5 March 2007The Australian
This summer, Australia feels like a war zone. Cities and towns across the country are enveloped in a perpetual smoke haze, and the braying of fire sirens is as commonplace as birdsong. Every evening television commentators deliver grim-faced reports from the front lines.
Tired farmers look dazedly into the camera. Firemen with soot-smeared clothes and chilli-red eyes shake their heads and mumble that they have never known anything like it. As with every modern war report, helicopters make a ubiquitous backdrop. They dip down in front of shrinking reservoirs, then stagger towards the fire front, their water pouches swaying marsupial-like underneath their bellies.
"Why? Why, Kamarrang?" asks a tall, slightly stooped Aboriginal man from western Arnhem Land in the far north of Australia. He is Bardayal Nadjamerrek, an elder of the Mok clan, and he is talking to a grizzled white fellah named Peter Cook, an ecological scientist. They are discussing the disappearance of whole groups of animals from the plateau of Nadjamerrek's youth. He repeats the question, this time looking upward to address the Old People - his ever-present ancestors - with whom he habitually discusses such issues.
This scene opens a nearly completed film, Fire in the Land of Honey, of which I'm a producer. The work of filmmaker Kim McKenzie, it is one of a trilogy of documentaries about Nadjamerrek and his native land, which his people call Ankung Djang. Collectively, the films will tell how 50 years ago the Aboriginal people left this vast plateau, the size of Belgium, drawn by the lure of money, tobacco and other novelties offered by distant buffalo camps, mines, stock stations and missions ... Since his people left half a century ago, fire - a staple tool of Aboriginal life - has turned into an uncontrollable monster, careering across the landscape, devouring the plateaus trees, plants, birds, animals and insects.
We do know the controlled-fire regimens that Aboriginal people practised for millenniums to nurture the land must be reinstated. But, like Nadjamerrek, we also suspect something larger is going on - we fear that Australia's soaring heat, vanishing water and rampant fires are connected to larger global patterns of climate change. Thankfully, we Australians at least have Nadjamerrek and the Old People to advise us; the rest of the globe is not so lucky.
Hugo Rifkind, in The Times in Britain, on the unrest over undress down under:
IT wouldn't happen over here. Sure, Tony Blair had that whole "torso of the week" thing going on in Heat a few years ago, but at least he was in on the joke. He didn't look good naked. He simply looked better naked than we expect our politicians to, which is like ET with hair and Y-fronts.
Australia is very different. In NSW the Opposition Leader, Peter Debnam, has come under attack from the Government for "staged stunts in his Speedos". Debnam has a torso like (James Bond actor) Daniel Craig's, even if he has a face like (unorthodox-looking British politician) Lembit Opik's, and he has been putting it to work for the cameras. John Watkins, the fully clothed Transport and Police Minister, reckons Debnam is offending common decency. He claims to have identified Debnam in "at least seven photo shoots in Speedos without a shirt or in other states of undress".
"John Watkins seems to be spending a lot of time sitting in his office watching the video screen, watching what I'm doing," countered Debnam, in a response that would have been devastating had he not delivered it at a press conference on Bondi beach. Now he has invited Watkins to challenge him to "a sand race in Speedos or board shorts or anything he likes". Bit below the belt, that. Not that he's wearing one.
Rex Jory, in The Advertiser in Adelaide, on insincere and pliant politicians:
IN these days of media scrutiny and a public demand for instant information and gratification, we have elected a vacillating breed of politicians who are little more than calculating, superficial robots. They are determined to tell us what they think we want to hear rather than telling it as it is.
As an example, last week (South Australian) Premier Mike Rann was on (the ABC's) Radio National and at the end of the interview the announcer remarked on how cultured and sophisticated Rann was.
Three hours earlier on radio FIVEaa, Rann adopted a more relaxed, almost ocker persona with a completely different demographic audience. Will the real Mike Rann stand up?
