A few random observations
- Defence spending is one of those areas where there’s always plenty to criticise, but why aren’t more people ripping into Brendan Nelson for spending six billion dollars on fighter planes we don’t need? It’s widely recognised that the planes to be replaced, the F-111s, are awesome, while the planes we’re buying are supposedly just a five-year stopgap. My knowledge of military aviation isn’t as current as it once was, but surely the F-111s can be refurbished for a few years for a miniscule fraction of that cost?
- Meanwhile, I recall saying something about Shinzo Abe “defusing tensions” between Japan, China, and South Korea. Looks like I was wrong, and the region is in for years of acrimony yet …
- Slightly randomly: Jimmy Wales (he’s the founder of Wikipedia, if you didn’t know) is coming to Perth! But alas, it’s for a moderately expensive education conference.
- Also randomly: after my dad had watched the late news on Monday, I caught a few minutes of Channel 10’s gadgets-and-games show Cyber Shack. Curiousity kept me long enough to see them “preview Windows Vista” by demoing Internet Explorer 7. Aside from some blatant factual errors (no, RSS does not “e-mail” you new articles, and no, you don’t need Vista to use IE7), the only big things they pointed out were the slimmer interface and tabbed browsing. Has anyone told them that every geek with any cred switched to Firefox years ago?
- On the topic of Windows: I wonder if the expertise gained by IT staff in WA last December is saleable to Americans right now? In lots of states, daylight saving starts three weeks earlier this year, and Microsoft is charging US$4k (!) for patches for people on extended support (for older products like Outlook XP).
- Finally, indulge me a moment of postcolonial theorising: yesterday I stumbled upon a series of travel articles in Slate about Aboriginal Australians. Just like the European Orientalists of the 1700s (note the title, “going native”!), Rolf Potts engages on a quest to “get a proper taste of aboriginal culture”, clinging to a silly notion of the pure noble savage that he can neatly package for consumption by an audience who needn’t leave their cosy Western existence. He rightfully acknowledges an Alice Springs cattle farmer who points out that city folk often don’t understand the issues faced by remote communities (and for that reason, I’m hesitant to critique the articles’ content) but he goes on to waffle about them anyway as if a short sojourn makes him an expert. Reading the articles, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were the work of an ill-informed, over-confident foreigner. (Admittedly, that’s a not-uncommon feature of travel writing.)
I read the Slate Australia article you link to, and I can only say that your criticism of it don’t make any sense. The writer admits throughout the article that he’s just a tourist writing what he sees, and he actively discredits the ‘noble savage’ myth in more than one place. He actively admits to the contradictions of his own reasons for traveling indigenous Australia, and the inherent limits of any tourist experience. It’s a much more thoughtful examination of the topic than you give it credit for.
CVT if you have a read of the comments on the following site you’ll see that they make a lot of sense.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004281.html
CVT: Potts says he’s just a tourist writing what he sees, but what he does is quite a bit different.
For example, although he does give a few sentences to discuss the “noble savage” idea, he doesn’t really give it up — he goes on an on about trying to get a taste of “authentic” Aboriginal culture, which apparently can only be had in the deserts of the Northern Territory.
This is problematic in a lot of ways, but the most obvious is this: the article mentions that most Australians live in coastal cities. But that is true for Aboriginal Australians as well as white Australians. The cultures of indigenous people currently living in the desert are closer to the cultures that those groups had a thousand years ago, but that doesn’t mean theirs is the only “authentic” Aboriginal culture.
It’s apparent that you’ve gone to great pains to read the comments to the Slate article (and that you’re very eager to name-drop Edward Said), but you’ve obviously done a lousy job of reading the article itself. In the same section of the article you keep referring to, Potts says this:
“Such is the irony of indigenous tourism: In seeking out a culture based on its difference from our own, we risk confusing “authenticity” with our idealized expectations of what that authenticity is supposed to look like. This could be why the self-ghettoizing brand of tour-bus-and-dinner-show tourism is so popular: It offers visitors a seamless product—didgeridoo performances, dot paintings, gift-shop boomerangs—that flatters expectations without raising any complicated questions.”
Later, he says this:
“As much as my visit to indigenous Australia has been an implicit quest for cultural novelty, true aboriginal authenticity was never mine to discover. This is because authenticity anywhere is an internal dialogue within a culture as it synthesizes its past with the present, hoping to better navigate a changing world. The job of the traveler, I reckon, is to slow down and listen so that he can hear snippets of that conversation.”
So, seriously: Read the whole article before you go making clumsy references to Orientalism. It’s far more honest and carefully considered than 99% of what you usually read on the topic.
Actually, I read all five articles several times. You might like to take more care in reading my criticism.
I accept that the articles are carefully considered, and indeed they’re beautifully written, but the methodology is still flawed. Potts is right to point out that “authenticity was never mine to discover” (by the way, the article with that quote wasn’t up when I wrote the post). My criticism, however, is that authenticity is a flawed concept to begin with. Aboriginal cultures (yes, plural) are complex, geographically defined, and historically varied, which is what my last comment was trying to get at. The articles hint at this (such as when talking about language differences) and yet the writing still clings to stereotypical notions of “real Aborigines” and “authenticity” like there’s a single monolithic entity of which you can take an ideal snapshot. But the idea of “authentic” Aboriginal culture makes about as much sense as “authentic” native American culture, or “authentic” European culture.
That, by the way, is the point of the references to Orientalism, which maybe you don’t understand as well as you claim to. A major point of that stream of writing is that the early orientalist scholars and explorers tried so hard to capture “true” Middle Eastern culture that they failed to realise they were studying facets of the particular culture where they were, and those weren’t representative of the broad variety of cultures across the region. They were earnest in doing so, and I’ve no doubt that Potts is/was earnest too, but they were still misguided in their efforts.
I thought the F-111’s were super gay? But the F/A-18 isnt any better, thats for damned sure. We used to have some – what happened to those?
So I agree, but not because the F-111’s are awesome, but because the F/A-18 is dodgy.
Oops, didn’t see your comment among the mountains of spam I’ve been getting lately
Anyway, we do have 70-ish of an earlier version of F/A-18, which (when not launched from ships) is better for anti-air than anti-ground roles. The F-111 is more of an anti-ground bomber, and is the most capable plane of its type in our part of the world; word is that it helped avoid war with Indonesia on at least one occasion. Its main benefit is that it can fly almost as far as an airliner without refuelling, and due to regular upgrades it has up-to-date avionics. The Super Hornet is an F/A-18 modified to be more bomber-ey, but it’s still not a real bomber and doesn’t have nearly as much range.