Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  When the New World opened up, so did bureaucratic opportunities. Untold wealth spewed across Europe, and everybody needed slaves. Kings had to employ bigger staffs, paper came back and proliferated, governors went to colonies and needed staff there too. Wars were fought with more sophisticated weapons. Kings like Philip V of Spain became superkings, and island nations like England developed navies capable of piracy when no war was even hull-down over the horizon. The booty had to be shared around somehow. Spanish torpor led to a concomitant bureaucratic torpor, while England and the Low Countries took to bureaucracy as Elizabeth Tudor did to a well-filled codpiece. The motto of the new age was simple: Bounty Breeds Bureaucrats.

  In fact, a new kind of bureaucrat arose: the corporation bureaucrat. The British East India Company (BEIC) is a splendid early example of the private business corporation, powerful enough to influence government and foreign nations alike. The BEIC wasn’t even daunted when a nation it lusted to buy from rejected the concept of money, as did the Chinese, from whom the BEIC wanted tea, silk, paper, ceramics, jade, you name it. Some bureaucrat or bureaucrats found the answer, which was to grow opium in Bengal and addict the Chinese to it, then use it as a form of currency. Worked a treat! And did it perturb the BEIC that a whole populace became hopelessly addicted? Of course not. Fat profits, heathen people who had no importance in the scheme of things apart from the goods their skills and labor produced. The day of the corporate bureaucrat had definitely arrived.

  My interest is flagging; I feel a dreadful ennui creeping over me: can there actually be an end to the subject, if not the sub-species? Yes, there can — but have I covered every mentionable aspect? No, I haven’t. There’s a cut-off point, at which my dedication to my subject becomes outweighed by the prospect of a degree of self-punishment excusable only in a flagellant, and that committed I am not.

  Suffice it to say that there are tried-and-true techniques whereby a bureaucrat may rise through the ranks. Knowing whereabouts the bodies are all buried is by far the most effective of these leavening ploys, but the art of brown-nosing one’s superiors cannot be over-emphasized either. Such are coupled with the sheer genius of a bureaucrat’s greatest weapon, haven and vanishing trick — the committee, which generates postponements and delays, proliferates yet more bureaucrats to serve it, and ends in the only result a committee is capable of producing — the catastrophe. For which no one is ever to blame!

  There are fashions in bureaucrats too. The fat-cat portly knight with lobster bisque stains on his tie has been replaced by the gym-slim Commander of Australia with leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, artificially aged so it never looks new. Though one thing you can be sure of: he always wears the right tie. Down at the bottom of the hierarchy bureaucratic mice scurry in grimy tunnels, but those at the top of the vast heap don’t walk the corridors of power; these are left to the elected representatives of the Herd. Your top-of-the-trees bureaucrat bypasses the corridors of power to dwell, a genuine mandarin, in his ivory pagoda tower.

  For be they government or corporate specimens, one thing is true of all bureaucrats: they are never elected to their office. Governments and boards of all colors and persuasions come and go, but the bureaucrats who shuffle the pieces of paper that cross the tables of those elected to office never change. They go on forever, leading the elected representatives by the nose. For where else can the elected representative go for information than to his unelected bureaucrats? Which means that if a government be as red as Karl Marx or as Tory-blue as Margaret Thatcher, the behind-the-scenes policies it pursues will be the same-old same-old, set in stone by generations of bureaucrats.

  POP GOES THE PUSSYCAT

  Ailurophobia, which is the fear of cats, seems to go back to the Middle Ages, when the lone crone in the cracked shack on the outskirts of the village always had a reputation as a witch. If she played her prophetic paraphernalia properly, she was classified a wisewoman and was relatively exempt from the pyre; if she worked through terror, juggled weeny skulls rather than knuckles, she was deemed malign, and went up in flames or down for a permanent dunk.

  Be she of either kind, she had a cat, traditionally a black moggie with big round yellow eyes having pupils like slits. The cat, everybody in the village thought, was her medium, the lock on the gates to the spirit world. But no one stopped to wonder if perhaps the old woman was lonely, or saw the cat for what it actually was: company able to sustain itself on rats and mice. Dogs cost.

  There is a sexual element involved in liking cats. They are judged feminine because they’re enigmatic and they have claws they’re not afraid to use. They are deemed incapable of love — what woman is capable of love? On the other hand, dogs are lusty, shove their noses into female crotches, love to the point of self-abnegation. Dogs are masculine. What man is incapable of loving to the point of self-abnegation?

  A veterinarian once told me that cats organize their lives like human beings, and fall in love without relinquishing their self-esteem. So whether you like dogs or cats rather depends upon what you want from your beloved: enslavement or something more conditional.

  Even in our present “enlightened” third millennium, prejudices against cats continue to thrive. An article in an Australian national newspaper in the year 2007 began thus:

  “If you own a cat, you know the smelly truth: they break wind and it’s foul. Not only that, it harms the planet.”

  All right, the readers knows the journalist is an ailurophobe, but the article was, I gathered, more a sling and arrow aimed at the rash of little companies that have arisen to sell people “carbon credits.” At first, it may seem to be a magical way to eliminate those carbon footprints our cars, disposable diapers, and heating or cooling bills indicate we use; then it turns out that the carbon credit company makes energy-saving lightbulbs, economical shower heads, or engages in think-tanks to reduce the First World’s carbon emissions.

  The journalist hastily assured readers that the cat keeps on farting, but that a very small sum donated each week will go to lessening the carbon footprint in less physiologically ironclad ways than farting cats.

  What I objected to strongly was the choice of a cat to illustrate the problem involved in six billion farting human beings and billions upon billions of farting animals.

  Consider the size of a cat: between 6 and 15 pounds. A Labrador dog weighs between 40 and 80 pounds. And a human male tips the scales at anywhere between 120 and 260 pounds. Meat eaters, all, plus, for the dog and the man, baked beans.

  In actual fact, cats and women are not profligate farters. When it occurs, a cat fart goes POP! and emits about 1cc of methane. A Labrador dog, which farts very frequently, goes BLURT! and emits around 20cc of harmful gases. A man’s fart, as any wife sleeping in the same bed as her husband can attest, goes RRRRRIP BOOM!, emits 100cc of lethal gas, and fouls up the entire bedroom for about ten minutes with the fan going.

  Once on Norfolk Island we had a lady politician who spent $38,000 — a huge sum for a small government — on investigating the possibility of harnessing the fruity foetor of pigs to reduce the gargantuan size of our electricity bills; Pacific islands, separated from each other by thousands of miles, have the highest electricity charges in the world. Anyway, Ma’s scheme didn’t work, but if it had, she would have been a heroine. My feeling is, she was just a couple of decades ahead of her time.

  Farts aside, what the newspaper article set me to thinking about was the present climate of confusion, and certain directions I can see the new religion of Environmentalism taking. One such is a substrate of scientific ignorance on the part of most people, combined with that good old Judaeo-Christian patina of guilt makes people sitting victims for sensationalism of all kinds, as fed by apocalyptic movies, poorly-researched documentaries, and print articles inspiring panic. The world’s carbon footprints cannot be obliterated by the efforts of the First World peoples; that is a task requires the co-operation of every living human being on the planet, as well as the not inconsid
erable numbers who, having died, cannot be found room to be buried.

  Ours is a cat household. We used to have a magnificent 22 pound (10 kilos) marmalade cat who lived to be nineteen. His idea of bliss was to curl up on Ric’s knees, but in his fourteenth year he was run over by a lawyer’s car and began to fart. No more sitting on Ric’s knees, though he was happy to sit at Ric’s feet. His successor, a marmalade named Poindexter, was far too dainty to fart. Now we have Shady, a perfect Felis silvestris libyca who might have walked into a Mesopotamian peasant hut ten thousand years ago. Shady is fat, and was named after the American rapper Slim Shady.

  Ric found Shady the other day hunched over in despair.

  “What’s the matter, fat boy?” Ric asked.

  “I am riddled with guilt,” said Shady.

  “Guilt? Over what, for cat heaven’s sake? You do us the most incredible services, Shades!”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Without you, we’d never know when our steak has preservatives in it — your nose is infallible.”

  “That’s not enough,” said Shady miserably.

  “Oh, come off it! You catch and kill a minimum of three rats a night,” said Ric, floundering.

  “I am guilt-ridden because my farts are turning my beloved planet into something akin to the swirling methane hell of Saturn, a planet I postulate was once overrun with farting cats.”

  “How do you know about Saturn? You’re a cat!”

  “Cats can look at kings, wear Wellington boots, and speak in a sexy Spanish accent like Antonio Banderas. Though, being a very pedestrian grey tabby Mesopotamian original descended through a line of ship’s cats as far as the Bounty, I can’t aspire to such heights. As a result of my ordinariness, I espoused planetary astronomy as an avocation. If I am polluting my dear planet, it surely behooves me to become an expert on planetary atmospheres,” said Shady in his eighteenth-century-ship’s cat accent.

  “Don’t worry your scarred little head about it, mate,” Ric soothed. “I haven’t smelled any farts when you sit on my knees. I also know the definition of an expert, which is what this carbon-conscious mob thinks it is.”

  “What is an expert, Daddy?” asked Shady, curious as any cat.

  “X is the unknown factor, and a spurt is a drip under pressure. Shed your guilt along with your fur, Shady. Guilt may look very becoming on a dog, but it sits ill on a cat. What do you fancy for your dinner, as the humans are having Col’s spaghetti?”

  “Green prawns simmered in dry white vermouth.”

  End of conversation.

  PORTRAIT OF A COLONIAL OVERLORD

  I had thought that any nation, having endured colonial status under an overlord, would, upon finally being granted independence, adamantly oppose the very idea of colonialism. Certainly, I thought naively, it would view the acquisition of colonies with horror. But in reality it doesn’t always seem to work that way.

  From that discovery, I progressed to wondering why these emancipated nations would hunger and thirst after colonies of their own, and stumbled upon one of those universal truths that people prefer not to discuss — or even to admit exist. Namely, it is a universal truth that all peoples yearn to have control of other people they can safely look down upon. This is particularly true of governments, and even truer of Caucasian governments. It’s like going back to school with a carte blanche to be a bully.

  Since I have a specific colony in mind, I also have a specific colonial overlord in mind. I will confine my story to them, and if my reader can substitute other places for mine, it will not surprise me. However, not all emancipated nations choose the bullying neocolonial path. New Zealand, for example, behaved as a prospective colonial overlord should, and abrogated the role.

  The colony I am going to speak of is the place wherein I have lived for thirty-two years: Norfolk Island.

  The colonial overlord is the Commonwealth of Australia.

  Norfolk Island lies over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) east of the continent of Australia, in the midst of the ocean — in fact, it is positioned at the junction of three named bodies of water — the South Pacific Ocean, the Tasman Sea, and the Coral Sea. It has no geophysical links to the ancient maxi-continent of Gondwanaland; rather, it is a part of a string of volcanoes that extend from the North Island of New Zealand to New Caledonia, and lies 450 miles south of Noumea, 850 miles north of New Zealand. Only the New Zealand volcanoes are still active, but there have been recent reports of a new volcano rising on the Norfolk Ridge — a giant of a thing that luckily has a long climb to the surface ahead of it. Between the East Australian continental shelf (a narrow one) and the Norfolk Ridge lie, going eastward, an abyssal plain, the Lord Howe Rise, and a trench. Whereas Gondwanaland, which incorporates Australia, contains the oldest land on earth at over three billion years, the Norfolk Ridge is at most only ten million years — a baby. Geophysically it is connected to New Zealand, not to Australia, which has led to some fairly rancorous debates as to which country owns the oil and gas reserves in Norfolk Island’s territorial waters, claimed by the Commonwealth of Australia the moment the hydrocarbon reports started coming in during the early 1970s.

  The Island was discovered by Captain James Cook on his second voyage, in 1774, and named after one of his staunchest patrons, the ninth Duchess of Norfolk. It was, he recorded, terra nullius — uninhabited. However, what Cook couldn’t know was that the isle had been the site of several Polynesian settlements down the centuries since those intrepid sailors took to conquering the mighty Pacific in outrigger canoes. Archaeological finds have unearthed a fascinating past for Norfolk Island. With them the Polynesians brought the red or cherry guava (porpay), the banana (plun) and the Pacific Island rat. All this evidence marks Norfolk Island firmly as a part of Polynesia.

  The Island is five miles by three miles, 15 square miles; eight by five kilometres means 40 square kilometres. When Cook found it, it was densely forested by what looked like massive pine trees, though in places he discerned flax plants. He saw them almost as a gift from God: southern latitudes lacked trees suitable for ship’s masts and anything that could be turned into canvas for ship’s sails.

  The Island utterly lacked any kind of harbor, and offered a reasonable anchorage in one place only, on the south-eastern side, where a sea-level saucer of land existed; its highest point was over 1,000 feet, it was surrounded by 300-foot cliffs, and the interior was as hilly as it was forested. A coral lagoon embraced the saucer of flat land, through which a stream of fresh water flowed. Time was to reveal that the Island lacked lizards, leeches and frogs, and had absolutely no mammals. It was a place of sea birds, a native parrot, and whatever bird life blew in, usually to perish. The wedge-tailed shearwater, Puffinus pacificus, migrated there each year to lay its eggs and rear its young. Fortune preserved it; the taste was too greasy for white men to digest. Whereas the Mt. Pitt bird, as it was known, was literally eaten to extinction by starving convicts.

  A tiny place, Norfolk Island. A mote in the vastness of the Pacific’s eye.

  The first 113 years of this story do not concern Australia, which did not exist as a nation, or even as a union of colonies. It was a collection of possessions of the British Crown, like to Norfolk Island. Every decision that was made, every action that was taken between 1788 and 1901 was a decision and an action of the British Crown, the colonial overlord of an empire bigger than Rome’s. The Crown consisted of bureaucrats who knew how to work provided the work was in the correct purlieu; administration of the Empire was an amazing feat. That the governors and other persons at the top of a particular colonial heap were grace-and-favor appointees or promoted beyond their level of competence was inevitable, and it was due to such men that most of the glaring mistakes were made. An inheritance that, interestingly, was adopted by the new colonial overlord when its turn came.

  The penal settlement at Norfolk Island commenced on March 13th, 1788, only six weeks after the First Fleet had arrived in New South Wales to find itself the victim of rogue
s and scoundrels who had supplied poor quality everythings, from saws and spades to tents and barrels of inedibly rotten salt meat. With better soil, better rainfall and softer wood to saw, Norfolk Island did well when compared to the plight of the settlement in what would later be known as Sydney. In fact, for several years the bounty of Norfolk Island was all that lay between success and failure for this penal experiment; New South Wales was so alien, so inclement that it didn’t even have limestone from which to make mortar; that too came from Norfolk Island.

  Not that all turned out as planned. The “pine” trees were unsuitable for ships’ masts; a species of araucaria, the branches all emerge in a ring around the bole, at which the bole will snap. And not one person knew how to ret flax! An expedition to New Zealand kidnapped a Maori chieftain’s son to teach the art, but of course retting flax is women’s work: the lad had no idea what to do, and eventually was returned to his people.

  But by 1808 it had been decided to close Norfolk Island down. Sydney was beginning to prosper, and a five-day sail to Norfolk Island unnecessary. By 1813 every last person was gone, and the Crown in its wisdom decreed that every building on Norfolk Island must be demolished and burned. Why? To discourage the French, whalers, or renegade convicts.

  Norfolk Island lay abandoned until 1825.

  In 1825 the situation in Sydney was quite different than it had been in 1788. Many of those transported were now free, genuine free settlers were beginning to come to try their luck in a new land, and the dumping ground function originally intended was now becoming slightly passé. Other penal colonies had been founded: Moreton Bay, Van Diemen’s Land. But there could be no escaping the fact that certain convicts were natural recidivists, some of them extremely violent ones. Of course no one stopped to wonder why that was: the impulse was simply to get rid of them. So Norfolk Island was made a penal institution for a second time, its inmates the dregs of Sydney that were not sent to Macquarie Harbour on the wild west coast of Tasmania. This second venture was cruel to the point of barbarousness: men being hanged thanked God for His mercy in giving them death. When the Commandant learned that a chain gang on its way to a place of work each plucked a ripe orange from a laden tree and ate it, he had the tree chopped down. No ray of light or hope was permitted to shine. Women convicts — there were some — were forced to dance naked and drunk before the guards who would then rape them.