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Empires of consumption.

Article Excerpt
We sit in a pocket of blissful Western ignorance, in little Australia, grown even smaller in the Howard years. It's home, far from the consequences of war in Georgia, the fate of Iran, the oppression of the Muslim peoples of western China. We watch our plasma screens (made in China, as Ned Rossiter reminds us in this issue), perceiving the world as an extension of our own needs and desires. Sport, our source of national pride. (Wasn't it wonderful that a girl from a single parent background had the go to win Gold?) China, often enough, a thinly veiled (racist) joke. (Did you see Kochie and Sonia doing slant-eye jokes on Channel 7's 'Yum Cha'?)

Just as the reporters in our daily press can't get their heads around Germaine Greer's argument that the collapse of culture means the bleakest kind of personal and social devastation, so morally serious discussion of any issue is extremely hard to find in Australian public discourse. John Martin ponders this great lack in the Australian psyche in the first essay in this issue of Arena Magazine in relation to Aboriginal connection to country. The national unwillingness to enter into other worlds, to feel and see them from the inside, has particularly Australian determinants. But history and geography grant us leave of our better senses. Martin...

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