By Frances Goold

Voice Crash Investigation [1] 

1

‘Mario, what’s your relationship to this park?’

‘This is the park where my wife and I got married, roughly eight years ago.’

‘And what did you father say to you at the wedding?’

‘My dad told the photographer he didn’t want that statue in our wedding pictures’.

‘Can you remember what he said about the statue?’

‘He said it represented the oppression of the African American people by individuals like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, etcetera…’

‘And your father, he’s from Georgia…so that statue to him has real horrible meaning?’

‘Yes, it does’.

‘I’m sorry that the American Civil War turned up to your wedding.’ [2]

There would not be many of us who have not, at one time or other, felt a powerful compulsion to avoid persistent memories of an overwhelmingly distressing life event – just as Mario’s father may have felt compelled to do in Lee Park on his son’s wedding day. Yet somehow Civil War trauma filtered through to Mario, having already claimed his father, who simply wanted to remove a distressing, “subliminally racist” reminder of Confederate power reasserted by a statue commissioned and erected during a period of state-sanctioned lynchings and racist terror in Virginia.

ON Mario’s’ wedding day, emotional pain and discomfort were managed civilly, contentious as the historical situation was in this case, and conflict was avoided.

*****

Trauma is often described as a normal reaction to an abnormal event, but what is not often understood is that trauma can shift and mutate through subsequent generations in intricate ways, in turn occasionally reinvigorated and refreshed by traumatic memories of war, and even by memorials erected in the ensuing peace. This is called ‘transgenerational trauma’.

In some way or another most of us have been impacted directly or indirectly by a traumatic event, either proximally, or back in time. Depending on the type and severity of the traumatic event, and one’s personal or social circumstances, there is very often timely recovery from a traumatic event – most especially in healthy communities where support provides natural conditions for healing that then reduces or even eliminates altogether the secondary impact on family members and community.

It transpired, however, that Mario’s father was not the only one wishing to render the statue invisible, and that more would be added to the story of Lee Park, with subsequent events adding layer upon layer to existing transgenerational traumatic aspects, some folding in from peripheral trauma histories ostensibly unrelated to the central event but compounding and contributing to its multiple ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ causes, until all necessary and sufficient conditions slotted themselves in place to bring about a deadly explosion.

On May 13, 2017, neo-Nazi Richard B. Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Lee Park in protest at the Charlottesville town council’s decision to remove and sell the statue. Counter-protesters gathered the following day and held a silent candlelight vigil that attracted over a hundred of the town’s citizens. A couple of months later, on July 8, 2017, the Klu Klux Klan held a rally in Charlottesville protesting the city’s plan to remove the statue. Approximately fifty Klansmen were met by several hundred counter-protesters. The police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and made many arrests. On August 12, 2017, during a ‘Unite the Right’ rally, clashes broke out between supporters of the statue, who marched under Confederate, American, and Revolutionary flags, and counter-protesters. During the rally, counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 others injured by a car-ramming attack. The perpetrator, James Alex Fields J., was found guilty of ramming his car into the crowd, and was sentenced to life in prison.[3]

Yet a closer look at the perpetrator’s – albeit brief – backstory reveals he was doomed from the start by an almost improbable trauma history, which began before he was born, and arguably overdetermined his psychological susceptibility to the supremacist influences and fantasies that drove him to murder.

*****

PTSD was first formalised as a psychiatric diagnosis in 1980 in the 3^rd Edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – best known by its acronym PTSD – is an anxiety disorder of the greatest severity. Significantly, it is the only classified ‘mental illness’ solely caused by an external or environmental stressor.

Traumatic events such as environmental disasters, the catastrophic human and material destruction and carnage of war leading to mass deaths and injuries, atrocities, dispossession of lands, countries, culture and language – and the interpersonal traumatisation caused by domestic violence and sexual abuse can lead to chronic levels of disturbance and dysfunction, folding in on families and communities in complex webs of intersecting causation. Occasionally escape and avoidance may be the only recourses for PTSD sufferers, precipitating maladaptive behaviours and ‘priming’ them for re-traumatisation and further dysfunction.

Our responses to a traumatic event are instinctive and mostly unconscious. During a moment of extreme threat we may find ourselves gripped by an instinct to survive, perhaps to protect others, and to regain control. It is not merely the original traumatic event that determines its emotional impact upon us, but how we respond to it as individuals, and even as cultures and communities.

Chronic PTSD is characterised by its enduring, complex character which, due to the environmental cues (triggers’) which reinvigorate and cause the sufferer to feel they are reliving the traumatic event all over again, may then cause them to resort to various ‘defences’ to ward off unwanted memories of the traumatic event, and thus gain control over their environment.

These defensive strategies may distort their relationships with those closest to them, and perhaps even a trauma sufferer’s ability to lovingly parent. Children of severely traumatised individuals are occasionally secondary victims, who may in turn develop a range of self-protective/defensive strategies to cope with a disturbed parent upon whom they depend. They may then in their own turn engage in overprotective, or other dysfunctional parenting styles modelled by their own disturbed parents., and so on infinitum.

Dissociation is an instinctive, autonomic response to an overwhelming stressor, and when this occurs in traumatised children, they may not be aware of what precisely they experienced until much later. Child victims of interpersonal trauma may be threatened into silence if the trauma occurs in the context of domestic violence or sexual abuse. Lacking the words to describe their experience, children may retreat into fantasies of escape and freedom, such as obsessively drawing pictures of birds and aeroplanes. If a child withdraws into themselves to manage a traumatic experience, they may fail to develop the verbal abilities to express their feelings, with all that this implies for healthy growth and development.

Adolescents and adults may also resort to maladaptive ways of forgetting and removing painful intrusive memories (e.g., nightmares and ‘reliving’ or ‘re-experiencing’ the original traumatic event in response to external triggers). They may habitually escape into substances or escapist activities simply to avoid traumatic memories, often unpredictably triggered and compounded by environmental cues over which they have no control.

Without adequate diagnosis and therapeutic intervention – and most crucially – without support and understanding, chronic, complex PTSD may develop, consolidating into a debilitating disorder of the self (personality disorder) which may impact and even cause great suffering and fresh trauma in those closest to the traumatised victim: families, extended families, and even cultures.

Hopelessness – as it plays out for all traumatised victim/survivors of colonial violence and racism – inevitably engenders a feedback loop of despair and rage in people who have been hurt repeatedly, then not listened to, causing a spiralling down into feelings of anger, rage, and depression, which in turn may precipitate further cycles of violence and trauma. Occasionally acting out in anger is the sole defence against powerlessness, or against perceived dangers of surrender, acceptance, passivity. When all else fails, in rare instances, suicide may be seen as the only way out of intolerable pain and perceived powerlessness.

As the Charlotteville tragedy demonstrates, the trajectory of untreated (or unresolved) trauma as its psychological impacts radiate through families, generations and communities – even entire countries consumed by revenge to start wars against their neighbours – is often difficult to identify. Everyone is impacted by the sufferings demonstrated by the historical examples: a returned soldier, his wife, his children, all suffer in different ways at different times, the children’s personalities shaped and their life circumstances and trajectories determined by the posttraumatic sufferings of a parent who fights for his country and afterwards, with no help forthcoming, is then left to battle his private demons alone. As demonstrated by the seemingly endless traumatic sequelae of war, there is no trauma that does not manifest in some way or another within and across generations. A severe untreated trauma can be as unpredictable as it is complex, and as opaque as it is decimating; indeed, it might be said that psychological trauma characterises the human condition.

Trauma changes us, and trauma shapes us.

Apart from child (sexual) abuse, the common existential threat for societies and nations woven through each of these instances of transgenerational trauma are colonialism and racism, which in their most violent forms spring from it and perpetuate it. And the frontier wars which inflicted such barbarous cruelties the Indigenous peoples of a country conveniently classified as terra nullius to justify European invasion and colonisation also set in train among the traumatised survivors the added complexities of transgenerational trauma.

2

On September 14 last, during a Q&A following her Press Club speech, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (hereinafter referred to as SJNP) responded to a question by journalist[4] regarding her view of the negative impact of colonialism on Aboriginal people (here quoted in full):

A: ‘No, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think so. Positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we’ve got running water, we’ve got readily available food, I mean everything that my grandfather had (sic) when he was growing up, because he first saw white fellas in his early adolescence, we now have….’ ‘… But if we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims we are effectively removing their agency and then giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives, that is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being is to tell them they are a victim without agency, and that’s what I refuse to do.”

Q: “So you don’t believe there’s any negative ongoing impact of colonization on indigenous Australians today (just to confirm)?”

A: ‘No, there’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation. …’

Q: ‘(There have been) …generations of trauma amongst indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation (whether that means colonisation continues now is probably a separate question), but would you accept that there have been generations of trauma as a result of that history?’

A: ‘Well I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts are also suffering from intergenerational trauma, so I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma’ (laughter and applause from supporters).[5]

*****

Of course it’s not for me to say when denial and disavowal become betrayal.

But what I can say with confidence is that for many, being In Denial is good, that it is a good, safe place.

And that denialism is only a few little denials away.

And also, that denial is sometimes a psychological defence against some bit of reality that has to be repudiated.

For many people, denial may feel like the only means of warding off traumatic memories, and to open up psychic space for renewal and reinvention and for strengthening bulwarks against unwelcome memories from intruding upon a new, safe emotional place. Denial can be a way of warding off whatever might threaten some hard-won security that has been cobbled together by a determined use of available opportunities.

Denial is also a cognitive defence against an overwhelming reality, where its repudiation is another means of gaining mastery over intrusive recollections and emotions. Denial of selected bits of reality and even against feelings such as trauma-related guilt (“if only I had been there/not been there, this would never have happened”, etc) may be seen as a component of well-integrated traumatic symptomatology, a determined – perhaps courageous – statement of resilience in the face of unbearable reality.

SJNP’s attempt to minimise the trauma endured by “convicts in chains” (my ancestors, as it happens) as a means of debunking the unimaginably greater sufferings of Indigenous people violently forced off their lands and dispossessed by the colonial ticket-of-leave squattocracy, was to deny the humanity of both the Indigenous invaded and colonial invaders, together with their many and varied sufferings and the wretched conditions imposed on all people by a ruthless, imperialistic, colonial power.

Was SJNP’s ahistorical denial of the negative impacts of colonialism and transgenerational trauma upon the First Peoples a mere political ‘provocation’, as Noel Pearson suggested,[6] or something deeper, such as a denial of her own origins in colonial history (including massacres) and her family’s trauma?

It is possible to tune into SJNP descriptions of her life experiences – and those of her mother, Bess Nungarrayi Price (hereinafter referred to as BNP) – and speculate upon how their collective experiences may have determined their commitment to Indigenous public policy. SJNP’s autobiographical stories contain much that is both traumatic and self-redemptive, which might illuminate her zeal regarding local self-determination and interventionist approaches to changing the lives of Aboriginal people.

Price has written that her mother was “born under a tree and lived within an original Warlpiri structured environment through a kinship system on Aboriginal land. Her first language was Warlpiri, and her parents, my grandparents, only came into contact with white settlers in their early adolescence in the 1940s.”^[7]

What Price omits to mention is her maternal grandfather’s proximity to the Coniston massacre, about which her mother provided the following account:

‘Sitting on a plastic chair under a tree at Kirrirdi, Price waves her arm lightly to the west and tells how her father, Dinny Japaltjarri, was a boy out hunting with his father when he saw white men for the first time, riding on camels in the desert 200km west of Yuendumu at a place called Yampirri. It scared and excited him. He was initiated at the time of the 1928 Coniston massacres, the punitive expeditions led by Constable George Murray, a Gallipoli veteran, in which at least 52 and perhaps many more Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye men, women and children were murdered in the last act of the frontier wars. She says he never spoke of it.’[7]

Murderous violence remains close and haunting. SJNP has experienced and witnessed – as did BNP[8] – seemingly endless violence, abuse, humiliation and degradation in her communities – a tragic outcome for which she blames Aboriginal men and white (and corrupt Indigenous) bureaucracies for ignoring, yet there is no disguising her contempt for the Indigenous middle-class she blames for the situation, for feminists who fail to stick up for murdered women. “We are human”, she reminds her audience, whilst yet denying the complex nature of trauma in her communities and its links to colonialism, white settlement and the frontier wars.

As she stated in her 2016 speech hosted by The Centre of Independent Studies (an Australian right-wing think-tank), “If my parents had not found each other, my mother would probably be dead”, as a result of the domestic violence suffered by her mother during her first marriage to the father of her first child (who tragically died at ten years of leukemia, during the early years of her marriage to David Price). Like her mother before her, she escaped by dint of her own personality and fortitude, through the support and security of marriage to a white man, and her ability to seize opportunities she maintains are, via her somewhat offensive bootstrap rhetoric, also available to her people.

So it seems there are some for whom the planets serendipitously line up and circumstances suddenly manifest for the priority of getting away, and just as a benevolent Christian mission and a white marriage saved her mother and offered her a pathway out, SJNP – straddling both white and Indigenous cultures as she says of herself – envisions redemption for her people along a similar trajectory.

Thus it appears that paternalism is better than nothing when your communities are imploding.

SJNP’s tone as, she speaks of the violence experienced in her communities, is a familiar one to any therapist who encounters a story told from “the zone” – an emotionally flat delivery that permits the retelling of traumatic experience without decompensation. There is a sense of her looking across from a safe place – which indeed is where she finds herself, embedded in the fickle and falsehearted embrace of the political Right.

Denial can be an aspect of the hubris that so often accompanies rapid political ascendance. Forceful denial serves both as pushback in the political bearpit and as a cognitive survival strategy for a woman who admits she has “straddled” two worlds, and has struggled to reconcile conflicting feelings associated with what is occasionally referred to as ‘cultural schizophrenia’.

It is possible this struggle been internalised and normalised, pushing SJNP towards political compromise.

3

It must feel good to have gotten out from under, be feted by power and cow-towed to by the media. When SJNP stated in her Press Club speech  that “we should not be enshrining racial division in our constitution”,[10] that the Voice is built on lies and is “an aggressive attempt to fracture our nation’s founding document and divide the nation built upon it rather than bringing it closer together”[11], that Australia’s democratic system needs to be completely overhauled, that Indigenous people are over-represented in Federal Parliament, that “attributing problems to colonialism does nothing to address the true causes”, and that the Voice is just another layer of bureaucracy and solely about the left holding onto their jobs (“once we get rid of marginalisation, their jobs will no longer be necessary”), one can only marvel at her reasoning. When she is moved to assert while casting her vote that “socialism is destroying the Territory and continues to destroy the territory”, one can only wonder what planet she is living on.

History may be regarded as the knitting together of rival interpretations, but to promote a rival history of a nation’s first people is to enter the realms of fantasy and hubris. But perhaps it is a better option than acknowledging the traumatic impact of colonialism closer to home, when such an acknowledgement may mean having to face the horrors all over again. Why would anyone wish to revisit such a past in memory, unless to make things better?

So it is that SJNP’s denialism may be lent credence in light of certain other remarks by her regarding ‘victimhood’ versus ‘agency’, and her borderline obsession with responsibility and self-determination. Nevertheless SJNP tends to conflate things and view compatible things as mutually exclusive – such as, for example, bureaucratic accountability, self-determination, self-responsibility, and so on, as incompatible with a Voice to Parliament. It follows then, that the very idea of transgenerational trauma must be repudiated because – according to SJNP – it has created a victim mentality among Indigenous people:

‘I strongly believe that intergenerational trauma was just a farce and ideology created to stand as another excuse for Aboriginal people to play victim to white government perpetrators… What Marcia helped me understand was that intergenerational trauma came in the form of thought pattern (sic), a way of looking at life through the eyes of a victim. The victim mentality is what grew out of intergenerational trauma, it has been the older generation and members of the stolen generation that have instilled within each generation passing that as Aboriginal people we have been victims of colonialism, white government and oppression. The current generation of the city-based victim brigade also reinforces the victim message. This argument has sat at the forefront of political debate driving the activists for whom it once served a very real purpose and brought about much-needed change, but at this point in time in our country’s current circumstances it is drowning out the voices of the victims who are being victimised by our own cultural forms of oppression.’ Activism has become so infatuated with looking outward that it is unable to look within. Guilt politics is the easy option, to point and blame deflects responsibility and puts it onto another, that other is our government which cannot fix our problems.’

Marcia Langton was likely here speaking metaphorically, so a literal interpretation of a throwaway by SJNP is probably disingenuous, perhaps even designed to lend authority to the disparagement of attempts to empirically establish the transgenerational traumatic impacts of colonisation upon Indigenous people – because (if I understand her meaning) to do so encourages passive victimhood precluding the personal responsibility and ‘ownership’ necessary for change.

It seems to me that the problem with this argument is its ‘either/or’ character; that one thing can exist only by eliminating the other, that the two things – presumably a constitutional Voice and self-determination – are mutually exclusive. Not only is a throwaway line by Langton invoked to decouple the misery of traumatised, violent communities from the intergenerational impact of colonialism, but is cited to support the idea that colonial history is fake and must be denied so as to restore dignity to Aboriginal people; that is, by disabusing them of their view of themselves as ‘victims’, by discouraging them from self-identifying as victims, and thus rescuing them from lethal passivity and inertia.

The muddle-headedness of this argument is that it implies that the indisputable facts of colonial history and an important conversation about ‘victimhood’ cannot co-exist. This argument creates a problem for the individual by virtue of the psychological fact that denial will not remove the traumatised and damaged ego from the person – notwithstanding SJNP’s view of herself as a paragon – and creates a problem for Aboriginal people in (it follows) that ‘Makarrata’ and truth-telling cannot take place without an acknowledgment of the impact of colonial history upon Aboriginal people by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Another difficulty for this line of argument is SJNP’s tendency to construct ‘straw men’. This was revealed in her various rationales for opposing the ‘Canberra Voice’ (a NO Campaign slogan) that relied upon her misapprehension of the role of parliamentarians as legislators who can “transfer constitutional power”, and so on. Her characterisation of the Voice as a top-down, Canberra-based legislative process, and her negative depiction of it as racially divisive was patently autocratic in tone:

‘We don’t need a Voice to Canberra, we need accountability. It is incumbent upon us as members of Parliament to determine what actions are required in order to fix the current structures and apply greater accountability. It is not for us to initiate a mechanism for a transfer of constitutional power to an entity controlled by a handful of individuals then relegating an entire group of Australians based on racial heritage to this entity. It is my hope is that after October 14 after defeating this voice of division we can bring accountability to existing structures and we can get away from assuming inner city activists speak for all aboriginals and back to focussing on the real issues’. (c.28.00)

Whilst in many instances doubtless justified, occasionally SJNP’s tone also shifts into contempt for Aboriginal male perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence in Indigenous communities, where her scattergun delivery is suggests a defensive process akin to traumatic displacement where – perhaps in order to preserve her own kin from her own rage or ‘fighting spirit’, which according to JNP’s husband is formidable – less helpless surrogates must be found.

Being perfectly privileged by LNP reactionary discourse, contempt and rage can be readily displaced onto the progressive left or even other Indigenous activists rather than inadvertently finding a tributary back into hapless Aboriginal communities, where rage – unable to be sublimated via erstwhile cultural pathways – now finds only violent expression. A more hospitable outlet for one’s unresolved trauma -related feelings may therefore be found via a political alignment with the ruthless agendas of the LNP and their unabashed dalliances with the American Right, which leave political neophytes such as SJNP spoiled for choice.

SJNP’s Press Club repudiation of the traumatic impact of colonialism upon Indigenous peoples – further pointing to herself as a perfect exemplar of psychological health – is likely just one of a range of trauma-related conservative strategies that have assisted in the family’s reinvention of itself beyond colonial history, but which nonetheless specifically requires the extra step of dissociation from that past to model self-responsibility and self-determination.

The fact that SJNP’s own CLP and the Federal Coalition have overseen a litany of failed promises and service delivery across a decade of government seems not to have distracted her from her loyalties to the political right. Despite the fact that nothing has changed under the auspices of the Federal Coalition in decades, SJNP believes that under her political leadership and the good auspices of the CLP in collaboration with Canberra, the ‘marginalised’ will rise from 230 years of depredation in a triumph of  democratic representation (after democracy in this country has been overhauled, of course).

Indigenous self-responsibility may be remodelled by a mythologising of Indigenous strength unshackled by enfeebling and debilitating traumata:

‘The cause of their pain has not been colonisation or racism, the cause of their pain has been closer to home – these are the voices that will not be represented within the new Canberra voice; the Canberra voice would not have a purpose if the lives of the most marginalised would dramatically improve. The Aboriginal industry would come to a screaming halt if the gap between our most marginalised and everyone else including privileged Aboriginal people disappeared.’ 

In this manner SJNP projects a sense of herself as a model of what Aboriginal people can achieve in similar fashion, by cold-turkeying from welfare dependency, and so on. Nominating herself as academic lodestar and reference point for these assertions is akin to the arrogance of her statement about being “more concerned with knocking over this referendum”, an autocratic and pugnacious remark.

While it is likely SJNP’s provocative statements were in line with the cheap sloganeering and Machiavellian tactics of the political right to which she has hitched her wagon, I suspect they also served to shore up her view of her personal achievement as unscathed and freely won – bootstrap-style – both as a means of flexing her muscle and authority as an emerging Indigenous leader, and as a measure of how far she can deny reality without much consequence. Her doubling down on her ‘double denial’ may be interpreted as a massive defence against emotionally re-entering her own ‘trauma trails’,[12] or that she is dependent upon anyone at all.

The difficulty presented by SJNP’s political rhetoric on self-determination is how will her people, who are continuing to suffer ongoing (transgenerational) trauma, find some interim, rational, healing place from which self-responsibility and self-determination may emerge. That dependency has been a theme in her husband’s life trajectory, or that she may herself have formed new co-dependencies – for example upon the Liberal party’s fulsome endorsement of her in exchange for her services to the LNP’s No Campaign – remain open questions.

SJNP envisages a positive future for Aboriginal people as a possibility even without a constitutionally enshrined Voice to provide an enduring, politically transcendent mechanism for change. But how does she reconcile the desperate need for life-saving interventions in her communities with an awareness that these may continue to originate from the same racist (e.g., assimilationist) government policies that led to the Stolen Generation, to deaths in custody, to domestic violence and sexual abuse in communities? To deny the impact of colonialism is also to deny that the source of so much misery has been at the hands of the conservative parties to which SJNP has sworn allegiance.

According to BNP, NT Labor did not listen to their pleas and requests, so she jumped ship for the CLP, thence followed by her daughter. SJNP’s fury is palpable and her opposition to constitutional recognition, viewed as a Labor conspiracy, is resolute. Indeed, so unified are mother and daughter that they appear to have become the ‘Aboriginal industry’ they scorn, and remain unruffled by their dubious affiliations with the network of Liberal right wing thinktanks and alt-Right organisations that provide them with multiple media platforms in service to mutual ends. There are always horse-trades and trade-offs in politics; however, in this instance, the Prices have traded off Constitutional Recognition – anathema to their parties – for a decentralised ‘voice’ and the status quo for their people.

To deny the negative impact of colonisation upon Indigenous Australians is one thing, but to emphasise its positive benefits against the historical record is remarkable for its ’severance of cause from consequences’ and wilful repudiation of empirical science and first psychological principles. The longstanding empirical validity of intergenerational trauma as applied to non-Indigenous peoples cannot be denied; to deny its applicability to traumatised Aboriginal people is simply to deny their humanity.

4

The conservatism of the Indigenous leadership behind the No Campaign was surprising – even shocking. And whether the failure of the Referendum can be sheeted home to conservative Indigenous voices such as SJNP’s, it can be safely assumed that its failure sprang – as might an airline crash investigation unfold – from multiple causes and conditions amongst which this snafu may be fairly adjudged as having been the critical factor.

Co-opted by the Right in a perfect marriage, SJNP is compelled to repeat the past. By squandering her political capital, and by hitching herself to the CLP/Coalition wagon, she has – perhaps unwittingly – embedded herself in an alt-right bankrolled project having an agenda far beyond her ken.

One can only hope it doesn’t end in tears. Or maybe that it does, dadirri–style.

5

‘Participants expressed disgust about a statue of John McDouall Stuart being erected in Alice Springs following the 150th anniversary of his successful attempt to reach the top end. This expedition led to the opening up of the “South Australian frontier” which led to massacres as the telegraph line was established and white settlers moved into the region. People feel sad whenever they see the statue; its presence and the fact that Stuart is holding a gun is disrespectful to the Aboriginal community who are descendants of the families slaughtered during the massacres throughout central Australia.’^[13]

It’s difficult to avoid seeing commonalities between the feelings of the people of Charlottesville and the feelings of the people of Alice Springs.

These events and their consequences on vastly different continents encapsulate the transgenerational suffering and trauma among Indigenous and African American peoples. This writer can only hope that – post-Referendum – Aboriginal Australians will come around to believing that their trust has not been wasted, that despite the awful, politically-manipulated rejection of the Referendum, there remain great swathes of non-Indigenous Australians who will continue to stand with them through ‘Makarrata’ and beyond, no matter what it takes.

*****

[1] The tv series, Air Crash Investigation inspired this title. I was fascinated by the consistency of the show in demonstrating time and again the causal rule that ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ were the causes of an airplane crash; that several necessary conditions might apply but that a crash did not occur without some final and sufficient condition, usually man-made in the aviation context.

[2] Lucy Worsley interviewing Mario, an African-American in the former Lee Park, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA; American History’s Biggest Fibs (2019), S1, Ep 2. During a separate interview with Professor Justene Hill Edwards, Professor Edwards stated that the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee wasn’t commissioned until 1917 and only later erected in 1924 during a time of heightened racial violence against African Americans, particularly lynching. Professor Edwards suggested that because of the timing of their commission and erection the Confederate monuments were intended to intimidate, to instil fear in people.

[3] Fields was later also sentenced to 419 years for the state charges, with an additional life sentence for the federal charges.

[4] Josh Butler, Guardian Australia.

[5] From about 50.00 – 59.30

[6] About. 10.50

[7] https://www.swcs.com.au/BessPrice.htm#Childhood

[8] Bess Price is a fellow member of the CLP, who served as a minister in the Adam Giles NT Government, holding portfolios including housing and statehood, and was a vocal supporter of the Howard government‘s 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, that implemented new legislation in response to the crises facing Aboriginal communities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bess_Price

[9] Senator Jacinta Price addresses National Press Club | ABC News – YouTube

[10] ‘This proposal provides nothing’: Jacinta Price on Voice to Parliament – YouTube

[11] – 3.22

[12] Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, Spinifex Press, 2002.

[13] Megan Davis, https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/exploration/display/103326-john-mcdouall-stuart

By James Moore  

How to End Book Bans in Texas

“Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings.” – Heinrich Heine.

There appears to be a viable and useful approach to putting an end to book banning, and it is time to use the template in Texas. More than 800 books have been banned from the state’s schools, and in the Hill Country town of Llano, a dozen books were removed from country libraries. The Llano case, which I wrote about extensively, is being appealed to a federal court, saw county officials pull a dozen titles and close their two libraries based upon the personal tastes of a few elected officials. The Texas legislature, meanwhile, passed a law requiring publishers to mark books for schools according to types of sexual content, which then determines whether they will be bought and distributed to students.

While traveling in Colorado this week, I learned of a dispute over books in one of the city’s local school districts. The Academy School District 20 in El Paso County had recently agreed to withdraw a number of books from school libraries based upon requests from 26 parents back in May. They argued that titles like Push by Sapphire, which provided the basis for the 2009 Academy Award-winning film “Precious,” fit the legal definition of obscenity. Two others included in the ban have also been part of the school board debates in Texas regarding censorship. They are young adult and coming of age titles, Lucky by Rachel Vail, and Identical by Ellen Hopkins. Some of the parents demanding removal of the books are members of Moms for Liberty, a group whose members have publicly quoted Hitler, which is one of the reasons they have been labeled an anti-government, extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

A recent candidate for congress in Colorado Springs, Rob Rogers, offered school board officials and superintendents the insight that there is more sex and violence in the bible than any of the books ASD 20 has marked for banning. Rogers, who is an Air Force veteran and data scientist, argued that the bible meets or exceeds what the district’s protesting parents are using as a legal definition of obscenity, and it, too, needed to be removed. Rogers ran for congress in Colorado’s 14th District and was defeated, but his children attend an ASD 20 school. His request to remove the bible was not immediately answered, though he insists the demands from parents to take other books off the shelves happened quickly after they complained their standards of decency were offended.

Rogers brought into his fight the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), which argued to the school’s board that the bible contains more violence and sex than almost any book an ASD 20 student might read. The organization’s attorney, Christopher LIne, pointed out language from the bible that ought to be considered offensive under the district’s adopted standards. He quoted the book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 22, verses 28-29, which not only describes rape and tells of victims being forced to marry their rapists.

Rob Rogers, Citizen

“One bible story,” he wrote, “is of a prostitute who ‘lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses,’ who ‘longed for the lewdness of your youth, when… (her] bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.’ Those passages came from the book of Ezekiel, Chapter 23, verses 20-21. This same story speaks about sex toys: you ‘took the fine jewelry I gave you, the jewelry made of my gold and silver and made for yourself male idols and engaged in prostitution with them.’”

The FFRF lawyer had won his argument by that point but he continued to quote from the books of Samuel, Proverbs, Leviticus, Numbers, Genesis, and others. A story is detailed of how a future husband wins a bride by killing two hundred of her father’s enemies, mutilating their corpses, and bringing back their foreskins as a dowry. Line’s critique also “recounts the exploits of two daughters who, having just witnessed a genocide and the murder of their mother by a pyromaniacal god, supposedly got their father drunk and seduced him in order to bear his children. Yet another book describes sperm, intercourse, menstruation, homosexuality, bestiality, adultery and whores. Another depicts a holy man impaling a woman through her belly and describes in loving detail how to steal and rape virgins as war booty. Yet another tale tells how a woman has her hand cut off for touching a man’s penis. In other passages, women’s skirts are lifted over their face so their nakedness and shame can be exposed to all. Another tale describes a man touching a woman’s ‘hole of the door’ and how her ‘bowels were moved for him.’”

Allowing children to read such lyrical porn in the bible while stopping them from accessing books that talk about LGBTQ issues in a relatively evolved world is a bit more than hypocritical; it’s profoundly absurd, and is keeping religion in schools while forcing out secular information that might actually help a child deal with real life. I’ll quote attorney Line again on keeping the bible on bookshelves at schools while removing others that offend a specific group of parents:

“The bible historically is doubtless the single-most weaponized piece of writing on the planet, responsible for unjust wars, genocide, anti-semitism, violent extremism, subjugation of women and pervasive racism. Throughout the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, chattel slavery, the Holocaust, and the history of homophobia, the bible looms large. As Born Again Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible author Ruth Hurmence Green eloquently put it, ‘There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.’”

Mr. Rogers and his attorney, Christopher Line of FFRF, won their argument. The “legal specialist” for the school district conceded Rogers complaints were valid and the board would be replacing the books that had been banned from student use. Clearly, the idea of removing the bible, regardless of its lascivious language, was more than conservative taxpayers in the district were able to countenance. They backed down to save the bible.

“Consistent with administrative policy,” the district said, “IJL and procedure IJL R, the District must hold religious texts, such as the Bible, to the same standards it holds all other library books, subject to review and reconsideration before removal. After careful consideration, the District assures that the removal of library materials will be based on established policies and procedures. Therefore, any books recently removed without following the District’s procedure shall be reinstated and subject to reconsideration upon formal request.” (Emphasis added.)

Rogers has come up with a fail safe strategy to be used in Texas public schools and libraries. Demand that the bible be expunged because it is, almost certainly, racier than any book on the shelves. If they cannot remove the allegedly holy book, Christian conservatives will drop their complaints about titles with words about farts and puberty. None of the 800 books on the state school board’s banned list will have any problem when compared to the naughtiness of those biblical characters.

God bless Mr. Rogers.

This article was originally published in Texas to the World.

By James Moore  

“There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race. Scientifically and anthropologically.” – Toni Morrison

The first time I encountered racism was in Memphis. I was twice the age of the Brown v. Board of Education landmark Supreme Court ruling ordering the desegregation of U.S. public schools, a decision that only increased racial antipathy, instead of cooperation, by Southern Whites. My father was taking a few of his children home to Mississippi to meet family and we had stopped for gas at a filling station on old Highway 51 on the north side of town.

My childhood environment was white. We lived in a small settlement of southern diaspora who had come north for jobs in the car factories in the Post World War II economic boom. Even though our families were generally economically disadvantaged as laborers, we had still managed to congregate in a manner that excluded Blacks. They were, of course, red-lined out of getting even VA bank mortgages for homes in that area, which meant when I graduated from high school there was still not a single person of color in our student population of thousands.

My father led me around to the side of the gas station for a bathroom break and I waited outside for him after he opened a door with a sign that said, “White men.” Immediately adjacent was another bearing the words, “White women.” When I looked toward the corner of the building, I saw a sign with an arrow pointing to the back that had one word: “Colored.” I walked over to explore and heard my father’s voice calling.

“Where you at, buddy boy? You better get over here, and now.”

“I’m here, daddy.” I came into view from out back.

“What you doin’ back there? You got no business out there.”

“I wanted to see what coloreds were.”

“You know what they are.”

“A little bit. But why does that sign show them out there?”

“They ain’t out there. That’s where their bathroom is.”

“Why do they have a different bathroom.”

“Cuz ain’t no white person gonna sit on a toilet where a n****r did. Now lets’ go.”

His last words in that moment have never left my memory. My father was raised a racist by parents who believed humans with different skin color were somehow lesser beings. He was still using racist terminology into his seventies and only quit in my presence when I told him he would never be around his granddaughter if he were unable to abandon the epithets. His perceptions and opinions, of course, did not change. He once tried to explain his beliefs to me by saying, “God made Blacks and Whites as different from each other as he did dogs from horses, and he did it for a reason.” I did not ask for an explanation of God’s thinking. I did not want to know what was secreted in the convolutions of my father’s brain.

Maybe it’s because I associated Memphis with such an unsettling memory that the city has remained with me as an icon of our country’s inability to understand ourselves and heal. I’m not thinking only of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, but that has undoubtedly had much to do with the city’s image in the American psyche. While the culture has mostly thrived, there is a logical case to be made that the anticipated economic expansion has probably failed because Memphis still has not resolved the issue of race, any more than the rest of the U.S., and what happened to Tyre Nichols has only made the subject more confounding.

If geography were the only element to define destiny, Memphis would have long ago become a giant, international city. Downtown sits on the banks of one of the world’s greatest rivers for shipment and is halfway between the Mississippi’s headwaters and the port of New Orleans. Immeasurable amounts of natural resources and produce have transited the river through Memphis, which was also once the location of the largest spot cotton market in the world. The construction of the Interstate Transportation and Defense System also ought to have delivered Memphis even more commerce. The north and south I-55 and east and westbound I-40 seemingly created an epic crossroads right in the heart of America, or at least its right ventricle.

There have been times in the history of Memphis where instructive, even predictive, information has been decidedly ignored, and caused crises. The recent police chief the city hired from Atlanta, Cerelyn, C.J., Davis, had been in charge of running a special police unit in her former city called “Red Dog,” which was criticized frequently as being “hyper aggressive.” Public backlash and a series of lawsuits resulted in the organization being disbanded but not before there were reports of people subjected to public cavity searches for drugs, and the thirty officers on the squad frequently ambushing young men. There were also multiple allegations of violence during the time Davis oversaw the Red Dog operation.

 

Davis could not have created the Scorpion Unit in Memphis without her Atlanta record undergoing some scrutiny. Why she thought it was a good idea to send groups of officers to the streets in her new role has not been explained beyond her claim that she believed there was an “outcry” from the public about a rising murder rate. In Atlanta, she had been given control of the Red Dog unit, narcotics, and SWAT. The narcotics team shot and killed a 92-year-old woman in a botched drug raid, which prompted Davis being named in a $4.9 million dollar lawsuit and final court judgment that accused the Atlanta unit of a “pattern and practice of ignoring and violating the rights of the citizens of Georgia.” Officers were frequently accused of planting drugs and lying to obtain search warrants.

Kathryn Johnston, 92, Killed in Atlanta Drug Raid

The Memphis managers who decided to hire Ms. Davis were not only ignoring her very public resume’ from another major American city, but they had also turned their back on the painful history of their own community. In the wake of the assassination of MLK, Memphis became one of several American cities that set up police “Red Squad” teams to monitor civil rights activists and political protestors within the local populations. In Memphis, the police department operated on the conviction that mostly African Americans, angered by the King murder and the rising black power ideology, combined with white students protesting the Vietnam War, would create an environment with potential for chaos and violence, and, at a minimum, dangerous levels of discontent. Unsurprisingly, (at least in retrospect), Red Squads coordinated surveillance efforts with the FBI and state investigative agencies to observe any person or group who might represent a threat to established political interests. If you were perceived as an enemy of conventional thinking, you were under Red Squad scrutiny. It was nothing more than a counter-intelligence operation to harass and disrupt the political efforts of black and white activists who had been animated by the King killing.

Was everyone in Memphis oblivious to the city’s past when the Scorpion Unit was created, or when Davis was offered the chief’s job? Only three years after the King assassination, a young black man, who had decided to evade police on a traffic violation like Tyre Nichols, was chased by white officers from Memphis and the local Shelby County Sheriff’s Department. When the 17-year-old Elton Hayes was finally arrested, he was bludgeoned to death in a ditch. It took two years for the nine officers involved, a number that included a black lieutenant, to be arrested and brought to trial on charges of murder and an attempt to commit murder. They were all acquitted. The verdicts prompted protests and civil disobedience and the Red Squad was deployed into the midst of the unrest. Officers were accused of attacking demonstrators, blowing up an organizer’s car, tapping phones and photographing people protesting the blatant injustice.

What happened to Memphis is an American story that defies simple explanation. When African Americans became increasingly politically active after the King assassination, white flight began to the suburbs from the urban core. A period of economic decline began in the city even as capable Black leaders were taking office. New business did not come to the city and a national magazine described the community as a “Southern backwater” and a “dying Mississippi River town.” The struggle is best told through the departure of Holiday Inn, which was founded in Memphis in 1951. The city did not become a center of commerce residents and business leaders had envisioned and the local hotel chain left town for Atlanta.

 

What Became of Memphis?

(Setting the scene – recently two friends, Loz Lawrey and Keith Davis, sat on Keith’s verandah and recorded their conversation. They wanted to capture the ‘now’ of their interaction. That conversation, by agreement, ended up morphing into two separate and delightfully different audio interviews. Nothing was pre-planned and both friends had quite different styles of self-expression. The questions and responses were totally free-form and in the moment. Here is the transcript of Loz’s interview with Keith asking the questions and Loz responding to them … Keith’s interview will follow on Thursday.)

Loz, why music in your life, why not woodwork?

Actually Keith I do both. Look, I grew up with music. My family had a big record collection and I just have fond memories of lying on the living room floor. I received messages of all sorts from folk musicians like Peter Paul and Mary, and my parents were folk music fans at the time and they sort of passed that love on to me, and so it was listening to all those tunes and realising that music can tell stories and make you feel things, and I guess that’s where it all started.

Yes, well the other night over dinner you sang a song about India, which certainly brought up feelings/memories in my friend who had joined us for the meal (and who had travelled there). Even though I didn’t travel on that part of the hippie trail in the old days, I never got to India, your song did give me a feeling, a sense of what it was all about. Is that what you try to impart with your music, to evoke feeling in other people?

I heard my music can do that and have that impact. I don’t actually set out to do it. You write a song.You’re telling a story. Something’s triggered you to do it. Yes in my case, that song India was just remembering a road trip I’d done when I was 21 years old. I was living in London as a student and it was time to head back to Australia. And I decided I wanted to do some travelling on the way. And there was a well-known, what they called the hippie trail, a well-known route from England through the Middle East to India, that many hippies and vagabonds used to follow at the time. And I heard a lot about it while I was living in London and became more and more interested in following that route.

And at the same time I was trying to find my own place in the world and I was in a sense on a spiritual search. I’d already figured out Christianity somewhat, And I’d had an interest in other religions. I’d actually read up a bit about Buddhism and I was interested in what religions had to offer, in terms of revelations about human existence and our place on the planet and our place in the universe in a sense. And I read a book called Be Here Now, and I think I’ve told you about that, written by an American who went to India and really had his mind blown by the change in culture and the focus on spirituality that you find in countries like India, particularly in India, where it’s a greater part. It’s a much less materialistic place than the western world I’d grown up in, you know, Australia, England.

And what’s interesting, you said your family was a diplomatic family.

Yeah, that’s right.

So you’re exposed from an early age to travel, different cultures, different ways of thinking?

That’s right. That’s right in a way. We lived in Washington for three years when I was very young, when I was a baby, and we would periodically come back to Australia, but my father was posted to other countries, after Washington it was Indonesia, he was working in the embassy in Jakarta for a couple of years, and then we went back to Australia again, and then after that France for four years, and in every posting he sort of rose through the ranks in a sense. And once we’d been back from France, I had just done my first year of high school by then.

So we came back for a year to Canberra, and I went to a public school there, and then he was posted again, he got his first ambassadorial post posting to Cairo. And that’s the point where I was put into boarding school, because the advice at the time was that you don’t take your kids, you put them in boarding school. So I spent the next four years in a boarding school in Canberra.

And … Was it a secular or…?

No, well it was a Church of England boarding school, it was … what we’d now call an Anglican boarding school, and the religion was definitely part of it, I mean we had chapel every morning and evening, quite a brief session, and we had to endure an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, every Sunday, every day of chapel, and hymn singing, and services, and listening to endless sermons and so forth. But it was just, you know, to the kids, it was just part of the wallpaper in a sense, it was just how things were done, and it wasn’t, you know… I mean I was slightly intrigued by it all, but never felt part of it.

In fact my parents were non-religious, and I actually had to go and get baptised to actually… to be accepted in the school, and I’ve never forgotten this afternoon, going to this chapel with my mother and her standing there rolling her eyes, well… well this chap threw water on me and mumbled the various things, and then declared me baptised at the end of the process, you know.

You do strike me as a secular man, perhaps a spiritual man, but not a
religious man.

I’ve always seen religion as something ultimately evil, if I dare say that, because of the way young people are brainwashed by their parents to accept a certain world view, you know, involving worshipping a deity and judging others. It’s that judgemental side of religion I really hate, we’re called non-believers, or considered lesser, or other. And I do consider myself a spiritual person because I spend a lot of my life trying to understand my own essence.

And yet I am a secular person because I do not subscribe to any creed or faith, you know. I really believe we’re all on our own search and on our own journey, and we all come to our own conclusions, and hopefully we all develop a lifestyle that reflects our core perspective, if you like. And ultimately, I just think human beings have an amazing capacity and potential to, well, I mean, I don’t understand science but I am amazed at scientists and their ability to analyse the universe.

I’m not putting this very well, but in myself, I know I’ve always wanted completion, I was obsessed with it from a young age, from leaving school, partly because I felt a bit lost. I’ve always wanted to find some sort of completion, and then over the years, through reading about Buddhism and so on, I realised there’s a concept of self-realisation that’s out there. There’s a path one can pursue to actually realise and achieve that. And I guess in my own way, I’ve been trying to do that.

What that is, I mean, I have no real vision of, does the world explode in blinding light? I don’t know. Do I become some super being? I doubt it very much. But to me, self-realisation or self-actualisation is really coming to peace with oneself, coming to know oneself, to feel an acceptance of oneself, and to banish self-doubt. I remember when Mahatma once said, I would rather have a bullet than a doubt in my mind. Because really, it’s that doubt that destroys us, our self-doubt, and the doubt that others inflict on us, through their judgement and the feedback they give us, or the criticism they use, you know.

And I guess what I aspire to in the world is to be a good person, a person who doesn’t harm others, who treats others with respect, basically.

Which leads me into another question. To you, what is love? What is your concept of what love is?

Well, that’s a big question! I grew up listening to a lot of pop songs about love, that’s for sure. And that kind of love is really about the love between men and women, or basically these days, you’d say, between two human beings. And yet, in a way, I feel like, before anyone can love, we have to learn to love ourselves. We can be love. We can feel love. Others can treat us with love, and we can feel that, and feel the warmth and the embrace of that. But I feel at the same time, we have to not love ourselves in some egotistical way, but come to understand ourselves. It’s only then we can really truly love others, and feel the love for others.

I guess, in a sense, it’s something we’re always developing a sense of, it is something we’re always working on because we’re always trying to understand each other. I’m still not defining love here. It’s a hard thing to define. We all know what it is. I really feel like they say love makes the world go round. In a way, there is something called love that is the kernel. It’s something that lies at the heart of human life, at the heart of our humanity. We have a capacity to feel love for others, to demonstrate love by how we treat them. As the song says, love is a wonderful thing. As much as we have light and dark, cold and hot, we also have love, and we have hate.

Where do you think hate comes from? What is the deep world that hate comes from?

It’s a deep well of ignorance, I believe. A black pit.

And how does hate develop in your opinion? I’ll circle back to political hate later.

It really develops through fear. Hate is really the other side of the coin to fear. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of difference, the type of fear behind classic racism, that hatred of people of other appearance or skin colour, hatred of other cultures. It’s all really founded in a lack of understanding.

We hear so often about people who have a fear of immigrants, and yet when the immigrants arrive and they get to know them, they realise they’re just like us. That’s why I’ve always felt that every school curriculum should have an overseas trip as part of it. Like kids should be sent overseas as part of their school education to experience other cultures that are different to if you live in a Western culture like Australia. A school trip to India, to the Middle East, to Indonesia, to Japan, to anywhere other than here. So the children can realise that it’s not all about us and our culture, that humans exist in many forms and have many varying societies around the globe.

And yet there’s a point where we are all the same, right at the essence of all of us. And that’s, I guess that’s what anyone in the spiritual search is seeking, you know, is that kernel, that inner truth.

That if we were all exposed to different cultures, different ways of being, that the level of judgement of the other would lessen?

It would lessen. Well that’s my personal belief, maybe wrong, but there’s a broadening
advantage to try. And I feel like the fact that my parents exposed me to all these different cultures, even in boarding school once a year I’d travelled to visit them at Christmas and I would land in Cairo and I would meet Arabic people and I would, I would get some understanding of their culture. I would see our servants fasting for Ramadan and I would learn what that was. And I would, you know, and my travels through the Middle East, that experience, it taught me a lot about the warmth of many of those cultures and the hospitality visitors receive, are greeted with. And I would come back to Australia and always feel a little bit sometimes like a stranger in a strange land.

You know, I did go back and live in London for a couple of years, but since that road trip from which I returned in 1974, I’ve really been in Australia since then, but I’ve never felt fully quite part of our culture here in one way, even though I speak with an Australian accent and so forth.

You almost beg this question. What time and place do you live in? What kind of world do you live in?

Well, I try to live in the present, totally in the present. I’m very bad at planning, looking ahead, you know. And really, I’ve really had an awareness ever since I read that book Be Here Now, which really, and the message of that book really was, life happens in this moment. In fact, I wrote a song about it on my last CD called Right Now, and it’s about how this is where life happens, right now, right here, and it’s never going to happen anywhere else. And John Lennon referred to this, that life’s what happens while you’re busy making other plans. We can think about the past, but it’s gone, It’s slipped through our fingers already. And the future’s an unrevealed secret that lies ahead. But we’re here in this moment where we both are sitting now, and we’re experiencing this moment, and this is where both our lives are happening, right now.

If you had to, which you don’t have to, but I’m asking you to, if you had to pick two people who have inspired you the most, who would they be?

That’s a really tough thing, because there are many people, and to say who’s inspired me the most, I would find it very hard to identify them.

Certainly, I did spend quite a few years following Prem Rawat, who used to be called Guru Maharaji, who taught me a lot about self-awareness and meditation and self-knowledge, and showed me techniques to meditate that have brought me much peace over the years, and helped me to accept life as it unfolds and accept myself and my role in it.

Do you think that we can actually inspire ourselves?

I guess so. That’s something I’ve never really thought about. I mean, inspiration can come from so many sources, I guess, from others, from experiences we have, from movies we see, you know, from songs we hear, from stories we’re told. From living we’ve done. I find that a tough one to answer, Keith. I’ve never really thought of how that I might have inspired myself.

Okay, I’ll circle back to the earlier question about hate, specifically political hate. Where does it come from?

You mean hating our political opponents?

Yes, to define it down a bit more, why in the current era do we have so many people who hate and cannot accept political difference?

Wow! Well, I think ignorance is a big part of it. I think inadequate education is a part of it. I think there are so many things that play into this. I think social media plays into it. I think as technology evolves and we rely more and more on it, there’s a diminishment of people’s ability to think critically. There’s an acceptance of shallow perceptions that are being shared and that we inflict on each other.

The lack of critical thinking, I think, is at the core of it. Because it’s really quite an amazing skill, and if one is able to do that, it’s a life-enhancing thing. But if you can’t think critically, you’re really living a more superficial life, where it gets harder to tell good from bad and see the true value of things. I think of what’s happening in America at the moment, and it seems that right at the core of the problems there, the lack of critical thinking and the possible potential of civil war, and the total tribal division between Republicans and Democrats, the way the country is split almost in two, and the inability of the two sides to even… You know, it’s becoming harder and harder for the both sides to even communicate.

Political hate is, as you say, it’s everywhere now, and there’s a resurgence in every country and it’s quite frightening, I find. There’s the rise of fascism that seems to be occurring globally, and the rise of these really narcissistic sociopathic autocrats who have no regard for either human life or the rule of law, or a sense of decency, the sense of decency that civil society requires as its foundation. Yeah, so political hate, political hate leads to war, does nothing to unite us, and yet, as someone who’s definitely on the left side, if we’re going to talk about polarised politics, I definitely am on the left, and there is always this great temptation to hate those on the right, mainly through a frustration that I simply struggle to understand their thinking. It’s as if there are two kinds in political terms, it’s as if there’s two kinds of human beings, and some are wired one way and some are wired another. And due to that there’s two different circuitries. it’s almost impossible to find common ground, because your world views are totally different, you know what I’m saying?

Yes. As you know Loz I’m known for quite happily going off on tangents. So … what is a question that you would like to ask of yourself?

That’s too hard. Yeah. Well, there is this one. The basic one is who am I and what am I meant to be doing in this lifetime, you know? If there was a creator, what would he or she want me to be doing? How would they want me to live? I mean, at the end of the day, I think our questions are answered by our own inner feelings. So, we resolve those questions within ourselves by a basic sense of right and wrong, I believe.

I mean, I have lingering regrets of having offended people at different times in my life, and now looking back at my age, I would dearly love to meet those people. I’ve tried to contact some through Facebook even, but simply cannot find some of them. They don’t seem to be on social media, but I’d love to meet up with them and apologise for the slight I inflicted on them at the time, you know? Because that has left a lingering sense of shame.

I remember in second-year high school, I got into a fight. One of the first kids who welcomed me to the school became a mate, and for some reason, one recess, and I put this down to teenage hormones, it’s a pretty weak excuse, I know, but we ended up in a fistfight, and I kind of punched him out. And as I drove off from school on my bicycle at the end of the day, someone shouted, good fight, mate! And all I felt was this cringing sense of shame, because I knew in myself that I had done it for bad reasons. I really had no…this guy had done nothing to deserve this. And it was a seminal experience for me, because it was a life-changing moment. These are the life-changing moments, I believe, when we make a terrible mistake and hopefully learn from it and change and modify our behaviour.

And there are moments when I’ve been rude to people, and wish I could take it back now. And yet I remember those things, because there aren’t that many of them, but they’re there. And yet at the same time, these are the things I believe that help us grow and mature. And I mean, I guess I see human life as a trajectory. We’re born into the planet, we come into this light, and then we’re subjected to everything. We can be lucky, we can be grow up in a family that’s loving and considerate, or we can be really unlucky and grow up in an abusive situation. And some of those situations can persist for years.

And I have to say, I’ve been lucky in my own way, and yet I’ve had my own struggles, such as being left in boarding school, which I didn’t find easy. But I feel at the end of the day, whatever we go through, we learn from, it informs our future behaviour. And hopefully, over time, we become better people and better able to treat others with decency and respect, you know? Which I think is really what lies at the core of the human condition and what it demands that we do.

People use the word humanity, meaning empathy, meaning decency, meaning respect for others, and a desire to include others. The word humanity has wonderful connotations. We speak of inhumanity as everything bad, everything evil. People describe Putin’s war on Ukraine as an inhumane venture, and clearly it is to anyone who has a love of humanity. How can some humans treat each other so inhumanely? It makes no sense to me, but history tells us it’s always happened.

And at the core of all that aggravation and warmongering and genocidal behaviour, I believe, is a lack of understanding. I mean, I also believe religions have a lot to answer for because they basically mess with people’s heads. I think of the Crusades and other wars of religion, and the atrocities that are committed in the name of the Lord or God or modernity, and I mean, at the end of the day, how do religions thrive? They thrive on ignorance.

I just remembered … I’m supposed to be asking some questions but I was quite happily getting lost in your discourse. Loz, I did read your humorous, really humorous article on The Australian Independent Media Network about flicking spuds at a photo of the Queen. So, are you a Monarchist or a Republican?

Well, I don’t know what the best model for a Republic is. The best model for organising society, but I’m definitely not a monarchist because I really think the idea of kings and queens and people being set apart as being special in some way or superior in some way is crazy, basically. You know, I mean, we’ve always had kings and queens and emperors, and today we have one of the autocrats … it’s pretty obvious Trump’s always wanted to be a king and Putin’s behaving like he thinks he is one, and they managed to weasel themselves into positions where they nearly get away with it.

But I believe in egalitarianism. I believe in equal rights, no one is superior to anyone else. And that’s apart from all these things that give us an appearance of difference such as our level of education. At the end of the day, people are people, you know, any race, any culture, any indigenous group. We’re all part of the same human race, and we are all equal. And I wish societies around the world reflected that because most don’t. Most have social structures that put some at the bottom and some at the top and others in between. And, I mean, the very concept of middle class, governments are always trying to please the middle class, and then other more right-wing governments seem to favour the rich. I mean, there’s so much that plays into all this, our world order and the social structures that different countries have that are really a vestige of their past history, and an outcome of past events.

As a musician, as a singer, a songwriter, from your point of view, what’s the value of music in our lives?

Well, well, I think music’s a touchstone. It evokes feelings. It brings up feelings that are already latent within us, and it triggers them, hopefully good feelings often. It’s something like smell you know. Music can touch us. Songs tell stories, and we need stories. Stories are the way we share our understandings, our knowledge, our culture, whatever that is. It’s how we learn music. Music inspires dance, inspires smiles. Well, there’s just something about music. It’s another way of communicating, I believe.

Interviewers always try to have the last say but let’s turn that one on its head. The last say in this interview is your say.

Well, I’m not sure I really have any big say. I’m just another little ant on the global ant heap, you know. I guess I’d love to see more empathy in the world. I’d love to see more coming together, more unity. I hate, I just hate what people are doing to each other and what evil people are inflicting on others around the world. I hate the fact that we’re unable to solve issues of hunger and starvation in some countries.

I’m very worried about the world and about our race and our treatment of the planet. Sometimes I feel we’re on a terrible course that can, in no way, be good. I think there’s a sense, a sense at large that people have, that the world is in a terrible state. And yet we are the perpetrators and the instigators of that. What we do, everything we do, every tin can we throw out, every plastic bag we drop into the ocean does harm. And yet it’s hard to live in a way that doesn’t have those side effects, you know. I guess I just hope for a world where we get it together before it’s too late.