MAS215 Theorising Media Essay 2 2017
MAS215—Theorising Media Essay 2
Word limit: 2000 words (excluding reference list)
Due: Midnight 30 October (Week 12)
Answer one of the following questions.
o You must cite a minimum of six academic sources, including at least three from the
MAS215 unit reader and at least three that you have found independently. You are
welcome to use more obviously.
o All essays are submitted electronically via Turnitin.
o Late penalties will be applied at the rate of 10% per day, inclusive of weekends and
public holidays.
Marking criteria: You will be marked against the following criteria in this essay:
o Does the essay stay focused on the question? Does the essay do what the
question asks?
o Does the essay show sufficient critical engagement with relevant and sufficient
readings from the MAS215 unit reader?
o Does the essay show critical engagement with sufficient independently sourced,
relevant and appropriate academic publications?
o Does the essay identify appropriate theoretical concepts & theorists?
o Does the essay show sufficient knowledge and understanding of the relevant
theory?
o Does the essay demonstrate critical and analytical thinking?
o Does the essay demonstrate relational thinking? (Does the essay make
connections between the set texts and the theory, and to other theoretically
relevant ideas and information?)
o How well does the essay use academic research to support the analysis? Are
there enough citations?
o Essay writing skills: essay structure, paragraphing, sentence structure, clarity of
expression etc.
o Appropriate and accurate referencing (in-text HARVARD style citation and list of
references).
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay 2 2017
Q.1 Critically compare, in light of postcolonial theory, both the lyrics and video of A. B.
Original’s song ‘26 January’ (2016) and Tim Blair’s newspaper article ‘Last drinks in
Lakemba: Tim Blair takes a look inside Sydney’s Muslim Land’ (The Daily Telegraph August
18, 2014). You may draw on postcolonial notions such as: resistance; otherness;
orientalism; hybridity and ambivalence in your comparative analysis. [The official video
for ‘26 January’ may be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ9qeX4gUeo]
A.B. Original (2016) ‘26 January’ from Reclaim Australia, Golden Era Records
You can call it what you want
But it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Fuck that, homie
You can come and wave your flag
But it don’t mean a thing to me
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Fuck that, homie
You can call it what you want
But it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Fuck that, homie
You can come and wave your flag
But it don’t mean a thing to me
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Fuck that, homie
They said, “Hey, Briggs, pick a date” (okay)
“You know, one we can celebrate” (for sure)
“Where we can come together (yeah)
Talk about the weather, call that Australia Day”
I said, “How about March 8th?” (that’s a good one)
And we can do it on your Nan’s grave (got that, bitch?)
We can piss up, piss on her face
Get lit up and burn out like Mark Skaife
They screaming, “love it or leave it” (love it!)
I got more reason to be here, if you could believe it
Won’t salute a constitution or who’s underneath it
Turn that flag to a noose, put a cease to your breathing
I can’t get in my whip, I get a ticket for that
I get a DWB, and that’s a ‘Driving Whilst Black’
I turn the other cheek, I get a knife in my back
And I tell ’em it hurts, they say I overreact
So fuck that! (fuck that!)
You can call it what you want
But it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
(Hey, Briggs!) Fuck that, homie
You can come and wave your flag
But it don’t mean a thing to me
No, it just don’t mean a thing
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay 2 2017
I said celebrate the heretic anytime outside Jan 26 (anytime)
That’s the date for them suckers doing that sucker shit (that’s true!)
That’s that land-taking, flag-waving attitude
Got this new Captain Cook dance to show you how to move (move it)
How you wanna raise a flag with a rifle
To make us want to celebrate anything but survival?
Nah, you watching tele for The Bachelor
But wouldn’t read a book about a fuckload of massacres? (what?)
I remember all the blood and what carried us (I remember)
They remember twenty recipes for lamingtons (yum)
Yeah, their ancestors got a boat ride
Both mine saw them coming until they both died
Fuck celebrating days made of misery (fuck that)
While Aus still got the black history (that’s true)
And that shirt will get you banned from the Parliament
If you ain’t having a conversation, well then we starting it
You can call it what you want
But it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Fuck that, homie
You can come and wave your flag
But it don’t mean a thing to me
No, it just don’t mean a thing!
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Nah, it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Nah, it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Nah, it just don’t mean a thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Nah, it just don’t mean a
Motherfucking thing
No, it just don’t mean a thing
Wave it, wave it baby
Wave it, wave it, eat the flag
Wave it, wave it mama
Wave that flaggy, wear the flag
Wave it, wave it baby (what you gonna do?!)
Wave it, wave it, wave it baby!
Wave it, wave it mama
Wave that flaggy
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay 2 2017
Tim Blair (2014) ‘Last drinks in Lakemba: Tim Blair takes a look inside Sydney’s Muslim
Land’, The Daily Telegraph August 18
The Lakemba Hotel is one of the last Anglo holdouts in Sydney’s otherwise Middle-Eastern southwestern
suburb. Frankly, the old joint — it opened in 1928 — isn’t putting up much resistance. Most
nights the bar is closed by 8.30pm or so, because by then what few customers it attracts are
insufficient to cover running costs. Still, it’s friendly and hospitable. Staffer Poppy helpfully showed
me to my $50-a-night room, which is the only option in Lakemba for anyone seeking short-term
rented accommodation. There are no other hotels or motels. In fact, there are no other rooms
besides number 15 in the hotel’s residential wing. All the others are taken by boarders, one of whom
has been here for 20 years.
It isn’t exactly luxurious. The room has a sink, which is nice, but nothing else by way of amenities.
There isn’t even a Gideon’s Bible. Instead, reflecting certain demographic changes in the area, there
is a Ramadan eating schedule.
Lakemba may be only 30 minutes from the centre of Sydney, yet it is remarkably distinct from the
rest of the city. You can walk the length of crowded Haldon St and not hear a single phrase in English.
On this main shopping strip the ethnic mix seems similar to what you’d find in any Arabic city.
Australia may be multicultural, but Haldon St is a monoculture.
This does have its advantages. If you’re ever in need of groceries at 3am, head to Lakemba, where
shopkeepers keep unusual hours, particularly during Ramadan. The food is delicious, of course. I
recommend La Roche and Al Aseel, but all restaurants in Haldon St are good. If you’re unfamiliar
with Lebanese food, just go for anything with the word “mixed”.
And then there are the downsides.
A few weeks ago a large crowd of mostly young men assembled outside the Lakemba Hotel. Waving
black flags, the men chanted: “Palestine is Muslim land. The solution is jihad.”
I asked a non-Islamic local about that night. “You should see them when they really go off,” she said.
“That was nothing.” Another non-Islamic woman said young men sometimes shouted “sharmuta” at
her from their cars. She looked up the word online and discovered it was an Arabic term for
prostitute.
Across the road from the hotel is the Islamic Bookstore, which bills itself as “your superstore of
Islamic knowledge”. Three books caught my eye. Here’s an extract from Muhammad bin Jamil Zino’s
“What a Muslim Should Believe”, a handy Q & A guide to the Koran’s instructions:
“Question 43: Is it allowed to support and love disbelievers? “Answer: No, it is not allowed.”
Well, that might explain a few things. “The History of the Jews” seems a bland enough title, but the
back cover quotes lines from Martin Luther that were used by the Nazis: “The sun never did shine on
a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people as they.”
The book offers this view, on page 16: “No one can deny the fact that the Jews are the worst kind of
barbarian killers the world has ever known!!! The decent great Adolf Hitler of Germany never killed
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay 2 2017
in the manner of the Jews!!! Surely only mad people or those who love killing infants, pregnant
women and the infirm will think differently.”
It goes on and on. Another extract: “Humor and jokes are strictly forbidden by the Jewish religion.”
This will come as a surprise to just about every Jew on earth.
Another must-read is Mansoor Abdul Hakim’s charming 2009 text, “Women Who Deserve to go to
Hell.” Turns out there are quite a lot of them.
“Some people keep asking about the denizens of Hell and the reason why women will go to hell in
large numbers,” writes Hakim in the book’s foreword before listing various types of hell-bound
females, including the grumbler, the quarrelsome woman, women with tattoos and women who
refuse to have sex during menstruation.
“Men’s perfection is because of various reasons: intelligence, religion, etc,” Hakim explains. “At most,
four women have this perfection.”
Mix this level of ignorance and loathing with the Islamic community’s high rate of unemployment,
and conflict is inevitable. The Islamic riots of 2012 ended up in central Sydney but began here in
Lakemba and surrounding suburbs, where seething young Muslims formed their plans, including
printing signs reading “Behead all those who insult the prophet”.
One of the men arrested in those riots was Ahmed Elomar, who was subsequently convicted for
bashing a police officer with a flagpole.
His lawyer claimed that Elomar was “overcome with the occasion”. The occasion continues. Lately,
Elomar’s brother Mohamed has posed with severed heads in Iraq, where he is fighting alongside
fundamentalist Islamic State extremists.
Back at the pub, a staffer mentions rare moments of cultural overlap. “Sometimes the young blokes
will come in here to buy Scotch,” she says. “They try to hide themselves under hoodies.” But when
the staffer sees them later in the street, they don’t return her greeting. The hotel is haram — sinful
and forbidden. Those early closing hours will eventually become permanent.
***
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
Q.2 Critically analyse, from an ecocritical perspective, the Alaska Wilderness League’s
short film ‘Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’ (2009) and Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Ghost species’
(Granta 2008). You may draw on such ecocritical concerns as: the nature/culture binary;
anthropocentrism; ecocentrism; and environmental activism, in your comparative
analysis.
Alaska Wilderness League (2009) ‘Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=7&v=FXvLh5YdAeo]
Robert Macfarlane (2008) ‘Ghost Species’ (extract), Granta 102: The New Nature Writing
[https://granta.com/ghost-species/]
It was to Methwold Hythe that Justin and I were heading that morning. ‘The Hythe’, as the older
people who live there call it, is an ancient village on the eastern edge of the Fens, just before the
peat gives way to sand. In the late seventeenth century, after Vermuyden had done his work, a few
miles’ travel north and west would have taken you into the thick of the blue-black loamy Fens. But
travelling a few miles east and south would have brought you into the Brecklands, England’s Arabia
Deserta, an area of caramel-coloured sand so extensive that an inland lighthouse was once erected
to orient travellers, and so unstable that in 1688 a prolonged south-westerly wind caused the sand
to form into a marching dune that buried a village and choked a river.
Justin knew Methwold Hythe very well, since he had been working there on and off for nearly a
decade. Justin is a photographer who is fascinated by people of East Anglia – rabbit catchers, reed
cutters, eel fishermen – whose rural ways of life have been brought to the brink of extinction by
changes in the landscape. He calls them ‘the forgotten people of the flatlands’, though he also thinks
of them as ‘ghosts’. He has taken around 14,000 photographs, all on colour slide film; of these, he is
satisfied with about eighty, and he is proud of perhaps a couple of dozen.
Among his different types of ghost, Justin is most interested in East Anglia’s family farmers – the
agrarianists and smallholders who still muddle by on a modest acreage. Until the twentieth century,
the agrarian tradition in East Anglia was strong: thousands of family-owned farms existed, worked by
people whose craft and local knowledge had been acquired over centuries and passed down through
generations.
But then, in the first half of the 1900s, came the mechanization of British farming. The application of
the internal combustion engine to agriculture meant that the horse was usurped by the tractor, that
the boundaries of the village exploded and that the number of people required to work the land was
enormously reduced. When the drive to maximize productivity began in the years before the Second
World War, the flatness of East Anglia made it an ideal landscape for conversion to big-field or
‘prairie’ cultivation. Now, very few small farms are left in the Fens. Those that have survived are
islanded by the landholdings of the mega-farms which now dominate. The rest have vanished: driven
to extinction by competition with agribusiness, by the tangled demands of farming regulation, by
climate change and by the lack of a younger generation willing to take over their running.
A mile or so west of Methwold Hythe, on Broad Drove, Justin stopped the van by a high hedge of
hawthorn and ash trees. ‘Let’s walk from here,’ he said. The wind was still strong, and it stunned the
skin of my hands and face. I followed Justin down a muddy track, past a blue boiler-suited scarecrow
that was sitting astride a rusty bicycle, and into a ramshackle farmyard. There were five big barns, a
mobile home and a lean-to shed on to which twenty-four spanners had been screwed so that they
spelled out A W Vincent. Two of the barns were open-fronted and they were filled with a slew of
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
objects: rusted pitchforks, seed drills, grease tins, pieces of timber, tyres, an old refrigerator and
enamelled signs from the 1940s and 1950s exhorting you to feed your dog on shapes! and buy
goodyear: signs of the times! Nailed to the outside of one of the barns was a series of what looked
like metal ribcages. They were, I realized, the latticed iron seats of old tractors and drill machines,
polished to a shine by years of use. The only new thing in sight was a tractor: bright scarlet, blackwheeled
and shiny. It seemed incongruous, like an outsize child’s toy.
This was Severall’s Farm, a twelve-acre smallholding farmed by Arthur Vincent and Henry Everett,
both in their sixties. They knew Justin well and didn’t mind him walking their land. Down by one of
the stripfields, we found Arthur. He was pulling and banding leeks. ‘Cold work,’ he said. ‘I used to
swear I’d never be dealing with winter crops, only now I don’t have a choice.’
[…]
Out by the southern hedge boundary of Severall’s Farm, we discovered a rural riddle. Two blue
plastic children’s chairs had been placed facing one another, as though their occupants had once
been in conversation. Nettles had grown into and through the lattice of the seats, binding them into
place. Here, as at the tabernacle, the impression was of the wild Fen reasserting itself: fingers of
vegetation reaching up to draw these human structures back down into the ground.
[…]
After half a mile or so, Justin and I emerged from our hedgerow on to a rutted lane and brushed the
twigs and leaves from our clothes and hair. From there, it was only a short distance into Methwold
Hythe itself. Near the crossroads in the centre of the village, we turned left into a farmyard with a
vast chalk-walled corn barn, its door propped shut with a fifteen-foot scaffold pole, and its red-tiled
roof slowly caving in.
This was the Wortley farm, belonging to Eric Wortley and his identical twin sons, Peter and Stephen.
It was Eric in particular that I had come to see. Justin knocked on a whitewashed door. ‘Come in,’ we
heard a high voice cry, and Justin creaked the door open. I followed him into the kitchen, ducking my
head under the lintel.
[…]
Eric unclasped a hand and pointed to the empty chair pulled up tight against the stove. ‘Sit down
here by the fire, get yourselves warm.’ Justin took a third chair from the kitchen table. We sat
together quietly for a few moments, hands splayed towards the heat. A saucepan of water grumbled
on top of the stove. A ginger-and-black cat was curled up on the brick ledge nearby, enjoying the
warmth.
Eric is ninety-eight years old; Peter and Stephen are somewhere in their fifties. Between them Eric
and his sons have put in more than 150 years of service on the farm. Eric is old enough that his early
experiences on the land would not have been much different from those of someone who had
grown up in the 1700s. No one knows quite how long a Wortley farm has been in the Hythe, but
Wortley is accepted to be one of the most venerable names in the village. At present, though, with
neither Peter nor Stephen married or with children, there is little prospect of the farm’s survival.
They are the last of their line: ghosts of a kind.
Eric tilted his head back and leaned towards me, trying to focus. ‘These eyes of mine,’ he said,
regarding me with a grin, ‘they’re so smeary, they even make you look pretty. That’s how bad
they’ve got. Have you come far today, then?’
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
In a way I had come very far indeed. Only thirty miles or so from my own home; only thirty miles or
so from Justin’s. But to step into Eric’s farm was to step back in time. Eric was born in 1910, in the
house in which we were sitting. He had lived there for nearly a century, and the house had barely
changed around him. Apart from a battered white electric hob and oven in the corner of the kitchen,
little dated the room from after the First World War. Whitewashed walls yellowed by decades of
stove smoke. A free-standing wooden dresser with wide eye-like cabinet windows. Gun hooks on the
crooked ceiling beam of the room, from one of which hung Eric’s flat tweed cap, its rim and crown
worn to a shine. A dark pinewood kitchen table.
‘That’s the same table I sat around as a boy,’ said Eric. ‘I was the eighth of twelve, not thirteen,
because Mother had one that died when I was two year old. What was there? There was Dolly, John,
Harry, Javie, Tom, Peggy, then me. I was eighth.’ He half-sang this list of names, with the lilting
Norfolk habit of prolonging and deepening the first syllable of a word, and shortening and
heightening the second. ‘And then there’s Mary, Dick, Renie and Ted. That’s how they was born.
Every two year Mother had another one. Now I’m the only one alive out of them all. Whether I been
lucky I don’t know. Still, I’ve had a good life, I’ve always done my word and I’ve always kept here.’
Distance doesn’t mean the same to Eric as to most other people. He lives in an unexpanded world. In
ninety-eight years, he has barely left his parish. He has never gone to London. He has been twice to
the Norfolk coast and once to Norwich, the county capital of Norfolk, about forty miles from the
Hythe. At the end of the first afternoon I spent with Eric, a year or more ago, just before I got into
my car to drive home, he asked me where I was returning to. ‘Cambridge,’ I said. ‘Will you be able to
get home tonight?’ he enquired kindly. ‘Won’t you need a place to stay?’
Eric has exceptional kinds of local knowledge. He knows the water tables, the weather habits and
the wind histories of every part of his parish. He holds in his head a detailed memory map of the
surrounding landscape. He has walked, ridden and ploughed every foot of his land countless times,
and watched its changes through decades as well as seasons. He knows the stories of the inhabitants,
living and dead, and the species of bird and animal that have thrived or failed here throughout the
twentieth century. And he has no interest in questions about the land that can be answered in the
abstract.
The historian and folklorist George Ewart Evans regarded the elders of the East Anglian countryside
as ‘survivors from another era’. ‘They belong,’ he wrote in 1961, ‘essentially to a culture that has
extended in an unbroken line since at least the early Middle Ages… The sort of knowledge that is
waiting to be taken down from the old people is always on the brink of extinction.’ But, Evans asked,
‘what is…the place of the small farmer in the new, evolving economy of today… Is there a future for
him? Or are we to be reconciled to his extinction, attributing it to something that was as inevitable
as a thunderstorm?’
Extinction presently seems inevitable. The Wortley farm, like almost all small farms in East Anglia,
now exists on a diminishing island of habitat. Approaching Methwold Hythe, Justin and I had driven
for miles through the land of the Shropshires, a mega-farm of over 12,000 acres. ‘Shroppy’s nearly
swallowed us up!’ Eric said to me that January afternoon, with indignation and a hint of pride that
they hadn’t been gulped. The scale of the Shropshires’ operation is immense. Two years ago, when
an unexpected May frost gripped the Fens, it was rumoured that they lost a million lettuces
overnight.
Disappearance of all kinds preoccupies Eric. There is a spectral quality to his vision: he sees the past
more naturally than he sees the present. The first time I went with Justin to visit him, on a hot
August day, Eric took his stick from behind the door and walked us round his meadows, farm
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
buildings and garden, talking all the while. I soon realized he was perceiving a different place from us:
a farm where fences were mended, where pigs rooted in the straw, where the great chalk barn was
uncracked and where horses grazed in the field behind the yard. ‘Ah, you know, the boys don’t see
these things that I see,’ he told me.
Listening to Eric talk that day, I was reminded of the evolutionary concept of ‘ghost species’, an idea
that entered conservation science in the mid-1980s. A ‘ghost’ is a species that has been out-evolved
by its environment, such that, while it continues to exist, it has little prospect of avoiding extinction.
Ghosts endure only in what conservation scientists call ‘non-viable populations’. They are the last of
their lines.
The soft-shell sea turtle is a ghost. The desert bighorn is a ghost. The tiger is a ghost, as is the sawfish.
Show specimens of these species may live on in zoos, parks or aquaria, carefully curated,
perpetuated through captive-breeding programmes. But hunting, habitat loss and pollution mean
that, in the wild, these creatures have now passed into their spectral phases. Some of the most
remarkable ghost species are to be found in the world’s coral reefs. In those great stone cities are
organisms about whose lives we know hardly anything and whose forms we can barely conceive of:
the mountainous star coral or the Nassau grouper. Some of these creatures are angelic in their form,
some demonic and none can exist outside the reef. They are almost all now ghosts, or near-ghosts,
as the world’s reefs are presently dying because of pollution, overfishing and, above all, the
increasing acidification of the oceans. If the world’s coral reefs are bleached into extinction, it will be
the first time that human action has successfully annihilated an entire ecosystem.
The species most likely to become ghosts are those that are most place-faithful – which is to say,
those that have evolved over long periods of time in response to the demands of a particular
environment: reef, desert or jungle. Species whose specialized skills are not exportable beyond that
environment and whose specialized needs cannot be satisfied elsewhere.
Historically, the idea of ghost species has been confined to the non-human kingdoms. But sitting in
Eric’s kitchen that January day, it seemed clear that there were also human ghosts: types of placefaithful
people who had been out-evolved by their environments – and whose future disappearance
was almost assured.
Eric, Justin and I talked on for two hours or so. Eric spoke often, and without sentiment, about what
had vanished from the Hythe during the century he had known it: pipes and pipe-smoking,
hedgerows, whistling and singing. ‘We sung when we were following the horse,’ he said, watching
the stove. ‘Or we whistled it on. They’d all be whistling then. Walking round, you’d hear whistling
from everyone working on the land. You’d stop and have a little chat over the hedgerow. Nowadays
you don’t hear anybody whistle. It’s all changed. It’s a quieter life now, because nobody’s on the
fields. Everybody in the village worked on the farms. Everybody now, well, they leave the village to
work. We all used to be a little family. Now I never speak to them.’
I asked him if the wildlife had changed. ‘Ah, well, nowadays you don’t see hardly no animals on the
land. A hare or two, mebbe. No birds, hardly any birds. We used to have birds’ eggses by the
hundred in boot boxes, full of eggses. Kestrels’ eggs, sparrowhawks’ eggs. One of those was a white
egg, another was a red egg – we’d climb up trees for them. A little old tomtit, a little jenny wren,
could lay fifteen or eighteen eggs. We had names for all the birds. The thrush was a fulfa. Mabish
meant mistlethrush, or maybe it was linnets. If you walked up to a hedge there’d be about twenty or
thirty birds’ nests about that time. They were thicker then, the birds. Tomtits, blue tits, jenny wrens,
especially the jenny wrens. I don’t see the wrens anymore.’
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
[…]
After we had left Eric, Justin suggested that we end the day with another walk. He parked near the
beginning of a rutted drove road that led off, arrow-straight, to the south-west. We walked up it for
a mile, past another tabernacle and a vast field of husky bean stems, and as we walked the weather
shifted around us. High monotone clouds blackened the sky to our north. The sunlight became cold
and blue: a storm light, whose twin effects were to give all standing water the appearance of zinc,
and to lessen depth perception, such that every element in the landscape seemed to exist on a
shared horizontal plane. Then a cold rainstorm blew in, belting big plump drops at us, and when we
turned our backs to the rain we saw that a double rainbow was arching above a row of poplars.
And then, to our north, two dazzlingly white birds lifted off from a black field, instantly drawing the
eye. The little egret used to be an exceptionally rare visitor to England. Then, in 1996, a pair bred in
East Anglia; there are now around fifty breeding pairs resident in the region. Climate change has
been an opportunity for this versatile species to increase its range, drawn across the Channel by the
increasingly hot summers of southern England.
That afternoon, the appearance of the birds seemed like a surprising sign of hope: a new species
making its home here, adapting to a changed environment. The egret is the whitest of any bird I
have ever seen, perhaps the whitest of all birds. And in that storm light the pair condensed the
sunshine to a magnesium-flare intensity. Justin and I watched as they beat away north on their
wings, into the black sky, whiter than ghosts.
***
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
Q.3 Critically analyse the short film ‘Across the Marshes: Plumstead to Cross Ness’, by Nick
Papadimitriou and John Rogers (2011), and the extract from Matt Condon’s Brisbane
(2010) from a psychogeographical perspective. You may like to discuss such
psychogeographical concerns such as: walking; marginal/marginalised urban spaces and
experiences; the re-enchantment of the cityscape; spatial history and ‘the past’; trauma;
and socio-cultural critique in your comparative analysis. [You may find ‘Across the
Marshes’ at https://vimeo.com/18843258]
Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers (2011) ‘Across the Marshes: Plumstead to Cross Ness’
[https://vimeo.com/18843258]
Matthew Condon (2010) Brisbane, University of New South Wales Press: Sydney (extract)
I have know it all my life – the large, dull, rectangular granite obelisk that marks the exact location
where explorer and New South Wales Surveyor General of Lands, John Oxley, set foot on the
northern bank of the Brisbane river in 1824 and proclaimed a settlement site. This was the white
birthplace of my city, the Caucasian holy ground, and although I had never stood before the obelisk,
it had always been there for me, somehow, like an unremarkable freckle on the body.
[…]
I take some photographs of the obelisk, just like Hurley. I imagine Oxley clambering up those moist
banks, though sharp walls of vine in his leather shoes, in his velveteen jacket, his hat off, his side
levers beaded with sweat on that steamy spring afternoon.
And still the wording and location of this obelisk trouble me. In Brisbane you don’t have occasion to
read many monument plaques. We have bronze statues of footballers. We have a space needle
owned by hairdressing entrepreneur, throwing eerie blue laser light across the river each evening.
We have street effigies of swagmen boiling billycans, left over from the World Exposition of 1988.
We have electrical power boxes covered in amateur portraits of a former premier or stick figures or
childish coloured patterns. The actual history of the city though is, by and large, a nameless jigsaw, a
book without an index.
So I turn to the works of prominent local historian, John Steele. In his 1972 book, The Explorers of
the Moreton Bay District 1770-1830, he reproduces extensive extracts from Oxley’s Field Books
regarding his journey up the Brisbane River in 1824. Oxley writes in his entry for Tuesday,
September 28, the date on our city’s obelisk: ‘… and we proceeded down the river, landing, about
three-quarters of a mile from our sleeping place, to look for water, which we found in abundance
and of excellent quality, being at this season a chain of pounds watering a fine valley. The soil good,
with timber and a few Pines, by no means ineligible station for the first settlement up the river.’
Then Oxley sailed his government cutter to the mouth of the river where it flushed out into Moreton
Bay.
In his footnote attached to the word ‘landing’, Steele writes, ‘probably at Frew Park, Milton. See
Truman, op.cit.’
What does he mean, Frew Park, Milton? Frew Park today is a derelict, empty inner-city plot of land,
the former home of Milton Tennis Centre that was purchased in 1915 by ‘Daddy Frew’, the longtime
president of the Queensland Lawn Tennis Association. By 1999 Tennis Queensland, crippled with
debt, had sold the centre to a developer. For months the abandoned tennis courts and wooden
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
stadium became home to vagrants. In April the following year it was torched by a 14-year-old
schoolboy. The development never eventuated. Frew Park is a kilometer up the river from the
obelisk at North Quay. Landing. The word used on the plaque attached to the obelisk. At Frew Park?
And who is Truman?
There is an earlier reference to Truman in a section of the book examining the choice of the site of
Brisbane. While Oxley favoured Breakfast Creek as the settlement site (later rejecting it for the fresh
water and strife with local Aborigines), he was also partial – according to those Field Books – to the
‘chain of ponds watering a fine valley’. T.C. Truman, the passage reveals, ‘convincingly argued in
Brisbane’s Courier-Mail in 1950 that the site of the ‘chain of ponds’ was in fact Milton, an old
riverside suburb and home to the famous XXXX brewery in the city’s inner-west. ‘The incident has
sometimes been construed as the discovery of the site of Brisbane,’ writes Steele.
So if the discovery of the site of Brisbane was at Milton, what was the obelisk doing at North Quay?
[…]
Now, as a middle-aged man, I decide to go down to the Milton landing site and follow the line of the
old creek in search of Oxley’s chain of ponds. As Truman writes: ‘I am told by old residents that there
were a chain of waterholes connected by the Western Creek which had its rise in a swamp with the
picturesque name of Red Jacket Swamp which has since become Gregory Park next to the Milton
State School. This creek used to flow through the areas now called Frew Park and Milton Park and
came out at Dunmore Bridge, on Coronation Drive. The last part of it has been converted into a
drain’.
I am quietly excited because the boy in me is discovering his city for the first time, tracing the steps
of his hero Oxley, erasing the fib. With the infinite confidence of a child I am convinced I’ll be able to
see beyond my time, beyond the office buildings and block of units and bitumen roads and
computer stores and tanning salons, and at the very least feel the shape of the natural landscape
that the surveyor general first stepped into. I can clearly imagine the landscape of my childhood in
Brisbane, 47 years ago, and what I remember is not fantastically different from what I can see in the
city today. The river hasn’t moved. The hills and gullies of the inner-west haven’t gone away. So why
couldn’t I go back less that another 150, and see Oxley’s valley?
I begin at the old Western Creek outlet on the river, as Oxley did, and work in the reverse of
Truman’s description. The drain that empties into the river, near the restaurant workers’ cigarette
tin, runs beneath Coronation Drive and the Oxley Centre. From a walkway underneath the drive it’s
still possible to see wooden fragments of the old Dunmore Bridge. Once under the Oxley Centre the
broad drain then passes beneath a stretch of road and railway line before it emerges again, as a
canal, running along the edge of Milton Park. In historical ignorance, I have brought my young son to
this park dozens of times: there is a metal children’s train he enjoys clambering over.
The grubby watercourse then takes a slight dogleg, turning to the north, and disappears beneath
Milton Road and the dilapidated open field of Frew Park and the former site of the Milton Bowl
bowling alley (where my mother played in a league for many years prior to its demolition) before
running beneath Gregory Park (and its cricket pitch and phantasmagoria of children’s swings where I
have also taken my boy too many times to remember). Gregory Park adjoins Milton State School,
where both my mother and grandfather were pupils. Grandfather and his wife, Freda, lived in nearby
Beck Street. So my maternal grandparents spent most of their life a few hundred metres from the
chain of ponds.
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
Having been born in Brisbane, I left the city in my early 20s and remained away for two decades,
returning to live in a house with my own family, also just a few hundred metres from the chain of
ponds. In total, my life and family history have intersected with Brisbane’s birthplace for almost a
century. I didn’t know it. I never knew the facts.
Today I walk the modern streets laid over Oxley’s landing place. I imagine the location of his
campsite and the place where he jotted in his Field Book, possibly by the light of the fire, that here
was a place ‘by no means an ineligible station for a first settlement up the river’. I continue on foot
beyond Gregory Park to the sharp ridges of Paddington, in Brisbane’s inner west, and look south
towards the river and delineate, for the first time, the scoop of earth that was Oxley’s ‘fine valley’. I
go home, a few minutes’ walk away, to my house perched at the edge of a side gully of that valley. In
a matter of hours, my view of the city has been altered forever.
Late in the evening, with the house and suburb, I sit out in the cold on the back deck and peer down
the forested gully in the direction of the river. It is quiet except for the occasional scratch and hiss of
possums through the Chinese elms and gum trees. In September of 1824 Oxley must have heard this
too; the devilish guttural screech of the possums; the strange scampering of brush turkeys through
the undergrowth. He must have smelled the wood smoke from the Aboriginal camps, not as sharp as
his own fire, but spread and strained through the eucalypts.
I think about the obelisk. How are there are two sites claiming ownership to Oxley’s landing. How
almost two centuries have passed and nobody has bothered to clarify the record; to set things
straight. I wonder why nobody cared enough to do that.
I recall how historical landmarks in this city have often been demolished on quiet nights just like this
– the Bellevue Hotel, Cloudland – and yet they left the obelisk. Here John Oxley Landed to Look for
Water Discovered the Site of this City. Here, an outpost for recalcitrant convicts. Here, a penal
colony built to take the pressure off another, more powerful, more robust settlement. A secondary
place. Something that germinated out of a government order, not from those human wellsprings of
hope, endeavour, courage. A harsh, hot tableau of public servants in their woolen uniforms and high
boots designed for an English climate, out to please southern masters. A town for the sharp talk of
spivs and murderers; a violent place built on deception and aggression; and with them the
entrepreneurs feeding off this government project. And at the top of Queen Street – not far from
the present-day Executive Building and seat of state government – was erected the huge wooden Aframe
where early transgressors were publicly flogged. Government and citizen. Cruelty and fear.
Fact of fiction.
I thought I knew my city. What else is there I don’t know? Then I have a thought that brings the cold
of the night into my stomach. I also know absolutely nothing of my own family’s history in this place,
beyond the two sets of grandparents. And even their stories are unclear, fuzzy at the edges with the
omissions, diversions, false scents and often out-and-out obstructions offered by surviving family
members over the decades. Have I shared the same collective Brisbane mindset that I couldn’t be
bothered addressing the truth of the Oxley monument? Is this what we are like here?
I remember something Brisbane-born author David Malouf once wrote about this place in his essay
‘A First Place: The Mapping of a World’. He discusses the city’s topography – ‘walk two hundred
metres in almost any direction outside the central city and you get a view – a new view. It is all
gullies and sudden vistas.’ He then writes: ‘Wherever the eye turns here it learns restlessness, and
variety and possibility, as the body learns effort. Brisbane is a city that tires the legs and demands a
certain sort of breath. It is not a city, I would want to say, that provokes contemplation, in which the
mind loses itself in space. What it might provoke is drama, and a kind of intellectual play, delights in
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
new and shifting views, and this because each new vista as it presents itself here is so intensely
colourful.’
I understand, shockingly, at this moment on the back deck, that I have lived with some form of
historical amnesia. That I have not contemplated; that I am in truth, disconnected from the place
where I came into this world, when I thought I was a part of its fabric, that it was essential to who I
am.
Here, on this night, I think of the obelisk over beside the expressway, the granite dark and gathering
due on its river side;’ the words John Oxley on the plaque sporadically illuminated by vehicle
brakelights where it faces the traffic, and wonder why my city of Brisbane grew up on a lie.
