Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

Political comment. St George's Terrace, Battery Point. August 2011.

Two points:

1) While the use of technology to enable mass production has engendered a number of serious spill on effects - i.e. the rapid expansion of population, the reliance on external energy sources and the creation of mass society - I am reasonably certain that pre-Industrial patterns of life like the (presumably) idealised agrarian might not have afforded the luxury of skipping your 10 am 101A Introduction to Government lecture to scribble some pseudo-anarchic commentary in public property. Certainly, if it did, the punishment for dissenting against the established order offered something of a deterrent.

2) We are already deep into a transformative phase whereby the industrial society (as found in Australia) is evolving into a post-industrial society. If steam power was the trigger for the shift from agricultural to industrial organisation, globalised information technology is driving the new transition. Like any birth, expect it to be painful. As someone who had the great fortune to exit school right as the key industry/ employer in my home-town of Burnie began the formal processes of de-industrialisation (i.e. sacking its workforce), people need to be careful when they pop the champagne corks and begin to jig upon the gravesite...

A question. Prince's Street, Sandy Bay. August 2011.

Comments

smudgeon said…

Thank god they eventually graduate and have it crushed out of them by the reality of adult life.

23 August 2011 at 10:21

Roddy said…

Why not just destroy society and let the microbes begin the process all over again.

23 August 2011 at 14:42

Kris McCracken said…

Smudgeon, or they never quite graduate and graffiti the town...

Roddy, good idea!

28 August 2011 at 12:41

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

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...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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