If you dare to question abortion rights be prepared to be denied the support of mainstream feminism.

The feminist movement is proud of its achievements in regard to reproductive rights so to question these gains especially the right to abortion, risks being denied the label feminist. I was married for seventeen years and other than when I was pregnant  relied on contraceptives to prevent any unplanned babies.  I didn’t want any more children so I chose to use an intra-uterine device as I was never comfortable with the idea of taking the contraceptive pill. I am supposed to be for ever grateful to feminism for the contraceptive choices to which my generation had access, but although they helped me avoid unwanted pregnancies and abortions, these choices failed to give me freedom.

Why did I spend my married years concerned with contraception? Well I didn’t want to have any more children of course and why would I or anyone really want to have an abortion. I also complied with my husbands sexual needs, not my own. In the wonderful words of Germaine Greer writing in The Whole Woman, abortion although necessary must be seen as ‘the consequence of oppression.’ Greer asserts that it is very strange that a woman who has completed her family continues to expose her cervix to semen when all she is really wanting is sexual pleasure. Greer suggests this is because intercourse is ‘an act of domination’ and that women who can’t suggest another way to make love or to insist on a condom ‘are certainly not calling the shots.’

I would rather have avoided the need to have IUD’s inserted and instead been  instructed on my natural fertility cycles  that  can be learnt and used to plan a pregnancy or to avoid same. Men need to own any problems with such birth control not me . When the twitter conversation recently turned to the issue of abortion  following a profile article of Melinda Tankard Reist, the author of Giving Sorrow Words and Defiant Birth, Tankard Reist was attacked for her known critique of abortion. The right to an abortion has become the ‘holy tenet’ of feminism and according to feminist and author  Anne Summers,  if you don’t support women’s rights ( meaning abortion)  then you can’t be a feminist.

In our male dominated and sexually saturated society abortion rights have an important place. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take the conversation further and that doesn’t mean I am not a feminist. But then I have a lot of problem with the word feminist. What does it mean? Just individual rights or collective rights to freedom for all women.  Mainstream or liberal feminism fails to go to the root causes of women’s oppression and  has come up with bandaid solutions to controlling women’s fertility such as contraception and abortion. The need for abortion rights needs to be considered in light of the societal context and we shouldn’t be afraid to go there.

 Fish-Hair Woman

  by Merlinda Bobis

In Fish–Hair Woman, Philippine Australian writer, Merlinda Bobis weaves a passionate story of love and loss, heroism and   suffering and the atrocities of war. It is 1987 and the village of Iraya is militarised as the Philippine government cracks down on insurgents. As I read this thrilling new novel I am wondering just how much of this narrative is fact?  I learn that the rebels are the New People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines which began its guerrilla campaign against the government in 1969.

As the author unsettles her readers with the fundamentals of war; capture, torture, murder and rape, she also spins the mystical and  strange story of Estrella, the Fish-Hair Woman who with her twelve metres of thick, black hair scoops up the bodies from the river floor.

The corpses are villagers; fathers and husbands, lovers and strangers.  There’s the unknown guerrilla – her pelvis has been clearly beaten and her breasts have been slashed – her nipples are missing. They are all victims of the military, tossed in the river  left to be gathered and wrapped in the lengthy tresses of the Fish-Hair Woman.

It’s an epic tale of peasants struggling for their land and raging  against U.S imperialism. It’s also about family and community, but most of all its about heartbreak. The magical Fish-Hair Woman is the child of an encounter between a young girl and one of the most powerful men in the country. The 15- year old girl dies giving birth, leaving Estrella in the care of the devastated but loving Mamay Dulce. Dulce is the mother of the adventurous, brave and rebellious Pilar who falls in love with Kumander Benito and the Communist cause vowing to rise above the oppressive regimes, and all those who destroy the lives and dreams of the once passionate farmers forced to become tenants on their own land.

This country with its death squads, torture and loss, attracts an Australian journalist who becomes involved in this haunting tale of war and love. Years later, his troubled son hears of the mysterious Fish-Hair Woman, and uncovers the unpalatable truth of his father’s disappearance.

Fish-Hair Woman is about passion, loss, and tortured souls blended with the elements of intrigue and mystery. It’s also a novel of war and human suffering, a timely reminder to this reader.

I could hardly put it down.

Fish-Hair Woman is published by Spinifex Press

www.spinifexpress.com.au

In Dirty Money, The true costs of Australia’s mineral boom, author Matthew Benns reveals how our soils are polluted, our children are made sick and our farmers are left helpless while methane bubbles in their waterways.

Benn’s story of ‘greed, pollution and murder’ is one that every Australian should read. To accuse the mining industry of murder may seem overly dramatic but in the 1990s when the local Congolese community protested the mining of their silver and copper for which they received nothing, the Australian company Anvil Mining retaliated by facilitating the shooting, beating and drowning of more than 100 villagers.

As for being guilty of greed one need only be familiar with recent Australian politics to know that miners pay very little tax with most  companies paying as little as 14 percent. Fortescue Metals, owned by Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest has not paid corporate tax for seven years and when the federal government threatened the imposition of the Resource Super Profits Tax on the big miners, the billionaire  claimed ‘it was an attempt to nationalise the mining industry’. For every $240,000 worth of iron ore that Fortescue Metals sells it gets about $200,000. Of this the commonwealth receives about $27,000 in taxes and the state around $12,000 in royalties. But the Yindjibarndi, the traditional owners of the land being mined, receive a miserly $136.

Pollution from mining is sadly commonplace. In the gold mines of Senegal landless farmers search for small fragments of gold in the polluted and depleted waterways after Mineral Deposits Limited have looted their homelands. The Australian mining company does not share its considerable wealth with the Senegalese preferring to send its profits to the tax haven of Mauritius. Then there’s the growing pollution that is being caused by coal seam gas exploration. CSG is set to be the next big mining boom; this time it’s taking place in the eastern states of Australia. Drilling down into the coal seams to obtain the gas requires the use of  toxic chemicals such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene. It is our national wealth that giant mining corporations are digging up and our farmlands, waterways and society are being changed forever.

Broken Hill became a boom town in the 1800s due to the huge amounts of silver, lead and zinc discovered in the Barrier Ranges. There are predictions that the  mine will soon close and the population could shrink from 30,000 to 18,000 by 2020. And as the boom turns to bust, the other huge problem for Broken Hill is dust which comes from the tailings, which are blown around and cover everything. The dust is full of lead and is negatively affecting babies and young children with studies revealing that blood lead levels of the children in Broken Hill to be 15 to 20 percent higher than those in the Canadian city of Trail, home to the biggest lead smelting industry in the world.

Socially, the mining towns face huge issues with the influx of large numbers of young men many of whom ‘fly-in and fly out’, and who don’t belong to the community and care even less. The workers have been called ‘the cancer of the bush’ often taking home their large salaries untouched. These mining employees who live in dongas on the outskirts of the towns have created a boom in another industry – prostitution. Women fly in from Perth and even New Zealand to cash in on the boom earning up to $4000 a week for servicing up to 15 clients in a shift.

Australia, regarded as a giant quarry began its mining history in 1840 with the discovery of copper in South Australia. In the 1850s the discovery of gold in Bathurst led to gold rushes with the metal subsequently found and mined all over the country.

Today Australia mines large quantities of minerals and resources including iron ore, nickel, copper gold, silver, uranium, coal, zinc, petroleum and gas. Australia’s mining industry is vast and is undertaken in all states. Significant mining areas include the Pilbara in Western Australia, the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, the Bowen Basin in Queensland and Latrobe Valley in Victoria. Areas such as  Kalgoorlie, Mount Isa, Mount Morgan, Broken Hill and Coober Pedy are known as mining towns.

But then it’s all worth it, isn’t it? Take the example of gold. 80 per cent of the gold dug out of the earth is used to produce jewellery or is stored as bullion and the rest is used in mobile phones, dentistry and computers. There is five grams of gold in the average wedding ring.  To produce one gold ring the mining company moves 10 tonnes of rock, the weight of  ten ford falcons and two million times the weight of the ring. It takes ten litres of diesel petrol to dig the rock up and the processing uses two per cent of the annual electricity consumption for the average family and requires a lot of water – 8600 litres per ring. And for each ring a newspaper sized piece of land is destroyed.

So what happens when we run out of resources? At the current rates of mining there are only 30 years of gold and ten years of diamonds remaining. China and India’s need for coal means there are less than 90 years of it left in the ground. At the present rate of extraction it’s likely that Australia will be merely a big empty landscape by the end of this century.

The author of Dirty Money demands that our politicians stand up to the miners  insisting they pay the tax they owe and that the proceeds be kept in an offshore fund for when the boom ends. If this fails to eventuate then in the words of the famous London Sun headline, Benns asks that ‘the last person leaving the country please turn out the lights’.

Source:http://gaildines.com/lectures-presentations/

Recently there’s been a spate of articles about pornography in the popular  press. In Porn is not a dirty word, former sex therapist and author of What Men  Want – In Bed, Bettina Arndt claimed that women had to put up with pornography  because men have ‘relentless’ sexual drives . Although women are now prime  ministers, governor generals and high court judges, the acceptance of  pornography as part of our popular culture makes it clear that all women aren’t  equal and many remain the object of male sexual abuse.

Rather than being art or a form of entertainment produced by the community,  pornography is a product of consumer capitalism that is harmful to women and  young girls.  Defining pornography can be problematic, but for author and  feminist Gail Dines, pornography is material produced and used to produce sexual arousal, and in the process furthers the sexual subordination of women. Nineteenth-century art historians were the first to use the word ‘pornography’ to describe erotic paintings and statues buried in the ashes at Pompeii and Herculaneum. These images were assumed to be harmful to children and women and were locked away from the public.

Currently we live in an increasingly pornographic world where images we see resemble the soft porn of a decade ago and concern about such material is dismissed as an overreaction or a ‘moral panic’, by the pornography industry. Pornography depicting a nude photo of Marilyn Monroe and seen on the cover of the first issue of Playboy  is not the pornography that is popular today. Instead, brutal and violent images can be instantly downloaded from four hundred and twenty million internet porn pages and four million porn websites and viewed by anyone with a computer.

The five million Australians who are consumers of pornography are able to view scenes that depict women laying on beds, sofas or tables while being anally and vaginally penetrated. This is called ‘gonzo’ porn, where the porn stars have their vaginas or anuses penetrated by more than one penis at a time. Such degrading and painful acts are accompanied by so-called ‘money shots’ where the man ejaculates on the face or the body of the woman. An even more degrading act is where the female porn star gets to drink the collective semen of multiple men.

According to The Porn Report , the Australian audience for pornography consists of everyday adults of all age groups, and backgrounds. Australian pornography consumers are Coalition voters, ALP supporters and Greens party enthusiasts. Interestingly, sixty percent of the viewers said they were religious and although women are fast becoming more interested in pornography, males still represent eighty two per cent of consumers.

But does this form entertainment have a rightful place in popular culture?  There is no doubt that the use of pornography is popular and enjoyed by five million regular uses in Australia  but rather than originating from the people it is imposed upon them by a burgeoning global industry based on the abuse of women.  The growth of pornography has been aided by the digital revolution with the porn industry itself being a driver of major developments in technology from VCRs and DVDs to the creation of millions of web sites.

Pornography began to develop as an industry in the 1950s with  Playboy, a magazine which ‘struck a nerve with American men’ (Dines 2010, 2). Playboy was popular with the ‘upwardly mobile’ white male of the 1950s, a time of great cultural and economic change (Dines 2010,2). The marriage rate was on the rise with the media promoting the family as the ideal institution, while demonising the single and homosexual. At the same time men were being warned that they were being made into ‘little men’ who were being robbed of their freedom (Dines 2010, 3). Playboy’s anti-woman ideology ramped up and became the text for those who wanted to be playboys and it set about teaching sexually conservative men who had grown up in the great depression, how to become consumers of goods and women. Pornography continued its growth in the 1970s when rigid gender roles were being challenged and attitudes to sexual behaviours were changing.

That pornography ‘thrives by popular consent’ (Hebditch and Anning cited in McGuigan 1993, 187), and evidenced by the willingness of consumers to pay for it, is an argument made by apologists for the pornography industry. Hebditch and Anning claim consumers are freely choosing to pay for pornography so the material must not be denied them. But such support for pornography as a legitimate form of popular culture lacks an appreciation of ‘the historical and economic conditions of cultural consumption’ and ignores the question of the political economy of culture, argued cultural populist Jim McGuigan (cited in Storey 1993,182).

Failure to connect pornography with its mode of production and the power of advertising is to ‘remain complicit with the prevailing exploitative and oppressive powers in society’ (McGuigan, cited in Storey 1993,182). Or as asserted by political theorist Benjamin Barber: What becomes a popular form of culture or taste these days arises from market research as to what products will make the most money (2001, 52). Barber claims that ‘markets today are what authoritarian states and despotic religions once were’ (2001, 57). ‘It’s money that’s doing the talking’, he says (2001, 58).

How do we judge the worthiness of a particular form of popular culture? Is the entertainment legitimate just because consumers are buying? According to Gail Dines, a mother, a feminist, academic and author of Pornland-How porn has hijacked our sexuality (Dines 2010), the extent and influence of the pornography business has important implications for society. ‘The entertainment industries do not just influence us; they are our culture, constituting our identities, our conceptions of the world, and our norms of acceptable behaviour’, says Dines (Dines 2010, 47). Filmmaker and researcher Chyng Sun (2011, 171-3) found that the popular movies were about sexual excitement mixed with aggression. When Sun’s study into pornography was compared with previous ones done in 1980 and 1990, it showed that pornography had become much more aggressive. Gagging on a penis appeared in twenty eight per cent of the porn scenes; double penetration of a women by two men occurred in twenty percent of the porn, and ass-to-mouth acts were a feature of forty per cent of scenes (Sun 2011, 173). According to pornographer Joe Gallant, the future of American porn is violence with the culture more tolerant of gang rape movies (Sun 2011, 174).

Pornography is also having an adverse effect on the relationships of many young men. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist and the author of The brain that changes itself has worked with a number of men who have acquired such an addiction to pornography that their real life relationships were threatened. These were not men who were immature or withdrawn from the wider world, but rather were pleasant, thoughtful men in reasonable relationships. Their fantasy lives were increasingly dominated by the scenarios that they had downloaded into their brains (Doidge 2010,104). Alarmingly as they view porn images, these addicts are actually making new pathways or maps within their brains due to the muscle’s neuroplasticity.

That the pornography industry, a popular form of entertainment is having a serious effect on the health and well being of society today is not an exaggeration, and should be a topic for a serious public conversation. Feminist analyses that exposed the systems of power under which women are forced to live, are no longer tolerated in a world of rampant capitalism and the commodification of everything (Klein 2011, 95).

Can we look to academia for leadership? Probably not, for as Dines laments, in the world of academia the stories of women who have been gang-raped after their male ‘friends’ watched pornography are merely referred to as ‘anecdotal evidence’ (Dines, Jensen & Russo 1998, 164). According to Dines, the reality of the pornography industry is ‘lost in the maze of postmodern terminology and intellectual games’ (Dines, Jensen & Russo 1998, 164). When Gail Dines appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program in May this year promoting her research and her latest book ‘Pornland’, How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, neither she nor the subject was given the respect they deserved.

Media commentary on the subject of pornography lacks an appreciation of how and why it has become a form of popular culture. Bettina Arndt claims that men have this ‘relentless lusty drive’ that must be tolerated (Arndt 2011), but rather than just accepting that this absurd practice where some men are spending hours wanking in front of  computer screen, while their partners are asleep in another room (Arndt 2011), the imposed normalcy of institutions such as marriage and monogamy might be discussed. However the lure of the pornography industry ensures that any resistance to capitalism and its sacred institutions is nullified.

Pornography as a form of popular culture is ‘hijacking our sexuality’ (Dines 2010), perpetuating inequality between men and women and is a form of male violence and abuse against women. Concerned members of society must be willing to debate the place of pornography as a form of popular culture even at the risk of being branded a sexual conservative or a religious zealot. It’s a human rights issue.

References:

Arndt, B 2011 Porn is not a dirty word, The Age, 16 October, http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/porn-is-not-a-dirty-word-20111015-1lqqe.html

Barber, B 2001, The culture of the politics of culture, Salmagundi, Spring, 130/131, Research Library p 50. Available Proquest, viewed 20 October

Dines, G, Jensen, R & Russo, A 1998, Pornography, The Production and Consumption of Inequality, Routledge, New York and London.

Dines, G 2010, Pornland, How porn has hijacked our sexuality, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, Australia.

Doidge, N 2008, The Brain that changes itself, Scribe Publications, Carlton North, Victoria.

Klein, R 2011, ‘Big Porn and Big Pharma’ in Tankard, M & Bray, A (eds) 2011, Big Porn Inc, Exposing the harms of the global pornography industry, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, pp 86-104

McGuigan, J 1992, Cultural Populism, Routledge, USA.

Q&A, 2011 ABC, TV program, 23 May, http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/past-programs-by-date.htm

Sun, C 2011, ‘Investigating Pornography: The Journey of a Filmmaker and Researcher, in Tankard, M & Bray, A (EDS) 2011, Big Porn Inc, Exposing the harms of the global pornography industry, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, pp 171-178.

Storey, J 1993, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, New York.

‘I wonder what you think about the government’s plan to keep older people at home and not in care, Helen,’ asks Joyce, a resident of a retirement village where I occasionally work as a community nurse.

Joyce’s inquiry has been sparked off by the current public conversation around the future of aged care in Australia. Strapped with a burgeoning growth in the numbers of older Australians, the government is forced to reform the aged care sector. At present over one million older Australians utilise aged care services, but in less than 40 years the number is expected to quadruple, due in part to the ageing of the baby boomer generation who made up the huge cohort of 79 million babies who were born between 1946 and 1964.

Our lives are longer now due in part to improved medical care, so ways to pay for the care costs of these extra years have to be found. The recent  Caring for older Australians’ report has seized upon the fact that Australians want to live independently at home for as long as possible and it is this sentiment that the government is exploiting. According to a government source quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald ‘the boomers are not going to cop moving into aged care homes’.

I would prefer to remain in my own home until I die but the reality of life at the coal face makes me doubt the new mantra of ageing in place.

Eighty- year old Joyce lives in one of the 90 self contained units in her retirement village and as she ages she can move into a serviced apartment where she will have her cleaning and cooking done for her.

 ‘What concerns me is that old people ageing at home are often lonely, explains Joyce.  As a resident of the village she has the company of around 200 people at varying stages of ageing. Her experiences as a former volunteer for  ‘meals on wheels’ brought her into contact with many older people living isolated lives in the wider community.

 On one occasion she had arrived bearing lunch for a lonely, ageing woman who refused the food explaining that she no longer had any need. In fact she had just taken an overdose of sleeping pills. ‘I am concerned that this situation will only worsen if there is more encouragement and inducement for the ageing to remain at home,’ suggested Joyce.

Joyce has learnt first-hand how the company of others benefits the ageing. The residents of the village are mostly widowed women who are well cared for by the management and staff and their own families. When they can’t attend to the cooking and cleaning they are able to move into a serviced apartment where they are surrounded by others in the same predicament.

Retirement facilities provide many regular and beneficial activities such as exercise classes and physio visits along with productive craft afternoons, and the popular movie sessions shown on the big screen. But what I really notice are the strong friendships that develop among the women who gather in the meeting areas and catch up on the latest news.  Some of this is unwelcome such as that of another resident who has broken her hip and won’t be returning; but mostly they watch out for each other.

As I’m having a cuppa with Joyce and her friends my pager goes off. It’s from one of the residents. Ninety- year old Harold has fallen over and he can’t get up. I find him lying on the kitchen floor head nestling the fridge; a pool of blood streaming from a large wound on his forehead. Harold is conscious but complains of pain all the way down his back and into his legs. Fifteen minutes later Harold is in the back of the ambulance and on his way to care.

Joyce is right to be concerned about ageing in place especially now as so many of us live alone. Who will care for us?

In July 2010, Christine Nixon resigned as chair of Victoria’s Bushfire Recovery and Reconstruction Authority, effectively retiring from public life. But this week the former Victorian chief police commissioner is well and truly back in the media spotlight.

In her new book ‘Fair Cop’ Nixon accuses Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd of running a ‘vendetta’ against both her and her successor Simon Overland.

Fair Cop details the life of this groundbreaking police chief who wished to make policing more accountable and less hierarchical. Nixon felt that the culture had to change and one of her more daring feats was to remove the popular well-stocked bars from police headquarters.

The autobiography co-authored with The Age journalist Jo Chandler delves into the tragic events of Black Saturday, the day when widespread and raging bushfires swept through the state of Victoria, causing 173 deaths and injuring hundreds.

The Royal Commission held into the Black Saturday bushfires found that the Victorian police commissioner’s co-ordination on February 7^th 2009 ”left much to be desired” and condemned her performance as ”hands off”.

On that blazing Saturday in February 2009, Christine Nixon was the Chief Commissioner of the Victorian police force and it was her movements on that day that have caused the press and others to call for her ‘blood’. Nixon admitted that she had abandoned the bushfire control centre and dined with friends.

The facts are well known- the survivors are still recovering and so I suspect is Christine Nixon who suffered a gruelling public grilling at the hands of Rachel Doyle, counsel assisting the Bushfire Commission.

Nixon also endured weeks of public scrutiny and derision led by a horrible media campaign. The former police commissioners’ claims that she was the victim of a sexist and fattist campaign are well grounded. Between the 7^th and the 19^th of April 2009, the press published over 110 articles about Nixon, many of these old images emphasizing her large body size.

I remember vividly the photo of Christine Nixon attending a birthday party and enjoying a piece of cake. The intent was clear; here was the police chief ‘shoving a piece of cake in her mouth’. If she can’t control what she eats and what she looks like, then how can the public trust her.

To appreciate the media representation of Christine Nixon is to understand the spectacle of woman, created and sustained in western culture.

Cyndi Tebbel, the author of The Body Snatchers- how the media shapes women says that when prominent women appear in the media, matters of attractiveness and clothing become the focus, whereas there is scant interest in the body shape or attire of the male counterpart.

The image of Nixon as a large, middle-aged woman attracted a huge media interest that was as focused on how she looked and what she ate as any error of judgement she may have made on Black Saturday. We need to ask whether the male head of the CFA, Russell Rees was subjected to such scrutiny over his image and attire. The fact is that he wasn’t.

Christine Nixon was the first woman to become a Commissioner of an Australian Police force and regards her way of leading as doing it “not as a bloke and not as someone else – but as just a woman would.” In an interview on ABC television Nixon told Peter Thompson, “I’m a product very much of the women’s movement. I’m very strongly committed to women and to the rights of women.”

The media does not portray feminists positively and Nixon is cast as ‘bad’ in this debacle.  In an article in The Daily Telegraph Clare Harvey wrote:  “ Melbourne’s Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt saw Nixon’s strife as the police’s comeuppance for sending a girl to do a man’s job”. According to Bolt:”She was hired from the NSW force not because she’d succeeded, but because she seemed fresh, honest – and an agent of fashionable feminist change.” Bolt said that what we got was “a feminised and demoralized force”.

But what the police force and Victoria really got was a feminist leader who challenged the patriarchy and for that she is still being vilified.

Coal seam gas is a form of natural gas promoted as an alternative fuel to coal. ‘The rationale for the use of natural gas has been because its combustion produces less carbon dioxide than coal,’ says Dr David Shearman, the honorary secretary for Doctors for the Environment Australia. The gas lies deep under the ground and secured in coal beds by water pressure.  The search for alternative and greener fuels has led to this growth in coal seam gas as an interim alternative while renewable industries are further developed and marketed.

But new studies undertaken by Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell University show that the impacts of methane leaks make the life-cycle greenhouse gas footprint of coal seam gas worse than those of coal and fuel oil when viewed for a 20-year period. Dr Shearman suggests that these fugitive methane emissions along with other environmental effects of coal seam gas mining such as water contamination, loss of productive land and disruption of communities mean that there are more adverse effects of the gas than with coal. Professor Howarth argues for a rapid move toward an economy based on renewable energy rather than to one dependent on the gas industry.

Nevertheless the rush to mine CSG is set to be the next big mining boom; this time it’s taking place in the eastern states of Australia. In our energy – hungry world, coal seam gas provides a vital source of fuel, and resource – rich Australia has vast deposits of it. Already Queensland is home to 3000 wells with a total of 40,000 wells to be constructed across the state, often on very valuable agricultural land. The sixty-billion dollar industry, promoted as an alternative to dirty coal is turning out to be anything but clean, with health experts, landowners and environmentalists raising the spectre of serious social, health and environmental impacts, and calling for a moratorium on the industry that threatens the livelihoods of farmers,  scarce water sources, and  food supplies.

Levels of pollution are increasing due to the escaping methane that is released during the extraction of coal seam gas. Toxic chemicals such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene are used in the extraction process. Then there are the heavy metals and radioactive isotopes – also damaging to health. There is also the risk that up to 40 per cent of the toxic chemicals remain within the structure of the seam and can move through the groundwater polluting the Great Artesian Basin – water used for agriculture.

Residents are reporting strange body rashes; some are suffering from headaches that won’t go away. There are stories of stomach problems and many residents affected by the coal seam gas industry are now wondering if their water supplies are safe to drink and bathe in. The  National  Toxics  Network  (NTN) is calling for a  moratorium  on  the  use  of  drilling  and  fracturing chemicals  used in the  hydraulic  drilling  and fracturing  of  coal  gas  seams . They want these chemicals fully assessed for their health and environmental hazards by the industrial chemicals regulator, the National Industrial Chemical Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS).

Dr Shearman is very concerned about how the CSG industry will affect Australia as a food producer both for the nation and as an exporter. ‘Large swathes of prime agricultural land are being degraded to facilitate gas wells.  A recent federal government report from its Science, Engineering and Innovation Council, warns that Australia could become a net importer of food in the future,’ he said.

There are billions of dollars to be made and eighteen-thousand jobs created but the community, environmentalists and landowners have come together to fight the gas companies all the way. In 2010 representatives from over 40 community groups formed The Lock the Gate Alliance calling for a moratorium on the coal seam gas industry that is affecting their health and the environment. The rural way of life is under threat with many farming families leaving their land as the intrusions caused by the mining process become too much to bear. And it’s not just the rural communities who are fighting the imposition of coal seam gas mining: Just last week it was reported that residents of  the Sydney suburb of St. Peters were rallying to stop mines being built in their area after they learned that  the New South Wales Government had approved plans by an exploration company to drill a well searching for gas.

The Australian Greens are calling for a moratorium on all coal seam gas extraction in Queensland and promise to introduce environmental laws to protect productive farmland and precious water supplies. The Greens believe that in this time of global food insecurity any threats to Australia’s food bowl should be treated with great caution. The Greens are joined by greenies, farmers, lawyers and representatives from ‘the top end of town’ such as the Macquarie Group Chairman David Clarke, also calling for a moratorium on the gas extraction.

According to David Shearman there is little chance that the industry will stop as the  government has signed coal seam gas contracts worth billions of dollars at a time when moratoria have been called in several other countries. However a Senate inquiry has been announced into the impacts of Coal Seam Gas mining including economic, social and environmental effects, property rights and values of landholders, sustainability of prime agricultural land and health issues.

Meanwhile it is clear that the coal seam miners and their facilitators – our governments show little sign of giving up on this environmentally damaging mining. Neither are they questioning the relentless cycle of economic growth that continues- whatever the cost.  Dr  Shearman fears that this will continue to be the  case unless communities and their supporters fight back. ‘The government supports industry, it wants the royalties,’ he said.

Audio

As the Federal Government prepares to announce the details of the long – deliberated carbon tax, the Climate Change Minister Greg Combet  remains addicted to strong economic growth.

But is business as usual really possible in our post-carbon world?

Speaking on Lateline Paul Gilding, the author of The Great Disruption said that economic growth is dead in a post-climate change world. He predicts the end of our current economic model of growth along with its wasteful consumerism. The author and former CEO of Greenpeace International says that plans to grow the economy three or four times by 2050 can’t happen because it is just not possible. ‘It would defy laws of physics, biology and chemistry’, he said.

Climate change is a symptom of a greater problem, says Gilding. The real problem is the ‘sacred tenet of global capitalism’, the belief that we can have increasing economic growth on a finite planet.

The challenges we  face  are much broader than climate change, argues Gilding. The problem is that we are addicted to economic growth and believe that we can continue to grow our economies – producing more and more stuff, despite the physical planetary limits.

Knowledge about the limits to economic growth is not new. The Limits to Growth report was published in 1972, detailing the consequences of runaway population and economic growth in the setting of limited resources. It concluded that humanity is dependent on the natural world with collapse being  inevitable  should our ecological footprint continue.

Gilding likens the global economy to a ‘giant ponzi scheme’ where as the money runs out the whole scheme collapses. Even so the IMF is predicting the global output per capita to triple by 2050 and we have already passed the limits of the planet’s capacity to support our economy.

The world is in denial about the speed and scale of the threats we face, claims Gilding. He predicts the coming of ‘the Great Awakening’ preceded by a major world crisis leading to a global emergency that will last for several decades. Gilding does not think it’s the end of humanity but rather the end of economic growth as we know it.

The immediate response to the ‘great disruption and the awakening’ will be to ‘decouple growth’ from carbon emissions making a cleaner more efficient economy while leaving the economic and power structures firmly in place. But once ‘the elephant in the room’ is faced, Gilding suggests  we will mount ‘a war-like’ response where large parts of the old economy and power structures will be destroyed and shopping for pleasure will be a thing of the past.

The immediate future is not pretty; the environmental debt   needs to be repaid. There will be loss of jobs along with substantial loss of life. Gilding predicts that what he refers to as the  ’one degree war’, needs to commence by 2018 and that planetary recovery could take up to 100 years.

The world is in for a very bumpy ride. Just don’t expect your politicians to tell you so.

It would appear that even the Prime Minister of Britain William Pitt (1759-1806) knew a thing or two about spin. I have always thought that the reason the British government settled Botany Bay was because it needed somewhere to dump its criminals. So I was intrigued to hear an interview on Late Night Live where author Alan Frost told broadcaster Phillip Adams that the official line ‘is a bit of spin.’

Emeritus Professor of History at La Trobe University Alan Frost, argues that from the very beginning, the voyage to Australia was ‘an imperial venture’ with the view to developing a free settlement. Frost has spent the last 35 years studying Australia’s European settlement. His research, which is based on over 2000 documents that relate to the mounting of First Fleet and the settlement at Botany Bay, has resulted in a fascinating story.

In his latest books, Botany Bay and The First Fleet, Frost takes his readers back to 1786 at the time when the British Government first announced its intention to set up a convict colony at Botany Bay. Frost asserts that the British Government’s real objective was to expand British commerce throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. To achieve this, Britain would need bases and resources along the major sea routes and ‘by transferring some of their population and at least some of their laws to New South Wales, the British made actual the preliminary right to possess this territory’.

If the motive was simply to provide a place to dump criminals then the voyage to Australia and the settlement was a very expensive way of doing this. The transporting of convicts to New South Wales, some 20,000 kilometres away cost around 2 to 5 times what it would have cost to keep them on hulks in the Thames.

But does the real story of the Botany Bay settlement matter? This is a question I put to Alan Frost.

‘It’s important that we have an accurate understanding of our beginnings. As individuals, we need to have a sustaining sense of the past. One of the things that I have found disheartening is how each Australia Day, newspapers trot out the same tired only ‘transported for stealing a handkerchief’ line and then refer to the accounts of people like Manning Clark.” Clark has described the convict colony at Botany Bay as ‘an indescribable hopelessness and confusion’ but according to Frost it was well organised and implemented.

That Botany Bay was settled just to dispose of unwanted criminals is still being taught in schools. Teachers rely on textbooks written by historians who didn’t have access to the National Archival documents which clearly show how seriously the Pitt government regarded the New South Wales settlement.

The details of the planning are well documented by Frost who maintains that the belief that the settlement of Botany Bay was ‘a shambolic affair’ was a myth, when really the preparations made for the colony were painstakingly orchestrated.

Contrary to common belief that the ships were ‘clapped-out tubs’ they were all under five years old and in very good condition. Convicts chosen for the First Fleet included those who knew how to farm, to lay bricks, and to weave cloth. Marines were also carefully selected for their skills as carpenters, millers and miners.

The First Fleet consisted of 11 ships which rather than representing ‘hopelessness and confusion’ were well fitted out. Amongst the supplies were two years worth of medicines and surgical items including beds. Such provisions were according to Frost ‘adapted to the needs of land based community’.

The quality of the food taken was very high; “the flour was made from good sound corn and calculated to keep for a good eighteen months’. Of the 1420 convicts who were sent to Botany Bay on the 13^th May 1787 about 1373 reached Sydney in January 1788. The death rate was about 2% – much less than was expected.

I asked Alan Frost if The First Fleet and Botany Bay have changed the public’s understanding of our history.

“I’ve had a good response from the reading public – there’s still a public interested in history but I don’t think that my work has had any effect on governments however. For a long time our view of ourselves as being mistreated by the cruel British has been central to our image of ourselves, with the attendant perceptions that we are irreverent, disrespectful of authority, egalitarian, and self-reliant. Whether that perception can now be removed or mitigated is doubtful,” he said.

Frost also wonders whether the centrality of this belief may be fading now that we are now a nation composed of such a mix of peoples and beliefs.

Even so the real story  must be heard.

My daughter’s been a vegetarian since her early teens. Her reasons are ethical, based on her love of animals. So I was rather surprised that she could watch A Bloody Business, which exposes the brutal killing of cattle in Indonesian abattoirs.

This episode of Four Corners featured the live export of Australian cattle to Indonesia. Around 500,000 animals are transported each year from Northern Australia where they are fattened up only to have their throats cut while fully conscious. In March 2011 Lyn White, an investigator for the animal rights group, Animals Australia visited eleven Indonesian abattoirs and filmed the abuse of the cattle which included eye gouging, kicking, and tail twisting. Four Corners used both its own video, and footage obtained by White to broadcast what “the Australian meat industry does not want the public to see”.

Following A Bloody Business, the public condemned the live trade and called for it to be stopped immediately. I listened as talk- back callers said they would never eat meat again and heard scores of vegans offer meat- free recipes over the radio airwaves. 

There is no doubt that the live export in animals must be stopped but the trade needs to be seen as part of the very strange way that food is grown and consumed in our modern world. These days few of us are farmers and most of us must depend on supermarkets and food grown thousands of miles away. Food – gathering today stands in stark contrast to that of our ancestors: Our predecessors’ meals included fresh fish caught in clean oceans and meat and dairy from flocks of cattle and sheep raised on pasture. The 20th century was a time of revolutionary change to the way food was produced, distributed and consumed. The rearing of animals underwent momentous change from small scale farming to intensive livestock rearing and huge feedlots along with the live animal trade.

Farmer Joel Salatin is a prominent opponent of our current industrialised food production and “the hero of the new local food movement”. Salatin has a small farm in Virginia,USA which feeds between 7,000 and 9,000 locals. He says that small mixed farming can feed the world and it “is the only system that really can feed the world”. Salatin believes that large-scale agricultural practices are no longer working and that the existence of new diseases such as campylobacter, E coli, listeria, salmonella, all unknown 30 years ago, is evidence that “the industrial paradigm is exceeding its efficiency.” It is unsustainable and incapable of contributing to healthy, happy animals or people.

While watching Four Corners last week I felt the shame of the meat eater that is shared by many including  Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma,  a book about “the search for a perfect meal in a fast-food world”. Pollan claims that “eating meat has become problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it”. We are very confused he says about whether we should be eating meat: As many people are turning to veganism the situation for factory animals is one of more, not less, suffering.  Pollan says this “schizophrenia” can be explained by the absence of these farm animals in our lives today. We no longer witness the killing of the animals or the butcher at work; our meat comes in plastic packages-its source far from view.

People for the ethical treatment of animals or PETA believe that by ‘going vegan’ we can help stop the abuse of animals including the atrocities of the live export trade. The animal rights group argues that veganism is better for our health and that plant foods will protect us from cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks and strokes, diabetes and obesity. However, according to Dr Stephen Byrnes author of Myths of Vegetarianism, the above afflictions are diseases of the 20^th century – humans have been eating meat for a long time. Research by anthropologist Dr Weston A. Price has documented the numbers of native peoples such as the Inuit, and the Masai who ate diets high in animal products but didn’t suffer from these diseases. Byrnes lists the likely causes of these maladies such as the hormones, antibiotics, nitrates and pesticides that are in commercially bred animal products.  These can be avoided by consuming organic meats, eggs and dairy products that don’t contain these toxins.

Humanity evolved eating animal foods- our bodies are suited and accustomed to them. Therefore we will continue to require the nutrients that animal products provide for the time being. However we can change the way we treat the animals that provide us with these products that are vital for our health and well being.

Last week the Australian community expressed its anger at the abuse of cattle involved in the live animal trade. In response the trade is to cease for at least six months.

My nine-year old granddaughter is among those outraged by animal cruelty and no longer consumes meat. She may be part of the growing movement that according to Michael Pollan “is groping towards a higher plane of consciousness”: Where we are moving towards an understanding that meat- eating is barbaric. This can be seen as similar to how we came to see that slavery was abhorrent. 

In the meantime and as we continue our evolution we can choose to source and eat ethically raised meat. Yes, it is expensive and the supermarkets are not likely to stock it unless large numbers of us call for it. If we continue to eat meat, and most of us will in the forseeable future, then we need to treat the animals that provide for us, with respect both in life and in death.