Reference :- It seems the lads at Rio Tinto were not breaking the law when they destroyed one of the oldest known sites of human habitation in the world . We obviously have some very crappy laws.
Well, as you might imagine , out contributing editor here at The Sky Reply , Gabbo ( the aborigine )
had a lot to say about a significant part of his ( and all humanity's ) heritage being blown to kingdom come merely to add a few pennies to some dividend cheques . He wants to know why we shriek with horror when the Taliban blow up a monument in the Levant that harks back a trifling couple of millennia , and then obliterate a site in our own country twenty times older without a second thought.
It has been hard to console him. The best I could do was explain that in our culture we don't cling to useless vestiges of the past that can't turn a respectable profit , and we can't understand his grief . He replied by asking us how we would feel if somebody dynamited the Sydney Harbour Bridge . Now there is a very interesting question . I guess it depends on the market reaction .
Monte ( the motorcyclist ) reckons that it would depend on why it was razed . If it was blown to smithereens by a terrorist intent on obliterating our way of life , we would be outraged . On the other hand , if we needed to trash it to access a plentiful deposit of rare earths to make i-pads , that would be different . Some people may object , but economic pragmatism would prevail . Seats to view the explosion would be sold . And little Harbour Bridge souvenirs would fill the shops . Everybody would be a winner .
Monte's view seems a bit radical to me , but Ken junior did make an interesting point . He reminded us that back in the seventies , developers wanted to make few quid by bulldozing the Sydney Rocks and knocking up some concrete and aluminium buildings showcasing designs that , by comparison , made the Bauhaus style of architecture look richly ornate. Were it not for the tremendous efforts of Jack Mundy , then leader of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation , the Sydney Rocks would now look like KGB headquarters in Vladivostok .
Anyway , explaining that capitalists are quite happy to annihilate their own heritage , as well as anybody else's , if there is a quid to be had , didn't seem to console Gabbo at all.
And it didn't console the rest of either . Maybe we will lighten up if a whiskey soaked Andy Bolt laughs about it on Sky News , and calls the ancient site a worthless pile of rocks . Worthless except for about 80 bucks worth of iron ore , that is .
Your comrade , Ken
No comments:
Post a Comment