Life Without The Boring Bits Page 9

  From 1914 until 1979, a total of sixty-five years, Norfolk Island was under completely autocratic Australian rule. Not only did this huge and prosperous nation embrace the universal truth and look down on the people of Norfolk Island, it also adopted all the worst features of the colonial overlord. Absolutely nothing was done. The only money Australia spent on Norfolk Island was to keep its Administrator and his imported bureaucrats in great comfort. Most of these administrators were abominable men; the few who were sympathetic met a stone wall in Canberra. For twenty-nine years a law was in place that forbade the printing or publication of anything that hadn’t been approved by the Administrator. In the twentieth century! It was repealed in 1964.

  Any public works or infrastructure considered urgent were refused outright, or else simply never done. Nothing was done!

  Despite Australia’s position as Norfolk Island’s colonial overlord, during World War II it was garrisoned by the New Zealand armed services. The airstrip, which did wonderful duty until the 1980s, was built by the American Seabees.

  In 1946, by which date Australia had been autocratically administering a non-self-governing Norfolk Island for thirty-two years, the United Nations under Article 73e obliged every member nation to disclose its non-self-governing territories. It was pretty hard for Australia to “forget” Norfolk Island in 1946; Australia administered no other small island dependent territory. The Indian Ocean territories were acquired later. So in 1946, with a Norfolk Island desk in Canberra, Australia denied having any non-self-governing territories. Australia lied! Lied to the U.N.! It was as crafty a lie as deceitful, because it removed Norfolk Island from any United Nations map of the world. To the U.N., apart from its indigenous bureau, Norfolk Island does not exist. The Islanders have no U.N. voice.

  In 1955 the Islanders were boiling over a fresh onslaught of injustices; 583 of them petitioned the Queen to return their self-government, but of course nothing ever came of it.

  Those sixty-five years of Australian rule, during which the people of Norfolk Island were almost entirely descendants of those who had colonized it, are an indictment of Australia’s record as a colonial overlord. To a Canberra mind, it entailed little more than being a cushy job as a reward for some party official: until very recently the job of Administrator of Norfolk Island was one of the “jobs for the boys” and carried a hefty remuneration.

  In the early 1970s reports began to filter in that there were big deposits of oil and/or gas on the Norfolk Island Ridge, within the 200-mile territorial waters. In 1979 Australia seized these waters by a unilateral act of its parliament, its excuse that Norfolk Island couldn’t look after them. Australia doesn’t do a very good job either. The best solution would have been to give the Islanders, still the world’s greatest seamen, a fast patrol boat. They would have loved the work and done it well, but the issue wasn’t looking after. Possible hydrocarbons was.

  In 1979 something very strange happened. The Australian Minister for Territories announced that Norfolk Island would be given a “limited form of self-government.” By this, the Islanders were becoming more educated and more sophisticated: they began to ask for their inalienable right of self-determination. One of the caveats attached to this limited self-government was that no referendum of any kind was to be held. Another caveat was to the effect that if the Island’s parliament got into debt, then self-government would be removed forthwith.

  Neither caveat has ever been removed, though neither is legal. Once self-government is given, it cannot be taken away. Not in 2011 — though right at this moment a so-called socialist Australian government is about to do so. According to the U.N., self-determination is an inalienable right of a people, yet the Norfolk Islanders have never been offered this right. It is theirs, and every move Australia makes to deny them is disgraceful.

  But I get ahead of myself. When one feels strongly, it is very difficult to be detached.

  The limited self-government given in 1979 was a unilateral affair. No one on Norfolk Island was consulted about what form it would take, what kind of voting structure would be put in place, what functions it could best do.

  Curiously, I arrived to live on Norfolk Island thirty-two years ago, at the dawn of self-government, and have watched the local people learn to govern better, if the truth be known, than Canberra governs. It’s easier; there are 2,000 people here, a little more than half of whom vote.

  After the Seabees built the airstrip, a tiny tourist industry grew here as Qantas and then other airlines ran flights. The day of the Islander was passing; the day of the expatriate was born. Slowly, slowly, the Island’s population began to tilt away from Pitcairn dominance, and some of these Australian expatriates began to agitate for closer ties to Australia. Luckily they have always been in a minority, but Canberra has been helping tip that scale by enacting laws overruling local laws. New Zealanders, of whom there are many, had always voted and belonged to the new parliament when it came along: Canberra took their rights away. Much to the anguish of the people it concerns, those who live on Norfolk Island. But having the power is all, and Australia uses it without adhering to the ways of life extant in this speck of land, so remote, so isolated.

  Yes, the injustices and colonial overlording continue.

  All the projects and infrastructure deemed unnecessary while Norfolk Island was under autocratic Australian rule became urgent, had to be done yesterday. Australia agreed to put up half the cost of each project; Norfolk Island’s two thousand people had to find the other half. Thanks to the frugality and shrewdness of the Pitcairn element in the population, literal millions had been salted away, and the Island managed to keep up for quite a while. It doesn’t take a gargantuan brain to work out that Australia’s new technique anent Norfolk Island was to send it broke with a series of massive undertakings, then strip all self-government away and annex it, which all who live here know would be the kiss of death for a way of life, and the death of the only Polynesian enclave under the Australian umbrella.

  The airstrip has been upgraded three times and now can take 737 jets regularly, as well as military aircraft. The tourist hotel strip and school have been sewered. A new airport and adjunct buildings have been constructed. A garbage and waste disposal scheme is in place. The generators have been upgraded to supply the whole island comfortably. Pontoons to help cruise-ship passengers get ashore easily have been built. The Cascade cliff, a huge undertaking, has been rendered safe. Much of the Island’s phone and power cables are now underground, obviating the eyesore of poles, and the work continues. One hundred miles (or 160 kilometres) of road have been tar-sealed. There are national parks and reserves. The beaches are pristine.

  Not bad for thirty-two years of self-government, eh? Even if the colonial overlord did pay half. When we ran out of money, Australia agreed to lend us the money interest-free! Interest-free! Isn’t that big of them? Everybody else gets gifts. Norfolk Island gets loans. Why is that, do you suppose? Why, because the Islanders are naughty, and criticize! They don’t lie down and salaam in obsequious thanks.

  Self-government in Norfolk Island is dogged by what the locals call “Standover Committees” — Australian parliamentary standing committees, which are really excuses for parliamentarians to go on nice jaunts away at the public expense and, if visiting Norfolk Island, drive the locals mad with questions that can sometimes verge on the ludicrous, so uninformed are these standover people when they come. More fruits of my thirty-two years on Norfolk Island! Standing committees visit Norfolk Island about twice a year, and cost the Island precious money it could spend on other things. Their reports are made in advance of their visit, and are always, always, always negative.

  Isn’t it amazing to think that in 2011 there exists a colonial overlord with nothing nice to say about its unfortunate colonies? Just criticism, obstruction and utter negativity. Believe it or not, I am an Australian patriot, and it hurts me deeply to have to say such things of my country. But they’re all true.

  Of the 1,100 peopl
e empowered to vote in Norfolk Island elections, the majority, thanks to Australian meddling, are Australians. The writing was on the wall when the New Zealanders were disenfranchised, but then a new Australian law allowed any Australian present on the Island for five months to vote. Until then, one had needed to be, in effect, a citizen of the Island. Not any more. It is so blatantly slanted, so prejudiced and discriminatory! Yet the Islanders were accused of discriminating in favor of the Pitcairn descendants, and forbidden by Australia to so do. This, despite the fact that they have declared themselves indigenous — has any people ever had greater entitlement than they? No. But anything less than a 40,000-year occupation disqualifies them in Australia’s eyes. Which simply says that Australia, has no idea what the word “indigenous” actually means.

  Our laws, of residence as well as of other things, are fair and equable. Five years earns residence and the right to vote — or used to. I condemn Australia roundly for its discrimination in favor of Australians in a place whose situation and history are not, and never were, Australian. The penal failures belonged to the British Crown, not to Australia. Since 1856, the Island has been the homeland of an ethnically distinct people, the Norfolk Islanders. Norfolk Island is not, nor ever was, a part of the Commonwealth of Australia.

  After thirty-two years of admirable self-government at great cost to the heart strings and blood pressure of all who truly love Norfolk Island — and after being forced into debt by a hugely wealthy nation to which these few millions are a pittance — in 2011 it seems likely that Australia has finally won the long battle.

  But at what price to Australia? The international reputation of a bully and a tyrant, for starters. In 1987, after three years of self-government, Australia terminated local autonomy on poor Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, because the Islanders spent unwisely. Here is the place to reiterate that removal of self-government, once given, is illegal: Halsbury’s Laws of England 3rd edition, volume 5, page 1202 agrees with me. But I do not think that Australia stops to consider whether what it does is legal according to respected convention. Its attitude is more “Who will stop me?” Power corrupts.

  Australia cannot say that all the moneys have been unwisely spent on Norfolk Island. In the over thirty years of limited self-government, huge strides have been made both in improved facilities and in infrastructure. Considering the utter nothing that Australia did during its sixty-five years of total autocracy, self-government in Norfolk Island has been a brilliant success. If there are things wrong with it, some glaring, how is that any different from governments in the Commonwealth? What’s happening on Norfolk Island is not new: we are vilified for things that go on in Australian governments every day. But if it happens in Australia, downplay it — if possible!

  Why then at the start of the second decade of the millennium does the Commonwealth of Australia wish to destroy everything Norfolk Island is? Not to improve our lot, for sure! Go to the internet and look up the web sites of Christmas Island to see what happens to colonies administered by Australia without any local self-government. It is a disaster; so is Cocos/Keeling. Unhappy, overrun by bureaucrats, abysmally lacking in facilities and used as dumping grounds: Cocos/Keeling became an animal quarantine station, and Christmas Island contains a massive concentration camp for boat people. When a woman of Christmas Island has a baby, she is flown to Western Australia to have it. Horribly expensive, yes, but there’s more to it than that. If no babies are physically born in a place, it cannot be said to have a native populace of any color or creed.

  Australia owes Norfolk Island a hospital; it was supposed to build one in 1969. But does the above mean that no obstetrician will be present on Norfolk Island, and the 155-year-old Pitcairn tradition of having their babies born in their homeland will be taken from them? It’s cunning, but it works. There’s ample evidence in the literature of Christmas Island that Australia’s policy once it took the place from Singapore in the 1950s was to discourage the establishment of a populace that could call itself native to Christmas Island. If Norfolk Island is to be another concentration camp, or a defence base, or any other hidden agenda, the first step is to make the place too expensive to dwell in. Taxation and land rates on top of our huge freight bills and our very real local indirect taxes would kill the Island as a homeland for ordinary, working people.

  What Australia never tells us is how much the Commonwealth has pocketed by selling our fishing rights, and how much tax it obtains from businesses established here that also exist inside the Commonwealth. The truth of the matter is that to integrate Norfolk Island into the Commonwealth will cost far more than it can ever bring in. The place hasn’t been a tax haven since 1975.

  We are a nano-drop in the Commonwealth’s bucket. So why this relentless push, no matter what the color of the Australian federal government? There’s a hidden agenda. There has to be.

  But, alas, we won’t know what it is until it’s too late.

  ANTHROPOMORPHISM

  No doubt arising from our animal origins and our animal nature, Homo sapiens has always incorporated animals into his (her is implied) life, and in multiple ways. Food and clothing. A sign of the seasons. Company. Knowledge of being prey. Fear not of being prey but of being bitten. Man’s early world was one of co-existence with animals.

  Just when the supernatural invaded Man’s brain isn’t known, of course, but logic says it was probably tied to his fellow beasts, particularly those seen as owning power. Big cats, bears, wolves. Each posing a threat to human life and limb, and therefore to be propitiated. Gifts were tendered; if the beast’s stomach were already full, it would go away. But what demands propitiation automatically has power, and in the tediously slow evolution of human society this power changed, became invested in certain humans within the tribal structure. The shaman or witch doctor took animal power into and unto himself, having convinced the tribe that he had acquired special knowledge and influence over animal magic. For it was recognized that animals retained some kinds of instinctual knowledge that humans were busy losing.

  That loss accelerated with the discovery of an agricultural existence. Instead of nomadic hunting and gathering, the tribe stayed in one place to grow crops and collect meat or milk beasts in herds. Another element than big cats, bears and wolves had to be propitiated: the sky, to deliver rain and keep the river flowing, and though this power was not embodied in the form of an animal, it was sensed to exist. Man’s cosmogony, his supernatural world, adapted to his new lifestyle.

  The word “power” became the word “god”, in those early days just a convenient term to indicate what had no visible form or entity, yet possessed the ability to overturn and ruin the most careful or cherished human undertakings.

  Some human brains developed in ways able to imagine that a spirit world went on distinct from the human one, whereas other brains developed in ways that nailed the spirit world to animals, even inanimate things like meteors. It all depended upon the human location and particular situation.

  But I am not going there. Instead, I want to stay with animal power, with the animal cosmogony. For out of it comes a phenomenon we still see every day, and will continue to see.

  Namely, anthropomorphism. Such a long word! Greek-rooted too. Its etymological meaning (that is, its core) is narrower than its customary use, which encompasses the entire gamut of creatures part-human, part-animal, part-imaginary, from the booted cat which speaks with the voice of Antonio Banderas to the sphinx which asked Oedipus its riddle on the road to Megara.

  Either one subscribes to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective race memory, or one does not. I have always felt that it has merit, given that we have been — and still are — actively evolving, and that our brains contain all the levels of our animal antecedents, albeit atrophied, or malformed, or hugely expanded, or radically changed. Why should there not be a thin sheet somewhere deep down in there that goes back to our beginnings? It certainly answers some of the questions about our abiding attraction for and love of humanizi
ng animals or animalizing humans. The emotions evoked are strong, generate pleasure or fear or even terror. Who remembers a science-fiction film of the 1950s called Forbidden Planet? Its script contained a memorable phrase: “monsters of the id.” The very good plot hinged on collective race memory and the monsters that bedeviled our origins — and how impossible it is to eradicate those monsters.

  Because no one teaches Latin roots anymore, let alone Greek roots, a word like “anthropomorphism” is unintelligible. A quick lesson: “anthro” is Greek for male, “morphism” is Greek for form or shape. So the word should mean having a male form. The Greek for changing something’s shape or form is “meta”, so when the shape or form is altered, you have a metamorphosis. Star Wars II featured an attractive lady assassin who is said to be a “morph” — the script uses the word, but also uses “shape-changer” to make sure the audience gets the message. But, George Lucas, you should have called her a “metamorph” or even just a “meta.” However, I rather get the feeling that accuracy is not a high Lucas priority. Did I say how much I loathe Yoda and his pop-psychology? Well, I do. I hate Yoda as much as I love Robbie the Robot.

  Myth and culture have always been stuffed with metamorphoses. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) wrote down the stories that were already an integral part of his world in 100 AD to while away a political exile on the Black Sea, pining for Rome.

  Perhaps his most famous story is about the beautiful young man named Narcissus, who caught sight of his reflection in a pool and fell in love with it. No matter how he begged and pleaded, each time he stretched out to touch the object of his desire, the beautiful young man in the pool shuddered and broke into a thousand ripples, utterly unattainable. In the end the gods grew tired of listening to Narcissus beg and plead, and turned him into a flower — the narcissus or daffodil. In an unexpected consequence, he donated his name to a modern psychological phenomenon called Narcissism — the love of oneself. It was a metamorphosis, but the opposite of anthropomorphic.