Other Highlights of the Byron Writers Festival

We have always loved Missy Higgins music so we are excited to hear that she is speaking at the festival.  I hadn’t realised how young she still is and yet how mature she has always been about what she wanted to experience in life.  She was discovered very young when her sister enters her song to a radio competition and she wins.  She realised at a very young age that she needed life experience to be able to write and only signed with the record company Eleven, when they agreed to not turn her into a pop star but also let her take a break to go on a backpacking tour of Europe. She has won seven ARIA awards and in addition to her music she is also passionate about animal rights and the environment. 

I had never thought that song writers would also be part of a writers festival and realised as I listened to Missy Higgins speak that of course they too are artists trying to convey a message.  Higgins used her music to express her emotions.  Like many artists, she is an introvert and loves to lose herself in the music she plays and the words she sings.  She talks about her love for Broome, a place that I too connected to when I visited a long time ago.  She spent 6 months there and discusses how she found a connection to the landscape and how being away from everything helped her to write new material. 

Missy Higgins talked about an urgency she felt to create good art and once again we feel really inspired by this talk.  I often vacillate between my love for writing and photography.  Sitting here at the Byron Writers Festival I feel inspired to start writing more!

On Saturday, we also listened to Malcolm Fraser.  Malcolm Fraser was Australia’s 22^nd Prime Minister under the Liberal Party but his views and ideas no longer support the ideologies of the party. 

He talks about the war in Iraq and discusses whether we really needed to be part of the invasion.  He talks about our close relationship with the Americans and asks if we needed to be in such a close alliance with them.  He criticises the current state of human rights in Australia and says we should be concerned that our freedoms are being whittled away.  We hear about the laws that now allow for secret detention of innocent people for whom the onus of proof has been reversed and feel amazed this is not more widely known. 

The section on Travellers’ Tales, were also conversations that really inspired me.  We had seen the movie Tracks recently, so the chance to hear Robyn Davidson talk about her perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea, with only four camels and a dog for company was inspiring.  She talks about her experiences and mentions that she was not really on a conquest to conquer the environment but rather she just wanted to feel a part of it.  She also laughs when she says the same trip that she did back then could not be really recreated today.  For one, the current technology such as IPhones and GPS would render it a completely different experience.  You would be required to obtain permits, write a blog, obtain funding—the list goes on.   Robyn says, ” there is no such thing as too much freedom, only not enough courage.”  She remarks that our systems have made it impossible for us to get lost today.  She asks us to extend the boundaries of our life and mentions that our crazy consumer culture is manipulating us.  Lastly, she says she can only call a place home if she can escape it—something that completely resonates with me. 

There are many other authors that inspire me in some way.  Claire Dunn talks about her book, My Year Without Matches, once again a story of connection to the landscape. It is a story of how feeling burnt out by her job, she quits a comfortable life to spend a year in the bush without matches.  She discusses how her adventure unfolds over four seasons and how she deals with the issues of survival: shelter, water, fire and food.  We also enjoyed listening to Jono Lineen and his discussions on how his Himalayan trek healed his soul.  He undertook a 2700-kilometre trek through the Western and Central Himalayas, a journey that up to then had never been completed solo.  Over time he comes to realise that this trek was far more than a physical challenge.  It was all about coming to terms with the death of his younger brother, seven years earlier. 

There were many more authors and sessions but I can’t blog about them all.  We say goodbye to the Writers Festival and spend our last night with Chris and Christobel chatting over pizza and drinks.  We are thankful for their hospitality.  It has been lovely to share their home and enjoy their generosity while at the festival. 

In Conversation with Bob Brown

One of the highlights of the Byron Bay Writers Festival was to hear Bob Brown speak.  The tent was filling up but we had got there early and managed to get some good seats up the front.  Bob is famous for many things but we know him best for leading the 1982 blockade of dam works on the Franklin River, an area of pristine beauty that was later recognised by a World Heritage listing.  He is both loved and hated by the Australian public depending on where they sit on the political spectrum.  It isn’t often you find a man who lives by his beliefs, who has been jailed, shot at and also founded the first Greens party in the world! 

He makes a few jokes at the expense of the Liberal Party and the audience warms up.  He remarks that he can’t actually find anybody who voted for Tony Abbott although he met somebody the other day who had a friend who might have... 

There is much laughter from the largely left of centre audience.  He remarks that capitalism has become the religion of this world with growth at the heart of it.  He says that occasionally we need a Tony Abbot to remind us that we must turn back.  The audience applauds.

The conversation then turns to his experiences as a gay man during a time when being gay was banned.  He publicly declared his homosexuality in 1976 to help other people through their struggles and recounts some of his horrific experiences including subjecting himself to electric shock treatment in an attempt to be ‘cured’.  After considering suicide he learns to accept who he is and came out at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Tasmania! 

The influence the Greens have on Australian politics has grown from strength to strength.  His campaign for the Franklin River is quite legendary and the party has been able to make great strides in convincing the Australian population to consider their message seriously.  I think many people do not realise that it is possible for us to both maintain our standard of living but use fewer and more sustainable resources.  Sadly, our heavy reliance on oil and those that benefit from it prevent any alternative ideas being discussed in Australia.

Bob Brown ends his speech with a anthem he has written to the planet.  The tent was overflowing and he got a standing ovation from the crowd but then of course he was preaching to the converted. We felt inspired and optimistic about the future and happy we had this experience.

The Ocean is Broken

We are at the Byron Bay Writers Festival and listening to Tim Flannery and Lisa-ann Gershwin discuss the oceans and their fate.  Tim Flannery is no stranger to this audience and receives a warm welcome.  He starts the discussion by reminding us that the ocean is 500 times bigger than the atmosphere and hence holds more dissolved gasses.  Much of the carbon dioxide that is released by us into the atmosphere dissolves into oceans, rivers and lakes.  Increased acidity upsets the ecological balance and results in many harmful outcomes such as coral bleaching, one of the reasons the Great Barrier Reef is at risk. 

He discusses the fact that many scientists believe we are on the cusps of a sixth mass extinction, which could wipe out most of life on Earth as we know it.  A mass extinction happens when over 75% of all species die in a period that is less than 2 million years.  We have had 5 mass extinctions on Earth over the past 540 million years and many of these have involved loss of life in the oceans.  The problem with change in the oceans is that it is irreversible.

Acidic water is corrosive to many species such as corals, who cannot survive when calcium levels in the water go down.  Many other species such as shellfish are also affected and when their numbers go down, their predators die also.  I think you get the gist.  I’ve done a bit of research on this since coming back.  The oceans have absorbed about 30% of the CO₂ emitted by humans.  This amounts to approximately a million tons an hour!  While this is great for life on land, it is death for life at sea. 

At the session is also Lisa-ann Gershwin talks about her book, Stung.  She is often referred to as the Stinger Lady and enlightens us on jellyfish blooms, something we had not known about previously.  She talks about the dead zones in the oceans where the blooms are most likely to occur.  We are quite surprised to hear that a massive jellyfish bloom in Western Australia of sea tomato jellyfish covered the oceans from Broome to Exmouth for 13 months.  She says they were so huge you could see them from space.  If our oceans continue to warm this will be a huge issue and impact not just our ecosystems but also our economy!  Like the dying coral, the jellyfish are another indicator that something is wrong with our oceans.  Too much nutrients, warming water, not enough oxygen, a reduction of predators are only some of the reasons for the over abundance of this species. 

Tim Flannery says there are enough signs out there to indicate something is amiss with the oceans.  He talks about the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is now dislodged and could collapse at any point.  We know the ocean is warming and Tim indicates that an increase of 1.5 degrees in the oceans could see the demise of the Great Barrier Reef.  He discusses other factors such as the dumping and dredging of the coal industry, which is also adding fuel to the fire.  The current government continues to approve projects in the reef, which has caused our World Heritage Listing of this site to be in peril. 

It was an extremely enlightening and informative session and we walked away having learnt that the next 6 years were critical for action.

Dream Boat Refugees

Why are Australian’ so passionately afraid of Boat People?  Is it because we are genuinely concerned about safety at sea for these desperate people or are we appealing to the fear and racism that is buried deep amongst many of us?  After all the largest consignment of ‘boat people’ disembarked on this land on the 17^th of January 1788 and many of the same people who are paranoid of refugees trace their ancestry back to this date. 

We are in Byron Bay to contemplate this and many other topics. 

We have decided to kick start the 3 day Writer’s Festival by sitting in on a session aptly titled Dream Boat Refugees!  The session includes Carina Hoang a Vietnamese refugee who left Vietnam by boat when she was just a teenager with her two younger sisters.  She has come to Australia via Indonesia, and the US. 

Read her amazing story:  http://carinahoang.com/about

Carina has now been inducted to WA’s inaugural Women’s Hall of Fame as one of their most courageous and inspiring women.  She has just produced a beautiful book of photos and stories about the journeys of boat people.  She shares small insights on her harrowing journey out of Vietnam, where she watched people die at sea.  Her story highlights what many refugees will tell you—that most people don’t really want to leave families and everything that constitutes home for them but they do so because they are fleeing persecution and have no option but to find a safer place to live. 

The session allows us to get our head around some numbers.  Only a small number of people who actually arrive in Australia come by boat—and they are between 2-7% of our annual migration.  Despite this, approximately 94% of people who come by boat are found to be genuine refugees while those who come by plane were more than twice as likely to be refused refugee status!  There are over one thousand children in our detention centres and many who are also living in community detention.  

If you watch the news you may have been led to believe that we are being swamped by refugees. In fact UNHCR numbers tell us that we only receive 3% of the refugee claims made in industrialised countries around the world. The largest number of refugees (80%) are actually hosted in developing nations! 

So in reality we are not really contributing our fair share to help all the people around the world displaced by wars we have helped support! 

One of the people on the panel is Julian Burnside a barrister who specialises in human rights and commercial litigation.  He explains the situation a little more.   The UN Refugee Convention to which we are a signatory recognises that refugees do have a legal right to enter a country and seek asylum regardless of how they arrive or whether they have a visa.  The refugees are not illegal.  Julian explains that the government is failing to comply with its international responsibilities. By suggesting that refugees are illegal it is able to then imply that they are criminals and so justify whatever actions it takes—such as locking up children. 

What if these kids were your own?  What would you do if you had to choose between the persecution of the Taliban or the slim chance you would make it to Australia.  What would you choose?

All I ask is this.  Can we stop the fear mongering, and hear their stories?