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Don’t give up David Lowe
I
s it all too late? Is the end nigh? Has the fat lady sung? Is the human race run? Lots of us seem to have jumped straight from saying ‘she’ll be right, there’s no need to do anything’, to ‘we’re all going to die! It’s too late to act.’ Both of these responses to the climate crisis are passive, and play into the hands of those who have put life on earth into this precarious situation. Doing nothing is against our national character. However much Scott Morrison enthuses about ‘quiet Australians’, these are not the people we remember, or mythologise. What we love, as a nation, is heroic failure. We admire people who fight against overwhelming odds, especially if they die in the process. This is what ‘having a go’ means. Think about Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, Phar Lap, the Socceroos, Gough Whitlam, Kate Miller-Heidke at Eurovision. If they’d won and lived happily ever after, they would be in the same box as our victories at Beersheba in WWI and at the America’s Cup in 1983 – soon forgotten. And failure is never inevitable. None of us know what’s going to happen. The only surefire guarantee of failure is giving up, and waiting
for the tide of history to drown you. Certainly the science looks very grim. The tipping points are accelerating, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are under starter’s orders, but these are not good reasons for inaction, or continuing business as usual. A few years ago, failure seemed inevitable at Bentley as we waited in the darkness for hundreds of riot police to arrive. Only one person I spoke to thought we’d win. If the people of the Northern Rivers had been passive in the face of the threat from unconventional gas, we would now be living in a gasfield. We stood up because it was the right thing to do. History is full of examples of people who didn’t give up, in spite of the overwhelming odds against them. In 1942, 21 year old Sophie Scholl and her brother began distributing White Rose pamphlets inside Germany, resisting the Nazis. They knew exactly what risks they were taking, but they didn’t wait for someone else to act. A few years after these young people were executed, the Nazis fell. In 1965, Charlie Perkins and his fellow Freedom Riders had their bus run off the road and were assaulted when they drew attention to the apartheid-like rules governing outback Australia. The Freedom Riders didn’t give up, or shut up. Today,
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A painting by Dale Marsh from the War Memorial showing the final moments of ordinary seaman Teddy Sheean. ‘Kind of sums up the way it feels sometimes,’ says David Lowe. the Moree pool where Aboriginal people were forbidden to swim has a mural proudly detailing that history, and Charlie’s film-maker daughter Rachel is doing the Boyer Lectures on the ABC. In the UK, the suffragette, Emily Davison was arrested nine times, went on hunger strike seven times, and was tortured in prison. In 1913 she died after being struck by the King’s horse. For most of her life, Emily’s cause was considered hopeless, but women gained the vote in the UK not long after her death. The Brazilian rubber-tapper Chico Mendes fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest and the human rights of those who lived there. He was told he’d be killed if he didn’t stop, but he continued speaking out, and fighting for what he believed in. He was shot dead in
▶ Continued from page 14 that sat on a piano keyboard and played an etude from Chopin, well that cat used to belong to that woman who sold flowers in Jonson Street in 1996. You know her? She had long blonde hair and wore a blue sarong. Maybe it was 1986. It was the year after… no, no it was 1996. But um, well… I need to show readers the eggs I had for breakfast and the cute shots of me wearing my beaut shorts in the bathroom. Maybe that could go on page 3 of the 23,200 copies of my stories? Now, the week after? Just stay with me, I reckon stories of me is all Byron’s literary elite need. Congratulations Echo! Raphael Lee Cass Byron Bay
1988. His beloved forest, the lungs of the world, is now more threatened than ever. Closer to home, a young Tasmanian sailor named Teddy Sheean found himself on a corvette called the HMAS Armidale in 1942, off the coast of Timor. After the ship came under attack from Japanese fighter planes, the large crew made it to lifeboats, but the fighters came back to strafe them. Wounded, Teddy strapped himself to the machine gun on the sinking ship’s deck and managed to shoot down one of the planes and save the survivors, before going down with the ship. If he’d chosen to give up, everyone would have been killed. 57 years later, the people of nearby East Timor went out to vote for independence from Indonesia, although they knew many would be
History of genocide
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The Dustyesky Choir sang at the Mullum Music Festival, in front of a hammer and sickle backdrop. As a Ukrainian Australian, I find this extremely distressing. The Soviet regime accounted for the deaths of over 6 million Ukrainians, through starvation or execution. The gulags were full of Ukrainians, including relatives of mine who died there. This choir, singing its Soviet era songs is not quaint or amusing. It is tasteless and cruel. If it was a choir singing Nazi songs of the Holocaust in front of a swastika, people would be rightly outraged. Dustyesky Choir just glorify a different genocide. Oksana Waterfall Mullumbimby
Dear Woollies, please explain how anyone thought it was a good idea to replace the card/cash machines with card only ones? That person should be demoted. An everyday example of the chaos this has caused is where 15 people are in the queue waiting for the cash machine while the card machines are vacant. People in the queue are grumbling, upset and angry, which is not the way people want to feel when they are spending their money. Happy and satisfied would be much more likely to bring customers back. You changed for the worse overnight; hopefully it will be as quick to switch back. Jay Carney Mullumbimby
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16 The Byron Shire Echo mşưĕŔćĕſ ǩǮǽ ǩǧǨǰ
murdered by militias for expressing their views. They went anyway, because it was the right thing to do. Giving up was not an option for any of these people, and it shouldn’t be an option now. Australians love to play the victim, but the truth is we are the luckiest, richest people in the world. The average Australian is far wealthier in terms of practical things and information than almost any human in history. True, the people of the past didn’t have cat videos to distract them, but that’s no excuse. So far, the climate crisis has been disproportionately affecting the poor, the marginalised and non-human earthlings, but now it’s biting us. It is our responsibility to use our wealth, education and position in the world to fight for what is right, just like we did in the Northern Rivers during the gas crisis. In WWII Winston Churchill didn’t say ‘we shall give up on the beaches, we shall give up in the fields and in the streets’. The volunteer firefighters who have been risking their lives to save our homes aren’t giving up. The inspirational students who have been standing up around the world, in ever-greater numbers, to confront the climate crisis aren’t giving up. And neither should we. Please join the students in solidarity when the next call comes, and think about what you can do to make a positive difference. Just don’t give up.
Winners, losers, equality How many losers around the world do you think are created when one person steps up onto the rostrum to accept a single gold medal? Multiply that by the number of gold medals given at a single Olympics and I suggest it would be in the millions. How does one believe in winners and losers and yet also believe in equality? Am I missing something here? Maybe it’s the old fake news again perpetuated by newspapers like yours. The song for accompaniment to this little tale is The Logical Song by Supertramp. Paul Moore Suffolk Park
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