Tetherd Cow Ahead

How hot has it been here? This is a bag of tea-light candles that I fished out of a box in our attic. Candle wax melt temperature for ‘cool’ candle molds is supposed to range from around 55 – 65° C (130 -150° F).

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #4

This is Danny Nalliah. Danny is some kind of flavour of Pentecostal Christian, and believes (or says he believes) that the Bible is the literal Word of God. Danny is a most irksome person at this very moment, because he also believes, and has made public his belief, that the terrible bushfires that are raging not more than 20 miles from my home are the result of divine retribution from God. Danny says God has done this because Victoria, my home state, recently decriminalized abortion.

On the website for his appropriately named ‘Catch the Fire Ministries’* Danny says that in November last year he had a dream in which he “saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably”.† He interpreted the dream to mean that God had “removed his conditional protection on Australia, and in particular on the state of Victoria for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb”.

Danny Nalliah epitomizes what I despise about religion. His self-righteous posturing, and despicable ignorant proselytizing is primitive and dangerous. He has told his followers that if they pray for forgiveness, God will deliver them from this horrific tragedy, and spare further fires. Of course, Danny wins whether or not the fires stop or worsen; if they die back, then the prayers are successful, if they flare up again, then God is still pissed. This is not a new game to Nalliah – before the last Australian elections he prophesied: “I will boldly declare that Prime Minister John Howard will be re-elected in the November election (if the Body of Christ unites in prayer and action) and pass the leadership onto Peter Costello sometime after.”

Of course, he was plain wrong, but sadly, for some reason religion is rarely called to answer for blunders of such magnitude. I guess that’s what happens when you write an escape clause into everything you ‘predict’.

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*I’m certainly not linking to this reprehensible organization – they don’t deserve the honour.

†As prophetic dreams go, this is pretty standard fare – there’s no specific prediction of a bushfire (it could just as easily have been a bomb blast, an industrial accident or an incident of arson, or riffing metaphorically, any of a hundred other things), and there’s no specified time limit (so it could be in a month, or in a year, or a decade). You see how this goes – a fire of some kind, at some time, is hardly much of a prophesy. Especially in a land that has bushfires every summer, to a greater or lesser degree of damage.

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In today’s lesson, we are studying the Australian Coat of Arms, that features, as you will have noticed, a kangaroo and an emu supporting a shield. The shield is divided into six portions, each illustrating one of the six Australian states. The Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, not being yer actual ‘states’, are not represented by any pictures, but their inclusion (and any further inclusions*) is supposedly implied by the seven pointed star above the shield (I can just imagine the marketing meeting where they spun that one up…).

In case you ever visit Australia, and find yourself in the bathroom of a pub using a ‘Turbo’ brand hand dryer, this is not the Australian Coat of Arms (if can’t quite make it out, the kangaroo is drying his paws while the emu looks on):

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*I swear, with Little Johnny Howard at the helm it wouldn’t have been too long before we were launching missiles on New Zealand or somewhere (in order to overthrow some despotic dictator, of course).

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Yeah, I know, I tell you I don’t do movie reviews and yet here’s another one of the damn things. What can I say – I feel compelled to comment on this one for the benefit of my buddies who worked on it and all my overseas readers who may or may not care to see it. So sue me – I’m making this blogging thing up as I go along.

First of all, I’ll get this out of the way so those of you looking for my usual acerbic cynicism can go read The Onion – I liked Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and I’m going to say mostly nice things about it. It’s a big, corny, campy mash of Gone With the Wind, Once Upon a Time in the West, Out of Africa and The Wizard of Oz that makes no excuse for being a melodrama of epic proportions. In fact, it is aligned so much in temperament with Luhrmann’s three ‘Red Curtain’ movies (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge) that I’m not sure why he has publicly divorced it from those films – it seems to me that preparing an audience to approach it as part of that ouvre might actually help them understand where it’s coming from.

There’s really not a lot to the plot of Australia. It’s a simple tale in two acts that weaves together a three-way love story, cultural biases & preconceptions, and big set action pieces, into a saga of grand, technicolour brushtrokes. It’s not David Lean, and it’s not Sergio Leone (even if it nods at both those directors) but it truly is Baz Luhrmann.

It is, in my opinion, a good thing that Russell Crowe, who was originally cast in the part of ‘The Drover’, pulled out of the film. There would be few who would disagree that, in this picture, Hugh Jackman really owns the role of the stereotypical laconic bushman, and as much as I really didn’t quite buy into the supposed passion between Jackman and Nicole Kidman (playing the prissy-but-ultimately-feisty Lady Sarah Ashley), I think I’d have bought it far less with Crowe doing the canoodling. The cast does a pretty credible job in the main, with Brandon Walters as ‘Nullah’ upstaging just about everyone without apparently even trying, and Bryan Brown and David Wenham playing bad guys of such extreme pantomime that I expected that they just might attempt to tie Kidman to some railway tracks.

For Australians, the film is a real round-up of familiar local performing talent. Barry Otto, Bruce Spence, Jack Thompson, David Gulpilil, Arthur Dignam, John Jarratt, Max Cullen, Sandy Gore and a host of other recognizable faces flit across the screen, filling the movie with a nostalgia that few foreigners will feel. The Australian countryside never looked more spectacular, lush with beauty from billabong to Never Never. With all these elements in play it’s as if Luhrmann has tried to distill the essence of every Australian ‘landscape’ film ever made (and by that I mean the films of grand throw, such as Sunday Too Far Away; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith; Mad Max; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Dead Heart; The Man From Snowy River; Rabbit Proof Fence et al) into one swirling mélange of Aussie popular film history. The music by David Hirschfelder operates on a similar level of pastiche, deftly weaving together quotes and variations on Sheep May Safely Graze, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Waltzing Matilda with the original score. Other references to Australian culture abound; Nullah’s dog is called Jedda; Lady Ashley’s horse is called Capricornia. It’s this cheeky love of detail, and the film’s sense of fun with the high drama that confidently keeps it from veering towards what could easily have been a rudderless mess. It’s truly operatic cinema.

The film is beautifully photographed by Mandy Walker and the costumes by Catherine Martin are gritty or pretty, as required. The production design and art direction are rich and elaborate – unsurprising in a Luhrmann picture, and the film sounds good and solid, if a little workmanlike (personal beef: if you’re making all your other components so hyperbolic, why wimp out on the sound?). There is rather too much music for my taste, and some of the visual effects are a bit ropey, but that’s hardly surprising given the rush in post-production to meet the screening date. The pic has been criticized for being over-long, and long it is, but it is always engaging enough to stop it bogging down.

Is Australia a true reflection of Australia?

Yes. Outback cattle stations do really look like that, and those big droves really did happen; Australians do really talk like that,† (although a drover would likely use something a little more salty than ‘Crikey!’ as an expletive); there really was a man known as ‘The Cattle King’ (Sir Sidney Kidman – no relation as far as I know) who systematically bought up millions of acres of outback cattle country and became very wealthy; the Aboriginal people really do ‘sing’ the land; Darwin really was bombed in WWII (the only serious incursion of the Japanese into Australian territory‡); we do shoot kangaroos, and eat them; Aboriginal trackers did help the white police hunt Aboriginal ‘fugitives’, and Aboriginal children were, for far too many years, removed from their families and raised in ‘good Christian missions’ (including an island off the coast of the Northern Territory); the Wet does save the land every year, and the results are just as spectacular as they look in the movie.

The flavour of an archetypical and mythical Australia suffuses the film, and I’m really glad about that, even if it is mostly a cliché. It’s the same kind of myth that you find in the Wild West and the Deep South of the old-fashioned American cinema that I loved as a kid. No-one’s really attempted this in Australian cinema (with the exception of The Man From Snowy River, perhaps) and even if it’s kinda quaint as a concept, someone needed to do it, and that someone could really only have been Baz Luhrmann.

Is Australia a true reflection of Australia?

No. I can’t imagine a pub full of drinkers of any era actually singing rousing choruses of Waltzing Matilda; the real Cattle King, although famously tight-fisted, was not the villain he is painted in the film, and he died in 1935, well before the war started; as far as I know, there are not, and never have been, such tipples as ‘Poor Fella’ rum, or ‘Kanga’ lager; station bosses in the outback probably didn’t have revolvers in holsters as a general rule (I don’t say that with any authority – it’s just that rifles are much more useful than pistols out on the cattle stations); even though the Wet refreshes the land like nothing you’d believe, an outback station would hardly support an explosion of azaleas, a lawn, and – what was that – a frangipani? So Baz has been flexible with the truth in the interests of the operatic vision.

But then, the clinical Old West of Leone and Ford, the genteel South of Mitchell & Fleming and the frosty Russia of Lean are all colourful caricatures too, and we love them despite their foibles. Why not Australia?

I saw the film in a packed cinema here in Hollywood. I assume that the LA audience is relatively sophisticated and probably nearly as cynical as I am. Yet when the lights came up, they applauded the film and they applauded the director. They may not have left the cinema with an accurate historical picture of Australia but my guess is that they left with an accurate assessment of the spirit of Australia. And what more could you ask of a movie than that?

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†And not at ALL like the execrable supposedly-Australian accent I heard from an actor in Frost/Nixon the other night – you’d think they could find at least one Aussie actor in Hollywood…

‡Japanese ‘mini’ submarines also made it into Sydney Harbour, quite unbelievably, but caused little damage.

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Australia is a country that is a long way from pretty much anywhere. For instance, if you had to walk to Australia from the US, it would take you nearly four months if you walked 24 hours per day and didn’t stop for lunch. And then you’d drown because most of the way it’s ocean.

Australia is also a country that lives under the illusion that it somehow has a credible presence on the world stage. I don’t exactly know how anyone here got that idea if they’ve traveled anywhere further than Bali, but that’s what our politicians keep telling us on the television.

Now for a very long time, Australia’s geographical disenchantment has been the source of hefty disadvantage when it comes to its interface with the rest of the globe. These difficulties affect political interaction, commerce, the arts and cultural discourse. This problem has come to be referred to as the Tyranny of Distance (from the title of a book and philosophies of a very famous Australian historian). For many decades, this looked like an insurmountable (or at the very least, hideously expensive) handicap for our isolated outpost.*

“If only,” people thought, “there was a way to communicate instantly with people in foreign lands! If only you could send them movies and music and pictures, collaborate on their projects, talk to them face to face and generally conduct business and social interactions as if you were just a couple of blocks away! If only they could pay you in their foreign money to do all those things via, oh, I dunno, some kind of secure money exchange that happened in real time! If only, instead of you having to sell your shiny gew-gaws to a sparse few customers in your neighbourhood, you could hawk them to a vast population of potential buyers from here to Timbuktu, all from the comfort of your own kangaroo populated home! Wouldn’t all that be just SUPER!??? Wouldn’t that almost instantly solve the difficulty of the Tyranny of Distance? Wouldn’t the democratically elected government of the Great Southern Land break open the bottles of locally-produced superior sparkling wines† and bend over backwards to see that such a magical solution was given every opportunity to work for the benefit of its citizens, its economy and its image as a forward-thinking and innovative political force of the 21st Century?”

Well, Acowlytes, that may very well have happened in some alternate reality where unicorns feast on sugar berries and rainbows grace every dew-frosted morning, but it’s not so, evidently, in the reality which we currently inhabit.

Some of you may have noticed that I’m sporting a new badge in the side bar over there to the right. This is because I’m really pissed-off that our government, notably their mouthpiece, the poorly informed Senator Stephen Conroy, is now trying to institute a level of censorship on the internet in Australia that is equalled in its draconian scope only by the restrictions on the personal freedoms imposed on the citizens of China and North Korea by their respective governments. And why? Solely because Senator Conroy (presumably goaded by a similarly unsophisticated lobby group) is apparently convinced that internet porn is going to flood into Australia and corrupt the minds of our youngsters, turning them into sex-obsessed Satan-worshipping crack-heads, and somehow usher in The End of Days. Or something.‡

I won’t explain the whole thing here – the proposal that has been advanced is so monumentally daft that a schoolkid can see the problems with it (and undoubtedly circumvent it faster than Senator Conroy can tie his shoelaces) – but if you are interested in further reading, the Electronic Frontiers Australia has a comprehensive and rational deconstruction of it on their ‘No Clean Feed’ site. (If you’re an Australian blogger, please go read it, and take some time to mount a protest in any of the manners suggested by EFA. This will affect you).

Briefly, the scheme that Conroy’s office has concocted, spearheaded by people who evidently think that the internet is some form of television, calls for censored content filtering to be imposed at ISP level on everything that comes into the country. It is entirely boggling to the mind that they believe this is even feasible, let alone that it will work. I can’t begin to imagine what kind of intellectual cripples are advising the government on the strategies they are suggesting should be implemented.** One thing is certain, any type of filtering on the scale called for by the so-called ‘Clean Feed’ proposal will bog down the net in Australia to a crawl and make standard commerce a chore beyond measure. Hear me Mr Conroy: these things are already becoming a problem, even before your dumb scheme kicks in.††

The image that leaps repeatedly to mind is that of a bunch of vigilantes from a medieval city deciding to burn all the bridges that lead into town in an attempt to keep out snakes.

For those of us who rely on the net as part of our business, particularly if we engage in significant international communication and data exchange on a regular basis, Senator Conroy’s idiotic concept is lunacy on an unparalleled scale. Our internet system is already over-priced and inadequate, a situation that our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has pledged to rectify with extravagant overhauls of the current infrastructure. That was all looking like a promising move forward until Stephen Conroy’s torch-bearing villagers arrived on the scene.

And if Senator Conroy’s department being completely wrong isn’t bad enough, they don’t want to be told they’re wrong either. Mark Newton, a network engineer with an Australian ISP, Internode, who wrote an incisive and highly critical appraisal of the Clean Feed proposal (as is his right as an Australian citizen) has been the target of attempted bullying by Senator Conroy’s office in an effort to silence his dissent.

In his letter, Newton completely discredits Government assertions that trials have shown that a filtering scheme is viable. Confronted with Newton’s devastating demolition of their cunning plan, the Government’s response (in what can only be described as a typical last resort of desperate politics), was to promptly distance itself from the whole affair by laying the responsibility for the trials at the feet of the previous Government. So much for informed debate.

So, dear Potential Foreign Business Partner: if you’re thinking of taking your business to China or North Korea because they’re giving you a better deal, remember that, until global warming sets in, we still have better beaches. And Kangaroos. And the flights here are only going to get cheaper, right?

UPDATE: Even though opposition to the Clean Feed is growing (thank Spagmonster someone’s noticed…) Stephen Conroy continues to fail to understand the problem. In this morning’s Melbourne Age he is quoted as saying:

I will accept some debate around what should and should not be on the internet — I am not a wowser. I am not looking to blanket-ban some of the material that it is being claimed I want to blanket-ban, but some material online, such as child pornography, is illegal.

Senator Conroy, you really don’t get it, do you? We all agree that the internet allows some people to gain access to some material that is not desirable by our consensual moral standards. That’s not an argument that anyone has mounted. And there is a LOT of material online that is illegal. That’s not in dispute either. It is magnanimous of you to suggest that you will deign to ‘accept some debate’ about it, but that is entirely beside the point. What you think ‘should and should not be on the internet’ is as irrelevant as what you think should or should not be in people’s heads. You cannot do anything about that. And trying to make the internet into what you think it should be by using your silly filtering system is entirely impractical. It won’t work. It is a DUMB IDEA and it is not the way to tackle the problem.

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*Fortunately we had a lot of things we could dig out of the ground that other people were prepared to pay lots of money for us to send to them, so our fate as a permanent continent-sized penal colony was averted.

†Not Champagne, of course.

‡This certainly has to be along the lines of how these people think. You really have to wonder about the magnitude of their obsession. No-one’s going to argue that there is a level of undesirable material out there on the net, just like there is in the real world, but speaking as a person who spends a good portion of every day online, it’s not something that ever has an impact on my usual daily life. You can close your eyes and hide under the covers and pretend it’s not there Senator Conroy, but that don’t change a thing. Why not handle it productively and, oh, educate people better. Oops. Silly me. WAY too hard an option.

**One can only speculate that anyone with any expertise in such matters is cynically accepting Government money in the full knowledge that any system they may be attempting to set up will comprehensively fail. Either that or they’re idiots.

††And aside from that, do you have any idea how much this makes us look like utter inbred hillbillies to the rest of the world?

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October 15, 2008: ABC News Online:

Australia will join five other countries in what scientists describe as one of the most ambitious explorations of the Antarctic.

Buried deep beneath the Antarctic continent is a mountain range of such a huge scale that scientists are almost in awe of what they are about to do.

My God! DON’T THESE PEOPLE READ!?