Don't care was made to care

Comments SMH Letters 24/7/25

Mending Country

Over three lovely hot days in January Denise and I attended a life-affirming memorial for my 84-yr-old sheep grazier/environmentalist cousin Sandy Campbell in Benalla (north-east Victoria) and two arresting solo shows – by the Australian contemporary artists Juan Ford and Joan Ross – serendipitously encountered on the drive south.

Struggling to articulate the linkages I sensed between these at-first-glance disparate experiences, I remembered the solid white moleskins I’d worn to all three events: to the N J Todd Funeral Home on the Baddaginnie-Benalla Rd, to the Benalla Art Gallery and to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Purchased a few years’ ago for $5 from an op shop in Hay and once doubtless prized by a well-turned-out local cocky, the trousers were generously cut from quality fabric (which, I mused recently, might just see me out). Free of fashion and embellishment, the all-cotton moleskins, crafted in Rochdale, Manchester around 1965, fit well whilst bringing to mind much that once seemed dependable, durable, even comforting about ‘the mother country’… e.g. Derwent Pencils, The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, Gerald Durrell. Originally the preserve of 19th-century European farm labourers, moleskins have been manufactured in Australia by R. M. Williams since the 1940s, and are today marketed as a stylish staple for all occasions ‘crafted for life as we look ahead to a more sustainable future, where less is more’.

Juan Ford, The Reorientalist (2013), oil on linen, 122 x 183 cm

Since acquiring those storied second-hand strides the ease and obeisance of empire have all but evaporated as we new-settler Australians awake to the lazily-concealed truths of colonisation and dispossession, and begin to nuance our conflicted relationships to Country, to good stewardship, to always was, always will be. The spectre of climate collapse, too, has altered almost everything.

~

Sandy (aged 79) with his prize-winning ewes, which took out the reserve and champion ribbons at the 2019 Wangaratta Show. Pic Mark Jesse

My cousin Keith ‘Sandy’ Cuming Campbell (1940-2024) was a giant of a man loved by his community with whom I felt, as a predominantly-urban earthling, a strangely-strong affinity. But I wish now that I’d darkened his door more often, known him better. Though well connected (his Scots engineer grandfather was briefly Lord Mayor of Melbourne) Sandy was something of a ‘black sheep’ who marched to the beat of his own, innovative, environmentally-attuned drum. He and his wife Sue worked tirelessly to revive degraded country in and around the north-east. In the 1960s they bought ‘Cooloongatta’, a denuded property out of Wangaratta better known as ‘the rabbit farm’ (its rolling hills lopped bare earlier in the century to fuel the gargantuan Eldorado gold and tin-dredging operation nearby). For 40 years the Campbells shot, poisoned, blew up, netted and dogged rabbits, while planting a million trees and improved pasture species, transforming the area’s most damaged acreage into its finest. Over many years Sandy was renowned for his prize-winning Border Leicester ewes, and in 2015 Sue was awarded an OAM for her dedicated landcare work.

After Sandy’s buoyant memorial event, attended by a couple of hundred friends, farmers, landcarers, racing figures, pollies (including Indi’s independent legends Cathy McGowan & Helen Haines) and extended family from across the eastern states, a few of us decamped to the Benalla Art Gallery for a light repast. There, a magnificent survey show of portentous contemporary ‘landscapes’ by the ecologically-touched Melbourne-based hyper-realist painter Juan Ford, its urgent wall texts and insightful catalogue (courtesy of curator Vince Alessi) were soon after to provide immensely prescient food for thought.

Juan Ford, Misunderstanding Everything (2009), oil on linen, 122 × 168 cm

Ruminating home up the Hume through country wild and tamed, place names explorational and aboriginal, the connections between (Sandy’s celebration of) life and art began to cascade and overwhelm, as supposedly hermetic realms (the gallery/the academy/the motel/ the odometer/the highway service centre/the e-Tag) collided, bled, coalesced. A few hours’ up the road – at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra – a second epiphany lay in wait.

Joan Ross, You were my biggest regret: diary entry 1806 (2022), oil and alkyd paint on stretched PVC, with printed perspex backing, 154 x 123.5 cm

Re-purposing and satirising the colonial project via artist interventions alongside august and ornately-framed portraits (almost all ‘influential’ men) and resuscitating forgotten/belittled First Nations figures, drawn from the Gallery’s vaults, Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams (curated by Joan Ross, Coby Edgar and Emma Kindred) personalises, names, takes aim. In the work above, writes Edgar, ‘Joan makes herself the subject. A woman in deep regret, tenderly holding onto a tree stump … in the background is a vista of deforested hills digitally composited from an 1806 painting ... Joan opens up the possibility of empathy in hindsight and does what few non-Indigenous people do; she mourns the destruction of Country and points to European exploration and exploitation as the cause.’ Her disturbed contemporary visions are not a million miles from the more universal shamanic protestations of Juan Ford, his beauteous, fearful canvases populated by environmental avatars ‘carrying with them powers of divination’, tattered banners and ‘messages of portent’.  

Ford’s exquisite paintings of nature – and thus he himself, and all of us – under duress, and Joan Ross’s fluorescent colonial stitch-ups, rigorously-researched and cleverly-collaged lampoons leaving Anglo-Celtic settler folk like me (and her) skewered and complicit, provide urgent and essential new lenses through which to re-consider Australia and those who’ve helped themselves via privilege and/or good fortune to destroy it, those who’ve weathered or succumbed to its hardships and vicissitudes – and perhaps most importantly, and hopefully – those who’ve worked often against the tide to nurture and add real value to our national account, to tread more lightly upon this special place, to care for Country, for ‘the biggest (damaged) estate on earth’.

~ 

Juan Ford’s show @ Benalla Art Gallery concluded somewhat fittingly on 26 January; Joan Ross @ National Portrait Gallery is on until 27 April 2025.

~

Incidentally, recent UK research sheds salutary new light upon those once-implicitly-trusted moleskins of mine. Like many an enterprising 19th-century industrialist, the brothers Langworthy, whose Rochdale factory nr Manchester (then known as ‘Cottonopolis’) once employed 1000 people, made their fortune on the back of cotton picked by African slaves across the Americas/Caribbean. 

In case you didn’t know (like me) … ‘Indi’ is the indigenous name for the Murray River.  

Texts channelled in this post include R. M. Williams 2025 ‘Moleskin: a heritage fabric for the future’ webpage, Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate (2014), The Border Mail (8 May 2020), ‘Rabbits - Sue Campbell OAM’, U3A Benalla and District Newsletter (5 June 2018), Charles Massy Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth (2018), Juan Ford: A Survey [exhibition catalogue essays by curator/editor Dr Vincent Alessi, Mardi Nowak, Amelia Winata, Julie McLaren, Louisa Waters & Michael Brennan] (2024), Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams (2024) [exhibition catalogue essay by co-curator Coby Edgar], Eleanor Dark Return to Coolami (1936), Peter Andrews Back from the Brink: How Australia's Landscape Can Be Saved (2006), Bill Gammage The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011) and Alexander Appleton’s 2023 Langworthy Bros research blog.

With thanks to Di Campbell, Sue Campbell, Denise Corrigan, Juan Ford and Joan Ross.

The Praying Mantis

Up at our neighbours’ house on Christmas Eve (where we’ve gathered around the piano to belt out carols every year since our children were small) I had an unexpected and unexpectedly robust conversation about climate change with the General Secretary of the MEU (Australia’s Mining and Energy Union). 

To the backdrop of Jingle Bells and Come All Ye Faithful, Grahame (from Pyrmont via Singleton) and I argued doggedly about when might be the right time to acknowledge the perilous reality of climate collapse by transitioning his workers from fossil-fuel extraction to something a little less damaging to the very future of this dear planet. Whilst acknowledging that 'he'd met a lot of people like me’ (people who knew that people like him existed but were frankly incredulous that they could sleep straight at night in their beds), Grahame remained completely unrepentant about coal. Whilst agreeing that climate change was real and that transitioning from fossil fuels was an important ‘goal’, Grahame claimed that government was impeding the process by refusing to properly fund his industry’s transition. Workers and their families, he kept reminding me, remained his primary concern.

As Rudolph and the turtle doves continued making spirits bright, and dashing through the snow (possibly to a cosy manger, I thought, conjuring dreams of retiring to my own, just four doors’ down), Grahame and I continued to slug it out in the backyard (thankfully, close to the Esky!), singing from our vastly different songsheets.

In the end, unable to buy Grahame’s adeptly-argued but insane Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho about coal, I began to wonder whether his industry’s ‘transition impasse’ was merely a delaying tactic being wheeled out by parties seeking to ensure business-as-usual conditions for the unimpeded, highly-lucrative, largely-untaxed, ethically-indefensible corporate rape and pillage of life on earth?

So, struggling for a little agency, a little clarity on Xmas morning I nailed up 350.org's big NO MORE COAL & GAS corflute on the front of our ex-factory premises.

An elegant green praying mantis was soon checking it out from atop a handy xanthorrhoea spike in our front garden. 

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ICYMI, I’ve been campaigning, exhibiting and publishing as an arts activist against fossil fuel for the past 15 years, often with other contemporary artists and writers … e.g. Leave It in the Ground (2013), Instruments of Democracy (2015), Abbott-Proof Fence (2015), While We Sleep (2016), Jerrys Malfunction (2021).

The Winter Key

Whilst Olympian deeds to the north have soaked up much of the coverage, here in the south three Giants, a Trek and a Carpe Diem have continued quietly to convene most mornings this chilly winter to chew the fat, to swim and sometimes shiver together @ Dawn Fraser Baths in Balmain, where the water temperature descends reliably each year to a sharpish 12 degrees.

The camaraderie of ‘The Winter Key’ – the pure exhilaration of immersing oneself in and ploughing the health-giving waters of Sydney Harbour with a handful of like-minded, increasingly-leathery inner-west legends – has proved irresistible to many of us for over 20 years, and remains an essential antidote to seasonal (even Trumpian) malaise.

Winter @ DFB is also about escaping the crowd, about having it (almost) to yourself, with no passing parade, no lane ropes and no lifeguards. It’s a time of freedom and idiosyncrasy: Dallas, for example, chooses to swim the (quite-complex) perimeter of the pool as opposed to conventional lengths, Jen regularly records the day’s water temp by inscribing a figure in the virgin sand with her flipper, and Nick, après-swim, is often as not upside down in a faultless yoga pose beside the pool’s elegant new stainless-steel railings.

Nor is the natural world ever far away: on Friday Greg swam out a few metres from Dawnie’s small but perfectly-formed beach to introduce us to the pool’s elusive resident flathead; earlier in the week Judy, departing on her bike, reported her first magpie swoop. In the pool there are almost always smartly-attired seagulls on duty. Sleek black cormorants chase schools of tiny prawns into the shallows and on occasion a lone darter, bittern or sea eagle surveys the scene.

As spring approaches and winds recede, below the glinting mirror surface a few wary whiting and luderick have begun to re-appear amongst the sea grass. Beneath the pontoon and around the stairs awaits a veritable aquatic flock of 200 or so patient bream, sustained throughout the long winter by Tony’s small but seemingly bottomless white-plastic bucket.

Above David, Judy, Ros, Kel and their steeds @ DFB, 28 July 2024. Pic Denise

Peace on Earth

Two gloriously quiet nights ‘under Nylon’ close to the Wimmera River disturbed only by the flashing of parrots, an emu and the odd wallaby, whilst dipping into Jen Craig’s curly new novel Wall (and wishing I’d brought along Dad’s bird books, as there were so many tiny honey-eaters I couldn’t identify) were brought to an abrupt halt when we discovered we had a flat battery. But the RACV in Nhill came swiftly to our assistance, and we were soon motoring once more towards SA. Passing through Goroke I could feel (but failed to sight) Gerald Murnane, whose Border Districts spent the entire 3400 km trip beneath several layers of clothing at the bottom of my blue bag. A few days’ earlier we’d passed through Warracknabeal (where a sheet of A3 taped below the town sign announced ‘Birth Place of Nick Cave’) and at the local Lions Club Flora and Fauna Park I’d met a long-time fan (a woman returned recently from a couple of decades living in Europe) who knew of Nick’s father (a teacher) and loved Into My Arms. As the mercury rose, the ‘roos lounged and the budgies squabbled I felt impelled to mention that I’d been to a few careering Birthday Party gigs in Darlinghurst c.1980.

Persona non grouter

Our ex-factory home studio has four glass-brick windows which have remained in ‘original’ condition since we purchased the derelict A. E. Harding & Sons premises in 1991.

The largest one (in our kitchen – once the dispatch office) exhudes a particularly beguiling, higgledy-piggledy, make-do, depression vibe. A few of its 64 greenish-glass bricks are damaged/cracked and one has housed a small wasp colony for years. The window also features some of the poorest grouting I’ve ever seen.

But you only notice these things when you have time, when you’re in slow-reno mode. And when you do, it’s chastening to realise that one has been living, quite happily (for 32 years!) like Steptoe and Son, ’midst a veritable sea of resonant defects.

Due to the age of the building, excessive recent rainfall and micro-subsidence (WestConnex tunneling? Sydney Metro’s high-voltage-cable excavations?) this year we’d begun to observe that significantly wider gaps had emerged between some of the glass bricks, and that it was a little breezier than usual in the kitchen!

So as part of a somewhat-glacial factory upgrade I determined last month to get grouting. As ever, the trick has been to be fussy, but not too fussy, aware that, between imperfection, error and finesse lies the true beauty of the barely-renovated.

Forest bathing, Darkinjung Country

Forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) is a contemporary Japanese healing practice (with Shinto roots) which prescribes immersion in nature: walking, meditating, even cooking in the forest, as well as moving at a snail’s pace and listening to the trees.

In a not dissimilar mode, our walking party of a dozen or so active inner-west seniors has been inching (and imaging) its way towards Newcastle on the 260 km Great North Walk now for several years (see earlier posts). Although our ‘progress’ has been modest, each leg (indeed almost every step) has contained a revelation. Recently, on a glorious early-winter weekend, we drove two hours’ north from Rozelle to camp and hike beside Wollombi Brook in the towering Olney State Forest. Our next adventure will take us into the Watagan Mountains (watagan is an aboriginal word meaning ‘the place of many ridges’).

I would like to acknowledge the Darkinjung people, Custodians of the Country we’ve traversed, and to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

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See also Forest bathing and the 'more than human world' - ABC RN Soul Search, broadcast 1 June 2023

Waxing & Waning

I don’t know about you, but I’m not getting any younger. In fact last month – much to my astonishment – I turned 66. ‘Happy birthday you old devil … or two thirds of one at least’, observed a friend. But somehow on that gloriously still late-March morning at Collaroy I felt more like a grain of sand or a piece of seaweed, as a tiny swell wrapped in on occasion around the pool. These days – despite years of lap swimming and lower-back exercises – my ‘jumping-up’ muscles are slowly atrophying. Indeed quite often I’m (reduced to surfing in) ‘on my knees’!

But it’s still priceless paddling out, bobbing about, having a chat, alert to the pulse.

Feeling part of it all … the universe, I mean.

What's not to like about re-growth?

Having traced an elegant double helix across south-eastern Australia on a recent 3000 km discovery tour – sampling remote beaches and national parks, small-town motels, walks, regional galleries and op shops, whilst dodging floods, mosquitoes and school holidays – we’d returned home after 16 days tired but inspired.

It had been tough and tedious pulling out of COVID + Sydney’s wettest year since white-fella records began (1858). Weathering 2500 often-torrential millimetres, our bathroom ceiling had begun to resemble a sieve + the factory’s vast, seeping corrugated roof had needed 400 ageing screws replaced. Out in the garden our hardy but now-waterlogged banksia and xanthorrhoea had hung on only by a thread.

Such urban discomfiture (the mild panic of rain drumming too violently upon tin?) of course bears only scant comparison with the savage disruption and emotional distress wrought by extreme weather across regional communities in recent times. So it is quite wonderful to report that on our serendipitous journey south we found ourselves constantly (almost guiltily) buoyed by joyous, often unscripted encounters with people, nature and art… in Bowral, Canberra, Braidwood and Bermagui, in Eden, Sale, Binginwarri, Inverloch and Korumburra, on Phillip Island, in Mornington, Melbourne, Seymour, Shepparton, Benalla, Bright, Mt Hotham, Omeo, Cann River and Saltwater Creek.

On lonely roads with limited reception we heard newly-installed independent senator David Pocock speak truth to power in federal parliament with impassioned attacks on coal and gas, and environment minister Tanya Plibersek pledge to halt extinctions.

Everything seemed (miraculously) interesting again… alive with possibility. Beside the highway’s damp macadam ribbon unimaginable new shapes and colours burst gently before our eyes.

Burning Mark Titmarsh’s house

This winter we’re burning Mark Titmarsh’s house.

Mark’s been our Callan Street neighbour and an artist/activist confrère for years. He’s helped fuel local exhibitions at our place and (more recently) the campaign against WestConnex across the inner west. Our kids, now young adults, have grown up together. This winter century-old hardwood posts and heavy floor joists along with bowed Oregon rafters and battens salvaged from the rear of Mark’s corner bungalow are keeping us warm. A major reno (by the Bull brothers) is in full swing, and it’s well known that I rarely say ‘no’ to a dangerous-looking pile of old timber replete with rusty nails.  

Fuel like this, for our slow-burning combustion stove, is gold. Because you see no-one uses hardwood (eucalypt) or Oregon (softwood – pine, originally from the north-west US coast) to build any more … the former too difficult to nail, the latter prone to white-ants and weathering. These days it’s more-often-than-not treated pine, and laminates – which you can’t burn. Prefab steel frame and concrete are of course also on the rise. So our days of urban-foraging for fuel (around 10,000 since 1991!) are numbered.

Which is a shame, because (although you may find it hard to believe) there are few things I enjoy more than an hour or so in the late afternoon wielding a circular saw and an axe safely in thongs on the street … pausing and chatting to neighbours and passers-by, then carting and stacking a fresh supply of patinaed old timber inside, replete with its belted-in nails, bruises, splinters and stains … its freshly revealed inner hues, grain and ‘story’ set to deliver further pleasurable rumination and affordable warmth over the darker, colder months to come.

The burning of salvaged timber, I might add, also saves it from going to landfill, where – I’m reliably informed by Malcolm, a retired engineer who lives around the corner – it would in time emit more CO2 than it does as seasoned, dry fuel for a regularly-cleaned slow-combustion stove. The particulate emissions, however, even from a highly-rated unit such as ours, are of potential concern. Although flickering hearths are pretty much a thing of the past around here (where gas, reverse-cycle aircon and under-floor-heating rule) I suspect that we’ve only a couple more halcyon wood-fired winters left here in the factory, before slow-combustion stoves are outlawed.

Funnily enough, though, as I write, WestConnex is constructing a massive unfiltered road tunnel stack at the top of our street. It will (medicos and scientists assure us) belch out countless tunnel-kilometres of vehicular-exhaust-pipe-emission concentrate, some of it carcinogenic, much of it dangerous-when-inhaled particulate matter (PM10s, PM2.5s) and, of course, tonnes of CO2.

To chart a pared-back, recycled and sustainable life against a backdrop of rampant consumerism, over-development, global heating and pestilence is becoming, I imagine that some of you might agree, quite a challenge. We well-meaning, community-minded, car-driving, coal-fired-appliance-loving inner-city ‘progressives’ stand today somewhat uncomfortably, our every move knowingly compromised, elaborately laced with minute hypocrisies and inconvenient truths.

As Mark’s magnificent old hardwood joists conflagrate and gently warm us through this cool July, it’s salutary to remember, to mourn and to honour the grand eucalypt forests and delicate eco-systems (in northern New South Wales?) from which they were ‘won’. And to be horrified by the fact that in recent years St Gladys Berejiklian’s LNP government* has overseen unprecedented levels of land clearing/species loss across NSW, having learnt – it would appear – next to nothing from the appalling ‘custodianship’ of our settler ancestors.

* Gladys Berejiklian entered NSW parliament in 2003, was Treasurer 2015-17, and Premier 2017-21.

Encountering the Magnificence

A light mist of rain had preceded us on that luminous, numinous November afternoon as we made our way back to camp from Girrakool on foot via the plunging Piles Creek Loop track. Earlier in the day we’d gathered with Darkinjung cultural leader, elder and artist Kevin ‘Gavi’ Duncan to listen and to learn a little about this ancient coastal country, its indigenous and settler histories, its rock carvings, scar trees and edible plants. Above a roaring cascade Gavi had sung us songs which (generously) welcomed us (white hiking-folk) to this special place [see video below]. Subtly, incrementally enriching our receptors, Gavi later performed a short and most-moving farewell in the picnic-area carpark, breathing visceral throbbing depths into the afternoon on his didgeridoo. Despite the unsettling drone of the nearby M1 motorway which drifted on occasion through the angophoras, thanks to Gavi Girrakool (‘place of still waters’) brimmed with story and possibility, alive with knowledge, respect, fondness and beauty. We plan to meet up with him again further north in Darkinjung Country, as we inch our way towards Newcastle on the Great North Walk.   

Darkinjung cultural leader, elder and artist Gavi Duncan (right) sings Naiyi Nayawa (welcome) to our walking group above the falls at Girrakool (Darkinjung Country, NSW Central Coast), 1 November 2020 [video Janette Willett]

The traditional boundaries of Darkinjung land extend from the Hawkesbury River in the south, Lake Macquarie in the north, the McDonald River and Wollombi up to Mt Yengo in the west and the Pacific Ocean in the East.

Walking North

It had been decades since we’d perused dehydrated-meal + lightweight-tent options, and we were concerned that lugging a full over-night pack might simply be beyond us. But thanks to the encouragement of some experienced neighbours and friends, we made it… 23 km from Patonga to Wondabyne Station!

We’d completed the first 50 km of the Great North Walk from Boronia Park to Brooklyn in a series of sporadic day walks with the kids in tow (2000-10), but the leg out of Patonga was a slightly more serious proposition, involving the downloading of 1 to 25,000 maps, submission of a Trip Intention Form + COVID-safe disclaimer, water purifying tablets, sleeping mats, solid boots and a trowel.

Surveying the rampant tendrils of massing Central Coast development from upon high after traversing remote ancient rock platforms and seeping watercourses with spear-sharpening grooves, making our way at one point for several kilometres on a barely-trafficked route via small cairns and tiny ribbons tied at strategic points to hardy banksia and resplendent wildflowers, it was salutary to reflect upon all that has been inflicted upon this beauteous but beleaguered country, in so short a time.

How did one tiny race of largely-white ants become so virulent, so damaging, so dominant? And what might we careless (and even vaguely-sensitive-new-age) ants do to reverse this poor stewardship?

Image Our party encounters a native rose (boronia serrulata) at the base of Mt Wondabyne, August 2020. On the next leg of our hike north here in Darkinjung Country, I hope to learn the indigenous name of this elegant flowering shrub.

Lest We Forget

Before we were so rudely interrupted (by COVID)… 

As catastrophic fires burned out of control up and down the east coast of Australia late last year we (Callan Street confrères) and our trusty home-made signs jostled outside Government House in Kirribilli in support of young climate strikers baying for action. In the midst of an emergency made palpable by toxic air quality our smirking PM had shot through to Hawaii with Jen and the girls for a holiday.

John Holland Memorial Baths

Rozelle’s new 50-metre municipal pool at the corner of Callan Street and Victoria Road opens this weekend. 

'With Dawn Fraser Baths currently closed for major renovation, and Drummoyne Pool over-run by school swimming carnivals every week-day in February, the John Holland Memorial Baths, frankly, couldn’t have come on line at a better time’, says Callan Street’s David Watson, speaking on behalf of 20 or so local lap-swimmers.

The new facility is a ‘thank-you’ from the NSW Government to the much-beleaguered NW Rozelle community, whose mental health and air quality has already deteriorated despite the fact that tunnelling for the Iron Cove Link is yet to commence, and whose lives and sleep patterns face severe disruption over the next six years due to the construction of the Rozelle Interchange.

The baths - free to Inner West ratepayers and residents - are being underwritten by joint-venture partners John Holland in return for naming rights.

Three Steves

It wasn’t difficult putting names to faces up at the Panaquip copy shop on Victoria Road.

Although there were two bosses, a couple of sales/service guys and a pleasant receptionist, three (of the five) were called Steve. I miss them all – Steve the thin white duke piloting his remote-controlled helicopter across the copiers and carpet squares after hours, Steve the ever-amenable single dad who loved fishing, and smoking – who ended up with tongue cancer, but survived – and big Steve the tech, buzzing about Sydney with his magic black case of screwdrivers and diagnostics. For a decade or more I was, frankly, in excellent hands whichever Steve spotted me first – struggling, often backwards, sometimes barefoot, juggling books and catalogues through their door (and two visual arts degrees), change jangling in my shorts.

WestConnex wants to demolish 224 Victoria Road, Rozelle – which for generations prior to Panaquip (since 1888) was a family grocer and corner store – along with 20 other treasured local homes and businesses (from Liquorland to the Iron Cove Bridge) to construct a belching tunnel portal for a gargantuan tollway that won’t work.

But we’re not going to let them. Are we.

THIS IS MINE, NOT THE MINE'S

Col ‘Midget’ Faulkner still holds the record, he says, for the longest tube ride on Sydney’s south side. Never one for publicity or competitions, Col – not to be confused with Bernard ‘Midget’ Farrelly – watched the greats come and go, and gave most of them more than he got: even world-champion Nat Young once made the mistake of dropping in on Col’s wave at Cronulla Point!

Nowadays Col lives a long way from the surf, in the tiny, dying hamlet of Wollar, 50 km north-east of Mudgee, five hours’ drive from Sydney. He lobbed there 30 years ago to visit his uncle, helped out with the shearing for six months, and never left. Col loved the peace and quiet - of being quite a way from anywhere. But for the past decade his town has been stealthily besieged, its social fabric eroded by the insidious intrusion of multinational Peabody Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company – recently declared bankrupt in the US), which operates the Wilpinjong coal mine, ever-closer to town. The NSW government is currently considering (i.e. about to approve) Pit 8 – an expansion which will bring more unacceptable dust, noise and division to the town and its dwindling population. Already residents have lost the mechanic, the hardware and stockfeed supply, and the school’s down to eight pupils. Since the bottleshop closed there's not even anywhere you can buy a drink.

Bev Smiles’ prescient COAL IS OVER! placard, Newcastle 2008
Photo: Sharyn Munro

On the invitation of long-time local anti-coal campaigner Bev Smiles, members of WRVAP (Williams River Valley Artists' Project) attended a meeting convened in the Wollar Memorial Hall on 20 April 2016 to discuss ways in which the townsfolk might get a better deal (or rather, how a really bad deal from an industry now in its death throes, might be sweetened)…

Wollar Memorial Hall

After a number of residents (including Col) have had their say, several of us speak against the mine expansion – about degraded environments, compensation for ravaged social fabric, and mine remediation. Although the meeting is locally framed we feel impelled to emphasise that the extraction and burning of coal is currently destroying not only Wollar’s but the entire planet’s social and environmental fabric. [Only the day before we’d learnt that the corals in Sydney Harbour were bleaching due to dangerously warm ocean temperatures]. After a comfortable night’s sleep @ BIG4 Mudgee we drive back to Wollar next morning to take some photos. In the car we re-visit the complex traumas of coal mining and struggle once again to devise a manner in which we might capture its inhuman face, its incalculable costs within the spaces of a Sydney art gallery. Suddenly I see Col pacing within a cage, a white-maned man/lion neutered by circumstances beyond his control, speaking to (and perhaps growling at) visitors. When we meet him again later that morning I tell Col that we might need HIM for our exhibition, adding ‘but you probably wouldn’t want to come down to Sydney, would you?’. ‘Na’, he drawls, ‘I got outta there’.

The Buick

En route back to Sydney in 1989 after years of working in the UK, Denise and I purchased a fabulous black 1965 Buick Riviera for $2000 from Virginia Gaunt, a Hollywood TV-producer’s widow, in LA. Petrol was a dollar a gallon, and we were off to Mexico! 

After the restraint and subtle greys of London, the ‘black man’s Cadillac’ embodied all the delicious freedoms of the new world – small town yearnings, restless road movies, bad bars, neon and billboards – with a hint of European styling.[1] Yet, according to Virginia, the two-door Buick coupe with its 401-cubic-inch engine was ‘a lady’s car’, which she’d used primarily for shopping.[2] Because I loved its seductive lines and its history and because it toured so effortlessly I shipped the Riviera home, had the steering switched from LH drive, and drove it in Sydney for many years.

However as those devil-may-care late-20th-century days slowly evaporated, our ‘dream’ car became something of a nightmare and, as if in testament to spiralling oil prices, emerging environmental sensitivities and middle-east unrest, the dear old eight-cylinder, eight-mile-per-gallon dinosaur languished mute, dust-laden and unloved in our garage for 15 years.

A Dinosaur in the Garage, 2006

After a few false starts and substantial hand-wringing (it’s surprising how attached a mechanical klutz can become to a piece of metal) – earlier this year I finally decided to let go.

Rozelle Riviera on carsales.com January 2015

Ian from Adelaide was quick out of the blocks and a few days later was on our doorstep with a plastic bag full of cash, which, he assured me, his father had helped him count. He planned to strip the car back to bare metal and to restore its original factory paint – to white. In coming years it’ll doubtless be worth a small fortune.

Buick Divestment Day, 4 February 2015

Nowadays, with only an occasional teary glance in the rear-view mirror, I travel largely by bicycle. Funny ol’ world… 

[1] The Buick was No. 2 in the General Motors’ stable. The Riviera was designed originally for Ferrari.

[2] 401 cubic inches is approximately 6.6 litres.

Bulga v Rio Tinto

David Watson - presentation to Planning Assessment Commission (Bulga vs Rio Tinto) @ Singleton Diggers Club, 1 July 2015

Good afternoon. I’m David Watson… environmentally alarmed human being, concerned father… visual artist. I grew up in suburban Sydney with a pet wombat named Binya and Neville Cayley’s What Bird Is That? by my bed. Perversely, my amateur-ornithologist father Ken ran a heavy-earth-moving-equipment franchise in Silverwater, selling graders, scrapers and front-end loaders to councils and cockies around the state. With ‘progress’ in full swing across the western world, coal was for a time arguably good for humanity. But that was 50 years ago.

In 1970 the prescient Australian author and conservationist Vincent Serventy published Dryandra, a quietly observant Walden-like paen to place, to the seasons and webs of life across a dry, seemingly non-descript forest region south of Perth, which he loved. As the toll of progress began to bite on ecosystems nationwide, Serventy was hailed as ‘spearheading the attack against the folly, greed and ignorance of Man, the destroyer of Nature'.

David Watson, Welcome Mat, 2012

How Vincent (who died in 2007) would mourn Australia’s current blind obsession with ‘growth’, our blithe destruction of habitat and community in pursuit of yet more ruinous fossil fuel. I can feel him rolling now in his grave – witness to this country’s greedy coal-rush, to our despicably dumb short-term business-as-usual approach, as we proceed, ignoring all dispassionate expert scientific advice with regard global warming – to feather our own nest, at the expense of others. 

David Watson, Climate Warrior George Nacewa from Fiji with a message for the current Australian government,
Pacific Climate Warriors blockade of Newcastle Harbour, October 2014

Over the past few years I have worked with a collective of environmentally perturbed contemporary artists to help draw attention to climate change. Engaging with local citizens and grass roots activist organisations in the Bylong Valley, at The Drip and in Gloucester, we’ve created exhibitions and agit-prop publications. Last year we undertook non-violent direct action training up at Maules Ck and paddled out with the Pacific Climate Warriors on Newcastle Harbour protesting coal’s role in raising sea levels; in April we mounted Instruments of Democracy, a performance inspired by the brave citizens from all walks of life locking-on across this state against new coal and CSG.

David Watson, Australian Navigators: Pocock & Laird, Brown, 2015
Masquerading as a page from a booklet of Australian postage stamps celebrating our '21st-century navigators' my imagery derives from activist images shot by Front Line Action on Coal in late 2014. Locking-on (l. to r.) in protest against Whitehaven Coal's Maules Ck mine in north-western NSW are former Australian Rugby Union captain David Pocock, fifth-generation local farmer Rick Laird, and 23-yr-old student Chantelle Brown from Wauchope. Australia Post's original Australian Navigators series (1963) featured Cook, Tasman, Flinders etc.

Canadian activist author Naomi Klein’s recently published This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate alerts us to the absolute imperative of global climate action. New coal mines and mine expansions are simply on the wrong side of history. Against the alarming backdrop of our now-universally acknowledged changed circumstances, it is clear to me that Warkworth Mining [Rio Tinto]’s mine expansion application should be rejected out of hand.

David Watson (with Denise Corrigan), Ransom Note, 2013
An entreaty featuring typography sampled from the logos of leading
global warmers (including Rio Tinto) active in NSW

We live on the sunniest, windiest continent on the planet. Why on earth are we not transitioning immediately to renewable energy – to a clean economy offering new jobs – and a future, for your children, and mine?

In July last year then Environment Minister Rob Stokes told the Sydney Morning Herald that New South Wales would be ‘Australia’s answer to California’ on renewables.[1]

How about we get on with that, Rob?

Thank you.

Images in this presentation were created for recent anti-fossil fuel exhibitions by the Williams River Valley Artists’ Project, the collective of contemporary artists with whom I have collaborated since 2009. I have copies of our recent publications here for the panel, and for members of the audience who would like to know more about our work.

Further information: http://williamsrivervalley.blogspot.com.au/  

[1]  Peter Hannam, ‘Renewable energy: NSW to be Australia's answer to California’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 2014.

The Big Australian(s)

In January we camped up the coast en famille, just like we have every year for the past decade, with lace monitors, spangled drongos, swifts and a motley throng of (largely city-dwelling) human beings. The ‘kids’ - now taller than me - still mercifully enjoy an unspoilt beach, a wild headland, and a game of Scrabble. As usual the weather was hot, the refrigeration poor, the swell fluky and the Macksville op-shops fecund. But something wasn’t right, something new was afoot. A strapping young family from Bulli in a flash black SUV had set up their new tent, tarp, chairs, stretchers, fishing rods and totem tennis on Site H, next door. A metre or so from our camp, emblazoned upon their esky, were the words ‘BHP Billiton – Resourcing the Future’. Did Adam work for the mines, or had he merely borrowed the esky, I wondered? Had their children been told yet about global warming? Cognisant that such conflicted issues lie at the heart of contemporary Australia, and not wishing to spoil anyone’s holiday via direct confrontation, one languid afternoon I snapped my 17-year-old son in his favourite new t-shirt, in a modest attempt to counter the spin, the all-pervasive corporate invasion.

BHP, once dubbed ‘The Big Australian’, is today one of this country’s big-four coal extractors/global warmers. In its amalgamated form the company is now 76% foreign-owned.

350.org is an international movement dedicated to solving the climate crisis. ‘350’ refers to the safe level (350 parts/million) of CO2 in our atmosphere, a level we are already dangerously exceeding.

We Are Caretakers - Not Taking Care

Last weekend my family and I drove up the New England Highway to Maules Creek - a 1000 km return trip from Rozelle - to witness how mining for coal (an ancient, now discredited fuel) is wrecking this land, how burning it is destroying our planet, and how thousands of Australians of all ages and complexions are taking to non-violent direct action to stop it. With 150 others, including several of my Williams River Valley Artists' Project (WRVAP) confreres, we camped on Cliff Wallace's 'Wando' property north-west of Boggabri to learn more about the remarkable work of Front Line Action on Coal and the Leard Forest Alliance. 

http://frontlineaction.org/news/

We gathered cross-legged on the floor and on camping chairs in Cliff's tractor shed to hear from a Gomeroi elder, local farmers and savvy young activists, and swapped notes with a teacher, an ecologist, a wool-classer, and a wiry Sydney cyclist who'd pedalled the last 200 km from Scone. Looking and listening intently for two days, we learnt about aquifers and species extinction, about koalas, bats and burrowing frogs, about the destruction of white box-gum woodland in the Leard State Forest, about tools and tactics: 'locking on', 'scrubbing', 'wallabies', 'bunnies', 'tripods', 'possums', police liaison and social media. 

We sat around the fire with a Kokoda veteran, seasoned environmentalists, babes in arms and fellow artists. On Saturday evening a self-funded retiree, an academic, a tree-changer, a city professional and a muso chipped in to cook and clean for two hundred curious and committed human beings. Even a sceptical 17-year-old (our son) was won over by the urgency, the energy. On Sunday afternoon, Greens leader Christine Milne dropped in to Camp Wando to deliver an inspirational off-the-cuff half-hour exhortation. Later, 300 arms were raised and crossed – NO DEAL – in solidarity against Whitehaven's plans for Australia's biggest new coal mine.

Early next morning, in a series of carefully orchestrated actions, all four of Whitehaven's existing coal mines in the Gunnedah Basin were shut down. Several upstanding citizens who'd locked-on to gates and barrels of concrete to delay the unfolding environmental travesty were arrested (bringing the total now to nearly 300). As one banner proclaimed, THIS IS REAL DIRECT ACTION!

A line in the sand – like no other in the history of this country – is being drawn. 

Get up there if you can - everyone's invited. Support these impressive, well-informed and well-organised souls, who are putting their lives on hold, their bodies on the line, for OUR future. Swell their ranks, bolster their resolve, to keep speaking the truth. 

PS  Great recent piece in New Matilda: http://bit.ly/1tFWV6N + look out for Black Hole, a strident new documentary film nearing completion: http://bit.ly/T96rS7