Culture, morality, choices

It appears I chose the wrong night to stay home Wed­nes­day. Matt says Strike were amaz­ing and my cousin Vanessa says the Random Dance at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl was equally impress­ive. Ah well… I needed to recoup.

Last night was Drum Drum from PNG, superb in the per­cuss­ive pieces but I was less inter­ested in the tra­di­tional songs, then a drink with Vanessa and friends of hers, back to the Gar­dens for a ter­rific set from Lime­stone (effect­ively Nicky Bomba and Joe Cam­illeri), some okay aerial work (the woman on the ring was incred­ible, the guys less impressive).

All this led to musing about Mel­bourne and cul­ture and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in gen­eral. I want this sort of musical fest­ival every year; why should it just be in asso­ci­ation with the Games? And some of my lack of appre­ci­ation for the guys on the aerial rig were that I have seen more impress­ive gym­nastics in com­pet­i­tion. I do want superb gym­nastics. I do have a sense of what I con­sider amaz­ing gym­nastics. I just want my amaz­ing gym­nastics in a circus or per­form­at­ive con­text and for there to be no concept of scores or win­ners, even though I clearly have a sense of ‘better’ or ‘worse’.

The light show on the river is a beau­ti­ful work: the fish from all the dif­fer­ent cul­tures work well with the river, the music is appro­pri­ate, the lights are impress­ive. But I keep coming back to a fun­da­mental issue with why it is here, this notion of Com­mon­wealth, this notion at all of a ‘common wealth’.

We don’t have a common wealth. We, Aus­tralia, have an incred­ible wealth we barely share with our own cit­izens let alone those from other coun­tries in our own stated alli­ance. Is it any wonder that Sierra Leone’s ath­letes abscond when they see the immense expendit­ure on dec­or­a­tions alone here? Accord­ing to the little fact box that appeared in print but not on the web site (man, The Age needs to get its act together), Sierra Leone has a life expect­a­tion of just under 40. Its infant mor­tal­ity is 143 deaths per thou­sand births com­pared to Aus­trali­a’s 4.7. Its HIV infec­tion rate is 7% com­pared to Aus­trali­a’s 0.1%. Where is our common wealth?

One of my issues with the Games cov­er­age was the lack of any sort of crit­ical ana­lysis of its pos­i­tion polit­ic­ally. The ini­tial dis­ap­pear­ances were dis­cussed in terms of the ‘safety’ of the indi­vidu­als (sure… in Sierra Leone’s civil war, 50,000 people have died in 10 years from a pop­u­la­tion of 6 mil­lion; I think they’re safer here). Now, at last, we’re get­ting some dis­cus­sion of the dis­par­ity of qual­ity of life.

But while we’re on this issue of safety: a woman was shot (acci­dent­ally) in North Fitzroy…. Mmm, say I, before I real­ise that the ‘Cap­ital City Trail near Rush­all Sta­tion’ is the one I walk every other day. Still… so very lucky, this life, these choices, these minor aches. And one of those aches is what do I do, what can I do, how do I start to make a dif­fer­ence, now?