© jonclark2000

Territory Day, the 1st of July, is a public holiday in the Northern Territory to celebrate the anniversary of the creation of the Northern Territory. On this day and only between certain times, people are allowed to let off fireworks and it’s a firmly entrenched tradition. Outside of those times on Territory Day the letting off of fireworks is illegal. If I’m not mistaken, the Territory government allows the sale of fireworks from selected places for a limited time before Territory Day. I’ve also been told that many people spends thousands and thousands of dollars buying up all manner of fireworks. Most of them are left off on the night but many are saved up and let off for some time after. I’m writing this post because, last night, I was yet again awoken after midnight by people letting off fireworks. Not a week goes by without being woken up in the middle of the night thinking that we’re at war. And this is not helped by the fact that I live in an area of high rises which seems to have been strategically designed by town planners and developers to form an echo chamber. Anyway, my fatigue this afternoon prompted me to finally dig up the recordings I made of the fireworks using my iPhone. So, keep in mind that these fireworks were being let off at least a block away and I was using my pissy little iPhone mic:

Anyway, I don’t think Territorians are psycho. Not any more than elsewhere at least But, they certainly have a disdain for silence. Whether it’s fireworks, general conversations, drunken conversations, the TV, music, basically anything that makes a sound, Territorians are militantly against silence. Territory Day is simply a day where they get to celebrate this fact, rather than the establishment of an administrative entity that no-one seems to care about.

Chatini, as far as I can tell, derives from the word for the Indian chutney. Problem is that most chatini are not like chutneys. I don’t even know if there is a defining feature of a dish that makes it a chatini. They are more of a side dish than the main feature of a meal. Chatinis are almost all made up of ingredients that are diced up or grated. By Mum’s reckoning they all are or, at least should, contain chilli. Chatinis are most commonly eaten with some bread – either faratas or dholl poori. Dholl poori are my favourite. Chatinis can be had on their own or with a curry. I think chatini pistache cotomili (coriander and peanut chutney) is awesome on its own and the chatini de mangue vert (green mango chutney, see below) is fantastic with a curry.

There are plenty of chatini recipes on the net, but I want to share my Mum’s version of a popular chatini – chatini pomme d’amout (tomato chutney) – and a lesser known one – chatini de mangue vert.

Chatini pomme d’amour

Easily serves 4-6 as a side

Ingredients

• 3 tomatoes, diced
• 1/2 a spanish onion, chopped finely
• 1/2 cup of coriander, chopped finely
• 3 hot red chillies, sliced finely
• 1 tbsp white vinegar
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Leave tomatoes to drain in a colander. This is to avoid making your chutney too watery since when you add the salt later this macerates the tomatoes a little.
2. Combine the rest of ingredients in a bowl. For the flavour, I would say you need at least 1 teaspoon of salt and 2 teaspoons of pepper. This provides enough salt for maceration to take place and enough pepper for flavour.
3. Just before you are ready to serve, add tomatoes and combined. Maybe even leave the chatini for a couple of minutes before eating.

Chatini de mangue vert

Easily serves 4-6 as a side dish

Ingredients

• 1 green mango (make sure it is ripe), peeled and coarsely grated
• 1/2 a white or brown onion
• 3 hot red chillies, sliced finely
• salt and white pepper to taste

Instructions

1. When grating the mango, be careful to not go deeply into the fibrous core. It’s not as nice.
2. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and serve. My recommendations for the amount of salt and pepper are the same as above. But, add more salt if the tanginess of the green mango is too much to handle.

These are really simple and tasty dishes to make, especially if you have good ingredients on hand. I had never actually had the chatini de mangue vert before (except maybe as a toddler in Mauritius) but I’m really in love with this tangy fruit.

Also, here’s a good recipe for chatini pistache cotomili.

© lee.sonho

My rant about the art and science of reviews has a purpose: so many accolades are poured on Brian Blade as a composer, yet so few reviews consider the compositions from his perspective. Most importantly, none I have read spoke of the changes in the compositions that make up the most astounding of his albums, Season for Changes. The irony of this is that one can already infer from the title of the album what the author of this work considers to be a fairly central theme to the compositions. But, talk of changes and progressions gets too technical for me and not very interesting. Nevertheless, I want to add two other somewhat technical elements – tempo and space – to my discussion of this album in order to give voice to what makes it phenomenal: how the compositions are at once profound and yet very accessible.

I will admit straight away that I’m not completely aware of Blade’s objectives with this album – I bought it from the iTunes store so no liner notes Nevertheless, it’s sometimes better to be unencumbered by the liner notes if it means hearing what the musicians are saying through the music. If there’s one way to sum up this album it is that it is deeply contemplative. I read one review where this album and what Blade is doing generally in his compositions is compared to the spiritual or transcendental effects Coltrane’s compositions had on its listeners. But, Blade represents a completely different breed. If Coltrane achieved this through complexity, Blade is achieving this through simplicity. And, as much as Coltrane’s complexity belied the simplicity of what he did, so with Blade his simplicity belies its very complexity. Sure, there are recognisable and enjoyable melodies flowing through Blade and Cowherd’s compositions, but they do not act as stable reference points for the songs, anchoring the improvisations that come in between. No, the melodies simply invite you deeper into each song and gives each one its fluidity.

© gotjazz3

This is partly achieved by the chord progressions underlying the melodies. There are an abundance of changes in most tracks, but even where used sparsely they really underline the beauty of each song. Some changes enact such a subtle shift in the mood of a song – almost unnoticeable, but cumulative in its effect of transforming you by the end. The title track, Season for Changes, is full of beautifully crafted changes that evoke different seasons – tumultuous storms, joyous summers, glorious sunrises, peaceful dawns, serene sunsets. Others compositions contain such abrupt, sharp changes that are jolting – in a good way. I remember on my first listen to Omni, I felt the same sort of transcendental introduction you get from many Coltrane compositions – beautiful serene melodies, sparse rhythm except for the amazing drumming of Blade that is definitely reminiscent of Elvin Jones, that culminates wonderfully. But rather than continuing with this theme, Blade smooths out with a warm and steady pop/folk feel. Quite surprising, but not awkward. Then Blade and crew abruptly shift into a darker kind of groove with the alto, Walden, blowing out a rocking solo that could easily have been a more energetic and driving improv in a fusion band. But he stays contained and restrained as his solo then fades out into the solo of pianist Cowherd and the mood lightens again. It’s the use of changes which are central to the way every track on this album conveys its complex feelings. Whilst every track has its dominant theme, the changes alert you to the presence of related yet seldom acknowledged undercurrents of emotions. And, for me, this has to be one of the greatest achievements of this album.

But, such an achievement is nearly impossible without the specific use of tempo and space. I can’t think of a non-ballad album that so blatantly works with a very slow to mid tempo. I’m usually not a fan of these albums anyway – with Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman being the exception. Of course, such a tempo means, amongst other things, longer notes and so is well suited to the melodic compositions of Blade and Cowherd. At the same time, there’s plenty of space in these compositions, too. And, for the large part, this tends to highlight Blade’s beautiful drumming – at times lyrical, other times grooving, always impeccable.

But, such masterful use of space, whilst highlighting the artistry of Blade and the band, also does two other very important things. Firstly, and perhaps contradictorily, it actually makes the compositions so much more fluid. Because of the simple melodies and slowish tempo, space does not actually punctuate the composition, but rather acts as its foundation. You become so attuned to the space in every song, aided and abetted by the tempo, that this becomes a very essential part of what you ‘listen’ to. In this way, the various sections of each composition actually melt into each other. Everything is drawn out, but nothing is left lingering like a bad smell. Cowherd on piano and Blade on drums are the key figures when it comes to creating space. Cowherd and Blade’s combination behind Butler’s solo in ‘Return of the Prodigal Son’ is perhaps most exemplary of the sort of layering they achieve that ebbs and flows underneath the solo. They never punctuate the solo with their own playing, but simply provide a texture against which Butler’s improvisation can draw its contours. The patience of the band is on display with such a slow building tune of the likes of ‘Most Precious One’. This is basically a 2 minute 50 second introduction to ‘Most Precious One (Prodigy)’ where a driving groove based on the theme set up from the previous track is the underpinning of Rosenwinkel’s improvisations with a rock sensibility. But the slow building up of the theme over almost three minutes does not drag. Cowherd gradually introduces each piece of the theme masterfully whilst also show casing some of his own lyrical playing. The full theme is then brought out when Cowherd is joined by Rosenwinkel and Blade which is not played for long, pausing in anticipation just after we are made aware of the general gist of the song. But, a testament to how the whole album is wonderfully crafted around space and tempo is the melancholic ‘Improvisation (Jon and Myron)’. A wonderful composition for organ and bass clarinet that would probably have difficulty fitting on any other album but this one. This song makes so much sense where it is – after ‘Most Precious One (Prodigy)’ and before the sombre ‘Alpha and Omega’. The bass clarinet is played in such a high register that I almost didn’t recognise it at first and the haunting sound of the pump organ is not something that is easily matched in a jazz scenario. But this combination really plays with tempo and space in such a novel way. Any lesser beings or any other type of album and this song would not have made much sense. With many of the tracks it’s as though your senses are heightened by the slow tempo and space without sacrificing fluidity, much like the way good movies use slow motion without disturbing the narrative flow.

© Daniel Lanois

Secondly, it emphasises the expression of certain moods and emotions, rather than particular sounds and phrases. I can think of a number of ballads where a similar use of tempo and space induces a comatose feeling, something worse than being underwhelmed. Not that one can be overwhelmed by the tracks from Season of Changes. Again, the comparison with Coltrane might be illustrative. The force of Coltrane’s playing and the very structured nature of many of his finest compositions (e.g. Crescent), are nevertheless not what one’s attention is drawn to, or at least not what one values in Coltrane. It isn’t that hard to be overwhelmed by Coltrane because so much is happening, yet the beauty of Coltrane is that his musicality is such that each composition carries you somewhere – whether it’s a heavenly experience as found on A Love Supreme, or the more earthly spirituality of Wise One, or the joy and playfulness of Inch Worm. Coltrane was a master technician and I know this is why he is admired by many, but it is not why he is adored by even more. Coltrane’s music told a story and it told the story well. And Blade has taken up this task in his own way. Rubylou’s Lullaby does not resemble a typical lullaby. But, the way it builds from a sparse introduction into a celebratory middle before shifting into the calming and hypnotic conclusion tells a story of resolution, of peaceful calm. Stoner Hill is probably the least narratively constructed composition with the repetition of verse-chorus-bridge throughout. Despite this structure, the change in the playing from a restful start to a more effortful climax does give you the impression of climbing a hill and reaching the top to take in the view. And this is what so many people love about jazz: it’s musical expressivity. Good jazz can speak to so many experiences and emotions. A friend recently said to me, and I have seen it written in many places, that jazz needs to get over its obsession with the solo. There are many musicians that have been trying to push this particular envelope with some success, but Blade has no doubt done it.

My stand out track has to be the closer – ‘Omni’. From beginning to end you are taken on a journey that, I think summarises the whole album. This song truly highlights the individual talents of each and every member of the band as well as showing how synchronised they are as an ensemble. I can’t stop listening to this album. It’s going to be a classic. It’s perfectly understandable after listening to it why so many think that Blade is changing the game and writing himself into the history of jazz as one it’s greats. Blade is not only a fantastic drummer, but a sensitive musician who is able to expand the capabilities of his genre without ruining the very many things that characterise it and make it great. It’ll be a tough act to follow.

I want to leave you with a great video of a Brian Blade solo on a funky little Joshua Redman track. I’m doing this because the album does not contain a single drum solo, just to emphasise what a generous musician and composer he is. But don’t let that fool you into thinking this guy can’t play. Check this out:

In all honesty, I think Joshua Redman cut the solo off to short…Blade was clearly just getting warmed up.

Just this month, prominent social philosopher Axel Honneth published a great review essay of the work of French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot who are known primarily for their book, On Justification. Before going into a critical appreciation of this work, Honneth begins with his own characterisation of the state of sociology, which, I believe, is similar to my own but more articulate, succinct and, therefore, worthy of being quoted at length:

Moral-theoretical categories have almost disappeared from the theoretical vocabulary of sociology. Neither perceptions of legitimacy nor perceptions of injustice, neither moral argument nor normative consensus now play a significant role in explaining the social order. Instead the object of sociological inquiry is understood either according to the pattern of anonymous self-organization processes or as the result of cooperation among strategically oriented actors; accordingly, the disciplinary role models are biology or economics, whose conceptual models appear suited to explain such a complex process as the reproduction of societies. One may easily get the impression that current sociology wishes to finally bid farewell to the generation of its founding fathers; since from Weber and Durkheim to Talcott Parsons, it was a settled matter that an adequate basic conception of the social world could only be derived using the concepts, models, or hypotheses of moral theory – practical philosophy was, so to speak, the foundation and guiding discipline for classical sociology. After the “Theory of Communicative Action” – the last grand sketch of a complete social theory based on the sources of practical philosophy – all this seems to have been forgotten. In any event, it could until recently appear that with Habermas’ book the tradition of a normatively oriented sociology has come to an end. It is mostly due to the efforts of a small group of researchers in France – which assembled around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot – that there continues to be a strand within social theory that employs sources of moral philosophy. Having emerged from an internal critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, the works of this highly productive circle, probing ever new directions, seek to explain the integration of our societies through the interplay of different moral convictions. The foundational text of this sociological school is the study On Justification, originally published in 1991. This book, which has meanwhile also been published in German, deserves careful consideration not least because it represents the most interesting attempt of the more recent past to give sociology a basis in moral philosophy.

What Honneth is saying is that trying to understand the way things are in the social world can only be done by including the use of moral concepts in the tool kit of sociology.² This is a very German and, I would argue, Habermasian perspective about the role of sociology in the social sciences and humanities. The role of sociology, in this view, should be circumscribed by the ideas explored and developed by moral philosophy. It’s role, in fact, is to test these moral theories and, in the end, to refine them against empirical findings. But, there’s a difference between taking our cue from moral philosophy, like the classical sociologists, and being defined by it, which I would say his Honneth’s view. I’m not entirely at ease with Honneth’s positioning of sociology, but am certainly agreed with him about it’s current state.

It should probably be pointed out that the characterisation I offered earlier of what sociology is and what sociologists do is my own account that might not be widely accepted. If anything, Honneth’s positioning of sociology as well as my own shows how normative theory has been completely devalued within the discipline. As much as classical sociologists may have taken their cue from moral philosophy, they were not limited to what moral philosophy offered when it came to inductive reasoning and theory building. As much as classical sociologists defined themselves against different disciplines – especially psychology and economics³ – they were often quite philosophical in their approaches. The same can be said of Boltanski and Thévenot. In fact, one of the French sociologists who Honneth is assumedly praising because he is part of this circle of the revival of normative sociology in France is Patrick Pharo, who would disagree with the positioning of sociology in Honneth’s scheme because sociology must have its own form of inductive reasoning and normative theory building if it is going to remain sensitive to the unobservable normativity of social reality as well as the practical and observable world.⁴

I think I’d like to see some of this reasoning gain some legitimacy once more. It’s not entirely foreign to sociologists and the French sociologists Honneth refers to do not have a monopoly on it. Not all sociology has to be geared towards and adopt some form of normativity. But, I’m interested in finding a way in which we can avoid devaluing theory building of this kind. The sort of positioning of sociology demonstrated by Honneth does not actually help because he is part of the very problem he is describing in the way he unwittingly removes any form of legitimacy in the sociological enterprise for inductively developing moral concepts. The normative disciplinary emphasis on empirical social reality is also another obstacle. Following my own characterisation of the current state of sociology, I think it’s important to define the discipline in a way which does not elevate the empirical or the normative to any sort of undue prominence. In fact, if I were to properly flesh out my philosophy of the science of sociology, I would probably be arguing that these two should remain in tension with each other in much the same way that social life is marked by the continual gap between expectations and reality. But, this is for another time…

1. There are, importantly, two schools of this critique – one which can loosely be called postmodern and the other which comes at it from an empiricist perspective. Two very different schools and it would be fair to say that the empiricist school of thought is dominant in sociology.
2. To be more accurate, I think Honneth is actually saying the sociology no longer even pays attention to how the social order is maintained or changed with respect to the moral and normative dimensions of social life.
3. read Hans Joas’ brilliant exposition of the history of action theory in sociology in his The Creativity of Action
4. Patrick Pharo has written very few articles in English, but this one on ‘How is Sociological Realism Possible?’ gives a good insight into his position which he has explored in more depth and breadth elsewhere in French.

This rant was inspired by a blog post I came across by Prof Michael O’Hare of UC, Berkley. Over at The Reality-Based Community, the Professor of Public Policy published, in toto, a welcome letter he gives to his students outlining his concerns about the consequences and unfairness of the present under-investment in public education in the United States, especially in his home state of California. It’s a brilliant idea and I think it’s something I will do next time I’m teaching. Here is a copy of the text which can be found over at his blog. And I suggest you visit The Reality-Based Community post of Prof O’Hare’s letter if only to read the comments that vindicate his concerns.

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere.  The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits.  And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine.  This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.

Swindle–what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future.  (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.

Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books.  California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.

This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves.  “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s?  Posterity never did anything for me!”  An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that.  Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English.  Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively!  You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in.  They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.

You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves.  Equally important, you need to start talking to each other.  It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again.  There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity.  Lots. Get to work.  See you in class!

Brilliant!

I’m a little resentful about joining the chorus of disaffected academics. What’s worse is that I’m not even an academic yet. But, after reading an email today regarding a teaching policy change, writing a reply raising some issues and receiving a disappointing reply, I can’t help but feel completely despondent about the future of academia and, therefore, what part I’d like to play in it.

I won’t reproduce any of the emails verbatim, but will point out the key features.

I received an email this morning stating that it was now the policy of the Faculty of Arts to make Blackboard and i-Lecture compulsory components of delivering all courses. Blackboard and i-Lecture are what are generally referred to as Web-Based Lecture Technologies (WBLTs). Specifcally, Blackboard is a tool for delivering courses online and i-Lecture is a tool for recording, managing and distributing digital audio lectures.

That this policy change made the use of WBLTs compulsory for all courses in the Faculty of Arts was surprising given the evidence is contentious about whether or not this improves the quality of teaching and learning and, even when it does, it only happens under certain conditions. That the email indicating this policy change made no reference to a Faculty strategy for the implementation of this policy was what concerned me and so I replied to the email raising some of the obvious issues:

1. As much as studies of WBLTs focus on the flexibility afforded students, there is not a lot of detail of how this affects the workloads and practices of teachers. Evidence shows that without adequate support, the introduction of WBLTs can be quite disruptive.
2. At present, the pay structure for online teaching hardly covers the necessary hours. These pay structures are based on the model for face-to-face teaching. Unfortunately, they do not suit the online environment because managers under-estimate the challenges online teaching and learning poses for students and teachers.
3. Given the policy seems to imply that online and on-campus delivery will need to be implemented for each course, to what extent will this be reflected in teaching workload allocations or resource allocations for tutors?
4. Many of the issues for teachers (as well as students) is a lack of technological literacy, competence and, therefore, confidence. What will the Faculty be doing to address these shortcomings where they exist?
5. Studies show that outside of pre-existing shifts, the use of WBLTs accelerate moves away from on-campus attendance in favour of online delivery. In the interim, however, many courses will end up in a situation where there are half-full lecture theatres and half-full online discussion groups. How will the Faculty cope with this, especially since it will affect present and future resource allocation?
6. Research is ambiguous about how WBLTs provide many of the things that both teachers and students enjoy about face-to-face interaction. How are WBLTs precisely going to be used in order to not reduce the quality of education and the satisfaction of teachers and students?
7. Will there be any further training/PD?

The reply I received indicated that the policy change had been discussed and approved by the Faculty board. The only comment I got on the issues I raised was that job satisfaction was not a reasonable consideration because students are showing a strong preference for online modes of course delivery and whether we like it or not we have to keep them satisfied as they pay our wages.

The problem is that I was discussing job satisfaction in a broader context. Here is what I wrote:

Arguably, many staff take pleasure in face-to-face lectures, how does the Faculty propose to deal with the possible loss of job satisfaction for some staff given there is likely to be a decline in lecture attendance as a consequence of this policy change (cf. section 5.3)? I can vouch for how depressing it is to lecture 6 students in a class of 70. But, then, if I don’t attend the lecture myself there will be no recording for i-Lecture. So, now we end up in a bind: implementing i-Lecture requires an on-campus lecture, but having i-Lecture reduces attendance to on-campus lectures. Is the Faculty willing to discuss these implications? Will we end up delivering lectures from our offices as pre-recorded speeches?

It was a little disappointing that the only point I made which received a comment figured in the most marginal way in my argument.

I’ve done my best to resist the increasingly vociferous lamentations that university education is being dumbed down, but I don’t feel that I can refute such claims any more. Personally, the pathetic reply to my email only signals the extent to which any sort of principled commitment to education is lost on university management. And, so I here I sit on the cusp of considering whether or not my 4 year effort to join the ranks of academics is even worth it. I like teaching – in fact, I love it. But, if my managers do not value it on principle, then what chance will I have of doing what is best? And, I can’t see myself joining an ever increasing cohort of academics who opt for indifference. And, I just want to say that I’m not trying to take a swipe at any academics who feel indifferent (or something similar) to teaching. No-one should have to love what they do in order to do it well. What I’m saying is that a lot of what we see as academic indifference to teaching is increasingly symptomatic of a system that does not actually value education. A system that valued education – teaching, learning and, at university, the independent research that supports and is supported by both – would encourage a different posture from academics and students alike based on a different set of expectations about what education is meant to achieve. Of course, the extent to which education has been bureaucratised means that it is a systemic issue requiring a systemic solution or dissolution.

Simon Marginson has produced what is one of the most important studies of the higher educational system in the last twenty years – Markets in Education. Important because it tracks an important shift in how we view education: from a public good to a private commodity. In this wide-ranging study, Marginson traces how recent changes in higher education in Australia have made education into a specific kind of private commodity: what Fred Hirsch called a positional good. A positional good is not something that is valued in and of itself, but for the position it offers its possessor in a particular market that hierarchically structures different types of the same goods. So, not only is the value of education completely instrumentalised as a commodity – that is as something that has exchange value on the labour market – but as a good which is seen to position someone within a social hierarchy and market. Putting aside for the moment that this is still premised on the normative expectation that education improves social mobility,¹ Marginson’s study was not concerned with the relationship between what education provides for the economy, but how the privileging of economic outcomes has wrought particular changes on what our idea of education constitutes and, with it, a re-configuration in how education is organised. As the title suggests, education is now itself a market where educational institutions are now competing amongst themselves, not for students, but for consumers. Marginson’s study is an interesting tale of how this market came about in the midst of increasing demands for the democratisation of education. In other words, as the general call for opening up education based on merit increases demand and the resources needed to invest in education, the government resists increasing funding in place of creating a market for education where educational institutions compete for competent students. There are other dimensions to the marketisation of education, but what is relevant here is how part of turning universities into corporations involved turning students into consumers and teachers into producers.

So, what does it mean to turn students into consumers and teachers into producers? Well, at a practical level, the sort of policy change my Faculty has approved exemplifies this. No-one cares about what you’re peddling so long as the students enjoy it. And, one should not be fooled into thinking that it is anything other than the student’s pleasure and enjoyment that comes to mind. Feel free to browse the archive of blog posts by our Learning and Teaching Centre (LTC) on the topic of engagement. Here we are being told about how to inspire students through the use of Lego, dance and play. There is nothing at all mentioned about interest. Somehow, an appealing delivery is meant to somehow make students learn – McLuhan’s the media is the message taken to its illogical extreme.  But, maybe we could read these blog posts as suggesting the real goal is not to entertain our students, but to at least not make them bored. Nothing, nothing at all, on how to get students interested in the specific subjects they are studying. Why? Because the LTC people see education as something abstract – devoid of substantive content.

Not surprisingly, this shift in thinking about learning and teaching is often referred to as student-centred learning.² In all honesty, I’m not sure where else learning takes place, but anyway…We can see just how much our LTC devotes to learning rather than teaching: their blog devotes 82 posts to the topic of students and 2 to teachers. This should not be seen as representative, but indicative. The general shift in the way teacher-student relationships are imagined is to see the student as active and the teacher as passive. This is bolstered by a normative claim that students should be the centre of learning. The ridiculousness of this discourse is that it presumes that we can somehow or have somehow been imagining teaching without students and learning. But, now, to compensate for this we need student-centred learning, which equates to learning without teaching, unless the teaching provides entertainment value. For example, the section of the LTC website on learning makes no reference to teaching, but the section on teaching continually refers to learning. Such is the general emphasis on learning, at the expense of teaching, that teaching has no equivalent driving concept like ‘student-centred learning’. Whilst it is true that the university, as an elite institution never did or had to consider the needs of students, there is a sense in which the philosophy of teaching on display here and that is informing our policies is over-compensating for this historical shortcoming.

But, it would be naive to think it is a mere philosophical posture. As the reply to my email made clear: job satisfaction of teachers is not a concern at all. Because students pay our bills, we just give them what they want. The LTC, with its research and policy bias towards students and learning is really only a market research department for the university. This is a harsh indictment – too harsh maybe. Especially considering there are talented and dedicated people there. My gripe is not with them. But the lack of critical reflection on the dominant discourse in education research means that all the well-intentioned research and advice feeds straight into devaluing teaching because it is too closely aligned with the view of the teacher-student relationship as a particular kind of producer-consumer relationship. What’s missing is any critical reflection about what organising education around a producer-consumer relationship might mean for the quality of education. And it’s not helpful that the LTC adopts this uncritical stance.³ There is a certain hubris here that is disturbing. There is no questioning student-centred learning and the commodification of education in which this is involved. If any problems are found with student-centred learning practices then these are merely glitches. The argument is rather weak: the consumer is always right; do what the consumer says and you will not be wrong. This circular reasoning is a rather poor measuring stick for determining whether or not you are providing a quality education.

Not that this spells out the entire philosophy of education at universities today. At least at Macquarie, we disguise this organising principle in the traditional garb of the public good and service of education, albeit in its most individualised articulation. The goals of learning and teaching are to produce reflective, critically-minded, competent and articulate graduates. I’m summarising here from the various documents available on the web and that I have come across through courses and staff meetings. And, here is where the whole student-centred learning philosophy falls down: this requires setting standards for what is learned, expectations of students and assessments that judge them on this. In other words, it requires being able to tell students they are wrong. Fine, I can see a counter-argument to this whole rant emerging: it might be fine to tell them what is wrong about what they learn, but it is not fair to do this regarding how they learn – so why deny them WBLTs? For starters, I’m not trying to deny them access to WBLTs. I’d love to see more technology used in education, not less. I’ve spoken to many students about their study practices and how they might go about improving them. I don’t do this in a way that tells them what to do, but I usually highlight deficiencies in what they are doing. My point is that nothing is perfect, so in presuming it is we won’t know what problems are lurking around the corner. Nor should critique and analysis paralyse us from doing anything. Rather, critique and analysis needs to form part of an implementation strategy once satisfactory solutions are found to problems. Including critical analysis is part of a conservative strategy for any policy since its leads to improvement by remaining sensitive to shortcomings. Assuming the infallibility of any policy means unanticipated problems are either ‘spun’ (the classic response of politicians) or just re-packaged as a problem existing solutions can deal with. At Macquarie, technology is seen to hold the solution to all our problems. And because of our blind pursuit of pushing more technology and doing so in a way that does not capitalise on existing techniques enough, we are not going to provide the best quality education for our students. But technology alone is not the problem. It is the way it is used to highlight the problems with teaching practices rather than learning practices. We have plenty of quality controls for evaluating teaching practices and producing ‘reflective teaching’, but very little for how students can and should do this. Add the way technology is sought as a replacement or supplement and you get the clear sense of how teaching is to revolve around the wants and preferences of students, rather than their needs.

As I mentioned, not only does the student as consumer remove the need to question our own practices when they are to the consumer’s satisfaction, it also does not allow us to question the consumer’s practices. As I was, in no uncertain terms told/reminded today, the student as consumer is king/queen. Their preferences bear the weight of the word of God. But, we have arrived at this taken-for-grantedness of the wisdom of the student-consumer through a couple of hundred years of Western thought, through homo economicus to the rights-bearing free citizen. Obviously, the credit-card toting consumer has been added to the repertoire of self-evident truths that are constitutive of the fabric of our Western society. But, what is the problem with this shift in the way students and teachers relate to each other? For one, the student-consumer is assumed to know what they want and that what they know is best. Under such circumstances, what is left to learn? If students are treated like consumers and act like them, then learning boils down to making a choice for a product and being given what was promised. The problem is that what many teachers want to teach does not appear relevant or obvious to the layperson. Even when the objectives do appear relevant and obvious, it is not always clear how to reach them. University helps to equip students with the specialised skills and knowledge for better appreciating the relevance of bleeding-edge research. Learning necessarily implies a transformation – from one way of knowing to a different way of knowing. But, this has to be taught rather than simply delivered like a package because this transformation is the product of reflection and thinking. And it is most productive and valuable when this thinking is the student’s own whilst still informed by the approaches within the discipline. The student-consumer is led to believe the most onerous thinking at university involves deciding which courses to take, not learning a discipline.

And much like retailers in the real market, universities simply think they are responding to student needs rather than shaping them. That re-shaping teaching policy only requires understanding what the student wants – that is, to satisfy their needs for flexibility in attendance. For example, introducing WBLTs, I have been told is important to satisfy the student-consumer’s wants. We ignore this at our own peril, since they will simply take their money elsewhere and I will be out of a job. Moreover, my satisfaction has to be crucified on the altar of satisfying the consumer. Basically, I should reconsider my career options if my ambitions for academia stem beyond doing research, teaching and administration that satisfies the market. Anyway, research shows that the introduction of WBLTs leads to the decline of on-campus lecture attendance. This might sound like a stupid argument – of course if you provide consumers with what they want then they will move away from what they do not want and towards what satisfies their wants and needs. But, with the way universities are run, this leads to a zero-sum game with potentially dramatic consequences: if more students go online than come on-campus, will we just move to online delivery or will we double-up and run the course both online and on-campus? I can’t see the universities in this funding environment allowing resources to be used this way. Something will have to give. In economic terms, university managers think they are just diversifying their products and services, but diversification can also lead to the colonisation of the sources of one’s own profits if not well-thought out. This is partly the problem with having the large budgets we have in this sort of a funding environment – there is so much pressure for improving productivity (doing more for less), but this pressure is such that there is not time to properly think through the full consequences outside of the supposed bottom line outcomes – customer satisfaction and the purported long-term gains this will produce. In the meantime, teachers are not provided with any extra support or resources to teach a course both online and on-campus and the only thing that will suffer is the quality of the teaching. But, if management has their way and teaching is reduced to content delivery then the quality of teaching will no longer be a factor.

And, I think there is a very real chance that universities will no longer be charged with teaching students how to think. According to this model,  the student-consumer is simply thinking of the ROI for his or her degree – the value of one’s degree on the marketplace for labour. This is only partly true. Students realise that there is something exceptional about university education – it is not simply its scarcity that allows education to be a positional good, but it’s social standing. There is a general view that educated people are better people because of their education. The number of studies that show how positive attitudes are positively correlated to higher levels of education supposedly prove this. The problem is that these studies do not often tell us the extent to which education influenced such positive attitudes. Only bad social science will leap to these assumptions. And many good studies show how education simply reinforces what already took shape by way of experience (e.g. Bourdieu’s study published as Reproduction and many others that have followed him). In fact, the buzzword of contemporary research is engagement. I’m hardly impressed by the advice of the LTC on engagement that I mentioned earlier. This semester I had a particularly challenging group of students because the course moved quickly over quite complex ideas and they seemed quite uninterested in putting in the requisite effort on their own. The course was designed so that lectures provided basic conceptual framework and the readings were material to be used for their own analysis which entailed applying the ideas form the lecture. The problem is that the course had a lot of assumed sociological knowledge. The strategic students understood the learning outcomes for each week, but not how to get there themselves. So, by the fourth week I undertook to reverse-engineer the point in each tutorial: how do we reach the conclusion offered by the reading(s) using the material offered in the lecture? I challenged the students to think about this and even gave them time, where possible, to consult readings, lecture notes and each other at the same time. Bit by bit, we pulled apart an argument to see how it reaches a certain conclusion on the basis of the evidence presented, analysis conducted and organised by theory. So, the students are not doing their own analysis, but learning how to understand what other people have done. Hardly, the sort of critical and reflective graduate skills set in the course objectives of every course in the Arts and Humanities. Maybe this is good enough…maybe not. But, what mattered here was my role in challenging students to think and providing pointers for them to do this. The small format of the tutorial allows me to tailor my approach to particular student needs – I got to know my students and their problems. Now, this was made difficult because the tutorial goes for 50 minutes and it usually started with a 20-3 minute student presentation. Not a lot of time to foster engagement. But, try to propose running a whole course like a seminar – where the lecture material is delivered some other way and the 3 hours contact is run like a discussion and you are going to get flatly rejected. Why? For this to work you need small groups. The lecture would have to be like a big agenda-setting seminar before students break out into smaller groups for more intense discussion. Even if you whittle the contact hours for a course down to 2 hours, you will still need tutors pulling extra hours than the current model (2 hour lectures and 1 hour tutorial). But, this may also exacerbate existing problems with engagement that are diffused by the relatively small weight given to proper engagement: not everyone is clearly spoken and confident. Make more of the course about engagement and the proportion of marks will go up and so will the anxieties of those few who are terrified of public speaking. Anyway, the point is that the implications of developing ‘real’ engagement – proper dialogue – will take a lot more time. I have no doubt that students will derive a great deal of value out of it and, done properly, it should not exacerbate well-known problems of engagement. But, even then, this is really only one way of teaching students…

As might be evident, real engagement is the seeming anti-thesis of what I predict: that universities will no longer be charged with teaching students how to think within a discipline by moving to a content-delivery model of teaching. Well, not really once we remember that teaching is actually all about student-centred learning. For the moment, there is a deep dissonance in the university about how to meet the objectives of student-centred learning based on engagement whilst pursuing an economically rational content-delivery model of teaching. Mostly, this is because, as I said above, real engagement requires more money than just content-delivery. For the moment, the student-centred learning ideology keeps the dissonance at bay because the dilemma of creating more content for students whilst also providing more engagement has largely been devolved from the institution and onto the shoulders of individual teachers and students. For teachers, this dilemma appears as workload issues. This is to say that teachers follow the imperative that any contact time with students not be taken up with content delivery since IT provides a better mechanism for this (cf. section 5.3 of a report produced by research conducted across four universities on the value of WBLTs: http://www.cpd.mq.edu.au/teaching/wblt/overview.htm). The assumption is that you simply use your normal preparation time to prepare digital content for these delivery systems, rather than for delivery as a lecture. Easier said than done. Lack of technical skills and support and an over-estimation of just how interesting lectures are when delivered through these systems means that teachers spend a lot of time converting courses for online delivery. And considering there are greater demands to freshen up courses, then this becomes quite onerous compared to adlibbing in lectures. But without ‘telling’ students some things, courses usually lack structure. Research, like that conducted by MQ, simply lays the blame with users of the WBLTs. The student is immune to any criticism or evaluation outside of assessment. And by then, it’s too late. Either that or we simplify assessment for the changed environment. We do less to evaluate thinking and more about knowing. But, then the university becomes a vocational educational institute.

I know I’ve been talking in this last section under the assumption that WBLTs replace on-campus course delivery. I am well-aware this not yet the course being set by universities, although OUA is an increasingly attractive model for universities. I’m merely speculating about the future based on some of the things we know right now about the institutional setting, educational culture and existing behaviours and practices. I’m not optimistic about the future. I only feel as though I’d be able to survive in academia if I significantly lower my expectations. And, I’m not sure this will do anyone any good. I’m not willing to play the game of pretending that a quality education can be delivered in the current or future environment given the trends I’m seeing. And the problem is that I truly believe in the democratisation of higher education – access to all and for all. However, historically speaking, this democratisation has been premised upon achieving the same quality of research and education as when universities were elite institutions. The design and funding of universities today is at odds with this. But it appears stuck in some limbo between these demands – as a positional good, a university education rests upon its quality and alignment with industry and market. And everything happening now is, at best, nothing more than a stop gap measure or, at worst, a reconfiguration and reorientation of the university into a corporation. Given this, I’m not sure I am willing to make the sacrifices and efforts needed to finish a PhD – something which is also caught up in the tensions between the economic rationalisation and democratisation of the university – in order to join the swathe of casually employed academics. I don’t think I’m brilliant enough to secure tenure and patient enough to live with its conditions if I did get it. I still think, as Bourdieu said over 40 years ago, that we need to fight for the proper democratisation of the university.

I know that what I have written here may offend some colleagues or anyone involved in higher education. This is not my intention. These are personal reflections whose only objective have been to help me make sense of what I’m trying to do and what I should be doing. I realise that if any of my superiors read this that they would probably not look favourably upon my views. If I’m going to be a ‘yes’ man I may as well do it for proper remuneration and somewhere where I can easily be indifferent to my immediate surrounds and the university does not allow me to do this because I’m too sensitive to the normative tension between the economic rationalisation and democratisation of education. I’m not sure how much I’m willing to ‘play the game’ or ‘change the rules’. I’m not even sure about how accurate my views are, which is partly why I am sharing them publicly. I never joined academia to make friends, but to make a difference. If anyone is offended by anything I’m saying here, I apologise. Any future academic or other employers reading this: I’m sure I’m not doing myself any favours – oh well, at least you know what you’ll be getting if you hired me and maybe this will make it easier to keep me off a short-list. Be that as it may. Dum spiro, spero.

1. Pierre Bourdieu’s dated, but still brilliant, study of the French educational system focuses primarily on the gap between the expectation of education and the outcomes. What drove Bourdieu was the discourse and reforms aimed at the democratisation of education in France with the view to improving everyone’s social mobility and creating a more equal society. What Bourdieu found was that education, despite its formal commitment to merit and achievement, is still culturally biased towards the already privileged – meritocracy is not the same as democracy and the former can be anathema to the former if taken to the extreme. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, whilst education does improve the socio-economic position of everyone who goes further, the outcomes are still quite undemocratic – they are unevenly distributed according to social class. For Bourdieu, this reflects the way in which the democratic reforms of education have not gone far enough.
2. It’s not so much the number of search results one finds for student-centred learning, but in what places it is discussed. For example, it is present in anything to do with teaching, course design and assessment which indicates the extent to which student-centred learning is an educational philosophy.
3. See this seemingly innocuous blog post by the LTC raising questions over criticism made by prominent sociologist, Frank Furedi, about the quality of education produced by student-centred learning. I say this article is seemingly innocuous, because the bias towards student-centred learning is evident in the blog title: “Student-centred learning? Or a chance to whinge?” Why must we choose between seeing Furedi’s comments as disillusioned whingeing or a delusional rave that actually confirms what he purports to be criticising, student-centred learning? Why can’t we see that there may be problems with student-centred learning?

Much like when I moved to Alice Springs in 2006-07, I plan to document the life of those around me as I encounter it. I’ll do my best this time to not bore you all with too many words but to also capture this visually. I hope to give you all a view of the easily misunderstood world of Darwin. I can’t promise I won’t be part of the misunderstandings, but this is invariably part of the process of learning to live somewhere new.

At the same time, I’ll be talking more about music and books. They both tell stories, albeit in different ways, and I plan on reviewing the stories I’ve been most interested in lately as well as the ones that will surely capture my attention later.

At the moment, I am working on two reviews: Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band’s 2008 release, Season of Changes, and Ahmad Jamal’s 1958 release, Live at the Pershing: But Not For Me.

Seeing the Brian Blade is likely to be the first off the blocks, here is my favourite Ahmad Jamal clip of his trio playing Darn that Dream.

Puy lentil salad

This recipe is pretty much verbatim out of the bible (i.e. Stephanie Alexander’s Cooking Companion).

Ingredients:

• 2 cups puy lentils (otherwise known as fine green/brown/french-style lentils)
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 cup freshly chopped parsley (Italian flat-leaf is nicer, I reckon)
• 1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• freshly ground black pepper

Instructions:

Soak lentils in plenty of water for 2 hours, then drain well, reserving a cup of soaking water. Heat olive oil in saucepan and sauté onion until golden. Add garlic and sauté for a minute. Add lentils, salt and reserved cooking water. I tend to add around half a cup when cooking with the puy lentils. Cook, stirring frequently, over a moderate heat for 20-25 minutes until water has evaporated and lentils are cooked. They should not be mushy and should still have a nuttiness to them. Tip lentils ito a bowl and stir in parsley, vinegar and extra-virgin olive oil. Grind on plenty of pepper. Feel free to expand salad. My favourite is to add some grilled haloumi marinated in lemon and oregano. Serve with some bread, if you want (pita or sourdough loaf is nice).

Basil pesto

This is from Stephanie’s with some of my own added suggestions. This basic recipe should be modified according to your taste and the occasion. For example, when I’m making this for a pasta dish, I tend to put less parmesan than in the recipe. This way, people can add fresh parmesan to their dish while eating. Or, if I know I’m going to be storing the pesto in the fridge I use the least possible amount of oil as possible. This is because you will continually add oil to the pesto after use to keep it fresh in the fridge. Another thing to note: you can blend the pesto to different consistencies to get different flavours and textures. Blending it more brings out the basil, blending it less brings out other flavours. I find the chunky version is nice as a spread. The only other thing to remember is that a basil pesto is only as good as the basil you use.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup well-packed basil leaves
• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons pine nuts
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• salt
• 60 g best-quality parmesan, grated

Instructions:

Blend basil, oil, pine nuts, garlic and salt until smooth. This can be done most easily in a blender, food processor or mortar and pestle. When evenly blended, scrape into a bowl and stir in cheese. Store, covered with a film of olive oil, in a screw-top jar.

When using as a pasta sauce, reserve some cooking water to thin the pesto so it mixes nicely with the freshly cooked pasta. Depending on how you use it, this can last ages. I find when I use it as a pasta sauce it will serve around 12-14.

Home-made pasta

This is pretty much a combination of pasta recipes from Stephanie’s and from Jamie Oliver. This recipe makes about 500g of pasta, which is usually enough for 5-6 people. I’m not even going to bother offer instructions on how to do this without a pasta machine – they’re widely available and it’s the best 50 bucks you will ever spend. But, I will provide instruction on how to make this with or without a food processor. Using a food processor provides the most consistent dough, in my opinion.

Ingredients:

• 400g plain flour (I think the Tip 00, finely sifted flour is best)
• 3 teaspoons salt
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten (or 8 egg yolks, if you want a stronger flavoured pasta)

Instructions:

Using food processor: Combine flour and salt in food processor. With motor running, add eggs. Process for a few minutes until dough clings together and feels springy (it should not feel sticky).

Without food processor: Sift the flour and salt onto a large workbench. It should form a mound. Create a large well in the mound and pour in lightly beaten eggs. Using a fork, gently mix the flour into the eggs by skimming some flour from the wall of the well into the egg mixture. Hopefully by the time the wall of flour is too small to hold in the mixture, the mixture will already have taken on a doughy texture and it will just be a question of kneading in the remaining flour. Sometimes the walls of the flour mound break and the egg mixture goes everywhere. Don’t panic, just mix the flour into any egg spilling and then mix that into the mixture in the well. The dough may end up not mixed as well or even dry. Simply knead the dough for longer and/or have some water on hand whilst you’re kneading to add some of the moisture that was lost.

On a workbench, knead dough for a few minutes, then wrap it in plastic film and let it rest for 1 hour at room temperature. I sometimes skip the last step if I’m not striving for perfection and just continue kneading.

Make sure you have a long stretch of bench on which to roll out the pasta. Make sure the surface is dry. Have some extra flour on hand.

Rip off a piece of dough roughly about the size of a tennis ball. Ensure the rest of the dough remains wrapped in plastic. Flatten out the ball of dough – using the palm of your hand does the job. You just don’t want the dough going through the machine to be too fat, otherwise it stretches and dries the dough out. Make sure pasta machine is on the widest setting. Roll dough through machine. Put machine to next setting and roll pasta through x 3. Fold the pasta into three (two will do, though). Put machine to widest setting and roll dough through. Put machine to next setting and roll pasta through x 3. Fold the pasta into three (two will do, though). Put machine to widest setting and roll dough through. Put machine to next setting and roll pasta to desired thickness – this will obviously depend on what type of pasta you want to make. At any point that the dough starts to get too sticky in this process, sprinkle some flour over the dough and spread it over the whole surface. Flip the dough and repeat before running it through the machine again. Avoid doing this right before folding the dough. Also, if the pasta doesn’t feel that ‘silky’ you can run it through the machine and fold it a few more times before rolling it out to your desired thickness. If you are cutting the pasta, add the attachment and roll the dough through. Once done, have some sort of hanging rack (e.g. clothes horse) on which to hang the pasta to dry. Repeat the instructions in this paragraph until you have finished the dough.

Cook the pasta as soon as you can in boiling salted water with some olive oil. Drain thoroughly and serve immediately.

Roasted Tomato Tarts

There was this other recipe I had for a tomato and olive tart that was just so nice, but I couldn’t remember it. This was as close as I could get. I’d actually never made it before, but it’s sooooo easy. It’s from Donna Hay’s No Time to Cook.

Ingredients:

• 1 sheet puff pastry
• 200g fresh ricotta
• 20g parmesan, finely grated
• sea salt
• cracked pepper
• 12 cherry tomatoes
• thyme leaves, finely chopped
• olive oil

Instructions:

Thaw puff pastry at room temperature, but just before it thaws, cut into 4 squares. Combine ricotta, parmesan, salt (to taste) and pepper (to taste). Spread ricotta mixture over puff pastry squares, leaving a border. Top each pastry with 3 cherry tomatoes. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with thyme leaves. Bake in pre-heated 180°C oven for 20-25 minutes or until pastry is puffed and golden. Serves 4.

I mainly wanted to use this post as a way of making available the photos I posted on Facebook that I didn’t want to put up on Flickr.

I’ve also included some videos up from the trip. Nothing spectacular. Enjoy! I did!

Sights and sounds of daybed delights, Shack 59, Gili Meno.

Me swimming.

Me chasing the rooster (not a euphemism).

Riding in Jupri’s boat to Gili T.

I had actually written one that I intended to send on the day of my marriage. It’s main theme was that government could not legislate the definition of marriage because it could love eluded legal definition. I recently discovered as I moved house that I never posted the letter. It was stamped and then stuffed in my drawer to only find the insides of a notebook, rather than the letterbox and the hands of aforementioned politicians. I don’t regret that actually. It was a little too soppy for what I want to do with these letters. As much as I want to add personal narrative, I also want to put forward a universalised argument – in other words, to outline the reasons why the legal recognition of same-sex couples is good for everyone, even if they don’t agree with homosexuality.

Lets face it, everyone deserves to go through the hell of weddings and marriage!

So, here is a draft of my letter for this year, including some of the good bits from last year’s letter. I’m probably not going to send it for a week, so feel free to offer advice.

I recently celebrated the first anniversary of marriage to my wonderful wife on the 24th of January. I say this because until the laws in Australia are changed, I will be spending some part of my wedding anniversary each and every year writing to you until Australian laws are changed.

There are many reasonable arguments out there both for and against changing our laws regarding the recognition of same-sex relationships. Most of the justifications should be heard and responded to because they do take other perspectives into account. But the fact an argument is reasonable does not make it right. I would like to share a personal story of my own wedding as a way to show why the general thrust of arguments favouring the legal recognition of same-sex couples are not only reasonable, but the right thing to do.

Personally, I’ve never wanted to be married – it has never occurred to me as an option. You don’t have to be married to be in love and to start a family of your own. I have always had two justifications for feeling this way: marriage, as a cultural institution, was not meaningful to me and marriage, as a legal institution, was too discriminatory. Culturally, marriage had always appeared to me as something couples just did because they had to – as a rite of passage from one stage of life into the next. This irked me because, in principle, modern marriage was supposed to be chosen and voluntary. But this only seemed to apply to the choice of partner rather than the choice of whether or not to marry. In all this, modern marriage still seemed to carry the cultural aura of feudal relations within it. Coupled with the fact I have always felt that the Marriage Act discriminates against same-sex couples and the reasons, in my own mind, for not getting married became overwhelming. And so, for the longest part of my adult life, I turned my back on marriage.

However, I never expected every other Australian citizen to do the same. We live in a democracy and part of our obligations as democratic citizens is to find reasons to accept things that we disagree with. It was easy for me to accept different understandings of marriage in the cultural sense. Even though Western culture makes of marriage a virtuous option for formalising a romantic, committed relationship between two people, it still remains only one option within our society. Especially since love increasingly became the essential ingredient for marriage coming into the 20th century, marriage has lost its obligatory character in Western culture. One marries because one wants to and out of love. But, marriage has retained a virtuous status as the best, but not only way, of formalising a committed relationship. I can accept that my own interpretation of marriage does not sit with the dominant view, so long as the dominant view is not imposed upon me in terms of how I choose to live my life. And it doesn’t.

Despite this, I came to realise that my comfortable place within Australian society and Western culture is a privilege. A privilege that is not afforded to everyone. To be specific, it is a heterosexual privilege. As a heterosexual male, I have the choice to shun marriage. If I were a homosexual male, I would not. This realisation bothered me at the time, as it does today. Both my ethical and moral disagreements came from a privileged position, because the law seems to believe that I have a greater or better capacity than a homosexual individual to make ethical and moral decisions about whether or not to marry.

Worse still, the arguments against giving homosexual individuals the capacity within the law to make this same decision are not for the greater good, but appear as self-serving, self-fulfilling prophecies. Take for example a prominent argument against the legal recognition of same-sex relationships: heterosexual couples make better parents. This is definitely true if we take into account the levels of homophobic attitudes in a society – where they are relatively high, so are the domestic problems within same-sex relationships. None of the evidence convincingly points to inherent problems within homosexuality as providing a causal basis for the success or otherwise of families. What the evidence does seem to show is that homophobia can and does hinder the possibilities for the full flourishing of homosexual relationships. And if we recognise love to be the most important ingredient in marriage and, therefore, families, then continued homophobia, it could be argued, plays a larger role in the success or otherwise of families created by same-sex couples. My point is that it is not homosexuality that causes problems in our society, but the continued stigmatisation of it.

But, why should the potential success of families be a determining factor for marriage? Disregard the fact, for a moment, that some homosexual parents are ‘better’ (whatever, that might mean) than some heterosexual parents and that many families are created outside of marriage. If we accept the arguments put forward by opponents of same-sex parentage, how far are we going to go to guarantee the success of marriage and family by means external to the relationship between the parents and the children themselves? Do we stop the disabled from marrying and forming families if it means the possibility of failure? What about groups seen to have high rates of domestic violence? Maybe only working couples in a comfortable financial position should be allowed to marry? Maybe only religious people? Logically extended, the arguments of the opponents of the legal recognition of same-sex couples could have serious consequences for everyone if they are deemed both reasonable and right.

It appears that ‘evidence’ of this kind should not be used as a proxy for our own capacity to make informed decisions about what we want to achieve. In other words, what is the case shouldn’t be used to suggest or replace our democratic deliberations and determinations about what ought to be the case. More broadly speaking, I can’t help but feel that all this emphasis on evidence-based policy in the area of social and cultural issues is diminishing our civic skills within a democratic community, where having a moral compass instead of a mathematical one should be more important. But I digress.

It is hard to argue against there being a range of material and immaterial conditions that statistically lead to ‘better’ marriages and families. This is not a good enough reason to legally proscribe marriages and families formed in the absence of such conditions. So, why is this being allowed for same-sex couples and not anyone else?

On a broader level, the lack of recognition for same-sex couples undermines the legitimacy of our legal regime. Equality before the law, does not have to mean the same laws for everyone, but can also mean legal equivalence. Positive discrimination in the law contains a host of examples demonstrating the success of legal equivalence. But the various legal mechanisms at the state and Commonwealth levels to provide legal protection for same-sex couples and individuals does not amount to equality before the law or legal equivalence. To some degree, and relally only since the Same-Sex Entitlements Enquiry in 2007, it could be said that homosexual individuals posses the same democratic entitlements and obligations as others, except for the ability to have their committed relationships to a significant other legally recognised. But, one technical point of contention remains: that the Marriage Act denies same-sex couples full legal equivalence.

Technicalities aside, why should we care about the Marriage Act if discrimination has been abolished in all other areas? I like to think that our laws are both expressive and regulative. In a democratic sense, our laws express the things we value. Laws do this, specifically, in their regulative function: they enable and constrain behaviour according to what we value. The legal act of marriage does this in a very special way. When my wife and I had decided that we would get married, it was based upon the fact that we wanted others involved in celebrating our love for each other. In fact, the law was sanctioning our love as well as providing us with the opportunity to celebrate this with people who were important in our lives. It was a special day because, as much as the love my wife and I share is ours and ours only, I could see in the people present at our wedding a recognition of our love beyond merely the shape it was taking in marriage. In the deepest sense, I could see in my friends and family that they could see my wife through my eyes and why I loved her. And only then did it occur to me what was so important about the day: this sort of recognition from the people we loved provided the foundation of our own love. I began to think of the many minute and unremarkable ways my friends and family have provided the lubricant and pillars of support for me in my own pursuits as well as those that have been shared with my wife. By the time it was my turn to give a speech at the reception, I was physically overwhelmed with gratitude. I couldn’t stop thanking the people without whom my wife and I would not have been able to share our love for each other.

But this is not the type of recognition I’m asking for within our laws. In fact, I think it would be wrong for our laws to only have this type of recognition in mind for it would be too prescriptive in how a couple should love each other and how people should respond to that. The type of recognition I felt – the sincerity, care and love – was enabled by the Marriage Act. Sure, I didn’t have to get married to have received such recognition – commitment ceremonies are increasingly popular today. But, in getting married that day, I, as a citizen of Australia, enacted a law in that instant. Not in the sense of establishing a law, but practicing it. From that moment on, whether or not someone knows me or my wife, whether or not they were intimately familiar with the character of our relationship, every other citizen in Australia was from that moment on compelled to recognise what my wife and I has established as a committed relationship based in love. It was a powerful feeling.

More importantly, I realised that I had taken part in the positive function of law: the reproduction of things we all value and want to protect and guarantee for future generations. And that thing, on the day of my marriage, was love. Not my particular version of it, because this is only available to my wife and myself. But, the abstract definition of love we all share: the mutuality, reciprocity, care and commitment for that one significant other. And the Marriage Act says this much already. Here is the particular way sections 45 and 46 of the Marriage Act 1961 was rendered in our vows:

I, Elizabeth Trevan, a civil celebrant, am duly authorised by the law to solemnize marriages according to the laws of Australia.  Before you Sara and you Bernard are joined together in marriage in my presence and in the presence of these witnesses, I am to remind you of the solemn, the serious and the binding nature of the relationship into which you are now about to enter.  Marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man to a woman and a woman to a man; it is made in the deepest sense to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.

Not only were my wife and I formally embarking on reproducing a societal value that day, but every Australian citizen was, from then on, formally obliged to recognize our small contribution to making a decent society. The law does have this sort of power in a democracy and it remains one of the most compelling and universal reasons for why the law should continue to be used to formalise and protect love relationships.

As joyous as this occasion was, both as a private individual and a public citizen, it was marred by the inequity of what I had also done: I was asking homosexual couples to recognize my relationship without having to reciprocate. There’s nothing in the Marriage Act that is unavailable to same-sex couples, in that they are more than capable of getting married and being married in the way prescribed by the law. Except for the fact that the definition of marriage excludes them from the opportunity. And to think this had only become so with the Marriage Amendement Act 2004. The irony of this for opponents of the legal recognition of same-sex couples: that a law has to be passed in 2004 to reflect what is supposed to have always been the case. In any case, the fact that I can seek and gain legal and social recognition from others for loving my wife, without having to reciprocate to everyone makes me ill at ease. And, I won’t rest until the laws at the source of this discomfort are changed.

Nevertheless, I think it’s understandable that people might want to argue that marriage is and should stay specifically heterosexual given its history. This, however, should not deny the equivalent legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Most European countries have civil union laws that are legally equivalent to marriage. This way the law reflects and retains the cultural heritage of marriage and the cultural shift where love as the basis of committed relationships is ignorant of sexual orientation. I don’t believe marriage has to be the way in which committed love relationships are formalised. But, we’re not even having a debate about civil unions. And it seems increasingly unlikely since the government walked away from the National relationships registry proposal. I strongly urge you: please start the debate on civil unions. Relationship registries are patronising and condescending and such a weak position continues to provide cover for the more prejudicial attitudes and arguments against the legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

My point is: the law and the bureaucratic apparatus of government should not be substitutes for real democracy. Our laws and policies should not impede ways of life that remain within our sharable definitions of what constitutes a decent society. This does not mean that we can’t disagree and debate what different ways of life mean for our shared existence. And sometimes the social sanctions that emerge from democratic deliberations between citizens hold more power than legal sanctions. At the moment, though, our laws are legitimising un-democratic and unjust perspectives on homosexuality and same-sex relationships. Our laws are perpetuating a stigmatisation that has no basis. This is unacceptable for the legitimacy of our legal system and the liberal democratic social order it seeks to protect.

So, I stand here, from within my heterosexuality and from within the institution of marriage – a position of privilege – to say that arguments against the legal recognition of same-sex relationships are wrong and indefensible. I’m looking forward to your reply. I certainly hope it contains, at the very least, a response to my points. I am certainly eager to know what the government has planned beyond the relationship registries that were proposed.

Before I leave, I would like to express in advance my appreciation for your consideration of my correspondence. If I don’t hear from you, rest assured you will hear again from me in one year’s time.

I’m with Mungo MacCallum: who cares? The 26th of January marks the day Australia was turned into a penal colony. It marks the beginning of what almost brought about the end of the Indigenous population inhabiting this continent. Who, in their right mind, celebrates that? Not that the Australia Day celebrations wafting in through my window have anything to do with that.

No, the shouts of “Woo!”, “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!”, “Yeah!” have other reference points in mind. We could speak of some sort of disguise for banal racism, of exaggerated patriotism, ethnocentrism and blind nationalism. We could equally speak of national pride and joy. But really, for most of these yahoos, Australia Day could probably happen any day of the year, so long as it continued to be a public holiday. Drinking, barbequing and hanging out (preferably at the beach) hardly relate to the 26th of January. For all the commentary, punditry and pontification espousing the virtue or iniquity of Australia Day misses the point: all the fuss has occurred predominantly since the 26th of January became a properly observed national holiday in the 1990s. I can’t help but feel that the years of the Howard government have helped to feed the demons lurking around on Australia Day.

But we shouldn’t underestimate the timing of the public holiday as being more significant than the history it seeks to celebrate. Every public holiday in summer in Australia follows exactly the same rituals: drink, eat (barbie) and go to the beach. Christmas, New Year’s Day and Australia Day. Drinking, eating and going to the beach, on each of these days, is granted legitimacy and even virtuous status by the events marked by each of these public holidays. But really, everyone just wants to get pissed, gorge themselves and float around the pool or the ocean in the sun. This is what we aspire to as Australians on Australia Day and it is what we celebrate – a way of life revolving around beer, barbies and beaches. When compared against the lofty proclamations of politicians, pundits and commentators Australia Day appears to be quite the sham. Not to say real national sentiment isn’t present amongst the celebrants. Not say the 26th of January is merely an excuse or pretence for drinking, eating and going to the beach. Not at all. It’s just that when it boils down to looking at the things we are supposedly celebrating, it seems as though we are not aiming very high.

So, it’s not like I’ve got anything wrong with drinking, eating and going to the beach – I engage in all three of these things myself regularly throughout the year. It’s just that on Australia Day, I’m all of a sudden made to feel like there’s this club that has a monopoly on these things and that I don’t belong. Mostly because I don’t hop into my Australia Day uniform – the Australian flag. I was never one for uniforms. You might say I’m paranoid and being irrational – that I am part of the club. Some might even say I perhaps don’t deserve membership for even thinking I’m not part of the club. None of this alleviates the conditions that give rise to this sense of discomfort. There are the well-worn criticisms of Australia Day I mentioned earlier – it’s chauvinistic patriotism, the disguise it provides for racism, ethnocentrism or blind nationalism. None of these hold up empirically as solidly as their critiques believe – it’s hard to prove the structural or even prominent presence of such vices. But they don’t need to be in order to have their desired effect. The new uniform of Australia Day acts as a palimpsest for all these vices – real and imagined. The new Australia Day uniform and ebullient celebrations in which they are witnessed are too easily aligned with the vices.

Let me explain with some examples. It’s easy to imagine how the person proclaiming migrants should ‘fuck off’ identifies their sentiments as patriotic rather than racist when shrouded in an Australian flag on Australia Day. Even as the racism is attempted to be lessened by an appeal to patriotism, it is still racism disguised as chauvinistic patriotism – it’s still fucked. Around the internet, comments on Australia Day stories are littered with reproaches to criticism of Australia Day because this should be a day of pride. But when it comes to offering what it is we ought to be proud of, very few substantive suggestions are offered, but the flag would have to be the most consistent one. In any case, these idiots speak as though pride exists in its own sentimental universe without being able to feel shame. And one needn’t look far for images of Australia Day redolent with white, Anglo icons draped in the Australian flag. Even the attempts to ‘ethnicise’ Australia Day feel a little patronising in the face of so much awkwardness around seeing such Australianness out of context on a migrant body.

But, to put it bluntly (and be prepared to call me a snob, or some variation on this disparagement), there is no dignity in what we celebrate on Australia Day and the way in which we celebrate it. Walking the streets and reading people’s comments about the many citizenship ceremonies taking place today (even though this is old, here’s an example), it feels as though citizenship is a competition – a race to the bottom in our attempts to reduce ourselves to the pure Australian, to not simply wear the flag, but be the flag. I speak of it as a race to the bottom because rather than enriching and expanding what it means to be Australian, we are climbing down the evolutionary ladder and heading fast towards an amoeba-like state of simplicity, stupidity, of being less than ordinary, of unsophistication. Not that this in itself is bad, but along with it we have lost a sense of dignity that respects the dignity of others because what we call pride does not come from the same place that we can also feel shame. But, then again, on a day like today, shame does not have to be felt. One only has to look how hard it was to say sorry to Indigenous people to see what I mean about a lack of dignity. Our pride is not tempered by a sense of humility that is considerate of the sentiments and thoughts of others. This is why the Australian flag is now worn as a uniform – like other uniforms, its presence is rather unremarkable and benign for the most part, but the devastating force that lies dormant in the wearing of the uniform lurks uneasily below the surface.

Mind you, if we really want to stick it to flags and what they have come to symbolise, then we should also be having a look at the debate raging (here, here, here and here) over Google vs. Howard Thomas as to who is to blame for the Aboriginal flag being dropped from the google.com.au logo for today.

© oneleon1905

One of my earliest memories is of my second trip to Mauritius when I was 6 – I only remember two other things before this (you can ask, I won’t tell). I remember we stopped at the side of the road on the way to Père Laval’s grave. A guy had a little cart similar to a hot dog stand you would see at the footy in the 80s and he appeared to be selling food – at least, that’s what it smelt like. It was at this stop that I was introduced to dholl poori. I’m pretty sure I had it with chatini pomme d’amour (tomato chutney), but my first taste was of the poori on its own. My taste buds have yet to come close to the excitement of that first dholl poori.

My father made the best faratas of anyone within our familial network in Australia. He showed me how as a kid and being the rebellious son of my father, I dutifully forgot how. Until recently. Sure, my faratas don’t quite match up to my dad’s, but they’re pretty close now. When it comes to dholl poori, no one in my family knows how to make them properly. In any case, there have been plenty of Mauritians selling the stuff for peanuts so the urge to learn myself has never been there. But, over the years my memories of my first dholl poori have been coming back stronger and stronger, such that other people’s dholl poori are less and less meeting my expectations. I decided that if I’m going to try to relive that first dholl poori, I’d have to make it myself.

A lady by the name of Madeleine Philippe has what appears to be the most helpful recipe for dholl poori online. That’s not really saying much. Dholl poori is very easy to make for experienced hands. There’s a lot of work that goes into this simple recipe, which makes it easy to go wrong. Not so simple a recipe really. Anyway, I’m going to provide you with my version of dholl poori which is based entirely on the recipe by Mme Philippe, but with more instructions on how to get it right and make them good. What you should end up with are very thin and quite flaky pooris with a nice spicy dholl.

Ingredients:

• 500g yellow split peas
• 1/2 tbsp turmeric
• 2 tsp salt
• 750g plain white flour
• 1 tsp salt, additional
• 2 tbsp turmeric, additional
• 1 tbsp ground cumin
• 250g ghee (but you might need more)

Instructions:

1. Boil yellow split peas. Place enough water in a pot to boil the yellow split peas. About half a litre should do the job, but it will depend on the size of your pot. The water is used later in the making of the dough and the less water you use, the stronger its flavour. Once water is boiled, add yellow split peas, 1/2 tbsp turmeric and 2 tsp salt and drop heat to medium. Stir occasionally to prevent peas from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Allow peas to boil until soft, but not sticky – al dente, if you will. Once done, pour peas into a strainer placed over a large bowl so that you retain the liquid used to boil the peas. Strain the peas well. Leave for some time in the strainer and make sure to not leave above the hot liquid. Allow liquid to cool – I’ve placed it in the fridge while in Darwin, but I’ll probably do the same elsewhere.
2. Prepare dry ingredients for dough. Sift the flour and 1 tsp salt into a large mixing bowl.
3. Prepare dough. Once the liquid from boiling the peas is cool enough, mix it slowly into the dough. I create a hole in the middle of the dry ingredients, add a ladle of the liquid and gently push the dry ingredients into the water while I mix them together until no more of the dry ingredients will mix. I then add another ladle of liquid and repeat the mixing process. If you run out of the liquid leftover from boiling the peas, just use warm water. As the dough starts to get bigger, I actually knead the dough to ensure it continues to mix without using too much liquid. I also add less liquid each time – something like 1 tbsp at a time. You want the dough to be soft, but not sticky. It should be smooth and soft, not too silky, but no dough should peel away and stick to your hands. Once done, wrap in plastic and rest in the fridge for an hour.
4. Prepare dholl. Before going on, make sure the peas are as dry as possible. Do whatever to make it as dry as possible – muslin, paper towels, whatever. Once dry, the peas need to be ground. A coffee or spice grinder works best. A mortar and pestle will also do the job. Either way, don’t over do it. If you end up with large chunky balls of ground peas you have overdone it. You want the ground peas to be a little chunky but mostly powdery. Once the peas have been ground, place in a large mixing bowl, add 2 tbsp turmeric and 1 tbsp ground cumin and mix all ingredients. Use a fork to do this and mix by making a similar aerating motion you would to scramble eggs. This helps to distribute the spices evenly as well as keep the peas from developing into chunky balls. Add more salt or spices (i.e. turmeric and/or ground cumin) to taste. I tend to add more turmeric and salt. Once mixed, the dholl should be a little chunky, but mostly powdery.
5. Retrieve dough from fridge.
6. Prepare dholl poori. This is the hardest part to get right. Remove some dough about the size of a squash ball and make into a round piece of dough. Cup the dough ball in your hand, using your palm or fingers. Create a deep well in the centre of the dough ball using your thumb. Using a teaspoon, place some dholl in the centre of dough ball. Press the dholl well into the base of the dough ball. Add more dholl and press it into the sides of the dough ball expanding the width of the well. Keep adding dholl in this way until you feel as though the dough ball has reached a size whereby there is still enough dough left around the sides of the well to cover the well. The idea here is that you expand the well so that dholl reaches to the very edge of the poori, once rolled out. But you don’t expand it to the point where there is not enough dough around the side of the well to eventually pull over and cover the well of dholl properly. Pressing the dholl into the sides of the dough ball should also deepend the well to some extent. Once you have reached a point where the well is wide enough, start filling the well with more dholl until it sits just below the lip of the well – about 0.5cm to 1cm, depending on how wide the dough ball is. Make sure to pack the dholl in relatively tight. Once packed, pull up on the dough around the well of dholl and then fold over the well to cover. Once covered and sealed, I like to round out the dholl poori in my hand so that it rolls out nicely.
7. Roll out dholl poori. Do this on a lightly floured surface. Ensure that the surface and the dholl poori is always lightly floured because you want to roll it out nice and flat. If you use a lot of flour here, that’s fine. Once the dholl poori is rolled out you can just wipe off any excess flour – the dholl poori is best cooked relatively flour free. If while rolling, the dholl starts to appear really close to the surface of the poori dough, this is fine. Continue rolling lightly. You want to avoid rolling to the point where the dholl creates holes in the poori dough. The idea is to get the dholl poori as flat and round as possible.I ended making a little video, with assistance from wifey, showing how I prepare and roll out the dholl poori.

   

8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until you have enough dholl poori to cook. I usually make whatever will fit on my kitchen bench before I start cooking.
9. Melt about 250g of ghee.
10. Cook dholl poori. Heat some ghee in a non-stick frypan over medium heat. Once hot, place dholl poori in frypan. While cooking, place ghee on uncooked side of dholl poori using a pastry brush. Cook the dholl poori for about 15 seconds. Turn over and cook for another 15 seconds. You don’t want to brown the dholl poori. You want it to cook to the point just after it loses its doughiness. Once cooked, place dholl poori on a paper towel. You can create a stack of cooked dholl pooris, each separated by a paper towel.
11. Make more batches until finished. Go back to step 6 until you have finished cooking until you run out of dough.
12. Enjoy! Nice with a good chatini, but I also like to have it with a curry.

The end product: tasty dholl; soft, yet flaky pooris. The dholl pooris of my youth.

I was still living with Benoît at the time and it was a Saturday, late summer (possibly even spring already), we were a little hungover. We’d missed the markets up at Croix-Rousse . We decided to head out somewhere, no destination in mind. Ben always walked around with his camera. Always. I had talked often about Ligne D on the Lyon Metro – the trains were automatic, driver-less and so you could sit at the very front and see where the train was going. My fascination with Ligne D reinvigorated in Ben vagues ideas he’d been shuffling in his head already of filming something down there, but what, he wasn’t sure. So we decided to head for Ligne D and film something, anything – it would be improvised. One trip, the full length of the line. I was the muse for the most part and Ben the director. We got so much footage that we didn’t travel the full line. Excited, we went back to my office, grabbed some beers and food and edited the footage. It was lunch when we set out. We were finished in time for dinner. These clips are the result of that afternoon. Fond memories.

I remember Ben was bubbling with ideas at the time. Technically, he was sound with a DV camera and editing tools. Looking back, I feel as though Ben may have been in a formative stage of his creative development and I was there to witness and, on occasions like this, to participate in that. These are special memories for me. It’s probably no surprise now that Ben’s commercial work has led him on to TV commercials and music videos. He seems to have the capacity to do so much with so little. Please take the time to sample some of his wares: Stances.

This visit, however, Sara and I came dangerously close to overdosing on cinema. Thankfully the choices we made were mostly good. So we live – I live – to tell the tale.

It started with the end of the world as we know it – 2012. It should never have started here. It’s a bad movie. Too many scenes in the movie exist for the sake of the visual effects and so all sorts of bullshit is permitted that breaks the minimum requirement of a movie – the willing suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge put it (albeit in reference to drama, broadly speaking). Most people seem to feel the same. Surprisingly, David and Margaret were quite appreciative of the film. Sure, the film does mindless but visually spectacular very well. But is that enough? Not for me, I’m afraid. Having said that, the visual effects are truly impressive – the detail of roads crumbling, of the earth giving way, of volcanic explosions and tsunamis.

You would certainly think that this movie will change the standards when it comes to visually spectacular. But, I don’t think it will. All the standard setting movies in this genre have been able to achieve this by combining the visually spectacular with a decent story. The Matrix is the example of how to do this, but Emmerich’s other movie, Independence Day, is another one. A story shouldn’t be filler for special effects and that’s how I felt watching this movie.

The next movie we watched was a family event. Mr and Mrs Everingham wanted to see Bright Star, the movie about the three-year relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Befitting this icon of 19th century British Romanticism, the movie was aesthetically pleasing. From the lighting and sets, to the photography and costumes, everything oozed the 19th century Romanticism, especially its sensuality. All of these traits are the hallmarks of a great film by Jane Campion, but there is no doubt in my mind that Abbie Cornish, in the role of Fanny Brawne, makes this film. Her portrayal of the jubilation and anguish of the relationship between Brawne and Keats is superb. Mostly in the way that she doesn’t overdo either the jubilation or the anguish – she takes the character to the edge of the extremes in each case without falling into the abyss of exaggeration. Actually, I watched the really pathetic “behind the scenes doco on the ABC just after I watched the film and I could really see just how contained Cornish was. She’s good and now I know why. So, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a period piece. Given the detail to the aesthetic elements, it’s easy to see why one would think this. But the movie does not dwell long on such details. With Campion and Cornish at the helm, this story of love, life and death (a running theme in this summer’s viewing for me) is beautiful and beautifully told. More on Rotten Tomatoes and At the Movies.

Ricky Gervais The Invention of Lying provides the other bookend to Bright Star – like 2012, it was crap. I’m not the biggest fan of Gervais, mostly because I don’t his stuff that well – I watched a little bit of Extras and not much of The Office. Not because I don’t like him, but because I don’t watch a lot of TV. So, when Sara told me he had a movie out I thought we should give it a go. Plus, it was the light-hearted turn we needed after 2012 and Bright Star. And give it a go, I did, but from about the halfway mark all I wanted to do was turn it off. But, my own movie-watching code (watch every movie to the end unless it makes you vomit) and the fact that I was watching it with Sara and her Mum prevented me from doing anything of the sort. As with so many movies – the premise is great, the execution shit. The idea of a guy who can lie in a world that can’t is great. Even better that it’s an odd-ball loser of the sort Gervais plays well. But the way in which the old idiom of “you better watch what you wish for” is so poorly played out in this movie that I was gagging a little on my vomit. The whole sub-plot regarding Gervais’ supposed knowledge of the afterlife is especially hopeless. Sure, the movie cleverly raises the idea of how dissimulation is in fact a really important part of our lives – it provides the lubricant that makes social life smoother and the protection needed occasionally to hide our imperfections from others. But the way the movie deals with the consequences of this is stupid and uninteresting. I love comedy that is equally absurd and profound because it touches on some of the most unremarkable, yet essential parts of our everyday lives. This movie had the right idea, but sorely fumbled with the profundity. What was equally bad was the way the good guy comes out on top – that is, the way Gervais’ character, in the end, wins over the girl, Jennifer Garner. The biggest pitfall here is that there is no connection between Gervais and Garner – nothing to suggest why Gervais, despite all the obstacles, would want to fight for Garner. This is where the movie becomes a victim of itself, because all this honesty prevents any expression of why Garner would be interested in Gervais. He’s not a good match in any sense and so his attraction to her seems utterly baseless. Except of course for the fact she’s supposed to be a hottie. Yawn. On top of this you need to add the odd mix of English satire and self-deprecating humour alongside American desires for farce. Despite the poor execution of the idea, the movie has saving moments mostly achieved by special guest stars like Ed Norton and Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’m surprised Margaret and David gave it three stars. At least Rotten Tomatoes echoes my sentiments.

Les beaux gosses was our next adventure. I’m not saying this as a snob, but the translation of this title to ‘The French Kissers’ is stupid. ‘Beaux gosses’ is a youthful slang way of saying ‘hot guys’ in French. Don’t ask me what the current equivalent is in English. It’s meant to be ironic. It also draws attention to the focus of the film – our two anti-heroes, Hervé and Camel. They are to be seen in the original French poster on the left. See the irony? Plus, in drawing our attention to the two main characters, we’re lead more immediately into the coming-of-age theme of the film. The International English title, The French Kissers, makes very little sense. It’s cashing in on a term that has lost all of its French relevance. Sure, the title contains a play on the word French – but, so fucking what? It’s not clever. It says nothing about the film, because it sure ain’t about French Kissing. Looking at the poster (right), however, you’re led to believe it is about French Kissing or the French kissing. Either way, boring and clichéd. I wish they had come up with something more clever to market the movie. A tough ask, I know, but it goes to show how dumb marketing people are.

Anyway, with that out of the way, it has to be said this film is clever and funny. As a coming of age tale, it deals with immaturity in a clever way. This, however, does not come at the expense of really accessible humour. Some of the jokes are a little pubescent, but the satire is brilliant. While comparisons abound to other teen comedies, Les beaux gosses isn’t derivative and formulaic because it relies substantively upon narrative and character development. Not stereotypes of geeks and nerds, but the unique, yet recognisable personalities of Hervé and Camel. The cleverness is achieved mostly with the tragic reality our beaux gosses, but the movie really captures the awkwardness of teenage sexuality and sexual experiences. It’ll have you in stitches. More on Rotten Tomatoes and At the Movies (classic David and Margaret, BTW).

Thankfully, New Year’s Eve was a quite one. For some reason I had agree to Mr Everingham’s invitation to watch In Search of Beethoven on New Year’s Day. We were still a little tired, but not so tired to easily lose consciousness in the cinema. Admittedly, I was feeling a little ambivalent about going to see this film – I’d heard about how good In Search of Mozart was (even though it wasn’t even to motivate me to go see it at the time), but I am also not very interested in classical music. My Dad would buy those ‘As seen on TV’ K-Tel collections of classical music. They came with these booklets on the music and history and he would often sit me down while he played the music and read the notes to me. I was more interested in BMX at the time and the big jump we’d built down the road. To this day my aversion to classical music exists, albeit in different form. There’s a question of taste and preference – it’s not my bag – and then there’s also the cultural elitism surrounding the music that still irks me. However, the legacy of classical music is profound. There is a certain grammar to music – the way a piece can capture different emotions, moods, seasons, ideas. 19th century composers like Beethoven wrote this grammar – not from scratch, but they really set out the “rules”. This much I knew from my father and K-Tel’s $9.95 collection of classic composers he bought every month. This documentary film on Beethoven carefully and comprehensively details the basic reasons as to why Beethoven was a revolutionary in the way he changed the grammar of music as a form of artistic expression. Of course, the life and work of Beethoven is not merely discussed, but it is played by some of the best musicians in the world. Thankfully, the documentary does not dwell for too long on the worn out clichés of Beethoven’s life – his musical genius despite or because of his deafness. It’s a long doco (running time: 139 minutes) and the praise for Beethoven starts to feel sycophantic towards the end. But these shortcomings of the film hardly take away from the insights it provides and the musical experience to be enjoyed. I’m not surprised this movie has been met with almost unanimous praise (see Rotten Tomatoes and At the Movies).

Actually, this does not end Summer Cinephilia – just this post. I read The Lovely Bones before going with Sara to watch it in Darwin a couple of weeks ago. I feel terribly ambivalent about both the book and the movie and this deserves explanation – something I’ll take up in a new post.

Thankfully, a sober and intelligent voice from the Centre has decided to share with us the uniqueness of Alice Springs. Alice Online is the work of it’s editor, Dave Richards. It is far too easy for many of us outside Alice Springs to understand the importance of what is happening in the Centre from within our own metropolitan or national frames of reference. It’s often a comfortable black and white view of the world. The problem is that Alice Springs stubbornly refuses to be a black or white town – in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Alice Springs and Central Australia sustains a complex social, cultural, political, environmental and economic landscape. And I only got a glimpse of this after a little less than a year there. Not because this landscape is impenetrable, but because contrary to expectations things change in the Centre (as much as they stay the same). Before you hop on the next bandwagon regarding the various issues coming out of the Centre, let Dave and his contributors shed some light on this weird and wonderful place and give flesh to our otherwise skeletal understanding of the desert.

Tony Eastley’s reflections about these and other recent events in the US go some way to reinforcing this picture of racism rearing its ugly head. Stories of private racist jokes, of euphemisms deployed to disguise what could easily be interpreted as racial prejudice and of public remarks suggesting Americans cannot and maybe should not have to cope with a black President. These are the stories that suggest a racist underbelly that is either making a comeback or has never really gone but is once again scratching the surface of public consciousness. The problem with this particular view is that it treats race as though it were an organising principle of people’s experiences, of how they relate to each other, or even of society as a whole. This is not easily proven, even if you pull out the arsenal of statistics that could easily be interpreted as lending credence to this position. The fact that race is not such an organising principle lies in the way racism supposedly finds its public expression – for example, euphemism and appeals to popular opinion. In both cases, attempts are made to not make race the basis of justifications and claims to validity regarding public expressions that appear racist. This could just be lip service to norms of racial equality and anti-discrimination. Even still, what this means is that even racists have to pay heed to anti-racist norms.

Let me flesh this point out with an example of the way euphemism works. I remember when living in Alice Springs, there was a highly charged debate about the Federal government and Alice Springs Town Council’s plans to employ disused dongas as temporary accommodation for Indigenous people. A community campaign started, once potential sites were publicly canvassed, carrying the slogan ‘Not in my backyard’. There were many concerns expressed, none of which touched on race, but those outside the campaign and who largely supported the plans suspected it. What got my attention was the letters to the editor that referred to ‘ratepayers’ and the way their concerns had not been taken into account. It irked me, but I wasn’t sure why. It then hit me that it was to mark out the distinction between residents and those who would occupy the dongas – between ‘real’ Alice Springs residents and blow-ins. It was partly a reminder of the electoral clout of ‘ratepayers’ versus Indigenous people. This particular phenomenon was just one of the many ways the campaigners against the dongas were able to argue their case without making a single reference – positive or negative – to the Indigenous people involved. My immediate reaction was that it was a smokescreen, a way to make illegitimate claims about race appear legitimate. This may have been the case, but it’s not so important because the important point is that the campaigners had very little sympathy for those who would be affected – the Indigenous people who would be occupying the temporary accommodation. Whether it was race or not, whether it was house prices, real or perceived concerns about safety, etc. it mattered very little because Indigenous people were effectively rendered voiceless and invisible by not counting as addressees and conversation partners in the discourse created by the campaigners. This is even more so the case with the account Tony Eastley offers of his friends who went to a wedding in the South – a case that is typically used to indicate a seething underbelly of racism. By evening’s end, feeling comfortable in a private context and, presumably, with plenty of social lubricant – alcohol – in play, some guests started to share racial jokes. All of this suggests a wariness by the guests to say these things in the sober light of day, in public. In this sense, we can see anti-racist norms operating with regards to these public expressions, but we also get the sense that anti-racism does nothing to prompt and encourage sympathy. If anything, this suggests anti-racist norms to carry more weight amongst more people than any form of racism.

But to say that anti-racism is the norm does not mean that racism does not exist – whether it is structural or in attitudes. It is just to say that it is not an organising principle. And the fact that racism remains is partly reflective of the failure of anti-racism. Both in America and in Australia anti-racism has treated racism as though it is an essential feature of our society, of individuals or both. The fact that racism has become far more diffuse – characterised by euphemism and obscured behind other more benign facades – is a testament to anti-racism’s past success and present failure. In it’s most basic form, racism reflects a particularly prejudicial way which people relate to each other based upon apparent racial characteristics. It is very much a legacy of late imperial colonialism and Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism provides one of the most sensitive accounts of this. But most of the structural features of this legacy were being removed throughout the 20th century and had been largely eradicated by the 1970s and 1980s. And it is not surprising that this coincides with the emergence of a different discourse – multiculturalism. While anti-racism was necessary to purge as much as possible the discriminatory and prejudicial features of social relations, multiculturalism embarked upon ways of establishing new ways of relating to each other across what came to be seen as equal cultural differences. To put it simply, anti-racism was about how we should not get along and multiculturalism was an attempt to forge new ways to get along in the face of the social and cultural changes wrought by anti-racism.

In Australia, however, multiculturalism has been completely whittled away as a normative expectation and set of policies. It’s existence in Australia today remains only as a set of policies geared entirely towards newcomers. I’ve talked about this elsewhere¹. There are many contributing factors to its demise – given the obvious successes of multiculturalism, it is necessary to wind it back; the advance of neo-liberalism has helped to reduce culture to some type of external factor not worthy of any attention; the backdoor re-entry of a parochial nationalism via the neo-conservative agenda. Hardly a comprehensive list, but I don’t have the time or the energy to go into it here. Suffice to say we appear to have given up on ways of trying to understand each other beyond what the market or a parochial national identity offers. Though we went a long way towards taking down the barriers to understanding, we haven’t gone far enough in building the bridge across the cultural divide left behind.

And this is the problem we face today: we are incompetent at trying to understand and respect each other across various forms of difference. Culture, race, ethnicity and whatever other markers of difference you can think of do pose problems for developing mutual understanding. But when we give up on the projects that seek to cultivate the competences needed for this task then all we are left with is fumbling in the dark for a light switch (e.g. anti-racism without multiculturalism) or swinging blindly with a blunt instrument (e.g. relying on obvious markers of difference as containing the cause and solutions to the problems of cultural pluralism). In many ways, we’re seeing the blunt instrument flashing before our eyes and we’re treating it as racism when it may or may not be. Condemning it racism is intolerant and pushes the problems further and further into obscurity. We need to cultivate a culture of mutual understanding so that we can (because we should) disagree with respect.

1. Here, here and here.

Alice Springs is actually a very culturally diverse town and black and white reflects one dimension of that diversity. But speak to anyone who has lived in Alice and despite being such a small town, there is very little understanding and interaction across the various little cliques that make up the Alice Springs social and cultural landscape. And Alice Springs is cliquish. This is witnessed in the bizarre mannerisms – polite indifference, euphemism, avoidance strategies in conversation, etc. – as much as it is evident in moral outrage and conflict. So when something like racism makes its presence felt, you get a wild variety of responses. But it is more telling what is not often suggested: dialogue. Every group in Alice has been really good at staking its own claims to public material and symbolic resources. To some degree this is shared amongst loose coalitions based on either shared interest or some other more informal form of affinity. But, as far as I’m concerned, there have been no serious attempts to talk across apparently deeply divisive boundaries.

Two recent events in Alice have brought out some of these divisions: the murders of Ed Hargraves and Kwementyaye Ryder. Both have been suspected to have been racially motivated, despite any evidence to suggest this. But, as uncovered by Dave Richards of Alice Online and reported by Sara for AM, the vandalism of a roadside memorial to Kwementyaye has the potential to become explosive.

© Dave Richards, Alice Online

For some time, the Ryder family has been calling for calm and has led by example in talking about this with the family of the accused. Understandably, the Ryder family feels angry, frustrated and disappointed at what has happened. But the major problem to date has been that the burden of resolving the misunderstanding that plagues Alice Springs has been the burden of one family and a grieving family at that. There is no shortage of admiration on my part for what the Ryders are trying to do. And no shortage of anger about the lack of support to take up their appeals for calm and understanding.

© Jesse Smith

On the weekend a police officer was seriously injured after being smashed in the head from behind with a bottle. In another incident, a woman was found wondering the streets of Melbourne with a stab wound to her stomach.

Citing a visit to New York as the inspiration, the Victorian Police Association is recommending mandatory sentencing for violent assault – a situation which removes any capacity for judges to take any considerations into account when determining the sentence of someone found guilty. Basically, zero-tolerance.

When your job involves something like chasing dangerous criminals or stopping violence, then you can understand the desire of the VPA to want some protection themselves.

Robert Doyle, Mayor of Melbourne City, offered this piece of tripe as support for the recommendation:

When you attack a police officer then you are really attacking the foundation of society and I think the harshest measures of the law should be for those who are bashing the people who, after all, are designated to take care of the rest of us.

Since when are the police the foundation of society? I always thought people were the foundation of society, but that is sounding a little crazy against what Doyle is saying. The police are a public authority, not a benelvolent ruler. The legitimacy of their authority rests upon the normative consent of the public. They are not a public authority simply because they are government funded or because they deal with the public.

Utterances like this truly do give the impression we live in a society where justice is synonymous with law and order, rather than fairness and doing what is right.

In the end an idea like freedom is compromised: we need more punitive laws because people don’t know how to use their freedom. The liquor licensing law changes aren’t working…quick get in more CCTV cameras! The next step that seems to be on the horizon is perhaps the scariest. I’m not exactly sure what to make of the suggestions implied in these statements by the Victorian Police chief:

SIMON OVERLAND: There is probably 300,000 people who come into the CBD on a Friday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. They don’t live in the area. They come in from around Melbourne. Many of them come in to have a good time. Some of them come in to cause problems.

We are looking to understand where people are coming from. What sort of patterns we are seeing and then what we can put in place to either dissuade them from coming into the city or what other action we can actually take to deal with the root cause of the issues.

How do the police dissuade someone from coming in to the city? More importantly, how do they actualy identify those people they need to dissuade?

Brian Kearney from the Hotels Association is less equivocal about the matter:

BRIAN KEARNEY: If initiative such as that stopped the people that we don’t want in the city from coming into the city – that would be an excellent initiative.

Which people would that be, Mr. Kearney? Seeing as hoteliers and nightclub owners don’t see the problem occurring inside their doors, they see it coming from on the street. David Butten, from the Nightclub Owners Forum, was quite frank about who the problem people are: those who drink on the street. I’m sure Mr. Kearney et. al. would surely agree that it is these people who are going to be targeted. It’s very convenient: it gets rid of an aesthetically unpleasant sight as well as forces people into licensed venues. Win-win!

What is going to happen to picnics and BBQs in the park? Are we going to have to have alcohol free BBQs and picnics? I suppose they could impose time limits – this is what happens mostly in Sydney. After dark, no drinking. The point is that it’s just continuing to shift the problem from one sphere to another. In the end it’s going to push drinking into the home and who is to say that this isn’t the source of drinking problems anyway?

I suppose the thing that irks me overall is what is happening to our sense of public space. The term public, here, is being conflated with economic or commercial. In so far as this is a public issue it relates to the safety of those people who have a legitimate claim to public space – commercial entitites, like pubs and clubs, and their paying patrons. There is very little sympathy for those who drink on the streets: Why do they drink on the streets rather than in these establishments? What does this say about their relationship to the public sphere? The only attempts to look at these questions are within the frame of surveillance and control. And the issue does not stop there considering that mandatory sentencing is being espoused. This is tantamount to surveilling and controlling our judges. Why do we hate the freedom of others so much?!?!

The reasons they provide are a little vague and bordering on bizarre:

In consultation with the vendor Sotheby’s has decided at this point in time to withdraw the lots from sale. This has been done to ensure the safety and security of the public and staff and to protect the works.

Is this in response to the potential disturbances the planned protests at the auction could have caused? It seems the only reasonable conclusion. Either way, Mansell is claiming it as a victory for their protestations. But, again, I raise the question: what sort of victory does this represent?

Firstly, I need to note that I had referred to the incorrect Truganini bust in my last post: the one at the centre of this conflict is not the E J Dicks, but that created by Benjamin Wall. Secondly, it doesn’t change much of what I said considering what I eventually found to be the Sotheby’s catalogue note.

Looking at the catalogue notes it is much easier to understand how the sculptures’ idealisation of the ‘wild’ natives represents the racially prejudiced interpretations dominant at the time. The notes even discuss how the busts took on ethnographic significance as modelling the “doomed race” of Tasmanian Aboriginals.

However, there are two problems facing Mansell’s claims. Firstly, like any form of expression there will always be some discrepenancy between the intended and recieved meanings. Secondly, the meaning of any objectified form of expression will change over time. Taken together, in as much as Wall may have intended to portray a “doomed race”, the busts today represent the great historical error of such a claim.

For Mansell, though, the sale of the bust can only be interpreted as sanctioning the original meaning. For Mansell, the bust is of commercial value because it represents a racist interpretation of history, which, therefore, means that whoever buys them actually buys into the original racist meaning. Of course, if this was so then Mansell has every right to feel offended because to accept this interpretation of history means accepting that there are no Tasmanian Aboriginals left. It’s easy to understand why Mansell is so sensitive because the whole idea of Aboriginality is at stake.

Although the catalogue says nothing about the historical error – that Tasmanian Aboriginals ended when Truganini died – it is implied. And I quote from the catalogue:

When considered in this framework, it is possible to read Law’s sculptures as consciously idealising, showing Woureddy as (in Mary Mackay’s memorable words) ‘hunter, warrior and man-in-command, a Greek hero in kangaroo skin’,15 and Truganini, the ultimate victim of the European invasion, the so-called ‘Last Tasmanian’, as an archetypal mourning figure…

I added the emphasis to draw attention to how the catalogue pays heed to the historical error. So, it is hard to suggest that Sotheby’s is trying to cash in on this exoticisation of Aboriginality by undermining contemporary its contemporary understanding.

This does not take away from the fact that a buyer may have held the view that Tasmanian Aboriginals did indeed die off with Truganini. This may be the meaning a buyer could have attached to the purchase of the busts, but this does not necessarily amount to a general sanctioning of that perspective. Hypothetically, someone could only hold on to this view if they believed in some sort of purity of biological race – an idea that has very little scientific and popular validity.¹² In this case, contemporary Aboriginality would be undermined. But is this the widely held view? No. Nor is it the official view of the Tasmanian government. Nor is a pure Aboriginality sanctioned by census categories. I remember Andrew Bolt taking a swipe at a whole bunch of Indigenous leaders for not being Indigenous enough and, thefore, unrepresentative. His op-ed piece was based on a subtly disguised notion of socio-biological race. Even though he hardly sought racial purity, his point was to suggest that attachments to an Aboriginal identity were overemphasised at the expense of some sort of common identity. It’s a classic conservative argument that misinterprets a commitment to universalism as the need for homogeneity. Even in so far as conservative and racial perspectives may overlap, neither reflects a dominant logic of Australian society in my opinion. If anything the hypothetical conservative and/or racist buyer of the busts would simply reflect a still potent undercurent of conservatism and/or racism.

My point is that race is not an organising principle of our society. In so far as it exists, it reflects the ways in which we have yet to properly or fully erect the social infrastructure for understanding and relating to each other in ways that foster respect and recognition. But that gap between expectations and reality cannot simply be sweeped under the rugs because this is hardly how we can affectuate social change. And this is precisely what I think Mansell is doing in his protests: attempting to sweep under the rugs a sensistive memento from the past that exposes the historically contingent nature of an Aboriginality in a counter-productive search for certainty and authenticity.

The problem Mansell and others like him will forever face is that there is no sure fire way of eradicating contingency in culturally plural societies. It has to be remembered that the struggle for Aboriginal recognition seriously undermined and reconfigured Australian identity. Every culture reminds the other that it is not the only one. Every similarity between cultures can be responded to in a way that shows precisely how no one culture has a monopoly on that which is shared. Every cultural difference can be responded to in a way that raises questions about one’s own way of life is but one of many. Living amongst and with different cultures invariably raises questions. And for a question to be raised means that the thing under consideration is under doubt. We can respond by eradicating that contingency or by engaging with it. Mansell’s strategy falls into the former. And the problem with that strategy is that it erects barriers around and attempts to fortify the thing under question. So much so that it may unintentionally lock out those people it is seeking to protect within its walls.³ At the same time, these fortifications prevent dialogue. And it is only through dialogue aimed at reaching some sort of shared understanding that the contingencies we all face in our cultural identifications that we can continue to pursue the gap between our expectations and the sometimes imperfect reality we occupy. In the end we all lose out.

1. Although, it is interesting to note how genetics is becoming the new racism.
2. Also, it should be pointed out that some studies show that many people still believe in the category of race, but generally tend to use this term to describe ethnic and cultural heritage rather than some sort of socio-biological makeup.
3. I remember a story some years ago of a Tasmanian woman who was denied Aboriginality by Tasmanian Aboriginals and was going to the UN to dispute it. I might be mistaken about this particular case, but I know of many, MANY stories from central Australia where ‘half-bloods’ are marginalised, ostracised or excluded by ‘full-bloods’. Obviously both a response to as well as a perpetuation of the racial logic of colonisation.

But, now Mansell is trying to do to history what it had almost done to him: make it disappear.

For Mansell, the existence of the busts portrays a version of history that must be denied: a version that depicts the extinction of Tasmanian Aboriginals and their subordination.

“These images are held up to perpetuate the racist myth that unless you were so called full-blood, untainted by marrying with white people, you weren’t a real aborigine,” he said.

“The fact that the museum has been displaying a bust of Truganini, along with the busts of other people, is perpetuating the myth.

“Everybody knows that the image of Truganini conveys to the racist people of the world that she was the last something or other…either the last full blood or last aboriginal.

“That is a racist perpetuation of a myth and her image is being used to try to exterminate the aborignal people in Tasmania.

But to call the existence and display of the busts racist on these grounds is to equate the historical meaning of the busts with that of today’s. From the very little I could find quickly on the bust of Truganini, there is nothing to indicate that they were created to immortalise the last of the Aboriginals. Though, we could always find some racially prejudiced meanings in these busts, it only reflects the culture of the time. A culture that we are to this day attempting to overcome. But Mansell’s suggestion of what should be done with the busts will hardly further this cause:

“These busts shoud be returned to the aboriginal community in Tasmania without any conditions so that aborigianl people are no longer hurt by the use of the images of a dead woman who can’t protect herself and who, if is she had known about this, would have objected very strongly,” Mr Mansell said.

There are many hurtful memories from the past, but it’s not clear how hiding them away and forgetting them (if that’s even possible) will help. After all, it was precisely this that Mansell was fighting against for a long time – the attempts made by Tasmanians to use Truganini to hide and forget the past in order to deny the existence of Tasmanian Aboriginals.

It’s not clear that, for example, the Tasmanian Museum is using these busts to actually claim that Tasmanian Aboriginals no longer exist. It is not hard to display such a historical and culturally potent work in way that does not cause disrespect. For example, it should suffice to simply state how the death of Truganini and Woureddy were incorrectly used to claim the end of Tasmanian Aboriginals and, therefore, deny the existence of part-Aboriginals. In this way we can pay heed to the historical reality, while showing how things have changed.

However, the fact that something like this does not suffice for Michael Mansell shows to a large extent how things have not changed enough.