Exploitation of Cocos (Keeling) Islands

by John


I lived on West Island, one of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean back in the mid-90s.

I wrote a long sequence of poems on the islands (collected in Lightning Tree, with some of those poems included in my recent Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015), and also a novel Post-Colonial.

I have maintained an interest in the islands and follow any news relating to them. I was thus astonished and appalled to see the Premier of Western Australia's latest statement of cultural insensitivity, ignorance, and grotesque exploitation.

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands have a fraught colonial history, and the Cocos-Malay people who live on Home Island have a cultural life that extends back to the first half of the nineteenth century (and obviously beyond that to their places of heritage). They were horrendously exploited by white colonial overlords (starting with Alexander Hare and his harem slaves, and his conflict with the Scotsman John Clunies-Ross and his family who arrived in 1827), right through to the late 1970s.

As indentured labourers who were paid in tokens ('Cocos Rupee') only usable at the islands' store, the Cocos-Malay people have the right to self-determination even if they opted to go with Australian citizenship during the 1983 referendum on self-determination.

The mid-twentieth century John Clunies-Ross (the family ruled across two centuries) sold the islands to Australia — forced to do so by the Australian government due to the overtly colonial exploitation model under which the islands were being ruled, though the islands had technically been under Australian administrations since the 1950s — back in the 1970s. Yes, sold.

That West Island is an extension of Australia is arguable in some ways (though I'd refute this as well); it is certainly not a playground for the Colin-Barnett-leisurists.

Barnett's insensitive implication that Bali exists as a tropical paradise for 'Westerners' (specifically the Western Australian versions) to play out their fantasies is obscene. Western tourism's impact on Balinese cultural and day-to-day life has been immense and very often negative. All the economic-rationalist arguments in the world won't offset the abuse that is 'Kuta Beach', that is the mockery of spirituality on the island.

The Home Islanders of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are of Sunni Islamic faith, and they have been so long before they were 'purchased' by Australia. The religious bigotry that has embroiled Australia in the hatefest that has led to so many Muslims in Australia being targeted by right-wing 'patriots' is shown for its absurdity in the fact of the Cocos Islands having been Muslim (and to some extent animist) long before there was even a Commonwealth of Australia.

In fact, Cocos-Malay culture is complex and diverse, and people of many different geographical and ethnic origins came together as 'Cocos-Malays',  and though the people only number in the hundreds (on the islands; many other Coco-Malays have emigrated elsewhere in Australia and Malaysia), a Cocos-Malay language has essentially become its own language, and aspects of island culture belong only to those islands.

I don't doubt that some Cocos-Malays, and probably quite a few non-Cocos Malays running businesses on West Island, would welcome this message of development, but I personally know many Cocos-Malays wouldn't. There's a difference between having interested visitors and making a massive exploitative assault on culture and rights that comes with isolated places being turned into the playgrounds of holidaymakers looking for pleasure, leisure, and a beach party. Sensitivity and respect are the key in this.

My novel Post-Colonial was actually an attempt to articulate an independence movement under difficult economic conditions. It follows a character who has gone to the islands to experience oral cultural histories, while wrestling with his own demons of addiction and disillusionment with Western life.

I send my best to those people on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands who need to know that some people on the 'mainland' actually do care that their cultural identities and 'ways of life' are respected. Here is my poem to Mr Colin Barnett and other would-be exploiters:

Graphology Endgame 15: Cocos Islands Party Plan

‘Just think about it — our own tropical paradise. An alternative to Bali.’

            Colin Barnett, Premier of Western Australia

The Premier of Western Australia

wants to (re)turn the Cocos Islands

(in)to a colonial playground. Sensitivity

swirls about his corporate state

of excitement. Like a cyclone. Shattering coral,

threatening homes with breezy annihilation. 

Those small risings of land made so slowly —

particle by particle — way out

in the Indian Ocean, carrying a legacy

he will never translate, hearing only English.

This threat to the spirits that simmer

in the lagoon, drift through coconut palms,

scuttle over the sand dunes of South Island.

The Big White is sailing back in with the tide.

The Big House is rising again. Small sailing

craft are becoming quaint. Ghosts indentured.

Drinkers at The Club on West Island are charging

their glasses. Prospects of a fire sale?

Can he possibly know that Hari Raya doesn’t

imbibe his eternal beach-party movie,

his piss-up for patriots

with palm-heart daiquiris?

            John Kinsella

ANZAC Day and Pacifism

Written by John, to express sentiments held by both John and Tracy

Stated straight out, we believe ANZAC Day is an extension of the State’s desire to keep the population militarised.

From school classrooms where it is the prime focus of nationalist propaganda through to the television screens across different stations — interdenominationally, if you like — through their trans-vector fronts such as religious organisations (which have vested interest in the militarisation of the State to protect themselves and to use as a vehicle or vector for their own imperialisms), ANZAC Day focuses aggression.

We have no problem with acknowledging the horror of war, the brutal loss of ‘civilians’ and ‘soldiers’, and lamenting of humanity’s folly in allowing war to happen in the first place.

The inculcation of State values is, of course, desired by much of the population — though if such people were aware of having been propagandised, no doubt many would still choose the path of glorification rather than lament.

When the dawn services call to memory men and women who died in war, they cast it as sacrifice for the nation, for the country. This may or may not be true in individual cases, but it certainly can’t be made as a generalisation.

My Auntie Dulce is one of the last still-living wives of a Gallipoli veteran, Harold - a soldier of the 10th Light Horse, who came to believe in peace and never war. Uncle Harold, who would never march on ANZAC Day, never trade in what one might call the ‘currency of medals’, used to say, ‘Don’t let them glorify it – it’s not glorious, it’s brutal.’ And he felt that if talking about it would help people understand it was brutal, then that was worthwhile – but not if it was intended to glorify.

So we don’t object to the conversations that come out of ANZAC Day, but we do object to the militarisation of our children at school, our ‘selves’ as part of the country.

To give a sad intensity to this lament, we are disgusted to see that the Australian Defence Minister used this day to announce in Afghanistan that ‘diggers’ had ‘killed’ a hundred Taliban. Crowing over their skill in killing, the hierarchy cast it against the background of personal and collective sacrifice for the nation. Disgusting.

Did they mention the Afghan children killed by Australian troops in ‘crossfire’ during a military activity a couple of months back? We doubt it.

ANZAC Day is not about the people killed by ‘our’ soldiers, but about affirmations of the State as a military entity. Military entities require selective memories as much as they require poetry and art to feed their myths of glory. Every poem we write should be an anti-war poem. Every poem should be an affirmation of non-violence. Violence begets violence — and you don’t need to be part of a religious hierarchy to make this call. Pity religions didn’t abide by this observation.

ANZAC gatherings without uniforms, without weapons, without the military at all, would be an alternative — if people must gather for such things. By all means, lament the loss of humans, the death, the maiming, the damage to the environment, animals, plants. Lament the damage to the spirit of all. Not a gun in sight. Never. Read Wilfred Owen, read Leon Gellert or any of the many women poets of the First and Second World Wars (for example) who wrote against war and if not combatants experienced the horror in equivalent (or greater) measure. Poetry as activism.

On Anarchism: Part Three

Continuing: John Kinsella interviewed by Tracy Ryan (State Library WA, 2004)

Tracy
...Colin Ward, when asked about religion, said that rather than being the opiate of the people, in that famous saying, he said, it’s rather the stimulant of the people. Exactly like nationalism, it stimulates hostility and aggression towards others. Many have observed that people who are kind and considerate in their personal life can become mass-murderers under the banner of God and the State, and we are seeing a lot of religious strife, daily, or things that are connected to it. Would you agree that it is a stimulant of aggression and hostility, and why? Can veganism, just as a matter of interest, be a form of religion or equivalent to religion, and does it thereby risk similar problems?

John
I think straight-edge is a religion; I think there is a kind of hierarchy within the group that commands people to do something. Veganism is a personal choice to me. I don’t tell you that you should be a vegan. I became a vegan for the reasons I’ve described very clearly. I realised I was certainly not better than the things I was killing and it came about in a very literal kind of process. I believe very much in people finding their own way – and that’s what an anarchist world is, people finding their own kind of place in their own way in a social context. But the idea of being called or forced into any activity, for our own benefit especially – that deeply bothers me. So yes, I do see organised religion as being part of – as much of the state part of a controlling liberty. Free will is a slogan as much as freedom of the vote! Propaganda of souls.

Responses to a question (unrecorded) from the audience:

John
The media is the construct of the state anyway, the media exists because the government exists. The media applies and works through government boards, what’s shown on television even if it sometimes pushes the boundaries I mean, all the ills of the media can be traced to the ills of the State which can be traced to the ills, in my argument, of any controlling system (religion etc). Authority and power are the things that bring abuse on every level. I mean the embedded forces in the Iraq war, what fun and games we have in terms of televisual entertainment. Remember John Forbes’s brilliant “Love Poem” — its all “being staged for me”. The absurdity!

Media as a concept is actually a problem. We are talking about communications; there are other ways of communicating, the “media” is a self-serving entity. You’ve got the judiciary and you’ve got the legislature, and the constabulary being parts of the state, and then there’s the media. Clergy, nobles, commoners, and ‘the press’. Media is an extension of the state. It uses the power, the facilities, the permission of the state. Pirate radio plugged into the grid, or pirate radio using the mechanisms of corporate capitalism or relying on those who receive its signal having access to the grid: it’s hard to get away from media being media. Whichever state it might be, this state or a state elsewhere, it’s still an extensive arm of the state.

Tracy
So can I narrow that down then to kind of come full-circle, to some kind of closure, to what Bill [Louden] was saying about the connection with poetry and poetry as a medium – what’s poetry got to do with all this?

John
Poetry for me is the most direct form of communication – the one that goes in deepest. There was an Australian anarchist – Harry Hooton – who wrote his poetry mainly during the late 30s to the late 50s. He said something like “Language is not eternal. It will be replaced. We are not going to talk forever” and he said, there will be some kind of action in the end, and he said the words, once they left your mouth, were dead.

For me, poetry is, in the structural sense, neither speech nor writing but something between, and it’s a way of keeping words alive. Not killing them. Poetry is an act of non-violence, even if the content is violent, or invokes violence. Poetry is a very impacted and compacted way of expressing things. I don’t believe in writing didactic, polemical poetry to tell you what to think, but I believe in writing a poetry that evokes the mood, and it might bring an alternative to a response. Poetry is not dialectical by default. Maybe what I’ll do to wrap up my contribution is read the poem “Shootings” from my book The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995). In this poem I wrote literally a crisis of killing, of hunting, and the fetishisation of this on the familial and private level... set against the backdrop of gun-making and social and gender expectation. The public and the private melding and conspiring in conflict. I wrote this poem as a way of moving on from what I was. Poetry became a way of considering something, of prompting action within the subjective self, and from there, hopefully, community.


SHOOTINGS

1

I collected makers’ names
like stamps – Winchester, Browning, Sportco,
the more exotic Finnish and German brands.

Death was a fantasy
made real
in the bush enclaves
of my uncle’s farm.

Vermin!
was the password
before touching
a gun.


2

My oldest cousin’s heart
is not in it – shooting
parrots that is.

He’s taking me
because I’m up
for the holidays
and hungry
for trophies.

We march out
past the dams,
past Sand Springs
and Hathaways,
and close in
on a stand
of York gums.
I take aim
at a pair
of 28s
and drop one.
Its partner sits
twisting its head,
picking at a branch
and glancing
towards the ground.
I reload and take aim.
My cousin grips my arm
and points to the corpse
splayed on the ground,
tail cocked heavenward.
Something twists
in my stomach.
I am too young
to put a name to it.
I lower the gun
and turn for home.


3

When I was twelve
I walked all day
mid-summer
without water –
rifle slung
over my shoulder,
sun obscuring
those wicked crows
my targets
(too smart
to be shot
by a kid
who measures death
by the number
of bullets
left in a packet)
and nearly died
of sunstroke.


4

I’ve seen photographs
in a biscuit tin
that show young men
sitting on mounds
of rabbit carcasses.
Mounds as tall
as the young men
they support.


5

The last thing I shot
was a ram with a broken
neck. It had been hit
by a car. Through
the open sight
I measured its breath
and for once
looked death
straight in the eye.


6

Rabbits frustrate
large men
with high-powered
rifles.

The lack of more
exotic game
leads them to vent
their frustrations.

Rabbits aren’t just shot.
And full moons
do induce madness.


7

Harvest time, and
between shifts
workers corner
a pair
of screaming
foxes
in a forty-four
gallon drum

a shotgun wedding
in a forty-four

the sun skylarking
as the bouquet of lead
rips the steel
with a fizz

the gossip columnists
decked out
in army fatigues.


8

My uncle once killed
sheep with a knife.
Then he turned to the gun.
Regardless, city children
waited for the bladder
to be sprung.
The dogs frantic
below the carcass.


9

I placed the barrel
of a gun with a hair-trigger
against my tongue
as an experiment.
Tea-tree scraped at the windows
and all hell broke loose
in the chicken run.
The fox I sought
dropped from the roof of the coop
and sat at my feet –
too close to shoot
it ran
straight through me.


10

Did it a favour –
it was a mangy specimen
anyway!


11

Stalking.
Wending your way through.
Like dropping a parrot
mid-flight.
Downwind you approach
your upwind life.
Smell yourself.
Fear stinks.


12

I empty the breech and drain the powder.
I break the sights and seal the barrel.
I renounce the hunt, the flesh, the kill.
I embrace the sting of a cold morning,
the flight of the parrot, the bark
of the fox, the utility of the rabbit.

John Kinsella


Responses to a series of unrecorded questions from audience

John
It’s interesting we raise children, obviously, in that environment. I’ve argued for an anarchism that exists within a state as well as a grand vision of some world in which is not governed in that way. People say “you let your kids do what they want”; we don’t let our kids do what they want. We let them do what they want unless they are going to hurt themselves or others, and pretty well that’s the law we live by. If it’s not going to bring harm or distress to others or to the person themselves, then they find their own way.

The process of deciding what is good for others and good for yourself is obviously a subjective one and there is a form of authority in that. But what I’m arguing for is that social interactions bring their own authority without someone telling you how those social interactions should take place. Natural law as Bakunin says. I lived in two ‘communes’ in my life apart from the family commune. I consider the family unit a commune when it works fairly. And we’ve lived with extended families as well at times, and so on. But I’ve lived in two communes with groups of people who were very dissimilar, yet held one view, and that was that you could live mutually, supportively, without time being in control or someone being higher up than others. And one of them was incredibly interesting and successful in the sense that we pretty well functioned and got things done, and another one was incredibly ineffective.

The ineffective one was because there was a single relationship involved in it between a man and a woman – it didn’t have to be heterosexual relationship but it happened to be in this particular case – and single people around us, and there was a friction between the relationship and people being single, especially people so deeply connected to each other, and that brought its own hierarchy as you’d expect, but that didn’t last long enough to get any fair judgment on how these thing might evolve. But my experience has been that people, even people who deeply disagree, in time either learn to live with each other, or there is a disaster of some sort. I think the disasters are less rather than more.

And Ward talks about many solutions, for example, he says, what happens is you’ve got a group where someone turns around and says about killing people, and the answer is that someone will obviously stop that person if they can, even the pacifist will react. I get this question: If a lion was going to eat your daughter, what would you do? I would stop the bloody lion eating my daughter. It’s a silly question. That’s putting the logic of pacifism to the point of absurdity. On the other hand, if someone was attacking me, I would choose not to respond. I wouldn’t choose it if it was my own daughter, or a child on any level. Because the responsibility is a social responsibility.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be social responsibility. I’m saying an anarchist society is all social responsibility, and in a sense, those kinds of paternalistic relationships we are talking about are going to exist with interaction with people, that’s human nature. You are going to work it out with yourself because no one is going to say, Okay, this person has the authority, and then is going to back them up. They are in it on their own. I’m anti-technological, I’m not anti-knowledge, I’m not anti-people knowing things and doing things.

Now I’m the most plugged-in person when it comes to the net, as you can imagine, but I deeply deplore it, and wish I weren’t. And in many ways, seriously, what I work against is what I’m actually doing myself in utilising that technology. I think it is an effective technology in disseminating ideas, and getting knowledge – and often false knowledge at that, mind you, which is a different argument.

(Another audience question)

John
I’m actually saying that there should be no adversarial system. I’m saying that natural, adversarial dialogue takes place between humans anyway. We don’t need people backing up those natural adversarial dialogues with court systems. For example, if I deeply disagree with the fact that you are putting pesticides on your lawn and I go and dispose of your pesticide drums when you are not looking, by law I can actually be fined or jailed if it goes through court. That backing up of your right, as it seems to do, wouldn’t exist, because the common right is that pesticide is bad for all of us. And it’s a kind of commonsense approach to all of this that I deeply value.

(Another audience question)

John
... I’m arguing – this is the umbrella argument for anarchism – that justice is the primary issue, that we are saying what is beneficial to individuals and the social group at the same time. As I said, I don’t believe in violent revolution. I believe in gradual change, and that is why I do a lot of the kind of things I do. For example, I have worked with people who function in schools, courts, universities, you name it – they are all part of the governing system. That doesn’t invalidate their efforts. I am talking about a co-existence with the state, but a co-existence in which gradually change will come, and I want to see an anarchist society, with natural law and natural justice.

End of interview

Philip K. Dick Interlude

By John

Been reading (or mis-reading, as I do all Dick’s work) Philip K. Dick’s novel We Can Build You. Have probably read over half his novels now and many of the short stories. Starting to shape chapters of the book I am writing on his work, but there’s still a long way to go — I need to read everything, and then again and maybe again. I am, by nature, one who needs to read a writer’s whole oeuvre. Before Dick it was Stendhal, right down to his so-called Three Italian Chronicles.

The Dick is particularly interesting in its portrayal of Pris, another of his definitive, affect-testing (of the reader!) and significant female characters. Mental ‘illness’ and the terror/effect/administration/policing of ‘treatment’ resonate through the novel’s anxieties and paranoias (so characteristic of almost all Dick’s work), but the greatest paranoia is to do with gender and role play, and the obsessive distractions of sexuality and its implications for loss of control, and also redemption.

Dick is overtly ‘guilty’ of sexist cliché at times (he always seems to describe how a woman is dressed and what her breasts are like and whether or not she is good-looking; actually, he is breast-obsessive — it’s to do with the trauma between concepts of nubility, ripeness, fertility, and a weird form of body pastoralism versus artificiality: the doll versus the flesh), but this is offset by the sub-genre de-role play of his female characters.

His brilliant so-called ‘mainstream’ novel Mary and the Giant, originally written in the 1950s (and set in California) but unpublished until 1987, years after his death, deconstructs female stereotypes of genre novels to the nth degree. It’s still ‘genre’ in that it writes out of genre methodologies. The same grammar, syntax, sentence structure as his sci-fi writing of the period. It parodies genre and mimics the ‘literary’. Creates something new in the process. Its own limitations of social perceptions are choices made to illustrate the limitations of fiction itself.

I often think Dick is the ultimate fictionalist. Fiction is a ploy, a smoke-screen for the degrees of separation we hide behind. Fiction is closest to reality, in other words. It is as remarkable as Stendhal in its sympathy for the female protagonist (Mary Anne Reynolds). It also deconstructs racial stereotypes and examines nodal points of prejudice that come out of self-protecting primary societal discourses. How ‘whiteness’ is self-protecting, and creates its own hierarchy of oppressions (reaching a crisis of ‘masculinity’ — or maybe self-masculinity — in terms of comparison with perceptions of ‘black’ masculinities) that cross over, overlay, and delete.

It doesn’t equate bigotries as exchangeable, but explores the contact points and sub-narratives of prejudices that encompass creating ‘subaltern’ figures in order to preserve their own privileged status (even though Mary is forty years younger than her oldest — white/middle class/experienced — lover, Schilling, she ultimately and definitely de-loves). A bit like conservative Anglicans in Australia fighting against the ordination of female bishops. But hey, I left the Church when I was sixteen and have never looked back. All are systems of oppression to me.

Tangentially brings to mind again We Can Build You where Louis is telling Pris (whose only friend as a child was her chemistry set, and that was as she seemed to want it) about a young bird having fallen from a nest and his going to pick it up to attempt to return it to the nest, and the bird opening its mouth. Louis sees this as evidence of the bird’s trust, of the ‘mutual love and self-assistance in nature as well as cold awful things’, Pris rejects this, saying it ‘was ignorance on the bird’s part.’ Louis says ‘innocence’, not ‘ignorance’. In there is all ‘God’, in its contradictions, and the system of language serves as well — or better — than the system of control that is organised religion.

Personally, I respect all religions and no religions at once. I certainly respect each individual’s right to spirituality, to choice of belief system, but not to a right to impose this. Obviously. Speaking of Dick’s ‘mainstream’ novels, another favourite of mine is In Milton Lumky Territory, also published long after its writing and set in the 1950s (Reno etc).

Apart from reading Dick, I have been pondering a new short story. These things take so long for me to sort in my head. The hardest genre, I reckon. I have the narrative (which is something more than plot) — derives from a story told by my brother (a shearer) to Tracy and then by Tracy to me. It’s the germ of the idea that will go into various other places. I like stories derived out of stories derived out of stories. The degrees of separation enhance the fictionalism.

Oh, some real progress was made today with the reconstruction of my novel Morpheus. Written when I was seventeen going on eighteen, it has been tracked down in its various locations (it was broken up and chunks lost etc) by Paul Hardacre at Papertiger Media, and with a fair bit of reconstructive writing by me, and detective and editorial work by him is being reconstituted for publication early next year. A bizarre and difficult task! I am sure Paul would more than agree.

Finally, Mary and the Giant brings me to music — music binds the novel together — and class. I am hearing snippets of Tracy’s latest passion (and Tim’s)... an anarchist... Georges Brassens. You’ll get no facts from this entry, just bendings and warpings. Why? you might well ask. Why?

Niall Lucy and I have finished working on 'our' plagiarism book and are now starting work on another on ersatz. Dick again... The Simulacra. American soldiers in Germany. And so on...