I remember marching up Manly Beach .. sometime in the late 1970s .. we could do that then without the supervision of a department of State Security – no listening devices or phone cameras being waved in our faces for the future benefits of a government fear campaign – the particular occasion I’m remembering was a grand community march to have the North Head Sewage outlets removed. We didn’t achieve that but the government did come to the party and manage to extend them another km out to sea. You’ve gotta try, and back then it seems we were prepared to try a little bit harder. This was about the same time as the old forgotten Clean Up Australia campaign was beginning – no public protests marches I remember for this one, but I do remember marching up and down the beach picking up rubbish. There wasn’t much back in those days even though we thought there was way too much. I suppose that shows .. is a sign, of the progress we’ve made as a society.

Now, ooh, 40 years on and progress has certainly made one giant leap. I haven’t been back to the beach in 20 years, but I’ve managed to keep quite up to date with our progressive view and lack of actions in semi-wild places. Something in me has always gravitated to the fringe of Nature most liable to the destruction of man. Not something I would recommend to others .. beside which, they really don’t exist anymore. The beach of course has an advantage over the other wild places as the Earth’s great oceans fight a hard battle – despite mans interventions – on the foreshores. We have never really conquered the ocean – I suppose were going to leave it until we’ve destroyed the land. We cant be far away from that now …

Maybe it’s a good thing that the kids are concentrating on that Final Frontier – Space – plans streaming ahead for the destruction of Mars. No great oceans to fight about up there it seems. Do you think the intention is to make this Earth, our Earth, the rubbish dump for the humanizing of the great ocean of space?

You’d make a mint over rubbish collection these days (not the picking up of the bins, that’s been a gold mine for eons) .. it’s the stuff thats not seen as rubbish, the stuff floating about in the wind, the stuff someone else left. Of course, you’re not allowed to – OH&S – dangerous job. Shame. The new society produces the stuff on an exponential basis .. so it seems. I’m comparing it to the old society, which of course I can’t help doing being a child of the old society. Now it’s progress, it’s a shame and it’s catching. Grandma and Grandad don’t see it these days which is strange seeing as they were the ones marching against sewage outfalls and in the forefront of Clean up Australia campaigns. Same sort of thing with the old 40hr Famines etc .. that’s all in the past now. Kids dont like the ‘on the ground’ effort – there’s probably an App you can play it all on now, earn points. It’s all probably against the law anyway – like saving whales.

There was a certain advantage growing up back then, before we’d discovered that we were going to colonize the Universe .. when principle fluidity wasn’t seen as a good social virtue. Shame. It’s a dangerous thing to box up old souls. It makes them remember. The old minds expand as the bodies contract. You can see why so much of the great ideals, literature and arts came out of the past. Prisons and small damp huts certainly gave our race that progress at all cost mentality. Gives hope for all the kids spending another Christmas on Manus & Nauru – sparks for the worlds of the future.

Perhaps that’s the idea behind the new Draconian governments and PC – to compress the human mind and soul to ensure that it has nowhere to go but to expand outwards. Artificially limit the bounds of humanity in order to expand them. I have a friend who likes these sorts of trains of thought … I have an old dog who would just like it if I took him for a walk. There’s a nexus here I’m sure .. and there is, after all, no true gaol for thought.

… What brought all this up? Well, I’m in one of those semi-wild places and the winds beating upon it like I remember the waves beating on the shores of my youth – and I’ve never seen so much rubbish blowing about on that wind. Progress? Who knows .. they say it is. Another thing I notice, no one’s sense of direction, or of where it is they actually are seems to have improved with all the land clearing and phone GPS.

Reminds me again. There was another old boy I once knew .. way more obnoxious than me, way way more obnoxious … He had a funny way with direction in semi-wild places; you’d say to him something like, “Go West!”, and he’d roar back .. “facing out or facing in!!”
He was way more obnoxious than me – he used to produce guide books. True.

‘Art is man added to Nature’ as Bacon has said, and perhaps, while there is not much more need be said – it is not much for a book. – D.S.MacColl