Apocalyptic Days - Rock of Ages Blown Away
Apocalyptic Days
Rock of Ages Blown Away
These apocalyptic dust storms are becoming a little tiring. Everyone at the annual local tree fair stands around discussing everything but the weather for a change, trying to ignore the obvious disaster occurring all around us as insinuating tendrils of dry distant Lake Eyre slip into our nostrils and silt up our lungs.
There are less people buying trees this year. Everyone mingles on the margins of the old corroboree ground, gossipping round the edge of the racetrack whose green grass covers the old celebration circle of the Gumbaynggirr tribe. There was once a magical crystal-studded pool at one of the centres of the oval track, filled with pure water, studded and girt with clear quartz columns. It was bulldozed to a morass of broken rock and muddy soil two generations ago, desecrated by rednecks to ‘keep the boongs away’.
They created a muddy dam in another spot instead, to water the cattle that are fattened on the old corroboree ground. As I’m too fond of saying (in paraphrase of Joni Mitchell’s Parking Lot), you can’t know what you’ve lost when it’s gone.
It’s not as if the Gumbaynggirr tribe is extinct, or been displaced by the forced evictions and removals that were meted out to them by the invading Eurosurpers. They still live everywhere hereabouts, but the sacred corroboree ground is now a dream lurking somewhere in the soil.
My mother lived on the hill opposite the gates of the racecourse with my grandparents and her older sister Dolly, where they ran market gardens and nurtured fruit trees until the Great Depression. That was before imported fruit flies destroyed the local stone fruit industry, and before the region dried up and blew away. Much of Oz was enveloped in dustbowl conditions seventy and eighty years ago, just like the trashed middle portions of the United States. Most of the primordial forest along this eastern seaboard had just been decimated by the first massive wave of ‘land clearing’. That was the last time the dust blew this thickly; an old-time human lifetime ago.
My grandfather Richard is a tall pillar of rugged pink flesh in my memory, surmounted by a bushy white beard and a crumpled Stetson hat. He died when I was a toddler, but my Random Access Memory can still draw on images of the elderly Scotsman who took his new Aboriginal bride to the hill above the racetrack. My mother’s and her mother’s stories, and those of my Auntie Dolly, fill in a minute fraction of the vast gaps of my modern ignorance; all of them are long gone, now, and hardly anyone alive in this rural region remembers them today.
When my mother was a very little girl, playing on the hillside above the recently fenced-off racetrack, the vista that faced their house was comprised of the rugged hills where I now sit and write this little tract on a laptop. I didn’t know any of this when I moved here from the big Smoke twenty years ago; all my mother’s family were already dead or disappeared, and I was then unaware of the fact that I’ve come to inhabit the land of my mother’s childhood dreams – the mysterious gorge country of the then-unmapped hinterland. *
My mother’s family moved away in the Great Depression. When everything dried out Richard kept the family alive for the first year on bread and dripping, along with plague rabbits he hunted with a .22 single shot rifle. He sold up the waterless land on the hill and leased a milk bar café in a downstream town on the riverside closer to the Pacific Ocean. It was a real money-spinner in those straightened days, right at the spot where coaches and buses pulled up on the old dirt highway, to await the punt which would take them across the shark-infested Nambucca.
Richard gave a section of the land by the racetrack to two of the local clans of Gumbaynggirr men and women who survived on his block. In those days aboriginal people were classed as wildlife and, as they weren’t citizens of the country that had stolen their homes, they weren’t allowed to own land. So it was all taken away from them – including the little parcel Richard had given them, which was handed over to a local timber mill that still cuts scrappy vestiges of the once mighty forest and carves the surviving ironbark trees into pallets and tomato stakes.
As Auntie Dolly told me in the ’90s – when I finally found her in a Pentecostal refuge near the nation’s distant capital – Richard made enough money from the riverside shop to move his wife and daughters to Sydney, a place where he could never stand to stay. He spent his remaining years in the bush, remitting monies to his family but living in places remote from their hearth; though perhaps not as remote as the place where I write this now.
Fanning the Flames
The fire in the valley had almost gone out when the dust storm arrived. Now tendrils of smoke are all but invisible in the overwhelming mass of vaguely reddish greyness. The dawn of the first dust storm (three days ago) was all red skies over paradise, and as the morning progressed an orange haze became a muddy morass that slowly filled your airways and coated all the newly minted spring leaves in a fine dusty powder.
I’m told that sixteen thousand tonnes of soil is blowing across the coast and into the ocean each and every hour. It’s hard to say how bad the fires are, but very little smoke is evident to my clogged senses. Award-winning documentary maker David Bradbury recently warned what could happen if the proposed open-cut uranium mine in central Oz goes ahead, and millions of tonnes of radioactive tailings are strewn across the landscape each month. Any further dust storms will then be leavened with alpha and beta particles and sweep across the most populated areas of the country. +
Of course, co-opted ‘experts’ have had their say, too. They claim such a scenario is ‘unlikely’ – which is also the way other ‘experts’ describe the dust storms we’re currently surviving. They even have the gall to suggest that radioactive particles will be ‘diluted’ by masses of surrounding dust. These morons don’t seem to have any idea about radioactive fallout or contamination. You can’t ‘dilute’ radioactive particles. They either enter your body – and wreak terrible havoc - or they don’t.
Many people will fail to recall what happened after Chernobyl went sky high and spread poison round the world. When a hundred tonnes of radioactive Ukrainian mixed herbs arrived on the docks of Oz, the ‘minister in charge’ allowed it to be ‘diluted’ (at a 10:1 ratio) with clean, non-radioactive herbs. This only served to spread the poison more widely through the population. I haven’t eaten European cheeses (or herbs) since 1986, but of course, hardly anyone will realise that the most ‘benign’ fallout from Chernobyl – Caesium 137 – has a half-life of just under forty years. Most will accept the assurances of ‘public health authorities’, just as they do with regard to GM foods and pesticides, herbicides and other agents of ecocide.
‘Clean’ dust is bad enough, thanks. All you people who think nuclear power is a clean alternative to toxic fossil fuels have been grossly misled by industrialists with (in)vested interests and their show pony spokesturds. Or perhaps you believe you’re immune to the cancers which are expanding through the world’s populations of humans and other animals, or think that making doctors and lawyers and weapon makers richer is a good idea.
Future Shock
The noise of the windstorm is deafening, a continual nagging susurrus amidst tidal surges of roaring atmospheric waves. In past years such winds have driven many new settlers mad, sending them scurrying back to cocooning cities and towns. After a few days the noise can drive people mad; one year back in the ’90s I watched more than a dozen relationships shatter under the strain around here, in one fractious winter when this little valley was almost completely depopulated.
It wasn’t very cold; it never is, here in the subtropics. But the wind proved unbearable to many who were not securely fastened to the earth, or secure in themselves. The women left first, hotly pursued by their men. Now most of them live at the beach, or back in the cities.
Better than living ‘On The Beach’, I guess. But it’s far better to be active today than radioactive tomorrow. Help fight the good fight, folks – vote Green, live green and stand in the paths of corporate bulldozers, if you want to be on the side of the saints. Stop the destruction and replant your little patch of earth.
As my mother’s mother would have said, “Saints preserve us!” But after all’s said and done and all demiurges are appeased, no-one can preserve us but we, ourselves.
The more things change…
- R.A.
PS – The neo-Reichian cloudbuster seems to have worked quite well to decrease the intensity of the fires. I’ll have to try it on the local manifestation of this semi-continental dust storm, too…
* See Second Chance Tortoise in these pages for the story.
+ See the New Illuminati
Images - http://i.usatoday.net/weather/_photos/2009/09/23/sydney-dust1x-topper-medium.jpg
& author’s
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