- Feb 10
- 0 min read
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- Feb 6
- 4 min read
Plastic bags have always reminded me of toxic, urban jellyfish sailing around in swarms. They are a listless trouble with nowhere to go but landfill, river systems and the guts of animals.
In some places, like the rubbish-tip slums of Manila, they get a second life as they are pulled from the debris and recycled, but elsewhere we never reach out to stop them, we just watch them float by on their way to somewhere else. Of course the people of Manila and the like would find something else to recycle, or some other industry, if it wasn’t getting plastic bags out of the muck. Honestly they don’t need them and nor do we. Why is it only in desperation that our fellow humans go to such as effort to make use of them while we, in our comfort zones, grab them and throw them away with impunity instead of putting our minds to finding a better alternative?
The answer to this question makes me think that plastic bags are also not just the bearers of bad news, they are like bad news in many ways. They are unpleasant, stay with us briefly and continue causing trouble somewhere else long after we’ve forgotten them. Do we watch plastic bags drifting past us in the same way as we view the news of global troubles? We could chase after them and do something to try and make the planet a better place by dealing with them, but there is so much rubbish flying around where do we start? It’s much easier to let it all go by and leave it to someone else to deal with.
Plastic bags are both a manifestation and a symbol of our unwillingness to deal with world problems as a human race. We know we shouldn’t use plastic bags, we should ban them but we don’t. We know there is no real reason in our abundance for poverty, starvation and war, but as societies we don’t stop this. We know in many places plastic bags make the quality of life far worse for our poorest brothers and sisters, as well as our animals and flora, but we still keep using them.
We should be able to put our heads together as a species and come up with some biodegradable alternative easily enough that sees an end to the slag heaps, the burn offs, the dead albatrosses’, dolphins and rivers, the wasted oil and the thousand-year land-fills, but we don’t. Maybe it’s just that they aid our consumption, they are forgettable and we can’t do anything ourselves to stop them being a problem, once we’re done with them, so we toss them aside like bad news, and move on to the next thing.
Australia, a nation of twenty odd million, uses around four billion plastic bags a year. Two hundred bags per person each year, not counting plastic wrapping and the rest. How do you not get dispirited and give in to using bags yourself when two hundred a year less from you would be infinitesimal?
We can build bombs to blow up the world a million times over but not make a biodegradable plastic bag. There’s a missing motivator here that’s not just about blocking out ears at the news of calamity or kicking a chip wrapper into the gutter. It’s one that speaks of us as human beings and our willingness to tackle serious problems when we don’t feel under the immediate pressure to save our skins.
Can we make changes for the good in times when there is no great menace? Can we use times of peace, prosperity and safety to makes strides for a better world as great/or greater than when we are forced to deal with crises?
A history professor of mine used to invite students to select objects in the classroom and then explain what war produced either them or their materials. He told us Napoleon invented canned goods (Coke anyone?); the CIA invented the internet (selfie posted from class) and so on.
My professor’s point was that we don’t throw ourselves and resources into solving big societal problems unless someone puts a rocket up us, literally. To him, advancement was only a response to crisis or the need to get the upper hand in conflicts. The kick back for societies as a result being a lot of neat new stuff spun off from the military into benefits for civilian life. We let the captains of industry get what they want- Iraqi oil, Timor’s gas etc; we watch the drama our taxes fund from a safe distance; and in the end some of the stuff our militaries use, to do the job, gets reinvented and we get voice-activated internet specs as a result. What we don’t get is a solution for saving the Orangutan or the Amazon, from ourselves and our plastic bags.
We have had a War on Drugs and a War on Terror but not a War for Resources Alternatives or a War for Species Preservation. What matters more in the long-run? If it’s the latter then I guess we have to think about what sacrifices we are to make, instead of other people sacrificing for us, to conquer these calamities.
Why don’t we start with plastic bags? Can’t we have a war on them and throw the resources of the CSIRO or inventively-supported private industry into developing a natural silica or vegetable by-product that would make biodegradable bags and sort out the land-fill, petroleum waste and wild animal death problems they cause? Is there enough urgency within us to say this is something we need to face up to and defeat before it’s too late? Are plastic bags more of a threat to our way of life than Saddam Hussein was?
At least we have no trouble finding the implications of their danger, unlike the threat we were told Saddam posed. We don’t need plastic bags. We could always carry cloth ones or find environmental alternatives if we felt a sense of urgency around the impact they pose to the comfort of our lives. Let’s do this before we find ourselves watching a future war on our hologram TVs while the garbage trucks empty our bins full of plastic outside and the world loses another Orangutan.
- Feb 4
- 5 min read
As a singer I've been lucky enough to experience what is to be at the epicentre of power generation through music, and to be the focal point of that too. It is the ultimate buzz, it really is. I get why octogenarian rock stars keep chasing it even if they create the spectacle of over-steamed turkeys fussing around the stage looking for their lost car keys.
Take when my band, Andorra, played a 2006 peace festival in Leichhardt, Sydney, in support of the people of Lebanon and Palestine who were suffering through one of their cycles of being bombed back into the stone-age by Israel and co.(1)
From Andorra's rep for putting on festivals and music events with a social focus, I was asked by the organisers to arrange performers for the day.
We also used the occasion to debut a song I’d written called 'Keysar Trad Jazz'.(2) The track drew on the brilliant jazz stylings of our keyboardist Matt Campbell and also featured a message of peace by leading Australian Islamic spokesperson Keysar Trad.
In my inimitable way, I had arrived at singing to the crowd, on that day, by taking my self-amusement possibly too far. From wondering aloud about how something as incongruous as Keysar Trad adlibbing over jazz might sound, I was bound by my own creed to then have to make it so. My foolish fancy was to become a reality.
Well not all foolish. When the concept of the song took shape in my mind, the political reality of what was pushing people like Keysar into the public spotlight, guided what myself and Andorra created.
Geopolitically, the world at the time was in a pressure-cooker again with the deep pulse of war-threats drumming in our temples. The genocide of a generation of children denied medicine continued to play out diabolically in front of our eyes, in Iraq, and opportunists were seizing the chance, as they do, to postulate for personal gain, or shiv their enemies while no-one was looking.
Lebanon was, at this time, in the sights again and, amongst all this, we as a band, wanted to do our thing which was, not just to sing against the idea of more war in our own words, but to find the voices of those being tarred by anti-Muslim rhetoric from above, in an Australian context. We understood that people are people and just want their kids to have a safe, happy life. Most thing beyond that are really just bull.
I reached out to Keysar who was, not unsurprisingly, sceptical at first of our intent and being dragged into the batty fever-dream of my creations. Doing his own research, he determined that I checked out. He warmed to the idea when we explained that he could contribute in his own words alongside our plan to showcase the modern face of Muslim music in Australia, including the youth. I figured to throw in something of those lilting vocal melodies I'd come across and loved when tuning up and down the AM dial and landing on Middle Eastern music stations. I mean, why not? If you're gonna go, go hard.
What came of it was a track where I played a character who MC'd throughout, in a Tom Waitsian smoking-room growl, while other performers from the Islamic diaspora in Australia featured throughout. We brought together the superb Arabic singer Manelle Ibrahim, Lebanese-Australian hip-hop artist Susan Chamma and Keysar himself, who dreaded the idea of being recorded singing but who was happy to orate some considered thoughts, by rounding things out with a message of peace and understanding. Truly just madness but it worked, amazingly, with the heart of everyone involved.(3)
Manelle had laid down her vocals for us in a couple of takes, in her loungeroom, after we were whisked to her house in a community member's four-wheel drive, one afternoon. Susan preached in the studio at the Redfern Community Centre, where we had some cache. And Keysar recorded his piece in our make-shift studio in Smithy's Music Shop in Petersham (where my Andorra co-conspirator Eric Bellingham worked).
From my flight of fancy over a politically-orientated pun, the recording ended up meaning a lot to us all. Keysar tells me that he revisits the recording still, to this day, as a comforting reminder and a delight of his own artistic journey.
It was not all comfortable at the time, though. Not because we were not all on the same page, or because Keysar was a man who had to get in, get his track down and go, with the focus and brevity of Frank Sinatra on golf day. It was because, as we pressed play, war literally started.
I was stunned by the prescience of the situation we were in as Keysar asked for a second, during a level check, to answer his phone. When he returned he told us that aircraft had started flying over Lebanon and bombing Beirut. He was committed to finishing what we were doing but had to keep taking breaks from recording the vocal part he was adding, to take calls. Lebanon was being blown to pieces as we mixed and played backing tracks and parts and pulled our song together.
I was sobered in the realisation that what we were doing was anything but silly, despite the fun play on words I had started out with, and the chutzpah I used to see where that could go. We were recording something that pre-empted the destruction playing out on the other side of the world, with a counter through art, and with the words and expressions of those under psychological and legislative attack, in our own country, and physical attack elsewhere.
Fast-forward to the Peace Festival and I was there, front and centre, as the first notes of my band struck in unison behind me. At such times we often see ourselves in the frame, through observant memory but, on this occasion, my experience was two-fold.
I got to see people's eyes light up as they felt themselves awash with the sonic energy my band was creating and their delight as rhythm took them over.
We’d never played such perfect, unifying and powerful notes. I knew it. I experienced an awe as I tried to keep my attention on singing. As a unit we had arrived at a peak brought together from the years of practice, and the unconscious understanding of players for the movements and improvisations of team mates. This along with our individual hearts, energy and the beliefs that brought us to such a place all combined. The audience were enveloped in the dome made by the power the music was putting out. I could see it travelling across them like the time-lapsed thaw of winter snow as the Spring comes in and lights up the faces of flowers with the warmth of a brighter day.
1. Peace festival
2. Keysar Trad Jazz
3. Everyone involved
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