Statement

 

from John Kinsella

Australia the Warlord

             John Kinsella

 

 

It seems appropriate that regret should be uttered at a time of mourning. We have just suffered close personal loss, and there’s something very specific about the way a family deals with such loss in day-to-day activities, in the ‘emptiness’ of the early hours, and in reprocessing the nature of close relationships and what they mean.

 

And the regret I wish to utter is that Australia has fully committed itself to the path of militarism. The militarisation of universities that some of us spoke out against over the last decade in particular has come to a very rotten fruition under the present federal government. More and more arms companies (in all their tech ideations) are becoming entrenched in Australia, and from AUKUS to the manufacturing of missiles, from high energy yield weapons to sonar guidance systems, the speech of warfare is becoming normalised in Australian public discourse.

 

What bemuses me, as an extension of grief, is why I’m not seeing activists standing against this. In universities (in Australia and other countries) I have witnessed what amounts to quietism at best, and even in one instance, overt pressure applied by militarists (in various guises) to quell a pacifist voice as such as my own. People so readily accept a new status quo; under the ‘military solution’ approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ‘be prepared’ stance regarding China’s own militarism, the voices of difference and opposition are crushed.

 

Witness the Australian Labor Party’s verbal attacks on one of their own in Josh Wilson, who along with others was accused of ‘appeasement’ for resisting the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Witness the deployment of war-time prime minister John Curtin as talisman (a racist and a militarist), and as lethal force of persuasion, based on an idea of history as conflict dialectic. ‘Appeasement’ is one of those vox-pop snap-grab terms that twists like the knife it is intended to be: it carries the white feather, cowardice, betrayal, and delusion in its militarist etymologising. As it is used with respect to an arms-race, it seeks to disarm the already disarmed. It’s pernicious and easy. Those who wield it ‘appease’ death and hatred as they do so.

 

No. It’s time to stand up to this endgaming, to deny the euphemisms of ‘defence’ and position it for what it is. People can get out there and protest fossil fuel usage (as they should), yet they don’t take on the defence industries? Come on!

 

Every day we are greeted with yet another extension of the ‘military vision’ (essentialised around the idea of ‘pillars’, what’s more), as today I rose out of sleeplessness and processing a lost life to read that Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where I lived for a short while in the mid-90s, is having its runway ‘upgraded’ for military purposes; that this ‘pivot’ of surveillance is necessarily going to become more and more a focus of ‘protecting’ Australian interests (and assets), as well as those of its ‘allies’.

 

The fate of sea turtles on the Cocos is another aside, of course. The lack of environmental scrutiny and clearances another. And then an article that has sad visuals of boys with their toys, and yet another exploiting military tech company using Indigenous country for their exploits: laser weapons. So many of these companies with their university graduates in enthusiasm-mode are inculcating themselves into the day-to-day functionality of the body politic and the ‘social organism’. An organism that is building-in its own death. What is literature to all this? A mode of decorative mourning? Literature won’t be there in the end because it can only write after the fact and not in medias res? The writing is now, the writing is not accepting the status quo, not expecting to be value-added by peers and official mechanisms. And yet we do, because writing is an extension of the self into the ‘outside world’. We need to work through this.

 

Apropos of all this, and related because the arc towards military arms dealer status (already was, but now aiming for warlord status) that comes out of the military occupation and oppression of Indigenous peoples: a comment on The Voice and where I stand.

 

I fully support all Indigenous moves towards the reclamation of their lands and rights, and I support the position of the YES vote as I totally oppose all that the NO vote stands for. However, I think that anything connected with the system of governance (colonial, oppressive) that rules Australia is inevitably going to be compromised and limited by definition (and legal actuality). So YES, of course, but only in itself, not by way of vicariously supporting the colonial militarist system of governance by proxy.

 

The collective vision of ‘Australia’ is compromised because of its colonial focus, and because it subscribes to an exploitive state-business collaboration, but it will inevitably become even more compromised with its leap into major arms dealer status. War is exploitation on every level, and people who would normally oppose the doings of arms companies quickly become silent at times of conflict (that concern them... whilst ignoring conflicts elsewhere that do not threaten their personal, ideological, profit or well-being status), even promoting, say, the manufacture of arms to send to Ukraine.

 

To oppose such gratuitous death industrialising is seen as relative, only belonging to ‘times of peace’ and to ‘better circumstances’. A whole ‘realism’/’realistic’ semantic construct is established to control discourse and to bring about an acceptance of a new militarised status quo. Violence is sold as peace, and ‘attack’, ‘defence’, and ‘justice’ are intertwined and made determinate of each other.

 

But mourning is mourning, no loss is acceptable, and no loss in its essence, in its actuality, is prevented by inflicting loss (and that includes on animals). The broader silence of many writers (especially poets) in particular bemuses me. While many relish there being a ‘leftish’ government in place, it’s a furphy — politics are shown by actions, not words, and the actions of the federal government are militaristic, nationalist in extremis, and citizenship-orientated. For such governments, environment is about functionality (even positive climate-change preventative actions are dressed in economics, common sense and survivalism), not about quiddity or something that might exist in itself outside utility. And to separate the damage of environment from the well-being of people is to create the destructive dualism underpinning the horrors of Western colonialism that has wreaked havoc on the planet for centuries.

 

Counterintuitive Ghazal, 26th January, 2022

If I’ve learnt things askew, it feel it’s not because of bad intentions —

rather, I laud the form and am sad if spirit shifts when I make use of it.

 

On a day of trauma for many, a day of mourning a day of anger

at ill-gotten gains, when there are no platitudes, only pain, I call on it.

 

I call on a form of desire with all ‘erotics’ stripped away because

of the greed of one body over others, because of the chasmic longing in it.

 

Third person singular, I locate those items of ongoing occupation,

and they are all around me and I make use of them as I make recourse to it.

 

I don’t for a moment believe that life can be renewed for the oppressed

from the ‘rotting corpse of the settler’ as violent Frantz Fanon would have it.

 

In fact, I see the artists and poets and singers redressing the wrongs

and bringing repair, knowing the gun was the end of justice and not start of it.

 

But Fanon was right about loss of dignity and hope and ongoing mental illness

wrought by the settlers who played their part and excluded or validated it.

 

I laud this form because of its moments linking to moments, its building

out of longing and despair — in the interconnectedness, each couplet unique in it.

 

I feel the trauma of Karla Dickens’s artwork that antiflags and is forever

more than object — January 26, Day of Mourning — and acknowledge it.

 

I am a flagless person but that doesn’t exonerate me. I feel my bare feet burn

on the ground and know it’s more than a reminder. In my weakness I call on it.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Note: for more on Karla Dickens see this article.

Against Australia's Arms Trade Ambitions

           

          by John

So, the fascist regime wants to position itself to become a major arms exporter, to feed the horror and distress of military conflict around the world. Its concern about export to oppressive countries is a furphy, a way of positioning itself as righteous in exporting to the apparently ‘better’ countries, countries more efficient at screening their human rights abuses.

Australia hungers for power, and the constant papers and addresses to position itself as an influential ‘middle power’ are part of the same mentality that denies human-induced climate change, sees the remaining native vegetation and wildlife as something to delete or at best fetishise, something that stands in the way of ‘development’.

It’s tragic being inside this most nineteenth-century political and psychological immaturity — a game of states and borders, of power deals made by elites with vested interests in their outcomes. Australia is not decolonising; it’s recolonising and extending its ambitions into becoming a coloniser in overt and subtle ways. Arms exports are the most brutal form of colonisation.

This goes hand in hand with the abuse of refugees, of ‘turning back the boats’, of refusing to scrutinise the ‘fuck off we’re full’ or ‘if you don’t like it, leave’ mentality that rules in much of rural Australia, and in the suburbs as well.

One of the most appalling notions underlying so much of this pocket battleship aggression, this dreadnought hangover of the years leading to the First World War, is that of ‘any job being better than no job’. We hear this being peddled by politicians of the right over and over again. So, to manufacture arms that are used to kill is a just way of making a living?

There aren’t even semantics worth undoing here to show the blatant hypocrisy of such unreasoning ‘pragmatism’. The mining industry hugely benefits from arms trade, and all the ‘philanthropy’ of rapacious miners buying off academic institutions, and infiltrating the thinking and processing mechanisms of universities, doesn’t change the fact that in the end they provide the raw materials of bullets, guns, missiles, atomic warheads. The degrees of separation seem to protect their consciences, but in the end, the corpses are at their doors, and the doors of government.

Christopher Pyne’s desire to position Australia as a 5 percenter in terms of defence industry and sales is an overt fascist desire — the nation state develops and fosters industries that entrench a militaristic identity in which we are all expected to acquiesce or to be excluded.

There are no real rights in Australia, just illusions of rights. They are taken from us daily, and we do nothing. Australia already participates in the international arms trade; don’t think it doesn’t. And this should be stopped immediately.

But things are about to get a whole lot more bloody in the new patriotism stakes that are being foisted on us. If this core of colonialism is not addressed, Australia will consolidate its position as a New Colonial Power. For that’s what it is, and why people can’t see the wood for the trees given most of its forest and bush is being chopped down with nothing but dust in sight, chopped down and burnt or logged and/or turned to woodchips; it’s an astonishing feat of denial. But then again, note the sticker you see around here that supports the hunting and fishing party: a gun with a tick, and a tree with a cross through it. Get it, people?

The Wild Colonial Boy

The wild colonial boy is a loner

The wild colonial boy has guilt over his plunder

The wild colonial boy plunders his guilt

The wild colonial boy doesn’t know

            what to do with the plunder

The wild colonial boy offloads the plunder

            at the trash and treasure

The wild colonial boy can’t tune into the Eureka Stockade

The wild colonial boy tries to fly in and fly out but is caught out,

            amphetamines in his urine

The wild colonial boy shares a cell with a Noongar bloke

            who shares law and knowledge from country

The wild colonial boy rather be inside than out

            because the chains and slavery of the languages

            of occupation leave him confused and angry,  

            but inside is murder and he knows it

The wild colonial boy doesn't know what to do

            with his skill set — he thinks of going bush

The wild colonial boy watches the numbats

            near the huts in the visitors’ part of Dryandra Forest

The wild colonial boy listens to the crested pigeon flying, to the bush stone-

            curlew stalking, the western gerygone singing along with the

            elegant parrot in the canopy and the golden whistler

            and even the nest-hunting shining bronze-cuckoo

The wild colonial boy couldn’t be said to be distracted as the cops

            close in around him, but listening to the cross-talk

            of community, the close-knit interferences of belonging,      

            the distress of songs broken up by songs of repair and reparation

The wild colonial boy is taken and cuffed and has the shit

            kicked out of him — now he is tattooed with a constellation

            that shines over no part of the earth but is permanent

The wild colonial boy watches a young Noongar bloke being beaten

            to death in the lock-up

The wild colonial boy has been extradited as witness

            to be laughed at by the judge, to be warned to say nothing more

            if he ever wants to wander the plains again

The wild colonial boy promises himself he will shout the truth

            at every footy match, in front of every television,

            to the writers of reports who will go home to love and calm

The wild colonial boy wanders the port streets on his release,

            not understanding he’s in a decolonising world,

            the shops bristling with worldly goods, with opportunities,

            and all good things coming to those standing and waiting

The wild colonial boy stops in front of a travel agency window

            and sees a jet will take him anywhere in the world

            and that he can unlearn the codes of his failings —

            he can become he can become he can become

The wild colonial boy has worn dresses and wandered naked

            and has never been stuck on the codes of the pub

            and wonders if his time has come, but the urbane laugh

            at him — his phonelessness — head-in-hands on the kerb

The wild colonial boy looks out for his mate the actor

            but knows in his heart that his friend is gone,

            a friend who had been eaten by Australia,

            a friend whose name he won’t use in a song

            out of respect for the dead

The wild colonial boy looks out from near the walls

            of the Roundhouse and finds solace

            in the sea, the dolphins, the gulls

The wild colonial boy hears the many conversations

            and all languages make sense to him

            though he claims none — he is homeless

            and stateless and his family can't reach him

The wild colonial boy can't ‘call Australia home’, though he has never

            really left its shores; but he has travelled outside its jurisdictions,

            and he has travelled far beyond its metaphors

            John Kinsella

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers — a poem

By John

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers

The new colonialism

eliminates or integrates

the water’s edge. The Avon River

is replete and despite the chemical

run-off it can’t quite process,

birdlife is rife along its banks.

Perched in dying paperbarks

spoonbills eke out nesting plans,

and sacred ibises preen

themselves with optimism?

A problem with me using this term?

Really? Try the trampling-under

of birds and riparian vegetation

as the eye of the telephone

mediates the real world

into digestible auguries: and where

a rare white swan swings

its neck, a Pokemon perches,

scowling and grimacing.

Trodden under, this nature

of encounter, this exercise

routine to coax emergence

from the caves of gaming,

this tracking of each and every

cybernetic soul, this savvy

that marginalises non-participants

and swallows tales of capitalist

liberty with addicted gulps,

is a travesty of seeing. Too blunt?

Each step into privacy,

each sucking of another’s skin,

each moment of worship interrupted

and over-ridden, each threshold

crossed to gather location

to conquest, is the theft

of reality from non-participants,

all sucked into a vortex of deadlife.

The sacred ibises preen with optimism,

believing, along with spoonbills,

that they will nest and raise their young,

and see what they see with their own eyes.

Violation of geography, absorption of ‘outdoors’.

            John Kinsella

A Rage for Verse: The Case for Charles Walker as the Author of the First Volume of Verse Published in Western Australia (1856)

by John Kinsella


In doing research for the Western Australian Poetry Anthology (Fremantle Press, 2015) that Tracy and I are editing, I have come across some bizarre and quite sad material. John Hay’s 1981 essay ‘Literature and Society’ from A New History of Western Australia (ed. C. T. Stannage, 1981, UWAP, Perth) draws heavily on Beverley Smith’s UWA thesis on early Western Australian writing written in the early '60s, and makes interesting if very brief points of reference worth following up. This is one that interested me in particular because as I have written elsewhere, Henry Clay’s Two and Two: a Story of the Australian Forest by H. E. C., with Minor Poems of Colonial Interest, is often considered the first volume of poetry by a single author published in the colony (Perth, 1873).

Yet as Hay notes, ‘In February [?] 1856, the convict Charles Walker seems to have published a small volume entitled Lyrical Poems, the first book of verse to be published in Perth. No copies are extant.’ (p. 607) One might guess that the claim (not Hay’s claim but asserted in various places) for Clay’s being the first book of its type published in Perth is due to the ‘No copies extant.’ There is no evidence outside newspaper advertisements that Walker’s book existed at all. Naturally, this has got me intrigued, especially as, through drawing on colonial and later sources, I have made the same claim for Clay’s book myself.

So what do we know of Walker? Almost nothing. In the Western Australian newspaper The Inquirer and Commercial News (1855-1901), Walker published almost weekly advertisements from 19th December 1855 through to late March 1856, relating to a work entitled Lyrical Poems. The advertisements up until that of 6th February 1856 are worded

‘Lyrical and Other Poems’, By Charles Walker. Persons requiring a copy will please to forward their wishes to the author, at Mr G Marfleet’s, Perth; which will meet with due attention.’ 

Then they change to this:

‘Just Published LYRICAL POEMS by Charles Walker Copies can be had at the Stores of Mr G. Marfleet, Perth. PRICE — Half-a-crown.’

So, we might assume the book was printed and published, and might we conjecture that it was done through Marfleet’s booksellers? In itself, it’s thin evidence, though it would be strange to pay for advertising so consistently if there was nothing intended and ultimately nothing to show.

But it gets stranger. Searching the newspapers of the period, there is no evidence of Walker publishing poems in them — the usual method of dissemination of the time. Being a colonial poet prior to the boom of ‘Manly poetry’ (as A. G. Stephens, editor of the Bulletin would call the outburst of goldfields versifying that began in the 1890s, starring poets such as ‘Crosscut’, ‘Bluebush’, and ‘Dryblower’) was no easy thing outside whimsical versifying, either praising or mocking (complaining of) colonial life and administration. As Hay quotes Henry Clay writing in his introduction to Immortelles (serialised then published in 1890),

‘The pioneers of local literature in a small community should prepare to encounter special difficulties and a probable harvest of loss. Without assumption, they should have sufficient self-reliance to hold their ground against the saucy badinage of amused spectators and the practical indifference of friends.’ (p. 608)

Or is there perhaps evidence of Walker publishing in the papers? Well, there’s one poem in the same paper where he promoted his book. It’s a poem with a twist — a threat poem, an investigative poem, a sleuthing poem. As a mirror of the convict system that saw him (as we will discover) working under the ‘care’ of Mr G. Marfleet, presumably as a Ticket-of-Leave man. This poem-advertisement is nothing less than a hunting poem. But it carries above it an epigrammatic (separate) advertisement giving his reasons, and what he wants in transparent prose (is the poem transparent in its call?). This is what we read:

[Advertisement.]
WHEREAS a manuscript book, containing about one hundred pages, was taken away from me about eighteen months ago, and, from circumstances which have come to my knowledge, believing it to be in the possession of some person well acquainted with its contents, I hereby offer a reward of Two Pounds for the recovery of the same. CHARLES WALKER. Perth, April 24, 1856.’
NOTICE.
WHEREAS a man, some five feet ten,  
(No matter whether Charles or Ben)
Has took it in his empty head,
The equal empty tale to spread,
That all the dreamings of my muse
Are of the ladies’ charms profuse,
But scarcely ever condescend
His vocal talent to commend;
He wonders why his foolish tales
So little on your mind prevails :
And why the slander he has sown—
I find it has been all his own —
Has never been received as truth,
By any mind of common growth.
This is to let that tall chap know.
That he may find a ‘bar’ or so,
To mar the quiet of his path,
Should he presume to tempt my wrath.
AUTHOR OF ‘LYRICAL POEMS.’
(APA citation — Advertising. (1856, April 30). The Inquirer and Commercial News (Perth, WA: 1855-1901), p. 2. Retrieved March 27, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article66005007)

What is plain from this is that either this manuscript is a new work, or maybe it’s the old work and it never actually appeared. Conjecture. Who is to know? Is the offender Mr G. Marfleet, or is even supposing so a smear? A little more evidence comes our way shortly. But in the meantime, the poem itself is telling — clearly his verses (likely of Lyrical Poems given the lack of newspaper and journal evidence of other publication — though some may yet surface) had attracted negative attention. The slighting of his work as effeminate had brought the phallic response — ‘he may find a “bar” or so,/ To mar the quiet of his path.’

There is bitterness and zeal in this poem. I hesitate to call it doggerel because it is too convinced, too passionate, too driven. Its awkward syntax and odd parsing don’t invalidate its desperate anger. Politeness is only formal — this is a poetry wanting to burst out of its constraints. A ‘self-promoter’, that ludicrous accusation pointed at the poet who feels passionate about being heard, about speaking out...? As he accuses, the offender is all bluster and ‘talent’ and no substance because it is ‘he’ that is the fraud. But sadly, Walker undoes it all with the threat — a moment of vulnerability, weakness, and brutality. But really, it’s about his own feeling of inadequacy more than any other, any ‘five feet ten’ swell, be he Charles or Ben or whatever. I think Charles Walker was the most modern of colonial poets.

But our poet sadly didn’t have to pay to promote his work or threaten others for taking his creativity and manuscript away. On the 6th August, 1856 — such a short time later — he is discussed as ‘news’, in the ‘Local and Domestic Intelligence’ columns of the paper. We read, with shock:

A few days since a reconvicted man committed suicide in the establishment by cutting his throat with a razor. His name was Charles Walker, formerly in the employ of Mr Marfleet of this town, from whose service he absconded a few months ago. It was for this offence and for being out of his district without a pass that he was returned to the Establishment for twelve months. While in the employ of Mr Marfleet his general character was good, but his manner was flighty, and there was no doubt a tendency to insanity. He was a somewhat conspicuous character in consequence of his rage for verse making, which found vent in the advertising columns of this journal, and in a small volume entitled ‘Lyrical Poems,’ published some six months since.

The account of this tragedy appears to give us a third-party confirmation of the existence of a book of poetry written by Charles Walker — ‘Lyrical Poems’. It doesn’t confirm the book was printed in Perth, but it would seem likely given Walker’s convict status, and what we might assume were limited means. But then, he could pay for the advertisements, and he did offer a (sizeable) two-pound reward.

Did his book sell well enough at half-a-crown to yield him a windfall? Did being ‘the first’ add a mystique and appeal to the collection or was he crushed by his critics before he began?

The conservatism of reading environments as well as the tendency to self-help (see Hay regarding the later Mechanics Institutes) publications — how to be a more effective settler — probably counted against this convict. John Boyle O’Reilly was said to have scratched poems on prison walls wherever he was incarcerated (see H. Drake-Brockman in The West Australian, 19th July, 1952:

‘Perhaps at Fremantle gaol some poem may still lurk under whitewash. O’Reilly wrote poems with nails on his prison walls in Ireland and England. After his escape, he declared that he would like to revisit old cells and find his scratchings. This never happened.’)

and Henry Clay would battle on against the negative attitudes regardless, but outside newspaper opinion versifying, print-poetry was thin-on if existent at all.

Charles Walker’s ‘rage for verse making’ fits. His self-inflicted death (if that’s actually what it was) and the reference to his employer the bookseller (or storekeeper) who clearly reported him for going AWOL, fit the profile. What became of his missing verses, his published book? Creativity in the colony was impractical in so many ways. My great-great-grandfather was a labourer, a farmer, and later a school teacher — the first full-time schoolteacher in the first Catholic school in the Vasse (Busselton). No doubt he ranged from the practical to the creative — he certainly propelled himself forward and self-taught himself to another ‘level’ of colonial society, no easy thing for a just-post-famine migrant with a huge family. Charles Walker’s poetry was a direct conduit between his inner self and reality as he perceived it. We see that in his one remaining poem, his self-promoting advertising verse-threat.

There’s no biographical data readily available on Charles Walker outside what I’ve presented here. He was a ‘reoffender’. The establishment took him back. Convict Establishment — Fremantle Prison — consumed those used to create it. This self-eating in the new Eden was the paradox of the colonial, but of the State in all its manifestations. It needs what it can destroy. Charles Walker wanted to be heard — was desperate to be heard — and he was punished for it. Was he paranoid, did he carry out his verse threats, was he hard done-by?

There’s a history and embodiment of poetry in this, and none would know this better than the indigenous singers, story-tellers and poets of early colonisation in Western Australia, and what has followed. We have reports of the threats of Yagan and what colonists did to him, but nothing of the poetry of his people, of himself. In Jack Davis: A Life Story (Keith Chesson, Dent, 1988, Melbourne) we read, ‘Yagan had made every effort to bring some sense to the worsening situation. In March 1833 he had arranged corroborees to bring about a cultural exchange with the settlers.’ (p193) Of course, Yagan’s head was cut off and smoked. This is the brutality at the foundation of the Swan River Colony. Convicts were controversially brought into the colony in 1850 (until 1866) and the cruelty and degradation meted out to them are never to be forgotten, and come as a direct extension of the treatment of Yagan and his people. Charles Walker wrote in this ecology, and wrote out of it. Isolated, keen to speak out, he advertised his condition as celebration but with passion. He raged until the very end. We can get this much from what we have.

Without going into the content of the paper the same day Charles Walker published his reward and poem-advertisement, take one item in the same column:

‘POWDER MAGAZINE. PERSONS having Powder deposited in the Magazine at Fremantle are requested, in demanding the same from the Commissariat, to state, — The marks on the package  The size, whether whole, half or quarter barrels  The contents, giving the description as well as the quantity of powder. And no demand will be noticed unless this notice is complied with. The Magazine will be open for the delivery of powder between one and two p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Commissariat, Fremantle, April, 26, 1855.’

This is the material of the frontier.

Whether or not Walker’s poems were over-delicate and fey versifying as we might assume it had been said, he certainly had decided on a verse that was confronting, aggressive and of the place and conditions he was part of. His violent death was of this, too. The poetry and his condition of being, his manifestation within the colonial body-without-organs, within the city of Perth, and the gaol itself, as a form of textual projection. As Derrida gesticulated (waving his arms), ‘Everything is a text; this is a text’... and so we have the first book of Western Australian poetry by a single author. The advertisements, the poem advertisement, the plea and accusation and the mediating figure of the ‘book-seller’, the report of his death... accusations of loss of control to the (illogical?) forces of poetry... this is a full book. It is there for us to read. You don’t judge a book by the number of pages it has, or even by its format. It is text, poetry is text, and it is here with us now. It is the truth of the lyrical urge. It is Lyrical Poems by Charles Walker, 1856.

Polysituated(ness): international regionalism

By John Kinsella


For the last 18 months I have been working on a book on ‘place’. I was recently invited to (what looks like a very interesting) event to discuss ‘home and away’. I think it is part of a series located in different cities. Anyway, that’s an aside to my present point, which is not a critique of that event, but rather a comment that comes out of the issue central to my critique of the idea of ‘place’.

I do not believe one is ever ‘at home’, because home is composed of so many variables, so many intersecting, bisecting and even parallel lines, that the expression only serves as a very general ‘location’ device that evokes certain sentiments around particular geographic co-ordinates. My problem with ‘home’ is that it is too often deployed as a term of ownership rather than belonging, and even when belonging is a passionate component, it is so as a declaration of exclusion, possession and security that necessarily denies such claims by (some) others. Who belongs ‘at home’? Those with whom we grow up, whom we allow and admit, who came before us (and how far back)?

I argue that we can only discuss connection, belonging, participation, and even visiting or departure, in terms of polysituatedness. We are always polysituated. If we are talking of where we primarily live (though we might go away, travel, or relocate and return every now and again), we are talking about so many different notions of connection and alienation that ‘home’ simply doesn’t answer the condition. At Jam Tree Gully we are talking of the idea of a ‘block’, the idea of fences or absence of fences, where a space begins and ends, overlaps with near and far neighbours, the act of accepting visitors, intrusion by the Shire (and its roadside herbicides), relationship with the town (some distance away) where we shop and collect mail, and the relationship of this town to regional centre. Then there are animals and plants (endemic and ‘introduced’), topographies and histories (dispossession, ‘settler’, ‘claim’ and so on), all of which create alternative configurations of that place.

Place is never static, and place is always defined in contradictory as well as complementary ways by outsiders and insiders, by those with vested interests and those indifferent. The horror of bauxite mining companies trying to develop their ‘claim’ south of Toodyay is a case in point: their configuration of a home that is not theirs in terms of dwelling (they can’t live in their proposed excavation), and a home which is the colonial target of a multinational conglomerate, is redefined in terms of run-on ‘local’ benefits for those who claim it as their place of dwelling. Shires love such propaganda to fuel their own dreams of personal and collective profit focused through improvement to living conditions (theirs). As such pressures come to bear on place, ‘home’ unravels into the polysituated: we take in information about our condition from sources far from our dwelling, well and truly outside locale. We create intersections with dialogues in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. At the same time, racist and exclusionary forces are at work in confining and enforcing sub-communal notions of home (to keep it ‘white’ or to resist certain religions or to keep out ‘greenies’). We polysituate where we sit, as much as when we travel or if we have more than one ‘home-place’. I am never ‘away’ because I am concurrently present in a nuanced and polyvalent discussion of belonging and exclusion.

One is cast as ‘UnAustralian’ for opposing the mining industry; living in a corner of Europe you’re asked, ‘when will you be going home?’ even if you have ancestry in that place. We live at a single point and all other points at once: the damage done locally affects the wellbeing of the entire biosphere. That’s the core of international regionalism: respect for regional integrity (whether we claim ‘region’ as home or not), and a desire for international dialogue. I celebrate difference and respect the customs of the local, but I also know that ‘home’ is a construct that suits the coloniser, as the colonised are forced to have loss of dwelling become a definition of home where other ways of conceptualising connection (e.g. totemic) are rehybridised to accord with western colonial notions of participation, connection… and ownership or non-ownership.

This is the way the disgraceful intervention into indigenous communities worked in Australia: home security becomes security for the nation to control and exploit what it sees as its materials of presence (people, minerals, soil, air, animals, plants etc). That’s home. And then the complicit (so very many of us) leave and look back with nostalgia, judgement, new knowledge, and still the desire to own memories and even the future of where one is not literally. They, also, are polysituating. It’s not always a generative and positive paradigm.

Polysituatedness works as a model within international regionalism for recollections and embodiments of earlier places of dwelling in one’s life, a family’s existence, or that of an entire community. When migrants describe their present ‘home’ as entailing aspects of their previous ‘home’, or refugees while embracing ‘opportunities’ in their new place/zone of enacting ‘living’, recall what they have been forced to leave behind and seek to recreate the complexities of that previous space in the new space, a polyvalent model of belonging is created.

Polysituatedness ‘explains’ these chronologies and spatialities, but takes things further by questioning the very nature of origins, birthplace, allegiance and loyalty, rights by soil, and other expressions (legal or conjectural) of connection to a particular set of geographical co-ordinates and their claimant communities. It also allows for a way of seeing entirely outside ‘claim’: connection through association, or even connection through ‘place’ itself making a claim on him/her/them. To occupy space and identify space are necessarily acts of definition, acts of establishing presence. To disrupt and twist Michel de Certeau’s words (yet again — unplanning in my/this case!):

‘The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors’ (The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall, University of California Press, 1988, p.101).’

It’s the ‘shadows and ambiguities’ of ‘home’ that undo rather than reinforce its claims to certainty, permanence, and as a reference point, but they are also the generative, creative and spiritual values of any such desires. Dwelling resists these, place embodies them, and space is the place of enactment.

From the city to the country, from pathways to trails, the rhetorical path is broken inside and outside the discourse. Parkour breaks the established paths and permissions through urban space, the sheep that breaks its desire line trails to the farm dam to escape, with its lamb, the predating fox, changes the rules it has established within the rules the farmer has established within the rules survey has established, and all the while there are preceding laws and rules of movement and belonging that are being negotiated without awareness (and sometimes with).

A brutal example of breaking the lines using ‘freedom’ as the outcome would be the trail-bike or four-wheel drive thrashing its way through bush, or following kangaroo trails and damaging peripheral vegetation. The ‘freedom’ of the place, of making use of, say, a broader definition of and catchment for ‘home’ (i.e. not where they dwell but within the region where the ‘participants live’) by these parties, is an enhancement of their notion of freedom and belonging, adding value to their sense of home, while diminishing it in the animals and plants, in the ecos itself, and in those humans who live in something more akin to a symbiotic relationship with that place.

Movement through place becomes the constant in the Polysituated equation as one leaves the dwelling in pursuit of food (or receives it via an online delivery service or has a friend pick up a take-away and bring it over, etc), or as one contacts the water board or electricity company or phone company to bring in to one’s space the allowances and opportunities of extended place, broader community. The lines are always alive, right to our transference to the funeral parlour in death, even if the ashes come back as a quasi-final statement of belonging.