Mar 31 2009
Location, Location, Vocation…
Location, Location, Vocation…
Location, location, location is not merely a money-making mantra in the world of so-called ‘real’ estate; it’s a necessity for long-term survival. Realty is reality with no ‘I’, no eye for the REAL reality of life and living. People sell their souls to ‘own’ something that will forever outlast them and their puny efforts to remake it in the image of Mammon. Can a mayfly own a tree or a hill? But money nonetheless goes and grows where the feng shui flows healthy, balanced and strong; the literally poisonous tendrils of ‘progress’ can’t easily reach here, and when they attempt to they’re usually hacked off by circumstance or ‘coincidence’.
There’s an old, crackly copper telephone line that will sometimes sustain an internet connexion at the doddering government-guaranteed speed of under twenty kilobytes per second. That’s right, 19.2 kbs. It’s a joke even when it works. There’s no mobile reception out here for third-class rural citizens, unless we personally invest in a supremely expensive satellite phone to get the basic service that’s guaranteed to all others.
You’re reading this (and my other sites, possibly – see below) because I pay five bucks an hour to enter it all on the net at the nearest internet ‘café’ (where we’re not allowed to eat or drink coffee), after driving fifty klicks on dangerous winding roads to the nearest village in the Jackaroo Deva. So if the missives aren’t posted every day, don’t be surprised – I make no apologies. You can make a donation to the cause at the New Illuminati or Prince of Centraxis sites below – other not-for-profit sites that offer glimmerings from the Other Side.
We other ratepayers outside the towns have to drive our own garbage to the tip (a hundred kilometer round trip) with its limited recycling systems - and we have to pay to get in. Shades of Alice’s Restaurant. We get no services for our mandatory payments to local government or the all-powerful beef producer’s board, which is entitled to place an inescapable impost on rural landholders – even if they don’t grow beef – but at least we don’t pay (pause to spit) rent to be allowed to live on the common earth, that’s ‘owned’ by no-one (or at the very least owned equally by all).
There’s an old, untrustworthy mains power line threaded up the valley, but to keep any modern equipment running in one piece requires plenty of filtering, suppressing and buffering. And the cost of getting a line to the only decent house sites is impossibly prohibitive – fortuitously, it’s much cheaper to use solar and/or hydro and/or wind. A single solar panel and battery powers my laptop; there’s no mains power at my little shack by the swimming hole and my ‘real’ house up the hill is still half finished.
Our wise government recently announced massive rebates for anyone setting up a solar energy system to power themselves; but in an almost Orwellian twist the rebate only applies if you live in a city or town and can add your power to the now privatised and soon to be utterly unreliable coal-fuelled grid. You get zilch if you actually need the power – and if you connect to the mainline (to sell power to the grid) you have to pay a licensed installer to put in equipment that’s very simple for people with a modicum of electrical nouse to install – like me, for instance.
Putting in a power line also means cutting vastly wide long swathes through the recovering rainforest, incidentally; they aren’t laid underground and the utility companies can ignore many ‘mandatory’ ecological safeguards – the poison trees on riverbanks, for example.
The only ‘service’ that civilisation provides out here is the gravel road, originally created by the pioneering settlers who were given deeds to ‘Crown Land’ that had been stolen from the local Gumbayngirr Tribe. The tribe got to stay here in the rainforest for a while longer, working for sugar and tea, clearing their own land for the ‘pioneers’ on pain of death – though many clans were deliberately poisoned with strychnine in their ‘free’ flour or waterholes or massacred at gunpoint, just as in the Americas (and everywhere else). The native clans still live around the area, but this single block of land is one of the only places they’re welcome to come and stay in their own territory – outside the ‘missions’ that exist out of sight on the edge of most nearby towns.
The mission system (which exists out of sight and mind of most urban dwellers – and most people in Oz are hive-supporting city dwellers) looks like – and is – an apartheid system, but it’s one that’s willfully maintained from both sides of the racist divide. The local Aboriginal people, once forced behind wire in concentration camps attached to pedophile-breeding churches - that were the only places they weren’t likely to be shot on sight - had no choice but to call the camps home.
Today, generations later, the Gumbaygirr clans build and maintain comfortable suburban lifestyles and houses in singular unfenced compounds that are still the only places they can call their own. They live on postage-stamp sized blocks that are collectively owned, surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of land stolen from their forebears (the few that survived the massacres and diseases). The slow old fellas carrying a fishing rod still have redneck guns pointed at them by those who continue to profit from the murders and theft - if they try to walk across their ancestral lands to their legally accessible fishing holes.
People in the cities think it all happened a long time ago.
Until 1968 Aboriginal people were registered ‘wildlife’, counted and having their births recorded with farm stock in the same ledgers, administered as native fauna. Many who live in the country and cities today were born as ‘wildlife’ – many who are still alive, even though their lifespans are notoriously almost a generation shorter than those of their supplanters. The funerals never end.
Ask an Aboriginal person about the many meanings of the word ‘fair’ and learn why it’s a word best avoided in this country, too pregnant with painful and self-deceptive double meaning that goes unnoticed by the ‘mainstream’ (white) majority. Advance Australia Fair.
Most of the roads in this country follow the routes of ancient Aboriginal walking tracks. All the much-vaunted European early explorers actually had to do to blaze a trail was follow the well-marked annual paths of an ancient nomadic people that knew their vast individual tribal territories better than a civilized person knows their own suburban block.
They even know what lays under it, for instance.
Last week I was asked if I wanted to identify myself as ‘of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent’ on a government form. I have the legal right – but not an ethical one. I ticked the ‘no’ box. Many ‘white’ people in this land could tick the ‘yes’ box if they wanted. But to be an aboriginal person (the indigenous name for ‘aborigine’ varies from area to area – here it’s Goorie) is to be part of a real clan and tribe, an extended family that most of we moderns are now completely cut away from, whatever our antecedents; the sustaining natural lifestyle that made us all possible - along with easy, loving marriages, well-rounded children with multiple role-models and the shared, unthreatening love, skills and involved wisdom of aunts and uncles, grandparents, children and cousins.
I’m a hermit in paradise, cut off from the all-but-extinct tribes that came together through the timestreams to make me what I am in the here and now, whatever their myriad colours, castes or creeds. I’m a living crossroads of many races, times and places, fortunate enough to resemble the ruling classes of this slightly advanced classless society into which I was born.
Out here on the edge of the rainforest the road is all you get for your council rates and charges; they turn over the dirt surface in a perfunctory fashion every year or two. It’s a good deal. They leave you pretty well alone out here, unwilling to traverse their own poorly maintained roads to come and bother you for anything. Progress progresses elsewhere, just as I hoped when I first saw the place.
My vehicle of the last few years, the Olden Jackaroo Deva, is a life-saving necessity to a lone hermit. The downpour finally ended today, blown away by a tree-bending gale that was so strong it even dried out the boggy ground a little; it’s always wise to work with the weather. What was impossible yesterday (when planting trees was de rigueur in the perfect wet weather) was easy today. The cackling flock of guinea fowl and a handful of curious escapee cows watched as my nearest neighbour – a fellow bearded hermit named Steve who lives about half a mile away – helped me pull the metal beast free from the sucking fertile soil’s slimy embrace.
I gave Steve a bottle of Cooper’s Stout and ten litres of a valuable local alternative currency – petrol – to compensate him for his irreplaceable time.
Fair’s fair. We didn’t record the transaction for tax purposes.
Then it was still possible to pick up fruit and nuts and firewood from beneath the windblown trees in the fading light. Dinner’s cooked on the open fire tonight; the gas ran out and this week Wonder Boy is taking a sabbatical with his mother and twin sisters at their well-established community a few valleys away to the north.
I’ve arranged to caretake one of the many vacant houses that are slowly decaying around the surrounding depopulated hills. If I pay the power bill I can use the place for free. And the power’s good for another couple of desktop computers – provided by the very generous Mr Local Geek, a true patron of the arts - so the kids will be able to play games without taking turns with me on the laptop, and I can continue to write diatribes (from this pentagonal room, up the hill on an eastern facing in this extended hermetic hermitage) to you - my anonymous judge, jury and co-conspirator in the tapestry of alternate consciousness.
The rodents are beginning to get venturesome. It’s a prolific year for mice and men. These are the golden years, wherever you are, no matter how hard or easy your life seems. Soon it won’t be quite so easy – unless you plant a forest tomorrow, or preferably yesterday.
Time flows on…
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R.A.
- - Save the World from Rampage http://www.geocities.com/r_ayana
- Her(m)etic Hermit http://hermetic.blog.com
- The Prince of Centraxis – http://centraxis.blogspot.com
- The New Illuminati – http://newilluminati.blog-city.com
- Ringwood – http://gonow.to/ringwood
Imagine Nation - http://imagine.today.com
