With under two weeks to go until Propagandhi release their new album, Supporting Caste, the band is joining us for a series of Dispatches as they tour Australia and New Zeland.
My destination today is the Syndey Observatory and Astronomy Museum, a quiet Victorian edifice suffused of brass and oak that one can imagine was once the jewel of Sydney Harbour, now relegated to a postscript by the behemoth Sydney Harbor Bridge and the towering financial district that crowded it out of the limelight so many years ago.
I map out an intentionally meandering route that takes me first to the Australian Museum, where a marquee exhibit chronicles the all too familiar story of the birth of a colonizer's nation at the expense of an entire and immemorial indigenous culture (the city is built on Cadigal land). It's a brief but powerful archive of humans held in shackles, enslaved and displaced, stripped of their languages, their customs and, as in Canada, their children, all for the supposed greater good of a superior civilization that has gone on to make a name for itself by completely trashing the entire planet. I'm certainly no primitivist, but for fuck sakes my dear ancestors, could we seriously not have figured out how to document the sidereal motion of the Southern Pleiades without having to destroy everything and everyone else on earth? I mean, really now.
From the Australian Museum, I weave my way through the Botanical Gardens, pausing at a memorial to Joseph Gerrald, one of the "Scottish Political Martyrs", sentenced to 14 years in the then prison colony of New South Wales in 1794 for advocating equality, free speech, democracy and universal suffrage. What a madman. His words on the plaque read: "I see through the cheering vista of future events the overthrow of tyranny, and the permanent establishment of benevolence and peace". A few yards further down the path I pass one of the ubiquitous state billboards encouraging Australians to report the suspicious activities of their fellow citizens to the authorities. Well played!
I cross the Harbour Bridge on foot and apparently activate a time machine that transports me back to Sept 12th, 2001, as the Harbor Bridge anti-terror security guards do their best to intimidate 39 year-old men in Bon Jovi t-shirts taking pictures of the Sydney Opera House. I guess countries killing children in other countries (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/13/2491422.htm) just can't be too careful these days eh?
Eventually I wind my way back towards the observatory, it's copper-domed chamber housing the oldest working telescope in the southern hemisphere, built to observe the historic 1874 Transit of Venus. It is here that I find a public toilet and take a crap.
Thank you for reading.
chris
ps. speaking of the ascendancy of science on the backs of the vast majority of the planet's population, allow me to suggest an interesting book I've been reading recently: A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks by Clifford D Conner.