Blue Mountains National Park, New South Wales, Australia



December 29^th 2002

posted @ 7:18 PM -

Today's mess of posts starts here

Oh, and my Aussie number is out of action. I was hoping to check it for the next few days just in case anyone sent SMS to it, but it won't connect to anything here in NZ.

posted @ 5:14 AM -

catching up

this place is about to close, and I still have a lot to write, so I'll just quickly catch up once again. I started to enjoy Sydney a lot more after the last time I wrote, for various reasons: the weather improved, I left the British lager lout crowd behind, I found some much nicer parts of the city than I had seen before (I still maintain that Bondi is a bit pants, but Manly is great, and not just because it has a ridiculous name that is responsible for such things as the Manly lifesaving club), and got out of town to see some of the remarkable Australian countryside. Then Lynn arrived, and the day she left I managed to catch up with Toby. Things with Lynn get better each time we meet (which is not very often), and New Year's Eve was particularly memorable, spent as it was at the Opera House. It made for a start to the year which was better than I would ever have dared hope, and I had been pretty optimistic about it to begin with.

So far (it's only been about 6 hours) my fresh start in New Zealand has not been so auspicious. I had some difficulty convincing immigration to let me in, then I got to Christchurch and discovered that buses to Nelson only leave early in the morning, so I couldn't get to where Tom & Caroline are just yet, then the phone number I had for them didn't work, and then there seemed to be no room at the inn for this night. I have sorted things out one by one (booked a bus for the morning, found a space on a floor at a hostel, checked email and updated the phone number), but I guess I've been a bit spoilt because the past 5 or 6 weeks have been so unremittingly easy.

I was also toying with the idea of moving to Hong Kong and trying to get a work permit there, but it looks like that won't be feasible because the rules there are far less accommodating for people who want to turn up first and then find a job. I'm still tempted, and I'm still doing research, but it looks like I probably will stay in New Zillund.

posted @ 5:11 AM -

The Logical City

On the theme of things I've changed my mind about recently, the past year or two has seen me radically change my ideas about cities. For one thing I've stopped reflexively hating them; a process which started with me growing increasingly fond of London (where I have deliberately avoided living for the last few years, but would probably now enjoy), was helped along by my being very impressed with Helsinki, Amsterdam & Montréal on short visits to each, and sealed by my unbridled enthusiasm for Hong Kong. But there's a bit more to it than that. I had been (and still am) very convinced of the importance of cities being well-planned, but whereas I used to think a purely rational planned city was an ideal to be aspired to (without making the connection that Milton Keynes (my idea of hell) was the only example I knew of such a place), I have now grown to appreciate the bits of disorder that make each city distinctive, and the 'organic' growth that leads to this.

The point when I really understood this was some time over the weekend I spent in Singapore. I actually had a good time in Singapore, but that was in spite of not liking the place a great deal, and really should be credited to having some nice people to spend time with. Singapore itself is quite creepy.

You see, if you had given me, a year ago, an island and a free reign to design the ideal city there and make my own laws (as a sort of Sim City Raffles - don't try to think about that too much), it would probably have looked quite a lot like Singapore. The buildings are pretty and colourful, the public transport is fast, efficient and cheap[ish], the streets have lots of trees, finding one's way around is fairly easy, everything is very clean, and for all functional purposes the city seems to run very smoothly. But there's something missing; the sort of something that no planner could foresee or design in. It just feels a bit soulless.

After a little while wandering around I saw a driver drop some litter from their window, and it seemed like cause for a celebration, just because it was the first time I had seen anyone break ranks. I found it hard not to photograph every crack in any building's paintwork, just because there were so few. The tarmac just seemed too black, the paint too white and the lines of cars too straight. Even the bloody hookers looked so respectable that when I had wandered into the red light street it took me a while to realise I had done so.

I feel strange criticising a city in this way, because it just seems to be one illustration after another of too much of a good thing. I want places to be clean, I don't want to turn a street corner and be confronted by heroin-haggard hydras, I want finding my way around to be easy. But I also need to feel like there is something to a city that has grown up by itself, controlled by the collective will of a mass of people, and not just a central authority that thinks (just as I probably would have done in their place) it knows best. And I'm very, very glad I saw Singapore, because it helped me realise this.

posted @ 5:01 AM -

Cosmetic security measures

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. This is the sort of stupid thing I could see myself doing.

Incidentally, I carried a large weapon undisguised on a plane today. Just because it happenned to be a clichéd souvenir of Australia (a fighting boomerang) and brightly painted doesn't change the fact that it does have a sharp point, is meant for injuring people, and wouldn't take much skill to knock someone out with. But of course my inch-long blunt penknife had to go in the hold baggage....

posted @ 4:38 AM -

Was the Empire all Evil?

The other thing that Malaysia made me re-think somewhat was the role of the British Empire in determining the fate of its colonies. In tune, I think, with a lot of British lefties, my feeling used to be that this was entirely negative; that the Empire was so purely exploitative, and had so few redeeming features, that it could only be held responsible for problems in its former colonies and that the few successes were in spite of the British involvement.

I spoke to a few Malaysians about this for one reason or another, and they all disagreed quite strongly. They seemed to have quite a high opinion of the British, as an empire which had obtained colonies by trade and persuasion rather than pure brute force, and while clearly exploiting them also building enough infrastructure, providing enough education, and where possible leaving in a planned enough manner not to leave chaos in their wake. It clearly hasn't been like that everywhere, but looking at Malaysia I can see their point. A caricatured version of the argument runs like this: we are richer and more modern than Thailand because the British built infrastructure and left us with plantations that provide valuable exports, and we are a much better organised and more stable society than Indonesia because the British ruled with some sense of responsibility and didn't leave without making British Malaya into a potentially viable state, unlike the Dutch and Portuguese who just raped and pillaged and left abruptly when the tide changed. When I still didn't seem too comfortable with this, a couple of people went on to say things to the effect of: look at Hong Kong, and look at Guangzhou. Why is one a far better place to live than the other, to the extent that there was a steady one-way stream of migration for decades? There's only one major difference - during the worst years of the Peoples' Republic of China, Hong Kong was ruled from Westminster.

I don't really know enough about the history of the region to argue much of this any further (except to say that I am convinced Hong Kong benefitted hugely from escaping the Cultural Revolution), but I just found it a real eye-opener to hear people in a former colony speak in a positive tone about the former colonial masters. They should, after all, have some idea what they are talking about.

posted @ 4:31 AM -

One blood

I feel like I've taken a lot in on this trip, but sometimes I question whether I really have been any more intelligently receptive of new impressions than my backpack. It's partly just because I've been through a lot of places so fast that I feel I must be jumping rashly to conclusions, but also a lot of it is because there are so few places where my prior expectation has been wildly wrong. That probably sounds like an odd thing to self-criticise about, and I suppose it could just be that I was reasonably well-informed to begin with, but I can't help feeling that I've been selectively aware of things that fit my pre-conceptions.

Malaysia was different. Actually I didn't have much of an idea what to expect to see in Malaysia, but what surprised me is that it's made me re-think some of my ideas about racism and integration (and also about British colonialism) somewhat. The thing is that three very different cultures (the Hindu Tamils, the Muslims (Malays and a minority of the Indians) and the Chinese) live on top of each other, and it works relatively well, in conditions that I would previously have expected to be a recipe for disaster.

I have always maintained that ethnic communities (including my own) have to be willing to sacrifice a degree of cohesiveness if they want to integrate well enough with their neighbours to be seen and treated as individual human beings, and not just an amorphous, mistrusted them. I have also been struggling for a while with the contradiction between that and my belief in the importance of keeping traditions alive, and of each person knowing where their roots lie. In short I'd been in favour of assimilation to the extent that racial differences become invisible, at the same time as wanting to see everyone maintain their own sense of identity in the face of this assimilation.

What I saw in Malaysia - in fact one of the best things in a country that I generally have a high opinion of - was that there were 3 seperate communities, with distinct identities, each doing their thing in their own way, but still managing to get along. And it wasn't just a matter of not throwing things at each other - the Malays eat in the Chinese restaurants, the Chinese eat in the curry houses, and there are mixed groups of friends hanging around. But all of this happens at the same time as the distinct groups go to seperate schools where they learn their own languages better than the language of the country (something I would have expected to be a particular barrier to integration) and use English (which is a second language to all) for communication between groups. At the same time as many of these people are religious and worship their different gods in different ways (another thing I used to associate with intolerance and poor neighbourly relations). At the same time as each town has a distinct majority of one particular groups, and Malays are the minority in several places.

There are flaws, to be sure. The most glaring is that all of this apparent harmony rests on a foundation of discriminatory laws, which make a lot of things (buying a house, getting a loan, &c.) easier for bumiputra than for the [generally wealthier and better educated] Chinese or Indians. These laws are a perversion of justice - essentially penalising 3^rd-6^th generation immigrations for the success of their parents & grandparents - but they don't seem to be as resented as I would have expected, because I think a lot of the Chinese (the generally richest group and therefore the most discriminated against) see enriching the Bumiputra, even at their expense, as a necessary cost of keeping the peace. For all the lack of tension that I perceived, it's worth remembering that many adult Malaysians can remember vicious and lethal race-riots in the first 2 decades of independence.

Still, warts and all I did feel that what I saw in Malaysia was a picture that gave me much ground for optimism about the ability of different communities to share one land and get on; something which I have been quite pessimistic about since the riots a year and a half ago in Northern England. It doesn't have to be that way, and the harmony evidently can be achieved without people forgetting who they are, where they came from, or that they are different.

posted @ 4:00 AM -