PO Box 2 Blackball

The suburb of Holsworthy where I’m staying has evolved from it’s original army base function in order to support a housing development. The development is well designed as an interlocking maze of courts, each street containing around fifty houses. There are small parks or common areas dotted throughout, there’s a child-friendly speed limit of 40kph and the houses are generous, three to four bedrooms, sometimes condominiums with a small back lawn and a garage in front. The planners have even left a patch of wilderness, a scraggly piece of gum-tree bush for older kids to play in. There’s a small scale shopping centre with a supermarket, a liquor outlet, a couple of takeaways and a community centre and there’s a train station nearby with regular trains to the airport and the city. The inhabitants are overwhelmingly first generation migrants, from the Middle East or Asia; the occasional elderly Australian registering as a museum piece.

But despite this competent planning for community, the people seem resolutely cut off from one another. No one looks and no one talks. The front door of where I’m staying is 5 metres away from the neighbour’s front door but the concept of dialogue is, by some unwritten agreement, out of the question. People exit, get in their car and drive away. The nearest to a public event is someone washing their boat. Of course children have to go to and from school so there is morning and afternoon movement, but overall, a considerable alienation reigns and I realise that inside each house  memory of, and maintaining contact with home, is the important thing and achieved via social media, reruns of Iraqi soap operas, Bollywood movies and television on demand from the home country. Locally there are perhaps visits to mosque or church and a network of extended family who have similarly migrated.

These people are, above all, here for material reasons, to live the Australian Dream. And it must be working out, for the cars are new, the houses are air conditioned, there are abundant bathrooms and the tv, fridge and stove will be smart. But this fundamentalist materialism produces a cultural sterility. This is another wave of capitalist settler culture. The indigenous culture, a time when different relations with the land were formed, is totally absent. These new settlers are achieving the immediate dream and for the next generation, an even greater dream begins: to be an NRL star, or a rapper or a model, or simply to head up the IT ladder, to become a fair dinkum Aussie. Or maybe to, in turn, head to LA or New York.

Outside the suburb, as you enter the link roads and highways, crammed with trucks and other traffic, lined with service centres, takeaways, light industry and warehousing, an intense ugliness exists. Here as well, the traffic gridlock begins.

But there is, with Covid, a great irony, for in a place which denies contact, contact now needs to be able to be traced with thoroughness. The virus joins people, crossing ethnic, material and geographic boundaries with great ease. The virus becomes the community which capitalism has eradicated − except in the mind of a nostalgic town planner. And in a further irony, once contact has been found, people need to be even further isolated.

I suspect the climate emergency will have a similar effect; re-moving the migrant yet, at the same time, leaving some behind, to relearn other types of relationship. The Aussies, like the Americans, will find this hard. At the moment there are only a few marginal, small countries on the edge of the global catastrophe who seem capable of adjusting in a reasonable manner: Aotearoa, Iceland, the Scandinavian countries, maybe southern Ireland.

But enough. There remains, in every situation, the wonder of the new-born child, slowly opening his eyes and gazing, with a slight frown, on the world he has inherited. This morning, at 4am, he babbled for the first time and language was once again created. That first babble produced in me a feeling of immense love.

The second Blackball Readers and Writers Festival, run by the Bathhouse Co-op, was very successful. People are happy and thinking, was Nicky Hager’s comment at the final dinner. It’s a small event, around 70 people all up and held in the library of the local school. There’s a single program so everyone attends everything – so no choices and no rushing from place to place.  The theme was ‘activists, renegades and recluses’. People like the small scale and the mingling and the conversations that take place over kai. European activists have the concept of radical hospitality − the change that can take place around the dinner table − and something of that nature occured.

On the first day we ‘resurrect’ a West Coast writer, someone who wrote while living here for a period at least. This year it was the turn of poet, Peter Hooper, who worked by day as a teacher and who lived a lonely life – was most probably gay – but a man who had a big influence on students with a literary bent. He was also an early environmentalist. Cold Hub press have gathered his poetry for the first time and it is an evocative read.

Becky Manawatu proved a humble yet committed person, seemingly young, yet she has teenage children, and after a huge debut with Auē, is joining the whanau of established Maori writers.

And then another honouring occurred as Elspeth Sandys spoke of her uncle, Rewi Alley, the subject of her book, A Communist in the Family. As she spoke we became fully aware of Rewi as a significant figure in 20^th century history – a leading activist in the Chinese revolution and a tireless worker for social justice, held in high honour in China, yet here? − an information panel off the main road in Springfield where he was born. Our communist phobia is ridiculous.

Nicky Hager is another activist who has impacted significantly as a writer. I had the task of interviewing him, which required a reading of his seven books. In doing so I was struck by the depth of his study of the NZ role in the US Afghanistan adventure, a book called Other People’s Wars. It is the least read of his books but perhaps the most important as he details the stupidity and the consequences of a country like Aotearoa following the Americans in their imperial interventions, of spying on their behalf, and of equipping our military, at great expense, so that we can join their deadly games. And this happens partly because of the top brass in the defence forces and in MFAT leading the politicians by the nose because they like the kudos of mixing with the big boys. As he points out, this continues a tradition of ‘tagging along’, from the Boer War onwards and is sold to the public through the sentimental ANZAC tradition. Our role should be very different.

There were other contributions, from the more traditional story teller, Sandra Arnold to the growing work from within the environmental and climate emergency movement by writers like Tim Jones and Kathleen Gallagher, where we begin to imagine life within this framework.

And as I said, people enjoyed the event as an encounter not based on marketing and commodity (there was zero dollars spent on advertising), but based on community tradition.