I dance. I fly – dog paddle upwards, a vertical take-off like a helicopter (great for escaping danger), and breaststroke through the sky or glide on updrafts. There is joy in the journey. But back down on earth, leaving the reverie, my physical and attitudinal surroundings are not so conducive to travel. I use a mobility scooter or wheelchair to get around and commuting on public transport from Blacktown to Wynyard Station is closer to a nightmare.
To travel to Sydney’s CBD by train, I load my wheelchair into the back of the car using a hoist. It only takes me about ten minutes to drive to the station, then the search for parking begins. There are notoriously few public car parks near Blacktown Station, let alone disability spaces. At Boys Ave there are 130 spots, and eight of those are for disabled commuters. Say I’m lucky enough to find parking. Then I unload my chair, negotiate holes in the footpath, humps, bumps, and kerbs to get to the station. Wait my turn in front of the lift. The doors open and close. It’s overflowing with impatient commuters. I wait a while before the doors open finally to reveal a space for me. I wait for an attendant to let me through the ticket gate. Wait again for rail staff, who are often stressed and grumpy, to organise the ramp to get me over the gap between the platform and onto the train. Over 6000 commuters pass through the Blacktown station turnstiles on a typical workday during morning peak time, 15,800 people during an average 24-hour day.
In a 2019 9News report, Blacktown residents interviewed said they hardly ever get a seat on the train going to or from work. Standing room only, they’re packed like battery hens on the way to the slaughterhouse. Often the train is too crowded for me to board. When I can get on, I need to manoeuvre my way through the crush of bodies and find a place to hold onto a handrail so my chair doesn’t slide when the train brakes. At Wynyard, there’s another wait. The station attendant needs to put a ramp down and help me off the train. Even if a support worker accompanies me, I’m exhausted by the time I get to work and have a raging headache. My joints and muscles scream in pain.
Generally, I avoid public transport, choosing instead to load my scooter into my car and drive calmly through Blacktown’s asbestos jungle. With lockdown, I rarely travelled to the city and now I’m self-isolating, I work from home as much as I can. Today, however, I need to meet with other creatives in person at the start-up hub where our small arts organisation has a desk. The haunting voice of Karen Chilton reverberates through my car. She narrates the story of Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, the latest book to satisfy my craving for Afrofuturism and Black speculative fiction. Suburban homes flick by, some just starting their gentrification journeys, moving away from the perceived stigma of working-class existence, to maybe one day, achieve the affluent, leafy, suburban bliss of Castle Hill. I glide past Kings Park Industrial Estate, a car and truck rental, and left onto Sunnyholt Road. Turn right, gathering speed, 100 kilometres per hour to merge onto the M7.
In the first half of her interview, Gaele introduces her upbringing and disability work, her creative methods as a cross-genre wordsmith and her reaction to the Australian bushfires and the current climate emergency.
Leslie: Could you tell the story, please, of how your interest in various forms of writing and disability arts began, grew and developed? How did your early life shape your creativity?
Gaele: I was born and grew up in regional Victoria, Australia. When I was very young, I did the rounds of all the Sunday schools; Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic, to collect books. I liked the stories. We moved around a fair bit but for as long as I can remember, public libraries were the centre of my world. When we lived in a small fishing town where there was no library, I looked forward to the bookmobile that drove in regularly. My parents also paid off a set of Grolier encyclopedias which provided me with hours of reading. We had an Astor radio with two shortwave bands. I discovered Radio Moscow and would listen to their English program. I received books and plastic records from them in the mail. I particularly loved traditional stories or folktales from around the world about magical and imaginary beings. So I would say that access to stories, books and reading during my early life definitely shaped my later creativity.
My interest in writing developed at school, particularly the secondary school I attended in Melbourne, where I had dedicated English Literature and History teachers who encouraged me to write. I kept a journal during that time and, as a teenager, was influenced by the politics of the Vietnam Moratorium and the growing women’s liberation movement.
I remember seeing demonstrations by disabled people on TV but knew very little about disability politics. I did not then identify as disabled. My understanding of disablement as a political concept only came about in the late 1990s when I began to experience impairment that affected my mobility and my access to buildings, transport and events. My involvement in disability arts only really started in the early 2000s when I came back from living overseas for over twenty years. I met with Amanda Tink and Josie Cavallaro at Accessible Arts NSW, who assisted me quite a lot in understanding the disability arts environment in NSW and Australia. At that time, I started writing my body into my work, the way I moved through the world, my experiences with hospitals and doctors. I was part of the first Australian cohort of Sync, a training program presented by the Australia Council for the Arts that focused on the interplay between leadership and disability. The people I met there and the course itself helped me understand that, as disabled people, we can lead through our art and arts work. I founded Outlandish Arts, a disabled-led arts company for disabled artists across all art forms.
Now is the time, with climate disaster upon us, to stop concentrating on fighting the boss and make the changes we want to see.
Scotty Foster is a solar powered, radio broadcasting, organic growing, co-operative creating, earth and people-protecting worker from Canberra, Australia. He currently earns a meagre living doing on and off-grid solar and general electrical work. Scotty is creating a co-operative commonwealth, through community groups, and on Community Radio 2XXFM98.3 with the ‘Behind the Lines’ show.
This interview is the fourth of four interviews with volunteers involved in the building of an earthbag water tank at Lucky Stars Sanctuary, Bywong. Vanuatu Earthbag Building assisted in this project. They have provided free plans, support and the materials required to build water tanks for people in need in fire zones in NSW Australia, cyclone zones in Vanuatu and Pacifica.
Gaele Sobott: How did you hear about this earthbag tank building project?
Scotty Foster: I heard through my dad. Someone told the Rural Fire Service that the project was happening. He’s with them, so he passed it on to me in case I was interested.
GS: Does the Rural Fire Service support this type of project?
SF: Yeah, I reckon they would love it. The more places that have tanks next to them specifically for fire protection, the easier their job is.
GS: Was the lack of water a problem in the last fires?
SF: It’s always been a problem around here, yeah.
GS: Why did you decide to get involved?
SF: Well, I can see that it is a simple construction technique that anybody can do. It’s not costly, and all you need is to raise some of your community to come and give a bit of a hand. It’s a very useful method of construction to know about. We’ve got a block out in the bush but we don’t want to be out there in fire season. Given the right conditions, it will go up in flames just like the last fires. We used to go there but now it’s too dangerous. In the previous ten years, fire danger conditions and the ferocity of fires have increased. We now have the new classification of ‘catastrophic’ fire danger. This earthbag technique would be perfect for building a fire shelter that meets the increased fire danger.
GS: How? Tell me more.
SF: The massive, thick walls would hold a lot of heat before transferring it through to the centre of the building. We need that mass in the walls and the sturdiness of the structure. It’s very strong and fireproof.
Working on the tank at Lucky Stars Sanctuary
GS: Do you see other applications for this method of building?
SF: Yeah, it is now almost a year since the last fires began in NSW and there are still a lot of people down the south coast living in tents and caravans. Perhaps this method of building would be useful down there as well and help people to help themselves. If you look back 150 years, communities had building societies, where a bunch of people would get together and pool their resources. They’d then build one house after another after another until everybody had a home. It was a cheap and efficient way for the community to come together, and building codes weren’t such an issue back then.
GS: Are there currently barriers, laws, etc., that make it difficult for communities to go ahead and build as you are suggesting?
SF: Yes, there are many. The Extinction Rebellion mob have come up with a concept called a ‘dilemma action’ where a group of people take some form of action like blocking a road, or in this case building unapproved houses. If the government acts against the group, it will end up looking heavy-handed and idiotic. If they leave the group alone, then it sets a precedent. Building sturdy houses at this time for people who have been forced by fire and lack of government action to live in tents and caravans, is a great moment for that sort of action. I can’t see anything wrong with people getting together and just building their own good-quality houses. The need is huge. If you do it well enough, you can always come back with an engineer who says, ‘Yeah, that’s alright’.
GS: Some politicians are saying as far as climate emergency goes, we just have to adapt. What does adaption mean to you?
SF: Well if we keep putting carbon into the air, there is no adaption. We can’t cope with a climate that is three degrees hotter, let alone six degrees. I don’t know why they are doing this. There is no logic to it. They either deny that climate disasters are happening or they’re like Scott Morrison, who is part of a brand of Christianity which believes in the ‘rapture’, where the world ends and god takes all the true believers to heaven, leaving all the unbelievers to an eternity of hellfire. Of course their church is the only true one. There’s a possibility they believe that it’s time to end the world. Who knows what the motivations of these people are, but they do need to be stopped.
GS: What do you think the alternatives are?
SF: Adaption is one part of survival. Climate change is happening in a significant way, and we are locked into that. They talk about geoengineering. Most of those schemes are extremely risky and pretty crazy but there is one form of geoengineering that would be a really sound way forward. That is to convert the world’s agriculture into organic techniques that take the carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil. We could take all of the world’s agriculture and use it to take carbon out of the atmosphere and to put that carbon back in the soil where it came from. That would go a long way. But we also need to stop damaging our habitat as a way of life.
GS: For this local area and the south coast, what do you think the immediate ways forward are?
SF: We need to change our building techniques for one thing. The way we keep building these crazy English houses here in Australia, particularly with the climate getting way out of control with fire season, bloody pyro cumulus nimbus clouds and firestorms. The earthbag design used to build this water tank protects against fire. Bring it on. Build houses, animal shelters, bunkers. You could build a house by bulldozing up four dam walls in a square, and put a roof on it, if you wanted to. Site it properly of course.
GS: What work do you do? What are you working on at the moment?
SF: I’m an electrician. I have been an organic farmer for many years. I’ve been a blockader and an activist. At the moment I’m building co-operatives to try and create a new economy that will make this crazy one, that is eating the earth and eating people, obsolete. Build an economy that is good for people and good for the planet.
GS: I had the impression that various regulatory hurdles and laws constrained co-operatives in Australia. Is that the case?
SF: It used to be that the co-operative laws were different in every state, which made it quite difficult to trade across state boundaries. That’s been fixed now. The Co-operatives National Law has reduced red tape and simplified financial reporting for smaller co-operatives. I mean you can use any form of governance as long as the registrar lets you do it.
GS: How are your co-ops going?
SF: So far, so good. We’re still in the set-up stage of the community-run farming co-op. We’ve got a renewable energy co-op which has put in one set of solar panels already. It’s called the Pre Power One Renewable Energy Co-operative. It’s designed to enable people who have a roof with a lot of sun shining on it but no money, access to solar energy. It also allows people in the area who would like to take their money out of fossil fuels and put it into something that is reasonably ethical, to do so.
GS: How does the investment bring a return?
SF: So the way it works is that when you become a member of the co-operative, you get the right to do one of two things or both. If you have a roof that you would like the co-op to install solar equipment on, then you can put up your hand and ask for that. We will come around and make sure your house is suitable, for example, check that there is not a great big blue gum on the north side or something basic like that. If it’s good to go, then we will get a couple of quotes. Then we open up an investment opportunity for the other members who can choose to invest. We get the equipment installed for that member. That gets paid back to the investor when people pay their bills. A portion of that bill will go straight to the investor, and another portion will go to the co-op. The investor will double their money over about twenty years which is a lot better than super. It’s different from perpetual investment which is what most companies offer where if you invest once, you get the right to profits from that company forever. In our case, we prearrange precisely how much we will pay you back. We pay that amount, and the deal is done. You can invest again if you like. The beauty is that all the equipment winds up under the ownership of the people who are using it. That is a major problem in our society. Almost all the productive assets are owned by people who are either extremely rich or completely imaginary, i.e. a corporation. The purpose of corporate ownership is to extract as much wealth out of the community as possible.
First Pre Power installation – Dunlop, ACT
GS: How do you maintain the solar units?
SF: There are two ways. You can either put a surcharge, a couple of cents on each payment. As hundreds of people are paying regular bills, we will have a pool of money that we can dip into. Or we can just raise another investment opportunity when the time arises that we need to buy something.
GS: How do you manage the co-operative?
SF: Management iscritical. Currently in our society, management is almost always a very top-down, hierarchical, do-as-I-say model. We reckon that it is one of the leading causes of a lot of problems, certainly a lot of mental health problems. If we’re spending a large part of our time at a workplace where we have no control over our work situation, it’s going to affect us. We go through school under that model, and we leave school and face that model again in the workplace. Our families are that model because our parents were taught that model, and their parents too. So how do we do it differently? Luckily, people have been thinking about this for quite a while. We didn’t have to come up with an answer by ourselves. The intentional communities movement uses the sociocracy method of governance and decision making.
This is a system whereby the people who are involved in the community make the rules. The organisational units in the group are “circles” of people who have a defined way of meeting. A lot of the political and power problems that arise in groups these days are from a lack of structure in decision making. There is a lack of knowledge about how the organisation works. So, what happens is the members of the group have to make it up as they go along. Of course, the people who are very forceful and perhaps manipulative tend to rise to the top of that sort of organisation. Sociocracy and holacracy, which I’ll talk about later, are both flatter forms of organisation than the usual hierarchical forms of decision making we find in our society. Meetings are very structured and use a form of decision making called consent which is quite different from consensus. Consensus is where you all need to agree on something before it can go ahead. It can take a lot of negotiation. It is easily stalled by someone who is bent on getting their own way and doesn’t care about anybody else. It’s good for certain things. If people want to form the purpose of their organisation. Then it might be important to use consensus, so everybody is on the same page. Consent is slightly different. A proposal is put forward, and members ask themselves if it is good enough for now and if it is safe enough to try. It is an iterative process. If there are no objections, then the proposal can go ahead. If there is some doubt, the group can say, well let’s try it and come back to assess in a week or six months or a year.
GS: Are there cases where the iterative process should be applied regularly, anyway?
SF: Many of the newer organisational models that have come out of the tech revolution use iteration frequently. Lean methodology is an example of that type of management, but I’m not really up on that. I believe they use iteration a lot.
GS: I imagine it allows for more experimentation, but also it would assist with transparency and accountability.
SF: Absolutely. Our current organisational models do not make transparency and accountability a priority. Transparency and accountability are crucial to creating more humanised ways of organising where people are comfortable and in control.
GS: You said you are also starting up a community-owned farming co-operative. What management model are you applying to that group?
SF: We will be using holacracy which evolved from sociocracy. Sociocracy is an effective form of self-management in situations where there is a community of people living together, like housing co-operatives and other intentional communities. Holacracy is more structured and business-focused. It uses documentation and software, so it’s clear to everybody what the organisation is about. A new member can join the organisation, look up the website and know exactly what the group is about.
GS: Did you establish the purpose of the co-operatives before starting?
SF: We’ve tried both ways now. I came into the Pre power co-op as a bit of a ring-in. It was after the business people involved couldn’t get the concept of a co-op not being for-profit and needing to be controlled by the community. They graciously dipped their lids and bowed out, but then they needed to find someone else to be on the board, who was more aligned with the ideas we are now putting into practice. So, I wound up taking the position. We did have a few things to sort out like a purpose that really fits the bill. There are four of us involved and a couple of other people who come in and out, so it’s taking some time. There’s a lot of work to do in setting up a business.
GS: How do you protect yourselves from burn out?
SF: We make sure that if it is too much to do, we do it next week. We don’t pressure each other with timelines or anything but burn out is a real issue. Part of the model is to ensure that the structure will be easily replicable, so it will be easy for other co-ops to join in. A co-op is a business, and running a business is a pain in the arse and running a business as a volunteer after work is just ridiculous. It’s draining, especially if you’re working long hours. So the model we are working with envisages lots of local co-ops. Pre Power One is the first local co-op we’ve set up, and twenty per cent of the revenue from this co-op will go straight up to what we call Pre Power Central. That is a co-op that is owned by all of the local co-ops. Its sole job is to make life easy for the local co-ops. The central co-op will employ people with that twenty per cent of the revenue, whose job it is to assist with running a local co-op. They will be mentoring. There will be templates for co-op policies, insurance, arrangements with installers, basically all of the hard stuff. It makes it easier for a local co-op to set itself up. All that is left for the local co-ops to do is to hold a certain amount of board meetings per year, run the AGM and figure out what to do with the profits they make.
GS: Are the local co-ops volunteer-run? Are they able to pay themselves?
SF: The locals are basically volunteer run. We use twenty percent of a local co-op’s revenue to pay the central co-op to do most of the work. If a local decides that it needs to pay someone to do something the central coop is not doing, they can do that by agreement amongst the members. The effect would be that the extra wages bill would come out of the discounts received by the members of that particular local co-op.
GS: Earlier you asked, how we organise in a different way when all we know in our families, schools, businesses, government is top-down decision making with little transparency and less and less accountability. How do you think we can start organising differently?
SF: Well, sociocracy and holacracy is one aspect, but it is a huge task to change the existing systems and culture. Sociocracy has been successfully used in family situations before, but we are also going to have to start implementing these processes through education by opening up schools. How we fund those is going to be interesting.
GS: How do you see that happening on the ground say in this area?
SF: I see it as a later stage. The first stage we open co-ops like the renewable energy and the farming co-ops, where the people involved pay their bills. People already pay bills. We are encouraging them to stop paying bills to outside entities that make a profit from them. We want them to start paying bills to an organisation that is owned by them and controlled by them. A form of organisation where they get to decide how to spend any profit in a way which will benefit the community.
We are using a participatory budgeting scheme to distribute our profits. That’s where you have a pool of profits made by the organisation, and the members get to vote and decide how that money is spent. We will have a set of criteria for applicants to pass, and members can vote according to how much they want to give to who. For example, some of those profits could go to building and staffing a school, and some to say, elder care. These are services that are not suited to privatisation or to purely profit-making concerns.
Comparative diagrams showing climate co-operative and corporate organisational models
GS: If as a community, you are taking on the responsibility of care and education of your members, does that mean you assume that the responsibility for these services does not lie at a state or national level, or do you envisage starting locally in order to make changes at state or federal government level?
SF: I guess the structure of responsibility that we want to build here is called subsidiarity. It means that decisions are made at the smallest possible level, so if your school can make a decision, that’s great, that’s where it should be made. Suppose there is a circle for cleaning within the sociocratic or holacratic structure of the school, and a decision needs to be made about cleaning. In that case, the cleaning circle should make the decision. If there is a kitchen circle, that is who should make decisions about the food. If you have a complaint about the food, go and see the kitchen circle. From there, you work outwards in a federal manner. You make formal arrangements with other entities that are doing the same thing, so with other schools. Anything that needs doing at a broader level like negotiating with the government or raising funds for particular projects can be done by all those schools agreeing to work together. This method or organising has been successful in northern Syria with democratic confederalism in the Kurdish areas. They spent seven years running a system that was working in exactly that way.
GS: I imagine it takes a fair bit of time to build the structures and culture required to run a system like that effectively.
SF: Major changes like this can really only happen where there is a power vacuum. For example, when Assad deployed all his troops to the south of the country to fight the Arab Spring. The Kurds, who have been fighting Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, were well-armed and ready to build alternatives. They’ve been preparing for this for a very long time. Abdullah Öcalan has been around for a long time. He was one of the founders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 1978. The party was not aligned with Russia when it started, and it didn’t take the official communist line as gospel. Because of this they were shunned by the communist world. They evolved towards democratic confederalism. In their guerrilla camps, they’d have a yarn around the campfire analysing how oppression arose historically and decided the first instance of oppression is probably the oppression of women by men. Gender equality is central to their organisational principles. The Kurds are known for their women’s army, which is also democratically run.
Sovereignty is held at the neighbourhood level. That is the ability to make and enforce rules. Within each neighbourhood, sub-communities are represented. The neighbourhood meetings work on a majority vote basis.
GS: How do you see this type of system dealing with exploitation?
SF: Okay, for example, there’s also a women’s council for each neighbourhood. So when decisions are to be made, the information goes out to a group of women in each sub-community. So, there are parallel structures at work in their social contracts.
GS: And wage exploitation?
SF: Well, the Kurdish example covers a very poor area. Historically, under Assad, it was mainly primary production, a lot of crops but no processing of the crops. It was all exported—the extraction of fossil fuels and that sort of thing. Everything gets taken out and shipped away. They have set up a whole system of co-operatives now to do that work. The local communities are federated. Say you’ve got a town with ten communities in it, they band together to organise water and electricity and all of that through co-ops they create in common.
GS: How do they meet their social needs?
SF: Through neighbourhood meetings, I suppose.
GS: Are you saying there is no need for wages?
SF: Oh, I see. I’m not sure. I haven’t managed to get a source about how the economic system works yet. But they have achieved an enormous amount, very inspiring, much longer-lasting and more peaceful than what the Spanish Civil War achieved. The Kurdish example illustrates to me that the federalist model with local sovereignty is entirely possible. It is a way to create a peaceful, sustainable society out of an absolutely turbulent situation.
GS: Here in Canberra, what do you do about the role of media which generally supports and enforces current power structures?
SF: We run a radio show, Behind the Lines on community radio 2XX and make a podcast called Align in the Sound. That is a three-way podcast between the New Economy Network of Australia (NENA), Behind the Lines and a group called Co-operatives, Commons and Communities Canberra (CoCanberra). So if there is something we want to learn, we do it in a public manner. We record it and leave it as a public record and information source that anybody can look up at any time. What a lot of people lack at this point are ideas. We don’t even know that alternative ways of organising and living exist. Who has heard of sociocracy or holacracy or what’s going on in northern Syria? Almost nobody.
GS: Tell me a bit about the organisations, CoCanberra and NENA you just mentioned.
SF: Every month CoCanberra and NENA Canberra region combine to hold a community information or study group night. For instance, we recently invited the National Health Co-op and a co-op from Sydney, called The Co-operative Life, who do aged-care and disability help. We sat the video conference TV on the couch at the food co-op, everyone else sat around it, and they talked about their models, with Q&A afterwards. One is a worker co-op, and the other is a consumer co-op. We were able to explore how they work and why, and what problems they face. We also do asset-based community development training. The idea here is that the community is an asset. The strengths and passions of the community need to be uncovered and used to build solutions to whatever problems that community is experiencing. When we discover or come up with new ideas, we run a workshop.
The New Economy Network of Australia is an Australia-wide networking organisation of people who are essentially trying to build a new economy. CoCanberra is about starting up co-ops and getting things implemented on the ground. The Pre Power and Community Owned Farming co-ops are projects that CoCanberra is deeply involved in. Radio Behind the Lines does long format interviews with anyone who is trying to make the world a better place.
Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s what we are all doing.
Of course, we do have to fight the old system as well because it’s very quickly munching its way through the planet. The New Economy Network is a co-operative devoted to building a new economy. They’ve been around since 2016 when a conference was held in Sydney by the University of New South Wales law school and the Australian Earth Laws Alliance. At that point, there was no peak body in Australia, so they decided to form one. You can become a member of NENA. It’s got a really good website. They have geographic hubs, and they also have sectoral hubs like an education hub, a First Nations economics hub, housing, food, you name it. There’s a long list. You might live in a regional area, and you’ve got a passion or in-depth knowledge of renewable energy; you can hook up with people from around Australia who have similar values and skills. Behind the Lines is a community radio show that has been going for thirty-two years. I’ve been doing it for fifteen years. We work together with CoCanberra, and have recorded a lot of the New Economy Network conferences. If it’s appropriate to record the CoCanberra / NENA meetups, we will record them. We run editing training workshops over the web, building a team to polish up all that raw audio. Once we finally get them edited, We put them all up as podcasts.
GS: Do you work with unions?
SF: We’ve been trying to, but we haven’t had the numbers to form what they call a union co-op yet. There is interest in Canberra, and there’s a mob in Melbourne called the Earthworker Co-op. They bring together trade unionists, environmentalists, small business people and others in common cause. They began as a coalition of what was left of the Builders Labourers Federation after they got banned, alongside parts of the Green movement. Earthworker operates parallel to us trying to create a co-operative commonwealth on the ground. We are moving towards meeting our needs and capturing the profits rather than letting them go up to all the crazies who currently run the world.
GS: What are the main problems you see with trade unions in Australia.
SF: I think their principal problem is that they are stuck fighting the boss rather than working to make the boss obsolete. They are stuck in a perpetual fight, and that’s not good for culture, spirit or anything else. From being in the system, you become like that system no matter what principles and community support you start with.
GS: What is the main message you would like to pass on to people?
SF: We cannot afford to muck around with slow change any more. Now is the time, with climate disaster upon us, to stop concentrating on fighting the boss and make the changes we want to see by ourselves. We cannot wait for big capital to do it or for the government to do it. We have to do it ourselves; otherwise, it’s just not going to happen. We only have a few years, so we better figure out new ways of organising ourselves to displace the system that is currently ruining the world. Care for people, care for the earth. We can create economic systems that support socially just and ecologically sustainable communities. We can do it, but we have to act now to get it done in time.
Interview conducted with Scotty Foster by Gaele Sobott at Lucky Star Sanctuary, Bywong, 11 October 2020.
The sky is a dark smoke cloud tinged with orange, it’s difficult to breathe outside. I assist my mother to shower, rubbing shampoo into her hair. I hand her a facecloth to wipe the soap from her eyes. We’ve closed the windows and doors to stop ash from coming inside. It’s hot. I’m disabled, 63 years old and my parents are in their late 80s. My mother is ill and has been in bed for a few months. It is extremely difficult for her to walk to the shower. There’s no electricity due to the fires that are raging up and down the south coast of New South Wales. No TV, no internet, no phone coverage. Emergency calls only on my mobile phone. Web-based fire apps aren’t any good to us. I’ve packed the car ready to drive to the evacuation centre at Moruya showgrounds. We are relying on the static reception of the ABC and a battery-operated radio for local emergency updates. I am impressed by the local knowledge and articulate reports of people who phone in about their experiences of the fires. Their reports are invaluable to understanding the trauma and loss, the ferocity of the fires and the extent of the devastation.
The waiting is frustrating, I feel underlying and suppressed fear. Occasionally, anxiety marks my parents’ voices and actions. My father is blocking the downpipes ready to fill the guttering with water. He is determined to stay and defend the house against ember attacks and perhaps even approaching fire. His truck is packed and facing the road. He says he will go if necessary. There is no use arguing with him. I oil my mother’s finely wrinkled skin, careful not to press too hard; run my hands over her stomach, silently thanking her for bearing my sister and me. Her thighs are smooth, almost youthful, her ankles thin. I help her into pyjamas and bed and leave her to sleep.
*
Now I reflect as I wait. The ABC’s emergency reporting is serving us well, but disgust takes over at the Australian government’s not particularly subtle dismantling by stealth of this vital community and national asset. In fact, I realise disgust has been a more or less permanent emotion over the course of 2019. I’m not usually one for hyperbole but I think in this case it is warranted, not to be taken literally but illustrative of the proportions of my disgust; multi-directional, multi-dimensional, stretching to every extreme of my existence and beyond. I breathe the particulate matter of disgust into my lungs, into my veins, arteries and capillaries, my heart, my brain. It penetrates the subterranean reaches of our earth; the water tables, the aquifers, even, I suspect, the white-hot, molten-metal core. Disgust drifts to where our earth’s atmosphere bleeds into outer space.
Most of the time, disgust accompanies feelings of grief and dread. As in early 2019, when close to one million fish searched for flow, for faster cooler deeper current, desperately fighting to breathe in the lower Darling River. But they failed, suffocated; their bloated, rotting corpses floating on blue-green algae pools, piling up on the banks and dry riverbeds. The deaths of 100-year-old Murray cod, golden and silver perch, bony bream with shining spirit skins haunt me. I grieve for them as I grieve the looming death of the Murray-Darling rivers system. I fear for the lives of farmers, townspeople, wildlife, reptiles, fish, insects, plant life, wetlands and soil that depend on this river system. Geologically speaking, the Murray–Darling Basin is over 200 million years old. The river system stretches 3,200 kilometres from Queensland, down through NSW, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory then into the Murray Mouth at Goolwa, in South Australia.
My top lip curls up on the right side, my throat constricts and I feel nauseous. Disgust oozes through my body in response to reports that in 2012 after public consultation had ended on the draft Barwon-Darling water management plan, the National Party, Primary Industry Minister, Katrina Hodgkinson changed the rules to allow irrigators to extract 32 per cent more water during low flows. Disgust that corporate farmer irrigators, many of whom are said to be major National Party donors, have been taking water illegally from the Barwon-Darling and the NSW government has turned a blind eye. Disgust at the massive level of corruption and fraud, lack of transparency and obvious disregard for the health of the Murray-Darling river system that are hallmarks of the government’s water buybacks, water-efficiency projects and capturing of water from overland flow and floodplains. For instance, the federal Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, David Littleproud, has family links to those charged with Murray-Darling Basin fraud amounting to A$20 million, yet he is still the Minister overseeing complaints in a separate investigation of the $80 million Murray-Darling Basin scandal involving federal MPs Barnaby Joyce and Angus Taylor.
I feel disgust at the corporate farming of water-guzzling crops that are not suited to our dry climate: like the annual planting of cotton, with an average irrigation requirement of 7.8 megalitres per hectare and the planting of permanent crops like almonds that require an average of 13 megalitres of water a year per hectare. About 90 per cent of Australia’s cotton is grown in the Murray-Darling Basin. Cubbie Station, located on the Darling Riverine Plains, is the biggest water user and largest cotton farm in Australia. Its storage dams stretch for more than 28 kilometres. This water is harvested from the floodplains and cannot, therefore, flow naturally to the river. It is believed floodplain harvesting is a major contributor to the huge drop inflow in the Darling River. A significant portion of the water stored in dams is also lost to evaporation. Cubbie has water licences for 460GL or 184,000 Olympic swimming pools.
Instead of addressing how these actions contribute to the reduction of water flow, the Federal Agriculture and Water Resources Minister David Littleproud and his NSW counterpart Niall Blair blame the drought.
*
I let disgust go. I must take my mother something to drink. She is tiny in her bed, covered by red blankets, sleeping. These days, she has almost no appetite. We offer her smaller servings of food, yoghurts, milk drinks; easily digestible with nutritional powder, banana or blueberry or yoghurt mixed in. As the electricity is off, I mash a banana with a fork until it is liquid, whisk it into the milk mixture then strain out any lumps. I may try mashed avocado next time. We are on a journey of discovery, finding out the food tastes and textures that please her. She likes some soups, carrots cooked until they are soft and vegetable risotto. Yesterday, she asked for a cup of tea.
The police knock on the door. My cousin in Perth is worried as she can’t get in touch with us. One policeman tells us that Mogo, Batemans Bay and places like Malua Bay have experienced significant damage from the fire. They say they would prefer my mother and I go to the evacuation centre today.
My father packs a change of clothes and a toothbrush in a bag. I prop Mum crookedly against some pillows on her bed; she manages to drink a small glass of banana milk. I decide to check out the centre and leave her to sleep.
It’s not far to the Moruya Showground. There are a lot of caravans and tents around the oval, horses in various enclosures and other livestock in small buildings. I can hear hens clucking and roosters crowing. People are carrying cats and walking their dogs. The evacuation centre volunteers and emergency workers are set up at tables close to the entrance of the indoor basketball court. A man offers his arm to help me walk. I’m thankful. It’s difficult to negotiate the crowd without my mobility scooter. People, strangers, seem to gain comfort from talking to each other about their experiences, their losses, their fears and their plans for the fires approaching Moruya. I talk to a couple from Canberra who can’t get back because of road closures. Another woman tells me the water is off at South Head. Two elderly men say that the leather shop in Mogo has burnt to the ground. There is a whiteboard with the latest information on the fires, road closures, power cuts and the times when food is served. I register my parents, myself and the cat with the triage team. The workers try their best to help find a suitable place for us to stay but the accommodation on offer is not accessible. They advise me to try the retirement village near the hospital which has chairs available for the night. I drive there and speak to the woman in charge. She is efficient and welcoming. The hushed pinks, greens and grey of the interior provide shelter to many elderly people and some disabled young people, all sitting quietly, staff bustling between them. The woman says we should hurry to be assured of a place as they are also expecting elderly people who are being evacuated from the retirement village in Dalmeny.
Back at home, I give my mother a small glass of apple juice. Dad puts an esky full of drinking yoghurt and apple juice, a pillow and a woollen blanket in my car. I drive to the retirement village with Mum. Two members of staff wheel her inside, I park the car and bring her bag in. She is sitting on a chair, upright, tense, ready to leave. Her eyes are bright blue, buttoned into her pale face, searching for me. I sit next to her, suddenly realising that possibly she thought I had dumped her in a retirement home under the pretext of evacuation and I wasn’t returning. She asks me numerous times why we are here and where my father is. A staff member offers her a sandwich. She refuses to eat with a slight air of indignance. She keeps repeating that she wants to go home. Her confusion and anxiety are increasing rapidly. I tell a member of staff we are leaving, take my mother to the car and we drive.
I’ve lost awareness of dates, days. It’s a weekday, mid-afternoon. No cars on the road, no people walk the streets and everything seems to glow a dirty, apocalyptic orange. We drive past the Queens Street Medical Centre. There is a sign on the door that reads ‘Closed due to fires’. Some businesses that rely heavily on the tourist season have decided to call it quits for good. ATMs don’t work and the few shops that are open require cash. The chemist in the main street and Woolworths are closed. I drive home, hoping it will be possible for Mum to stay one more night in the comfort and familiarity of her own bed.
Dad agrees with this decision. The fire glows red on the ridge north of Moruya. I’m on edge, wondering how I will know if there is an ember attack or if fire approaches during the night. I manage to sleep soundly, waking to the alarm at 6am. Dad helps Mum into the car. We find parking in front of the evacuation centre. It is not too far to walk. I keep talking to her, explaining that we will be staying here for the whole day and night. An emergency worker asks if we would like someone to bring us our meals. I appreciate her assistance. It means we don’t have to join the long queues at the building that serves as a kitchen. A charity volunteer talks to me about finding a mattress for my mother. Soon, a young man appears with an air mattress. He proceeds to blow air into it. Another volunteer brings sheets and pillows that have been donated. People are helpful. They assist me to walk and carry things. When the electricity goes off, a woman in a bed nearby tells me she is a nurse. She offers to take over from me for a while to fan my mother. Her husband has Parkinson’s and is waiting for his daily medication to take effect. Their two teenage sons are with them. Like many people in here, this family knows the fire has already been through their area but don’t know if their house is still standing. I keep Mum’s fluids up and give her mouthfuls of yoghurt from the esky. When a volunteer brings spam and salad sandwiches, surprisingly she eats most of it. The small dogs are yapping, the parrots squawking but generally, the animals in the hall are well behaved.
Time passes slowly. I keep talking to Mum, reassuring her. Someone says the fire is at North Moruya, firefighters are water bombing near the airport. A volunteer offers me two wet cloths. I put one at the back of Mum’s neck and one in the esky. She asks about Dad a few times, then asks if we can go home soon. I tell her we are staying the night. I don’t know how I am going to help her up from the mattress when she wants to go to the toilet. I speak to the emergency workers about it. The hair around my forehead is wet with sweat. People stop and talk to us. I notice various disabled people of different ages with varied impairments and health conditions. They are accompanied by family and friends. The strength of community in this hall is palpable. People seem to know intuitively how to help each other, their skills are apparent. It is clear that, even without resources, we will make the best of the distressing situation we find ourselves in.
Mum wants to go to the toilet. She tries to get up but cannot. I ask an emergency worker for assistance. She calls another woman. They try to help but hurt Mum by pulling on her arms. She doesn’t complain. An elderly woman sitting across the way gets up and walks over. Her name is Val, she was a geriatric nurse in England. She demonstrates to the women how to help a frail person up from the floor. Mum is on her feet. I guide her to sit on the walker and push her. We move slowly. I’m not physically strong. The walker helps me balance. There are four toilets and a row of metal basins on the wall. One toilet has a piece of paper taped to the door with ‘For people with upset stomachs’ written across it. Apparently, some form of gastritis is raging through the dogs and the humans in the centre. When Mum is finished, I rub her hands with sanitiser and we return to our mattress. Even though this experience is hard for her, she is quietly persevering. She lives in the immediate present or in her childhood. She talks to me now about her father, telling me that he was a gentle man.
*
I lay next to her and I think about resilience and about how we are made vulnerable by a system that has let us down. How communities that lack resources – poor communities, the disabled, the elderly, First Peoples’ communities – are particularly impacted by disasters like this one. My guts twist in anger and hurt for those in need who are disregarded or, worse, stigmatised and punished by government policies. Disgust sets in again at the repeal of Medevac, stripping away the only pathway to evacuation from offshore detention for sick refugees. Disgust at the decision to axe funding to the main body representing First Peoples women survivors of domestic abuse. Disgust at Robo-debt’s cruel assault on our welfare system causing extreme distress and, in some cases, suicide. Disgust at the refusal of government to increase the New Start support allowance which, at around $40 a day, condemns people to live well below the poverty line, barely covering rent, let alone other essentials.
Disgust that people on the cashless welfare card will not be able to buy goods during this disaster when the shops are demanding payment in cash. Disgust that the expansion of the cashless welfare card is costing between $4,000 to $10,000 per person to implement and manage. This money could be going directly to income support or work programs, education or additional resources and infrastructure in areas impacted by high unemployment. It goes instead to Indue Pty Ltd, a corporation said to donate to various Liberal and National Party branches nationally. In August 2019, Indue is reported to have received up to $21.9 million. If the card is extended to every person receiving benefits, the cost to the taxpayer for administration alone will be in the billions. Disgust also that the Indue card is the result of the sustained efforts of billionaire mining magnate, Andrew Forrest, who dictates that the solution to what he perceives as the ‘welfare dependency’ of First Peoples is income management.
*
Women bring us our evening meal; a sausage with mashed potato and fried onions. One woman asks if she can bring some water with electrolytes.
I say, ‘Yes, please.’
‘It’s cold and it’s electric-blue,’ she adds.
When she returns, Mum has a long drink from the flask. Then tries to get up. An emergency worker brings two young army reservists who offer their help. Val explains to them how to lift. They do a great job. I ask them how they feel about helping citizens at home. ‘It makes me feel valued,’ one says.
I help Mum to the washbasin and pour water from a bottle so she can clean her teeth. We return to our place on the floor and lay down with every intention of sleeping. It is noisy and hot.
Mum turns to face me. Her eyes seem to look right into who I am as if she has some kind of superpower.
She asks, ‘How are you? How are you really going in your life?’
I say, ‘I am good Mum. I have friends. I’m good.’
She continues to look at me.
I have not asked myself this question. Every day is a struggle. I am self-employed, work non-stop and make very little money. My work-life balance is terrible.
Children run up and down the hall, laughing and screaming. The main light in the hall is just above us, secured to the backboard of a basketball hoop.
*
I return my thoughts to Andrew Forrest and the big mining companies in Australia. Miners of fossil fuels like Adani only expect to be viable if they depend on subsidies, favourable deals and tax concessions. Over its thirty-year life, Adani’s Carmichael coal project would be given at least $4.4 billion in taxpayer subsidies. The miners bring in huge revenues but pay little or no tax at all. The latest Australian taxation figures record that massive oil and gas producers, like Exxon Mobil with $9.23 billion in Australian revenues, Chevron with $5.27 billion and Woodside with $6.28 billion, all paid no tax. Gina Rinehart’s company, Hope Downs, with $3.8 billion in revenue, does not pay tax. That both our two major political parties support coal exports when we could be developing other export industries including renewables, makes no sense. I want to see a breakdown of who exactly benefits from the US$87.7 billion income from our 2018 exports of mineral fuels. Given that the demand to decommission coal mines includes a just transition of jobs to renewables, I wonder why there is so much emphasis on jobs in the coal industry when just over 37,000 jobs are involved and many mines, including Adani, are automating. There is also little discussion on how the increase in our exchange rate caused by the resources boom negatively affects other job sectors — industries such as tourism, tertiary education, manufacturing, agriculture that employ vastly more people in widely dispersed locations. I feel disgust that we are lied to by politicians like Scott Morrison and the billionaire-owned media. We are not given the information we need to make decisions, we are discouraged from thinking critically.
I feel disgust that Gina Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting, donates millions to the right-wing, climate-denying think tank, Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) which has close links to the Liberal party and to Murdoch’s media. Murdoch News Australia pays no tax, despite $2.4 billion in revenues from its papers and websites. The same media spreads clearly disproven disinformation that arsonists, not climate change, are responsible for the continuing fire disaster we are experiencing in Australia.
I am equally disgusted when, in September 2019, Donald Trump hosts a state dinner in honour of Scott Morrison accompanied by guests Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest, billionaire media magnates, Seven West Media chairman Kerry Stokes, News Corp’s Lachlan Murdoch and billionaire Anthony Pratt. These are the important players in Australia’s oligarchy. This is where power resides.
I assume oligarchs can helicopter out of a danger zone if they ever find themselves in one. They can afford to ‘adapt’ to climate change by building bunkers into their holiday homes. We never expect to share space with an oligarch in an evacuation centre.
*
The generator stops. The lights go out. An emergency worker fiddles with an electricity cable.
My mother asks, ‘Can we go home in the morning?’
‘I think so,’ I say and turn over to sleep.
The generator starts up again. I wake to the light flickering in my face. Most people in the hall appear to be asleep. Mum is trying to get out of bed. She thinks she is at home. I explain that we are in the hall, that we have evacuated. She asks where my father is. A volunteer comes to help her up. I can now see bruises on Mum’s arms, her hips and knees are sore. Val comes over and instructs the woman how to lift. Val also lifts. I wheel Mum to the toilet. It is too late. She has wet herself. I wheel her back to the bed and pack our bag. We pass by the tables near the entrance and sign out. I explain that I can’t continue to put Mum through this. A young man helps us to the car. I don’t know if we are still under threat from fire. We drive home.
Both Mum and Dad sleep through the next day. I listen to the ABC. A neighbour knocks. He tells me we must boil our drinking water because it is now being mixed with water that comes directly from the river. He says the supermarkets are empty. There is no food, no fuel. I take two cans of Irish stew from the cupboard. That will do us.
As the days roll by, we are lucky; the electricity is back on and so is the phone and Internet. Many communities are still waiting for the electricity to be restored. A truckload of supplies gets through under police escort. The food is gone from the supermarket by lunchtime.
*
My father has an appointment with an Aged Care Assessor who will assess him for Home Care Packages (HCP) level 2. She tells us that her house, north of Moruya, is under threat from the renewed fire danger forecast for the weekend. She will move into town with her in-laws. As we talk, the lack of transparency and brokenness of the aged care system become obvious. Unlike the NDIS, where disabled people at least have the option of self-management, the elderly must use providers. Some providers are said to charge elderly people up to 50% of their government subsidy for administration. Comparing provider charges is an almost impossible task as the formats are not standardised. I ask the assessor if she can explain the announcement made over Christmas by the federal government that private companies will deliver assessments from April 2021. She doesn’t know about it. More than 400,000 assessments are done every year for home-care packages and residential care, at a cost of $800 per assessment.
Disgust settles in the room once again as I realise this is another opportunity for private enterprise to pocket public funds. The assessor explains how, to date, state-employed nurses, social workers and geriatricians work through community health and public hospitals to assess the level of care required by individual elderly people. She doesn’t think private providers will have the community knowledge, expertise or concern for the individual to provide this service. She is worried that, without the involvement of state and local government structures, there will be even less transparency and little accountability. She gets up to go, saying to Dad that it will take up to two years for his package to come through once it is approved.
He says, ‘Well, I may not be here by then.’ He adds, ‘But I don’t want to shoot the messenger.’
I follow her out the door, holding onto the wall for support.
*
The road to Batemans Bay has just opened. I want quotes for an adjustable bed for my parents, so Mum can sit up in bed to eat. I drive through smouldering, blackened forests. Twisted sheets of roofing iron mark the spot where houses, sheds and businesses have burned to the ground. Smells of burnt wood intermingle with the acridity of charcoaled animal flesh. The agony of a young kangaroo, its body seared to a fence, is captured by a photographer, singeing the psyche of the world. One billion animals estimated killed in the fires. Unknown numbers of invertebrates, insects, frogs, bats dead. Possible catastrophic consequences to ecosystems. More than 2,000 homes and eight million hectares burned. Vast areas of bushland will not regenerate. At least twenty-four people were killed and the fires continue.
People in Sydney have been breathing toxic, smoke-filled air for months. People on the south coast are breathing smoke. On 1 January 2020, Canberra’s air quality is the worst of any major city in the world. On 8 January, the Bureau of Meteorology announces that 2019 was Australia’s hottest and driest year on record. Yet our government acts as if it is business as usual, touting that we’ve had fires since time began.
The 2008 Garnaut Climate Change Review examined the scientific evidence around the impacts on Australia of climate change and predicted that, without adequate action, the nation would face a longer and more intense fire season by 2020. Disgust almost overpowers me that this and other warnings are ignored. That Scott Morrison chooses not to meet with the twenty-three former fire and emergency leaders who ask to discuss early preparation and the equipment needed to fight the impending fire disaster. Disgust that, under the 2019-20 NSW state budget, fire and rescue capital expenditure is cut by $28.5 million or 35 per cent. The Rural Fire Service capital expenditure budget is cut by $49.9 million or 75 per cent. Disgust that the Prime Minister sees fit to go on holiday to Hawaii, the NSW Minister for Emergency Services goes on holiday to Europe, and the Federal Defence Minister goes on holiday to Bali while this land is suffering a profound disaster of apocalyptic proportions. Disgust runs out my ears, oozes from every pore and orifice at the arrogance with which the Prime Minister responds to public concerns on how to compensate and properly equip volunteer fire crews who have been battling the fires since September. Disgust at the forced handshakes and thuggish behaviour he imposes upon the traumatised community of Cobargo. I cannot possibly talk about everything that disgusts me. There is too much. This is why I choose to represent my disgust through hyperbole.
*
The bleak, ashen husks of trees that now comprise Eurobodalla Botanical Gardens are a blur as I drive back to Moruya. It dawns on me that, just like hyperbole, disgust has a purpose. Feelings of disgust are an evolutionary response to protect us from pathogens, infectious threats. Disgust helps us protect and preserve the social order from something that is offensive, poisonous or dangerous. Disgust is about survival.
My disgust calls for totally different ways of living and producing, and different ways of relating to each other and the earth. I don’t think anybody knows yet what this will look like, but I’m sure the oligarchs must not have any say in shaping it. Carbon-fuelled accumulation of capital, greed and ever-increasing profit margins are dangerous to life on earth. Our survival will involve us developing confidence in our ability to respect life, to love and help each other, confidence in our skills and our knowledge, so that we may work within our communities, upwards and outwards, joining with other communities for the common good. Our survival will depend on us learning how to recognise and actively fight corruption, fraud and lies. It will mean we find ways to make reliable information available to all, support and build progressive, independent media, develop critical thinking and make decisions based on facts, not lies.
I read that on 31 December in Victoria, Veronica Marie Nelson Walker, a 37-year-old Yorta Yorta woman is charged with shoplifting and refused bail after representing herself at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, instead she is remanded at the Dame Phyllis Frost maximum-security women’s prison. On 2 January she is found dead in her cell. Our survival depends on urgently building solidarity with those who are discriminated against, racialised, criminalised and murdered by the laws and system that are supposed to protect us. We know the violence against First Peoples, disabled people, women, refugees, the elderly and other oppressed groups of people is linked. The brutality of this system is lethal.
*
I stand by Mum’s bed, looking at her curled warm in her blankets.
She asks, ‘Do we have to evacuate again?’
‘No,’ I say, lying next to her. She talks about her father being on the susso. She describes how, during the war, at school, they did drills, practised climbing down into trenches in the Exhibition Gardens.
‘I don’t think the world has ever been in as much danger as it is in now,’ she says, placing her hand on my hand.
Gaele Sobott 