Australian dreamtime and visions

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33857, 31 May 1975, Page 10

Australian dreamtime and visions

Australia 2000! By Don Fabun. Cassell Australia. 185 pp. Index. N.Z. price $10.75. Mr Fabun is an American author overwhelmed by the size, the richness, the space and the possibilities of Australia. ‘‘Australia 2000!” bears all rhe marks of a labour of love. For Mr Fabun, Australia, the “stone raft.” offers opportunities for social and environmental experiments which might, quite literally, change the world. No other country, let any other continent (except, perhaps. Antarctica) has the same potential while remaining almost untouched by human beings.

Australia, as Mr Fabun suggests, does have possibilities of choice about its future which are not open to others. Perhaps in association with its off-shore islands—New Guinea. New Zealand, and Antarctica—it could attempt to develop quite new forms of social engineering and life - styles untrammelled by European experience. The uniqueness of the indigenous life alone suggested possibilities men had never dreamed of. “Anything was possible in this strange land and only the impossible could be believed.” he writes of the first days of settlement. “No-one could have made up the hairynosed wombat; only the continent itself could have conjured up that image.” But wombats are One thing; new communities thriving on cottage industry. solar power, fresh water from icebergs, and linked electronically to give them a sense of identity are quite another. To propose, as Mr Fabun does, that Australia attempt to involve other nations in the development of its vast

inland spaces, perhaps by leasing room for thousands of citizens from other countries to come and experiment in creating new communities, is, in 1975, a utopian vision. Australians do have the willingness to gamble on the unknown, the practical vigour, the readiness to “give it a go” which Mr Fabun describes. But the country’s social fetters have set more firmly than this author will concede. And more is needed to shift them than innovations by Government, however well-intentioped, as Mr Whitlam has discovered.- < Mr Fabun has made a start in moving Australian opinion with this handsome volume. His technique of presentation is curious—newspaper headlines, quotations from a great variety of sources, fragments of maps and short stories, even reproductions of paintings are melded together with skill. The quality of the text saves the result from being merely “trendy.” And Mr Fabun has done well to recognise the imaginative pursuit of pure and applied science carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. C.5.1.R.0. has an honesty, a curiosity, and freedom from Government control not accorded to many research institutions round the world. Whether Australian tax-payers would be prepared to turn it and their country — into the combination which would make Australia a “laboratory for the world” remains to be seen. To spell out the possibility was well worth while. Not all Mr Fabun’s suggestions deserve such serious consideration. The

“high-paying tourist industry” which he proposes for the Antarctic has been advocated before, not least by Air New Zealand. It carries with it environmental dangers, to say nothing of physical dangers, which simply do, not justify any advantages. Mr Fabun praises the Antarctic as an unpolluted world. Why pollute it? And New Zealand? “Here be monsters,” he writes. “Vast resources of falling water turning turbines . mountains so high that the congealed breath of Antarctica never melted . . . windows to the centre of the earth . . plenty of room to try out all sorts of long-term experiments, possiblysponsored by other countries that could not realistically be pursued by them because of ideological, religious, political, or racial restraints. The New Zealanders probably would hardly notice the newcomers . . .” What would Mr Muldoon’s immigration policy make of that? Mr Fabun goes on: “The ultfaconservative New Zealanders might not take too kindly to the notion, but they were an eminently pragmatic people, and if a scheme made money and did not change their life-style, why not give it a go?” It sounds like a dream, and it is. Mr Fabun has been overwhelmed by Aboriginal visions of the dreamtime, by the genial “mateship” which he found in Australia, and by the geological age and wealth of the southern continent and its off-shore islands. But he has put his dream together in a vision that deserves more than a passing thought.