>[!INFO]+ Meta >Area:: [[Neverland - The Lost Continent of Australia]] >Date:: 2013 >Tags:: #text ## **Another Europe** ### ***Niemalsland - Tom Morton*** It is 2011. The former German colonies of Bismarckland, Hegelopolis, Kruppsreich and Bahroland have become social theme parks, experimental micro-states. Hegelopolis, on the small southern island across Tristan Strait from the mainland, is a faithful reconstruction of the society of the former East Germany, complete with a fleet of reconditioned Trabant cars and an extensive network of Stasi informers. Hegelopolis is especially popular with American tourists and senior citizens from the former GDR, many of whom choose to retire there. Bismarckland, lying across most of the north and west of the continent, is a vast penal colony, modelled on Kafka's famous short story. The global market in corrective services has meant a vast influx of prisoners from all over the world, but especially from the U.S. and China. Kruppsreich, on the Eastern seaboard, once a vast chain of smokestacks stretching from Neudarmstadt in the south to Stahlhelm, halfway up the east coast, is now repositioning itself as a biotechnology hub, sourcing organs and other body parts for the growing European market from a large pool of unemployed industrial workers. All three regard Bahroland, the home of the first German settlers in the nineteenth century, with a mixture of fear and condescension. Lying along the central southern coast, on some of the driest lands in the continent, Bahroland has become an ecodemocracy based on the teachings of the former East German radical Rudolf Bahro. A blending of indigenous landcare principles, advanced viticulture and associative democracy has made Bahroland a modestly prosperous, relatively harmonious society, almost entirely self-sufficient. But the rulers of Kruppsreich and Bismarckland are growing increasingly nervous at the spread of underground political movements in their territories which look to Bahroland for their inspiration. How will they react ... ? > Tom Morton is Associate Professor of Journalism in the Faculty of Arts > and Social Sciences at University of Technology, Sydney, and a > broadcaster with ABC Radio National ### ***Danish-Italian Colonisation - Julie Copeland*** At this lowest point in our political history and with our growing sense of environmental catastrophe, it's hard to think of any beneficial human invasion of this land girt by sea. Our present culture has much in common with the ancient Romans---the worship of sporting heroes, public baths, gladiatorial games in mega-stadia and Proconsuls who govern the provinces for an overseas power. As a Europhile, if I construct an ideal society in my head, it would be a Danish/Italian mix of sense and sensibility. So casting back to a pre-colonial time, I like to think how, despite no Bolognese fleet, the people from the most civilised part of Italy, Reggio Emilia, managed to bring their splendid quality of life---flair, fashion and food---to create the richest, best-dressed Communist state in the history of lifestyle, to the southern continent they named Benvenuto. When the good people of Copenhagen also decided to sail south, their all-female government developed a system of true social justice and the most enlightened attitudes towards other boat people, minorities, the indigenous people and all the other creatures on the fragile continent, which they treated with care and compassion. Not surprisingly, the Danes' gloomy disposition dried out in the tropical sun, so that the entire northern zone of Benvenuto was given over to hedonism, nudist camps and large free-love parties in which the term 'a Danish pastry' acquired a new connotation. Conversely, although the elaborate statuary and marzipan-like facades of their private dwellings betrayed their cultural roots, the Bolognese developed a Calvinist work ethic which led to them successfully reclaiming the dry inland, which they turned into sublime landscapes covered with the world's best olive trees, while in the green coastal areas their vegetable gardens provided a renowned vegetarian diet. With the olive oil export profits, they built elegant piazzas in every town, with marble fountains running recycled water and the purest wine. In time, increased fraternisation led to the lazy, sun-loving Danes developing a passion for opera, and the Bolognese, now working the one-and-a-half day week, were able to travel north for long holidays in nudist camps, where together they painted up and performed street opera every weekend. > Julie Copeland was a broadcaster with [ABC]{.smallcaps} Radio > National. ### ***French - Greg Barnes*** The French and the Dutch plunder the place. Mind you, there's not much obvious trade, but they ply the coastline picking the low-lying fruit---sometimes literally. Then the settlers come, the trading outposts. Dutch, French, even some English. What is to be made of the indigenous inhabitants? They are left alone in the main. After all, this is an island of commerce. But what lies within the vast land? Exploration is sporadic but significant; there are new trading posts and roads and all that attends the needs of commerce. Here it is now---a genuinely liberal home. The descendants of Indonesian-Dutch encounters; French-indigenous unions; some Anglo-Celtic mix---but a minority. Religion is the product of missionary zealotry, but it seems reticent in a culture where no one faith predominates and where hedonism seems readily apparent. The politics is far from lazy---the great southland is a geo-political plaything for much of the nineteenth century, up until the mid-twentieth. But when the inhabitants returned from the Sorbonne and Amsterdam they were radicalised. Their African confreres were carving out their own self awareness. Time to do it here. We are Asian---multiracial yes, but our geography and heritage says we are not an outpost. Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City are the architecture of colonial masters. We are a point in that triangle. Sport is just relevant---soccer of course. But what is to be made of New Zealand's cricket obsession---but of course, the English! The main game is artistic culture---the blending of the land, the sea and the multiracialism; a richness and an eclecticism that creates an interesting Sunday magazine travel article in the *New York Times*. But the indigenous people of our land are marginalised. They live on the edge of town, the slum-dwellers. Yet there is now genuine empowerment since our independence from the French in 1955. They are now in the loop---at last, a genuine *terra australis*. > Greg Barnes is Chair of the Australian Republican Movement ### ***New Holland, Portugal and France - Itiel Bereson*** The Dutch, who controlled the Spice Islands of their East Indies Archipelago (Indonesia), settled a predominantly non-European population in north-western and northern Australia as trading outposts. These areas were unsuitable for European population because of adverse climatic conditions, so the Dutch settled an Indonesian population who were mainly Muslims---thus the foundation of a multicultural population of Muslims in the north and Protestant Christians in the south. This would have serious consequences for Australia after World War 11 when the Dutch Empire disintegrated. There was also an amalgam with Australia's indigenous nations who taught the Indonesian settlers survival techniques. As a consequence of the occupation of Western Australia, the Indian Ocean lay securely in Dutch hands from Cape Town to New Amsterdam (Perth) and the Indonesian Archipelago. This made it very difficult for rival trading nations such as Britain to gain access to valuable trade with China. During this period Portuguese navigators laid claim to western Victoria, which they named Ispiritus Sancti, and the site of Warrnambool became Porto Segusa, the colony's new capital. Further East, French explorers La Perouse and Boudin established a string of settlements in the name of Louis XV. Louisville (Sydney) in Port Jackson became the capital of Nouvelle France. As a result of a minor war with Holland, the Dutch ceded the island of Tasmania to Britain---a new Sceptred Isle which would produce golden apples and timber for the British Navy. But the British navy was unable to rule the waves because the route to the lucrative trade with China was closed to British shipping as the French in La Nouvelle France and the Spanish in the Philippines controlled the Pacific Ocean. The Australian continent presented a mixture of different languages and creeds, but there was no interrelationship and multiculturalism was unable to be implemented. Indeed the divisions made for tensions over a range of matters. Colonial armies had to be on the alert on the borders of the colonies because the rivalries of their European owners stoked the fires of war, particularly during the nineteenth century when wool and gold were much sought after commodities. Border and customs posts formed the nucleus of fortress towns. One major area of concern for many years related to disputes over the control of the Murray River, which was claimed by colonial powers under different names. The French called it La Nouvelle Seine; the Portuguese, whose border was in South Australia, controlled the mouth of the river. The French desperately tried to obtain an agreement, calling it Concordia. However for the sake of uniformity the powers agreed to call it by its indigenous name, Meeton, and the estuary of the river was named Goolwara. > Itiel Bereson is an author of Australian history books which are > widely used in Australian secondary schools. ### ***Roman Australia - John Slavin*** Through historical factors and the unexpected impact of sudden technological developments, which we shall not explore here, Terra Australis, or as it was afterwards known to cartographers due to a scribe's error, 'Terror Ostrich', became the last and forgotten colony of pre-Christian Rome. It remained an oligarchy with a titular head or Proconsul, even after nominal Senate and ward elections were introduced in the late nineteenth century as the result of trade guild agitation. Though it gradually lost contact with the founding Motherland, it continued to observe the best and worst of her practices. Both sides threw up (if that is the Ciceronian term) demagogic leaders whose aspirations were balanced by the lowest level of virtues: Hawkeye, the mangrove swamp speculator who afterwards turned to Buddhism; Malfactus Frazone, the failed sheep exporter; Wilmus Haydensus, ex-commissar of the Praetorian Guards; Kimus Beelzebub the Lugubrious, who campaigned for the two-hour day and year-long daylight saving, and Howard Minor, the vindictive leader of the small business aristocrats, known to his intimates as 'Little Caesar'. As in ancient times, the populace in the main ignored the epithets and sounds of broken crockery emanating from the Capitol. The culture was marked by a laconic stoicism derived from the philosophy of Seneca. Its general homily declared: 'Grin and bear it!' with an equally influential axiom: 'If you rise above yourself it's because you are a windbag in need of puncturing!' The populace believed avidly in magic, fate, sudden shifts of fortune, tax dodging and cheating the bureaucracy, and the wheels of chance. The wheels of chance were huge chocolate wheels which stood at every street corner where, for a sesterce, citizens could give their lucky numbers a spin. Hence the popular Ostrich saying: 'Hit and run!' Foreign and military policy was dictated by preservation of the frontiers against barbarian invasion. If you weren't a citizen then you were a barbarian. Terror Ostrich had been blessed as an island nation but was haunted by 'the Great Emptiness', a metaphysical condition that affected the nation but which few cared to mention, much less define. Consul after consul raised the draft and maintained a watchful red alert from watchtowers along the northern frontier, where regional differences of culture, religion and race bred a healthy paranoia. One recent Proconsul, Paulus Kettledrum, had actually led two legions into the wilds of Islamic Batavia and never returned. Some spoke of military debacle but others reported that he had been seduced by foreign ways and adopted the outward show of a nawab. Like their fearless founding fathers, the Ostriches loved to build roads in straight lines. Some of these disappeared into the Central Desert and never re-emerged. Neither did the construction engineers. The entire eastern half of the country, however, was interlaced with freeways which weren't free at all. Donkey cart drivers were constantly arguing against a toll that equated them with elephant freight trains. The people and government of Terror Ostrich were great appreciators of water and wind power in all its forms. Unlike the Greek colony of New Zealand, they took care to protect rivers from bad farming methods and their elegant aqueducts were considered a marvel of recycled materials. The stoic asceticism of the nation was judiciously permitted a licence to excess on at least two occasions during the year, deliberately designed as safety valves, to celebrate the distinctive qualities of the two principal cities, Packer Maximus, and Murdoch Minor. In the spring the northern city celebrated the Floralia, a three-day sex and drinking spree highlighted by the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Then everyone went back to being half-naked sunburnt citizens. In the south the citizenry was coyer. Their principle festival was the Equinox or 'Spring Racing Carnival' in which rich businessmen piggybacked their favourite mistresses, naked, around a large, rain-splashed circuit. The Southern Ostriches were connoisseurs of 'form'. Although the Terror Ostriches are seldom heard from on the world stage, there are infrequent reports of a Republican movement to declare national independence after two thousand years of the continuing, absent but influential power of the founding city which this report has aimed to trace. The movement is not likely to succeed in the immediate future. The majority of the populace can no longer indicate the location of Rome on a map. > John Slavin was the opera critic for *The Melbourne Age*. He teaches > 'History of Cinema' at the Victorian College of the Arts and has > completed a doctorate in Australian national identity. ### ***The stray Roman - Chris Wallace-Crabbe*** Like the Gaul of our headstrong predecessor Julius, Asia is divided into several parts. For years we had sailed the trade routes from the Red Sea to Co-Chin, as the Indians call their great port. Now it was time to go farther, perhaps to another Ultima Thule. C. Marcus Dugulus set forth eastward with three triremes, to trade with islands of spice without a middleman. What happened can only be deduced from the gossip of Moluccan island-hoppers. Two ships were lost in that fierce archipelago, and Marcus was forced to press even further east, passing through a tropical strait and bending southward. The Romans apparently arrived at a sheltering cape with sandy shores, and there established a temporary castrum, from which they never returned. Rumour speaks of their camp as a web of straight lines. Years thence, we wait still for news of their success, for evidence of their trading goods. Marcus Dugulus must surely have stamped his name upon those shores. > Chris Wallace-Crabbe is Emeritus Professor at the Australian Centre, > University of Melbourne. He is the author of many books of poetry and > prose, including *By and Large* (Brandl & Schlesinger). ### ***Dutch Australia and the conflict with Japan - Guy Rundle*** Australia -- the place with too much history 1616 Dirk Hartog is blown ashore on the very south of the West coast, dropping anchor in what he dubs the Zwartezwaan River. Sailing the south west corner of the continent, its lushness and strategic position fires him with a passion to sell the Dutch monarchy on the idea of a colony. The military/transit post of New Amsterdam is established in the new colony of New Holland in 1620, on the mouth of the Zwartezwaan. 1621 William Jaantzen having gone East, not West at Cape Filipe (the large triangular cape at the north east of the continent) in 1606, came down the coast, encountering the islands later to be known as the New Azores, strung along \'Calliopes\' Necklace\', as the great coral reef along the coast came to be known. With Portugal barred from further South American colonies by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the lush lands and sheltered passage of the coats and archiplego become too irresitable, and in 1621 opposite Ilho do Amor, a large triangular island sheltering a bay, the town of Faro is founded, in the colony of Novoporto. Its major export in the 1700s -- following the Catholic church\'s outcry at the exploitation of South American natives - is a stream of aboriginal, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander slaves for the mines and plantations of Brazil. 17 Admiral La Perouse having died of what would later be surmised as a burst appendix, his junior officers\' incompetent, command was wrestled by a 20 year old Corsican bosun Napoleon Buonaparte -- who, by a stroke of fate had also missed selection for the voyage. Unaware that revolution had engulfed France, Buonaparte landed the French fleet at a place called Esperance, just to the East of New Holland. Attempting to establish a perfect society and make himself emperor-monarch, Buonaparte found the terrain unpropitious, and so in 1795 moved the colony East, the first outbreak of green after the long desert plain, to a large peninsula, shielded by a large island with a distinctive species of kangaroo, with a large bay on either side, *La Nouvelle Rochelle *and *Roi Soleil* as they came to be officially known, *Cul and Chatte* in slang forever after. It was at the mouth of *Chatte* that Buonaparte established *Ville de Soleil*, proclaiming its immediate independence. A follower of Rouseau, among others, he advocated polygamous intermarriage with the native population as an immediate solution to the absence of women, and inaugurated vine cultivation from on-board samples in the promising plains and valleys to the north-east. 1770 Captain Cook, and the first fleet -- pretty much as you\'ve read elsewhere. 1803 Novoporto, stretching down the south of the east coast, and New South Wales meet at a mid point about thirty kilometres north of the east coast's easternmost point, a promising bay. The longstanding English-Portuguese alliance treaty forestalls any conflict. However the large scale slave trade of Novoporto sits ill with the increasingly anti-slavery sentiment within the British Navy, even as punitive decimation of NSW aborigines begins. 1823 A steady stream of royalist refugees from the French Revolution\'s second terror (1805), arrive in Soleil. Initially welcomed by Napoleon, his son Napoleon II, and the empress Ivaritji, their horror at a second and third generation mulatto society brews and eventually leads to conflict. With Britain at war with revolutionary France -- and with Soleil sympathetic to the revolutionary regime -- attempts are made by Britain to install the Whites in power. Lacking sufficient force in the colony to achieve this, the British succeeded only in gaining the Whites a permanent minority foothold in the society, whose \'marron\' -- chestnut -- population, revolutionary France hastened to try and support. To the north, now illegal slave trading by Novoportan ships is being intercepted by British naval ships, putting tensions on the entire British-Portuguese alliance. Slavery remains prevalent in the new sugar plantations of Novoporto, prompting an anti-slavery \'freedom passage\' from Novoporto to New South Wales run by slavery opponents. 1835 The Catholic population of New Holland -- largely based in the southern towns of Zeeland, Niuw Hag, Zwaandam and others -- following bitter and violent dispute, decamp en masse to the newly-established second colony of Van Diemen\'s Land. Over the next century the split will become absolute, with wry references to the differences between the Catholic \'apples\' of Tasmaneiland (as it is renamed) and the New Holland \'oranges\'. 1850s With the absence of a German presence on the continent, the nineteenth century saw a stabilisation of the continent\'s five powers. New Holland established a presence on the northern part of the west coast; Britain leapfrogged Portugal to establish coastal ports in the large square peninsula to the north, the most prominent being Port Darwin; in Zeepardje (Seahorse) Bay, at the bottom of the east side of the mainland was colonised by Tasmaneilanders, but the realisation that its \'heads\' created a natural deep port, soon attracted thousands of British settlers. As New South Wales spread south below the Murray River, the question of sovereignty became insistent. The rise of neo-Calvinism as a political movement in the Netherlands, saw Tasmaneiland declare its independence; the extermination of the island\'s aboriginal population would later be pointed to by British writers as proof of the relatively more humane nature of their own colonial process. New Holland became an external province of the Netherlands with representatives in the Dutch parliament. In Soleil, the return of the French monarchy prompted a brutal civil war, the heavily reinforced Whites this time triumphant. Meanwhile a cash-strapped Portugal traded the southern part of Novoporto to Britain for cash, shrinking to a small part of the north-eastern coast. The scramble for empire of the 1870s-80s saw all powers make a sudden push to build their local populations; by the turn of the twentieth century, the continent\'s population had swelled to twenty million (including Marrons -- other aboriginal groups remained uncounted). On independence New South Wales was renamed Australisia. By agreement it took over the gold-rush fuelled booming city of Zeepardje, renaming it \'Melbourne\', though it retained a strong Dutch flavour, and the official name never really stuck. 1920s Tensions renewed after the first world war. As the possibility of huge natural resources in the hitherto, merely nominally-claimed areas of the interior became vital. The \'race to the centre\' defined the decade, with New Holland pushing all the way up through the gold and iron fields of the West. Zwartezwaan (New Amsterdam) was now the largest Dutch city in the world, its wealth enriching the mother country; the mother country in turn giving it the new doctrines of racial purity folded over from neo-Calvinism\'s notion of religious purity. Australisia spread northwards and westwards, Novoporto became little more than the hinterlad of Faro, a city which became notorious as something of a lawless freeport, a crossroads of the world. As the continental population pushed towards fifty million, distinctive expressions of national cultures developed. Sydney, Wollongong, Newcastle, Zeepardje/Melbourne, Faro, Le Roi Soleil, Zwartzwaan were great cities of the world, teeming with industry, ideas, movements. Books, operas, plays, you\'ve never heard of were written; places that would have been dusty country towns -- Bathurst, Antwerp, Canbery, Orange, Oraanje, Nouvelle Lyons, Wangarratta -- were major regional cities, as distinctive as Manchester or San Francisco. The continent boomed, the energy was phenomenal. And then came the second world war\...with civil war in New France, the Japanese attempt to link up with Nazi-run New Holland, battles across the border, the invasion of the West, the spies\'/exiles/ playground of Novoporto, (which gave us, among others, the great Bogart-Bergman movie *Faro)* the New Holland Dutch Left fleeing to Tasmaneiland (yes, that\'s why all the coffeeshops), the rising-up of the Marrons, the New France revolution and the Second Soleil Republic, apartheid in New Holland, and more and more\....but hell, you know all this. Hence the universal observation - "Australia has too much history". > Guy Rundle is co-editor of *Arena* *Magazine* ### ***La Perouse - Nikos Papastergiadis*** The question 'what if?' is not just hypothetical, but came close to being actual. The French captain La Perouse who set sail with an expedition to colonise Australia was confronted with an option at the beginning of his voyage. A young officer called Napoleon offered his services. La Perouse had the perspicacity to decline his service and set out, arriving at Botany Bay just days after Captain Phillip. His stay on the shores was brief enough to have a suburb named after him. What if he had actually accepted the young Napoleon? No doubt we would all be speaking French, our wine and cheese industry would have blossomed a century earlier, all the roads would be straight, and Alice Springs would have been our capital. > Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor, Cultural Studies and Media & > Communications, University of Melbourne ### ***Briefing Note for President Bush's Visit to Australia, May 2003 - Dennis Altman*** After their crushing victory at Waterloo, France annexed New South Wales (renamed Nouvelle Bretagne du Sud) to provide a penal colony for the large number of British dissidents opposed to the new kingdom of Normandy et les Anglo-Saxones, ruled by Napoleon's cousin, the Princesse de Londres. The former British settlement of Sydney was renamed Bonaparteville, and in the late nineteenth century its old streets were largely replaced by several major boulevards opening onto a large square on the harbour. You will be greeted outside a replica of the Paris Opera House, built as a symbol of the dominance of French language and culture in Nouvelle Bretagne. The peaceful collapse of the French Empire saw the emergence of a number of independent nations in Europe and the successful revolutions of the Franco-Spanish colonies of South America. In 1898 the colony became a self-governing part of the empire, and ten years later the new nation of Australia was formed through federation with Swan, Moreton and New Zealand. By 1940 Australia was predominantly English-speaking, although its population was largely of southern European, Indochinese and Pacific origin. Australia is now governed by a presidency, held jointly by leaders of all the major parties. This brief historical sketch should explain the historical sensitivities of the Australians, in particular the need to speak in both French and English (the necessary French phrases will be provided for you in phonetic spelling), and to pay due attention to the complex protocol demands of a triumvirate head of state (known as *les gouverneurs generaux*). Your staff are currently reading the seven volume *Histoire d'un systeme surveillant* by a certain Michel Foucault, and will provide you with the appropriate summary on 8x4 cards.  > Dennis Altman is Director - Institute for Human Security, Professor, > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Professor of Politics at > Latrobe University. ### ***Antipodean Venice - Mardi McConnochie*** 'I tend a garden in my dreams, a garden on an island, where a city of light is built upon the cliff face; a city on the water, where music plays every day and the sun shines and the ferns are rich and green, and red and blue parrots dart between the trees. It is a beautiful and civilised place, where the people discuss poetry and sit on their piazzas watching the lights change on the water until late into the night; where a man and his three daughters can live in harmony, a quartet of delight, where there is no anger, no cruelty, no madness, no revenge; only words, and love.' This is the final paragraph of my novel, *Coldwater*, which imagines what life might have been like for the Bronte sisters had they been born in New South Wales instead of Yorkshire. I recently had a conversation with a New Zealander (from Wellington, another city on the water), who asked me what I had had in mind when I described this magical place. Is it Sydney? Yes, I said, and no. In fact I was imagining an antipodean Venice, with all Sydney's hedonism and aquatic charms, a Sydney with its heart truly engaged by the life of the mind, where great art is not just an excuse for a great party. An imaginary Sydney, then, but not an impossible one. > Mardi McConnochie is a novelist and screenwriter. ## **Another Asia** ### ***The Cultural Revolution - Duncan Kerr*** Extract from the *Encyclopaedia of Australia*, University of the Second Reconciliation Press, Darwin 2002. The Cultural Revolution was a difficult time for Australians with family in China. Mao's call for a revolution against the 'four olds' set in train upheavals in Beijing. This created an opportunity for Australians to finally break free of the middle empire's residual suzerainty. For most Australians this meant little. Beijing had always given its Australian imperial governors great latitude. Conventions had built up that the empire would appoint elders of the Aust-Chinese community as their representatives. By the late nineteenth century Darwin's unique form of government, which included appointed and indigenous elders, had been formally recognised by the Emperor. Under His benevolent neglect, Australia became the most powerful trading nation in South Asia. It acquired the status of a regional superpower after having sided with Java's indigenous and Chinese communities against the Dutch. Leading Aust-Chinese families held hereditary influence, much as had the Doge in Venice at the height of that city's power. Even after Mao's victory, foreign minister Chou en Lai had only demanded lip service compliance to communist ideology from China's powerful Australian commercial Protectorate. The Cultural Revolution came as a shock. The predominance of males arriving from China in the first hundred years had led inevitably to blended families. After two hundred years most Aust-Chinese were of mixed race and proud of their quasi-independence. The First Reconciliation, occurring fifty-five years after the first and sometimes violent Chinese settlement, had led to the establishment of local indigenous elders' councils throughout the country and conferral of equal legal status on all Australian residents. Mao's persecution of relatives in China for their association with capitalist-roaders and Beijing's demands that Aust-Chinese renounce their local loyalties and customs ultimately triggered Darwin's 1968 War of Independence. > Duncan Kerr was Member for Denison (Tasmania). ### ***On to the Kingdom of Prester John - Christopher Kelen*** Nothing but trouble from Europe. Dante whacked Mount Purgatory down here for a lark. The Dutch got shipwrecked. The Portuguese couldn't find anything worth taking home. The Poms started a gaol. And the Frogs, before they started nuking, disappeared almost unaided down the plughole of the Pacific. There's before that. The Romans ought to have got here. The Egyptians might have. The wily Odysseus---why not? China's answer to the wily Odysseus was the giant Cheng Ho. I have it on solid fourth-hand authority that it's going to take some time for historians to assess the validity of Gavin Menzies' recent claims that the plucky Ming eunuch went just about everywhere you could go in a ship. Wherever he went, it was about fifty years before Columbus. Cheng Ho is quite a character---took 30,000 crew with him on one expedition. In Sri Lanka he fought a war and won. Why did Ming China do this stuff? Why did they build the Great Wall? Failed policy is always inscrutable. History and politics are both arts of amnesia. So I say, let bygones be bygones. My summer holiday in the southern winter hardly counts, but I know for a fact that the Maoris are still discovering Australia. The question is, who's next? My suggestion is that when the eastern part of Indonesia---let's say everything south and east from Bali across to New Guinea---secedes from the Javanese Empire, it ought to immediately annex (by friendly treaty of course) the unknown southern land. This would give the new kingdom some great cuisine, magnificent cloth, and more volcanoes and earthquakes than you could point a stick at. Precedent? Greece's recent annexation of Europe. Would our Prester Johnnie have to find a soul? It's never too late for that. > Christopher Kelen teaches in the English Department at the University > of Macau. His fourth book of poems, *Republics*, was published by Five > Islands Press in Australia in 2000. ### ***The Antipodean Civil War - Chris Tsiolkas*** Though South Australian historians have largely concentrated on the Townsville Siege as being the opening salvo in the Antipodean Civil War, it would be fairer to argue that the Massacre at Alice Springs\*, in 1949, was the first real incident of the conflict. The Muri communities in the north and north east of the continent were largely Islamic by the commencement of the Second World War. (In fact, the discipline and combat skills of the Muslim Muris forms a small but exemplary study of heroism in Allied memoirs of that war.) There had been increased hostilities between English-speaking and Muri Northerners ever since the formation of specific Islamic and Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory.\*\* These hostilities were being exacerbated, it is claimed, by Muri politicians and revolutionaries urging the Aboriginal peoples in the south and west of the continent to demand the identical set of political and civil rights won in the Northern Australian Parliament in 1935. On the other side, English-speaking Northern Australians were whipping up hysteria in their own communities regarding the increasing 'Mohammedanism' of the North. Though certainly true that by the end of the decade young Aboriginal men and women in the Southern States of Australia were converting to Islam in remarkable rates, there as yet had been no violent conflict between Christians and Muslims. It is difficult to remain objective about the 1949 massacre, given that it is a continuing sore in the relationships between the two nations on this continent. There is no doubt that the attack on the New Medina Mosque was of an extremely heinous and blasphemous nature. What we do know is that a group of drunken English-speaking men set off from McGilly's Pub early on the morning of 15 June 1949. They proceeded to force open the mosque and to desecrate it by polluting it with bodily excretions and with slogans written in black paint. The force of the resulting rage expressed by Islamic Muris was catastrophic. The number of dead is still contested but certainly close to 150 English-speaking men and young boys were slaughtered in Alice Springs the two nights following the desecration of the New Medina Mosque. Many of the corpses had their genitalia and hands cut off in reprisal for the desecrations. The Townsville Siege may have seen the declaration of the North secession from the federation, and the resulting Battle for Queensland, but the massacre at Alice Springs saw the first wave of refugees flee from North to South. (And, of course, from South to North. As we shall see, the revenge taken on Aborigines in the South by refugee Europeans was equally violent and atrocious). It is clear that any study of the terrible civil war that led to the formation of the Republic of North Australia and the Commonwealth of South Australia must begin by examining the circumstances that led to the mosque's desecration and to the subsequent slaughter. > From the introduction to The Crescent and the Kangaroo: The Antipodean > Civil War by Bilal Willangallee, 1989 \* Alice Springs was the Australian designation for what is now New Medina in the Republic of Northern Australia. \*\* The first Islamic School was set up in Alice Springs in 1936, one full year from the proclamation of full political rights to all Northern Australians. The schools were identified as necessary by Aboriginal Clerics as Northern Australian schools of that time refused to teach either Koranic studies or Aboriginal languages. > Chris Tsiolkas is a Melbourne writer and author of *The Slap*, > *Loaded* and *Jesus Man.* ## **Non-colonisation** ### ***The unimaginable - David Carter*** First, the obvious. What if Australia had been colonised by the French? The prospects are entrancing and alarming. It's not just that we wouldn't have had to wait until the 1980s for good bread and good cheese. We'd still be a French colony unless we'd had a civil war. Our racism would be more subtle and self-righteous but also more contested. We would've had generations of Aboriginal students and intellectuals trained in Paris. Think of that. We would have a weirder relationship to American culture. We would be more cosmopolitan and more colonial at once. We'd be Catholic and anti-clerical. We might have had peasants. The peculiar thing about British colonisation---for a contemporary multicultural society---is how successfully the British, or at least the English, destroyed their own folk cultures through the industrial revolution. If the ethnicity of the coloniser is always (relatively) unmarked, or aspires to be, then in some ways for Britishness this was multiplied to the power of two by the absence of such traditions. British was the first modern 'ethnicity degree zero'. But what if Australia had never been colonised at all? This is the breathtaking and heartbreaking possibility, the very edge of the horizon of imaginability. Imagine, though, a modern Aboriginal nation or a continent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, trading with the Maori nation of Aotearoa, with New Guinea, the Republic of Kanaky, Indonesia, China, the USA. Might the north have become Muslim? What institutions and cultures might this Aboriginal continent have developed within itself and from those it invited in? What cultures and politics? A post-modern Aboriginal continent, global and territorial, unimaginably at home *and* wired to the world, and so Asian-Aboriginal as well. I'm beginning just to be able to imagine it. > David Carter is Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural at the > University of Queensland. ### ***Never a Colony - Barry Hindess*** If Australia had not been colonised by the British, must we suppose that it would have been colonised by somebody else? During the early fifteenth century the rulers of China supported a major program of voyages of exploration, with fleets travelling as far as Africa in the west and even, according to some reports, the Americas in the east. The program was brought to an abrupt halt in the 1430s, well before European ships had reached Asia or America. What if, after a few early and expensive ventures, the rulers of the maritime powers of Europe had also been persuaded not to support further voyages of exploration? Sceptics at the time used the example of Imperial Rome and the more recent case of Venetian imperialism to argue, correctly, as it transpired, that the oppression of others by imperial powers invariably led to oppression and corruption at home. Imagine, then, that wiser counsels had prevailed in Europe, that states of the Western kind had not been imposed on the rest of humanity and that the market had not come to dominate all forms of economic activity. That is the easy part: the more difficult part is to imagine what alternative paths of development (including other imperialisms) were closed off by the West's attempts to impose its vision of social and political organisation on the world. Western conceits dominate our imaginations, just as they have dominated our histories, and it is partly for this reason that the colonisation of Australia by somebody else seems such an obvious alternative to colonisation by the British. But we could perhaps try to imagine an Australia which, while exchanging things, ideas and visitors with various parts of the world---possibly even with Europe---remained largely in the hands of its indigenous inhabitants. > Barry Hindess is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the > Australian National University. ## **Anti-colonisation** ### ***Radical Ecological Urbanisers - Geert Lovink*** Having had a different starting point Australia would have been country with real cities, not CBDs plus suburbs. If Australia were to redo its 'colonisation' then it could at least understand 'settlement' as a crucial part of urban planning. There are merits in density. The vastness of the continent does not have to be replicated and mimicked in the layout of towns. I would suggest that Australia should be recolonised by a global taskforce of (ecological) engineers and urban planners. People who are not afraid of the future and crack down on the mythology that there is no space (or better, water) for population growth. For me, that's eco-fascism. The question of water, for instance, is one of clever distribution and re-use. The fact that so many Australians, many of my best friends included, lack the utopian vision to overcome such short-term concerns and refuse to think in terms of ecological engineering is shocking to me. There are so many new innovative materials, plenty of sun wind energy available. On the level of research and small initiatives there is even a lot going on in Australia, but there is hardly any substantial political and economic will to push for real change. Society is so much more progressive than the political and economic class which is currently ruling this country. I do not want to blame the British for all this. Were---and are---they such bad engineers? Perhaps not. We could go back in time and suggest classic city builders such as the Italians. Venetian traders could perhaps have built trading posts on Australia's west and north coasts as early as the sixteenth century. More likely the Portuguese or the Dutch would have. The fact that they did not is more like a matter of coincidence. I am more interested in future scenarios in which progressive forces start to shape radical forms of urbanity. Instead of retreating to the suburbs, defending the pre-industrial farmer mentality where every one should be entitled to own their own micro piece of land (with a pathetic shed on it, ready to be blown away by the first big storm or burned down by bush fire), a new consciousness is required. If the Australian (media) mentality is profoundly modern and urban (which it is), then it is bound to be set for a severe collision course with the pseudo peaceful reality of the suburbs. Send in the radical ecological urbanisers. > Geert Lovink is Research Professor of Interactive Media at the > Hogeschool van Amsterdam. ### ***Australian Castles - Niall Lucy*** Following its overwhelming electoral victory in 1996, the Keating Labor Government announced its bold plan for cultural revolution. Everything hinged on the Australian Castles project, initiated the following year. By Christmas 1999, Australia had its first castle --- Balmoral, in Bendigo --- chosen by the PM for maximum symbolic impact. As a lesson in appropriation, the Bendigo Balmoral showed up the Scottish Balmoral for the simulacrum that it was. Originally a sixteenth-century tower house, Balmoral Castle in Scotland was built in 1855 as a gift from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria. Keating knew that Albert was attracted to the tower house because the surrounding woodlands reminded him of Thuringia in his native Germany, and so he saw Balmoral as a perfect illustration of what he took to be true of British history in general --- there was nothing terribly 'historical' about it. British history, Keating understood, was all about appropriation, imitation and symbolic inventiveness. Since these were not the exclusive property of any nation, Keating saw the Bendigo 'copy' as an opportunity to expose the Victorian 'original' for the imitation it had always been. From this lesson a cultural revolution was born. The 'new' Victorian Balmoral was an immediate success, drawing thousands of visitors a day. Cardiff Castle in Wales, which Keating commissioned for Canberra --- reasoning that someone's idea of an enchanted fairytale castle built in the nineteenth century on the remains of a Roman fort would make a perfect image for the seat of government --- also proved to be hugely popular, as did the ruins of Fremantle's Penmark Castle from thirteenth-century Glamorgan. Today there are hundreds of Australian castles, pillars of a nation without nationalism. But only half a century ago our history as a footnote to Europe oppressed us. Keating's Lesson led straight to radical reform, especially the Welcome, Stranger immigration policy of 2001. As every Australian schoolchild now knows, the lesson was that history has always been postmodern. The past has no essence, no unifying spirit ... and cannot determine our identity. > Niall Lucy is co-director of the Centre for Culture & Technology at > Curtin University. ### ***History in motion - Lesley Stern*** I lived for a few years, long ago, in South Gippsland. It was beautiful there. One day I stood by a waterfall and surveyed the landscape. On one side there were rolling green pastures where sheep and cattle grazed, and the occasional discombobulated rabbit, myxed out of its mind, would scramble out of the ground, flubber around and disappear down another hole. Not that the holes were visible from where I stood. Nor signs of the war between blackberries and 245-T. On the other side there was rainforest, dense vegetation, giant ferns that had been growing since the world began. Two different worlds. I understood then a phrase I'd heard, a phrase not quite grasped, that had nestled just below the surface of consciousness. It was this: colonialism changes geography. Standing there, in this bifurcated landscape, I understood, a little, the nature of Gippsland. But I could not fully grasp what it must have been like before the British, before the massacres, before the coming of the cow cockies and later the weekend farmers. What this landscape must have been like when, rather than being sketched out via a series of negatives---no rabbits, no sheep ... ---it was positively peopled. What it was like when Koori people lived here, before the British invaded. And what if some other nation had colonised? Would there be croissants instead of rabbits? More philosophy in schools? Fewer massacres? And what if Australia had never been colonised? What if there were another history, utopian and retrospective, a history of encounter and of circuits of exchange, in the course of which old and new technologies were to converge, generating an entirely new way of imaging the world? Imagine this: other modes of imagination, other ways of rendering fiction, visually and emotionally. Modes that emerge in the south and travel from place to place. Let's imagine flows of knowledge, perceptive and practical, that pertain to a variety of techniques for the putting-into-motion of images, or the putting-motion-into-images. We are talking techniques here, techniques and technology, invention and adaptation and borrowing and tinkering. Projectors, lasers, trompe l'oeil? I think not, but these are the terms I know. Consider how these journeys might have eventuated: from Southern Africa, across the Indian Ocean, for instance, or through the islands of Oceania, until a Maori delegation arrives, one day, on the beach, bearing images; or, rather, the material means for rendering, visually, the immaterial. What are these motions pictures like? And where were (or are) they seen? Are they like the flicks, or the movies, or the pictures? Are they representational, or would it be more accurate to say dialogic, or virtual? Well this is a question to which there is no answer. Or let's cut to the chase and put it this way: I have no answer, only speculation and desire. Desire for an other history of Australia, and another history of the cinema. These images were secret, and so was the technology of transmission. I imagine (greedily, longily) that if you were initiated, or lucky, you might see these images moving in the depths of the forest, against canyon walls in the desert, but also in dwellings that were simultaneously temporary (like humpies) and permanent (like long houses), dwellings where one might lounge like a lizard while watching, or be poised, alert, ready for action. And I imagine a kind of industry (moving images not representational, but certainly imbued and mobilised by the force of repetition) that is not about export and the conquering of markets, but rather about the local and the continuous tension around what constitutes the here and now. Imagine: another history of Australia, another history of motion pictures. > Lesley Stern is an Australian citizen, born in Zimbabwe and currently > Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. ### ***wasteland - Nikki Gemmell*** You were right, I shouldn't have come. This land is through me like poison now, doing its dirty work. To think the ancient mariners once called it Terra Australis del Espirita Santo, South Land of the Holy Spirit. There's nothing now, just a hurting light and a humming silence. And I can't come back to you. There was an accident during an expedition. I can hardly write this, everything hurts. I've found a computer and am not meant to be here. I can't be long. You'll get a visit from The State in a couple of days, with some story about what went wrong. I love you so much. Can you feel it, my arms enfolding you. We were assessing levels of radioactivity. After plundering the riches of this land and then fucking it over completely with nuclear testing they're assessing if they can populate again. That's the real reason for this mission. We came to a plain that was once an inland sea. Now it's crusted over with salt and the bones of old vessels leer up from its bed like the carcasses of prehistoric beasts. The fishermen had chased the water as it bled from their grasp, they'd tried reaching it with concrete pylons that stretched like fingers into the vastness and then they'd tried netting it with canals and all that's left is their graves. The three-masted crosses look like the masts of ghost ships, reminding us of the folly of ever trying to tame a lake. Or a continent, for the world's use. The driver careered over a bluff and hit solid rock and the vehicle split like a watermelon. We were exposed. The air's saturated, still, it will be for centuries. We're now in these isolation huts by a beautiful bay. There's a headland like a toothbrush and the sky's vaulting, optimistic, naive. At night there are stars like I never see back home. I stare at the great, heartbreaking cram of them and my stomach twists at what we've done to this land. I love you so much, it comes over me in great waves. I can hear footsteps. Don't try and get me home. I'm holding out a hand to you, can you feel it, palm to palm. > Nikki Gemmell is the author of three novels, *Shiver*, *Cleave* and > *Love Song,* which have been translated into many languages. She's > currently living in London. ### ***A kiss on two cheeks - Fiona Giles*** It is recorded that when the American Indians first witnessed their white visitors shaking hands, they fell about laughing. A kiss on two cheeks. First, which side? (Although there are, no doubt, arcane rules for the natives of this cultural greeting practice, so they always know, and avoid pecking each other on the chin and banging noses). My face is approaching yours. I am aware of the length of your nose. You are taller. Our glasses might clash, or maybe the brim of my summer hat will graze your cheek. (Maybe hats should be removed first---another arcane rule long since gone the way of the single silk stocking?) Our hands are outstretched. We are anxious. Keenly anxious. Like tennis, that other French game, we are facing each other, and we are dancing. Our feet stop at the required distance, as though we might choose to tango instead. You bend your neck, and incline your face towards mine. You are supplicant. I tilt my face upwards and, holding on to habits past, stand on my toes, even though it's not strictly necessary. I am open. I am reaching for your hands, no, instead your arms are rising to hold my triceps, no again, the options are still fluid, we are rising still, like birds, and embrace our shoulders and hold each other's backs, resting against the feel of a chest. I am soft and bosomy, and you are soft too, but there are firm pectorals beneath the cotton T-shirt. I belatedly fear a chest thump as from a giant NBA star, but this chest is held back, politely distancing your stranger's body at the same time as we have hurtled through space to eradicate our distance, keenly anxious. Who is this person? You are an Afghan stranger. You are young. You have stepped off a boat. Your religion strikes fear in my heart. Your circumstances draw me to welcome you, and yours to accept me, come what may, since thankfully I am not clad in razor wire. But this is no honeymoon, no meeting of two minds. We are keenly anxious. Our kisses make sounds. Like birds. We don't say peck for no reason. Our kisses make speech impossible. There is no need to speak. Our kisses mean we cannot see each other's faces, except in a blur. There is no need to see. We have rehearsed the conditions for intimacy. We have allowed ourselves briefly to be known. We have visited a stranger's body, and returned, all within the realms of social grace. We are brave and strong. A kiss on two cheeks. The kisses are the same. They are one kiss. Only the cheeks are different. > Fiona Giles is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and > Communications at the University of Sydney.