Jan 18 2009
Who Owns the World?
Who Owns the World?
Who Owns You?
“We just left a message for you – on your blackboard, back at your house!” The six year-old smiled through his serious pale eyes, surprised to see me in the village.
“Thanks so much! What did the message say?”
“It said we came to see you, but you weren’t home. Where were you?”
“Right here in town for a change!” Boing the acrobat and McBoing his son had just left the small bakery and paused outside the hand-made chocolate shop when we bumped into each other. Boing was easy to spot, wearing his trademark magenta townie’s hat. He was rearranging his son’s accoutrements, under the watchful eye of the newly installed street camera. We arranged a rendezvous up the road, at Rusty and Kim’s place, where much of the impending Exodus festival is being organised.
The village of two and a half thousand souls has a ‘chamber of commerce’ – even though it has no actual ‘chamber’ – a self-important group that recently decided it would be a good idea to put a live feed of the main street on the web. The broken town clock was being refurbished and a plea went out to raise funds to repair it. Many in the village pitched in and more money was raised than was needed, so it was easy to add a few hundred bucks to the cost and install two cameras. Now their glassy stare is fixed up and down the wide main street that was once an avenue for logs hauled by dozens of bullocks. For a while it was the main national highway, in times that were better in some ways and worse in others - whether you’re an Aboriginal person or not.
It used to be a timeless town. Now the clock is ticking – right beside the poorly phrased ‘Reach Out to Kids With Cancer’ plaque, mounted on a granite rock imported from some other region. And now the town is under remote surveillance. These days we do the security agencies’ work for them. We even pay good money to install the very equipment that in other times will be used to oppress us - if the government fails to get it together. Novelty and narcissism combine with our laughably short memories to condemn our children to the excesses of control freaks. The kids are even programmed to view ‘Big Brother’ as some semi-benign and divine distant family member with our best interests at the heart of his concerns. Totalitarianism is a word that’s too long for many people to spell, understand or remember.
We cross the road to avoid the pubfull of leering loud drunks and saunter past the supermarket, where cheaper alcohol is sold to rednecks and aboriginals alike. Not like the old days, forty years ago or less, when the blacks weren’t allowed to buy alcohol from these poisoned waterholes – or allowed to buy vanilla icecream from any local shop. But they were happily sold other colours and flavours, before they were allowed to be citizens (and were no longer classed as ‘wildlife’), in the late 1960s. Most of them preferred chocolate icecream anyway.
A few minutes later we’re in a suburban town backyard, shaded from the bright summer sun beneath Rusty’s shopfront home, an old hardwood building opposite the local police station. Cosmo the dog pants and salivates all over us. In ‘my day’ the kids were asked to play outside when their parents were smoking; now, for some unimaginable series of so-called reasons, the adults leave the house to smoke while the kids stay glued to a screen inside. Makes sense if you don’t think about it – particularly when Huddo turns up and says, “Hey, guys, you can smell that right over the road.”
“But there’s no-one at the station, is there?” eye ask.
“No – but they could turn up any time.”
“Then let’s hope they have some real criminals to catch.”
Huddo – who’s patiently waiting for a lift out of the valley – shakes his bearded head. “I’ll be back in a few minutes then.”
“Hi, Ram!” Young McBoing greets me from his chair betwixt Boing and the lad’s mother, a psychology researcher. “We were just at your place, swimming in your river, Ram!”
“It isn’t my river – feel free to swim there any time!”
“Actually,” his mother informs him, “we own part of the same river, just upstream, don’t we?”
“Actually,” eye tell her, “your land title doesn’t even say you own the land you think you bought. It only gives you the right to occupy it. Check the deed for yourself…”
“Actually,” Rusty cuts in with red dreads swinging, eyeing me across the table, “everyone owns the river, wouldn’t you say?”
“Actually,” eye reply, “it’s more a case of no-one owns the river. We all share it with everything else. We’re made of it.”
“I know that anyone can walk along the riverbanks – but just what is the law in this area?” the psychologist asks. “Where are the boundary lines?” A double-barreled question. Being judgmental and pusillanimous is a real downer, but everyone expects it of me. It’s one of my roles. No point disappointing them. Avoiding the more obviously rude responses such as, ‘In your mind,’ eye give her a fairly accurate summation.
“On paper the property lines go to the centre of the river on the titles around here – but the river has changed course since the blocks were surveyed. That’s one reason the cattle ‘owners’ trash the banks – they often end up with more land than they’re entitled to.”
“So our boundary is the middle of the river?”
“Probably. Yes and no – the banks and water are actually public property. The only ones who aren’t allowed on the banks or in the river are cattle.”
“So we can go there any time, right?”
“Of course - even landholders are part of the public. But you can piss people off if you try to walk through their backyard, and crossing their land to reach the river is still trespassing.”
“We can canoe or swim anywhere we like though, right?”
“Only if you don’t run into the barbed-wire fences the jerks have strung across the boundary lines, instead of fencing the cows away from the banks.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” the psychologist asks, exhaling and passing the smoke to Rusty.
“Only for the last century or two. Almost everything they do is illegal – burning and logging forests on river banks and in upper water catchments or grazing horned beasts there, so the desexed steers everyone eats can have a little more grass; destroying the rivers with cattle is illegal, spraying fertiliser and poison in the water courses upstream from all the towns is illegal. Cutting a single tree or having a cow or sheep within twenty metres of the upper bank of any watercourse, temporary or permanent, is illegal. You don’t expect these halfwits to act responsibly with no-one watching over their shoulders, do you?”
“How do they still get away with it?”
“None of the environmental agencies have any teeth. No-one watches or protects the rivers and forests except poor hippies and ferals who can be burned out, beaten up or busted by the rednecks at any time. No-one ever busts the farmers for breaking the law and trashing everyone’s planet – the worst they get is a slap on the wrist. As long as people can buy dead animals in the supermarket, no-on notices or cares that paradise is destroyed – until the water runs out.” It’s difficult not to take the high moral ground when you’re a vegetarian forest-saving greenie who actually practices what they preach. Everyone else here, no matter their political or ethical allegiance is a beef eater– like Cosmo the carnivorous wolf, disguised as ‘man’s best friend’. See how friendly they are if you don’t feed them – they’ll eat your children.
“Don’t know the value of water until the well runs dry,” Rusty observes.
“Maybe,” she says, “we could start up the local catchment group again…”
“Great idea!” We discuss the details for a while. What’s left unsaid is that none of them actually live on the land yet (despite years of ‘intentions’ to move from the cities and towns onto the block that’s been waiting for them for years), while many of the cow ranchers were born in the houses they still inhabit. These concerned citizens are worried about their ‘country property’, not about their lives – or those of all the rare and endangered creatures in the national parks that surround the gouges we make in paradise, in order to live here with superfluous imported comforts and luxuries.
Things only change when responsible ecologists start to outnumber the assholes in an area. Most people who have the ready dosh to buy land aren’t responsible ecologists, even if they aren’t cow ranchers. Most people have no idea. Most people look at the forest and see dollar signs instead of trees, when it comes to the crunch – like a mid-life crisis or a relationship hassle.
You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution, there’s no middle ground. It’s always possible to be both, of course – if you’re an ignorant hypocrite. A hippie critter usually makes a much better, more caring and sharing neighbour than does a ‘land owner’ who doesn’t even know they don’t legally own ‘their land’.
A True Story (and flagrant opinion)
- R.A.
image - author’s
