andypaine

Over the last year or so, public debate around Christian morality has been dominated by a couple of things – the “Safe Schools” program of gender inclusive education and the plebiscite on marriage equality. These topics have raised a number of issues for Christians about how to respond. One question is about how Christians should relate to state power and legislation. Another question is how to truly love our neighbours when they are different from us. But another is a question about how we read the bible.

As society has changed to allow more people to come out as being of non-heterosexual orientation, many Christians (including myself) have had their biblical interpretation challenged by our experience. This experience of getting to know people who are gay, lesbian or trans; and recognising that these friends did not do anything to choose this “sin” and in pursuing loving relationships they hardly seemed to be committing some great wrong.

There are several responses that I have seen to this dilemma. One is to weasel around the words in the bible – saying things like “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality”, or “the homosexuality strongly condemned in the bible was not the same as the mutually consensual relationships of today”. Another response is to just discard the bible, or at least parts of it, as something written in another time and not relevant for today. Another is to carry on in a state of cognitive dissonance – on one level affirming the words of the bible but in practice loving and accepting people whose lives don’t quite fit into a biblical idea of sexual morality.

All of these I’d say are fairly understandable ways of dealing with our predicament, and I would certainly recommend our interactions with others are dictated by love rather than any particular interpretation. An interesting thing about these three responses is that they all are premised, at least as a starting point, on the idea that there is one coherent, “inerrant” line through the bible that we should obey.

The historical context of Christianity in a way dictates this view of scripture more so than other religions. While a formal doctrine of “biblical inneracy” is a very recent phenomenon; the early Christian church developed its creeds out of theological arguments aimed at articulating one true doctrine. The dominance of Greek thought and its emphasis on rationality and reason would have been very influential on this. Protestant Christianity meanwhile, emerged contemporaneously with the Enlightenment, the “age of reason”. In these contexts Christianity was seen as needing to make logical sense. Jewish religion (the people who wrote most of the bible!) as a counter-example is much less strict on dogma; interpretation is perpetually fluid and open to debate.

If you take a step outside of these cultural dictates, it is no great stretch to say that the bible contains numerous contradictions that are hard to reconcile – just to name a few you could say the violent, vengeful God vs the forgiving “love your enemies” of Jesus, salvation by faith alone vs judgement for actions, God’s sovereignty vs human free will. The New Testament interpretation of Old Testament passages too would rarely pass today’s standards of contextualisation.

To use one (topical) example, the question of homosexuality has challenged for many Christians how we read the bible. I already mentioned some of the responses I have noticed. But I think this challenge is also an opportunity to reassess how we use the bible.

I don’t especially like to say this, but it is pretty hard to read the bible and find a pro-homosexuality message. It is our experience that makes us want to. To say that Jesus doesn’t mention it is hardly sufficient (since there are plenty of other things he doesn’t mention which we can all still agree are morally wrong), and to say these verses are bound in the context of the time is fair enough, but where does that leave the rest of the bible? And who gets to choose which bits are for today and which aren’t?

To re-examine a biblical view on homosexuality, I’m going to look at all the biblical references to it, but only in depth analyse a couple of them. There are six references to homosexuality in the bible. This of course is worth remembering – many many other things are given more airtime in the bible yet this issue has come to be commonly seen as the most definitively “Christian” political issue.

The first is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. It’s a pretty well known story, so I won’t go into the details. But it paints a picture of a very depraved society, though as many have pointed out the actions of a city full of men demanding access to rape two strangers is hardly the same thing as a consensual homosexual relationship. Interestingly, when Sodom is later used as an allegory for sin in Ezekiel 16, homosexuality is not mentioned. Instead, it says “Sodom.. was arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”

The Old Testament law has two references to homosexuality – Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Both of these are strongly worded (calling it “detestable”) and come amongst a set of sexual guidelines that mostly still resemble our society’s parameters of sexual morality. Much of Leviticus though is full of laws relating to food and clothing that very few Christians today would consider keeping – it is in fact Christian orthodoxy to not see these laws as essential to be kept. Much of the New Testament is dedicated to arguing why these laws should not be kept (though to be fair, the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 does still ask the non-Jewish Christians to “abstain from sexual immorality”).

Moving to the New Testament and there are several references in the letters of Paul. In 1 Corinthians 6:9, homosexuals are listed among those who will not inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Timothy 1:10 is a similar list, though the word here sometimes translated as homosexuals is disputed – in my NIV bible it is translated as “perverts”. Of more direct reference to homosexuality is Romans 1:26-27, which we will come back to in a second.

Actually the bible passage mostly used by Christian opponents of same-sex marriage is none of these – it is Genesis 2:24, the part in the creation story where it says “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” This passage, it is claimed, is a description of God’s intended order, and is reaffirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19 when he is asked a question about divorce by the Pharisees.

Now this is where I want to really dig into our interpretation of this. There are several interesting things to note here. One is that neither Genesis nor Matthew is about gay marriage. Matthew 19 is in fact about divorce – and very strongly prohibits it. Most churches, at least in the Western world, no longer hold to the line Jesus says here that “anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” I would suggest the reason for that is our experience that not every marriage is healthy and that actually sometimes the most loving and just thing is divorce.

Secondly, Jesus’ affirmation of Genesis here is a funny kind of affirmation. He starts with “at the beginning the Creator made them male and female”, but in this very same passage he somewhat cryptically says “some are eunuchs because they were born that way” (which I think at the very least is an acknowledgement that sexual and gender binaries are not as clear as many would claim from the bible). And he quotes “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”, but again says “some have renounced marriage for the kingdom of heaven”. In saying this, he seems to be affirming the disciples’ assertion that “it is better not to marry”. Paul echoes this at length in 1 Corinthians 7, a chapter that starts with “it is good for a man not to marry”. So much for God’s “intended order”.

In fact, the Christian loyalty to the nuclear family which leads many to oppose same-sex marriage for the sake of children’s right to a mother and a father doesn’t really seem to come from the bible. Jesus in fact repeatedly criticises the primacy of the family –

in Luke 8:19-21 “Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him, but they were not able to get near him because of the crowd. Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.’ He replied, ‘My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.’”;

Luke 9:59-62 “He said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ But he replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’”;

and Luke 14:26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple.”

None of these verses, of course, are referring to same-sex marriage. But Jesus is against a love for those close to us that excludes others – “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” (Matthew 5:46-47); and for a radical kingdom of God that transcends human barriers and includes the marginalised. To sum up the Christian message as a defence of the nuclear family is to do the exact opposite of the verses I have just quoted.

Let’s move back to Romans 1. It is the opening statement of Paul’s long exposition of why humans are unable to be justified by law and instead require faith. And it says “Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

The basis of Paul’s objection to homosexuality here would seem to be that it’s not natural. It’s interesting then to venture to another of Paul’s letters – one which we’ve already seen also mentions homosexuality – 1 Corinthians.

In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul gives the church at Corinth some guidelines for worship. It’s a strange and convoluted passage with the main thrust being that women should cover their head in church and men should not. Paul uses the same terminology as Romans 1 (“para phusin” in the Greek, if you’re interested) to say that it is natural for men to have short hair and women to have long. There are a couple of noteworthy things about this.

Firstly, it’s another biblical instruction that most Christians disregard with no guilty conscience – because contrary to what the bible says, our experience teaches us that it makes no difference to prayers whether a man’s head is covered or a woman has short hair. Secondly, there is no definition of “nature” I can think of that would indicate it is natural for men to have short hair and women long. Men have short hair because they cut it with scissors. So we’re forced to conclude that Paul’s definition of “nature” can at times be kinda questionable; and that his gendered distinctions of headwear here would seem to contradict his assertion in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free.

So where does this leave us? Probably further from a definite position on anything than we were at the start. But doctrinal rigidity can be a problem because once we dig around we may find it’s on shakier ground than we first thought. But more than that, it could lead us to miss out on what the holy spirit is actually doing.

I mentioned earlier the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. It’s a very interesting piece of scripture because it actually documents how the early Christians dealt with their theology being challenged. Barnabas and Paul return from their travels telling of Gentiles converting to Christianity. For us reading now, this seems obvious as part of the message of Jesus. But for the church at the time this would have seemed much more of a crisis of belief. The Old Testament; from the laws, the history of wars and invasions, the post-exile books where the prophet Ezra condemns the Jews for inter-breeding (Nehemiah 9), and the prophetic books which frequently condemn the surrounding nations and speak of Israel’s resurgence; continually asserts a picture of Israel as the exclusive people of God.

The New Testament interactions with Gentiles; from Jesus’ argument with the Syro-Pheonecian woman (Matthew 15), to Peter’s dream from God (Acts 10); show even for the positive encounters with Gentiles it was far from a given. And yet, at the Council of Jerusalem the apostles take the experience of seeing the holy spirit move among Gentiles and decide on a massive theological shift.

James’ quoting of scripture to support this decision is really interesting. He picks up a verse from Amos 9:

‘“After this I will return
and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
Its ruins I will rebuild,
and I will restore it,
that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,
even all the Gentiles who bear my name,
says the Lord, who does these things” –
things known from long ago.”

But if you actually go and look up that reference, you’ll find that’s not quite what Amos said – Amos 9:11-12 goes

“‘I will restore David’s fallen shelter –
I will repair its broken walls
and restore its ruins –
and will rebuild it as it used to be,
so that they may possess the remnant of Edom
and all the nations that bear my name,’
declares the Lord, who will do these things.”

“All mankind seeking the Lord” would seem quite different from the Jews “possessing the remnant of Edom and all nations”. If you look into it more you’ll find that James’ quote is actually tacked together from three different prophecies made by three different people in three different contexts – the line about all mankind seeking the lord comes from Zechariah 8, while the Lord doing these things known from long ago is from Isaiah 45. James is effectively rewriting the bible to suit their new experience of the Holy Spirit. Adding to the feeling that they are just making it up as they go along is the statement from the apostles to the Gentiles – where the instructions about the disregarding most of the Old Testament are justified because they “seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit” (Acts 15:28).

In the end, the church won out from the apostles’ willingness to have their doctrine challenged. It expanded to new places and people; most of the most influential figures in Christian history have been non-Jews. More than that, it enabled the church to actually live out the inclusive vision of God and the Holy Spirit to act.

It’s worth remembering Jesus’ many repudiations of the Pharisees’ legalism and his very concise summary of the Old Testament laws (Matt 22:34-40). Paul in the end says the same thing (Galatians 5:14). St Augustine’s answer to the debates of christian morality? “Love and do what you will”. Christianity should never be reduced to a set of rules (something New Testament writers struggled against); it is a living thing – the quest to radically love and to bring about the kingdom of God. The bible only really works in this context.

But where does this leave us in regards to the bible? In the classic words of the writer of Ecclesiastes, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” I hope the bible is not useless (for one it would make all the time I spent writing this redundant), but I believe it only makes sense in the context of love in action.

In the end the bible is an amazing book, and one passage in isolation can still be very powerful. It is also an undeniably counter-cultural text (though it has much more to critique about our current society than just sexuality, which would be nice to see more Christians acknowledge). But to use this book as a guideline for how we will base our life, or how we will relate to public policy that can affect other people’s lives; we need to view any one passage in the context of the whole book, of history and the wider body of knowledge; and of our own experiences. A lot has changed in the 2000 years since it was written, just like a lot changed over the centuries that the Bible was written in and a lot will change from our time into the future. The trick is to be open to the light our new experiences will shine on the word of God, and to love boldly and radically.

I’ll admit that my own experience has led me to reject verses that see homosexuality as innately wrong. I even go to the rallies in support of marriage equality, to churches that explicitly affirm diverse gender and sexualities, and support in any way I can the struggle of people of all sexualities to authentically live out a life of freedom and fulfillingness. And having put a lot of time and thought into it, I can also say that I do so not in spite of my faith in Jesus and the bible, but because of it.

It was the kind of news you don’t want to hear when you call your parents for a catch up. The Mudgee Black Swans – the club where I played my first games of aussie rules football – are close to folding, according to an article in the local paper.

Hearing the news took me back to my first ever game of aussie rules. I was 16, and had been playing soccer for a local club. While soccer paused for the school holidays, the footy kept going; and the club took advantage of the fact by recruiting some much needed playing numbers.

It was pouring rain – turning the field into a mudheap and testing the skills of the seasoned players, let alone the rookies. One of my teammates went to take a mark; the wet and heavy ball slipped through his hands and broke his nose. We lost by some margin, but I had the time of my life. The next week I was up before the sun and on the bus for the three hour road trip to Parkes; where we lost by roughly 100 points.

I was hooked though. I played the rest of the year when I could – playing footy in the morning then soccer in the afternoon for home games, even having my first taste of men’s footy late in the season (of which my only memory is being welcomed to seniors with a massive late hit by a hefty country player).

The Black Swans started with the kind of mythology every sporting club should have – the sporting culture of the town is dominated by rugby league and union, but one day after watching the AFL grand final, a group of friends decided Mudgee needed an AFL club and resolved to start one. That day one of the group spotted a black swan on his dam. It was fate.

The first few years were a success – playing in the CWAFL reserve grade, the Black Swans lost two grand finals in a row. Life was harder after a short stint moving up to first grade though, and the club was struggling when I started playing.

That first year I played I never once heard the club song for a victory. So it wasn’t until halfway through the next season, as our under-17s group gradually improved together, that I won my first game of aussie rules. I stood silently satisfied as a few of the club stalwarts belted out, to the tune of John Mellencamp’s Jack and Dianne;

“Oh yeah, life goes on; playing football for the Mudgee Black Swans
Oh yeah, the game goes on; we never give in ’til the final siren’s gone.”

Sadly that season the under-17s were the only team singing. The seniors lost every game and morale was definitely not at a high point.

It’s funny though how things can change. As we gathered again for pre-season in 2005; there was a new coach, some new players. Half a dozen of us had graduated from the juniors, where we had learned how to play together and to win. There was a new feeling around the place.

In the Black Swans’ finest moment, we went through the season winning nearly every game. Our star full-forward kicked 100 goals. In a year when the local rugby league and union teams both failed to make the finals, the back page of the local paper was solidly AFL for all of September. The week before the grand final there was a double page spread profiling each player individually – we were even asked to describe for readers our best playing attributes (I was a handy player off the half back flank, but found the question way too awkward so answered, as an in-joke, “fiery red hair”). That newspaper is probably saved at my parents’ house somewhere.

On grand final day we went to Bathurst and came home with the Black Swans’ first and only flag. It was the last game I ever played for the club though – by the time the next season started I was playing for the Southern Sharks in the Sydney AFL.

A couple of years ago the club held a fancy dinner to commemorate the 10th anniversary of that premiership. I didn’t make the journey down for it, though I had a twinge of regret when I heard that the Black Swans, who barely won a game that season, had a stunning win over the eventual premiers aided by some of the weekend ring-ins.

The news of the club’s impending demise gave me a kind of nostalgia for those few years of teenage footy. It’s funny though because I can remember virtually nothing that happened on the field in those years. The memories that make me smile are everything else that comes from a footy club – the impromptu community that developed among the friends, family and randoms who would come and watch the game. The kids we would help coach during the week who on game days would hang around and work the scoreboard for the seniors games. The unlikely mix of people, from tree-change yuppies to outback shearers and teenage schoolkids, who would get together on freezing winter nights in singlets and shorts to run around a field.

The grand final? I remember precisely nothing of the game, but I can vividly recall an exchange at training two days before. One of the players suggested we all wear shirts and ties to the game. Another, our huge and heavily tattooed forward pocket, said he had never worn a tie. The statement was greeted incredulously. “You don’t wear ties in jail,” he replied with a shrug.

Those few years I spent at the Mudgee Black Swans taught me a lot about how to play football, but they taught me a lot else too.

Grand final celebrations. I think you can spot a tuft of red hair up the back as the only evidence of me. I never have liked photos.

A friend once gave me a definition of “vocation” as “where your abilities meet the world’s needs”. I think she said it was from one of those new agey pop psychology writers, though google attributes it to Aristotle. But whoever said it, that definition has never left me and I have yet to ever hear a better definition of what it means to do meaningful work.

Some people will always argue they are the exception, but I still think it’s safe to say that the employment of most of us does not meet this definition. Most work neither uses our abilities nor meets the world’s needs very well; some of it is actively destructive towards society and the planet. In the end the reason for this is that the logic that governs our world is not abilities, not needs, but purely profit.

And so work – that human impulse to contribute something towards making a better world – is deformed into the slow dripping water torture of pointless jobs, endless bureaucracy, demeaning bosses, fear of losing your job, and plain old exploitation that is given the cruelly ironic name of “making a living”.

I am of the belief that work can be rescued and reformed into something fulfilling, rewarding and useful – something that inspires us rather than drains us, a place where our abilities meet the world’s needs. And in this article I’m going to share a few shifts in how we perceive work that might help us get there. I’m also going to share examples of how I’ve tried to put them into practice.

I do this not to boast about my own achievements or because I believe everyone should do the same (after all, that definition would suggest that what a fulfilling vocation looks like should be different for every person); I do it because most of what I write here is already written in other places. And yet jobs are getting more oppressive and monotonous. Theory is good, but we also need practical ways to try to change how we work.

When I was younger I enjoyed work – I liked my first job (at a fast food chain) much more than I did the school work which was supposedly going to guarantee me a better future. The tangible results of working together as a team to serve customers were more rewarding than the abstract idea of studying things I wasn’t really interested in with a view to some future employment (things I was interested in I studied obsessively – didn’t help my marks!). I worked hard at it too. It seems hard to believe given how my life has turned out, but at the end of my first year of paid employment I had a fancy certificate saying I was “employee of the year”.

Other jobs I had as a young adult included working at a supermarket and working as a labourer for tradesmen. Especially labour work gave me another reason to enjoy work – under the traditional gender roles I had grown up around, there is something very manly about getting up early, doing hard physical work, getting dirty and going home tired.

But still these jobs didn’t fulfil me in the way a true vocation should. I didn’t at that stage have an inkling of what my vocation might be, but I intuitively recognised this when I turned down a couple of opportunities for apprenticeships in different trades. The only reason I needed was imagining myself in ten years time completely bored and wondering why I was still doing this job. These jobs didn’t especially use my natural abilities very well (even that idea of masculinity, as powerful as it was, belonged to someone else not me); and I didn’t really feel like I was contributing much to any great need in the world.

A couple of years out of high school I ended up studying again. Theology was the degree, job prospects extremely limited. Not only that, but within touching distance of getting my degree I stopped studying, impatient to do something else. I was a self-defeating careerist. Yet I was getting closer to discerning a true vocation – theology was what I was interested in and could prepare me for what I wanted to do in the future. Plus having youth allowance cover most of my expenses meant that the building site I worked on for most of my time studying – the new building of the Sydney church I was part of – I could do mostly for free, only invoicing them for my hours worked when I had run out of money.

Now unpaid work is not something I always recommend – especially if someone somewhere is making a profit off your labour. The current prevalence of unpaid internships is just another addition to the list of terrible things about work. But the problem with paid work is that just because somebody is paying you money (and let’s be absolutely clear here – as a worker, you make money for your employers, not the other way around), it is assumed that this work is automatically your top priority and every other part of your life should revolve around the hours they want you to work. Plus regardless of your abilities, you do things the way your boss tells you too, again because they are paying you. There are all kinds of ways we try to match our abilities with the world’s needs, all kinds of things that could be considered work. But there is usually only one standard by which we measure their importance – money.

In the end the reason we do this is because we need money to survive. This is what I discovered once I stopped studying and went back to work. I wanted to change the world, to change my life and to try different ways of doing both. But I had to pay for rent (not cheap in Sydney) and food, and so ended up juggling a variety of jobs in an attempt to have enough money to get by without having my life taken over by a full-time job.

It was hard, and often if a short-term job dried up I didn’t make enough to pay the rent. Which was a bit demoralising. But meeting people who shared my desire to live beyond just making a living, I discovered that you could eat for free from the bins of supermarkets. And that you could avoid rent by shacking up in abandoned houses. I already knew that most things we are told we need we don’t really – an idea was germinating in my head.

I remember the day I decided I was going to quit money. There was a protest by the asylum seekers locked up at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. A detainee had committed suicide, and it sparked the rest to burn furniture and climb on the roof in protest. A group of us went out to Villawood to show our solidarity and to talk about their situation with locals and interested observers. When the protesters said they were going for another day, we decided we would too. Except that night my job called, asking me to work the next day. I couldn’t say no either – because I needed to pay rent and because saying no might mean I got less shifts in the future (unbelievably, there was no roster – we were expected to wait by the phone for a call to work and to be available when it came).

That next day, as I stacked supermarket shelves, I resolved that no longer would economics dictate work for me. Within a few months, I had given away most of my possessions, moved out of my rented house and quit my jobs. I was free to do the work that mattered to me.

That change, at 24 years old, is one of the defining moments of my life and certainly a key point in my exploration of what it means to do meaningful work. Freed of economic needs and cultural norms; I could begin the process of figuring out how to meet my abilities with the world’s needs.

An early discovery was that despite all those years of cursing the alarm clock and longing for days off, I actually really liked and needed work. As I hit the road and explored new cities, I found myself searching for the connection with others that comes from achieving something together, for the feeling of fulfilment that comes from contributing something to the world. I could live very comfortably off the waste of our society and do very little; yet I would quickly, in whatever city I ended up in, amass a steady schedule of volunteering at different things. I jumped at the chance to participate in working bees. Often without much of a home of my own to maintain, I would clean the houses of my friends, usually much to their bemusement.

With that discovery made, I also began to look at work in a different way; and to believe that maybe the distinction between work and leisure need not be as defined as we make it. As the rhetoric of “self-care” becomes more and more widespread, the work/leisure distinction is becoming stronger than ever. We are told we need to set aside “me-time” – to do activities we find fun and relaxing away from other responsibilities. I certainly don’t dispute this, especially as new technology enables employment to colonise more and more of our lives. But the problem is that most self-care literature doesn’t question the single most destructive thing for all of our selves – that economics is continually given priority over human needs. I believe in self-care, but think it should include critiquing the kind of work we do, and asking why we find it so draining.

Long before I gave up money I developed a habit of staying behind after events I attended to help pack up. It was helpful to to others, but it was also an excellent way to meet others and it transformed my own role from passive consumer to active participant. Now I could make a lifestyle of it – I did hard physical work, sat through marathon political meetings, played music for people, or hung out cooking with my friends. Which were work? Did it matter? I was under no compulsion to do any of them, I maybe saw some value in them; but still I did these things because for whatever reason, I enjoyed them.

Thinking about this, an interesting example that especially comes to mind is Food Not Bombs. A world wide movement of communal cookups that serve food for free in public places, I have regularly done Food Not Bombs in various cities for many years now. Like a lot of things that rely on volunteer labour, Food Not Bombs is famous for burning out its participants. Certainly in Brisbane it was for a long time a real struggle to get a functional collective going that could do all the work required to make it happen. In fact, for several years, I pretty much single-handedly kept Brisbane Food Not Bombs going – every week I would dumpster-dive food on a Thursday night, bring it to the kitchen on a Friday afternoon, cook meals (usually with a few helpers, though not always), serve it up on the street and then clean up afterwards. When I left town for a while, it would stop happening. I don’t say this to boast – I’m much more proud of my achievement now that we have an actual sustainable collective. The point of this example is that I managed to feed countless people, use food that would otherwise have been wasted, and offer an example of a non-money based way of relating to others. And I managed to do this not because it was successful (it was the source of much despair), or because I was under any compulsion to do it. The reason I kept coming back every Friday (and still do) was in the end because I enjoyed doing it.

Erasing the distinction between work and leisure opens up all kinds of possibilities – what is work anyway? Because our usual definition – the thing you get paid to do – obviously no longer applied. That definition fails for multiple reasons anyway – as the feminist movement has long pointed out, not all work which enables economic growth is paid anyway, and for a long time women have been expected to do the home labour that allows men to go to work without being paid for it. But another interesting point is that some people do for free what others get paid for. So why is one “work” and the other not? To use myself again as an example, I play music for fun and because I love music. Occasionally I get paid for it, but mostly not. I think of music as a fairly self-indulgent activity, but the reality is that many people get paid for making music. Same goes for writing, playing sport, even reading to try to understand the world. I will argue that all these things are worth doing, although not because the fact that someone somewhere gets paid for it gives them some kind of legitimacy. No, something is worth doing if you feel it contributes something to the world, in whatever way. Isn’t that the purpose of work?

So the horizons of work are thrown wide open. You can see why I struggled when I’d meet people and they’d invariably ask “what do you do?” This question always frustrated me anyway, because when we ask each other “what we do”, it always implies their paid employment, whether or not that is where their true passions or skills lie. For many people it’s their most hated part of life! Coming back again to that definition of where our abilities meet the world’s needs, to achieve that requires investigation of what our abilities actually are – something which the economic impetus of employment rarely allows us to do. Not only are our work options limited to those things which can make money for someone, we are expected to specialise in one task – the basis of capitalist exchange.

For some people, specialising in one task is perfect. But for many of us, we have diverse skills and diverse interests. Finding fulfilling work is easier if it involves a variety of tasks. Not only that, but to discover our skills often requires the time, freedom and support to try new things. One of the earliest things I started doing after quitting money was to get a pen and write. I had never really written creatively before as an adult, but I enjoyed it and other people seemed to enjoy reading what I wrote. They would even thank me for new insights I had given them – in a tiny way, my abilities were filling a need. Yet what I wrote offered no commercial potential, and I didn’t feel that writing was especially my calling any more than other things were. In other words, without the freedom to experiment, I never could have discovered this part of my vocation. Similarly, I simply fell into doing radio journalism because there was a need for people at 4ZZZ in Brisbane. I had never really seen myself as a journalist, but it has subsequently become a huge part of my life, and something I think I am reasonably good at – as well as being something there is an undeniable need for.

“What I do” has always been very varied, and I doubt I’m alone in preferring it that way. In fact, truly trying to match our abilities with the world’s needs probably means changing tasks as we discover new sides of ourselves and the needs of the world around us shift. A rigid, specialised workforce causes issues when technological or societal changes make some jobs obsolete. But it doesn’t need to be that way.

Over two years after I had left the paid workforce, I got a call from a friend. He is the boss of a disability support organisation, and he told me they had a new paid role open up, and I was the person they thought should fill it. For all the reasons I have already mentioned, I was very hesitant to take it up. I hadn’t missed paid employment, nor had I missed the complications that having money to your name brings. Plus I liked being a crazy example of someone trying to live a very different way. But the work was something I thought worthwhile (I had been doing a pretty similar job as a volunteer for quite a while anyway) and they seemed to think I had something particular to offer the task. Half a day a week was hardly the most strenuous workload either, and I figured the money could come in handy. So with much consternation (I did the job for two months before I even filled out the paperwork for pay, and even then it took my boss telling me his supervisors were on his back about it), I re-entered the world of paid employment.

For three and a half years now I have worked in that job. I believe I’ve contributed something to the world, and to be honest that money has come in handy. But I have continued to treat that job as only part of a broader oeuvre of work that I do, and my employers have supported me in that way too – giving me time off when I have asked for it, and not been fussed when they get a letter from the government saying my criminal record has changed and they need to re-evaluate whether I am morally fit for the job.

I mention this especially because obviously not everyone wants to live the kind of lifestyle that allowed me to experiment with work. But this doesn’t mean it’s impossible for those that don’t. There are unlimited ways we can change our lives and our society to pursue a more meaningful way of doing work. As many ways as there are imaginations in the world. I have lived communally in a way that can support each other to follow their vocation whether it makes money or not; on a broader scale ideas like the Universal Basic Income could enable us to rethink what it means to work. Technological changes are meant to enable us to work less; the stress, debt levels and number of completely useless jobs that fill our society are a good reminder that they mostly haven’t done that. In the end, technology is as enslaved to economics as humans are, and when we rectify that it could radically change our society.

Despite all this, people continue to do work because they believe in it, regardless of profits. People volunteer for causes they believe in. Open source programmers develop computer software for the world to use freely with no financial reward or other recognition. While politicians entrench the status quo that pays their (hefty) bills, grassroots volunteer movements are usually the force for change that betters our society. Even our most basic needs point the way to new possibilities – people come home from their paid jobs and grow food or build shelter and transport for fun. It’s my belief that these cracks in the economic system is where a lot of the most important work is done.

As for me, I still do support work, and radio, and Food Not Bombs. Still play music and write. I paint banners, organise public events and plan political campaigns. I still help out at church, try to be a good friend and a friendly person to people I meet. Me and my housemates open up our house to people who need somewhere to stay or someone to talk to, and occasionally deal with the complications that come from that. I do all these things plus whatever other opportunities come up; and I do them all as well as I can because I believe my ability to do those tasks meets a need in the world.

As I was writing this, I talked to my friend about the ideas. She wasn’t so enthusiastic. She protested that this definition of vocation is entirely self-enforced, and in her experience (and mine too, let’s be honest), people are often happy to sponge off others without doing an equal share of the work.

This is a valid point. Human selfishness is an inescapable fact whose power should never be underestimated. But whether that justifies our current system is another question. The idea of capitalism as a meritocracy is a blatant lie. We in the west constantly sponge off the cheap labour and resource exploitation of the majority of the world’s population. That we have more money than people of the developing world is due entirely to accident of birth, not because we work harder (we don’t, in case you were wondering). No one sponges more than the CEO who earns 50 times the amount of the employees in his company who do the actual productive work.

The idea of work as abilities meeting needs should be read as a multi-faceted critique of overwork, pointless jobs, exploitation of others and the expectation that you can do nothing and someone else will do the work. It is a motto for taking personal responsibility of our own lives and the world around us. It is an invitation to become workers, not just products.

written October 2014 (and promptly forgotten until recently).

I’m sitting in a courtroom at the Brisbane Magistrates Court. The matter at hand is over a few hundred dollars in fines given out regarding the lighting of the sacred fire at the Musgrave Park aboriginal embassy.

The embassy has had some dramatic moments in its time, but the incident we’re talking about here wasn’t really one of them – the embassy lighting the fire as a ceremonial formality at a small meeting, the council extinguishing it out of pure pettiness.

The court hearing now is even less distinguished. Present in the room is the defendant, the prosecution and defence lawyers, witness on the stand, the magistrate and clerk, and myself and one other supporter.

The magistrate is literally falling asleep in his chair, closing his eyes for minutes at a time, yawning and at times swinging around on his chair. His interactions with the lawyers mostly seem to be snappily asking when the whole thing will be over. The clerk is looking nearly as bored as she stares at the computer screen – I have no idea what she is looking at on there. The walls are drab and brown, the light fluorescent and the atmosphere less than electric.

The prosecution lawyer is trying to build his case by extracting from the witness a statement that the fire in question, though it had once carried the coals from the original Canberra tent embassy, was no longer sacred because it had been put out and re-lit.

This displays a lack of understanding of ritual, symbol and traditional religions. What makes a fire sacred is not how long the coals have been continuously burning; it is what it symbolises that makes it sacred. I remember once having a conversation with a whitefella who lived at another aboriginal embassy. He had worried that the fire would accidentally be left to go out. The elder replied that the fire went out all the time, but the real fire was what burned in our hearts.

But more importantly, the question is what role does the court have in determining what is sacred? I can’t think of anywhere less sacred. Even that bible that sits on the witness stand is the opposite of true symbolism – it is just a worthless prop where the actual contents of the book mean nothing. The pages of court copies of the bible could all be blank and no one would ever know.

For all its mighty imagery and glamour, our courts seem to me to often be concerned with semantics – endlessly digging out different laws and sub-laws, building entire legal arguments not on the actions in question and their consequences but on one specific word in the law. If people can afford a good lawyer they can get off virtually anything by arguing some trivial detail; but people who can’t afford a good lawyer are told they won’t be represented by legal aid unless they plead guilty – regardless of whether they actually did it or not.

A friend told me once about a time they were at the magistrates court waiting to have their matter heard. There were over 150 people waiting in there, and so the police prosecutor walked into the waiting room and declared that there was a “special” for that day – if you had a minor charge and plead guilty you would be fined $150 plus $100 court costs and you could walk out. This is pretty much my experience of our justice system – judges file away people like they file away papers. Read out the charge, give a punishment, sign the sheet and walk out.

Plea bargains are very common in our court system, but to me these represent the opposite of justice – the chance to not actually deal with what really happened in court is dangled as an incentive for people to plead guilty, often to something they may not have actually done. Especially when people have been held in remand and will be released with no further punishment than the time already served, it sustains a system of not actually dealing with the issues, yet the lawyers and judges all still get paid for doing their job.

Aboriginal people understand better than anyone the hypocrisy of the law. As a race they are maybe the most incarcerated people in the world, often for completely trivial offences; while the theft of their land and murder of their people goes unquestioned. Over the sad history of white domination of aboriginal people in this country, every new horrific development has been signed in by the law.

And not much ever changes in that regard. Wars, climate change and massive financial inequality go unchallenged, while our courts are full of people busted with drugs or not co-operating with police. Or people who actually have committed significant acts that affect other people; but who rather than dealing with the real-life consequences of their actions go through an endless rigmarole of bureaucracy and then finally pay a fine or do time or end up with some other condition completely unrelated to the crime of which they are accused.

Of course, often our court plays a very important role in defending human and environmental rights when they are threatened by politicians and businesses. But even this process is one that is hidden from understanding from the rest of the general public – veiled in a cocoon of law-speak inaccessible to most of us, to in the end provide a verdict that seems to be pretty much common sense.

Back at the court, and the magistrate and both lawyers are trying to work out what a “statutory instrument” is. The magistrate sighs, adjourns the court, and walks out. I don’t know what a statutory instrument is either, but I also don’t care or pretend that it has anything to do with whether a group of aboriginal activists should be allowed to light a small fire when they meet together.

And this is the real problem with the law – the law enforcers (in this case the council) can take an action and fine someone no matter how inconsequential their actions are, and the only recourse people have is to take it to a mind-bogglingly confusing court case a year and a half later.

As we see governments rushing to give more powers to police and intelligence organisations, it’s important that we remember how the law mostly works – those in power do what they want, and if the person on the receiving end is wealthy or persistent or lucky enough to challenge it then they might one day have the court agree with them; although most likely by that point the damage has already been done. The system works, but for who?

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January 15, 2017 · 4:15 pm

My top 10 songs of 2016

Another year, more great music released. Here are 10 songs I loved for various reasons:

Spindles – Revolution

I had a long wait between first hearing this song and it finally being recorded. But at one point shortly after its release, I reckon I listened to this song at least once a day for about three weeks. I craved it. I thought about writing an essay based on the lyrics.

Spindles had other great songs (no official release yet beyond a few internet uploads) and played some fantastic shows – from the little library at Jura Books to the wide open desert at Roxby Downs. But if I have to pick one song it’s still this one.

 

Dispossessed – Thronebreaker

2016 was a huge year for Dispossessed. At the start of the year I was hearing favourable murmurs about this new band out of Sydney. In March when I saw them I agreed they were great but was surprised at how young they were. Since then the band has lost members, had all their gear stolen, had one of their members be the subject of a public shaming campaign by the Daily Mail. They’ve also toured, gained loads of mainstream press attention, and released a fantastic album. Vice called them “the most important band in Australia.” I think it’s just great to see a proudly multi-racial and political band from western Sydney smashing it.

 

Camp Cope – Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams

I first saw songwriter Georgia Maq play a few years ago. I don’t know how old she was at the time, but she looked like she could have needed parental supervision to go to her own gigs. Camp Cope bassist Kelly I have similarly seen around the place since she was very young – I think her first musical effort was with all-femme scremo outfit Palmar Grasp.

So what a pleasure then to discover Camp Cope’s debut album – showcasing some great songwriting from Georgia MAq aided by wonderful melodic bass playing from Kelly. If I’m being totally honest, a few of the songs are still a little too teenage angsty to really resonate with me. But this one – linking the experience of sexism with 9-11 conspiracies in a way only the internet generation can – is just brilliant.

 

Curse Ov Dialect – Greed

I can’t say I’m really in the loop these days when it comes to new music, but one thing that helps me find out about new releases is scrolling through the new additions folder at 4ZZZ community radio. And that was how, at the start of the year, I made the unexpected discovery that legendary Melbourne hip hop crew Curse Ov Dialect had released their first album in seven years. I suppose layering all those weird samples and coming up with the tongue-twisting lyrics must take a while.

Of course, the album is fantastic and endlessly rewarding – a year on I’m still listening to it trying to work out what half the songs are about. But while Curse Ov Dialect’s beats and lyrics are dense and strange, their music is still somehow danceable and singalongable. They are also an amazing live band, which hopefully we in Brisbane will get to witness some time soon.

 

Babaganouj – Would you like me?

I’m not wilfully obscure or anything, it’s just that the music I find interesting is usually some tuneless racket that gets played in front of 50 people in a random location. As an analytical person too, I like music that has some kind of broader context beyond just sounding nice.

Indie pop is not always my preferred genre. But sometimes there’s just a band so good at what they do that I can’t resist. And that’s where Babaganouj come in – these guys just continually release glorious pop songs that light up the airwaves. This was my favourite of the year.

 

Nahko and Medicine For The People – Love letters to God

It took me way too long to discover Nahko and Medicine For The People’s last album, but by the start of the year I had it on high rotation. In April when they came out to Australia I was in Melbourne, and even discovering the show was sold out wasn’t enough to stop me from going – some desperate manoeuvring at the front door got me a ticket to a show that was all the better for having a room packed full of devoted fans.

A while later the new album came out. It didn’t quite grab me the way the previous one had; I think I would prefer the songs with a bit of a rawer production. But it’s grown on me a bit, and in this song the regular themes of Nahko’s music are all there – spirituality, forgiveness, resistance, transformation.

 

John K Samson – The oldest oak at Brookside

Like most years, in 2016 I spent many hours listening to Canadian band The Weakerthans. Unlike most years, I also got the gift of new music from Weakerthans songwriter John K Samson.

These days the instrumentation is pretty mellow (especially compared to his time playing bass in Propagandhi), and the songs are less personal – mostly now the character sketches that were always part of his songwriting but also are surely influenced by his other job of writing and publishing novels. There is a bit of an environmental message flowing through, which you can possibly pick up in this song.

I have to admit, that nasally voice and those minute lyrical observations are like a kind of comfort food to me. And his albums are like little books of stories that every time you open them you find some new detail. I couldn’t really pick a favourite song, but this tribute to an old oak tree in John’s home town of Winnipeg is one of the most immediately satisfying.

 

Carb On Carb – Eden terrors

Don’t look too closely at the release date – this album came out in 2015 but I first heard it this year. Once I had heard it though I listened to it an awful lot through the year.

It’s never hip, but I’m a bit of a sucker for emo music. Fortunately Kiwi two-piece Carb On Carb do the musical style very well while mostly avoiding the melodramatic treatment of falling in and out of love that can make the genre so punishing.

 

The Dead Maggies – Billy Hunt

I didn’t know the music of The Dead Maggies all that well when I decided in August I would hitch down to Nimbin the next day to go to their gig – it just looked like an interesting show. The next day I was picked up on the road by the Maggies’ tour van, saw them play, hung out with the band, and before you knew it I was heading down to Tasmania for the HOBOFOPO festival of folk punk organised by the band.

The Dead Maggies’ music is fun but also very informative about Tasmanian history. Like this one, about convict and serial escapee Billy Hunt who dressed in a kangaroo skin and hopped away from prison only to be shot by a hungry hunter.

 

Virginia Sook – Mandarin song

I mentioned this song in this list last year actually. It got recorded this year and also was performed at a memorable music event – my birthday party. Sitting around a fire in my backyard, a guitar was passed around and some amazing songs played – including this one.

I don’t say this to boast that I have friends who play music – I say this because I honestly believe that the music made by our friends and neighbours can be as good as what’s on the radio and the big record labels. Better even because we have an added connection to the songs and their meaning. The best birthday present I could ask for is friends sharing their musical creations. Plus this song is awesome.

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December 27, 2016 · 8:47 am

A Tasmanian pilgrimage

For a fair chunk of my recent three week stint in Tasmania, I hitched around from town to town without any real destination in mind. But between all that I made it out to a couple of the more remote parts of the state for a pilgrimage of sorts – to the Florentine Valley and the Franklin River.

The Florentine is in Tasmania’s south-west. 25km past the last town in that direction, traffic is fairly infrequent. But from 2006 to 2012 it was the site of Camp Florentine, where a group of committed environmentalists held one of Australia’s longest lasting forest blockade camps.

The people in that camp battled the cold and the rain; the hostility of loggers and the forestry industry; the heartbreak of watching a forest clearfelled in front of them. To stay there as long as they did showed amazing resilience and bravery. But they also showed a lot of creativity – banner drops in cities (even off the side of the Spirit Of Tasmania ferry), barricades in the shape of pirate ships, angels on tripods. They were “forest ferals”; people who rejected the values of mainstream society to camp in the bush, eating roadkill, sneaking around the forest and getting arrested disrupting logging.

I have to admit it was towards the end of that six years that I first heard of the campaign, but it inspired me to hear of these people protecting from clearfell machines one of the country’s last wild frontiers. I helped run fundraiser events, did protests at Harvey Norman against the sale of timber products made from these forests. I heard people who had been there talk about the beauty of the Florentine and what it meant to them. “The Floz” to me was always a magical place.

For quite a while I assumed I would at some point make it to the Floz to help out. But in 2012 a truce was called while the logging industry and environmentalists negotiated a “forest agreement”. It wasn’t an easy process – forests kept falling, but environmentalists were told that any protests would risk the whole process being thrown out. Blockaders were shut out of the negotiations. Many felt betrayed not just by the government and industry, but by big environmental organisations. Long-term forest activist Miranda Gibson went up a giant eucalypt and didn’t come down for well over a year to keep the eyes of the world on Tasmania’s south-west forests.

In the end the “forest agreement” was bitterly disappointing. It included industry subsidies but little conservation outcomes. It included a gag clause saying the whole thing would be discarded if anyone protested against deforestation. And after all that, it was torn up a year later when the state government changed. But there was a victory of sorts – 170,000 hectares nominated for (and awarded) world heritage status. It even survived Tony Abbott taking the unprecedented step of asking the UN to rescind part of the decision.

I went to the Floz with a couple of friends. None of us had been part of the camp but we had all heard stories from friends who had. We slept at the old campsite; we walked through stunning rainforest full of fallen trees covered in bright green lichen, an undergrowth of ferns, a distant canopy of giant and ancient sassafras and eucalypts. We went to the Growling Swallet, where a creek disappears into an underground cave. We walked to the river near where the last Tasmanian tiger was captured in the 1930’s (of course we hold on to hope there are still some in that dense forest). We walked to the top of a mountain range, where the vast valleys of green were laid out in front of us, punctuated by the scars where forest had been clearfelled.

The Florentine Valley was certainly as beautiful as I had hoped, and walking those tracks gave me a new sense of appreciation for the people who struggled so hard to stop those ancient trees being knocked down.

A few days later I headed north-west towards Queenstown, knowing that along the way the road would be intercepted by the Franklin River. The Franklin holds an even more iconic place in Australia’s protest history than the Florentine.

In 1979, the Tasmanian government announced plans to dam the Franklin and flood the valley for generating hydroelectricity. Many of Tasmania’s rivers had already been dammed for the same purpose; but this time conservationists decided that this valley; forest so impenetrable few settlers had ever made it through (of course a notable exception being the legendary cannibal convict escapee Alexander Pearce), should be protected.

Led by a prominent Hobart doctor named Bob Brown and represented by Peter Dombrovkis’ iconic photograph, the campaign to save the Franklin was born.

People from all over Australia took up the cause, first through political campaigning and then in late 1982-1983 by flocking to the Franklin River to blockade workers beginning construction of the dam. 1,400 people were arrested in the blockade, which became a media spectacle and captured the imagination of the public in a way few environmental campaigns have before or since.

In 1983, the federal Labor opposition declared in the leadup to the election that they would stop the dam if they were elected. With the Franklin duly playing its part, Labor won the election. The Tasmanian state government challenged the decision in court, even threatening to secede from the commonwealth. But in the end the Franklin was allowed to flow, Tasmania never suffered a shortage of electricity, and the campaign put the state and its phenomenal natural beauty on the world stage in a way that no amount of hydroelectricity could ever match.

The Franklin River meets the A10 highway near Derwent Bridge. I got picked up hitching by another tourist from the mainland – he had rented a car and had ten days to drive around the state. I told him of my plan to see the river and he said he’d like to join me.

As we took the short walk from the highway to the rope bridge across the river, I told my new companion about the history of the campaign and its significance (I stopped short of launching into a chorus of Goanna’s cheesy campaign anthem Let The Franklin Flow). When we got there though, the mighty Franklin was looking pretty subdued. No high gorges or swirling currents like the Peter Dombrovkis photo, just a nice if pretty average looking river ambling along at barely waist-high depth.That spot I guess is not one of its more spectacular points.

Still, we hung out for a while on the bank of the river, I stripped off for a refreshing (ie. very cold) swim. Just by walking from the highway we had left behind the last bit of industrialised civilisation between here and the coast – a fact attested to by the rickety one-person-at-a-time bridge that crossed the river. From here on the Franklin wound through country where the Tasmanian devils, quolls, pademelons and thousands of other species can roam freely.

This little pilgrimage to those two sites might seem quaint and a bit nerdy, but I’m glad I did it. Firstly it helped to enflesh for me these stories I have heard, helping me to appreciate them in a new way. Secondly, it allowed a re-evaluation of the history that has brought us to where we are today.

While I was in Tasmania, Donald Trump was elected as US president, the latest of a series of reactionary election results in 2016. I wish I could have shrugged it off, knowing I was on holiday. But instead, it prompted a lot of thinking. Can we of the pro-immigration, pro-environment political left really be losing this badly? As Hillary Clinton raged against “deplorables” and those she was targeting proudly took on the label; I had to wonder how we had gotten so out of touch. How many people in the political left have any kind of relationship with the average Trump/One Nation voter? When the mainstream view is so far from my own in so many ways, how to I find a place where I belong in this culture and these people?

These are questions that rolled around my head as I went on long bushwalks. I didn’t come to many satisfactory resolutions, but it was really nice to think of these environmental campaigns as part of the history that had shaped Australia – not a fringe sect, but a powerful movement that gathered people together, that gave voice to feelings that were deep-seated and shared by many, that influenced the society we live in today. And it is a part of our culture I feel I can proudly identify with and situate myself in.

And looking at that forest and that river, I had to admire the people who had given so much and staked it all on protecting these places. People who dedicated their lives to the cause, going to live in remote locations; standing in the face of a hostile media, government and local opposition. They didn’t see events as just unfolding guided by fate. They believed that we should play an active role in shaping the future. While one view of the future was proffered by the powerful people of Tasmania (and indeed the world), they were able to see a different one – and the proof is standing there in the forests of Tasmania that sometimes those visions of the future can turn out. Opening our eyes to a different vision of the past also allows us to envision a different future.

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December 8, 2016 · 12:53 pm

Not Drowning, Waving – a cultural appropriation case study

Over a year ago, I started just for fun writing short articles based on songs that would come up on shuffle mode on my mp3 player. The articles were intended to form a zine that I have never gotten around to publishing.

But I occasionally am reminded of this particular piece as the online debates over cultural appropriation grow more and more fervent. I don’t intend to write an in-depth article on the concept of cultural appropriation, but I do think that this article – in a specific micro-study – puts forward some of my own ideas on the issue; ideas that I think are a reasonably interesting contribution to the debate.

Not Drowning, Waving – Claim

In 2015, cultural appropriation is a hot topic. Especially in online media, where marginalised voices have a new platform, there is heaps of writing about white culture co-opting the music, clothes and imagery of other cultures to gain some kind of ‘cool’.

Cultural appropriation is not in itself a bad thing. Throughout history, one of the ways that humanity has progressed is through observing and copying other groups and the way that they did things. I think it is in fact much more natural for ‘culture’ to be shared and copied than our modern system of copyright and intellectual property.

Where it becomes problematic though, is where cultural appropriation comes alongside colonisation. So the situation we have now is that non-white cultures who have had their land and traditions forcibly taken off them now have the somewhat irritating sight of seeing their music, clothes and art become valuable commodities that can make a lot of money – usually for white people and corporations, with little credit and even less cash being given to the original source.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, one if the best things that happened to rock music was that people in the western world discovered that other parts of the world have music too. Suddenly there were new record labels like Real World and World Circuit, new global stars like Youssou N’Dour and Yothu Yindi, and new collaborations like Paul Simon’s Graceland album, Deep Forest’s house remixes of African field recordings, and Melbourne band Not Drowning, Waving.

Not Drowning, Waving mixed rock with classical instruments, with ambient soundscapes and with traditional Melanesian music. The song Claim (title track off their third album) is a good example – the song is almost entirely didgeridoo and clapsticks played by Gnarnayarrahe Waittairie, with the band playing a very minor role.

David Bridie from the band would go on to start a record label to release Melanesian music (mostly Papuan, Torres Strait or northern Australian Aboriginal), and would record a number of film soundtracks, a feature of which would be electronic and ambient production mixed with traditional music.

In the 1980’s, I think ethical questions around cultural appropriation were less widespread (although there was quite a debate in political and music circles surrounding the ethics of Paul Simon’s Graceland album). In the expansive, exploratory vibe of the time, it made sense to take on different musical styles. That spirit of experimentation made for some amazing music. Graceland is a perfect example of the fact that even without a real commitment to the actual culture and conditions of people, you can still make some brilliant music.

But it’s never really just about the music, is it? The critique of white cultural co-option is a valid one, and anyone who thinks it’s “just about the music” is exactly the kind of person who needs to be listening to it.

So as well as purely the sound of the music (which I quite like), there is some worth in analysing the cross-cultural ethics of Not Drowning, Waving. And in this field I think they do pretty well. Rather than just a cultural dilettante, David Bridie has shown a real commitment to the music of Melanesian cultures and the people who make it – the music by releasing and promoting music made by artists who would not otherwise be given those opportunities, and the people because he has continually offered his support to the people of West Papua in their struggle to resist Indonesian occupation.

Some may debate my views here, but I’m satisfied I can listen to a song like Claim and enjoy it as an exchange of musical ideas across cultures, rather than an act of exploitation.

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