BECAUSE THE JOURNEY HERE IS ACROSS A FLAT WORLD
My mother journeyed here from England in the late thirties as part of England`s stolen generation. My mother had been bought by Bernardo Homes to fulfill the needs of the white ladies who were the partners of those furthering the great British kingdom across the colonies. They needed `white` ladies in waiting because many of the English ladies felt the darker, coloured girls were in fact dirty and didn’t like being touched by them. So in England the poverty ridden poor and the gypsies were taken to be trained as personal maids. All pretty horrific, court cases still pending etc., but it is not these stolen ones, or black lives or yellow maidens I want to talk about, but the `flat world`.
It is so easy to carry a proven fact in your mind yet not let it intrude into your reality. My mother knew the world was round, she had a world globe in the house but that didn’t contradict her knowledge that the world was also flat. Her journey to Australia by ship proved that, it was flat all the way. Although cold south winds would blow in winter, which she accepted sensibly was in the middle of the year, rather than December. Those south winds in her mind and in her comments to me, blew from the north. And, we all know the cold winds blow from the North Pole.
You may at this point of reading wish to stop and examine your own mind for these `parallel inconsistencies`. They could be simple, like always saying you get to work early, while in fact normally you arrive late or you always put the bin out which you don`t and so on.
Many things become indeterminate inconsistencies that don`t fit the `golden path` of our lives, so we negate them. I say negate because we certainly dont forget them, we just dont accept them as a real part of our lives. Because the inconsistencies may well be an important fact of someone else’s `golden path`.
Let me digress a moment, I used to sail on racing yachts and in our crew was a Swiss man who was worth a few million. He constantly told me (no good bludging uni student that I was) he came to this country with ten dollars in his pocket and in ten years was worth four or five million, completely self made. Then I met his dad, seemed his father was extremely wealthy, proud of his son who he had financed through uni. He had bankrolled his son`s business venture, based around the father`s patents. His father had established himself here in Australia a few years before his son arrived, organizing business, flattening the earth, so to speak.
Relationships are built on this dual realty of what is important at that moment, family/work, friendships/wife, children/child, right down to you and the dog. Interestingly mostly you never have to choose, balance, time and ritual hold fast. Particularly as all our literature, art, music, movies rely implicitly on our `willing suspension of disbelief`, across the world people are glued to screens awaiting `what happens next`, this perverse attachment to the magical components of social media invades all we are as a race and no more so than hash tag groups.
Social media is not new, just changed in form, Shakespeare wrote plays about love and sexuality, about age and acceptance, about race, colour and oppression, as did many others, in all forms of art. I attended a photographic display of racial subrogation that was on display, at a public park in Sean Reap. But all art is in itself `populist` like hit songs, movies etc, they are impacting on our lives then as the flat earth call forth our attention, the social message is disassociated from our daily lives.
Those who read history know that little has changed, man is still punishing the losers in his societies and is at war with anything that contravenes his `golden path` ideals. It is not hashtags we need or `conversations` or new laws. We need to start again and by this I mean give up all our preconceptions of truth, faith. Set aside our pain, our hurt. examine ourselves, then slowly move outward. First family then friends then subcultures, slowly moving outward, knowing that each individual is accounted for in our examination.
But We know that won`t happen, so I guess we will continue our journey across the flat earth with a broken GPS.
