Blog, Portfolio

Voices lost

Not long ago, I interviewed an academic whose field is AI in literacy. Before I began my questions, she started with her own: Are you afraid of what AI might do to your job?

I began working in a London newsroom in 2007. Two phones bleated and flashed all day long, banks of TV screens showed 24-hour news channels and I occasionally took copy over the phone, typing stories for reporters on the move. There were four daily editions of the newspaper. Inevitably, as cortisol levels screeched into the red, I watched nose-to-nose shouting matches between editors on the backbench.

To the side, tucked away and largely silent, was a single online editor, brought into the fold shortly after I began. He knew, of course, what nobody else wanted to admit: three years after the launch of Facebook and nearly a decade after Google’s arrival, print media was in deep and unchartered turmoil. Job losses, oligarch schmoozing and expenses tightening followed.

We lost a quarter of the newsroom in 2009. In Sydney, we lost a third around 2013. We lost another third in 2017 and there was a cull in the middle somewhere, too. In the last few weeks, rounds of losses at the ABC and SBS. 15 years since my first day on a newsdesk and no-one knows, still, how to reconcile news journalism with the braying realities of the unchecked internet.

If there’s a status quo that sums up my time in newsrooms, it is this: redundancy rounds. This, I should add, before generative AI – another, uglier beast yet – really bites.

So, my answer to that sharp-thinking, wise scholar is a little lazily reached, but borne from experience. I’m not worried, I’m curious. I’m used to instability. Or, as one editor quipped, if you haven’t been made redundant three times, you’re not trying hard enough. Bigger than that, though, is this: we’re surrounded by living, breathing stories that are waiting to be told.

My last two pieces for the now-defunct SBS Voices focus on Muslim integration and sexual violence. They’re raw and they’re hopeful and they speak to and for those whose voices have for so long been ignored by the conversation in Australian media.

They were told by humans, to humans. They are stories with roots that reach back many generations and their essence cannot be dug from a corpus or ploughed by bots.

Here they are. And, thank you to the outgoing team at SBS Voices for their support and commitment over the years.

The school experiment that changed me

He took my body from me and I’m still trying to get it back

Portfolio

Ending period poverty

My first piece for the connective and globally-minded team at Missing Perspectives.

When Rochelle Courtenay visited Katherine in Australia’s Northern Territory in 2019, she was shocked to learn that Aboriginal individuals had to use mattress foam instead of sanitary pads when they had their periods.

A vending machine providing free pads has since changed that. But period poverty, described by the UN as the struggle to afford sanitary products, remains an all-too common situation in remote communities in northern Australia, where a packet of sanitary pads costs between $15 and $20.

“We make sure people don’t have to pay those prices,” says Rochelle, Founder and Managing Director of Share the Dignity. The charity has installed free sanitary item vending machines across Australia and in 2015, she sent pallets of sanitary supplies to Coolgardie in Western Australia after a woman was fined $500 by police for stealing a packet of tampons from a service station.

Bianca Rayner of the Central Australian Youth Link-Up Service (CAYLUS) in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory says some Aboriginal families in the region cannot afford blankets and shoes. Period products at exorbitant prices are well beyond their budgets.

“It’s really tricky from a financial perspective but also the shame around it,” she says, explaining that menstrual products are usually kept behind shop counters where the attendants are male. Her team delivers sanitary products and educational tools as part of its Menstrual Hygiene Management program.

Menstrual inequity, highlighted by World Menstrual Hygiene Day, is often compounded by water and sanitation access, cultural norms and expectations, and education. But it also extends well beyond remote Australia and can force individuals to stay home from school and work, exacerbating the economic vulnerability of people who menstruate. Period poverty and poor menstrual health exist all over the world, but in Australia, a member of the OECD and home to over 2.2 millionaires, the issues are only “getting bigger,” says Rochelle.

One in five Australians now lives below the poverty line, representing a fast-growing number of people for whom menstruation means compromising on the most basic of needs.

“Getting period products becomes less important than putting food on the table. We’re hearing stories, even in Canberra, of women using wadded up toilet paper,” she adds.

In the Share the Dignity’s landmark 2021 survey into periods in Australia, more than 40 per cent of 125,000 respondents said they sometimes, regularly or always found it difficult to buy period products because of their cost.

Rochelle successfully fought to end goods and services tax on sanitary items and has seen a commitment by every state and territory to provide free sanitary products in schools. Victorian government policy, new legislation in Canberra, and a “game-changing” children’s education program in Queensland are positive steps.

Still, the work of organisations such as CAYLUS are a “drop in the ocean”, admits Bianca, and it’ll take a more inclusive conversation to truly make a difference. Global initiative Period Positive Workplace, will bring the corporate world and men into the picture.

“This is not a female issue,” says Rochelle, “this is society’s issue.”

Portfolio

The world is full of persons, only some of them human

My latest story for Patagonia’s Roaring Journals.

There’s a moment in The Road to Patagonia when Matty Hannon – protagonist, film maker, surfer – stands, surveying the damage to his kombi van, which has just flipped and rolled off a remote Alaskan highway. He’s unscathed, but in the background of the shot, transporting oil to Valdez, lies the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. It’s a neat, if accidental, piece of symbolism: even in the wilderness, we’re never far from the long reach of exploitation.

Be it in the jungles of the Mentawais or the coastal scrub of Chile, the theme of taking – by corporations, governments and ideology – is central to the film. But there can be no taking without giving, and at the documentary’s heart is Matty’s deep commitment to something more tender, too – a generosity of spirit, of the collective and of nature. Arcing from pounding surf to environmental degradation, mental health and rebel resistance, the story is an unhurried, unpretentious look at how humans and the earth coexist. Surfboards strictly non-negotiable.

I watch the premiere in a packed theatre at Byron Bay International Film Festival, a bobbing line of babies in arms making up the back row of the audience. One of those is Colt, Matty and his fiancée Heather Hillier’s one-year-old son for whom the story is a parable and a love letter, a philosophical cornerstone and a paean to a future well lived. As we watch Colt’s parents meet, fall in love and travel down the west coast of the Americas, we see colliding worlds, crumbling cultures and the potent and hopeful connective fibre of something more spiritual, to something bigger than you and I.

But the story begins some nine years before that kombi crash and epic two-and-a-half-year journey south to Ushuaia. It begins with a Sony camcorder, bought towards the end of a five-year stay in the Sumatran jungle, where Matty “disappeared” with the Salakirrat tribes of the Mentawais.

There, the ecology degree he studied at Deakin University was no longer theoretical. Cut off from roads, electricity and phones but connected to culture, community and pristine waves, he filmed to share his life with family and friends at home in Melbourne, but also to capture something that he knew was special and threatened. His tribespeople friends weren’t financially wealthy but lived in abundance, intertwined with the land. They took only what they needed from the jungle and the sea, humans and nature living as one, resolutely traditional despite being well-aware of the outside world.

“It totally opened my mind to a different way of life, one that is dedicated to community and family and the environment. You’re incredibly time-rich over there,” he tells me as we talk in my home on Bundjalung Country a few days after the premiere. We drink tea and are interrupted by an obsidian crow who hops through the front door. Big Scrub rainforest isn’t far from my veranda and the ocean is less than a kilometre away, but Matty and his tribal chest tattoos seem a long way from the unknowns of the road.

It’s an exercise of my imagination, then, to picture him in Melbourne working a city job when he returned from Sumatra. “I just felt utterly out of place,” he remembers as he recalls the immensity of the city and its effect on his identity. He was diagnosed with anxiety and, for all its trauma, that moment gave life to the idea to surf his way from Alaska to Patagonia, filming the odyssey as it unfurled in no hurry and with no particular plan. Instinctively, he drives, then motorbikes, then horse rides his way south, stopping to sample some truly singular waves along the way. With each starry night, a bigger picture comes into focus, as if his own health is a fractal that can be multiplied to a universal scale: how did we lose the way when it comes to looking after our planet?

The first child of four, Matty was born in London, moved to Victoria as an infant, then to Jakarta and the Dandenong Ranges as a teenager. Those hills gave him a vantage point from which to understand the creep of urban sprawl and by the time he left, the “soul-destroying mediocrity of suburbia” had swallowed his teen home.

In the Mentawais, he saw coral bleaching, cyanide fishing and palm monoculture. Later, he and Heather witnessed the extent to which Canada’s old growth forest has been axed. But what they came across on Chile’s coastal spine is what he calls the epitome of industrialised monoculture. “They’ve literally just wiped the surface of the earth clear and planted pine trees in identical rows,” he says. Between an Indonesia striving towards development and communities torn from their life sources, he saw that “what we consider to be good quality living is not necessarily the truth”.

Instead, while Matty and Heather camped and foraged, spoke with locals and took on perilous mountain passes on their way south, an observation slowly condensed, then crystallised. “In their own different cultural ways, everyone was saying the same thing,” he recalls. “Up until a very short time ago, we all experienced the world through almost the same lens, albeit with a different cultural veneer over the top. We all saw the world as being animate.”

Heather and Matty’s recordings explore the theme of resistance, gently telling the stories of violence and revolutionary tactics of those who have fought for their lands and communities. Zapatista members speak about the power of the collective. Mapuche rebels recall fighting, arson and kidnappings. One Mapuche interviewee claims to have been sent to jail for opposing large-scale industry – not a world away from the treatment, closer to home, of Adani protester Ben Pennings. But, bewildered and dispossessed as some of their interviewees are, they have in common a deep respect for relationships that go beyond the human.

“It’s almost word for word,” says Matty, describing the similarities between those he met in Chile and Indonesia. They talked about the spirit of a volcano or the spirit of their vegetable garden, or the spirit of a river. Derived from the Latin for ‘breath’, animism attributes sentience, or soul, to other beings, forces of nature and things. Matty quotes scholar Graham Harvey when explaining the concept: “Animists are people who recognise the world is full of persons, only some of them human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.” It is practised all over the world, from Western Apache to Siberian Eveny people, and has been for many thousands of years. Anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor labelled it “primitive”. Today, it is a counter-cultural misfit in an empirical, solvable world.

Still, it comes unbidden. At my mother’s funeral, I spoke about her soul living on in the jacaranda trees and the scudding clouds, in the chilli I chop for dinner. She is them and they are her. Here at Roaring Journals, Ella Noah Bancroft writes of a crying planet who “pleads for her children to return to a world of reciprocity”, as does Linley Hurrell, who shares the deep and ancient connection of Gunditjmara people, kin to koontapool, or southern right whales.

At one point in the film, the couple desperately search for water as they trek through Chilean dunes. They and their four horses haven’t drunk for a day and the humans are starting to panic. The next morning, the pack sets off, rounds a corner and finds a spring, fresh water dripping from grassy outcrops overhead. At its base is a religious shrine. The horses drink, Matty and Heather drink. Their relief fills the moment, and it’s easy to see why humans have come to worship a place where water gives life to animals and plants. Not far away, entire forests are being razed.

Might a lost sense of devotion be at the heart of environmental degradation? Perhaps we can learn to live as better humans by taking animism as a starting point and unspooling from it a thread that weaves being into all that surrounds us. “We’re immersed in a story that says we are separate and superior to nature right now,” Matty says. “If we were to stop for a moment, we’d realise that the most intelligent species in the world shouldn’t be the ones destroying it.”

We’re also the ones attempting to save it. Just as interconnected as the planet’s problems are, so might be the ways to counter them. Technology, be it in the form of wind farms or copper batteries, must only form a fraction of the recovery plan. (Matt is currently making a film about copper mining on the Clarence River and much of the resource’s demand comes from the renewable energy sector). Indigenous philosophy is also part of the answer, along with social and behaviour change, legislation and a lot of imagination. Pausing to assess our own behaviour must feature, too. “We’re ingenious,” Matty adds, “but we’re really only going to find success when we stop to analyse our own story.”

His own version of salvation was to slow down and connect. He and his family live on Gumbaynggirr Country on land he owns with his brother and sister. They’re plugged into local permaculture and a tight community. Connection means immersing himself in the ocean, eating local produce, walking, gardening. It means going out and canoeing the rivers and being conscious and building a home. Lacing the everyday with awe. Living with a long-term mindset. And what will the everyday look like in, say, 50 years’ time, when Colt’s 51? “I guess what I would want is that he grows up with a sense of wonder and a sense of hope,” says his father. “I don’t think there’s any way you can shelter him from the realities of the world and the problems we’re seeing.”

Perhaps, a little like frogs or earthworms, those communities in Sumatra, the Amazon and the Andes behave as sentinel species, sensitive to the changes wrought by globalisation. The world is alive and beloved, they taught Matty. And everything worth loving is worth fighting for.

Photo by Matty Hannon

Portfolio

The truth of Australian wars

My latest feature for SBS, and one of the most important topics I have ever covered. Read the story in full below, or over at SBS.

“I was angry that my ancestors were part of the white-washing of history”

As a young girl, Sandy Hamilton held her ancestor, Stephen Partridge, in great esteem. A member of the British Army’s 46th Regiment, her great-great-great-grandfather had arrived in New South Wales in 1814, travelling its rivers with explorer John Oxley and later becoming superintendent of convicts in Port Macquarie.

“During my childhood my father instilled in us a sense of honour that we were somehow better because of our bloodlines to this man,” the educator from NSW tells SBS Voices.

But it was a version of history that turned its eyes from the whole, inconveniently grim, truth.

In fact, Partridge and his regiment arrived in NSW to witness the occupiers meeting resistance from independent, self-governing Aboriginal nations. The response was brutal and indiscriminate.

The fear and the stakes were deemed so high that, in 1816, the 46th was ordered by Governor Lachlan Macquarie to punish “hostile natives” – despite their status as the King’s subjects – by firing upon them and “hanging up on trees the bodies of such natives as may be killed in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors.”

And so unfolded the Appin massacre, when Muringong, Dharawal and Gandangara men, women and children were ambushed in their sleep and shot or forced over the cliff edge by soldiers moments before dawn at their encampment at Broughton Pass, 60km south west of Sydney.

In the aftermath, 14 bodies were counted although it is believed others were not retrieved from the gorge of the Cataract River below. At least three, including one woman, were later decapitated and sold by soldiers.

Far from his sparkling image, Partridge was likely party to a violent attack on women and children.

It is a fact that Hamilton learnt in 2016, when she watched Dharawal elder Glenda Chalker describing the 46th’s involvement with the Appin massacre on TV. Hamilton instantly checked her family records and realised the connection.

Every detail I discovered made me sick to the core, but I felt compelled to find out the truth about him and not just the glorified version

“It was a shock. Every detail I discovered made me sick to the core, but I felt compelled to find out the truth about him and not just the glorified version,” says Hamilton.

“It’s the cover-up that angered me. I was angry that my ancestors were part of the white-washing of history … [My ancestor] was also an instrument in the dark history of the invasion.

“I don’t remember the word massacre used in relation to Australia up until a few years ago. I’m now 57.”

The following day, she drove six hours to Appin and met with Chalker, taking the first steps on what has become a long journey of healing – and a determination to speak plainly about the past where it has so often been obfuscated.

In her new SBS documentary series, Arrernte and Kalkadoon presenter Rachel Perkins explores the “great Australian silence” around Appin and the many other massacres that form Australia’s bloodiest 100 years. The Australian Wars lays out the unpalatable facts: soldiers, convicts and settlers made a grab for land in what many historians agree counts as a war – and yet no war in Australia was ever declared.

Before that fateful dawn raid at Appin, Governor Macquarie instructed his men to avoid injuring women and children wherever possible and to call a command to surrender. But historians claim he would have known that First Nations people lived in family groups, making it impossible to attack male warriors alone. And, “even if there was a call to surrender, that was never, ever going to happen when you turn up at dawn with 30 soldiers with muskets ready. As soon as someone moves, the order to fire is given,” historian Dr Stephen Gapps tells Perkins in the series. “It was always going to turn into a massacre,” he says.

Realising that what happened at Appin was illegal and well beyond the bounds of civilised behaviour, Macquarie sanitised the record, as historian Bruce Scates tells Perkins in the series. “Several natives have been unavoidably killed and wounded in consequence of them not having surrendered themselves on being called to do so,” Macquarie wrote afterwards.

It is just one of many instances of white-washing that served Australia’s settlers and, 200 years on, continue to dominate the narrative of Australian colonisation. As the series notes, even people living in Appin do not know of its barbaric history.

Hamilton’s thoughts about Partridge run parallel to how society is beginning to reappraise Macquarie’s achievements. She has accepted that Appin is in her DNA, but was Partridge simply a soldier following orders?

“Was he a terrible man … was he cold-hearted and lacking in all feeling? He wasn’t trained to run down innocent women and children and old people, so I can’t help but to think that as a human being he was shocked by the situation he found himself in and that he was repulsed and horrified by what he was compelled to do. I hope he was,” she says.

“I don’t know how he lived with himself after that. All I can imagine is that he was in some sort of denial.”

It is likely that, fresh from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, he would have seen his job in NSW as part of another small-scale war, Professor Henry Reynolds, who appears in the series, explains to SBS Voices. Certainly, the Dharawal people would have seen this as war in its most fundamental of senses – but for the British to acknowledge that would have made a knotty situation yet more complicated.

“To treat Aboriginals as worthy foes would have created a different situation … It would have meant that fundamentally there was that respect for the people who were resisting,” says Professor Reynolds.

Instead, according to Reynolds, Indigenous people were increasingly redacted from the story and by the early 20th Century became little more than a footnote in history books. Leaving out First Nations peoples meant, “you left out the violence,” he says, and leaving out the violence meant swallowing, then promulgating, a convenient falsehood.

Now, asks Perkins, “are we ready to face the past … or go on living a lie?”

Hamilton has faced hers unflinchingly. She attends the “incredibly poignant” Appin Commemoration every year, where, aware of the complex layers of her story, she celebrates the survival of the Dharawal people and its culture, in spite of massacre, abduction, servitude and, ultimately, silence.

“It wasn’t just white settlers defending themselves,” says Hamilton. “Unless we can lay it all out on the table and talk about the details … unless we’re brave enough to actually accept those truths and those stories, then we can’t really understand our history or our present. We can’t make sense of where we’re at right now unless we can look very plainly at what happened.

“There is no reconciliation without truth-telling. The trauma continues every time the truth is not told.”

The 46th was eventually posted to India while Partridge transferred to the 48th Regiment when his wife became pregnant. Today, he is survived by hundreds of living descendants. “Many,” Hamilton believes, “aren’t ready for this moment of reckoning.”

Three-part documentary series The Australian Wars premieres on Wednesday 21 September at 7.30pm on SBS and NITV, airing weekly. You can catch up at SBS On Demand.