Malice and Cruelty Towards Corellas in the WA Wheatbelt

A generalised hatred of corellas in the wheatbelt is remorseless and obvious. Not only do shires carry out ruthless culling, but if one hears corellas coming into a zone, it’s inevitable that gunfire will follow. I’ve been writing about this for decades, and all that happens is I have an index of poems lamenting the violence, the aggression, the excuses for cruelty.

And the excuses meted out by the killers? That the birds are an agricultural pest. Everyone who lives here knows about their loss of habitat — less than 3 percent of pre-colonial vegetation remains in the wheatbelt — and everyone knows that the birds are managing their environment in the best ways open to them.

 

Everyone knows that these are flocking birds with complex social interactions, and everyone knows that arguments around them being ‘invaders’ are ludicrous. Further, everyone knows that these birds are considered ‘fair game’ across various parts of Australia and are treated as animals without any rights. Western and little corellas live in the paradox of being ‘protected’ under the 2016 Biodiversity Act and also being labelled an agricultural pest.

 

I have intervened in culls (York 2003/4), written poems and stories against them, and recorded observations in an attempt to oppose them. I am not alone in this — many others have spoken, written, and campaigned against the slaughter, and continue to do so. There was a recent mass cull across a number of shires in the ‘Avon Valley’, and that has also brought an outcry, as it should.

 

But until the mistreatment of these birds and many other animals across the wheatbelt is highlighted, and until shooting while arguing on the grounds of the common good (‘anti-feralism’) is shown to be an hypocrisy (sport gained out of killing), and the other methods of killing exposed for their cruelty, this will continue. Grain growing areas are inevitably going to ‘collide’ with the wildlife that have been ousted, but rather than this kind of abuse of animal rights, it seems essential that more areas are set aside for these creatures, and that non-violent means of working towards a co-existence are investigated and put into practice.

 

Apropos of all this, indifference to targeted animals becomes a masking of cruelty. The other day we witnessed someone calmly driving their car over a stunned corella (but standing and surrounded by other birds)  — literally crushing it under their tyre. Did they perceive this as a ‘mercy killing’ (what a sick concept — ‘putting out of its misery’) or did they just see themselves as extending the cull? It happened next to the Northam Grain Terminal, where corella shooting is a regular occurrence (I wrote and published a story relating to this last year), and the roadside was a display of battered corpses.

 

What was one more corella? It was a sentient life. It was in need of help which could easily have been provided by a vet or animal care worker.

 

Before we could intervene, the deed was done and the driver left the scene, slowly returning to the speed limit. People who treat animals with cruelty are also capable of treating humans the same way. This poem is part of a collaborative work I am involved with which acts as witness, but really, the actions have to be on a personal level across the entire community. Some are speaking out; may many more.

 

Malice

 

In the age

of the short

attention

span

 

a white car

approaches

arrangements

of white

feathers —

 

a clutch

of corellas

on the road

alongside

the great

A-class

wheat bin

(longer

than

a ship);

 

one of the birds

has been injured

and rocks

back

& forth,

tended by

its companions

 

the white car

glides then slows

and almost stops

before the driver

guns the motor,

crushing

the injured,

shocking

those birds

tending;

 

it’s as specialised

an act of cruelty

as I’ve ever

witnessed,

 

deliberate

as a war

crime.

JK

 

NOTE: looking through my old emails, I find message after message to shires protesting corella culls. These spread over many years and are directed towards York, Northam and Toodyay shires. And I found this poem I sent to the Northam shire. It's never made a difference, though not for want of trying. I found an email where Tracy points out one woman who tried to stop an earlier cull.

Dawn Corella Asks to be Let Live: against the 2020 Northam ‘Corella Cull’

On returning after being away and hearing corellas at dawn

As if survival of dawn and call

is a matter of word sparkle —

a quid pro quo you expect from ‘art’,

a gift of zest and boost of the beautiful.

How so when so many of you won’t stand 

for the art of corella, the collaborative

art, the voicings of faith and fascination,

the line through darkness that gives?

When the cullers come to cull 

ask how many are getting a bit of sport 

out of it — the kill that plays with ‘skill’,

the art of the dawn call’s bloody fall.

John Kinsella

 

Poem for All Those Suffering from the Violence in the 'Middle East'

When One Is on the Verge of Leaving the World

When one is on the verge of leaving this world

the stresses on the atmosphere are increasing,

and the war-makers gloat over their annihilations

and many others die quicker than it takes for 

your own death to complete its cycle, even when

it’s ‘mini-stroke’ after ‘mini-stroke’ and you’ve 

only got one eye to the world. In the time between 

emergency and operation, in the time blood 

pressure drops critically in ICU to be persuaded 

to rise but not rise too far, the killers have killed 

so many others, with or without ‘pre-existing

conditions’ (other than living), and some repairing

from ailments, others just finding a way through

to dawn. These lives all terminated, these lives

burnt in the name of other lives and also to show-

case hardware, to make an exhibition of power.

When one is on the verge of leaving this world,

bushland is replaced by a playing field on which

a ball moves between profiles, the slices of life.

John Kinsella

State Violence and Hate

The violent actions of the NSW police force against those protesting the Israeli President's visit to Australia are on display for all to see. This record of police brutality is a grim reminder of how vulnerable human rights are to manipulation and abuse, as is the very fact of the presence of a war criminal in the social discourse of the broader community. 

Aligning the presence of one of the leaders of the Israeli war machine with the need to address people's deep distress about the horrific slaughter at Bondi risks contesting and erasing the fact of the destruction and genocide in Gaza. This serves no form of justice for anyone. If this person were acting as a 'private citizen' mourning personal loss, a case might be made for a private visit even in the fallout of his being a 'signatory' to the crimes of the Israeli state, but this visit was hardly ever (just) about that. He comes as the war criminal he is, supported by the state.

It seems clear that the reality of anti-semitism being the driver of the Bondi massacre cannot and should not be negated by defining it as an extension of the conflict in Gaza. To do so is to excuse the inexcusable, to negate the humanity and agency of each murdered individual, and to offer a pathway for justifying the heinous. 

The acts of the NSW police fit the pattern of state control, and the refusal to offer a right of protest against a figure identified directly with slaughter, coming as a representative of a war machine that has so far escaped any real scrutiny and consequences for its genocidal actions, is such a disturbing mixing of registers of suffering that it offends basic human rights. Bigotry — be it anti-semitic or anti-Palestinian — is the bloody divider between oppression and justice. 

Having spent a life resisting fascism, often enduring death threats and even beatings in my younger years, I find any attempt to rationalise murder and violence as justice absolutely unsupportable. The shift from colonial aggression into 'decolonising' aggression is a contradiction so easily presented as the 'real' form of activism, as opposed to declaration that all forms of violence are wrong. There is too much manipulation and control going on across discourses that seek justice by trying to render void other ways of seeing (by which I mean non-violent ways of seeing and dealing with wrongs)... an aggressive censorship that would remove all opposition around pathways to peace and justice.  

We are sadly dealing with what amounts to a new racism - a racism that refuses the label as part of its process, and that justifies itself in the context of resisting what it perceives as an indefensible racism (which it is, of course) ... resulting in more hate and a deepening racism. Semantics can't alter that fact that ALL racism is wrong. 

I personally stand for all those who are oppressed and all those who are harmed. Even the oppressors don't deserve harm — what they need is to be prevented from causing harm and to be shown a way past their own hate and bigotry. Disarming in the material reality as well as in thought is a start. We must all hold violent policing to account and the state and policing system that would justify the violation of basic human rights all in the name of thwarting hatred. The irony is deadly and a negation of human rights. 

Hate is the word of our age only because it is underwritten by histories and stories of hate. 

John Kinsella

In Support of the Indigenous Community at the Boorloo Invasion Day Rally Who Were 'Allegedly' (legal/press jargon) Attacked, and in Support of All Indigenous Peoples

Sidestepping

 

Outside the GPO,

Boorloo/Perth.

Midday.

 

Who wants to call

a meeting space

‘Forrest Place’?

 

Site of non-violent

resistance

to settler

thinking.

 

Invasion Day gathering

to affirm the rights

and spirit

of First Nations people.

 

I cross the overpass

from the railway

station, descend

the escalator

 

and walk adjacent

to where, a week ago,

the attacker threw

an improvised

 

explosive device

encased in a Disney sock —

into the heart

of the crowd.

 

Racist nationalism

is the slow emergence

of cause while

continuing its effect.

 

The unexploded

that reaches

and keeps reaching

for casualties,

 

for aftershocks.

Walking adjacent

I try not to sidestep

the distress.

 

 

            John Kinsella

For the People of Iran

 

BABA TAHER

Baba Taher (1000-1075?), also known as Oryaan

(the Naked) is recognised as one of the first poets

of mystical love, later known as Sufism, in modern

Persian. Very little is known about his life other than

his being originally from the city of Hamadan, 

where he is also buried. He is best known for his 

lyrical doe-bayt (two verse) quatrains.

Translated by Ali Alizadeh and John Kinsella (taken from Six Vowels and Twenty Three Consonants: An Anthology of Persian Poetry from Rudaki to Langroodi, ed. Ali Alizadeh and John Kinsella)

Supporting Writers Who Have Withdrawn from Adelaide Festival

There is no room for censorship of the arts, not ever. We are a community of difference/s, and communities of difference are necessary to creating safe, just and caring communities at large. Nor is there ever a supportable reason for cancelling, as the New South Wales government has done, the right to protest, to marching for a cause in a peaceful way. Shutting down conversation does not bring healing.

And I also want to voice our complete opposition to the actions of the Trump administration in attacking Venezuela under its 'Donroe' doctrine of western imperialism, its abuse of the land and people in its oil theft and usage, and its blatant attempt to enact yet another colonialism on the people of Greenland. One does not have to search very hard to find Australian undercurrents in the mining grab for Greenland rare earth and uranium deposits. In all of this we are dealing with a growing capitalist oppression, exploitation and tyranny.

John Kinsella

On the Killings at Bondi, Sydney, and in Providence, Rhode Island

We wish to send our support and care to all those who were injured or affected by the massacre at Bondi Beach and to remember those who were killed.

We also wish to send our support in the same way to those affected by the mass shooting in Providence, where we have dear friends. As I was writing to my friend Kwame Dawes, he was experiencing what was happening at his place of teaching. It was horrific.

 

It is deeply distressing to see political point-scoring taking place when people are suffering such physical pain and emotional trauma. What is obvious is that psychologies of hatred lead to death and misery, and that bigotry has many manifestations. The availability of weapons is a disgrace, and until a central part of the discussion becomes the complete disarming of the world in all capacities — private, military, individual, nation-states and so on — then hatred will find its means of inflicting the most harm it can.

 

Regarding the massacre targeting Jewish people celebrating their faith at Bondi, it is brutally insensitive and bigoted to correlate this with what has happened in the destruction of Gaza. Both are crimes. Both deserve to be understood for the indefensible crimes they are. It seems to me even inappropriate to draw them together in this lament, but others are doing so, will do so, and the situation will be manipulated to suit different agendas and beliefs. But people have died. People have had their loved ones taken from them. Community has been shattered. Our care should be for every person lost, every person affected, and for the broader community. This cannot happen. We are all culpable for failing to nuance social interactions on broader scales to help play down aggression while remaining committed to just causes. Life is the most just of causes, and life has been taken. Every person of Jewish heritage in Australia will feel threatened and vulnerable. This matters. This cannot be, any more than it can be the case for people/s of any heritage.

 

The objectionable correlation of Jewishness with the behaviour of the Israeli military state has become a mode of bigoted convenience for anti-Semites — that’s obvious to anyone who is active in pro-Palestinian causes. To support the Palestinian people does not equate to being anti-Jewish, and yet for some it is a contradictory vehicle for their own hatred. The focus on ‘race’ rather than heritage, on ideology rather than faith, has led to disturbing divisions in the common humanity we all share. We are all humans, we all wish to live decolonised lives, we all wish to survive without physical threat. To kill is the most colonial of acts. Colonialism occurs in shadow as well as overt ways. A murder is a murder.

 

So, our love and care to all those affected and damaged. Society’s purpose is to be non-violent. It’s the world’s purpose, too. Let’s start now. Totally.

 

Proliferating Elegies

 

And this morning we woke

to hear of friends at risk

in Providence, of a scene

unfolding, of a live situation

when there were already deaths.

Across the curve of the world

the news — we are safe

but it is still happening.

The heat was rising

and I went outside

to feel how heavy

the air was already.

Before the storm arrived

I saw a kookaburra

with lightning draped

from its beak. I have written

to seven people over

the last twenty years

to see if they’ve survived

mass shootings.

 

We read that it had been a beautiful day in Sydney

while it was storming here, fire in the forest.

Then people were crying and calling

across time zones, unable

to reach the end of day. We stretch

out a hand as lightning reaches

inside the house into us.

We talk in the dark, waiting

for the lights to come back on.

We learn that the killers

were father and son — that

one of them had held a gun

licence for ten years. That he

had six weapons, all legal,

all accounted for. A father

and son who went to work

killing. A spree. A targeting.

Organised, specific. A ‘mass

casualty’ event. Their family

home is being raided to find

details, to find evidence

for what remains. The hospitals

are full, transfusions

taking place. The sea tests

the beach, as always, as always.

 

 

            John Kinsella