Text: Living local at the bottom of the world
The one thing you realise when you fly back to Australia from Europe is how long the flight is – its painful, dry, loud and noticeably without the excitement of a trip that's taking you ‘overseas’ to see the delights of Europe, the Americas, Africa or Asia. The
Great Southern Land is a long way away from everything.
Although it is miraculous that aviation can make the world feel so small and that it takes less than 24hours to travel what 'once upon a time' took six months. The trip from London
to Sydney is still one of the longest journeys you can take on the planet before you start heading back in the other direction. When we overhear Americans in Turkey complaining about a 10 hour trip we think - "Pfft - 10
hours in the air, flying north, north west from Sydney and you've only just crossed the Arafura Sea."
Of course, air travel is the ball of the carbon footprint of reasonably affluent global citizens. The thing is if you cut air travel out we are more or less stuck in Australia. While you can bike ride around Europe and be in France for breakfast and Italy for lunch, in Sydney it would be more like Glebe for Breakfast and maybe Bankstown for lunch, if you really leg it.
In New Matilda earlier this month I asked two questions: "Would you go mad if you were stuck, not just in your suburb, but on this island continent? And not just for two months but for the rest of your life?" [1]
These are pertinent
questions for those who live on this island continent who are serious about the charge to live locally.
There is a geographical and historical dimension to the 'live local' debate that is not yet being seriously discussed. Since the First Fleet landed, (post)colonial Australians have been trained
away from the local: a long, long way away.
This text is intended as simply a preliminary provocation to consider the tendency in Australian culture to look away from the local, to look elsewhere, for culture, for food, for travel, for work, and for some, this is forever. The five hundred thousand-plus Australians that leave the country each month to travel (either business or pleasure) in the short term actually signal something big that needs to be considered when thinking about the small.
I am really interested in local visual arts, local theatre, local literature, indigenous culture and arts, bike riding, local produce and community gardens – but the suggestion here is that historically speaking, perhaps even before Australia was colonized, perhaps when it was a mere twinkle in the eye of some map maker who
once drew a large sea-monster on the co-ordinates where ‘Australia’ is now located, is that the tyranny of distance feeds into much of our cultural imaginary and our lived experience of this culture in many ways and has done since before the colony of Australia existed. This is part of the Australian experience, (be it white, ethnic, migrant, ex-pat, whatever) and I suspect it also resonates in surprising ways within the indigenous Australian
experience too.
When Patrick White received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973 it seems that the one thing ‘Australia’ can take credit for is for being so unbearable that it propelled him to write his novels:
“When I was rising eighteen I persuaded my parents to let me return to Australia and at least see whether I could adapt myself to life on the land before going up to Cambridge. For two years I worked as jackeroo, first in the mountainous southern New South Wales,
which became for me the bleakest place on earth, then on the property of a Withycombe uncle in the flat, blistering north, plagued alternately by drought and flood. I can remember swimming my horse through floodwaters to fetch the mail, and enjoying a dish of stewed nettles during a dearth of vegetables. The life in itself was not uncongenial, but the talk was endlessly of wool and weather. I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my
uncle's, on the dining table.”[2]
While of course White’s experience is not analogous to everyone’s, or maybe anyone’s (it could be entirely idiosyncratic), the practice of looking overseas for travel, culture, artistic inspiration, work, home is rooted in Australian cultural history.
As you can see, this is an idea I’m just beginning to flesh out in relation to the ‘live local’ movement. But I thought I may as well make it part of this public discussion in the process.
To be continued…
[1] Jennifer Hamilton “Big Ideas, Small Scale” retrieved from http://newmatilda.com/2010/01/08/big-ideas-small-scale 10/01/10
[2] Patrick White from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980,
Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific
Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993. Retreived from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1973/white-autobio.html on 24/01/10
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Derived from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPvIH1XQ-uk
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1973/white-autob...
http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.map-nk2456-13-e
http://newmatilda.com/2010/01/08/big-ideas-small-scale
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Comments
3 comments
02.02.10 — Claudia Taranto
Great ideas Jennifer, thanks for posting them. It's interesting to think about this in an increasingly globalised world. While white Australia seems to be moving beyond its adolescence and is feeling more comfortable about its identity and place in the world the cultural cringe is still alive in some quarters.
29.01.10 — Andrew Davies
Hi Jennifer,
Really enjoyed this. Keen to read your New Matilda piece as well. Thanks for sharing it with us and welcome to Pool! Please let us know if we can help in anyway in the future.
Andrew, Pool Team
27.01.10 — GB
Excellent article - you are a very good writer. I have traveled widely but as I get older I prefer to stay local. Don't even like going into cities much nowadays. I go global via the internet.