anti-colonial ‘tellings’. 

There is a desire, almost a compulsion, for an end to the grieving of the invasion but there is no real possibility of this as long as that colonial invasiveness continues. Wadjemup, sacred island site of a colonial prison for Aboriginal people is spoken to with fires on the beach just as marches along Riverside Drive in Perth (Boorloo) under the eyes of armed police (of course) connect the statistically staggering reality of Aboriginal people, especially youth, in colonial jails now. Deaths in custody connects with the first months and years of the Swan River Colony. 

Spreading an Aboriginal flag in Temple Underground in London is an affirming and contesting moment, but no one really notices. The crowds move on around. This is a cosmological occurrence as well, and actions are witnessed and implicated in the stars: ‘the Whadjuk/ and Captain James Stirling/ those born under the Milky Way/ and those born under St George’s cross, a red rose and the Three Lions’(‘On the Edge’). Captain Stirling (massacre leader) whose presence is murderous, corrosive and entrenched still. 

The statement that ‘our understanding was never friendly’ (‘Misunderstanding’) frees the ongoing colonial manipulation of invitation and welcome arising (at least in part) out of certain first-contact accounts that are at the core of a settler sense of justification and reconciliation. If friendship was offered (out of the temporary impression or belief that the invaders were Noongar ancestral spirits returning over the sea) it was under a different set of terms of engagement. There was no friendship in the act of military invasion. In the pivotal poem ‘On the Edge’ we read:

     friendship and curiosity
     on the edge

    

     a boundary that will be raked over by boots

     by a false declaration of sovereignty

and this gives lie to any conceivable ‘legitimacy’ to just and equitable co-existence by the colony with Noongar people. It simply becomes an act of invasion, a process of ongoing theft.

The incredible gift of this book with its search for justice, restitution and redress is that it suggests a healing might come when the colonial invasion mentality is stopped. This cannot be stopped not by exclusion, but by change in the way settler culture addresses its past and also the grief of Aboriginal people in deep and complex ways. In the poem ‘Grandfather’, an ancestor of Shiosaki indicated in a ‘snippet of conversation’ with that colonial ethno-manipulator, Daisy Bates, says that ‘There has never been an attempt to annex neighbouring tribal territory’ by Noongar peoples. Invasion mentality is colonial mentality.

There is a thesis to be written on this book, but in the immediate term it should be read by anyone interested in true paths to justice. And from such works and invitations to response by other Noongar writers, we might understand that the ‘ancient root systems’ will bring the red eucalypt flowers and the Rio Tinto Tower will eventually give way to Noongar people being ‘reunited// in an historic reckoning’ (‘Refugia’). Noongar people will: ‘rise from the ashes// rise above the colony// rise into stars’ (‘Noongar Rising’).

            John Kinsella

Origins of Colonialism # - a New Experimental Film

Over the last eighteen months I have been steadily accumulating 'footage' for a new series of experimental poem-films. This is the first and was filmed in at various locations in Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia.

'Origins of Colonialism #' is a demi-silent film... there is sound, and the jackhammering is intrusive/interruptive, a motif of terror, but a conceptual silence also underpins the whole: the silence of a world still largely and materially in denial of collapsing eco-systems, and also the silence around confronting the causes of ongoing colonialism (one of the major reasons we have got to the point of collapse). Paths laid down over other paths, the labyrinth that cannot be 'solved', and the 'pre-evidence' (out of precedent) of our own footsteps to come as we follow the tracks of modernity laid down over the ley lines of deeper presences. And always looming, the markers of mining wealth and power. 

This new series connects to my earlier Rental Crisis films (see Rental Crisis 3 here), which I briefly discuss in an earlier blog entry. The lurid 'neon light' motif recurs and intensifies.

    John Kinsella

Eclogues and the Fact that Colonialism Thrives in Western Australia — What Can We Do to Stop It? What Can Poetry Do to Thwart Colonialism?

After seeing images of the mass destruction of native bushland in the southwest of Australia near Scott River committed by the Blue Whale Farming Plantation I reach a nadir of anger, frustration and despair. Earlier in the day I have been writing pleading letters to prominent members of the Anglican Church to ask their assistance in trying to stop the grotesque 'development' of native bushland in the Hills of Boorloo/Perth in north Stoneville, a destructive project that would see the clear-felling of at least 200 hectares of 'vegetation', and possibly more (around 60 000 trees plus undergrowth). 

The Anglian diocese 'owns' that land, and the land development company Satterley at their behest is aiming to create a townsite through erasing this rich, diverse and essential hills habitat. The material gain for a supposedly spiritual organisation is obscene in itself, but it further implicates the original colonial project in Western Australia (backed by Canberra), and the consuming of country to disperse the material rewards among a hierarchical organisation. The Federal Government just gave approval for this 'project', and if that is bewildering, put it in the context of the mining and pastoral 'lease' colonialism that rules Australia making such things too often a fait accompli.

This is an unreconstructed colonial country, still emphasising its imperial roots rather than diverging from them. And not that far away from north Stoneville, Chalice has been granted official 'strategic status':  'The Western Australian Premier Roger Cook has granted strategic project status to Chalice Mining's (ASX:CHN) Gonneville Platinum Group Elements-Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project.' just to make it that much easier for the erasure of habitat (and all it contains) and the imposition of 'green targets' that are industrial-consumer markers of 'climate care', and nothing to do with the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains. It's greed fused with 'progress', and such money is to be made that 'trickle down' arguments abound. If you want the truth of the brutality, you never need to look further than a website like Mining dot com dot Au... it tells it proud and raw, and within the colonial matrix of lip-service and industry-inflected reportage. 

This is what it's like in Western Australia and Australia as a whole — it's a barely mitigated assault on natural ecologies. From a visceral localised hatred of the individual tree found in some (I hope not many) urban (and rural) dwellers, to mass clearing illegally committed by a company with a (presumably unwitting) colonial signifier in its name (as well as an appropriation of an endangered species to boot), to mining companies claiming they are delivering the planet from climate change while destroying entire ecosystems, it's a remorseless furthering of the colonial project to its ultimate end: complete exploitation till every cent of profit is rung from the occupied land. 

Whether there is a 'Labor' or 'Coalition' government in power, the environment suffers. Whether there is a 'Labor' or 'Coalition' government in power, colonialism thrives, if via different routes. The surface gloss of Labor doesn't hide the reality of the damage being done. A conservative government got AUKUS up and running, a Labor government has given it teeth. And so on.

Out of my despair, I constantly ask myself what can I really do? When the bulldozers arrive at Julimar Forest or north Stoneville, I will be there. In fact, I will be reading and recording my 'Bulldozer Poem' before that and getting it out again as a contribution to preventative action. It's obviously best to stop an infection rather than to try to treat it when it's gone too far. And this is the infection of colonialism and capitalist greed. This is the infection of hierarchical governance on all levels: it is the fusion of the corporate, the private and the militarised state. I will read other poems. I will speak. I will write. The powers that be aren't perturbed, of course, but I do hope to motivate others. There are plenty out there caring and acting, and at least Blue Whale Farming Plantation have been held accountable and are having to revegetate the area they destroyed, but it won't and can't be the same as the erased habitat.

Out of my despair I continue to try and act. On the weekend I am teaching a poetry workshop based on the eclogue. I have used this form for almost forty years as a way of bringing opposing voices into a synthesis of refusal to comply with the status quo not only of capital and power, but also the power-structures of literature itself. 

'Literature' (especially as a nationalist mode of monitoring and archiving) is a tool of presentation, of regulating creativity through critical reception, dispersal of texts, and aesthetic co-ordination (and imposition) of public response. 

Take the eclogue, ur-textuality of Western 'pastoral' (though it means 'small poem' its emphasis is traditionally on the song-dialogue... and is underpinned with a bucolic competitiveness that brings certain issues of immediacy into focus), and consider the 'founder' of the tradition, Theocritus (a Sicilian Greek who wrote out of Alexandria and Cos c.300BCE-post-260BCE). Consider his concerns for herders and herds (the 'bucolic'), song, love, sex, humour, mythology, quotidian 'realism', households, 'towns' (see his 'mimes'), kings and hierarchies. It is also worth considering the embedding of slavery, empire and rural production into Theocritus's hierarchy (or faux non-hierarchies) of voices and what he does or doesn't do to question this). See here for J.M. Edmonds' English translation of Theocritus's First Idyll. 

Anyway, my eclogues are about departures and reconstitutions, and if the form isn't always 'anti', the content inevitably is in its (attempted) non-compliance. Traditions are created around texts, and extra compliances obviously imposed, so one is resisting traditions as well as 'original' contexts.

If in the Australian context the machinery of the colonial is resisted by Indigenous sovereignty, culture, knowledge and all attendant rights of being on country, there is an eclogue-ic marginalia of colonial resistance in the broader sense of transportation and punishment of convicts. This may or may not apply to individual convicts, or groups of convicts, but from the beginning of the colonial enterprise the 'undesirable' was either recouped through 'ticket of leave' reward for compliance (at least officially), with aim to eventually becoming a willing coloniser, or 'eternally' condemned as a threat to the empire. 

To stop machinery destroying habitat by direct intervention (locking on, damage of the machines or whatever) is seen as a threat to the colonial state and the law exacts 'revenge'. To stay on the other side of the eclogue and compete with the state you are expected to operate within the state's rules. Even activism such as my own which relies on non-damaging and non-violent interventions is threatened by action if I cross onto privatised land (what a joke). 

How we write about a wrong matters. To do so in uninformed ways with 'literary' aims in mind (even if we would like to think it's otherwise) can feed the state and capital by attenuating the 'literary', giving it legitimacy through adding 'depth', 'range' and 'sincerity' to its make-up, therefore 'legitimising' or making 'authentic' in consumable ways. I am reminded of the failed utopianism of poet Southey as he lapsed into a deep empire conservatism via official acclaim (the most effective weapon of the state to control its errant creative voices!). Southey's apparent radicalism (a very literary radicalism to my mind!) of the 1790s, when he wrote of transportation in his 'Botany-Bay Eclogues' (Oxford, 1794) without (as, sadly, was to be expected) understanding or connection with Aboriginal sovereignty, was a classic case of ambition vs. social issues. This is basic noble savage stuff, dressed up with the idyll to be tainted by the 'rustic' and the 'herds' of colonialism... the intervention is noted, but an awareness of the imposition of literary artifice on the 'native' is lacking. Could this poem have been much more? Likely, but not over the distance and via the literary tropes of 'wilderness' Southey is deploying. The eclogue fails to do any sort of justice.

Welcome, ye marshy heaths, ye pathless woods,

Where the rude native rests his wearied frame

Beneath the sheltering shade; where, when the storm

Benumbs his naked limbs, he flies to seek

The dripping shelter! Welcome, ye wild plains,

Unbroken by the plough, undelved by hand

Of patient rustic; where, for lowing herds

And for the music of the bleating flocks,

Alone is heard the kangaroo’s sad note,

Deepening in distance! Welcome, wilderness,

Nature’s domain! for here, as yet unknown

The comforts and the crimes of polished life,

Nature benignly gives to all enough,

Denies to all a superfluity.

The eclogue here becomes a tool for one set of voices to be privileged over other silenced or absent voices (outside 'observational description', which is a mediated subjectivity via the poet, who observes nothing in a real sense). And this might well be the problematical crux of the eclogue form. With this in mind, I try to push the form's temporal and spatial co-ordinates as much as the conceptual ones so that each 'voice' in itself is multi-layered, and not just performing a binary action within the poet's overall intent/vision/cause. There need to be cracks and fissures in each 'voice' in the 'dialogue' of an eclogue. No voice even in my most oppositional (argumentative) eclogues is meant to be unified and resolvable.

I attempt to use the eclogue to undo the controls of primary industrialising... the crushing notion that those who provide 'organic' and inorganic raw materials to communities should in some way have some kind of primacy over those who don't. Those who manufacture toxic spray to 'assist' farmers in growing grain to 'feed the planet' are as entrenched as values in the colonial equation as the invaders who stole the land in the first place. And this is what my eclogues seek to show through juxtaposition, conversation, artifice, contradictions and also colloquial familiarity. 

Here's an eclogue I've written in the height of 'spray season' here... even if you don't use the crap itself, it gets imposed on you and certainly on the habitat. The drift is literal, and it's also ontological, spiritual and political. We are all poisoned no matter how 'distant' its application.

Spray Regime Eclogue

 

 

Wild Oats

 

Cushioning the car-window-toss

of plastic drink container

to wager those carcinogens,

uncomfortable breakdown,

I labour to raise a seed head.

 

 

Glyphosate

 

Every excuse is made for my love

as you wither to root system.

I am non-selective, unbigoted

to de-glyph perennial unwanteds.

 

 

Wild Oats

 

Where native vegetation was excoriated

I stepped in to colour-code for privateering

astronauts (and the rest of them). Inland sea

to push aside, seeds clinging to their suits.

 

 

Glyphosate

 

I do love you, even if my love is broadly targeted.

I wear the marks of my makers down the line.

I love you as I love a herd of weeds.

I love you in the wide open spaces, the corrals.

 

 

Wild Oats

 

I call you out, N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine.

I call you out, Round-Up.

I call you out, evader of class-action suits.

I call to the sun and the earth and your deliverers.

I call through the hierarchies, to your makers.

 

So I keep trying and refuse the despair. Poetry has a purpose, and this is its purpose for me. To resist colonialism, violence, the hypocrisies of capitalism, while connecting respectfully as much as possible with the land itself and all it nurtures. And to push the form further, to show the complexity of any voice placed in a dialogue that is oppositional, I offer below an eclogue in 'signs' wherein each sign is affected by the other. Even a land developer can love an animal or care about the state of climate while destroying animals and climate — if we don't work to understand these contradictions, we'll never address and resolve the issues of damage.

Graphology Superscription 78 Signs of Ecloguismo: a spatial resistance collectivism

 

=, [], @

 

 

P(r)oem

 

Machismo almost destroyed us

in its plays and counterplays

across windrows and furrows,

across spray regimes

and territorial markings,

across closed and open forms.

Sign the alternatives,

sign the tolerances,

stress-test in metal fatigue

open-cut and deep below.

Signs to represent trees

and horizons. Conversations

resolving into the body-

collective, its energies.

 

 

Signs

 

 

=

 

Negating ¹ won’t let me

offer equality, such values

obfuscate a truth: we both

wish to see complete

redistribution of wealth.

The aphid per broadacre crops.

Food per industrial agriculture.

Clouds in the dirt.

 

 

[]

 

I am not saying you’d confine

me to index bracketing, to the single

value, resenting being thrown

into juxtaposition, a contesting

argument. I sign compatibility

as red-tailed black cockatoo

to full moon, a highlight

like a cluster of decades-old

trees on the edge of whittled

‘green space’. This set [I offer].

 

 

=

 

And so we resist form, and yet

are brought into rank proximity,

to be denied what we constitute.

Rufous whistler strikes alarm

and it sounds ‘joyful’.

 

 

[]

 

If it’s concrete to the orb weaver spider

[and you, my friend, seem to sign that]

turning the tree fork into death’s lyre,

does it follow as abstract subtext

bracketed to contain quotes

from a broad range of industry

sources, such as the road widening

destruction of yandee & flooded-

gums crossing a lexical Rubicon?

 

 

@

 

Me? Seems possible. Or it’s an appeasement.

Or ‘integration’. Or theft’. Or an act

of conscience-relief like replanting

saplings you know will be cut back

to their genes if and when you are no longer

around and they become ‘unwieldy’ or outré.

 

 

=

 

I have been co-opted, voicing

the voices that would force open

the everlastings before the sun

has signalled them. Or referring

to a meteor as a shooting star,

overwhelmed by your... our?...

role in it. It burnt me

through foliage. I saw.

 

 

All

 

We are bones left

after the silvereye’s death.

We are Theocritus

thirsting for home.

We are positive

and negative.

We are quantity

and empty.

We resist the survey.

We pass through the controls

placed on topography.

1. is a 'not equals' sign.

    John Kinsella

Statement

 

from John Kinsella

Australia the Warlord

             John Kinsella

 

 

It seems appropriate that regret should be uttered at a time of mourning. We have just suffered close personal loss, and there’s something very specific about the way a family deals with such loss in day-to-day activities, in the ‘emptiness’ of the early hours, and in reprocessing the nature of close relationships and what they mean.

 

And the regret I wish to utter is that Australia has fully committed itself to the path of militarism. The militarisation of universities that some of us spoke out against over the last decade in particular has come to a very rotten fruition under the present federal government. More and more arms companies (in all their tech ideations) are becoming entrenched in Australia, and from AUKUS to the manufacturing of missiles, from high energy yield weapons to sonar guidance systems, the speech of warfare is becoming normalised in Australian public discourse.

 

What bemuses me, as an extension of grief, is why I’m not seeing activists standing against this. In universities (in Australia and other countries) I have witnessed what amounts to quietism at best, and even in one instance, overt pressure applied by militarists (in various guises) to quell a pacifist voice as such as my own. People so readily accept a new status quo; under the ‘military solution’ approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ‘be prepared’ stance regarding China’s own militarism, the voices of difference and opposition are crushed.

 

Witness the Australian Labor Party’s verbal attacks on one of their own in Josh Wilson, who along with others was accused of ‘appeasement’ for resisting the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Witness the deployment of war-time prime minister John Curtin as talisman (a racist and a militarist), and as lethal force of persuasion, based on an idea of history as conflict dialectic. ‘Appeasement’ is one of those vox-pop snap-grab terms that twists like the knife it is intended to be: it carries the white feather, cowardice, betrayal, and delusion in its militarist etymologising. As it is used with respect to an arms-race, it seeks to disarm the already disarmed. It’s pernicious and easy. Those who wield it ‘appease’ death and hatred as they do so.

 

No. It’s time to stand up to this endgaming, to deny the euphemisms of ‘defence’ and position it for what it is. People can get out there and protest fossil fuel usage (as they should), yet they don’t take on the defence industries? Come on!

 

Every day we are greeted with yet another extension of the ‘military vision’ (essentialised around the idea of ‘pillars’, what’s more), as today I rose out of sleeplessness and processing a lost life to read that Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where I lived for a short while in the mid-90s, is having its runway ‘upgraded’ for military purposes; that this ‘pivot’ of surveillance is necessarily going to become more and more a focus of ‘protecting’ Australian interests (and assets), as well as those of its ‘allies’.

 

The fate of sea turtles on the Cocos is another aside, of course. The lack of environmental scrutiny and clearances another. And then an article that has sad visuals of boys with their toys, and yet another exploiting military tech company using Indigenous country for their exploits: laser weapons. So many of these companies with their university graduates in enthusiasm-mode are inculcating themselves into the day-to-day functionality of the body politic and the ‘social organism’. An organism that is building-in its own death. What is literature to all this? A mode of decorative mourning? Literature won’t be there in the end because it can only write after the fact and not in medias res? The writing is now, the writing is not accepting the status quo, not expecting to be value-added by peers and official mechanisms. And yet we do, because writing is an extension of the self into the ‘outside world’. We need to work through this.

 

Apropos of all this, and related because the arc towards military arms dealer status (already was, but now aiming for warlord status) that comes out of the military occupation and oppression of Indigenous peoples: a comment on The Voice and where I stand.

 

I fully support all Indigenous moves towards the reclamation of their lands and rights, and I support the position of the YES vote as I totally oppose all that the NO vote stands for. However, I think that anything connected with the system of governance (colonial, oppressive) that rules Australia is inevitably going to be compromised and limited by definition (and legal actuality). So YES, of course, but only in itself, not by way of vicariously supporting the colonial militarist system of governance by proxy.

 

The collective vision of ‘Australia’ is compromised because of its colonial focus, and because it subscribes to an exploitive state-business collaboration, but it will inevitably become even more compromised with its leap into major arms dealer status. War is exploitation on every level, and people who would normally oppose the doings of arms companies quickly become silent at times of conflict (that concern them... whilst ignoring conflicts elsewhere that do not threaten their personal, ideological, profit or well-being status), even promoting, say, the manufacture of arms to send to Ukraine.

 

To oppose such gratuitous death industrialising is seen as relative, only belonging to ‘times of peace’ and to ‘better circumstances’. A whole ‘realism’/’realistic’ semantic construct is established to control discourse and to bring about an acceptance of a new militarised status quo. Violence is sold as peace, and ‘attack’, ‘defence’, and ‘justice’ are intertwined and made determinate of each other.

 

But mourning is mourning, no loss is acceptable, and no loss in its essence, in its actuality, is prevented by inflicting loss (and that includes on animals). The broader silence of many writers (especially poets) in particular bemuses me. While many relish there being a ‘leftish’ government in place, it’s a furphy — politics are shown by actions, not words, and the actions of the federal government are militaristic, nationalist in extremis, and citizenship-orientated. For such governments, environment is about functionality (even positive climate-change preventative actions are dressed in economics, common sense and survivalism), not about quiddity or something that might exist in itself outside utility. And to separate the damage of environment from the well-being of people is to create the destructive dualism underpinning the horrors of Western colonialism that has wreaked havoc on the planet for centuries.

 

Counterintuitive Ghazal, 26th January, 2022

If I’ve learnt things askew, it feel it’s not because of bad intentions —

rather, I laud the form and am sad if spirit shifts when I make use of it.

 

On a day of trauma for many, a day of mourning a day of anger

at ill-gotten gains, when there are no platitudes, only pain, I call on it.

 

I call on a form of desire with all ‘erotics’ stripped away because

of the greed of one body over others, because of the chasmic longing in it.

 

Third person singular, I locate those items of ongoing occupation,

and they are all around me and I make use of them as I make recourse to it.

 

I don’t for a moment believe that life can be renewed for the oppressed

from the ‘rotting corpse of the settler’ as violent Frantz Fanon would have it.

 

In fact, I see the artists and poets and singers redressing the wrongs

and bringing repair, knowing the gun was the end of justice and not start of it.

 

But Fanon was right about loss of dignity and hope and ongoing mental illness

wrought by the settlers who played their part and excluded or validated it.

 

I laud this form because of its moments linking to moments, its building

out of longing and despair — in the interconnectedness, each couplet unique in it.

 

I feel the trauma of Karla Dickens’s artwork that antiflags and is forever

more than object — January 26, Day of Mourning — and acknowledge it.

 

I am a flagless person but that doesn’t exonerate me. I feel my bare feet burn

on the ground and know it’s more than a reminder. In my weakness I call on it.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Note: for more on Karla Dickens see this article.

Against Australia's Arms Trade Ambitions

           

          by John

So, the fascist regime wants to position itself to become a major arms exporter, to feed the horror and distress of military conflict around the world. Its concern about export to oppressive countries is a furphy, a way of positioning itself as righteous in exporting to the apparently ‘better’ countries, countries more efficient at screening their human rights abuses.

Australia hungers for power, and the constant papers and addresses to position itself as an influential ‘middle power’ are part of the same mentality that denies human-induced climate change, sees the remaining native vegetation and wildlife as something to delete or at best fetishise, something that stands in the way of ‘development’.

It’s tragic being inside this most nineteenth-century political and psychological immaturity — a game of states and borders, of power deals made by elites with vested interests in their outcomes. Australia is not decolonising; it’s recolonising and extending its ambitions into becoming a coloniser in overt and subtle ways. Arms exports are the most brutal form of colonisation.

This goes hand in hand with the abuse of refugees, of ‘turning back the boats’, of refusing to scrutinise the ‘fuck off we’re full’ or ‘if you don’t like it, leave’ mentality that rules in much of rural Australia, and in the suburbs as well.

One of the most appalling notions underlying so much of this pocket battleship aggression, this dreadnought hangover of the years leading to the First World War, is that of ‘any job being better than no job’. We hear this being peddled by politicians of the right over and over again. So, to manufacture arms that are used to kill is a just way of making a living?

There aren’t even semantics worth undoing here to show the blatant hypocrisy of such unreasoning ‘pragmatism’. The mining industry hugely benefits from arms trade, and all the ‘philanthropy’ of rapacious miners buying off academic institutions, and infiltrating the thinking and processing mechanisms of universities, doesn’t change the fact that in the end they provide the raw materials of bullets, guns, missiles, atomic warheads. The degrees of separation seem to protect their consciences, but in the end, the corpses are at their doors, and the doors of government.

Christopher Pyne’s desire to position Australia as a 5 percenter in terms of defence industry and sales is an overt fascist desire — the nation state develops and fosters industries that entrench a militaristic identity in which we are all expected to acquiesce or to be excluded.

There are no real rights in Australia, just illusions of rights. They are taken from us daily, and we do nothing. Australia already participates in the international arms trade; don’t think it doesn’t. And this should be stopped immediately.

But things are about to get a whole lot more bloody in the new patriotism stakes that are being foisted on us. If this core of colonialism is not addressed, Australia will consolidate its position as a New Colonial Power. For that’s what it is, and why people can’t see the wood for the trees given most of its forest and bush is being chopped down with nothing but dust in sight, chopped down and burnt or logged and/or turned to woodchips; it’s an astonishing feat of denial. But then again, note the sticker you see around here that supports the hunting and fishing party: a gun with a tick, and a tree with a cross through it. Get it, people?

The Wild Colonial Boy

The wild colonial boy is a loner

The wild colonial boy has guilt over his plunder

The wild colonial boy plunders his guilt

The wild colonial boy doesn’t know

            what to do with the plunder

The wild colonial boy offloads the plunder

            at the trash and treasure

The wild colonial boy can’t tune into the Eureka Stockade

The wild colonial boy tries to fly in and fly out but is caught out,

            amphetamines in his urine

The wild colonial boy shares a cell with a Noongar bloke

            who shares law and knowledge from country

The wild colonial boy rather be inside than out

            because the chains and slavery of the languages

            of occupation leave him confused and angry,  

            but inside is murder and he knows it

The wild colonial boy doesn't know what to do

            with his skill set — he thinks of going bush

The wild colonial boy watches the numbats

            near the huts in the visitors’ part of Dryandra Forest

The wild colonial boy listens to the crested pigeon flying, to the bush stone-

            curlew stalking, the western gerygone singing along with the

            elegant parrot in the canopy and the golden whistler

            and even the nest-hunting shining bronze-cuckoo

The wild colonial boy couldn’t be said to be distracted as the cops

            close in around him, but listening to the cross-talk

            of community, the close-knit interferences of belonging,      

            the distress of songs broken up by songs of repair and reparation

The wild colonial boy is taken and cuffed and has the shit

            kicked out of him — now he is tattooed with a constellation

            that shines over no part of the earth but is permanent

The wild colonial boy watches a young Noongar bloke being beaten

            to death in the lock-up

The wild colonial boy has been extradited as witness

            to be laughed at by the judge, to be warned to say nothing more

            if he ever wants to wander the plains again

The wild colonial boy promises himself he will shout the truth

            at every footy match, in front of every television,

            to the writers of reports who will go home to love and calm

The wild colonial boy wanders the port streets on his release,

            not understanding he’s in a decolonising world,

            the shops bristling with worldly goods, with opportunities,

            and all good things coming to those standing and waiting

The wild colonial boy stops in front of a travel agency window

            and sees a jet will take him anywhere in the world

            and that he can unlearn the codes of his failings —

            he can become he can become he can become

The wild colonial boy has worn dresses and wandered naked

            and has never been stuck on the codes of the pub

            and wonders if his time has come, but the urbane laugh

            at him — his phonelessness — head-in-hands on the kerb

The wild colonial boy looks out for his mate the actor

            but knows in his heart that his friend is gone,

            a friend who had been eaten by Australia,

            a friend whose name he won’t use in a song

            out of respect for the dead

The wild colonial boy looks out from near the walls

            of the Roundhouse and finds solace

            in the sea, the dolphins, the gulls

The wild colonial boy hears the many conversations

            and all languages make sense to him

            though he claims none — he is homeless

            and stateless and his family can't reach him

The wild colonial boy can't ‘call Australia home’, though he has never

            really left its shores; but he has travelled outside its jurisdictions,

            and he has travelled far beyond its metaphors

            John Kinsella