Art is fundamentally good, but when is it s bad idea?

The proposed new multi-million dollar Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) will not be affected by our changing climate, or that can only be assumed if notice is to be taken of the “business case” that articulates the wonderful benefits a new SAM will bring to the city and area.

New South Wales firm of Simon McArthur and Associates produced a more than 30 page document affirming the practicality of the idea, but not once mentioned any environment or associated climate difficulties.

Eager to keep the conversation alive, I wrote the following and in submitting to The News, was politely told that is wouldn’t be given space, unless I choose to use as one of my regular fortnightly columns.

 

When is a good thing a bad idea?

The idea of building a new art museum in Shepparton ticks all bar one of the boxes and interestingly that last box is the biggest of all and the one that really matters.

Yes, a new art museum for the city is a wonderful idea for art is at the heart of everything we do and so to celebrate and recognise its importance through the creation of the beautiful lake-side proposed complex suggests a coming of age for the city.

Everything about the idea appears to be as it should, except for its timing.

A collision of world events suggest the city’s interest and emphasis should be about building resilience, entrenching what exists and underscoring the strengths of our culture to ensure we can arrive as unscathed as possible through the unfolding challenges.

Like many others, I endorse the importance of emphasizing art, but rather than committing our resources to create something new, we should be exploring every avenue to use what exists, even if that demands some changes to our behaviour.

Much of what presently happens at the city’s offices in Welsford St could be, thanks to modern technology, undertaken and completed almost anywhere in the city. It is not essential to have all administrative staff at Eastbank.

Yes, keep the customer/ratepayer contact people, the Mayor’s office, the council chambers, and any other pieces of the operation vital to the daily public operation of the city.

The Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) already has space in the building and so the area cleared of relocated administrative staff could easily be incorporated into a restructured art museum.

With costs far below that of what is proposed near Victoria Park Lake, SAM and the existing library building could connected to create a beautiful centre of the city-community facility that would answer our civic needs.

Yes, the new SAM is a good idea, but its timing is bad for rather than such wonderful physical city enhancements, the city should be acknowledging the changes that are settling upon because of global warming and along with that playing its part in cutting the world’s carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80 per cent with a decade or two.

Building a new, stand-alone art museum that oozes embedded energy is contrary to an efficient and sustainable city future.

Yes, let us use what we have, modifying what exists, provide the services we want and need and yet do it thoughtfully in terms of our carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, despite the opinions of the doubters, skeptics and others, we have changed our climate system, subsequently the benign weather that once was is gone and we are quickly moving into an era in which we will need every resource we can gather.

Events highlight need for a civil society

George Orwell, metaphysics and the idea of a civil society crammed my thoughts as matters of the past week swept into focus.

Orwell, writing in the early 30s about a hanging Burma, erased any personal doubts about a state executions.

His words; words first read more than 20 years ago, live with me today - he wrote:

“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.”

The execution by firing squad of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran may seem remote from those of us here in the Goulburn Valley, but it is not as the killing of these two men damns us all and is simply a further example of how our civil society has become somewhat threadbare; worsening as we wander into the embrace of a strange vulgarity.

Yet, many of us can casually discount what is ahead for Chan and Sukumaran arguing that they knew the risks, they were aware of the consequences and so should pay the price. This, many say, has nothing to do with us and so is not our responsibility – wrong!

At this juncture metaphysics enters the equation and bound by philosophical realities, we must look to the ultimate causes of anything, in this case the execution of Chan and Sukumaran.

Was their attempt to smuggle drugs simply spontaneous and poorly thought through rash behaviour or was it the sinister manifestation of an ailing society that has not only failed these men, but now intends to camouflage and hide the trouble by executing them?

A good and decent society brings with it demands of civility that exceed what exists and although Chan and Sukumaran maybe guilty as charged, each of us needs to remember that they are a product of this society; a society we helped create.

The militarization of the world and subequently our police forces is not to be unexpected

Events in Paris that produced this response
 were not to be unexpected.

Recent events in Paris, Sydney and other parts of the world were not to be unexpected.

Broadly, humanity’s trajectory is toward violence; aggression predominates in most of our activities from commerce to sport and politics and to even the humanities.

It should not surprise us therefore; that a society rooted in violence has many people who see the solutions they seek in bloodshed, brutality and the physical and emotional battering of others.

Most of us see ourselves as remote from what happened in those two cities and although that may be physically true, our endorsement of existing governance structures, either nationally or internationally, makes a lie of that.

Not for a moment should we endorse the behaviour of those branded as terrorists, and although they may be driven by ideologies we find offensive, they are simply people who have been marginalized by our market-driven, competitive, consumerist society soaked in violence.

True, the world is now a safer place than it has ever been, but only a slither of good-will stands between us and the expression of disenchantment such as witnessed in Sydney and Paris.

None of us arrive in the world with pre-determined fates, rather our destiny is shaped by the environment in which we grow and develop and so it is what happens around us that sculpts what we become.

Present society is violent in intent, but this surreptitious attack on our thinking is mostly wonderfully camouflaged to appear simply as commerce, competition or entertainment.

With our minds and thinking under the constant influence of violent images we vote for governments embedded with institutions which depend upon violence (pay your tax or we will send you to goal) for their legitimacy.

The world's police forces are becoming
increasingly militarized.

Police forces around the world protect society’s status quo, but many who disagree with what exists make their point using the tools and violence that same society has made available, endorsed and allowed to infest most every process.

Much of the developed world draws its control, its power and authority from violence; a surreptitious violence not always apparent, but always there, always ready for application ensuring the inequality that favours a few and maligns most is preserved.

World events illustrate just how militarized our police forces have become and so the sight of a death-laden police officer has now become normalized and so unsurprising to most.

Gone are those officers whose first and only defence was inquiry and a few words of compassion, benevolence and advice as they set about resolving a human drama.

What happened in Paris was seen as an affront to free speech and in that spirit of that cherished doctrine, maybe we should be looking beyond our much prized democracy; a governance process history illustrates fails every test of equality and fairness.

The Goulburn Valley urgently needs optimists; optimists, however who are in context

Optimists are urgently needed in the Goulburn Valley.

Herman Daly - his sound advice
has been ignored by most.

However, optimism alone is not enough for what we need are positive thinkers who understand the context of the world within which they seek their utopia.

Many careful thinkers around the world have declared this to be the decade in which we, and that is you and me, must make some fundamental and critical decisions about our behaviour and so how we use and apply earth’s limited resources.

Being half-way through this vital decade our options are becoming fewer and so this is the year we must decide.

Yes, we either waste it pondering the past or apply our intuition, inventiveness and imagination and go somewhere we have never been before, the future.

And so what will we do?

With a country lead by people with values rooted in 20th Century and seemingly afraid of addressing tomorrow, it is likely we will continue to look at life through the prism of what was.

It is misplaced optimism that has brought us to where we are now; optimism that has diverted our attention elevating the economy to God-like status, blinding us to other possibilities, other ways of living, of being a healthy compassionate and considerate community; a community that understands that infinite growth on a finite planet is not only problematic, but impossible.

Embarking on the second week of 2015 and surrounded by what are generally narcissistic New Year resolutions, it seems we need to lift our gaze and consider the views University of New South Wales lecturer, Dr Ted Trainer.

Dr Trainer, who writes about sustainability and justice, has said on The Conversation (a joint universities website): “It is also now clear that increasing the GDP in a rich country does not improve the quality of life!”

“This is what the ‘limits to growth’ literature has been telling us for decades, but most economists, politicians and ordinary people still fail to grasp the point,” he writes.

Conscious of that we need to consider and act on what a senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, Herman Daly, said in the early 70s about the need for a Steady State Economy.

Daly, like many others since, pointed to the weaknesses of our existing economic system, noting that it favoured only a few, marginalized most and left the bulk of humanity limping toward extinction.

Yes, we need optimists; people who can see beyond what exists, understand there is another way and stand up and holler in support of American linguist and  philosopher, Noam Chomsky, who has repeatedly argued that we should put people before profit.

Arguments that without profit we can do nought are fallacious – optimism and educative, innovative and ecologically responsible ideas are unstoppable.

Personal pools of inadequacy arise at Simon's celebration

Personal pools of inadequacy became both deeper and wider as plaudits were piled upon the life of the late Simon Furphy.

This rather special portrait of Simon Furphy
was on show at the recent celebration
of his life on the banks of the
 Sevens Creeks at Arcadia.

Funerals are rarely places of criticism or doubt and so to hear such laudable talk of a fellow who for 60 years had been an intimate player in Shepparton’s practical and social life should not have surprised.

No, the praise was not a surprise, but what did catch me unprepared was how Simon’s honesty and passion for life left me feeling like I had not really had a “crack”, how I had been less than an ideal husband, father and friend, and how I had failed to use my skills, whatever they might be, to make this a better place.

From all accounts Simon lived his life as if the glass was half full and even in the final days of his struggle with bowel cancer, he was, according to family and friends, fiercely optimistic, illustrating to the end a signature trait.

Hundreds of family and friends recently gathered on the banks of the Sevens Creek, beneath shady gum trees, at the Arcadia property of his brother and sister-in-law, Andrew and Frederica to recognise and celebrate the former Shepparton solicitor, through music and story.

Simon had been a diligent fellow, but also, so we were told at his “celebration”, of his ease in acquiring friends and his curious penchant for striking alliances that brought personal benefits or enriched whatever group he was with.

No matter how jolly people may be, funerals, or a celebration in Simon’s case can be less than uplifting for even though we might all still be alive, and that of itself is cause for joy, there is a sombre sense about the whole affair.

Listening to the wonderful optimistic, upbeat, sociality and enthusiasm Simon brought to life ignited reflection upon what it is to be human.

Unquestionable Simon, as with the rest of us, had his failings and as suggested by author Isaiah Berlin, was built from the same “crooked timbers of humanity”, just as we are.

Ironically, just about the time we gathered on the banks of the Sevens Creek to listen to music and tells stories about Simon, and celebrate his life, a book about our denial of death had slid into view.

We all live with the implicit understanding that death awaits us and so are driven to sometimes bizarre ends to achieve imagined immortality and frequently those efforts manifest themselves in less than kindly ways.

Strip away the façade that is modern life and revealed are the reasons why men hurl themselves over parapets to certain death, why we exhaust ourselves acquiring what we want, rather than need and why we are victims of a surfeit of emotion.

And yes, it was a celebration, and yes, if I perceive Simon as portrayed, it was sad we kicked up our heels without him.

Democracy and decency demand recognition

Democracy and decency demand that we recognise those who lived in this country before the Englanders arrived in 1788.

Many here believe they enjoy the privileges of a democracy, and some do, but it is slanted to favour just a few, those who by birth and so social class fall in with the machinations of the moneyed minority.

Democracy in its truest sense will not exist in Australia until we have, initially at least, recognized in our constitution that other people lived in this country before Europeans set up camp in Botany Bay.

Australians are inherently easy going and tolerant to a fault, and so have stood back in quietist fashion allowing the more aggressive to supplant democracy with other processes that favour a minority and disenfranchise most.

We now live in a militarized plutocracy; we have been duped into endorsing governance processes that protect the affairs of the elite, while we are rewarded with crumbs from the main table and garrulous distracting entertainments.

The progeny of those who have lived here for 40 000 years mostly make-up the disenfranchised; democracy has failed them; racism has railed against them; and forever seeking refuge in claims of innocence, our ignorance has reigned over two centuries of missed opportunities, brought about by our arrogance and our failure to acknowledge that through our ways we were unable to accommodate the needs of others.

Suggestions that we wait until 2017 to even vote upon the idea of recognizing those original inhabitants is an indefensible delay; the white man’s ways have disrupted and in many cases destroyed the lives of indigenous people and all they seek now is recognition.

Humans, irrespective of where they are from or their affiliations and what their interests might be, need to be recognised.

Recognition is a fundamental human need and right with research clearly illustrating that people emotionally prosper when they are embraced and welcomed into the group or community.

Anarchy - is misunderstood,
 but has an
 inherent decency about it.

Democracy is about recognizing your fellows and with that allowing them to be an integral and so useful part of our community.

Indigenous people traditionally enjoyed a powerful tribal culture in which the expectations of individuals were defined and adherence to those values was demanded, but within and around that was a freedom that most today would consider anarchy.

The perverse tolerance and liberty introduced by the invading Englanders, along with their foreign ways, destroyed existing inherent tribal culture and through the application of a militaristic and authoritarian colonialism built around those who had survived here successfully for 40 000 years a way of life they didn’t understand, and mostly still don’t.

Democracy in its truest sense, as opposed to the present plutocracy, is what all Australians need, or maybe even the genuine exploration and understanding of anarchy.

Card tables and raptuous applause, not paddlocks and memory sticks

Never seen before security and other restrictive arrangements around Brisbane’s recent G20 forum where the reverse of how it should have been.

Where the G20 Summit should have been
held - card tables and rapturous applause.

Rose petals and red carpets should have been thrown down before the leaders of the world’s 20 richest economies, rather than barricades and bomb searches.

Money has always perverted human values and ideals, that’s a generalization, but accurate and timely, and so rather than meeting in secretive and secluded places those same leaders should have gathered around a few card tables at the city’s King George Square.

An appreciative audience should have looked on, cheering as the leaders agreed to liberalize the world economy, making certain that the less than one percent that control most of it, agree to share their spoils with the rest of the world.

The cheering and applause would not have slowed when those G20 “men in suits” voted unanimously to instigate sweeping changes around the world to ensure everyone would not only have something to eat, but that their homes would be secure and the political intrigue with which the world is riddled, would vanish to be replaced by hitherto unseen transparency, friendship, compassion and collaboration.

Amid the continuing rapturous applause, the delegates would commit as one, vowing to act in unison with neighbouring and distant countries as they worked to build a world community in which contemporary Western lifestyles would be softened to allow less developed countries to prosper and edge ahead.

With the world fed, housed and thirsts quenched, and the economy broken to become a servant of man, rather than the reverse, the G20 leaders would have packed up their papers, folded their tables, acknowledged the crowd and taken an economy flight home.

Utopian flights of fancy always stumble and fall when reality intervenes, especially when it is the hard-edged, brutal and unforgiving economic convictions to which the contemporary world has willingly surrendered its kindness, fairness and decency.

Collusion and conspiracy breeds behind closed doors and the transparency allowed by the bright light of day is quickly obscured by darkened windows, cloistered and secreted away in brief cases and on memory sticks, hidden from public gaze by locks and impenetrable codes.

Endless arguments justify the G20 retreat from public gaze, but surely if what is discussed and decided upon is in the broad and best interests of ordinary folk, from the bloke baking your bread to the woman in charge of this newspaper, then why can’t it be laid out for all to see, and consider?

It can’t, not because of the aforementioned arguments, rather because it is simply not fair and despite the swagger and fist-pumping of G20 leaders it is about further entrenching an economic inequality that favours a few and disadvantages most.