Can you imagine buying someone?
Not buying their labour - we do that all the time - but buying the person?
I can't.
But for all of the problems I have with conceiving purchasing another human being, can you imagine selling someone?
I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...
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If only our pets could tell us what they are thinking.
For example, to a bill of sale which featured a 21 year woman accompanied by the word "breeder", the museum directors added that this did not necessarily mean she would be used for breeding purposes. No alternative "explanation" was offered.
But the most ludicrous bit of all was a statement by the museum that went something like (and I paraphrase from memory here): "Africans were not the only people to endure great hardship on their way to America. The Irish, for example, suffered enormously and even had to pay their own ship fare".
I kid you not. This was really there. I assume it has long since disappeared. But can you imagine the workings of a mind that so many years later tries to assuage our horror over the barbarity and cruelty of slavery by reminding us that the slaves, at least, got a free ride?