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

A Poem On Laurie Anderson's 2026 Tiny Desk Concert

Graphology Recovery 14: Laurie Anderson’s May 2026 Tiny Desk Concert

 

Between phrases,

interstices

 

of rejuvenation

& counterpoints

 

to cataclysm.

Fewer streets here.

 

Of differing

commencement

 

inside

this infarct

 

where I’m told

it will always be night

 

but it’s not. Dogs across

this valley collate

 

angles

of voice

 

while roused sheep

offset

 

those risible

clouds

 

adoring room to gather

or dissipate,

 

manoeuvre ordinary

attributes

 

of soar. Glimpse

of a barn owl

 

overflying

late afternoon

 

ahead

of its night.

 

 

            John Kinsella

The Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference and the Government's Call for an Arms Hub in Western Australia

We already live in a militarised state here in Western Australia, with the Stirling Naval Base (it makes me iller than I already am just writing this name) and its 'key' role in the developing AUKUS nuclear submarine horror junket, but the latest effort of the Cook government (pseudo left-lite... essentially populist and not based on consensual politics in any real way) to create an 'arms industry hub' reaches new levels of appalling. 

As much as 'overuse' of adjectives horrifies certain writing teachers, so too the underuse allows the militarists to push their way through to outcomes that serve their violent, profiteering orientations. Further, they make every use of propaganda methods that they can, from the 'subtle' behind the scenes approach, to the grand announcement designed to appeal to an imagined 'majority's' desires and 'requirements'. 

Missiles are the key selling point because we have all seen the 'power' they have to rule from a distance, but this pitch to arms companies to tender for such a hub is 'inclusive'. Wars across the world serve to illustrate this, just as drone-manufacture and software have become a passport to trade viability.

When in 1956 G. E. M. Anscombe coined the term 'scare quotes' with reference to irony and specific usage in Aristotle's writings (see Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy (VOL. LXV. NO. 267, January, 1956; p.3), she might have been more than aware of its Cold War and active war implications (but this is guesswork on my part). Scare quotes and adjectives can barely expose the brutality and shortsightedness of Premier Cook and his compadres' thinking in this; with even the lightest challenge from a press conference journalist asking if to create such a hub meant that he was happy to be an arms dealer, he replied that he saw himself as a 'jobs dealer' (though roughly direct representation of speech, this actually deserves no quote marks beyond an accusatory function). 

The Perth Convention Centre we hear is heavily policed for this stanza (quote marks? my term...) of the Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference, to ensure the war talk and arms dealing can go along without interruptions or too much visible opposition. We hear the police will intercept those approaching, we know that national media will play down questioning. 

The Labor government sell of jobs, jobs, jobs has a corona of run-on employment about it: the threat of war creates work, and war itself demands everything (including control) of and over a community. The recent fossil fuel crisis (ongoing, as it can only ever be) has roused receptivity to fever-pitch susceptibility. Even the Tesla drivers yearn for the byproducts, just as Musk delivers his racist, polluting discourses via the SpaceX rockets and his broader industrialism. Yes, this is a conflation, but it's all about conflations. That's capitalism at full tilt... a martial metaphor. Oh, Tesla Cybertrucks are part of the 'targeting' program of the US military.

In the consumer-materialism of a 'resource rich' state (as they call Western Australia: scare quotes again but with a different inflection), such jobs obviously promise the sustaining of some lives at the expense of others. The translation of weapons into death is a far-away problem, until it isn't! And to heap more destructive pernicious corrosive and glib adjectives onto the whole, it is barely surprising that the town of Collie is being suggested as a feasible location for this arms hub. 

We learn that as the workforce transitions from its focus on coal mining, jobs lost will be jobs found (hand in hand with tourism and the natural environment?). The hard labouring base of mining and all it evokes in class struggle workers' rights achievements, even if those struggles meant something very different and more 'positive' in the times when they were so fervently pursued, is exploited by the implied correlation that one dirty industry can easily translate into another. Now, some miners might feel this way, but I am sure many others won't (even if someone like me opposes their very work base in the first place due to the rampant ecological and climate damage it causes). 

Human rights are human rights. Our histories might be different, but we need to start from a premise that we all deserve to live without direct or oblique threats. The arms industry is an industry of threat.

A personal note to all this, as it so directly affects the colonial gazetting I spend so much time in... I have been seriously ill of late and am hindered regarding what I can do in speaking out as this is happening, and I am hoping this short statement contributes to the groundswell of opposition. Missiles and mining, military vehicles and mining, first aid kits... and mining. These are binaries, they're part of the language of a conference that requires much ongoing background activity, and that defies anyone who contest its murderous reality. 

In Australia each state and territory is manipulated as a synecdoche for the people within its voting catchment (of course). So when Western Australia (meaning the government and specific lobby groups) calls for missiles, it's 'the people' who 'want them' because jobs mean not only sustaining one's own life (and family), but also destructively enhancing 'prosperity' through consumerism. Individuals and families destroyed by these activities (directly or indirectly), have no say and are not going to have a say in any way.

     John Kinsella

Support to All Those Suffering from Repression in Georgia

I post this poem in support of those I know in Georgia, and for all those who are suffering under its repressive Georgian Dream Party government. For information on what's happening there, you might start with the Amnesty International report on human rights in Georgia here. I especially send this poem to those imprisoned or harassed for their belief in freedom of expression and for their peaceful resistance to tyranny, and will work for their release using my pen, even if it's at a distance. Poets are always among those whose voices are crushed by the institutions of power, but poets speak beyond borders and will be heard. So many younger people are deeply distressed by the reactionary shifts in their life situations, and need to be heard, to be understood, to be affirmed.

A Pacifist Sends Support to All Those Suffering from Repression in Georgia

 

I have never visited Georgia,

though I have seen how pictures

of mountains and their valleys

can evoke both the fantastical

and pragmatic, how the comforts

and tensions of family

can be illuminated,

how distance between

village and city

can be both a stress

and relief. I hear talk

outside the global news

services and their selective,

delegated, weighted stories.

And I hear charged voices

arising from many

streets, houses, work-

places, parks, burning

with anger and frustration

but galvanised, polyphonic

through power-lines, through leaves,

a choir of terrain and its people,

gathering across altitudes.

I sense those after-image fragments

reaching out over the sea —

a mist with clarity —

coalescing to stir

all sacred places.

Lines of pain stretch out

from prisons, their speakers

hidden away, smothered,

and I know those, too.

You are heard, people,

you are heard. I send

this back in the hope

that it acts as a talisman —

to  help keep you safe,

to show that we care.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

Poem in Memory of JH Prynne

 

No Ultima Thule, No Coda

 

            im Jeremy

 

Obituaries will slant

towards inclination —

            in this

            de-realming,

wood pigeons bombilate

and you watch their

            history

            with application.

Roasted root vegetables

were more than an invitation,

            and the ferry

            was work

across speech bubbles

of reflection: what holds

            an identikit

            against conspiracy,

swayed in the circuitry,

limited to outreach emoticons.

            What will

            become

of that manuscript (monumental)

of love poetry (deprogrammed)

            shown

            beyond

the fallout of the Financial

Times? Contractions

            from the epoch

            of typewriter:

less space for questioning

before punctuation

            seizes

            the tiller.

Offering company, hinting

chimeras — drizzle

            arcing efflorescent

            powerlines:

how power is sourced,

distributed, made in reliance.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Mass Destruction of Habitat on Toodyay Road, Western Australia... it has biospheric implications

The horror of witnessing more and more habitat destroyed along and near Toodyay Road, Western Australia, is so overwhelming that it is causing post-traumatic stress disorder for some of us, and for the biosphere itself. And it's ongoing. Soon, large swathes of bushland will remain only as photos and memories. Then people can forget it was ever there and adjust to the new reality? No.

This 'road realignment' and 'improvement' for safety reasons, to bring into accordance with 'modern road standards', is excessive and counter-intuitive. The violence of driving patterns is in evidence for all to see on any journey along that road and that's a huge part of the safety problem. Upgrading doesn't have to mean mass destruction. Further, the extraction industries and their trucking patterns are a doom in themselves. Trucks are supposed to be speed-limited to 100kmh, and I can promise you that's frequently not the case — I have seen trucks overtaking cars that were doing 100kmh. The plus or minus in their limiting must be truly flexible.

Associated (above ground) power line installation (and the wide clearing for fire-safety reasons required around power lines), the nearby mining of gravel for road-building, and ongoing agricultural land clearing (clearly some are escaping scrutiny or working the laws to their advantage) are part of a package from Dante's Inferno. 

Yesterday, nearer Toodyay, we also saw machinery tearing down vegetation around a creek, with the tracks of the diggers embedded in the stream bed itself. Have permissions been obtained from the Noongar community/elders? These are sacred waterways, as is very well known in the region. 

The environmental 'sign-offs' on these kind of 'works' is reprehensible, and the gall of the justifications, including a specious argument that because there's nearby national park, animals have other habitat available to them, is appalling. And as soon as you read that some of the bush being cleared is 'degraded', you get the (il)logical rhetoric at work. And a sign on the road saying a section being cleared is 'dieback affected' is not going to prevent its spread!

Every crunch of the bulldozer kills innumerable smaller creatures — reptiles, rodents, marsupials — and demolishes bird nests and so on. We have for many years watched white-tailed black cockatoos roosting in the very trees that are being literally plucked out by the roots —it's an inventive array of machinery the destroyers have got at their disposal.

It bemuses me to see the operators of these machines chatting between killing sprees. Sure, people are compelled to make a living, but all of us have consciences, and surely these must be bothered? It reminds me of the 'just-war' scenarios and the military tyranny we are all being affected by, some catastrophically. A pseudo-theological debate just as governmental 'environmentalism' is a pseudo-ecological fait accompli. And these demolitions are yokings of government and business — the twin arms of the modern Western state doing their best to cover each other's complicity in ecocide by fulfilling 'promises', 'contracts', and meeting 'outcomes'.

This is a local issue with planetary implications — if habitat can be treated with such disdain, then all life is devalued, and we all know where such degradation leads. We all have an obligation to act, including those doing the damage and hiding behind specious justifications. We are all in this together, let's start acting as a community that recognises that all roots reach into the planet itself, and roots around here are specifically Noongar and without ongoing Noongar consultation, there's no way through on any level.

Stages of Planet Killing on Toodyay Road

 

It starts in offices and conferences room,

unless it is that grim whisper on the road

as drivers overtake on double

white lines or thrash the speed limit.

 

It echoes through government,

through departments, to business —

that search for quotes combining

frugality, outcomes, and brag sheets.

 

The surveyors come — neat harbingers

with their deft theodolites, stakes

through hearts, pink ribbons

streaming like dead arteries.

 

Environmental clearances an exquisite fait

accompli, ultimately, and sacred water-

ways re-mapped to be entered by tracked

machinery, banks undone, water stained.

 

There is the language of minimisation,

which we’ve come to expect, thanks, and down-

loads to offset the distress. And as old trees

are yanked out by the roots, and buttressed

 

bulldozers mount vegetation

before crushing, carrion vehicles

buzz like powerlines, the land rewritten

outside so many memories — but not all.

 

Wildlife told there are other places

it can go as it is slaughtered. Contract

killers anonymous as, later, efforts to tidy

with a few plantings, or just guiderails.

 

 

            John Kinsella

In Response to Cyberbullying

Alphabetical Disorder 24

 

Apocryphal as spite,

false social media account

purports & implicates,

engines the basic ingredients,

kicks home goals, exclaims

yum yum to suffering,

zips personality into a body

bag — always on the hunt,

traducing through ‘own lips’,

deploying capitals & exclamation

marks. The storm came

though it wasn’t forecast,

sheet lightning sarcasm

while the buddy buddy

republic of letters

caught on & followed

xenologists throughout —

globe-trotting, re-routing,

questing & occupying

(virtually) every outlet.

High fives over drinks,

jolly hockey sticks,

increments of fabulist

lingua franca. Exploration

of those private spaces,

ululating with gratification.

New bullying — cyber & otherwise.

 

 

            John Kinsella