In 1964, a graduate student by the name of Donald Rusk Currey was doing research on ancient climate change and taking core samples from old trees in order to gather the data he needed for his work. On a mountaintop in Nevada he finds a grove of Great Basin bristlecone pines which are very old indeed and, using his special coring drill bit ordered from overseas, Currey attempts to extract a sample.
Though it is not overly expensive, he really needs that specially procured bit to continue his work so when it gets stuck in the middle of this pine Currey panics and asks a ranger what he should do. Together, they decide to just cut down the tree because there are dozens of them out there and would anybody really miss just one of them?
It turns out that particular Great Basin bristlecone pine was the oldest non-clonal living organism on planet Earth, a realisation that dawned on Currey one tree-ring at a time as he counted them back in his lab. It was, he estimated, almost 5000 years old, more than a quarter-millennia older than the then oldest recognised tree know about at the timer. Locals had names for the grove of trees and the one Currey had lopped down for his drill bit was called Prometheus after the Greek God of fire credited with granting humanity civilisation through flame, if not life itself from clay.
Like Prometheus, Currey appeared to suffer some cosmic punishment for his deed. The shame of it haunted him, it seemed, because he never spoke about it. He stopped researching trees and turned to salt flats — as Radiolab reporter Pat Walters drily observed, there are no trees on a salt flat — and one day, 25 years after the original incident, he’s interviewed about this work by a television reporter. The nature writer Michael Cohen explained what happened next to the radio program:
All of the sudden out of a clear blue sky the television reporter asked him ‘oh aren't you the Currey who killed the world's oldest tree’. He was completely ambushed. And Curry just turned his back and ran away. That stain that doesn't wear off somebody.
The federal government’s Census debacle this week reminds me of this entire Radiolab episode from 2010, titled Oops. It’s almost tragic, in the original sense. If we are to take the Labor government MPs at their word and accept that their government intervened to squash the Australian Bureau of Statistics asking a set of expanded questions — on sexuality, people who are transgender or intersex and First Nations cultural identity — precisely to avoid exposing these groups to a ‘divisive’ national debate, the eleventh hour clusterfuck has ensured a week of divisive, harmful debate.
One sets out to better understand trees and nature and then kills the oldest living plant? Devastating. One sets out to better understand the rich tapestry of Australian life and then rejects those who do not ‘fit’ in order to ‘save’ them from ‘division’, causing a week of division? Tragic.
There is value, I think, in explaining why I think saga deserves the opprobrium it has attracted. Inevitably there has been a symphony of voices who think Anthony Albanese’s unilateral decision to over-rule the test questions from the ABS is small biscuits in the scheme of things. And, in one sense, they’re right. It is a simple matter of public administration that may or may not have drawn the Sauron-eye of culture warrior Peter Dutton and his motley crew of soul-chipped, Dulux paint Natural Whites. The data collected by the Census is important, not because it ought to make any of us feel good in and of itself but because it informs public policy and anyone who has tried to drive a medium to heavy vehicle under the Montague Street bridge in Melbourne knows that measurement matters.
But, I think we can all agree that whether or not to add new data points to the 2026 national collection was hardly a matter pressing on the consciousness of 26 million Australians (or is it 27 million?) which is precisely what makes the political intervention so thunderously stupid. And, to be clear, it was a political intervention. I’ve had people all week telling me, credulously, that the ABS handles the questions and format and why was everyone getting all het up about Albanese.
Well, I can tell you why. The ABS was ready to push the button on testing the new questions on Monday with a briefing to media. Albanese found out about it (headline: Labor Prime Minister finds out stats body is getting ready to implement Labor policy) and descended into the kind of panic usually reserved for people like me who used to over-commit to social events, tell someone you’d make their thing, and then decide on the night that you’d rather be hit by a bus and so you either have to be honest and explain that you’re a piece of shit or come up with an excuse so screamingly obtuse it’s almost impossible to counter. Hey sorry I can’t make it after all, I was beaten in a game of dice by several rats.
On Monday, the ABS Australian Statistician David Gruen confirmed the topics were yanked by the government.
“Given the Government’s announcement yesterday that topics will remain unchanged from 2021, I have made the decision that the upcoming Test will not proceed. The Test would have included topics that the Government has now decided will not be in the 2026 Census.”
And so it was that Albanese left his ministers to explain the inexplicable.
“We’ve seen how divisive debates have played out across our country and the last thing we want to do is inflict that debate on a sector of our community right now,” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on Wednesday. This was all about social cohesion, he said, even as the decision catapulted various marginal communities into the sun to melt the last remnants of any social adhesive stuck to their persons.
By Thursday, MPs were no longer pretending this was about protecting the community. It was actually all about cost of living now!
Here’s Senator Murray Watt on 29 August just a day before his boss phones into a radio station to wind back the policy which was wound back a week before:
Journalist: Do you agree that the LGBTQI questions shouldn’t be included in the census?
Murray Watt: Yeah I support the decision of the Government to do that. What we’ve said is that right now the priority for Australians is focusing on cost of living relief. That’s where all of our attention is being directed, and we think that there’s no reason to add additional questions to the next round of the census.
Of course, as foreshadowed, the next day the Prime Minister phoned into ABC Radio Melbourne for a chat with Raf Epstein and dropped what many are calling a backflip, which it isn’t, because a backflip implies you end up facing where you were before and that just isn’t true. In the PM’s own words, emphasis mine:
“There is two years until this survey goes out. There were proposals for wide ranging changes in the Census and that has been rejected because we think that that’s not appropriate. But in 2024, or 2026, the world has changed as well. It used to be, as you know, Raf, it wasn't – people's sexuality wasn't as open or as accepted as it is today. And therefore the Census, in terms of modernising, reflecting some of the changed values which are there, by asking a question, I think that people would think that was a pretty common sense outcome.”
The political solution was to offer up a single question on “sexuality” to appease the masses, but not the more substantive package of data collection the ABS was already working on testing. Nothing for transgender or intersex people or, it would seem, First Nations identity. Other groups will be able to better explain why all of this really does matter but my interests converge at the locus of administrative decision-making and the inability of people to tell the fucking truth.
I am not so much offended by the myriad barbs that have been, and occasionally continue to be, levelled at me for being gay. Gosh, it’s all so 2002. And in any case, I grew up in Queensland which is like an inoculation, sort of, if you squint. You can yell faggot at me from a moving car all you want but it will never hurt as much as watching cowards in positions of power stumble through the weeds of their own incompetence.
It’s all just so small. The actual detail, the steps to be taken; the minds involved.
While I recognise that, to a very large extent, things have moved on a bit from my personal feelings about being gay or otherwise — there are pressing concerns for the younger and even more diverse members of the LGBTQI+ community that transcend whatever battles I once fought — I maintain an interest in good governance as a general rule. I've seen a few people now take the story of Albanese’s speed wobble and turn it into a gracious example of ‘listening’ and ‘responding’ to community upset which is rather a lot like assuming an umbrella is an apology for rain.
I don’t want to be unnecessarily curt but even if one chooses to disbelieve the reporting on the subject, take a look at the words of the government ministers from the PM down and tell me where the grace or honesty is located. There is none, to my eye, because even in the comedown Albanese has declined to furnish his contortion with anything that even resembles an admission, let alone an apology.
From the outset, we have an unforced error made to dodge something that had not yet even arrived — Peter Dutton et al — to the issue of Census collection and purely in the service of side-stepping a potential political hit, not protecting the delicate humours of society. That’s like crashing your e-scooter into a bridge pylon and saying you swerved to avoid nothing.
At least Prometheus, sentenced to have his liver repeatedly devoured by a Zeus-ian eagle for his crimes, managed to have his organ regenerate in the night. This government seems to have lost theirs permanently.
Many are the methods of their ineptidue.
But who’s counting.
Observations
Tassie Had a Little Lambie
My task this week gone was to make sense of the Jacqui Lambie Network political party meltdown in which two newly elected Tasmanian state MPs were expelled from the group by Jacqui Lambie herself. Why, I wondered, did this matter at all. Obviously it does, but I’m always looking for something bigger. To a very large extent, however, despite its easy shimmering distractions (did you know a member of the Jacqui Lambie Network ‘management committee’ is also the CEO of the Australian Karate Federation? Or that election analyst Kevin Bonham is also a recognised expert on land snails? I didn’t, and boy did I love learning that) this is as much a story about the Tasmanian domestic political scene as it is about internal chaos within an eponymous political party. Here’s a taste:
The story is haunted by the ghosts of the last erratic parliament, where two Liberal MPs defected and “held the government to ransom every other day”. It involves two further Spirits that are yet to arrive: the replacement Spirit of Tasmania ferries due later this year and next, which will have nowhere to berth because the state failed to make sure either the new berth or upgrades to the existing berth will be ready in time.
“The Spirits are five years late, $500 million over budget and unable to operate at full capacity when the first ship is operational,” the state’s Labor spokeswoman for infrastructure, Anita Dow, said on August 12, “and we are still not sure when this will be.”
Sources familiar with the protracted bid to replace the ageing Spirit fleet say it was long known that ships big enough to cross Bass Strait – and withstand its furies while hauling vehicles, freight and, soon, 1800 passengers – had to be made in Europe. The existing fleet came out of Finland.
Pearl Chat Corner
Welcome to Pearl Chat! It’s brief. This week the little bandit made it inside the house in her quest to find the perfect spot to lay. I never wanted to be the family that lets the chickens inside — I feel like, once you’re there, you are quite close to giving up — but once she was inside I thought very seriously about whether we could make an exception. Alas, there’s still some life in me yet. I’m not ready to give in. Sorry Pearl.
Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival program is launched!
It’s a cracker festival helmed for the first time by the extraordinary Maeve Marsden who has run Queerstories for the longest time, making it into a truly wonderful expression of story and joy and pathos.
The full program is here and, for those who live locally, I’ll be appearing at two sessions on the Sunday including this interview about Mean Streak and the story of Robodebt. Once again I am reminded that I really need to get some new author headshots because, well, look.
But that’ll be a job I get around to in 2025 probably.
While I’m at it, I should probably also let you know the start of the book launch events are coming through. Very early days and there will be more to come in other cities and other festivals etc but to start with the delighftul folk at Avid Reader are hosting the launch at an offsite venue on Wednesday night, 16 October. God it’s really not that far away! Tickets are priced it seems but if you want to come and money is tight, let me know and I’ll sort it out for you. I haven’t even asked anyone to do the conversation duties yet, so this is very early bird! Love.
I’m Secretly Tonka Truck Coded
Few people may know this about me but when I get stressed or just need to completely chill the fuck out out, one of my favourite things to do is to watch literally any documentary about people building extremely large things. We’re talking dams, skyscrapers, expansive bridges, airports and what have you. The shows I tend to watch most often have names like Megabuilders or Megastructures or The World’s Biggest Engineering Disasters which does what it says on the tin. I’ve come to learn, over time, that it’s not really that I am Tonka Truck coded (although I did love them as much as any kid could) but that I just really, really, really like knowing how things work.
And because I am not an engineer or a carpenter or even that capable assembling flat pack furniture, these shows represent an entree to a truly mysterious and fascinating world. I imagine it’s like if someone came up to you and said ‘oh by the way, I can show you what God looks like’ and it’s a show on 7MATE. Incredible. What are the odds!
This is my long way of saying I read the most wonderful feature article about a critical piece of California Highway overpass that literally melted away after a truck accident and the high stakes venture to have it completely replaced in just 25 days. That sounds fast even to a layman, but when you see all the moving pieces you begin to understand just how amazing an achievement it is. So, I guess, for the maybe four of you who are into this sort of thing, read it. It’s gripping!
The transmission in Reeve’s truck had 18 speeds, and it required a mental map that took years of driving to develop. Reeve approached the incline at 55 miles per hour in 15th gear, and needed to shift all the way down to third and slow to about 14 miles an hour. The shifts had to be fast and fluid—if he stalled at that grade, he wouldn’t be able to get going again. The delay would be hours. Myers, watching the clock for the load to arrive, would be pissed.
“…motley crew of soul-chipped, Dulux paint Natural Whites” will forever live rent free in my head. Thank you!
Just swap in the photo holding Pearl for the author head shot and you’re good to go 👍