Thursday, April 26, 2018

The Australian War Memorial and Operation Sovreign Borders

The Australian War Memorial is a memorial, museum, and archive in Canberra, our nation's capital city. It is owned and run by the government. The war memorial's website says "The Memorial's purpose is to commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war."

The Oxford Dictionary gives us two definitions of "commemorate":


  1. Recall and show respect for (someone or something).
  2. Mark or celebrate (an event or person) by doing or producing something.

Operation Sovreign Borders is, in short, a military operation to keep asylumn seekers coming to Australia by boat. It is the result of federal policy which - again, in short - means collecting any asylumn seekers who come to Australia by boat and dumping them in concentration camps run by Australia in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. And, yes, they are concentration camps, which are defined by the oxford dictionary are:

  1. A place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution. 
Politician Richard Marles has spoken out in support of the extension and inclusion of Operation Sovreign Borders at the War Memorial. If you're wondering what Operation Sovreign Borders has to do with war, well, you're not alone. Even Marles' political colleagues don't agree with the plan.

My first response to reading about this was a simple but instinctive "Fuck you and the nationalism you rode in on."

But, you know what? I've changed my mind.

Build it. Make it big. Make it grand. Put it out for all to see. Please forever immortalise Australia's decision to wage war on the desperate, our betrayal of the ideals sung in our national anthem*, the decision to be cruel and selfish and hateful.

And then remind yourself that a war memorial is not a place of reverence, not a place to bask in jingoism and chest thumping national pride. Nor is a war memorial a Questacon** of history, a place for school children and tourists to take a walking history-lesson on all Australian military actions.

What it is, what it should be, is a place of regret. It is a reminder of humanity's darkest history, of how a few sent many to die, of the savagery inside us that we pretend we have expelled in the millennia long process of civilising the species. A war memorial is a reminder that we do not owe our war veterans and our dead esteem and celebration, we owe them an apology. We owe them an apology because we - we the broken-at-the-core mankind - chose to embrace the worst of our nature and put the suffering of that choice on them and dared to call it "necessary" when it was simply easy to give in and ask them to wear those consequences for us.

So build it. Take my tax money and build your commemoration of our national shame. But do it knowing that we were - we are - wrong, we are fundamentally and irrevocably wrong. Do it knowing this is not a tribute, but a scar, a blight on our history.

And if you can't do that, fuck you and the nationalism you rode in on.

*The lyrics are literally "For those who've come across the seas / We've boundless plains to share"
** Questacon is a museum of science and technology with lots of interactive exhibits. It's a lot of fun.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Diversify Your Skillset

A man goes to the school of a great swordsman. The man says, "Master, how long will it take me to become an expert with the sword?" The master says "It takes five years to become an expert swordsman." The man says, "But, master, what if I spend every waking moment of every day practicing and training?" The master smiles and says "That's different. If you do that, it will take you ten years."

If being an author is your goal, if that's what you want to do with life, then you should treat being an author like a job. Work at it, get better, produce finished material. And just because you decide you're a professional word wizard who takes this shit serious, yo, doesn't mean writing will stop being fun. But odds are it will become more stressful. When you're not just writing for yourself, when you're not just writing for the pleasure of it, you become acutely aware of your audience (even if they're mostly imaginary at this point) and, more than likely, of the higher standards of performance you're now imposing on yourself.

Taking a step from writing as hobby and fun times to writing as work and fun times without replacing it with a new hobby and fun times is the perfect recipe for burnout and burnout is not what you want. What you want is a way to relax and to engage the creative parts of your mind without feeling the pressure of performing for an audience. I believe this is why so many creators and performers take up creative side projects. Stephen King is in a band, Robert Downey Jr sings, Jim Carey and David Bowie paint. Creative people are creative because of an intense desire to do so. If you also like to play video games and watch movies, that's cool, too. But you should spend some of your leisure time on something that stimulates you creatively.

Me? I run and play a lot of role playing games in my leisure time. It's how I get the bulk of my socialising and creative stimulation when I'm not writing. But ever the experimenter, I've spent a lot of time on drawing, photography, creating pixel art and, most recently, playing with Lego. I'll be honest with you, most of it is intensely, painfully, almost shamefully amateurish. In fact, a lot of it's just bad. But that doesn't matter, because I'm not creating for an audience. I might show them to interested parties - and to make a point, I'm going to show it to you - but these creative efforts are for me. They are a way to relax on my own and still be creative.

I've said before that statements like "you're not a real writer if you don't write every day" are bullshit. Real writers are people who write. There's no other box you need to tick. If you write for half an hour every weekday morning, well done, you're a writer. If you write for six hours on Saturday and spend the rest of your week living up to your other responsibilities, congratulations you're a writer. If you can and do make the time to write every day, excellent. Go you. Just because you don't have to, doesn't mean it's not awesome if you do. But you'll also probably burnout faster if you don't take care of yourself.

And you know what? The more you do in life that isn't writing, the better your writing will be. This comes back to something else I've often said: writing what you know is a challenge to know more. Your experiences away from the writing desk is fuel for the imagination.

Okay. I'm about to show off some of my non-writing creative endeavours. You will not be impressed by these. I will not be basking in the glory of these works. But neither do I care. Not caring is fundamental to the practice. I actively turn off the perfectionist parts of my brain and just create for the fun of it. If I get better incidentally, great. But if I don't? That's fine too.











Thursday, January 25, 2018

We've Boundless Pains To Share

Where I'm sitting now, on couch, in my home, was, until the late 1700s, the land of the Darug people. Respect to these original custodians, past, present, and future.
On January 26, 1788, the first fleet arrived on Australian shores and with them came the ancestors of my family. It is one event in a history of infinite coincidences that led to my birth. But it is also an event that set into motion a relatively short history of deliberate efforts to take a land from a people, and then to eradicate those people. It is a planned extermination that was frighteningly successful, and it is a mark on our history that we are not nearly as ashamed of as we should be. You may say it's ancient history, that you didn't do it, that you refuse to suffer white guilt because of what some people did hundreds of years ago*.
But there are no Australians free of that legacy. There are no Australians who do not benefit or suffer as a result of what has occurred and what has been perpetrated on the Aboriginal people. The price of white man's burden is blood. The price of luck in this lucky country is blood.
We cannot change history, but we must acknowledge it. We must acknowledge that history is a living narrative, one that touches the present, and for some, history's touch is painful. To celebrate Australia on this day is to revel in the pain that Australia's first people feel from history's white hot grasp. It is fuel for that agonising fire. This statement is not theory, it is not conjecture, it is fact. We know it is fact because they have told us that our celebration hurts.
And that's all you need to know. That's all that matters. It hurts. It hurts people now. To continue calling January 26 Australia Day is to do wrong by the country we're supposed to be celebrating, wrong by the people who make it Australia.
There is so much pain in our history, so much that must be fixed. They will be difficult problems to solve. But this is an easy one. This one has a simple solution.
Change the date.
*Aboriginal children were still being taken from their families in the 1960s. This isn't a crime of hundreds of years ago.