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Ladies and Gentlemen!
Let us share a five-minute, fair ground, roller coaster ride through the ups and downs of progress and industrialisation. let's celebrate Australia day by looking over the 20th Century.
Let us recall our old people and humble beginnings of a young nation. Let us travel a hundred years in just 5 minutes to the new millennium where the technological or communications revolution creates a thrilling loop in the ride.
There was a definite whisper from the poets and writers after the American Civil War, Gallipoli and “World War One”
However Boring and Futile would not become an accepted words to use, until after world war two. By the 1980's they had become an entrenched part of vocabulary and demeanour.
One of my old mothers has a yarn I can use to get a vibe for the early 20th century. I recall mentioning home birthing - like it was something new or ‘alternative’.
She says - “Yeah my second child was a home birth. He nearly fell down the outside dunny. It was “world war two”, and Dad was in the army - I was staying with my mother Rose.”
Rose was a nurse and she had her first child, the day they disembarked the steam-ship from London to the equally sunny bottom of New Zealand.
With no electronics or computer, Rose’s once dashing and heroic pilot husband, had crashed his plane into a mountain during a blizzard in “World War One”
Now he was a bad-tempered, badly traumatized, one legged alcoholic.
The village they settled in had no electricity and no motor cars, children with minimal schooling were put to work at 14 and most importantly for this story -there were no medical support.
Throughout the 1920s and 30s the local fathers to be, would bash on Rose’s door, usually in the middle of the night. And off she'd trundle to welcome new life, on the push-bike come rains hail or snow.
Never receiving a penny for her work.
In contrast to this, Mary Murphy my midwife was called by telephone, the journey undertaken by motorcar and it cost a thousand dollars.
Mary Murphy was equally matter of fact about the arrival of new life. Her grandmother was a midwife in the tent-cities out west. There weren’t even any doors for the fathers to bash on.
Still life was well lived, and it was never boring, or futile. Miracles were the stuff of ordinary men and women. Necessity was the mother of invention so there was Immense satisfaction and gratitude in making brilliant some things out of nothing.
I’m not sure she was ever grateful, but I have a friend who tells of clothes her mother invented from prison pyjamas, brought home by their father, a warder at Long-Bay Gaol in Sydney.
Generally speaking though, the old people, were profoundly grateful.
There was a great thrill in my mothers voice when she remembered one Christmas in the 1920s when she had no Christmas present. Her father, the one-legged war veteran, got out the crutch he would use for 70 years, and he hopped up the town, coming back with a box. Presumably on credit.
Inside Pandora’s box was her very first pair of shoes. And behold what an insight into the mystery - Women Shoes and Shopping.
The thrill was in the attitude of gratitude – but appeared to come from the gift itself. For two or three generations after this, the lower classes
would go crazy for consumer items the generation before had had to either make by hand or make do without.
Australia was one of the worst hit countries in the Great Depression and one of the last to recover. In the second half of the 20th century, the poor would grow poorer, and worse yet - more cynical.
By the end of world war two boredom and futility had well and truely raised their heads. We were one of the very few countries left with the monarchy system and still firmly yoked to Britain.
Although the Menzies conservative government formed in the 1940s. So it’s unsurprising to read Sir this person and Sir that person are writing the Australian national broadcasting policy and legislation.
Industrial Capitalism was king and mass broadcasting held the key to mass marketing the items of mass-production. When the country finally got working again the industrialised media was ready for it.
The most spectacular fireworks display being the global media empires of Murdoch and Packer.
And you can see a logic - if one pair of beautiful shoes brings pleasure, 10 pairs must be even better. If having a home was heaven, having a big home full of shiny modernist stuff must be even better.
Physical and emotional needs previously unmet during times of war and the Great Depression now in the baby-boomer generation - became a psychological hunger. Products were portrayed by the corporate media as symbols or keys to living the Beautiful Life . The Lords of course, had found a way of taking back the improved wages and conditions of the working classes. Like how they say, Hedley saw his workers spend their wages on beer- and decided to get it back again by going into liquor trade.
I remember a Granny saying…“We used to have three dresses, one to wash, one to wear and one for church.” I didn’t really know what she meant at the time. We were into the 1980’s, and an American dancer turned pop-singer Madonna had an act "Material Girl" that was raking it in.
Between the combined wisdom of global leadership that said we were all gonna be nuked, and dyed up blondes getting around in their underwear, – We were all too hyped to consider a humble Grandmother might truly convey a healthy sense of personal pride, human-dignity and worth.
Instead of being apples as they used to say, the late 20th century was decidedly pear-shaped.
Houses grew bigger and required two incomes families grew smaller. Women were required to pay tax as well as men. People were no happier. No one was any closer to the Beautiful Life.
The Great Depression, the basic unmet survival needs, traveled from the pocket to the mind, in time of the baby-boomer - but by the 1980s on our hearts. People now wanted purpose and meaning in their lives. Psychologists began to explore the quest for the Good Life.
Today economic justice and social justice are equal primary goals. Today we talk of the values-driven consumer. Vote with your wallet they say.
Wealthy people can be humanitarian. Business can be ethical, and capitalism can be conscious.
The new tele-communications systems allow us the greatest freedom of any point in the last hundred years to leave behind the stratified values of monarchy with it’s class distinctions, and the pretensious nonsense of television.
With support from fair trade and a fair go, the fairground is truly fair ground.
The technological and communications revolution has taken us full circle. Advanced communication skill allows for creative conflict resolution, in the home in the community and globally.
The technological and communications era return us to the wisdom and warmth of our home, our family, and community. Advanced communication skill sets us apart from beasts. Advanced communication skill makes us the noble creature we mean when we talk about civilisation.
The changes brought by the new communications systems have created a phenomenal loop in the roller coaster ride, in the circus of the past hundred years.
Fellow thrill-seekers, let us leave the intergenerational transference that gets in the way of the Good Life -back in the 1900s. With a quote from 1925...
“I wonder. I wonder if it matters that what they aimed at was illusion. Their lives are within themselves beautiful. I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty that men now and then create out of chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.” – Somerset Maugham
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