Papers by Matthew F Brown
Teaching History Journal (NSWHTA), 2021
I just can't fathom it", he mused. "They were doing so well before the war, and even until 1942, ... more I just can't fathom it", he mused. "They were doing so well before the war, and even until 1942, why haven't they put more effort into it? It would seem the natural thing for a crew like that, what with Hitler's unalterable resolves and thousand-year empire and all the rest. Pierce swung back from the window and glared at McLennand. "Doesn't it seem peculiar to you?" 1
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‘Is War Now Impossible?’ wrote Russian banker and self-taught military analyst Ivan Stanislavovic... more ‘Is War Now Impossible?’ wrote Russian banker and self-taught military analyst Ivan Stanislavovich Boch in 1898. Comprehending the implications for humanity of old military doctrines and ethics mixing with the new, mechanised and industrial scale weapons technologies, Boch’s warnings were ignored at the Hague Peace Convention in 1899. They were fully realised in 1914.
So too, the modern intelligence practitioner stands at a unique cross road in light of the rapidly changing technological, globalised security environment of our present day. Do we ignore these realities and accept Duan R. Claridge’s belief that “…intelligence ethics is an oxymoron. It’s not an issue. It never was and never will be, not if you want a real spy service” (Gill, 2009, p. 89)? Or do we see the ethical failures of Iraq and WMDs, the Abu Ghraib tortures, the fall out from the Snowden and Wikileaks affairs and even the Skripal chemical weapons incident as premonitions of catastrophe, akin to the Boer and Russo-Japan wars that preceded the horror of World War One?
However, an ethical intelligence practice can exist, this paper will argue that it must emanate from a model that has great versatility to overcome the litany of contemporary problems. These problems consist of the post-modern fragmentation of the threat environment; the subsequent epistemological shift from truth seeking to rights protecting; the failure of universal philosophical models and the disparity between societal ethics and institutional ethics.
Once these issues have been examined, ethical positions of key adversaries China and Russia will be compared with Australia in order to contextualise the threat environment that a satisfactory model would need to operate in. Finally, the Barret and Shelton versions of Kohlberg’s Matrix of Moral Development will be suggested as possible candidates for ethics education and ethical decision making.
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Responding to the uncertainty of the post 9/11 security environment and the advent of the ‘War on... more Responding to the uncertainty of the post 9/11 security environment and the advent of the ‘War on Terror’, Peter Gill examines how this new context has “reinforced the incompatibility of secret intelligence and respect for human rights” (Gill, 2009, p. 78). This development, in Gill’s view, has been caused by a changed perception of security risks in the context of ‘new terrorism’ (Gill, 2009, 78).
Discussing the threats posed by this new context to the place that law, rights and ethics and areas of intelligence practice have in security operations, Gill advocates for a “re-invigorated oversight necessary to protect human rights without hindering agencies’ ability to maintain public safety” (Gill, 2009, 78). Illuminating what he calls the “darkness at the heart of the ‘civilising mission’”, Gill argues “the task is to ensure that these efforts do not undermine democracy and the rule of law as much, if not more, than the threat itself” (Gill, 2009, p. 99). This endeavour results in Gill strongly advocating for broad ranging oversight, because “the actions of intelligence agencies must be scrutinised since the act in our name” (Gill, 2009, p. 99).
To use Marlow’s words, Gill’s task in this author’s view “was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints of nightmares” (Conrad, 2002, p. 115), when considering the dark possibilities of human rights abuses in the present security conditions. This paper will attempt to critically evaluate Gill’s arguments, finding points of agreement and contention set within the context of the wider corpus of intelligence literature.
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“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden s... more “As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
“ Europeans had been convinced of the existence of a Great Southern Land for more than two thousand years. At first it was dreamed of in much the same way contemporary people hope for extra-terrestrial.”
It is easy for one’s mind to be cast adrift into a more romantic era while contemplating those ‘barbarous’ coasts that Melville’s siren like prose tempts us with. Like wise, the rather ‘Edinburgh’ sounding Soviet submarine captain Ramius in the blockbuster Hunt for Red October, also lures the imagination towards a deeper will to explore the unknown seas while ‘quoting’ one Christopher Columbus:
‘And the Sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home’
The ‘dream’ however, is rudely interrupted with the realisation that Columbus spoke no such words, and that this stunning maxim from one of the greatest navigators to challenge the unknown seas is in fact, the product of the film’s director Larry Ferguson. However, we still like to believe it was Columbus, Scottish accent and all.
Human beings, as the X-Files Fox Mulder correctly surmised, tend towards the notion of ‘I want to believe’ when faced with tantalising and mysterious new scenarios. The Historian is then faced with a conundrum when accounting for ‘belief’, while at the same time remaining faithful to Von Ranke’s eternal doctrine of understanding the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. Yet, as with the ‘Mars Anomalies’, much of the evidence (but not all) regarding the Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia’s east coast almost a century before Willhem Janzsoon in 1606, may in fact be a broad case of Pareidolia, driven by a desire for an alternate historical narrative.
Pareidolia is a known psychological phenomenon by which the human mind perceives images, shapes and patterns that may not exist, often according to suggestions or pre determined assumptions. The unfamiliar and unusually oriented sixteenth century Dieppe maps may certainly have served as ‘inkblots’ that have been interpreted over time as representing Australia.
However, like the ‘Mars Anomalies’, an element of doubt remains due to the vast ocean of space and time that separates our human experience from the sixteenth century. Historical interpretation provides a flimsy plank hanging cautiously over the bow of historical certainty, yet like the Rorschach inkblots, sixteenth century cartography is at the mercy of modern interpretation and those who dare to walk the plank.
Fig.1. This map represents the apparent similarity between ‘Jave la Grande’ in the 1542 Rotz map and the modern cartographic representation of Australia. Not much imagination is required to assume a direct relationship of shape.
As this essay will attempt to demonstrate, interpretation of evidence and supposition in the case of the possible Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia’s east coast has proven as treacherous a sea as any sailed by De Gama, Magellan or Mendonca. Indeed, the Portuguese claim is not unique when considering the problem of who the first non-Aboriginal discoverer of Australia may have been.
In 1756, Charles de Brosses claimed in his Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australe, that the Frenchman Binot Paulmier de Gonneville had succeeded in 1504. The well known Australian aviator Lawrence Hargrave cited what he thought were archaeological ruins to posit that Spanish explorers had established a lost colony in Botany.
In 1947 V.R. Ramachandra Dikshiter suggested that Tamil explorers had arrived in Australia centuries before Cook. By 1980, Allan Robinson self published evidence that suggested the ancient Phoenicians had crossed the globe to Australia in ancient times. Most recently, Gavin Menzies met great scholarly resistance due to his unsatisfactory methodologies while advocating that the Chinese had landed in Australia in 1421.
It is the scope of this essay to determine the efficacy of the evidence that has been put forward in support of the claim that Portuguese navigators discovered and charted Australia’s eastern seaboard in the early 1500’s. In doing so, the many errors, assumptions and problematic interpretations of evidence will be examined, along with the same methodological issues that exist in the counter claims.
To achieve this end, an examination of the historiography of the theory will be assessed and critiqued, followed by a detailed analysis of the major arguments within the evidentiary fields. These will include the Dieppe maps and the ‘Mahogany Ship’, as well as problems surrounding place name identification and Jave la Grande. Hopefully the reader will better understand the paucity of evidence and difficulties surrounding the claims and rebuttals concerning the Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia.
Davy Jones’ Locker: The historiography of the Portuguese discovery theory-1786-2015.
“....that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on....”
The premise behind a Portuguese discovery of Australia has been in the public discourse since the hydrographer and propagandist Alexander Dalrymple implied in his ‘Memoirs Concerning the Chagos and Adjacent Islands’ in 1786, that the sixteenth century Dieppe maps depicting Jave la Grande, served as evidence for a pre existent knowledge of Australia before James Cook in 1770.
According to Dalrymple, the Coste Herbiage (coast of vegetation) on the Dauphin (Harleian) map was in fact Cook’s Botany Bay. The inference being that Sir Joseph Banks forwarded the knowledge to Cook while in possession of the map.
Dalrymple’s assumption may have been predicated upon the knowledge, as Stuart Duncan has identified, that Banks’ presentation of the map to the British Museum in 1790, well after Cook’s voyage was public knowledge, serves as circumstantial evidence of Cook’s foreknowledge of the Australia coast line via a supposed very old corpus of Portuguese cartographic material. Helen Wallis has noted that the map in question was probably thought of as originating in 1536 during Dalrymple’s time, but should be more accurately dated to 1547, thus throwing a cautionary light on the map’s actual original source material.
It is to Dalrymple that we may attribute, as Andrew Sharpe noted in 1963, the scholarly controversy surrounding the significance of Jave la Grande; that debate has ‘waxed hot ever since cannot be questioned’.
‘Costa dangereuse’ on the east coast of Jave la Grande was in Dalrymple’s view, where the Endeavour had actually run aground. However, this notion has been challenged by Bill Richardson who in the process of arguing for a problematic Vietnamese rather than Australian coast line for Jave la Grande, argued that Dalrymple (and by default Stuart McIntyre after him), had fallen victim to erroneous translations of place names.
Richardson’s alternative solution to Dalrymple’s Portuguese answer was to argue for the possibility of French mistranslations of ‘Mui Varella’ (the most north easterly cape of Vietnam) as ‘Costa dauraella’ rather than ‘Costa da varella’. To Richardson, it would have been quite plausible for Portuguese navigators to incorrectly transcribe ‘danarella’ or ‘dangarella’, followed by a French mistranslation as ‘dangereuse’. The ‘costa dangereuse’ found on the Jave la Grande depiction could be incorrectly identified by Dalrymple as the place of Cook’s accident.
It must be noted that Richardson’s argument, while at face value appears plausible, fails the tenets of Occam’s Razor by compounding assumptions in order to achieve a solution that is by definition, lacking evidence and therefore an argumentum ex silentio.
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“Money plays the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice-created to serve a master who cannot now rid h... more “Money plays the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice-created to serve a master who cannot now rid himself of his indispensible sprite. It is the master now.”
“Dr Schacht, you should come to America. We’ve lots of money and that’s real banking”. Schacht replied, “You should come to Berlin. We don’t have money. That’s real banking”.
Perhaps it is some form of nefarious economic sorcery of the kind quipped by Dr Hjalmar Schacht, that allowed a country roughly the size of Texas to very nearly win a six year global war against the combined military and economic powers of the U.S.S.R, United States of America, Canada, France, Great Britain and her Commonwealth? For it is not simply through military and social will that the Third Reich sustained such an effort, but through its economic strength.
That strength, though flawed in the end, like all economies stemmed from the political harnessing of the national will. Nobel laureate and noted Portuguese communist scholar Jose de Sousa Saramago remarked that ‘it is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power’. So it was in the case of Hitler’s newly elected regime in 1933.
The Nazis, as Van Riel and Schram have noted, were well aware that the promise of ‘bread and work’, their answer to the unemployment problem facing them in the aftermath of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, was vital to the stability of their political power and ultimately their war fighting ability. The Nazis needed a productive economy, and those who understood how to provide Germany with the ‘miracle’ in order to legitimise their rule and de-fictionalise Hitler’s ambitions.
Attempting to answer how Hitler was able to affect such an act of economic legerdemain in Germany between 1933 and 1939, we must examine briefly several key elements that surround the historiographical frameworks supporting current thought on the matter. A brief survey of Hitler’s own economic doctrines (or lack thereof) is required, followed by an assessment determining the extent to which a miracle was needed or occurred as a result of actual Nazi policy. We will then evaluate the degree of pre 1933 economic recovery due to interior and exterior forces, then determine the efficacy of actual Nazi policies and their repercussions.
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Jesus had warned over two millennia ago, that ‘If a house be divided against itself, that house c... more Jesus had warned over two millennia ago, that ‘If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand’ . Since his admonishments, the Church has suffered division, often resulting in physical violence. Indeed, the dilemma of unity had been manifest from the Church’s inception, plagued it during the patristic age with heresy and theological correction, and most profoundly illustrated in the schism of 1054 between East and West. Certainly, the great reformers operated in a climate of hierarchical and, most importantly of all, theological division.
Internal dilemma has marked theological progress, however, in the case of the Protestant Church in the Third Reich, as Helmut Thielicke observed, it was a distraction from the dangers outside the Church. This distraction, or rather a theological inability, made the Church attendees impotent in the face of nationalistic militarism and the wide spread violence of World War Two. They were, as Begbie has realised, theologically ill-equipped and unprepared to come to terms with the immense power of Nazi ideology, and the profound issues it raised for the life and witness of the Church.
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In the Australian context, Val Plumwood has voiced a definition of ecofeminist thought that sees ... more In the Australian context, Val Plumwood has voiced a definition of ecofeminist thought that sees ‘nature’ and ‘mastery’ in a different light. Plumwood’s critique ‘the stand point of mastery’, observes a set of views of the ‘self’ and it’s relationship to the ‘other’, that is associated with sexism, racism, capitalism, colonialism and the domination of nature.
The human/nature dualism as a part of a series of problematic, generalised dualism, for Plumwood, instigates a set of dichotomies (human/animal, mind/body, male/female, reason/emotion and civilised/primate) that result in oppressive mindsets towards environmental policymaking and social attitudes in Australia. Plumwood rejects the ‘hyper separation’ between ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and between humanity and nature as instigated by the current hegemonic view of Government. What is required, in Plumwood’s view, is an ecological ethic based on empathy for the ‘other’, rather than the current paradigm.
Even with this definition, criticism from within ecofeminist ranks has been applied. Janis Birkeland has seen in Plumwood’s concept of ‘master’, as a false dialectic of master/slave dualism, believing Plumwood to have marginalized gender so that in effect, she has ‘neutered ecofeminism’. Plumwood’s response, criticising Birkeland for misconceiving her argument, illustrates the difficulty in accurately identifying a rigorous concept of ‘ecofeminism’. Plumwood has however, established one key observation, gender conscious analysis is not the same as a gender-prioritizing analysis.
Though gender appears to be at the heart of ecofeminist analysis of environmental issues, it needn’t, as some older forms of ecofeminist thinking has suggested, require the doctrine of methodological priority for gender in order to demonstrate powerful links between feminism and ecology, or androcentrism and anthrocentrism.
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The voice of Australia’s public conscience seems to resonate with the dulcet, yet rhythmically sa... more The voice of Australia’s public conscience seems to resonate with the dulcet, yet rhythmically satisfying tonality of Jack Thompson, or at least that perception may been gleaned by this author during the high definition pan sequence framed by ‘An invasion is taking place...it seems as though nothing is sacred, that nothing is safe”. Wasn’t it Jack Thompson, still in his 1982 garb as ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ who castigated Australia’s littering and commanded us to ‘ do the right thing, keep Australia beautiful ay’? What could have Australia’s voice, and Breaker Morant’s defender speaking of invasions?
Equally disturbing, yet with far less eloquence and indeed, in a more militant and ‘underdog’ manner, images of ex kangaroo hunter and tree chopper Dayne ‘Frackman’ Pratzky stealthily crawling beneath barbed wire, kitted out in camouflage to obtain a mysterious liquid from an outback industrial site, conjure thoughts reminiscent of ‘The Great Escape’ or ‘Platoon’. 60 Minutes’ Liz Hayes also speaks of some national subjugation as she carefully phrases her concerns that ‘It is an invasion few landholders are prepared for...and just like the gold rush era of the 1850’s, nearly every backyard in Queensland’s north west Downs are being plundered by twenty first century prospectors.”
Invasions? Prospectors? Covert Operations? Again Hayes alludes to this apparently formidable foe as she alarmingly resounds “this would be bad enough if it were happening half way around the world in some tin pot dictatorship, but this is happening in our backyard. It is OUR laws and OUR politicians who are letting it happen.”
Who is this foe? Coal Seam Gas hydraulic fracturing!
The impact of popular and activist media presentations on environmental issues surrounding CSG ‘fracking’ has courted controversy in the United States via documentaries such as ‘Gasland’, and its various heavy industry and ‘fact checker’ rebuttals. Likewise, the Australian environmental-media landscape has germinated by way of American influence its own native crop of activist/pop culture documentaries over the last five years such as ‘Frackman’ and ‘Fractured Country’ from whence several of the aforementioned quotations derive.
Hydraulic fracturing and indeed industrial scale mining have been a part of Australia’s industrial narrative for quite some time, so why and how have the issues surrounding CSG fracking garnered such a media response in recent years? It is the scope of this essay to explore from an historical perspective, the development of CSG fracking, from its embryonic roots in the United States to the implementation in Australia, and considering the popular media precursors from the United States in order to understand how this issue has taken root with such potency over the last ten years.
The ‘Invader’: Hydraulic fracture gas mining
Known also as hydro fracturing, hydro fracking, fraccing and fracking, hydraulic fracturing has its origins as a mining technique in the United States. In essence, ‘fracking’ is a process of well stimulation where rock is deliberately fractured by hydraulically pressurized liquid made of water, sand and an assortment of heavy chemicals.
High pressure fluid (chemicals, sand and water) is injected into a well bore in order to crack the deep rock formations (fractures) so as to release trapped natural gas or petroleum. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, particles from the fracturing proppants (chemical gels, sand and aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open to sustain gas release.
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“There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were very, very political, and they l... more “There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were very, very political, and they literally hit you over the head with a hammer. U2 sometimes can hit you over the head with a rubber hammer.”
-Meat Loaf
Coming together in the early 70’s as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, Whitlam’s visionary ideas were challenging two decades of conservative rule and a growing public concern for social and environmental issues was building, Midnight Oil began crafting what would become a tri-decade career of musical activism.
With over 2000 live performances and record sales in access of 12 million, the work and career of Midnight Oil illustrates a case of interaction between culture and politics in Australia. As Roger Bonastre has noted, the work and trajectory of Midnight Oil, their pacifist and environmental songs, their lyrics against the excesses of capitalism, their activism for indigenous rights calling for a true reconciliation, reflected the longings of a new generation of Australians.
That ‘longing’ was part of what Stuart MacIntyre has called ‘Reinventing Australia’. Lyrically and politically, in addressing that ‘longing’, Midnight Oil (and perforce Peter Garrett), performed from a politically ‘left’ spectrum, though their perspectives might be called maximalistic rather than outright humanistic in terms of environmental issues and potential solutions.
For Garrett, to fulfil effectively the message of the band, a pragmatic element had to be in operation to drive home to popular audiences and authorities the true potency of the message:
“You can’t really be a band that sings about these kinds of things if you’re not prepared to do them”.
May 30, 1990 saw Midnight Oil put that pragmatism to an ultimate test via a street performance outside he Exxon Oil Headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Performing on the back of a flat bed truck to over 10 000 people, Garrett riled through song against the obstinate resistance of the Exon company to acknowledge fault, or offer to clean up the catastrophic 11 million gallon oil spill in Alaska caused by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez super oil tanker.
According to Garrett, the ‘special guerrilla action’ attempted to take:
‘...things we think are so important that they have to be said, and the best way we could say it was with song. What happened this morning was just another of the things that this band has tried to do for the last decade or so. We want to take some of the issues that are in the songs back onto the streets where they belong.”
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Papers by Matthew F Brown
So too, the modern intelligence practitioner stands at a unique cross road in light of the rapidly changing technological, globalised security environment of our present day. Do we ignore these realities and accept Duan R. Claridge’s belief that “…intelligence ethics is an oxymoron. It’s not an issue. It never was and never will be, not if you want a real spy service” (Gill, 2009, p. 89)? Or do we see the ethical failures of Iraq and WMDs, the Abu Ghraib tortures, the fall out from the Snowden and Wikileaks affairs and even the Skripal chemical weapons incident as premonitions of catastrophe, akin to the Boer and Russo-Japan wars that preceded the horror of World War One?
However, an ethical intelligence practice can exist, this paper will argue that it must emanate from a model that has great versatility to overcome the litany of contemporary problems. These problems consist of the post-modern fragmentation of the threat environment; the subsequent epistemological shift from truth seeking to rights protecting; the failure of universal philosophical models and the disparity between societal ethics and institutional ethics.
Once these issues have been examined, ethical positions of key adversaries China and Russia will be compared with Australia in order to contextualise the threat environment that a satisfactory model would need to operate in. Finally, the Barret and Shelton versions of Kohlberg’s Matrix of Moral Development will be suggested as possible candidates for ethics education and ethical decision making.
Discussing the threats posed by this new context to the place that law, rights and ethics and areas of intelligence practice have in security operations, Gill advocates for a “re-invigorated oversight necessary to protect human rights without hindering agencies’ ability to maintain public safety” (Gill, 2009, 78). Illuminating what he calls the “darkness at the heart of the ‘civilising mission’”, Gill argues “the task is to ensure that these efforts do not undermine democracy and the rule of law as much, if not more, than the threat itself” (Gill, 2009, p. 99). This endeavour results in Gill strongly advocating for broad ranging oversight, because “the actions of intelligence agencies must be scrutinised since the act in our name” (Gill, 2009, p. 99).
To use Marlow’s words, Gill’s task in this author’s view “was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints of nightmares” (Conrad, 2002, p. 115), when considering the dark possibilities of human rights abuses in the present security conditions. This paper will attempt to critically evaluate Gill’s arguments, finding points of agreement and contention set within the context of the wider corpus of intelligence literature.
“ Europeans had been convinced of the existence of a Great Southern Land for more than two thousand years. At first it was dreamed of in much the same way contemporary people hope for extra-terrestrial.”
It is easy for one’s mind to be cast adrift into a more romantic era while contemplating those ‘barbarous’ coasts that Melville’s siren like prose tempts us with. Like wise, the rather ‘Edinburgh’ sounding Soviet submarine captain Ramius in the blockbuster Hunt for Red October, also lures the imagination towards a deeper will to explore the unknown seas while ‘quoting’ one Christopher Columbus:
‘And the Sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home’
The ‘dream’ however, is rudely interrupted with the realisation that Columbus spoke no such words, and that this stunning maxim from one of the greatest navigators to challenge the unknown seas is in fact, the product of the film’s director Larry Ferguson. However, we still like to believe it was Columbus, Scottish accent and all.
Human beings, as the X-Files Fox Mulder correctly surmised, tend towards the notion of ‘I want to believe’ when faced with tantalising and mysterious new scenarios. The Historian is then faced with a conundrum when accounting for ‘belief’, while at the same time remaining faithful to Von Ranke’s eternal doctrine of understanding the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. Yet, as with the ‘Mars Anomalies’, much of the evidence (but not all) regarding the Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia’s east coast almost a century before Willhem Janzsoon in 1606, may in fact be a broad case of Pareidolia, driven by a desire for an alternate historical narrative.
Pareidolia is a known psychological phenomenon by which the human mind perceives images, shapes and patterns that may not exist, often according to suggestions or pre determined assumptions. The unfamiliar and unusually oriented sixteenth century Dieppe maps may certainly have served as ‘inkblots’ that have been interpreted over time as representing Australia.
However, like the ‘Mars Anomalies’, an element of doubt remains due to the vast ocean of space and time that separates our human experience from the sixteenth century. Historical interpretation provides a flimsy plank hanging cautiously over the bow of historical certainty, yet like the Rorschach inkblots, sixteenth century cartography is at the mercy of modern interpretation and those who dare to walk the plank.
Fig.1. This map represents the apparent similarity between ‘Jave la Grande’ in the 1542 Rotz map and the modern cartographic representation of Australia. Not much imagination is required to assume a direct relationship of shape.
As this essay will attempt to demonstrate, interpretation of evidence and supposition in the case of the possible Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia’s east coast has proven as treacherous a sea as any sailed by De Gama, Magellan or Mendonca. Indeed, the Portuguese claim is not unique when considering the problem of who the first non-Aboriginal discoverer of Australia may have been.
In 1756, Charles de Brosses claimed in his Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australe, that the Frenchman Binot Paulmier de Gonneville had succeeded in 1504. The well known Australian aviator Lawrence Hargrave cited what he thought were archaeological ruins to posit that Spanish explorers had established a lost colony in Botany.
In 1947 V.R. Ramachandra Dikshiter suggested that Tamil explorers had arrived in Australia centuries before Cook. By 1980, Allan Robinson self published evidence that suggested the ancient Phoenicians had crossed the globe to Australia in ancient times. Most recently, Gavin Menzies met great scholarly resistance due to his unsatisfactory methodologies while advocating that the Chinese had landed in Australia in 1421.
It is the scope of this essay to determine the efficacy of the evidence that has been put forward in support of the claim that Portuguese navigators discovered and charted Australia’s eastern seaboard in the early 1500’s. In doing so, the many errors, assumptions and problematic interpretations of evidence will be examined, along with the same methodological issues that exist in the counter claims.
To achieve this end, an examination of the historiography of the theory will be assessed and critiqued, followed by a detailed analysis of the major arguments within the evidentiary fields. These will include the Dieppe maps and the ‘Mahogany Ship’, as well as problems surrounding place name identification and Jave la Grande. Hopefully the reader will better understand the paucity of evidence and difficulties surrounding the claims and rebuttals concerning the Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia.
Davy Jones’ Locker: The historiography of the Portuguese discovery theory-1786-2015.
“....that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on....”
The premise behind a Portuguese discovery of Australia has been in the public discourse since the hydrographer and propagandist Alexander Dalrymple implied in his ‘Memoirs Concerning the Chagos and Adjacent Islands’ in 1786, that the sixteenth century Dieppe maps depicting Jave la Grande, served as evidence for a pre existent knowledge of Australia before James Cook in 1770.
According to Dalrymple, the Coste Herbiage (coast of vegetation) on the Dauphin (Harleian) map was in fact Cook’s Botany Bay. The inference being that Sir Joseph Banks forwarded the knowledge to Cook while in possession of the map.
Dalrymple’s assumption may have been predicated upon the knowledge, as Stuart Duncan has identified, that Banks’ presentation of the map to the British Museum in 1790, well after Cook’s voyage was public knowledge, serves as circumstantial evidence of Cook’s foreknowledge of the Australia coast line via a supposed very old corpus of Portuguese cartographic material. Helen Wallis has noted that the map in question was probably thought of as originating in 1536 during Dalrymple’s time, but should be more accurately dated to 1547, thus throwing a cautionary light on the map’s actual original source material.
It is to Dalrymple that we may attribute, as Andrew Sharpe noted in 1963, the scholarly controversy surrounding the significance of Jave la Grande; that debate has ‘waxed hot ever since cannot be questioned’.
‘Costa dangereuse’ on the east coast of Jave la Grande was in Dalrymple’s view, where the Endeavour had actually run aground. However, this notion has been challenged by Bill Richardson who in the process of arguing for a problematic Vietnamese rather than Australian coast line for Jave la Grande, argued that Dalrymple (and by default Stuart McIntyre after him), had fallen victim to erroneous translations of place names.
Richardson’s alternative solution to Dalrymple’s Portuguese answer was to argue for the possibility of French mistranslations of ‘Mui Varella’ (the most north easterly cape of Vietnam) as ‘Costa dauraella’ rather than ‘Costa da varella’. To Richardson, it would have been quite plausible for Portuguese navigators to incorrectly transcribe ‘danarella’ or ‘dangarella’, followed by a French mistranslation as ‘dangereuse’. The ‘costa dangereuse’ found on the Jave la Grande depiction could be incorrectly identified by Dalrymple as the place of Cook’s accident.
It must be noted that Richardson’s argument, while at face value appears plausible, fails the tenets of Occam’s Razor by compounding assumptions in order to achieve a solution that is by definition, lacking evidence and therefore an argumentum ex silentio.
“Dr Schacht, you should come to America. We’ve lots of money and that’s real banking”. Schacht replied, “You should come to Berlin. We don’t have money. That’s real banking”.
Perhaps it is some form of nefarious economic sorcery of the kind quipped by Dr Hjalmar Schacht, that allowed a country roughly the size of Texas to very nearly win a six year global war against the combined military and economic powers of the U.S.S.R, United States of America, Canada, France, Great Britain and her Commonwealth? For it is not simply through military and social will that the Third Reich sustained such an effort, but through its economic strength.
That strength, though flawed in the end, like all economies stemmed from the political harnessing of the national will. Nobel laureate and noted Portuguese communist scholar Jose de Sousa Saramago remarked that ‘it is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power’. So it was in the case of Hitler’s newly elected regime in 1933.
The Nazis, as Van Riel and Schram have noted, were well aware that the promise of ‘bread and work’, their answer to the unemployment problem facing them in the aftermath of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, was vital to the stability of their political power and ultimately their war fighting ability. The Nazis needed a productive economy, and those who understood how to provide Germany with the ‘miracle’ in order to legitimise their rule and de-fictionalise Hitler’s ambitions.
Attempting to answer how Hitler was able to affect such an act of economic legerdemain in Germany between 1933 and 1939, we must examine briefly several key elements that surround the historiographical frameworks supporting current thought on the matter. A brief survey of Hitler’s own economic doctrines (or lack thereof) is required, followed by an assessment determining the extent to which a miracle was needed or occurred as a result of actual Nazi policy. We will then evaluate the degree of pre 1933 economic recovery due to interior and exterior forces, then determine the efficacy of actual Nazi policies and their repercussions.
Internal dilemma has marked theological progress, however, in the case of the Protestant Church in the Third Reich, as Helmut Thielicke observed, it was a distraction from the dangers outside the Church. This distraction, or rather a theological inability, made the Church attendees impotent in the face of nationalistic militarism and the wide spread violence of World War Two. They were, as Begbie has realised, theologically ill-equipped and unprepared to come to terms with the immense power of Nazi ideology, and the profound issues it raised for the life and witness of the Church.
The human/nature dualism as a part of a series of problematic, generalised dualism, for Plumwood, instigates a set of dichotomies (human/animal, mind/body, male/female, reason/emotion and civilised/primate) that result in oppressive mindsets towards environmental policymaking and social attitudes in Australia. Plumwood rejects the ‘hyper separation’ between ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and between humanity and nature as instigated by the current hegemonic view of Government. What is required, in Plumwood’s view, is an ecological ethic based on empathy for the ‘other’, rather than the current paradigm.
Even with this definition, criticism from within ecofeminist ranks has been applied. Janis Birkeland has seen in Plumwood’s concept of ‘master’, as a false dialectic of master/slave dualism, believing Plumwood to have marginalized gender so that in effect, she has ‘neutered ecofeminism’. Plumwood’s response, criticising Birkeland for misconceiving her argument, illustrates the difficulty in accurately identifying a rigorous concept of ‘ecofeminism’. Plumwood has however, established one key observation, gender conscious analysis is not the same as a gender-prioritizing analysis.
Though gender appears to be at the heart of ecofeminist analysis of environmental issues, it needn’t, as some older forms of ecofeminist thinking has suggested, require the doctrine of methodological priority for gender in order to demonstrate powerful links between feminism and ecology, or androcentrism and anthrocentrism.
Equally disturbing, yet with far less eloquence and indeed, in a more militant and ‘underdog’ manner, images of ex kangaroo hunter and tree chopper Dayne ‘Frackman’ Pratzky stealthily crawling beneath barbed wire, kitted out in camouflage to obtain a mysterious liquid from an outback industrial site, conjure thoughts reminiscent of ‘The Great Escape’ or ‘Platoon’. 60 Minutes’ Liz Hayes also speaks of some national subjugation as she carefully phrases her concerns that ‘It is an invasion few landholders are prepared for...and just like the gold rush era of the 1850’s, nearly every backyard in Queensland’s north west Downs are being plundered by twenty first century prospectors.”
Invasions? Prospectors? Covert Operations? Again Hayes alludes to this apparently formidable foe as she alarmingly resounds “this would be bad enough if it were happening half way around the world in some tin pot dictatorship, but this is happening in our backyard. It is OUR laws and OUR politicians who are letting it happen.”
Who is this foe? Coal Seam Gas hydraulic fracturing!
The impact of popular and activist media presentations on environmental issues surrounding CSG ‘fracking’ has courted controversy in the United States via documentaries such as ‘Gasland’, and its various heavy industry and ‘fact checker’ rebuttals. Likewise, the Australian environmental-media landscape has germinated by way of American influence its own native crop of activist/pop culture documentaries over the last five years such as ‘Frackman’ and ‘Fractured Country’ from whence several of the aforementioned quotations derive.
Hydraulic fracturing and indeed industrial scale mining have been a part of Australia’s industrial narrative for quite some time, so why and how have the issues surrounding CSG fracking garnered such a media response in recent years? It is the scope of this essay to explore from an historical perspective, the development of CSG fracking, from its embryonic roots in the United States to the implementation in Australia, and considering the popular media precursors from the United States in order to understand how this issue has taken root with such potency over the last ten years.
The ‘Invader’: Hydraulic fracture gas mining
Known also as hydro fracturing, hydro fracking, fraccing and fracking, hydraulic fracturing has its origins as a mining technique in the United States. In essence, ‘fracking’ is a process of well stimulation where rock is deliberately fractured by hydraulically pressurized liquid made of water, sand and an assortment of heavy chemicals.
High pressure fluid (chemicals, sand and water) is injected into a well bore in order to crack the deep rock formations (fractures) so as to release trapped natural gas or petroleum. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, particles from the fracturing proppants (chemical gels, sand and aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open to sustain gas release.
-Meat Loaf
Coming together in the early 70’s as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, Whitlam’s visionary ideas were challenging two decades of conservative rule and a growing public concern for social and environmental issues was building, Midnight Oil began crafting what would become a tri-decade career of musical activism.
With over 2000 live performances and record sales in access of 12 million, the work and career of Midnight Oil illustrates a case of interaction between culture and politics in Australia. As Roger Bonastre has noted, the work and trajectory of Midnight Oil, their pacifist and environmental songs, their lyrics against the excesses of capitalism, their activism for indigenous rights calling for a true reconciliation, reflected the longings of a new generation of Australians.
That ‘longing’ was part of what Stuart MacIntyre has called ‘Reinventing Australia’. Lyrically and politically, in addressing that ‘longing’, Midnight Oil (and perforce Peter Garrett), performed from a politically ‘left’ spectrum, though their perspectives might be called maximalistic rather than outright humanistic in terms of environmental issues and potential solutions.
For Garrett, to fulfil effectively the message of the band, a pragmatic element had to be in operation to drive home to popular audiences and authorities the true potency of the message:
“You can’t really be a band that sings about these kinds of things if you’re not prepared to do them”.
May 30, 1990 saw Midnight Oil put that pragmatism to an ultimate test via a street performance outside he Exxon Oil Headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Performing on the back of a flat bed truck to over 10 000 people, Garrett riled through song against the obstinate resistance of the Exon company to acknowledge fault, or offer to clean up the catastrophic 11 million gallon oil spill in Alaska caused by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez super oil tanker.
According to Garrett, the ‘special guerrilla action’ attempted to take:
‘...things we think are so important that they have to be said, and the best way we could say it was with song. What happened this morning was just another of the things that this band has tried to do for the last decade or so. We want to take some of the issues that are in the songs back onto the streets where they belong.”
So too, the modern intelligence practitioner stands at a unique cross road in light of the rapidly changing technological, globalised security environment of our present day. Do we ignore these realities and accept Duan R. Claridge’s belief that “…intelligence ethics is an oxymoron. It’s not an issue. It never was and never will be, not if you want a real spy service” (Gill, 2009, p. 89)? Or do we see the ethical failures of Iraq and WMDs, the Abu Ghraib tortures, the fall out from the Snowden and Wikileaks affairs and even the Skripal chemical weapons incident as premonitions of catastrophe, akin to the Boer and Russo-Japan wars that preceded the horror of World War One?
However, an ethical intelligence practice can exist, this paper will argue that it must emanate from a model that has great versatility to overcome the litany of contemporary problems. These problems consist of the post-modern fragmentation of the threat environment; the subsequent epistemological shift from truth seeking to rights protecting; the failure of universal philosophical models and the disparity between societal ethics and institutional ethics.
Once these issues have been examined, ethical positions of key adversaries China and Russia will be compared with Australia in order to contextualise the threat environment that a satisfactory model would need to operate in. Finally, the Barret and Shelton versions of Kohlberg’s Matrix of Moral Development will be suggested as possible candidates for ethics education and ethical decision making.
Discussing the threats posed by this new context to the place that law, rights and ethics and areas of intelligence practice have in security operations, Gill advocates for a “re-invigorated oversight necessary to protect human rights without hindering agencies’ ability to maintain public safety” (Gill, 2009, 78). Illuminating what he calls the “darkness at the heart of the ‘civilising mission’”, Gill argues “the task is to ensure that these efforts do not undermine democracy and the rule of law as much, if not more, than the threat itself” (Gill, 2009, p. 99). This endeavour results in Gill strongly advocating for broad ranging oversight, because “the actions of intelligence agencies must be scrutinised since the act in our name” (Gill, 2009, p. 99).
To use Marlow’s words, Gill’s task in this author’s view “was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints of nightmares” (Conrad, 2002, p. 115), when considering the dark possibilities of human rights abuses in the present security conditions. This paper will attempt to critically evaluate Gill’s arguments, finding points of agreement and contention set within the context of the wider corpus of intelligence literature.
“ Europeans had been convinced of the existence of a Great Southern Land for more than two thousand years. At first it was dreamed of in much the same way contemporary people hope for extra-terrestrial.”
It is easy for one’s mind to be cast adrift into a more romantic era while contemplating those ‘barbarous’ coasts that Melville’s siren like prose tempts us with. Like wise, the rather ‘Edinburgh’ sounding Soviet submarine captain Ramius in the blockbuster Hunt for Red October, also lures the imagination towards a deeper will to explore the unknown seas while ‘quoting’ one Christopher Columbus:
‘And the Sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home’
The ‘dream’ however, is rudely interrupted with the realisation that Columbus spoke no such words, and that this stunning maxim from one of the greatest navigators to challenge the unknown seas is in fact, the product of the film’s director Larry Ferguson. However, we still like to believe it was Columbus, Scottish accent and all.
Human beings, as the X-Files Fox Mulder correctly surmised, tend towards the notion of ‘I want to believe’ when faced with tantalising and mysterious new scenarios. The Historian is then faced with a conundrum when accounting for ‘belief’, while at the same time remaining faithful to Von Ranke’s eternal doctrine of understanding the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. Yet, as with the ‘Mars Anomalies’, much of the evidence (but not all) regarding the Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia’s east coast almost a century before Willhem Janzsoon in 1606, may in fact be a broad case of Pareidolia, driven by a desire for an alternate historical narrative.
Pareidolia is a known psychological phenomenon by which the human mind perceives images, shapes and patterns that may not exist, often according to suggestions or pre determined assumptions. The unfamiliar and unusually oriented sixteenth century Dieppe maps may certainly have served as ‘inkblots’ that have been interpreted over time as representing Australia.
However, like the ‘Mars Anomalies’, an element of doubt remains due to the vast ocean of space and time that separates our human experience from the sixteenth century. Historical interpretation provides a flimsy plank hanging cautiously over the bow of historical certainty, yet like the Rorschach inkblots, sixteenth century cartography is at the mercy of modern interpretation and those who dare to walk the plank.
Fig.1. This map represents the apparent similarity between ‘Jave la Grande’ in the 1542 Rotz map and the modern cartographic representation of Australia. Not much imagination is required to assume a direct relationship of shape.
As this essay will attempt to demonstrate, interpretation of evidence and supposition in the case of the possible Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia’s east coast has proven as treacherous a sea as any sailed by De Gama, Magellan or Mendonca. Indeed, the Portuguese claim is not unique when considering the problem of who the first non-Aboriginal discoverer of Australia may have been.
In 1756, Charles de Brosses claimed in his Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australe, that the Frenchman Binot Paulmier de Gonneville had succeeded in 1504. The well known Australian aviator Lawrence Hargrave cited what he thought were archaeological ruins to posit that Spanish explorers had established a lost colony in Botany.
In 1947 V.R. Ramachandra Dikshiter suggested that Tamil explorers had arrived in Australia centuries before Cook. By 1980, Allan Robinson self published evidence that suggested the ancient Phoenicians had crossed the globe to Australia in ancient times. Most recently, Gavin Menzies met great scholarly resistance due to his unsatisfactory methodologies while advocating that the Chinese had landed in Australia in 1421.
It is the scope of this essay to determine the efficacy of the evidence that has been put forward in support of the claim that Portuguese navigators discovered and charted Australia’s eastern seaboard in the early 1500’s. In doing so, the many errors, assumptions and problematic interpretations of evidence will be examined, along with the same methodological issues that exist in the counter claims.
To achieve this end, an examination of the historiography of the theory will be assessed and critiqued, followed by a detailed analysis of the major arguments within the evidentiary fields. These will include the Dieppe maps and the ‘Mahogany Ship’, as well as problems surrounding place name identification and Jave la Grande. Hopefully the reader will better understand the paucity of evidence and difficulties surrounding the claims and rebuttals concerning the Portuguese discovery and mapping of Australia.
Davy Jones’ Locker: The historiography of the Portuguese discovery theory-1786-2015.
“....that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on....”
The premise behind a Portuguese discovery of Australia has been in the public discourse since the hydrographer and propagandist Alexander Dalrymple implied in his ‘Memoirs Concerning the Chagos and Adjacent Islands’ in 1786, that the sixteenth century Dieppe maps depicting Jave la Grande, served as evidence for a pre existent knowledge of Australia before James Cook in 1770.
According to Dalrymple, the Coste Herbiage (coast of vegetation) on the Dauphin (Harleian) map was in fact Cook’s Botany Bay. The inference being that Sir Joseph Banks forwarded the knowledge to Cook while in possession of the map.
Dalrymple’s assumption may have been predicated upon the knowledge, as Stuart Duncan has identified, that Banks’ presentation of the map to the British Museum in 1790, well after Cook’s voyage was public knowledge, serves as circumstantial evidence of Cook’s foreknowledge of the Australia coast line via a supposed very old corpus of Portuguese cartographic material. Helen Wallis has noted that the map in question was probably thought of as originating in 1536 during Dalrymple’s time, but should be more accurately dated to 1547, thus throwing a cautionary light on the map’s actual original source material.
It is to Dalrymple that we may attribute, as Andrew Sharpe noted in 1963, the scholarly controversy surrounding the significance of Jave la Grande; that debate has ‘waxed hot ever since cannot be questioned’.
‘Costa dangereuse’ on the east coast of Jave la Grande was in Dalrymple’s view, where the Endeavour had actually run aground. However, this notion has been challenged by Bill Richardson who in the process of arguing for a problematic Vietnamese rather than Australian coast line for Jave la Grande, argued that Dalrymple (and by default Stuart McIntyre after him), had fallen victim to erroneous translations of place names.
Richardson’s alternative solution to Dalrymple’s Portuguese answer was to argue for the possibility of French mistranslations of ‘Mui Varella’ (the most north easterly cape of Vietnam) as ‘Costa dauraella’ rather than ‘Costa da varella’. To Richardson, it would have been quite plausible for Portuguese navigators to incorrectly transcribe ‘danarella’ or ‘dangarella’, followed by a French mistranslation as ‘dangereuse’. The ‘costa dangereuse’ found on the Jave la Grande depiction could be incorrectly identified by Dalrymple as the place of Cook’s accident.
It must be noted that Richardson’s argument, while at face value appears plausible, fails the tenets of Occam’s Razor by compounding assumptions in order to achieve a solution that is by definition, lacking evidence and therefore an argumentum ex silentio.
“Dr Schacht, you should come to America. We’ve lots of money and that’s real banking”. Schacht replied, “You should come to Berlin. We don’t have money. That’s real banking”.
Perhaps it is some form of nefarious economic sorcery of the kind quipped by Dr Hjalmar Schacht, that allowed a country roughly the size of Texas to very nearly win a six year global war against the combined military and economic powers of the U.S.S.R, United States of America, Canada, France, Great Britain and her Commonwealth? For it is not simply through military and social will that the Third Reich sustained such an effort, but through its economic strength.
That strength, though flawed in the end, like all economies stemmed from the political harnessing of the national will. Nobel laureate and noted Portuguese communist scholar Jose de Sousa Saramago remarked that ‘it is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power’. So it was in the case of Hitler’s newly elected regime in 1933.
The Nazis, as Van Riel and Schram have noted, were well aware that the promise of ‘bread and work’, their answer to the unemployment problem facing them in the aftermath of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, was vital to the stability of their political power and ultimately their war fighting ability. The Nazis needed a productive economy, and those who understood how to provide Germany with the ‘miracle’ in order to legitimise their rule and de-fictionalise Hitler’s ambitions.
Attempting to answer how Hitler was able to affect such an act of economic legerdemain in Germany between 1933 and 1939, we must examine briefly several key elements that surround the historiographical frameworks supporting current thought on the matter. A brief survey of Hitler’s own economic doctrines (or lack thereof) is required, followed by an assessment determining the extent to which a miracle was needed or occurred as a result of actual Nazi policy. We will then evaluate the degree of pre 1933 economic recovery due to interior and exterior forces, then determine the efficacy of actual Nazi policies and their repercussions.
Internal dilemma has marked theological progress, however, in the case of the Protestant Church in the Third Reich, as Helmut Thielicke observed, it was a distraction from the dangers outside the Church. This distraction, or rather a theological inability, made the Church attendees impotent in the face of nationalistic militarism and the wide spread violence of World War Two. They were, as Begbie has realised, theologically ill-equipped and unprepared to come to terms with the immense power of Nazi ideology, and the profound issues it raised for the life and witness of the Church.
The human/nature dualism as a part of a series of problematic, generalised dualism, for Plumwood, instigates a set of dichotomies (human/animal, mind/body, male/female, reason/emotion and civilised/primate) that result in oppressive mindsets towards environmental policymaking and social attitudes in Australia. Plumwood rejects the ‘hyper separation’ between ‘self’ and the ‘other’, and between humanity and nature as instigated by the current hegemonic view of Government. What is required, in Plumwood’s view, is an ecological ethic based on empathy for the ‘other’, rather than the current paradigm.
Even with this definition, criticism from within ecofeminist ranks has been applied. Janis Birkeland has seen in Plumwood’s concept of ‘master’, as a false dialectic of master/slave dualism, believing Plumwood to have marginalized gender so that in effect, she has ‘neutered ecofeminism’. Plumwood’s response, criticising Birkeland for misconceiving her argument, illustrates the difficulty in accurately identifying a rigorous concept of ‘ecofeminism’. Plumwood has however, established one key observation, gender conscious analysis is not the same as a gender-prioritizing analysis.
Though gender appears to be at the heart of ecofeminist analysis of environmental issues, it needn’t, as some older forms of ecofeminist thinking has suggested, require the doctrine of methodological priority for gender in order to demonstrate powerful links between feminism and ecology, or androcentrism and anthrocentrism.
Equally disturbing, yet with far less eloquence and indeed, in a more militant and ‘underdog’ manner, images of ex kangaroo hunter and tree chopper Dayne ‘Frackman’ Pratzky stealthily crawling beneath barbed wire, kitted out in camouflage to obtain a mysterious liquid from an outback industrial site, conjure thoughts reminiscent of ‘The Great Escape’ or ‘Platoon’. 60 Minutes’ Liz Hayes also speaks of some national subjugation as she carefully phrases her concerns that ‘It is an invasion few landholders are prepared for...and just like the gold rush era of the 1850’s, nearly every backyard in Queensland’s north west Downs are being plundered by twenty first century prospectors.”
Invasions? Prospectors? Covert Operations? Again Hayes alludes to this apparently formidable foe as she alarmingly resounds “this would be bad enough if it were happening half way around the world in some tin pot dictatorship, but this is happening in our backyard. It is OUR laws and OUR politicians who are letting it happen.”
Who is this foe? Coal Seam Gas hydraulic fracturing!
The impact of popular and activist media presentations on environmental issues surrounding CSG ‘fracking’ has courted controversy in the United States via documentaries such as ‘Gasland’, and its various heavy industry and ‘fact checker’ rebuttals. Likewise, the Australian environmental-media landscape has germinated by way of American influence its own native crop of activist/pop culture documentaries over the last five years such as ‘Frackman’ and ‘Fractured Country’ from whence several of the aforementioned quotations derive.
Hydraulic fracturing and indeed industrial scale mining have been a part of Australia’s industrial narrative for quite some time, so why and how have the issues surrounding CSG fracking garnered such a media response in recent years? It is the scope of this essay to explore from an historical perspective, the development of CSG fracking, from its embryonic roots in the United States to the implementation in Australia, and considering the popular media precursors from the United States in order to understand how this issue has taken root with such potency over the last ten years.
The ‘Invader’: Hydraulic fracture gas mining
Known also as hydro fracturing, hydro fracking, fraccing and fracking, hydraulic fracturing has its origins as a mining technique in the United States. In essence, ‘fracking’ is a process of well stimulation where rock is deliberately fractured by hydraulically pressurized liquid made of water, sand and an assortment of heavy chemicals.
High pressure fluid (chemicals, sand and water) is injected into a well bore in order to crack the deep rock formations (fractures) so as to release trapped natural gas or petroleum. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, particles from the fracturing proppants (chemical gels, sand and aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open to sustain gas release.
-Meat Loaf
Coming together in the early 70’s as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close, Whitlam’s visionary ideas were challenging two decades of conservative rule and a growing public concern for social and environmental issues was building, Midnight Oil began crafting what would become a tri-decade career of musical activism.
With over 2000 live performances and record sales in access of 12 million, the work and career of Midnight Oil illustrates a case of interaction between culture and politics in Australia. As Roger Bonastre has noted, the work and trajectory of Midnight Oil, their pacifist and environmental songs, their lyrics against the excesses of capitalism, their activism for indigenous rights calling for a true reconciliation, reflected the longings of a new generation of Australians.
That ‘longing’ was part of what Stuart MacIntyre has called ‘Reinventing Australia’. Lyrically and politically, in addressing that ‘longing’, Midnight Oil (and perforce Peter Garrett), performed from a politically ‘left’ spectrum, though their perspectives might be called maximalistic rather than outright humanistic in terms of environmental issues and potential solutions.
For Garrett, to fulfil effectively the message of the band, a pragmatic element had to be in operation to drive home to popular audiences and authorities the true potency of the message:
“You can’t really be a band that sings about these kinds of things if you’re not prepared to do them”.
May 30, 1990 saw Midnight Oil put that pragmatism to an ultimate test via a street performance outside he Exxon Oil Headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Performing on the back of a flat bed truck to over 10 000 people, Garrett riled through song against the obstinate resistance of the Exon company to acknowledge fault, or offer to clean up the catastrophic 11 million gallon oil spill in Alaska caused by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez super oil tanker.
According to Garrett, the ‘special guerrilla action’ attempted to take:
‘...things we think are so important that they have to be said, and the best way we could say it was with song. What happened this morning was just another of the things that this band has tried to do for the last decade or so. We want to take some of the issues that are in the songs back onto the streets where they belong.”