bilateral kellerberrin

Two jokes from the dinner table:
1. Re the dole: David said, “well, the hours are good, but the wages are crap”.
2. Re New Zealand’s reputation of sending bludging immigrants to Australia: Tim said, “when someone migrates from NZ to OZ, the average IQ of both countries rises”.

I feel kinda irritable. I’m not sure that I am enjoying this writing as much as I was. Perhaps its because during the last four days there has been an explosion of stimulus, and I’m overwhelmed by it all – what can I possibly do to grasp everything that’s gone on? (the Cunderdin workshop, Anne’s activities, the med students and the anthropologists, on top of all the “normal” things that go on in the course of a day). And why should I even try? I wonder if I’m becoming accustomed to slowness. Just a few small things happening are enough to keep my thoughts revolving fruitfully, and any more than that seems like an overload. My process in Kellerberrin has been a rhythm of “exposure and withdrawal” – periods of time “out there” allowing things to happen – meeting people, looking around etc – followed by periods of retiring to my place and being alone. It reached a kind of equilibrium in this way, and maybe that balance has been tilted in the last few days…

Last night we had David Blair over to dinner. David is a friend of IASKA. Earlier in the day, he’d changed the locks on the cinema, and brought the key over for me. We invited him to dinner, and he rubbed his hands together and offered to bring the wine. I was pleased to hear that, as I’d heard he has a serious wine cellar, and it’s not easy to get a decent bottle out here. We baked some (frozen) whiting from the butcher, Anne steamed broccoli and brussels, and Tim and Cristina brought an excellent salad.

David has lived in the district for fifty years. He worked as a farmer until the late 90s, when interest rates and other economic issues forced him to sell up. Since then, he’s taught agriculture at the TAFE, and seems to still have a finger in many pies, wool lobby groups and so on.

We talked for so long, and about so many different things. Tim and David had lots to say about shearing, the “world’s most difficult job” – and about the comical attempts by Aussie inventors to get rid of shearers by inventing a machine to remove the wool. None of these machines seem to be able to do the job as well as a human. They range from robotic things which hold the sheep and shave off the fleece, to systems involving administering a chemical which induces a shock in the animal and causes the wool to just “fall off” – with very patchy results. So, much to their distaste, farmers are stuck with human shearers for the time being.

It’s hard to get good shearers, apparently. Young blokes don’t want to do it, the pay is not terrific unless you dedicate yourself to hard work for months on end travelling from farm to farm. The average age of a shearer is 42.

I love having an expert in the room that I can quiz about things which are crappily covered by the newspaper. I asked about live export of sheep. David said that originally, live export to the middle east was all about the fact that they didn’t have coolroom systems set up there to receive vast quantities of meat. So we shipped em live, and they slaughtered them over there. Also, Halal slaughtering techniques are pretty specific about how you kill, so originally the Muslim markets were happier doing it themselves.

But now there’s no need to export live. All Aussie slaughterhouses use Halal techniques, and are accredited annually by an official guy (from Saudi Arabia?) who pockets some cash and says “yep, all in order here, thanks for that.” And there’s plenty of cool room facilities in the middle east to receive as much pre-killed meat as we could send.

As far as the cruelty to animals thing goes, David doesn’t reckon its an issue. It takes four days for the boat to arrive from WA, and he said it’s no different for the sheep than being on a truck. The real reason the industry is resistant to live export is that there are two big export operators in Australia who would lose a lot of business, and they have been powerful in lobbying against change. It’s a shame, because we would gain a lot of employment here if we killed and prepared the sheep ourselves.

As chance would have it, yesterday I bumped into Jeff, who has taken up a job in the “abs” (abbatoir) in Tammin. I asked him how his job was going, and what exactly it was he does there. Turns out he’s the man with the knife – the sheep are stunned with some sort of stun-gun, to keep them still, and then Jeff gets a big sharp blade and slits their throats. How many a day, I asked. About 900, he replied.

Tim felt that not enough was taught in Australian schools about the importance of sheep and shearing in Australia’s history. The country was built on the sheep’s back, right? I felt a bit uncomfortable about this, especially since I’d been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, where he says that the sheep is an incredibly destructive animal which fucks up land wherever it goes. David agreed, and said that the few attempts to set up kangaroo meat and leather export have faltered partly because of European resistance to farming an animal they regard as our national icon. This is a serious marketing problem, because ‘roos are not as harmful to the land, and their meat and leather is of very high quality.

We also quizzed David about Aboriginal issues. He’s done a lot of travelling around WA, and worked with many communities recommending strategies for agricultural self-management. He’s got some strong opinions about the “Aboriginal Problem” – which is all about a widespread loss of self-respect or something. About the unwillingness of the younger generations to take up the reigns, or take responsibility. It seems to also have something to do with divergent attitudes to “work”. David said that they are basically lazy.

Lazy is such a loaded term – I mean, until recently I had been on the dole for five years, but I don’t think I’d been “lazy”. It’s just that paid work was something which took me away from what I was really interested in doing, rather than bringing me closer to it (which it might have done if I wanted a “career” or to buy a house). But it IS possible that if the dole had not been available to me, as a support for my art practice, that I would have had to be a bit more entrepreneurial, a bit more strategic about how to best exploit my skills to support myself.

Perhaps this is beside the point. But all that data – infant mortality (very high), life expectancy (25 years less than for whites), per capita people in jails (Aboriginal people 70% of all prisoners) etc etc, it’s pretty depressing. Actually, its a horrible indictment on a country that would send a billion bucks to an Indonesian natural disaster, but doesn’t rate this chronic local stuff very highly on the agenda.

I don’t even know how to write about the things that David said. I feel so ignorant, and nervous about making any kind of statement, judgement or suggestion. Is this how many of us city-dwelling folks feel? We just haven’t had enough personal experience to even have an opinion. Or are we just gutless bleeding hearts who are afraid of being accused as racists if we dare suggest that Aboriginal people are to some extent the cause of their own problems? Yeah, understanding historical devastation, versus the importance of an individual to take control of his/her own life, right? David’s vast experience perhaps gives him a licence to strongly condemn the hopelessness of the situation. But his pessimism makes me uneasy, and that probably says more about me than anything else.