Land, Truth Telling, Dark Emu and Humankind.
A sailing trip through four books.
If we can unclutter our minds from the relentless pressure of modern life there becomes the chance to think, for it is the set ways of our day to day that chains us both physically and intellectually. For many this is achieved only on holiday and this usually means travel, and the best form of travel is slow travel where there is the time and space to relax. When we relax we can assimilate new ideas and we begin a journey of learning. Australia with its big open spaces and vast distances could well be the home of slow travel. Australia could be the home of some remarkable thinking.
Of course the slowest travel is not to move at all, to lose yourself in the multiple worlds of books. For this essay I am going to give you both. Slow travel by yacht along the West Australian coast, and thoughts that come from the ideas within books I read while on that yacht.
Our trip began as a drive through inland Western Australia to Exmouth where we met our friends on their yacht. Our plan was a sailing trip to the Montebello Islands, an isolated marine park where the water is warm and the fish plentiful. Our further plan, if there was one, involved swimming, eating, drinking, and not thinking too hard about anything, and if ever the need to rush or to think arose I had these good books to distract me.
The Montebellos were the site of the first British nuclear tests, but sixty-five years later it is now pristine and safe. Radiation is present in a few hot-spots but the animals and vegetation, and the corals and sea life, these all seemed to be less damaged than they might otherwise be if the Montebellos had suffered the normal run of human activity.
Twisted metal remnants and radiation warning signs are a reminder that, on October 3rd 1952, we were no more than a lacky to Great Britain. Not just any test either — nuclear tests. Atomic bombs. How dare they blow up paradise! A part of Australia, my land, that they blew up then left to glow in the dark for two generations. At least now we can determine our own future.
And so it is that I am at sea reading ‘Land’, by Simon Winchester, (William Collins, 2021) as ideas of sovereignty and identity interfere with our relaxing holiday. ‘Land’ starts with a quote from Rousseau ‘…the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’ We meet Rousseau again in a bit more detail, in ‘Humankind’, but this quote in this place in ‘Land’ hints at a point of view. He never says it, but throughout this book I get the feeling that perhaps Simon Winchester agrees with me that there is a problem with how the modern world is shaped, how the rich get richer with much of their accumulating wealth based upon the ownership of land.
Simon Winchester is a prolific writer and well regarded for his historical works that weave history around a single theme. His book, ‘Exactly’ (Harper Collins, 2019) is the history of precision and ranges from nuts and bolts to jet engines and guns. It was guns that allowed so much of the usurpation of land by colonial powers, and once everyone had guns they got bigger guns and then, you guessed it, atomic bombs.
But Land. As a title it hardly evokes excitement, but single item history books form a new wave of publishing. You might have read ‘Cod’, Mark Kurlansky’s history and decline of the Atlantic Cod fishing, (1999, Vintage) as it was a best seller. But can you think of anything less interesting than a cod fish? How about a shipping container? ‘The Box’ (by Mark Levinson, published by Princeton University press in 2016) is the history of the shipping container and a fascinating book that includes links to the Vietnam war, Sony, and how we have come to live with all the affordable devices and comforts we now have. Or there is Bill Bryson’s history of our homes, called ‘At Home’ (2012, Transworld Publishing) where I can remember almost nothing other than to always put the toilet seat down before I flush because each flush pushes a gazillion germs into the air.
The point being reading these histories is not so much about the title or numbers and dates but about how it makes us feel. For the problems of the past will most likely be problems of the future and humans are emotional creatures and as I read ‘Land’ while on a yacht anchored under a perfect sunset I remember on the road trip to Exmouth we had driven by the front gate of Andrew Forrest’s pastoral holdings. Andrew Forrest is Australia’s richest man and someone right up there with claiming ownership of more of the planet than anyone else. How do I feel about this?
The argument might be that private ownership is the best way to keep the land productive. Most of us have heard the phrase ‘Tragedy of commons’, an idea first proposed by 1968 by American ecologist Garret Hardin. He wrote that to prevent the overuse and degradation of common land there should be restrictions on the use and the best way to achieve this was by property rights. An individual owner would look after the land, well, as if it were his own. Usurping commonly owned land by the rich and powerful began long before Hardin gave it the legitimacy it does not deserve but ‘Tragedy of commons’ is and always was a dubious proposition. Simon Winchester provides plenty of examples of successfully managed community land and I am sure you, like me, can look around and see privately held land that is severely degraded.
The taking of common land by the rich and powerful on the basis that it could be better utilised is something none of us would condone, right?
Land management prior and during European settlement of Australia is the subject of ‘Dark Emu’ by Bruce Pascoe (Magabala books, 2014). The book won awards when it was released and continues to cause somewhat of a storm, engendering rebuttal works such as ‘Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?’ by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe (Melbourne University Press, 2021). Some other criticism seemed to focus on whether Bruce Pascoe is indeed Indigenous, one even calling him a ‘fauxboriginal’. As if that matters. As if it matters also what label we attach to an ancient people who by design or luck modified the landscape and therefore the plants and animals on it, a people who garnered a living from the land. Bruce Pascoe is more concerned with what might have been and how we might learn from it and therefore tread a little less harshly on a fragile world. There is no question much of Australia is farmed unsustainably and maybe we would be better pressed to husband local species that are adapted to the local environment.
In a chapter entitled ‘Accepting history and creating the future’, Bruce Pascoe says ‘To wonder about the trajectory of modern civilisations is not to sneer at private enterprise or scientific enquiry, but to wish those energies were directed in such a way that they do not destroy the planet.’
In any case Dark Emu simply follows from ‘Biggest Estate on Earth’ by Bill Gammage, (Allen and Unwin, 2011) and both draw on copious amounts of research and provide numerous quotes from earlier observers. In regard to the European settlement of Adelaide, and observing that the two cultures failed to meet and learn from each other, Bill Gammage simply says ‘they both lost.’
Call the indigenous lifestyle what you will, but there seems now little doubt that when Europeans arrived in Australia it was populated extensively by a people whose individual groups lived over a defined range. They managed the land and they thought of themselves as custodians of it, not owners of it. And hence we have a problem. The great south land was no terra nullius and the very foundation of the nation is flawed.
But Dark Emu is not a book of problems or anger, it is an essay to change our understanding. The clue is in the title that invites us to try to see things anew, the emu being the shape of a dark space in the Milky Way. Do you see the stars, or the dark shape? Look up at night from the deck of a yacht anchored in the Montebello isolation and it is obvious. Why can’t we see the obvious?
When describing the Aboriginal people as the worlds oldest bakers, making bread from native seeds effectively domesticated through multiple tens of thousands of years of selection, and almost 15,000 years before anyone in Egypt thought to try baking bread, Bruce Pascoe asks ‘Why don’t our hearts fill with wonder and pride?’
Indeed. It seems we have no problem taking pride in ancient art sites probably as old as any in the world, art from a culture as old as any other, but we have difficulty attributing any credence to the idea of European type farming by a people who didn’t even invent the wheel. Is art a childish response to idleness or the manifestation of a complex and ritualistic society doing the best they can with what was available? Perhaps Jared Diamond had the answer in ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ (W Norton, 1997) where he points out, rather obviously perhaps, how difficult it would be to saddle up a kangaroo or to use one to tow a plough.
Later, in discussing some of the native grasses and how they are well adapted and might be used to produce a genuine Australian cuisine, Bruce Pascoe is even more enthused. ‘Set aside a few paddocks and have some fun, and I’ll eat my boot if it doesn’t yield a profit.’
Here is a historian I’d like to meet, and hopefully not at a charity dinner where he is eating his Blundstone.
‘Truth Telling’, by Henry Reynolds (Newsouth publishing, 2021), shows us the future will not be best served by fast legal footwork over the semantics of food gathering behaviour. The book is inspired by and begins with the Uluru ‘Statement from the heart’ and if nothing else you should read the statement. That 250 people could get together and agree, on anything, is remarkable. If a statement of such power, of such conciliation, of such wisdom, came from one person it would be remarkable. That it came from such a large group carrying so much historical baggage leaves me in awe.
‘Truth Telling’ is not so much about the Uluru Statement but a recognition that without telling the truth the ghosts and sins of the past will never diminish. This book lays out that truth. The truth, that more people died in what might be called the frontier wars of Australia than Australians died in the Boer, First, Second, Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, wars. Combined. And yet, in refurbishing the Australian War Memorial for $500 million nothing was allocated to recognition of these frontier wars, either there or anywhere else.
This, and plenty more, reasons to be angry. Yet the statement from the heart concludes ‘We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.’
Wow.
Whatever the legal arguments around terra nullius, the reality is that European occupation and resultant violence over much of Australia was at the hands of the settlers. Government forces came later to protect the settlers from dispossessed locals who were a little bit upset to have their land and livelihood taken from them. These settlers had been sold many things, one being the land itself. Another was the savage nature of uncivilised man.
This brings us to ‘Humankind’, by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury, 2021), a book that asks what the true nature of a human is? The first chapters are a revelation and if the power men of Russia had read this book the war in Ukraine might be a different proposition. Bregman shows us that taking a fight to the civilian population all you do is galvanise resistance. You might win the territory, but you will never win the population.
But what is war? Is it that without the tempering influences of education and civil society we would descend to savages, like those boys did in ‘Lord of the Flies’? (William Golding, Faber and Faber, 1954) Or are we by nature a kind and co-operative species?
Most likely you have read ‘Lord of the flies’ and you probably believe the idea of humanity it contains, for this is an idea also promoted by the kings who send us to war, the politician who appeals to our patriotism, and the election speech that promises to ‘turn back the boats’. Civilisation is all that separates us from the violent savage.
Bregman tells us William Golding was an alcoholic depressive, a school teacher who once divided his class of boys into two teams and encouraged them to fight. Golding was writing just after the second world war under the shadow of Nazism and so his version of human nature was easy to believe. The book became more than a novel. Many considered it to be proof of our innate savagery. Bregman set out to find if the scenario in ‘Lord of the flies’ has ever happened for real.
And it has, and the actual evidence seems to overwhelmingly suggest we are not naturally violent or warlike. Rutger Bregman says we rather should be called Homo puppy than Homo sapiens. We survived while Neanderthals didn’t, despite Neanderthals being bigger and stronger and having a larger brain. The difference is cooperation. As a survival strategy cooperation trumps intelligence or strength, a proposition you might have met at a corporate teambuilding event under the guise of ‘Champion team not a team of champions.’
But it would be a mistake to gather this truth from a single book. In his book ‘Walls’ David Frye (Scribner, 2018) details the repeated tendency of humankind to build walls to keep out the barbarians. The problem is that those living the cloistered safe life behind the walls revert to their true nature. They learn to write poetry and cooperate in creative endeavours and hence forget how to be warriors and the inevitable result is that eventually the barbarians successfully storm the walls.
Maybe walls just make those locked outside of them angry? Or Maybe there are two types of people, civilised or savage, barbarian or poet? Well, yes, of course, evolution works because of variation. Just as some people are tall and others short, some are cooperative and others are aggressive. Everyone exists somewhere along that continuum and we observe human history is a history of attempts to live the peaceful and cooperative life interspersed with occasional conflict inflamed by a vested interest who calls outsiders barbarians.
But back to Bregman, who in ‘Humankind’ tells us the story of Rousseau and the full quote from ‘Land’ that I mentioned at the beginning is worth repeating here.
“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’ ”
The attributes of competition and savagery are encouraged by the very forces that purport to civilise us, by leaders who build the walls or who would send us to war to defend ‘our’ land that is that is really no-ones to own at all.
Yes, wars are fought over land. The politics of ‘othering’ builds us as teams in different colours. It denies that although we speak a different language we are saying the same thing, until eventually we believe the lie ourselves, that the other side are nothing more than savages, barbarians, uncivilised and ruthless, and we must respond in kind.
In one of those wars, prior to the precision and mass production of weapons that Simon Winchester tells us about in ‘Exactly’, many muzzle loading guns that survived the battle were found with multiple shot loaded down the barrel. One had a total of 26 of the lead balls stacked one upon the other! Now, you can’t ram in more than one shot or the gun will explode when fired, but on the battlefield a soldier has only one excuse for not shooting at the enemy and that is to be loading his weapon. When the boss is watching make busy loading your weapon. Humans do not want to kill each other.
We all know we naturally shy away from conflict often to our own detriment. We greet strangers with a smile and handshake. Or, remember Christmas eve on the front in WW1? It is a story most have heard, how soldiers from both sides climbed out of the trenches and met in no-man’s land, shared cake and photos of their loved ones and the next day refused to fire, or if they had to, aimed high overhead. How, on the Australian frontier, settlers frequently befriended or were befriended by the indigenous people. How, despite all that has come before and all that still goes on, a statement can come from the heart that is not a declaration of war but an offer of conciliation. An offer to walk to a better future. In a time when war seems to be descending into little more than a drone strike computer game with all our natural humanity removed I think this is an offer of hope.
At the end of our month in the Montebellos we sailed to Onslow where we visited the museum and researched what we could about the atomic testing. Which was not much as the testing was done in secret and most of the story told in the museum is about the press contingent trying to find out what was really happening just over the horizon. Secrets and lies for the greater good.
We then sailed home to Exmouth and sometimes, when we least expect it, something jumps out at us and so it was when, after reading these four books and fermenting the ideas within them, I came upon the following quote in the Exmouth Museum. It is from Miho Stephano, who was shipwrecked on the Ningaloo coast in 1876. Miho and Ivan Jurich were the only two survivors and there were no European settlements nearby at that time. The two boys were taken in by locals who lived a traditional life punctuated by only occasional contact with the trading boats of pearlers.
Life was not easy for these locals. Each day they hunted and foraged, and each day they moved on so as not to exhaust the food and water in the area, so it was to their own detriment that they looked after the two boys who were near death. They camped with them until they were strong enough to walk, then the group moved and the boys were handed over to another group, and so on, until they got to a place now called Bay of Rest and met Charles Tuckey and his trading schooner. Hungry barbarians who are cannibals? Or the kindness of humanity.
The story is told in ‘The wreck of the barque Stephano’ (by Gustav Rathe, Hesperian press, 1990), and is not so much about shipwreck as about the traditional lives of the people of Northwest Cape, (on land now owned by Andrew Forrest). They lived with no enclosures or stakes or ditches to mark territory, and the landscape was networked by walking paths they all shared.
‘The West Australian nomad, in quiet possession of their native haunts, establishes that man is not intrinsically bad. Outside conditions and environments make them bad. In his natural state, man’s divine origin manifests itself plainly. When he can provide for himself honestly and without meeting opposition, he will freely use all his faculties, physical and moral, to do good and not evil.’
That was written sometime in the 1880’s by Miho Stephano. The evidence, past and present, is that we are a cooperative species. We tend towards kindness rather than aggression, we prefer to be helpful where we can be.
‘We invite you to walk with us.’
This invitation to walk is an invitation to human scale movement towards a better future. A future as wonderful as the Montebellos where nature has come back from the devastation of three nuclear blasts. If enough of us read nothing more than the prologue to ‘Humankind’ there might be enough pushback against the political ‘othering’ that holds us away from that better future. When the oldest civilisation invites us to walk with them I say take notice. Australia could be the home of something remarkable.
