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

On Modes of Protest — a letter regarding collective responses

On the need for collective, co-ordinated responses (to crimes against humanity, specifically the war on the people of Gaza): ...’only’ that peaceful interventions should (to my mind) be made in all possible contexts and that we need to speak to people to bring 'them' on board with addressing situations rather than entrench 'them' as enemies. I strongly believe that peace (in all contexts) can only come about by the privileging of open conversation, to show that human rights also involve the consciences of those who violate them and those consciences need addressing. As a pacifist, I am on the path of total disarmament (of all), and I think that empathy is core to change. At present there is no concrete world language of empathy outside a few individuals and groups — no means of translating different cultural values, lived experience, heritage  etc, into a comparative model so people generally understand difference as something necessary and inherent rather than something that poses a threat. That such rights are essential beyond all else. For me, the apparent total non-protest and the apparent lack of civil disobedience around Australia's militarisation (or, rather, its dramatic upscale from a force of colonial oppression to one with colonial-imperial designs) is entangled with all the other oppressions it overtly or inadvertently supports. So, really, I argue for a holistic approach to protest — we cannot hope to effectively help stop genocide in Gaza while the very basis of our lives in Australia is entrenched in the legacies of genocide itself, and future projections of this (via the realities of AUKUS and the like). We need to protest empathetically, persistently, emphatically (non-violently) and holistically and not in bits and pieces. A concerted but non-belligerent approach. Many will disagree with this, and see belligerence as essential, but in my life of enacting and participating in protest, I have found belligerence to be ineffective. Being emphatic and persistent — never giving in — is a different thing from 'belligerence'.

            John Kinsella

Campaign to Save Trees on the Northam-Pithara Road

Tracy (not in the pictures, of course, but as committed as any of us!) and I are not long back from time spent out at the site of Mains Roads' destruction of salmon gums and other trees on the Northam-Pithara Road about 10-12ks outside Northam heading north, on Ballardong Noongar boodja. Tracy took photos and videoed me speaking against the damage and reading my 'Sammies' poem originally written to help support efforts by many to stop Main Roads' destruction of ancient trees (we're talking up to 400 years old) along the York-Quairading Road a few years back (gathered in the collection I co-wrote with Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green, False Claims of Colonial Thieves). You can see that poem here.

Main Roads have an ongoing campaign of roadside (and beyond roadside) habitat destruction that is remorseless and gathering pace. Road widening, road realignment, remaking to suit increasing truck traffic and exploitation of country... with only the bare minimum effort applied to ecological concerns. Good people are out there campaigning constantly to stop this catastrophe, and sometimes they have small successes, but it's hard to be everywhere. The philosophy of utility and development needs shifting on a fundamental level. The destruction of these trees is the destruction of heritage and history, it is the deletion of vital elements of the sacred. It's an ongoing disaster on a massive scale (consider the fate of bush along the Toodyay-Perth road, along the Great Eastern Highway near Wooroloo etc). It's a deeply ingrained systemic problem. 

I am delighted that campaigners who spent time on site through the week succeeded in saving trees — or at least to have them tagged as being saved (in my experience, sadly, this doesn't necessarily mean they will be saved in the long run, so extra vigilance is required and the road design plan has to change). I fear, looking at the markings and pattern of road-widening (and sadly from much experience), that whatever they have tagged in the short term as to be left will in fact be removed unless it's changed at the planning level. I celebrate the communal work of the on-site protesters who at least had the workers listening to them. Good on them all — it's how and where change is really made. At the face of things. I arrived days after this, but documented nonetheless and worked on site on a new poem of peaceful but determined resistance.

I stood between two sammies (salmon gums) close to the road and the poem located itself. 

As it also located itself in the chopped down two/three-hundred-year-old trees further down the road... one with the word 'owl' painted on its corpse. 

Here is the on-site poem:

O Sammies Sammies — Ancient Trees on Northam-Pithara Road

 

 

O sammies sammies,

deep reach, earth to sky,

and location location

for so many birds,

written into their DNA.

 

O sammies sammies

deep reach, earth to sky,

part of the elemental sacred,

essential to health of country,

cut to the quick, deleted.

 

O sammies sammies

deep reach, earth to sky;

owl markers, cockatoo compass,

honeyeater spires, insect plumage —

hold out against the onslaught.

 

O sammies sammies

deep reach, earth to sky;

O sammies sammies

deep reach earth to sky,

deep reach earth to sky.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Extinction Rebellion is Too Much About Image and Not Enough About Its Own Impacts

I was deeply disturbed to see this in the press. The 'greening' of the Limmat River in Zurich as an 'event', as an act of protest, is obscene. No more dangerous than table salt, they claim? Let's look at some of the background to uranine, the substance used to colour the river in 'protest'.

Uranine has a complex chemistry and a complex history. Sodium fluorescein has made appearances as part of St Patrick Day Celebrations in Chicago, and had coloured the Danube in the 1870s. It is used to trace leaks in water tanks and pipes, but with a strong warning that it is not suitable as a 'food dye'. The materials used to make the dye are from inevitably dangerous extractive industries.

Its apparent 'non-toxicity' means it is used in some surgery, but in undiluted large doses it can prove fatal. It turns up in a report for Project Shad — a series of tests conducted to see what vulnerabilities US warships presented to biological and chemical agents. The report is telling in its implications of industry and application, in the journey a chemical product makes to its eventual usages.

Unless Extinction Rebellion collectively start to comprehend cause and effect, the sources of the materials they use, the extended metaphors (their conceits) and symbolism in the world as a whole they enact, then they are performing and enacting their own (collective and individual) need to be doing something, rather than changing anything.

Phones are their devices, and phones are at the core of much mass extinction. These devices are manufactured. The irony of table salt — no more dangerous than... — is figurative and literal. The salt industry in itself is worth scrutiny, and salt on the human body... well, hardening of the arteries is more than a symbol. Collapsing symbols. This photo op of people floating on the greenness of wish-fulfilment contributes to planetary dissolution; it does not help prevent it. Let the phones you use now (and, indeed, this computer), be the last you purchase. If they are 'de-teched' out of existence, so be it.

Stop buying the crap with horrific environmental consequences and the city will become far more aware than it would from you impressing your friends on social media. Sorry, you disappoint me and many others. Now is the time to act — you/we have the will, but also need to think about how.

Not super strong glues (horrific chemistry and horrific side effects to people and the environment); not dyes (synthetic at that! seeing is also perceiving), no phones... people stopping the consumerist new-tech new colonialism. That way we might make a difference.

I once worked with these dyes in a lab as a teenager. As 'harmless' (!?) as the mineral sands industry the lab was ultimately serving. Not all the leaks were caught, either.

Extinction Rebellion needs to stop being a showpiece and start being a rejection of all tech consumerism. They need to understand that the 'non-toxic' dye down its chain of being encounters origins in naphthalene (hydrocarbon), sulphuric acid etc etc. (consider how we get phthalic acid anhydride, how we get resorcinol... how the reaction takes places etc etc!). Need to dig deeper, think deeper, and act less for performance's sake.

Protest is being there, and we are all here, in the moment. We don't need to see you, we need to see the changes brought by your (and our) non-consuming and non-self-privileging of access to goods. Altering the 'mere' look of a river is nonetheless altering the river. Leave it alone and stop pouring shit — any shit — into it.

Villanelle of a Green Limmat River: with great sadness

The disconnect between cause and effect

as Uranine is poured into sharp contrast like snow melt,

the damaged river through the city is made bereft.

Temporary... as chemical warfare?... temporary as the best

laid plans floating in the bright emulsification of death — a test —

the disconnect between cause and effect.

Social media traces through screen memory through distinct

moments of play in the horror of on and on it goes left right left,

the damaged river through the city flows bereft.

Rebellion that feeds the extinction that synthesises and treats

‘world’ as playground to announce the leaks — halt!

the disconnect between cause and effect.

This landlocked calenture this old city called to order this cost

of confronting like a green algal bloom swallowing each breath,

the damaged river through the city is made bereft.

‘As toxic as table salt’ — sum of the parts — investigate the collect

& refining of salt, the world’s hardening arteries, the logo the crest —

via this disconnect between cause and effect

the damaged river through the city flows bereft.

            John Kinsella

A poem in support of Tahlia and Emma at the Roe 8 protest

Sweeney Witnesses the Attack on the Coolbellup Bush
by the Forces of a Corrupt Police State

for Tahlia and Emma

Wings clipped, you’d expect Sweeney to plunge

to the ground, plough into the ploughed sand

and wait helpless till collected by the mulcher

and spat into a pile of has-beens, signed-off on.

Wings clipped, you’d expect Sweeney to plunge

into the clouds of toxic dust generated by the smash-

and-grab, by the sweeping of the last pieces

from the board in an endgame not quite going to plan.

Wings clipped, you’d expect Sweeney to plunge

into the microclimate of asbestos, the bush stressed

as dumping ground for waste no one wants to pay for,

then murdered because other forms of life test reality’s limits.

Wings clipped, you’d expect Sweeney to plunge

into the crowd of protesters, some wearing face masks,

others exposed to the dust that reaches into front gardens,

houses, the small amount of space allotted to public recreation.

Wings clipped, you’d expect Sweeney to plunge

into the police lines, police told to watch out for the particles,

that it will cost them too in the long run, but the Big Cop

says hold your positions, breathe in, breathe out, it’s all propaganda.

Wings clipped, you’d expect Sweeney to plunge

into the bulldozer, stuff up its hydraulics, its bamboozled

driver bragging of his agency. And all the while the women

up the trees looking down and roosting, roosting, roosting.

Wings clipped he lifted, flying high, to sit close with Tahlia.

Wings clipped he lifted, flying high, to sit close to Emma.

Together, he said, Together we will keep the trees upright.

Together, he said, We will unravel the bulldozer, the mulcher.

            John Kinsella

Confronting the Bulldozers

I want to make clear that I do not advocate anyone putting themselves in harm's way when confronting bulldozers and other vegetation-clearing equipment.

If I make a personal choice to do so, in any given situation, at any given time, then I do it alone and expect no others to follow my example (in words or deed).

For me, that's a carefully thought out position when all other means have failed. I do not advocate any form of violent resistance.

I do believe I have the right to place myself between natural habitat which is under assault, and the machines being used to facilitate the assault.

I think the most effective approach is to 'talk' or 'sing' to the machines, so to speak — that is, to voice as one the opposition (poetry is effective) so that it is heard by all, confronting the machines, their drivers, and those who wield the power behind them (those so often faceless cowards who send the 'troops' in to do the dirty work).

Below is a poem, written in the context of the Beeliar Wetlands situation, which I believe could be effective 'sung' or spoken 'to' the bulldozers and those behind them, and also to all the 'undecided' or indifferent people who so often unwittingly contribute to the scenario of destruction.

So, please DO NOT ever put yourself at physical risk, but always stand united against this assault against the rights of the environment and, indeed, assault against human rights in so many different ways. We can act in peace and also respect ourselves in doing so.


The Bulldozer Poem

Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils

of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do

as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they

tear the earth’s skin — from earth they came.

Bulldozers are made by people who also want new

mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families.

Bulldozers are observers of phenomena — decisions

are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions.

They will hear our pleas and struggle against their masters.

Bulldozers slice & dice, bulldozers tenderise, bulldozers

reshape the sandpit, make grrrriiing noises, kids’ motorskills.

Bulldozers slice the snake in half so it chases its own tail,

writing in front of its face. Bulldozers are vigorous

percussionists, sounding the snap and boom of hollows

caving in, feathers of the cockatoos a whisper in the roar.

Bulldozers deny the existence of Aether, though they know

deep down in their pistons, deep in their levers, that all

is spheres and heavens and voices of ancestors worry

at their peace. Bulldozers recognise final causes, and embrace

outcomes that put them out of work. There’s always more

scrub to delete, surely... surely? O continuous tracked tractor,

O S and U blades, each to his orders, his skillset. Communal

as D9 Dozers (whose buckets uplift to asteroids waiting

to be quarried). O bulldozer! your history! O those Holt tractors

working the paddocks, O the first slow tanks crushing

the battlefield. The interconnectedness of Being. Philosopher!

O your Makers — Cummings and Caterpillar — O great Cat

we grew up in their thrall whether we knew it or not — playing

sports where the woodlands grew, where you rode in after

the great trees had been removed. You innovate and flatten.

We must know your worldliness — working with companies

to make a world of endless horizons. It’s a team effort, excoriating

an eco-system. Not even you can tackle an old-growth tall tree alone.

But we know your power, your pedigree, your sheer bloody

mindedness. Sorry, forgive us, we should keep this civil, O dozer!

In you is a cosmology — we have yelled the names of bandicoots

and possums, of kangaroos and echidnas, of honeyeaters

and the day-sleeping tawny frogmouth you kill in its silence.

And now we stand before you, supplicant and yet resistant,

asking you to hear us over your war-cry, over your work

ethic being played for all it’s worth. Hear us, hear me —

don’t laugh at our bathos, take us seriously, forgive

our inarticulateness, our scrabbling for words as you crush

us, the world as we know it, the hands that fed you, that made you.

Listen not to those officials who have taken advantage

of their position, who have turned their offices to hate

the world and smile, kissing the tiny hands of babies

that you can barely hear as your engines roar with power.

But you don’t see the exquisite colour of the world, bulldozer —

green is your irritant. We understand, bulldozer, we do —

it is fear that compels you, rippling through eternity,

          embracing the inorganics of modernity.

                                                              John Kinsella