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Living on the edge:

Reflections on an uncertain nation

by Simon Longstaff

May I begin with a confession (of sorts): I plan to use this occasion as an opportunity to engage in a moment of intellectual self-indulgence. That is, I plan to 'play' with a couple of ideas that I have had in mind for at least a decade. Given this, I hope that you will excuse the fact that I incorporate a fairly diverse range of material as I assemble my thoughts along lines that will be rather more impressionistic than tightly structured. I'm not entirely clear about where my thinking will lead. So, rather than try to outline a synopsis of an argument I might, instead, simply begin.

In each of the past few years I have had an opportunity to visit a gold mine in the Tanami desert. If your geography is a little rusty, then let me tell you that the mine is about 700km south of Darwin, about 600km north of Alice Springs and about 90km east of the Western Australian border.

This is remote, outback Australia and the mine is one of very few intrusions on a landscape that has remained relatively undisturbed for millennia. The Tanami Joint Venture gold mine is operated by Otter and is generally considered to be one of the best-run mines of its kind in Australia. As is commonly the case these days, this is a 'fly in/fly out' operation. This means that there is no township, no settled community as such. If you ever have an opportunity to visit this mine, then I recommend that you take a walk down the airstrip, by yourself, at night.

The dirt strip begins at the edge of the camp and extends towards the scrub. As you walk into the night, the sounds and lights of the camp recede until they are no longer discernible. If you are at all like me, then you are bound to be distracted by the arc of the sky – a massive dome of stars that seem, at times, close enough to touch. In that distracted state, it is easy to come upon the end of the runway, quite suddenly.

I have spent a reasonable amount of time in the outback. So, I am fairly much at home in the land. However, my experience at the end of the runway was quite unsettling. I can only think that it was something to do with the depth of the night, the complete absence of unnatural light or the fact that I was alone. Whatever the reason, the abrupt end of that runway seemed to mark a point of transition between two worlds. On one side of the line lay the world of: carefully graded gravel, aircraft, power plants, telephones and all that belonged to it. On the other side lay a world of: boundless space, raw nature, ancient ways, unspeakable mysteries, and so on.

I suspect that my impressions of the moment will sound like the product of an over-active imagination. Yet, I recall the sensation quite vividly. At the time, I felt compelled to cross the line (it wasn't just a matter of keeping walking). As I stepped beyond the gravel and into the scrub, I experienced a great sense of belonging – a quite unusual sense of being affirmed distinctively as an Australian. Yet I also felt a little uneasy, unsettled by the thought of how long it must take a person to become totally familiar with the vastness of our country – a vastness that is something more than the product of geography.

Now, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with ethics and uncertainty.

Let me try to explain. As an area of human enquiry, ethics is first and foremost about trying to answer a deceptively simple question; being, “What ought one to do”. A moment's reflection will indicate that this question has a couple of obvious features. First, it is a practical question. We encounter this question every time we have a choice to exercise or a decision to make. Second, the question is almost entirely unavoidable. Indeed, there is really only one way to avoid this question – by operating on automatic pilot; without living a life that is self-consciously our own.

Some people may be attracted to the idea that we surrender the burden of active and responsible choosing in favour of mindless conformance with custom, command, habit, law or tradition. Others will side with one of my great heroes, Socrates, and conclude (as he did) that, “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

Ethical questions arise in all shapes and sizes. For example, when the phone rings and I'm too busy to take the call, what should I do? When a belligerent and obnoxious neighbour drops his wallet when running for the bus, what should I do? When a confidential document, containing information about a business competitor, accidentally appears in my fax machine, what should I do? When a person says that she wishes me to help her to end her life, what should I do? When the wife of a colleague who is having an extra-marital affair asks me whether it's true that he's been working late at the office for the past month, what should I do?

Some people may find it extremely easy to answer each of these questions and to do so with total confidence. They might be considered to be the fortunate few. Many more people will find themselves wrestling with a genuinely perplexing ethical dilemma. Ethical dilemmas can be said to have a general form in which two values or principles, of apparently equal merit, are found to be in tension.

A classic example of this can be seen in the following scenario: on the one hand a person might be committed to the principle of truth telling. On the other hand, the same person might be wedded to the principle of keeping promises. So, what should such a person do when she knows that to tell the truth would be to break a promise? It might be argued that it is foolish to make promises that might require you to lie on occasions. This might be true. However, pointing this out to the person facing the ethical dilemma will hardly help them to find a resolution. The point is that even if we can be certain about some things, we cannot be certain about everything.

This is one reason why the ethical dimension of life is so challenging. Another is that the ethical landscape, that we traverse, is growing in scope and complexity. This is the product of two influences – new developments in technology and altered patterns of engagement across the world.

For example, technological developments in the field of biotechnology have generated the possibility of making new choices that were unavailable to humankind even a decade ago. Should people be able to create an embryo and then defer its gestation and birth until a time that is convenient for the parents. Should human cloning be allowed? Should humans alter their genetic material to incorporate that of other species?

Thus, we move into a world of increasing uncertainty. As you will have gathered from my comments, I do not think that there is much that we can do to lessen the degree of uncertainty that we experience. Indeed, I would contend that uncertainty is written into the human experience – especially made manifest by the ethical dimension of existence. If there was time, I might go on to speculate that there is a link between some of the discoveries in quantum mechanics, the possibility of free will and the existence of ethical dilemmas. There are also one or two interesting lines of argument arising from theology that might be pursued. However, I must leave these ideas unexplored until another time.

What I do want to flag is the possibility that a person or society's ability to deal with uncertainty is a key predictor of long-term success and that if this is so, then we Australians need to address what I perceive to be an uneasy relationship with the phenomenon of uncertainty. Curiously enough, we are quite good at dealing with change and innovation.

However, I would argue that an ability to deal with 'change' should be distinguished from an ability to deal with ‘uncertainty’. Some change can be seen to lead to fairly certain outcomes. Alternatively, people can cope with change if they have access to tools of a kind that seem capable of generating certainty (or even the impression of certainty). Typical examples of the 'technologies of change' include approaches like: business re-engineering, total quality management, and so on.

I will say more about this, and the distinctions that I have tried to introduce, in a little while. But for the moment, I would like to return to what I felt in the Tanami desert. Indeed, I would like to go beyond that experience and introduce a similar but different idea that is captured in Les Murray's poem, Noonday Axeman. I hope that my reading does the poem reasonable justice.

Noonday Axeman

Axe-fall, echo and silence. Noonday silence.
Two miles from here, it is the twentieth century:
cars on the bitumen, powerlines vaulting the farms.
Here, with my axe, I am chopping into the stillness.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. I pause, roll tobacco,
twist a cigarette, lick it. All is still.
I lean on my axe. A cloud of fragrant leaves
hangs over me moveless, pierced everywhere by sky.
Here, I remember all of a hundred years:
candleflame, still night, frost and cattle bells,
the draywheels' silence in our ears,
and the first red cattle spreading through the hills
and my great-great-grandfather here with his first sons,
who would grow old, still speaking with his Scots accent,
having never seen those highlands that they sang of ...
a hundred years. I stand and smoke in the silence.
A hundred years of clearing, splitting, sawing,
a hundred years of timbermen, ringbarkers, fencers
and women in kitchens, stoking loud iron stoves
year in, year out, and singing old songs to their children
have made this silence human and familiar
no farther than where the farms rise into foothills,
and, in that time, how many sought their graves
or fled to the cities, maddened by this stillness?
Between the trees, the tall light reaches me.
Things are what they are, and that is frightening:
they require obedience, if they are to be mastered
and so many have tried to force their dreams on this planet.
Things are so wordless. These two opposing scarves
I have cut in my red-gum squeeze out jewels of sap
and stare. And soon, with a few more axe-strokes,
the tree will grow troubled, tremble, shift its crown
and, leaning slowly, gather speed and colossally
crash down and lie between the standing trunks.
And then, I know, of the knowledge that led my forebears
to drink and black rage and wordlessness, there will be silence.
After the tree falls, there will reign the same silence
as stuns and spurs us, enraptures and defeats us,
as seems to some a challenge, and seems to others
to be waiting here for something beyond imagining.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Unhuman silence.
A stone cracks in the heat. Through the still twigs, radiance
stings at my eyes. I rub a damp brow with a handkerchief
and chop on into the stillness. Axe-fall and echo.
The great mast murmurs now. The scarves in its trunk
crackle and squeak now, crack and increase as the hushing
weight of high branches heels outward, and commences
tearing and falling, and the collapse is tremendous.
Twigs fly, leaves pass puff and subside. The severed trunk
slips off its stump and drops upon its shadow ...
And then there is no more. The stillness is there
as ever. And I fall to lopping branches.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. It will be centuries
before many men are truly at home in this country,
and yet, there have always been some, in each generation,
there have always been some who could live in the presence of silence.
And some, I have known them, men with gentle broad hands,
who would die if removed from these unpeopled places,
some again I have seen, bemused and shy in the cities,
you have built against silence, dumbly trudging through noise
past the railway stations, looking up through the traffic
at the smoky halls, dreaming of journeys, of stepping
down from the train at some upland stop to recover
the crush of dry grass underfoot, the silence of trees.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Dreaming silence.
Though I myself run to the cities, I will forever
be coming back here to walk, knee-deep in ferns,
up and away from this metropolitan century,
to remember my ancestors, axemen, dairymen, horse-breakers,
now coffined in silence, down with their beards and dreams,
who, unwilling or rapt, despairing or very patient,
made what amounts to a human breach in the silence,
made of their lives the rough foundations of legends –
men must have legends, else they will die of strangeness –
then died in their turn, each after his own fashion,
resigned or agonized, from silence into great silence.
Axe-fall, echo and axe-fall. Noonday silence.
Though I go to the cities, turning my back on these hills,
for the talk and dazzle of the cities, for the sake of belonging
for months and years at a time to the twentieth century,
the city will never quite hold me. I will be always
coming back here on the up-train, peering, leaning
out of the window to see, on far-off ridges
the sky between the trees, and over the racket
of the rails to hear the echo and the silence.
I shoulder my axe and set off home through the stillness.

Murray's central idea is that European settlement of Australia was accomplished through the colonisation of silence by sound – not just any sound, but that of Europe and its settlers. I have known this poem for many years; indeed long before I set foot in the Tanami. I suppose that it might have helped to shape my experience there.

My reason for introducing Noonday Axeman into tonight's discussion is that, for me at least, the poem offers the possibility of my impression of a people uncomfortable with uncertainty being explained in terms of an uneasy relationship with the land in which we live.

Paul Carter argues, in his alternative account of nation building, The Road to Botany Bay, that European settlers made meaning in Australia by requiring that the strangeness of the land and its inhabitants conform with the colonist's language. The reality of Australia was quite unlike anything that the settlers had previously experienced. One important result of this was that the language of exploration tended to be metaphorical rather than purely descriptive – as it had to be in a land where reality refused to conform to expectations.

Take the case of the explorers' task in relation to the discovery and naming of rivers. Carter argues that the explorers' task was to take possession of the land by naming it. To do so, it was necessary to 'discover' and name things of cultural significance, such as rivers.

The explorers came to Australia with an established sense of how rivers were meant to behave. Their assumption was that rivers should rise in the mountains and then flow towards the sea. The strength of this expectation was such that the mere discovery of a river could provide the travelling explorer with a sense of direction, with a ‘purpose’. However, as the explorers soon discovered, many of Australia's rivers behave in a quite different manner – flowing as they do towards the inland, there being exhausted in a network of capillaries that water the thin soils of the interior.

Yet, the conventional practice of naming went on as explorers and surveyors sought to make sense of the interior by labelling what they found with words that didn't quite fit the reality they encountered. In fact the naming of 'rivers', 'creeks', 'hills', 'mounts' and so on was more about the need to differentiate space than give a strictly accurate description of the phenomena that explorers encountered.

Carter offers a couple of examples of this peculiar naming practice:

The early travellers, then, invented places, rather than found them. To designate a place as 'mount' might express, in fact, the absence of that desirable feature. Paraphrasing one of his names, Sturt wrote,

The peak itself was nothing more than a sandy eminence on which neither tree or shrub was growing, and the whole locality was so much in unison with it, that we called it 'Mount Misery'.

A similar approach seems evident in Major Mitchell's “rather surprising”:

Approval of the name River Lett, a name that came into being in the following way:

On 24 November 1813 Evans had reached the valley, commenting merely that "the descent is rugged". A day of rest was spent beside the Riverlett (ie. rivulet and the name has remained as River Lett) ...

Apart from revealing something of the source of Australia's keen sense of irony, these passages indicate that the explorers made the best use of the only language that they had available to them – a language that couldn't do justice to a reality that it could hardly contemplate. Thus, the apparent disappointment of later travellers whose expectations of the Australian interior were confounded by the reality. Thus, the charge that the explorers had been incompetent, dishonest (or both) in their description of Australia.

I believe that this mismatch between the language of the explorers and the reality that they sought to describe had two related effects. First, it allowed any latent feeling of distrust and discomfort about this strange land (in which rivers flow 'backwards', trees retain their leaves but shed their bark, and nature's hoax is found actually to exist in the form of the platypus) to go unanswered amongst the majority of the population whose knowledge of the bush was only second hand. Second, the lack of a precise fit between what could be directly experienced and that which could be expressed, in the loose-fitting language of the European colonists, allowed gaps within which the possibility of the bush being 'mythologised' could be realised.

The second phase of this process operates as follows: because myths are not (and cannot be) literally true – many feel genuinely uncertain about how to relate to the land in which we live. Because we are uncertain of our relationship to this land, there is space to create myths. And so the cycle continues.

Let us recall a few lines of Les Murray's Noonday Axeman:

Axe-fall, echo and silence. Dreaming silence.
Though I myself run to the cities, I will forever
be coming back here to walk, knee-deep in ferns,
up and away from this metropolitan century,
to remember my ancestors, axemen, dairymen, horse-breakers,
now coffined in silence, down with their beards and dreams,
who, unwilling or rapt, despairing or very patient,
made what amounts to a human breach in the silence,
made of their lives the rough foundations of legends –
men must have legends, else they will die of strangeness –
then died in their turn, each after his own fashion,
resigned or agonized, from silence into great silence.

As we know, the vast majority of the Australian population clings to the settled coastal fringe – rarely, if ever venturing inland. In increasing numbers, we literally 'live on the edge'.

Yet, the 'bush' (as an imagined place) has assumed a quasi-mythical status as a powerful source of Australian identity. Consider this quotation from the Australian historian and mythmaker CEW Bean:

The Australian, one hundred to two hundred years hence, will still live with the consciousness that, if he only goes far enough back over the hills and across the plains, he comes in the end to the mysterious half-desert country where men have to live the lives of strong men. And the life of that mysterious country will affect Australian imagination much as the life of the sea has affected that of the English. It will always be there to help the Australian to form his ideals; and one knows of no land where they have a more definite ideal than in Australia, or where the whole people, men, women and even youngsters, are more consciously employed in working it out.

For Bean, the official historian of the First World War, this “definite ideal” was that of mateship, resourcefulness and giving the other a 'fair go'. That is, a rearticulation of the traditional virtues – especially those of justice (a fair go) and benevolence (mateship). Thus, we can interpret Bean as asserting that the Australian ideal is an ethical one.

That general determination – to stand by ones mate, and to see that he gets a fair deal whatever the cost to oneself – means more to Australia than can yet be reckoned ... whatever the results (and they are sometimes uncomfortable) may it long be the country's code.

So, the possibility of European mythmaking was realised. However, I believe that a lingering sense of discomfort remains. As in the early days of European settlement, the majority of the population lacks a deep connection with the land.

This makes Bean's argument that the land has shaped the ideals and ethics of the Australian people somewhat problematic. How could the land have had such an effect when so many have so little of the understanding that comes from a direct connection?

One answer to this question might be found in the earlier points about myths. At the very least, they provide a foundation of core values and principles. However, myths can only do so much work. A further thought is that we Australians have reconciled ourselves to the land by creating artificial boundaries and constraints in a vain attempt to secure certainty in our understanding of the place in which we live. In short, we make sense of the land by constraining its ability to speak to us. Paradoxically, our inability to live with the silence of the land leads us to silence of he land.

This dual approach helps to explain at least one further paradox of Australian life. Our myths tell us that we are a freedom-loving people with a strong 'anti-authoritarian' bias. Reality would suggest that we are a fairly closely governed people who accept a large degree of official interference in the conduct of our lives. My experience is that we tend to accept increased regulation and surveillance with very little comment, that we 'tow the line' in the vast majority of cases.

A tendency to limit uncertainty by increasing regulation and surveillance is not confined to the government domain. Organisations in the private sector are liable to be just as autocratic and hierarchical in their daily practice. In each case our response to uncertainty would seem to offer an explanation for why it is that business and government seem so keen to expand their 'technologies' of control.

It's as if the need to colonise the land, through sound, has been converted into a need to define and regulate life for the sake of certainty. Just as the early explorers generated a sense of progress by naming a series of 'rivers', 'hills' and the like, so modern managers of the Australian state and market have met their needs through the introduction of forms of control that have more symbolic value than real effectiveness.

The main problem with this approach to regulating social relations is that it hardly ever works – especially in times, such as those in which we live, where there is rapid and profound change and, in line with this, a significant increase in the scope and visibility of the ethical dimension of life.

An oblique reference

The explosion of the nuclear reactor, at Chernobyl, on 26 April 1986 brought about one of the world's worst industrial accidents.

It has been said that the plume of radioactive debris disgorged into the atmosphere was so great as to cause a general rise in the observable level of radiation at work within the planetary environment. There was, of course, an observable loss of life – especially in the case of those poor souls who were drafted into service to shovel the loose matter back into the slowly forming concrete sarcophagus.

Whole communities were removed from their contaminated land – but that may have been the least of their problems. Adults and children alike seem to have been affected by exposure to the high levels of radiation that surrounded them prior to the authorities ordering a belated evacuation. None can be sure that the effects of this exposure will be confined to the current generation. The sad truth is that the awful legacy of the accident at Chernobyl will be a burden borne by generations to come.

Many people still believe that the explosion at the reactor, at Chernobyl, was primarily the result of sub-standard Soviet technology. They are wrong. The technology may not have been the most advanced in the world. However, it was adequate to the task if operated in a safe and responsible manner. Which, as we now know, did not happen.

Instead, a handful of operators decided to conduct an unauthorised procedure during which they effected a radical shutdown of the reactor. They did so in order to observe how long the blades of the turbine would continue to generate emergency power; spinning under their own momentum. They did so without approval and with a near total disregard for established rules of operation and safety procedures.

The execution of this plan did not merely require that the operators flick a few switches. Instead, they needed to override a number of computerised and manual safety systems that were specifically designed to prevent the reactor from exceeding safe operating parameters.

Let nobody be in any doubt – the operators who put this plan in action were extremely clever and skilled technicians capable of re-programming computers and locking open valves critical to maintaining the overall integrity of the system.

Let me be quiet clear. The explosion at Chernobyl was not an inevitable result of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. The test was deliberate; the flouting of the safety standards was intentional. The only unplanned element was the result. Now I ask you, was this really an accident?

I imagine that some people will immediately be tempted to respond by pointing out that Chernobyl could have been prevented if only those in ultimate control of the facility had put in place better systems for control and surveillance. Surely a framework of checks and balances, enhanced by vigorous external monitoring, could have prevented the operators from acting as they did. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Let us be clear. It is not as if the authorities were indifferent to such matters. They certainly put in place systems that they thought to be adequate protection. Yet, these systems failed; because the operators were clever enough to have devised the means for over-riding or bypassing them.

That will be true of any system devised by or involving human beings. There is always a point at which human interaction will be critical. There is always a point at which the person 'monitoring the monitors' looks away or shows indifference. And that is when a Chernobyl, or one of its lesser cousins, emerges from the shadows of possibility into the full light of experience.

If any value can be salvaged from this disaster, it must be in terms of a very general lesson:

... in a world of high complexity the use of specific rules, regulations and systems will almost certainly fail to protect us from the malice or folly of avoidable human error.

The events leading to the explosion at Chernobyl are relevant to my discussion for a couple of reasons. First, the explosion occurred because of an ethical failure. Second, the explosion occurred because of an over-reliance on regulations and surveillance as the principal means of ensuring certainty of performance.

The lessons for a people moving into increasingly complex and uncertain times should be obvious – we need to move beyond our own over-reliance on the technologies of control and instead deal squarely with the need to develop an ethical response. For all of the reasons outlined above, this will require us to come to terms with a level of uncertainty that I believe we are currently unable or disinclined to accept.

I believe that our age is the culmination of a prolonged period of forgetting. That is, we live at the end of a period during which form and structure have taken precedence over substance. I might better explain what I mean by drawing on an approach adopted by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell when trying to describe a moment of spiritual enlightenment and all that follows.

Both talk about a moment that is best captured with the expression, “Ah Ha!”. The trigger for this response might be: a sunset, a face in a crowd, an unexpected chord in music, a flash of insight that comes with a new hypothesis. In fact, it could be almost anything. Whatever the source, there is a brief moment of extraordinary clarity and unarticulated understanding.

Alas, the risk of forgetting begins at the moment when we try to explain, to ourselves or to someone else, what it is that we have experienced. Not wanting to lose the insight we cloak it in words. If the idea is powerful enough we will try to capture it in the form of an institution. Some have even tried to preserve fundamental insights in brick and stone.

I want to suggest that each of our great institutions has been an expression of a great idea. I want to suggest that over time there has been a progressive forgetting of these ideas and that we have covered our loss with a fa'ade that is real enough to hide the fact that the interior is empty.

A society can live with this type of illusion when the winds of change are light. Then there is time enough to 'gild the lily' and 'paper over the cracks'. But these are not the times in which we live. Ours is a time in which our structures are buffeted by change and tested to the limit. Only those with a solid core could have hoped to survive. Few have done so.

Some might find this a depressing picture. I do not. This is a great time to be alive. It's a time to defy those who say that our future is fixed. It is a time to shrug off the dead hand of unthinking custom and practice and start to think for ourselves as we explore questions that will help us to define who we are as a people and what it is that we stand for. In short, we have an opportunity to take a fresh look at what it is that makes for a good life and a good society.

At the end of our great forgetting we find ourselves with the rare opportunity to think afresh and, in doing so, rediscover the lost heart of our society and its institutions. I suspect that when we eventually say “Ah ha!” it will be because we have discovered the same enduring truths encountered by our forefathers – a commitment to the search for truth, a belief in the possibility of justice, a recognition of the essential dignity of all, and dare I say it, the power of love. But there will be one, extremely important difference – no matter how close to ancient insights, these truths will be our truths.

Of course the process may be painful. We are already losing the option of looking back and blaming the past for the shape of our present. Beyond this, we will need to accept a greater degree of responsibility for the future that we fashion. Some are bound to shrink from this challenge. After all, there is a long-standing prediction that the Western Democracies will eventually collapse because of our radical incapacity to cope with the burden of our freedom.

So why accept this challenge? My first response is to ask, quite seriously, if there is any alternative to exploring the fundamental questions that we all face. My second response is to suggest that, even if there was an acceptable alternative, we should still choose to confront questions that challenge our notions of what is good and right because, in doing so, we discover the core of our humanity.

But first, we must learn to live with the uncertainty that arises in a world in flux, in a world where we co-create the future, in a world in which the ethical dimension of our lives is ever more present to us.

If my argument is correct, then this will require us to find ways in which we can truly be at home in our land. That is, we will need to embrace it as something unique but familiar. Indeed, it should be so familiar that only relative strangers – visitors to the land – should find anything odd or unsettling about the distinctive features of our land. I suppose that what I am saying amounts to a plea that we come to see and be in our land in the same easy way that the original Australians have done for millennia.

I do not know how this goal might be achieved. Our answer to the challenge of the silence that surrounds the Noonday Axeman is not to be found in the manufacture of certainty. Perhaps we need to look to the poets and artists for a clue. Perhaps it is as simple as learning to live in the silence, the dreaming silence of Australia.

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