Off to the wildnerness to try to connect

In the spirit of connecting to Australia's landscape, I'm off to a camping festival in tropical North Queensland in a few days. I'm scared, because I have a proper respect for the dangers of camping in a rainforest. (Leeches! Yuck!) But I'm also looking forward to connecting to the land in Australia a little bit more by being in the landscape. So... no posts for a while, but I'm sure I'll have some very interesting reflections when I get back.

Learning Aussie English

They speak a different language down here. Really, mate. This is one thing about Oz that I’m really fond of. The language is very colourful.

Just as all the plants and animals in Australia are adapted to conserve energy, so is Aussie English. Never say multiple syllables when a shortened version of the word will do. Three or four syllables in a word is out of the question - who has time? Endings of "-ie" and "-o" are the route to energy conservation: I cook on the barbie, I live in Brissy. Here's a short glossary of Aussie English, both shortened and non-shortened words.

"Can I see your rego?" = Can I see the registration for your car? "Registration" is 4 whole syllables, an outrageous energy expense! They shorten it to "rego," pronounced redge-oh.

"Did you see that doco on the telly last night?" = I would ask you if you'd seen that documentary on television last night, but I can't be bothered to say all that.

"arvo" = afternoon. "Can I come see you this arvo?" Again, the syllables problem.

to chuck a wobbly: to have a temper fit, a tantrum. "I told her she couldn't have ice cream, and she chucked a wobbly."

to bung: to put.
The first time a colleague said to me "Just bung it in me box," I was a little taken aback. Good thing I knew we were talking about an envelope. Such moments of bewilderment are all too familiar to me.

cozzie, swimmers: a bathing costume, swimsuit. "Bung on your cozzie, we're going to the beach."

daggy: unfashionable, dowdy, uncool. "That’s a really daggy outfit." A "dag" is a little ball of brown stuff that hangs off the bits of wool at the back end of a sheep – not a very pleasant image, but most people don’t think about where the term comes from.

to earbash: to talk endlessly and boringly. An "earbashing" is a dull lecture. "I made the mistake of asking him how LED’s work, and he gave me an earbashing."

dunny: a lavatory. I think it used to mean outhouse, but it’s used more generally now. Our department head, Debbie, has commissioned the refurbishing of the bathrooms on our floor at work, so we've dubbed them "Debbie's dunnies."

to bang: to have sex.
to bang like a dunny door in a gale: to have sex often and with enthusiasm

stuff up, get stuffed: f**k up, get f***ed

"giving you the goss" = telling you my gossip.

"my week is chockers" = my schedule is chockerblock full this week

"getting rugged up" = bundling up in warm clothing to go outside

"Mind if I take a sticky beak?" = This might be said the first time someone comes to your home, and wants to take a look around. It comes from Cockney rhyming slang, peek rhymes with beak, taking a peek is nosy, like a bird sticking its beak into nooks and crannies, so "take a sticky beak". It will take me decades to figure out rhyming slang. A lot of the convicts sent to Australia were Cockney, so some Aussie English traces its roots back to Cockney English.

I'm in love with North America!

Geez, I'm homesick. I can't wait to go home in November.
A slight re-write of some Joan Osborne lyrics, from Early Recordings, the song "Fingerprints":

Why does it take so long for me to leave you
Once I’ve said goodbye
I wish it could be over quickly
Clean and painless and dry
But your place has left its taste with me
And your land has left its mark
My heart is full of whispers
And voices in the dark
Why does it take so long for me to leave you
Now that I'm not there
I didn't know I would feel this way
The loss because I care
But my spirit has a memory
And it holds you close within
The feel of your deep forests
The earth that is your skin
I feel your fingerprints
On my heart
I thought that I could leave you
I thought I was so smart
Now I feel your fingerprints
Nothing I can do
Ain’t it touching how I can’t get over you
I never knew, I never thought
That I would miss you so much
And it doesn't seem another land
Can wash away your touch
I feel your fingerprints
On my heart
I thought that I could leave you
I thought I was so smart
Now I feel your fingerprints
Nothing I can do
Ain’t it touching how I can’t get over you

The trouble with Eden

You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at its myths and stories. Despite the best efforts of the founding fathers, the U.S. is a Judeo-Christian culture. One of the central myths underlying American culture is the myth of Genesis and humanity’s fall from grace. The bare bones of the myth: there was an initial period where things were blessed and wonderful, and through some wrongdoing, people were exiled from that original blessed state. The solution to re-attaining that original blessed state, then, is clear: address the source of the wrongdoing, and paradise will come again.

That basic idea still pervades many discussions in American culture where you wouldn’t think that the participants in that discussion would believe in or be influenced by the Old Testament: feminism, neo-paganism, environmentalism. In feminism, there is a mythical idea that there was once a blessed period in the past in which women were revered and cultures were matriarchal, and that a wave of warlike patriarchal invasions destroyed this Edenic scene. (Best exemplied in The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler.) More likely is that there have always been a mix of very many different kinds of cultures, some matriarchal, some not. Yes, there are many statues of female figures from 40,000-20,000 years ago around Europe. Interpreting these as fertility figures and objects of reverence is a perfectly reasonable idea. It does not follow, however, that there was an idyllic period of matriarchy from which we have "fallen" because of the "original sin" of patriarchy. The route to paradise on this view? Eliminate patriarchy.

In neo-pagan circles, there is an idea that there was an original, blessed state when the people of Europe worshipped the Goddess, and revered nature. (Best exemplified in Starhawk’s writings.) Again, the pre-Christian people of Europe were most likely a mixed bag of cultures, worshipping both goddesses and gods, as well as local spirits of the land. It’s clear they were pagan, and more nature-centered than modern industrial culture. It’s not clear that this period of time was a blessed Edenic state, as the early peoples of Europe seem to have spent an awful lot of time making war on each other, at worst, and stealing each other’s livestock, at best. I wouldn’t choose to go back and live in such a time. The route to paradise on this view? Go back to worshipping the Goddess.

In environmentalism, the original blessed state is the life of hunter-gatherers, all living in peaceful harmony with the land around them, living by a conservation ethos. Agriculture is the "original sin" that caused The Fall, in this case. (Best exemplified in Paul Shepard’s Coming Home to the Pleistocene.) The route to paradise in this environmentalist idea? Go back to the ethos of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So does that mean giving up agriculture? The planet couldn’t support as many people as we currently have if we were all living as hunter-gatherers. So what is the practical route to paradise?

I guess this is why I have a problem with the Eden myth: it plays into the idea that if we can just correct some mistake our species made in the past, we will be able to have a utopia on Earth. I don’t believe in utopias – humans are too complex, too much of a mixture of light and dark, and too varied to ever have a utopia. Also, it is not universally true that hunter-gatherer cultures follow a conservation ethic. Anthropologist Wade Davis and historian Jared Diamond¹ have both made the point that many rainforest tribes find the idea of conservation alien, because they cannot imagine the bounty of the natural world being depleted. A conservation ethos is not part of their foraging lifestyle. Conservation seems to be part of the ethos only of hunter-gatherers living in places with more scarcity – places with harsh winters, like the Great Plains, or the Arctic North, or desert ecosystems with few resources, as in the deserts of Africa and Australia. The reason conservation is now looking like a good ethos is that humans have discovered that all of the planet’s resources are limited.

It is absolutely true that agricultural cultures have always driven out hunter-gatherer cultures, and usurped their lands, and that throughout history, this has made hunter-gatherers worse off. Hunter-gatherers have absolutely experienced a loss, a degradation of their circumstances from a previously better state². Every one of our ancestors experienced this changeover from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural or modern industrial lifestyle at some point. This has made things much worse for humans all over the planet. I don’t deny that.

Still, I believe things can get better. Revering the feminine, getting rid of patriarchal systems and having a land-based conservation ethos may well be part of the solution, but they are not part of the solution because they can redeem our past sins. They are part of the solution because they are ideas that are good on their own merits. Just because I don’t believe in utopia doesn’t mean I don’t believe in reform. I just believe that the reforms will be something new, something complex, that our species is reaching towards, but hasn’t discovered yet. The problem with the Eden myth is not that things haven’t gotten worse. It’s that the myth points us towards simplistic solutions, and teaches us to be ashamed of our species, instead of looking for our best potential. We’ll only find a way out of our current mess if we look to our species’ best potential, and use it to correct for our species’ worst tendencies.


¹ Wade Davis, One River. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Jared Diamond, "New Guineans and Their Natural World,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, Edited by Stephen R. Kellert & Edward O. Wilson. Washington DC: Island Press, 1993.
² Hugh Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.

Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade. NY: Harper Collins, 1987, 1995.
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. NY: Harper Collins, 1979, 1989, 1999.
Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Edited by Florence Shepard. Washington DC: Island Press, 1998.