On the Western Australian State Government's Refusal to Effectively Protect Julimar 'State Forest' from the Threat of Mining (and other exploitation)

 

Herald Patches

 

(i) 2024: now

 

The minister for environment considers

Julimar forest’s availability for mining

 

            more important than its preservation.

            The chief executive officer of Chalice

 

couldn’t agree more, and praises

the official refusal to ‘sterilise’

 

            the forest’s ‘potential’. This is not

            surrealism but a radical departure

 

from the unconscious. There is violence

in city offices that spills out beyond

 

            low maintenance office plants, spills

            into the forest where fewer images

 

move as marsupials, lift as cockatoos.

Rhythm heralds consciousness.

 

 

(ii) 2019: prior

 

Rhythm heralds consciousness.

We seed an awareness in the vibrissae.

 

            Each livid patch, each resounding itch

            brings attention to the greater body.

 

One appears, then others. They will

scratch till the skin is damaged

 

            beyond repair. Make holes that can’t heal.

            A full scale ‘green’ battery industry

 

charges the assault. It’s a psychology

that goes back years. Take the 2019

 

            Indo-Pacific Defence Conference

            held at Crown Towers in ‘Perth’,

 

with a keynote on ‘defence industry

applications for WA's battery

 

            minerals and resources expertise’.

            ‘Green’ revolution destroying

 

all it contacts then making atopic collapse.

A minister’s or miner’s dream journal.

 

            A billionaire’s spacewalking view

            of Earth. A dermatologist’s similitude.

 

 

(iii) now unto ‘the future’

 

A dermatologist’s similitude.

Lost trees heaped for burning

 

            when up on the rise the house

            of the Big Whites overheats.

 

Largesse in the ore. Workers’

accommodation. Minesite infra-

 

            structure heralding State sanction.

            Words on the signs or the signs

 

themselves can be changed ipso facto.

Skill set. Application. Blue pencilled,

 

            each patch is forgotten. Bubble chart

            of raw data. Species lists. Red list data.

 

Environmental scientists, technicians,

supervisors, co-ordinators: on payrolls.

 

            Higher education for the conscious

            and unconscious. Illustrators.

 

Consumers. And open cut or under-

grounded into  the discursive,

 

            the body map

            is drilled into place.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

Some Recent Poetry

Have been reading a lot of excellent new poetry. Some of my recent favourites include Kwame Dawes' Sturge Town, Alan Fyfe's G-d, Sleep, and Chaos and Camille Ralphs' After You Were, I Am. Here's a couple of pics Tracy took of me reading from After You Were, I Am excitedly to the birds, trees, grass and water at Deep Water Point on the Djarlgarro Beeliar in Boorloo/Perth. Here, I am specifically reading Ralph's brilliant 'kyrie eleison' and vocalising its soundscape/word-play/deconstructive ironies, and also its theological echoes. Ralphs is a sculptor of poems with intense technical skill as well as slant insights.

And I'd also like to mention our son Tim's first collection of poetry, Wingbeat, which is full of the natural world and David Lynch.

    John Kinsella

Against the Melbourne Arms Expo

It is encouraging to see many thousands actively resisting the arms expo in Melbourne. How things have changed. When a 'defence conference' was held in Perth some years ago only a handful of activists made any effort at all to speak out against it. The destruction of Gaza is the prompt, as it should be, but the war machine is grinding lives into slurry around the world in many different ways. There's the obvious hegemony-threatening horror of the war in (and out of) Ukraine, and the straightforward violation of human dignity and rights by Russian imperialism, but also the complication of that war by Western arms manufacturers clearly benefiting from the conflict (so little will to demand peace). 

The Ukraine-Russia war has become a bizarre 'settled thing' — a semi-accepted state of being in which subtleties of capitalism and despotism ride the waves of 'fortune'. For those injured and dying, it leaves nothing. 

The ongoing assault by the Israeli state against Palestine is not only an offence against humanity and the very essence of justice, it is one increasingly and passionately opposed by many Israelis themselves. The world's failure to stop these horrors is a shared one — too many benefit from arms sales and prosper under 'peace through power'. It's a case of 'working from home' or sub-contracting the responsibility for killing to others, and being able to go about one's daily 'business'.  

These conflicts must be stopped by a collective show of civil disobedience and non-compliance. We need a peaceful completionism that says we will stop these grotesque wrongs NOW and, further, we will keep resisting the industries and their war-thinking when these specific abuses are ended. I have frequently noticed that the passion for protest diminishes once something has been 'achieved', but it cannot stop for in reality it is rarely ever achieved. An end to these conflicts will not mean an end to the suffering, inequity and injustice. Only by stopping the manufacture and use of ALL weapons in all circumstances will those suffering be given hope, the dead respected, and the living given their best chance to continue living.

Here's a poem for all living things. It is a poem that intends to speak to humanity about its inhumanity.

Graphology Superscription 71

Dead Sea sparrow flees
across scripts, speech. 

Swifts call themselves
back to the Wailing Wall,

crossing such different
belief systems, psychologies.

Quail live in Israel
and Palestine, and feel

sacred in themselves.
A lesser whitethroat

flew from Lithuania
and was netted, ring

on its leg. It wasn’t shot
down, only captured.

Release is semi-conditional.
What goes on above

and below ground;
the weight of bones 
in flight.

John Kinsella