Change – Is It Possible?
I first saw the 1953 film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the early 1960s, and, unlike many, I have to admit, was uninspired by the late Marlon Brando mumbling his way through the movie. But it remains a powerful play, about politics and manipulation and betrayal, with a bit of nobility thrown in. The most famous scene of course is the one where Marc Antony tries to change the mind of the mob. Once Brutus has convinced the crowd that it was a really good idea to assassinate the popular Caesar, Marc Antony has a tough gig on his hands to defend his murdered friend. It would be like Hillary Clinton doing stand-up comedy at the Republican Party National Convention.
However, Antony starts with the irresistible phrase ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’289 and never looks back. He speaks so eloquently and movingly about Caesar’s great qualities and his love for ordinary Romans that the crowd turns on Brutus.
The scene is famous because it shows how easily public opinion can be reversed. In our world, politicians, advertisers and tabloid media know this, and use shallow and often false arguments to convince people of a particular point of view. I find it amazing that public opinion is so fickle. But, whilst it’s unnerving sometimes that a whole society can quickly change its attitude on a topic, I also find it encouraging that the change is often from a negative view of a ‘worthy cause’ to a positive one.
I remember around the year 2000 having the second-hand experience of watching on TV an attempt by the people of a Tasmanian town to save a stranded whale. One of the rangers organising the rescue remarked to the camera that only a few years earlier, when a whale had beached itself in the same area, people from the town came and carved their initials in the poor creature as it lay dying. He thought it was extraordinary that in a short space of time they were now showing such compassion. He also thought it was wonderful. So did I.
In the 1950s, when I was growing up, nearly all boys were circumcised. In less than a generation that procedure suddenly lost popularity, except in some Jewish and Islamic families. Most baby boys now begin their lives without suffering this random and unnecessary intense pain.
People who are same-sex attracted have seen a remarkable change in community attitudes in the space of a decade or two. Memoirs like Against the Law (1955) by Peter Wildeblood, and The Naked Civil Servant (1968) by Quentin Crisp, detailing the persecution their authors suffered as a result of their sexuality, could not, we hope, be written nowadays, although some countries still have a long way to go – murder of homosexual people by stoning them to death is still an option for the judiciary to prescribe, in a number of nations.
In 1961, John Howard Griffin published Black Like Me, in which he described his experiences when he used medication to change his skin colour so that he could pass as a coloured man in the United States. He told of black people being refused permission to get off a Greyhound bus at a rest stop so that one desperate man had to urinate on the floor of the bus, a white man offering $7.50 to procure a fourteen-year-old black girl for sex, a white man wanting Griffin to show him his genitals to see whether they matched the salacious stories he had heard about Afro-American men. He recounted the story of a job interview with a foreman in an Alabama factory who calmly explained: ‘We’re gradually getting you people weeded out from the better jobs at this plant. We’re taking it slow, but we’re doing it. Pretty soon we’ll have it so that the only jobs you can get here are the ones no white man would have . . . We’re going to do our damnedest to drive every one of you out of the state.’290
Although there is still plenty of racism in the world, huge strides have been made since 1961. As books like Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man show, Australia, in its treatment of Indigenous people, continues to be one of the world’s laggards. But in my lifetime I have at least witnessed considerable improvement in the respect accorded to Australian Indigenous history and Indigenous culture. Many programs, some on a large scale and some small, have been implemented, in well-motivated attempts to remedy and apologise for past injustices.
We will never again see, in Western countries, the violence that was inflicted on schoolchildren as a matter of course in previous generations. Mrs Lawrence, the Grade 3 teacher at Devonport Primary School for 40 years, caned children, including me, with barely disguised savagery on a daily basis. When my brother volunteered to become a member of the school’s lunchtime choir, and one day was talking in the back row during a rehearsal, Mrs Lawrence came up behind him and slashed him so viciously across the back of the legs with a cane that his blood flowed.
We had a test every Friday, covering the week’s work, and any child who got fewer than seven marks out of ten for the test was caned automatically. Fridays were not good days for kids with dyslexia, learning difficulties or emotional problems.
In the classroom next door was Mrs Scott, the Grade 4 teacher at Devonport Primary School for 40 years. She taught the same children, from the same background, with the same values and attitudes. She did not use the cane once during her teaching career.
Although many adults cling with almost religious fervour to the clichéd idea that ‘children can be so horrible to each other’, ignoring the horrors that adults all too frequently inflict on people, schools nowadays are much kinder communities.
Unfortunately some attitudinal changes come too late. Gradually we are starting to recognise the need to conserve the planet and to keep our environment healthy. But the awareness has been too slow coming and, as a result, irreversible damage has been done.
In Queensland, in 1999, farmers heard that they would soon be prevented by the government from clearing their land. They reacted with an orgy of greed and rage, the like of which has seldom been seen. Using bulldozers working in pairs, with heavy chains between them, they cleared an estimated three quarters of a million hectares of forest. Restrictions were eventually brought in, at the end of 2006. However, the Act was watered down by a Liberal government in 2013, allowing the farmers to resume the devastation. The ABC reported that land-clearing rates went from 92,000 hectares in 2010–11 to 266,000 hectares in 2012–13.291 It quoted a grazier, Nikki Cameron, who defended this behaviour by saying, with breathtaking ignorance and arrogance, ‘I think you need to trust the people who are on the land and who have managed the land for many generations.’292 Barnaby Joyce, from the National Party, was the federal Agriculture Minister at the time. He also defended the farmers’ actions, using classic concrete language. If people made the mistake of electing a Labor government, Joyce warned, ‘You’ll have the state tree police and you’ll have the federal tree police.’293 The president of AgForce Queensland, apparently also an aficionado of concrete language, said, ‘We need to stop having silly arguments about trees every time we have an election.’294
Queensland parliamentarian Robbie Katter, son of federal politician Bob Katter, spoke of people in Brisbane holding ‘fuzzy feelings’, which in his view meant they lacked understanding of the desire of Queensland graziers to clear land at a rate equivalent to 100 football fields every hour . . . an image which made more vivid to my sadly limited human brain the amount of destruction wrought by these people. Katter told The Australian newspaper: ‘We don’t impose our views or cultural war and fuzzy feelings on South Brisbane. So we don’t appreciate them strongly imposing on our ability to exist up here, to survive out here.’295
It seems that in Katter’s mind, people who live in cities have no right to hold an opinion about environmental issues. Having been in Singapore whilst Indonesian farmers were holding their traditional annual burn-off, and groping my way through the ash-laden smog, aware that many Singapore people were suffering respiratory ailments as a result of the Indonesian farmers’ actions, I would say that city people have every right to respond when farmers act selfishly and destructively. Farmers are, after all, custodians of the land, not owners in the sense that we might be said to own a pair of shoes or a packet of biscuits.
In 2016, a statement signed by 200 scientists described an estimated total of 100 million native birds, reptiles and mammals dying in New South Wales from 1998 to 2005, and an estimated 100 million native animals dying each year in Queensland between 1997 and 1999 as a result of land-clearing operations.296 The farmers would say that they were doing this for future generations, for their children, and their children’s children. They do not seem to realise that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are more likely to curse their names and spit on their graves, for their desecration of the precious land.
To see the devastation wrought in Queensland by the 2019 floods, causing such catastrophes as the drowning of about half a million cattle, is to see one of the consequences of the behaviour of many graziers.
Since the 1960s, much derision has been expressed towards those who hold liberal and progressive views in our society. In the 1950s it was convenient to call them Communists, reds, lefties, pinkos. Since then the language has changed to equally contemptuous terms like ‘the chardonnay set’, ‘the latte set’, ‘armchair socialists’, ‘greenies’, ‘the chattering class’, ‘tree huggers’, ‘hipsters’ and, in Melbourne, ‘Brunswick socialists’.
It seems to have gone unnoticed by conservative commentators that on every significant political and social issue in my lifetime the ‘chardonnay set’ has been correct. Opposition to racial discrimination in the United States and Australia in the 1960s, opposition to the Vietnam War, pursuit of Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal, opposition to the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania, opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the promotion of alternative energy to try to reverse environmental damage, advocacy for the humane treatment of animals, opposition to sexual slavery, opposition to the exploitation of workers in the Third World by giant corporations that number their profits in the billions of dollars, demands for those giant corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, opposition to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef . . . is there any sane person who would argue that these causes have not been entirely worthy?
Instead of the endless denigration of people who hold progressive views, it may be time to recognise and honour them for their courage in consistently taking unpopular stands, maintaining their idealism and integrity in the face of sustained and often vicious attacks, and constantly working for a better world.
Our great challenge, the challenge for all adults but particularly teachers, is to convince children that change for the better is possible and achievable, that their actions can make a difference, and that defeating the forces of ignorance and self-interest – like the Queensland rural lobbyists mentioned earlier – is essential. The title of a 1983 Serbian movie, How I Was Systematically Destroyed by Idiots, serves as a useful warning. There is a real risk that we will be destroyed by idiots. Although, as I mentioned earlier, we are all guilty of inflicting damage on the planet on a micro level, nothing comes near the devastation wrought by such self-interested groups as land-clearing farmers from Queensland and elsewhere, cigarette companies, palm oil producers, certain mining and industrial corporations, and, in Australia in 2019, those who advocate fiercely for coal producers like Adani to be allowed to ruin the landscape so that they can continue to generate pollution on a massive scale.
‘The violence that men do not use except subconsciously in defence of a closed mind . . .’297 We need to recognise violence whenever we encounter it, call it for what it is, and have the courage to resist it. When I see conservative politicians and commentators, red-faced with rage, showering their audience with spittle in their furious denunciations of progressive views and enlightened ideas, clinging to their ignorance like a passenger on the Titanic hugging a pillar in the bar and insisting ‘The Captain said not to worry; everything’s going to be fine’, I can only refer to Freud, and speculate on the horrors of the toilet training these people must have endured in infancy. The stubbornness, meanness, and compulsive neatness and order that they demand is exactly as Freud described. Their fear of a flood of non-Anglo Saxons spilling into Australia in an uncontrolled mess reminds me of . . . what was it again? It’s slipped my mind.
Humans should be humane. We should be able to laugh and cry. It is difficult to imagine many conservative figureheads doing either. If we look at a politician or media commentator and find ourselves unable to picture them laughing or crying, we should deny them access to power. It is difficult to imagine the world’s tyrants – Hitler, Kim Jong-il, Pol Pot and Stalin, along with some current world leaders and demagogues – laughing with beautiful delight, or crying with genuine sympathy. For thousands of years sociopaths have been allowed supreme power in many countries, because people who identify their psychopathology and try to oppose them are unable to match the utter ferocity and single-mindedness of their personalities. Instead, they often die – heroically, nobly, self-sacrificingly – but they die. In doing so, they lose, and the world loses.
Mature humans are empathetic, imaginative, emotional and insightful. They should be able to understand abstractions. They are thoughtful, which means that they think. They take a careful, calm and considered approach towards the difficulties they encounter, recognising at the same time that their emotions can be important indicators of the direction they should follow.
Mature humans are dishonest, lazy, greedy, cruel and selfish at times. This is because they are human. The modern hankering for ‘role models’ that ‘young people can look up to’ is immature and naïve. It assumes that some people are better than others, but there are so many different criteria upon which better and worse can be judged that the concept is meaningless. Anyone who worships, reveres, idolises or even looks up to another person can only hope that they will never learn the full truth about that person, because if they do they are bound to discover that their hero has many flaws. Geniuses are attractive only from a distance. ‘Peu d’hommes ont esté admirés par leurs domestiques’ (Few men have been admired by their servants), as Montaigne said.298 When Darcy’s housekeeper praises her master to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, we can be pretty sure that Darcy is a good bloke.
Australia is an exceptionally wealthy and secure country. Yet to walk through a suburban shopping centre or down the main street of any country town is to hear a deafening chorus of cries of poverty and demands for more of everything. People are outraged that the government has not provided better internet access, new croquet lawns, higher payments to people who choose to have children, faster trains, funds for flood victims, grants to cassava farmers, subsidies for importers of condoms, increased prize money for the winners of the Annual Pie Eating Competition . . .
Meanwhile, in countries not far away (as if location were relevant), millions of people are homeless, starving, cold, frightened and dying from illnesses or injuries that could be easily treated were the right medicines, technology, doctors and nurses available.
We have a grave responsibility to educate ourselves and our children and grandchildren in our obligations to do more than apply a Band-Aid to a gaping wound, offer more than a jelly bean to a person suffering from malnutrition, give more than a box of tissues to someone who has lost their home in a mudslide.
We are continuing to fail in our moral duty towards our fellow humans.
In our homes and schools, we must do more than teach children and teenagers to be kind and polite to the people with whom they are in contact, to share the birthday cake equally, to dress appropriately, to manage their finances prudently. We must teach them that there is a big world out there, and it is in serious difficulties. Their privileged upbringing carries with it huge obligations.
My hope for Candlebark and Alice Miller Schools is that our students’ first-hand experiences, and their exposure to interesting, adventurous adults, will help equip them to revegetate, reforest, regenerate the world. They will do harm, of course, because they are human. I trust them though to commit so many good deeds that the planet will be much the better for the time they spend here. Life can be full of rich delights, and many are found in wild places. But: beware the bulldozers. Their hot breath is getting hotter and closer and louder.