I don’t know whether many of my compatriots have ever heard of a NSW rural township named Breeza. Here’s a wonderful photo of the Breeza landscape from Ian Stehbens:
Breeza is surely one of the loveliest names you could possibly imagine for a hot flat place out on the Liverpool Plains. One imagines sea breezes floating in magically from the distant Pacific! I heard this name constantly during my childhood, because my grandmother Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964] was born in nearby Quirindi and brought up in Breeza, on a sheep station named Currabubula. What fabulous place names! If you’ve got a map—or, better still, Google—you’ll find that the municipalities named Breeza and Currabubula lie in the middle of a triangle whose corners are Gunnedah, Tamworth and Quirindi.
I’ve just published (through Gamone Press) a family-history book, They Sought the Last of Lands, presenting pioneering stories of my Australian ancestors.
If you’re interested, I invite you to clickhereto download the chapter in which I speak of my grandmother from Breeza.
Now, some of the few remaining flimsy threads that tie me to my native land are about to be destroyed forever. A Chinese company named Shenhua has apparently received approval from the NSW state government to build a gigantic coal mine on the agricultural lands of the Liverpool Plains near my ancestral township of Breeza. Astounded and shocked by such a scenario, I hardly know what to say.
Australia is selling off to China
the lands and spirits of her pioneers.
The souls of my ancestors.
Click here and here for press stuff on this unfolding tragedy.
Meanwhile, as usual Down Under, where life is casual, nobody seems to give a coal-mine fuck. Is our Australian people really as apathetic and indeed pathetic as that? Yes, no doubt. I would love to be contradicted...
Readers who know French will have understood that my title is an awkward attempt to translate our fear that « la France d’autrefois fout le camp ». The concept of a legendary France has always been fuzzy but nevertheless perfectly real... at least in my mind. And the rhetorical question behind the present blog post might be rephrased as follows: Are there alarming signs, at the present moment, suggesting that the France of our dreams might be receding inexorably into the world of dreams?
Let’s leave aside Vercingétorix… who didn’t necessarily correspond to my idea of a typical Frenchman.
And Joan of Arc, too… who wasn’t exactly a typical Gallic female. (Many modern French women often find that English gentlemen can be charming.)
My legendary France might be thought of as starting with Denis Diderot [1713-1784], the brilliant instigator (with d'Alembert) of the Encyclopédie, which was intended to encompass all human knowledge of “sciences, arts and crafts”. To my modest mind, Diderot was one of the greatest intellects that the planet Earth has ever known.
His fabulous novel Jacques le Fataliste remains an astounding literary creation. Recommended to me enthusiastically long ago—for reasons that I was incapable of understanding at that time—by a lovely young student at the Sorbonne, Christine, who would become the mother of our children, this primordial work of Diderot happens to be my current bedside book.
Jumping shamelessly over countless scientists, philosophers and artists, I would next name Louis Pasteur [1822-1895] as a symbol of my legendary France.
He would be followed, soon after, by a woman who (like many famous French people) wasn’t even born in France: Marie Curie [1867-1934].
In the contemporary era, it’s not surprising that I’ve always been captivated by the spiritual presence of Charles de Gaulle [1890-1970]. Besides, his widespread arms inspired the gadget that enabled me to uncork countless bottles of wine throughout my early years in Paris.
Today, a trivial news item makes me think that all that gigantic intellectual heritage of France might be disappearing down the kitchen sink like dishwater. Let me explain.
Many of my Australian readers are familiar with the embarrassingly-stupid story of the railroad from Sydney to Melbourne, culminating in a notorious break-of-gauge singularity at Albury, on the frontier between the rival states of New South Wales and Victoria.
Insofar as the adjacent states failed to agree on a a standard common gauge, passengers have to descend from one train and get up into another. This innocent-looking country platform is in fact a monument to human stupidity, to the apparent impossibility of ever seeking agreement on simple issues.
For ages, I was convinced that nonsense of that deplorable kind could never occur in my hallowed France, where everything was conducted under the metrical auspices of René Descartes [1596-1650] for the mathematics and Napoléon Bonaparte [1769-1821] for the creation and enforcement of laws.
Well, my dear old France has just become involved in an astronomical fuckup. The dumb bastards in charge of French railways have recently ordered 50 million euros of rolling stock that’s slightly too wide for some 1300 stations! They simply forgot to take out a tape and get down on their hands and knees to measure the existing reality. So, more millions will have to be spent in shaving off the excess width of countless existing train platforms.
Once upon a time, this kind of error would have been unthinkable in France. Something has obviously changed... for the worse. Between now and the delivery of this rolling stock, certain human heads will surely roll. But this will not erase the nasty conclusion that my beloved ancient version of an eternal France—superbly philosophical and mathematical—would appear to be simply fucking off before our sad eyes.
Over the last 24 hours, French media have been having a field day writing what little they know about the mysterious "mad monk" who has just become Australia's new leader. French journalists all appear to be inspired by the same source material: a rather blunt French-language blog post written by a certain Charlotte Chabas and published by Le Monde [display].
A week ago, French TV viewers were shocked by an evening show revealing the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef. After all the hype generated by Tourism Australia's "best jobs in the world" stunts, the marketing seams are starting to show, and people in France are surely becoming aware that the legendary dream world that is supposed to exist Down Under could well be somewhat mythical.
The last time I was out in Australia (already seven years ago), I looked around for serious books concerning the state of the nation, and prospects for the future. Disappointed at finding nothing of interest in this domain, I was reminded of the words of my friend Geoff Brindley: "There is no writing culture in Australia." In bookshops, the shelves marked Australia or Australiana are packed with photographic albums of indigenous fauna and flora, tourist guides and cooking books. Even today, when I ask Amazon to display their books on Australia, there is simply no category of books dealing with contemporary Australian society, politics, economics, future challenges, etc.
In fact, the case of Australia has been handled expertly and thoroughly by the US scholar Jared Diamond. In his celebrated Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), he spoke at length about the alleged "backwardness" of Australia's Aborigines, with the intention of proving that we would be mistaken to imagine the existence of any "supposed deficiencies of the Aborigines themselves".
Today, I find that this 15-year-old book (which earned its author a Pulitzer Prize) has an annoying old-fashioned tone, as if the author didn't take time, before starting to write his book, to catch up on recent findings concerning the genetics of human populations. Sure, his end-of-book notes on further reading mention the great Italian pioneer Luca Cavalli-Sforza, but nowhere in Diamond's chapter on the Aborigines is there any mention of genetics and DNA studies. Worse, when evoking divergences between Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, Diamond refers to blood groups and the appearance of their hair, with never the slightest allusion to their respective genetic data.
Tasmanian Aborigines provide us with an extreme case of geographical isolation. When Bass Strait was flooded, some 10,000 years ago, Tasmania was probably populated by no more than a few thousand Aboriginal hunter-gatherers. By the time their descendants were discovered by 17th-century European navigators, Tasmanians had become the most technologically primitive people ever encountered on the planet Earth. Now, it's fair enough to blame the terrible solitude of Tasmanians for the absence of the elementary culture of making fire, boomerangs, stone axes with wooden handles, etc. But the author might have drawn attention to another obvious aspect of Tasmania's isolation and small population. After centuries of consanguinity, their gene pool was surely reduced to a minimalist state leaving few cerebral resources for creativity. While avoiding all references to genes, and bending over backwards to avoid being accused of racism, Jared Diamond nevertheless falls into the trap of comparing the respective "smartness" of Aborigines with a notorious pair of ill-fated explorers. "Robert Burke and William Wills were smart enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert regions where Aborigines were living."
A more recent and (to my mind) more convincing book by Diamond, Collapse (2005), tackles the fascinating question of why certain human societies suddenly disappear.
The author's presentations of the historical tragedies of the Pitcairn Islands and Easter Island are particularly brilliant. But I was impressed aboved all by his chapter 13, whose title incorporates a disturbing pair of inverted commas: "Mining" Australia. In fact, the explanations in this chapter lead us back inevitably and directly to the starting point of the present blog post: yesterday's coming to power of the "mad monk" (who once said that the notion of climate change brought about through human activities is "absolute crap"), and an environmental disaster such as the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef. Let me quote Diamond's opening paragraph, which examines Australia's likely destiny:
Mining in the literal sense—that is, the mining of coal, iron, and so on—is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings. In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament. That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time, and hence to deplete those resources. Since gold in the ground doesn't breed more gold [...], miners extract gold from a gold lode as rapidly as is economically feasible, until the lode is exhausted. Mining minerals may thus be contrasted with exploiting renewable resources—such as forests, fish, and topsoil—that do regenerate themselves by biological reproduction or by soil formation. Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, provided that one removes them at a rate less than the rate at which they regenerate. If however one exploits forests, fish, or topsoil at rates exceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinction, like the gold in a gold mine.
Then the author sketches the theme of his chapter on Australia in a single chilling sentence, where the inverted commas around "mining" indicate that he's using this term in its metaphorical sense:
Australia has been and still is "mining" its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals.
Diamond pulls no punches in describing the exceptionally fragile nature of the harsh "sunburnt country" that many of us came to love.
Up until reading Diamond's detailed descriptions of the low nutrient levels of Australian soils, I had always imagined naively that our agriculture was surely no less "lucky" than the many other aspects of Down Under in which Australians take pride. But this is not at all the case. We now know that the infertility and salinity of soils in Australia make them unsuitable for nearly all forms of agriculture and grazing. Then there's the terrible question of unpredictable rainfall due to the notorious ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation). I believe that every concerned Australian should make a point of studying Diamond's spine-chilling chapter 13 of Collapse.
Meanwhile, I was thrilled to see a victory photo of Mr Rabbit and his lovely women.
Verily I say unto you that they're as beautiful as a page from a fairy tale.
PS I should explain to readers who've never been to Australia that the title of this blog post is an advertising slogan that was used by the Red Rooster fast-food people.
I'm trying to figure out why that photo of Tony Abbott on the beach reminded me immediately of a red cock, about to crow...
In certain fields (and not only in sport), outstanding individuals from my native land can do just as well as celebrated Americans, if not better. Our latest specimen in the dumbness domain, Queensland political candidate Stephanie Banister, has just stepped into the limelight of international celebrity, where she's competing remarkably well against a famous US champion of stupidity, Sarah Palin.
Here are extracts from a TV video in which Stephanie evoked a nation named Islam:
Personally, I reckon that Banister makes Palin look like a boring intellectual. But my father was born in Queensland, so maybe I'm chauvinistic. Click here for an Aussie article on our champion.
PS Recently, when Kevin Rudd succeeded in kicking out Julia Gillard, the affair was hardly mentioned in French media. Today, on the contrary, the story of Stephanie Banister is repeated on every French media website. I would advise her to abandon politics and set up some kind of an international business—maybe in communications or tourism—enabling her to cash in on her sudden notoriety. For example, she could organize holiday trips for tourists who would like to visit various interesting places in Islam, and dine on delicious haram food.
I'm utterly shocked by the apparent absence of Australian diplomatic intervention in the case of Julian Assange, condemned to survive for the moment in a "space capsule": the London embassy of Ecuador.
Many years ago, when I had already lived in Paris for a long time (I arrived there in 1962), I used to say jokingly to Aussie friends and relatives (modernized summary):
If ever we Australian expatriates were to find ourselves in a nasty situation, I don't have the impression that our motherland would ever dream about sending in helicopters to exfiltrate us.
At the time (I'm talking about the 1960s), there was a rumor about the fact that our embassies and consulates were fed up with the task of repatriating mindless Aussie tourists who had run run out of money or run into problems of one kind or another. At that same time, I happened to be greatly impressed by the fact that French nationality seemed to be a precious acquisition, which guaranteed the holder against all kinds of unexpected happenings. The French seemed to think that a citizen remained essentially French no matter where he happened to be located on the surface of the planet. Australian authorities, meanwhile, seemed to act as if a passport-holder became "less Australian" as soon as he left the country.
Today, I'm convinced that Australia doesn't care an iota about citizens residing in Europe. For example, the Paris embassy probably has no official idea of my existence or whereabouts, and is probably unconcerned by this ignorance.
It's a hopeless situation. As I often say, Australia needs a revolution. Meanwhile, citizens will carry on looking moronically at media stuff about Gina Rinehart, the top-ten most expensive residences in East Sydney, the local football, the case of Julia Gillard and her father, etc... A perfect formula for eternal political stupidity.
BREAKING NEWS: The story of Pippi Bean (nothing to do with Julian Assange) provides another revealing illustration of the ineffective behavior of Australian consular services when faced with the case of an Australian citizen in distress in a hostile land. Click here to access an article on this affair.
The situation is unfair. Why is it that such-and-such a totally-unknown moronic compatriot from Down Under makes world headlines every so often? Meanwhile, we others have to work hard and constantly to air our narrow set of weird beliefs, our absurdities and our ignorance.
A couple of years ago, the Internet world discovered an amazing Aussie senator, Steve Fielding, who greatly impressed a visiting biologist, Richard Dawkins. Enjoy this video masterpiece:
After Steve Fielding and Cory Bernardi (who has novel ideas on the likely sexual tastes of gays and other mammals), I wonder who's the next idiot to acquire front-page notoriety. Personally, I would be more than happy to get interviewed by Australian TV on the interesting question of the sex life of Jesus and his wife. I have no facts whatsoever on this subject, of course, but I have a lot of fabulous and entertaining ideas, which I would love to share with the world at large. And I would make a point of getting drunk before the TV people arrived here to interview me and my dog.
