Secret Bushwalker Business

Sydney is remarkable in being surrounded by some beautiful bushland, some of it designated wilderness.  Sydney's sprawl is the result, it is said, of a conspiracy between hedonists and property developers.

Is a Sydney bushwalker making an expedition into a wilderness a hedonist or a property developer, or perhaps a little of each?  How are we to balance the two, and how are we to decide which places are public, and which private?

Wilderness - what is it?

Beautiful as some of it is, none of the wilderness is pristine, all of it is marked by European and Aboriginal occupation.  For example, we can measure the effects of rabbit control measures in the ages of trees everywhere - the rabbits ringbark young native trees, and so the forests have been scarred (albeit imperceptibly to us.)  Interestingly, there is evidence that having dingos range around decreases the population of ferals, but of course they shoot dingos, don't they?

Wilderness is a 19th Century romantic concept, you can read all about it in Thoreau, Nietzsche, and a hundred others.  Wilderness is held to have restorative and spiritual properties, and its existence is held even to be a measure of our civilisation, in that we exercise our considerable economic power in order to leave some natural places unexploited ('unspoiled'.)

By definition in the NSW Wilderness Act 1987, a wilderness is an area which is "together with its plant and animal communities, in a state that has not been substantially modified by humans and their works or is capable of being restored to such a state."

By that definition, there are perhaps no wildernesses in NSW, as both Aboriginal and Colonial land use, and the non-native fauna introduced by each have changed the state in ways we may not now be able to fully comprehend, let alone remediate.

However, and regardless of the vagueries of legislative definition: the hopelessly romantic, completely understandable desire to commune with 'Nature' (or at least those parts of it which don't involve blood, death, cruelty, mutilation, excreta, etc) is widespread in our population.  I endorse the sentiment and enjoy the 'wilderness' we have as yet not despoiled.

Cartography is Power.

I have been studying beautiful old maps first drawn before I was born, of an area I have come to know reasonably well in my old age.  The old maps have details lost to later generations because knowledge of the features might encourage bad behaviour and degradation of the sites.  Some camping caves (which may have been aboriginal occupation sites too) and some features designated 'abo sharpening grooves' (the abbreviation due to lack of space, I'm sure) have been lost to modern maps.

I have also pieced together, from published reports, guidebooks, conversations and memories, information about other exploitable features (tracks, routes, passes, campsites, caves, aboriginal sites) which are not in the modern maps.

I understand that the elision of features from later maps has been a considered act, intended to preserve the features from human degradation.  The approach has been "if people know these are here, they will be trashed."  But now I can make maps, high quality maps, and publish them to billions ... what am I to do?

I understand the keeping of secrets, and the necessity that people be initiated into knowledge of the land.  I understand how this totemic distribution of knowledge (through bushwalking clubs, affiliation groups) has the effect of reducing the impact of modern humans on the fragile land.

This is what the Aboriginals did.  They distributed land-use knowledge totemically, initiation was required to possess a right over the land in part, or its exploitable resources in a locale.

What I'm fascinated by is how this distribution mechanism is being replicated in modern society, where the totems are now bushwalking clubs.

Initiation, Knowledge, Ethics.

I recently found a 1930s monograph from the Australian Museum containing a trip report and detailed descriptions of a large number of Aboriginal rock carving sites, north-west of Sydney.  I plotted a course to them and organised an expedition.  I contacted the NPWS (government authority responsible for the maintenance of wilderness) and asked their advice.  Once I made it clear that I knew exactly where the carvings were, they were happy to talk to me about the expedition.  They explained that the sites were never publicised, but nor were they secret.  Once a person knew about them, NPWS was happy to discuss access with that person.

On reaching the first site, we found a visitor's book, much evidence of recent camping, and even a well-travelled trail off the public maps (and quite different from the dead reckoning and cairns we'd followed.)  The visitor's book revealed that this was a common destination for hikes from a number of privileged private schools.  This discovery has vexed me since - like the aboriginals, we have totemised knowledge of the land, made it esoteric.  Unlike the aboriginals, we have ceded the keys to people whose only qualification is wealth - an elite possessed not of knowledge, but of jet skis and urban assault vehicles.

I am concerned to enquire about the nature of our initiations, whether the rituals of initiation we now perform (club membership, organised hikes) really serve to protect the land, and preserve knowledge of the land, or whether they tend to reduce our ability to even act as custodians or preserve the sacred places.

If the modern initiations are without real value, it may be because we do not recognise them as such, and we have developed them without clear understanding of what we are doing.

The aboriginal initiations are long since lost, and with them a lot of knowledge of the land.  Some rituals required two generations of initiates to create a new generation, as new initiates weren't allowed to observe the construction of initiation spaces.

My question is:  what form of initiation is appropriate to what little knowledge remains?  We do not have the religious structure of real initiation, and for all the descriptions of 19th C Romantics of wilderness as "Nature's Cathedrals," the old gods are definitely dead - for we ourselves have killed them.

The Future is Augmented and Diminished.

Right now we're talking about maps, and about notes and reports shared through the conversation that never lulls but sometimes lulz (internet.)  Soon enough it'll be ubiquitous computing, high availability network connections and augmented reality.  How does one even keep a secret (even a benign one) in that kind of environment?  Should one?  By whom should it be kept?

It may be that most knowledge of places and things will disappear, but that what knowledge remains will be more public and more enduring than the places themselves.  If that is so, what is the ethical choice to be made, to disclose, to hide or to initiate?

What Whitlam Did

Tired of late degenerate capitalism?

This ABC Post by Jonathan Green compares the current Labor government with that of Gough Whitlam (in the 1970s.)  It reminds me why people tolerate governments' power: to collectively improve the lot of all, not to benefit the oligarchs and banksters; not to balance the budget, but to spend the tax take on things which matter; certainly not to regulate private behaviour, suspend habeas corpus, serve a medieval religious ideology (I'm looking at you, Abbot.)

The included list of achievements bears reformatting in a more readable form.

"It was, after all, the Whitlam government (and here we are grateful to various sources) that

1. ended conscription and withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam,
2. implemented equal pay for women,
3. launched an inquiry into education and funded government and non-government schools on a needs basis, 
4. established a separate ministry responsible for Aboriginal affairs, 
5. established the single department of defence, 
6. withdrew support for South Africa, 
7. granted independence to Papua-New Guinea, 
8. abolished tertiary education fees and 
9. established the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme, 
10. increased pensions, 
11. established Medibank, 
12. established controls on foreign ownership of Australian resources, 
13. passed the Family Law Act establishing no-fault divorce, 
14. passed a series of laws banning racial and sexual discrimination, 
15. extended maternity leave and benefits for single mothers, 
16. sought to democratise the electoral system by introducing one-vote-one-value, 
17. implemented wide-ranging reforms of the Labor Party's organisation, 
18. initiated Australia's first federal legislation on 
19. human rights
20. the environment and 
21. heritage, 
22. established the Legal Aid Office, 
23. established the National Film and Television School, 
24. launched construction of National Gallery of Australia, 
25. established the Australian Development Assistance Agency, 
26. reopened the Australian Embassy in Peking after 24 years, 
27. established the Prices Justification Tribunal, 
28. revalued the dollar, 
29. cut tariffs across the board, 
30. established the Trade Practices Commission, 
31. established the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, 
32. established the Law Reform Commission, 
33. established the Australian Film Commission, 
34. established the Australia Council, 
35. established the Australian Heritage Commission, 
36. established the Consumer Affairs Commission, 
37. established the Technical and Further Education Commission, 
38. implemented a national employment and training program, 
39. created Telecom and Australia Post to replace the Postmaster-General's Department, 
40. devised the Order of Australia to replace the British Honours system, 
41. abolished appeals to the Privy Council, 
42. changed the national anthem to Advance Australia Fair and 
43. instituted Aboriginal land rights.

Mind you it took them three years."

I'd like to add 44. Sewered most of Sydney.  (Hard to believe, isn't it, that Sydney wasn't sewered 40 years ago.)

Hydraulic Despotism Hits the Road

In the 1980s: the NSW Government, under Nick Greiner, entered a secret commercial agreement with toll road operators not to create any public transport alternatives to their toll roads, effectively granting them a near monopoly on transport in parts of Sydney.

In the 1990s: the NSW Government removed the prolog from road legislation granting the Minister the power to regulate "for the purposes of road safety and traffic flow,"  implicitly permitting him or her power to regulate for other purposes, such as the enrichment of commercial interests, raising revenue, or because he or she felt like it.  This quiet elision was justified as part of a process of 'harmonisation' of NSW road rules with those of other states.

The 1960s: My primary school teacher, the venerable Bonnie B. Dean, told us all the story of a world renowned race car driver who was charged with speeding.  The driver may have been Stirling Moss, but it was a long time ago.  His defence was that he admitted the facts, but asserted that he was driving safely at that speed as he was a trained racing driver, well used to travelling safely at far greater speeds.

Mrs Dean's explained the moral and legal implications clearly, to a class full of 8 year olds, and I remember her learned exposition clearly:  Driving is a privilege, and not a right.

The 1860s:  My great-great-great grandfather, William Delaforce, was granted his ticket of leave, he set out to walk from Port Macquarie to Sydney, a journey of nearly 400km.  He was stopped in Newcastle, some 240km into his journey, and required to produce his ticket of leave.  The constable doubted the authenticity of the documents, so arrested William, and had him sent back to Port Macquarie.  Despite his papers being validly granted, and his consequential common law right as a freeman to go about the land having been violated, my grandsire stayed put in the port, took up land at Rawdon Island, and as far as I know never sought to leave the place again.  He died there in 1900.

Apparently it was quite common for tickets of leave, issued as they were by a penal colony, to restrict the rights of former convicts to move - this enabled local economies to have a captive work force, and kept wages down.  We were never very interested, as a state, in civil liberties when money was at stake.

1753: Blackstone on the Absolute Rights of Individuals wrote:

To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.

Such confinements as imposition of a curfew, Blackstone suggests, might be occasionally necessary for the common good or security of the realm, but they are not to be regarded as commonplace or usual, they are to be imposed for a purpose and for a particular time.

 1215: Magna Carta

(39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

 Confinement of the person, imprisonment, does not necessarily proceed by means of slamming of barred doors, laying on of hands, arrest or official detention.

Confinement of the person can consist, as in the case of my forebear, of the arbitrary imposition of a requirement to produce a proof of one's right to go about, through an erosion of the common law, through an excessive executive zeal, through the derogation of the rights of the people, through the erosion of the principles of right, through ... let's be clear ... laziness of the common man.

Hydraulic Despotism is governance in which a natural monopoly is leveraged to coerce the people into acceptance of arbitrary rule.

Where once Mrs Dean may have been correct, the actions of successive governments at all levels in Australia have made it impossible to live normally in Sydney without a car.  Zoning, lack of alternative transport modalities, illicit secret deals, unaccountable authoritarian structures like the RTA, have so changed the fundamental relationship of people to the land that it no longer makes sense to speak of driving as a privilege, any more than one would speak of clean water as a privilege.

I was surprised, on visiting suburban Chicago a few years ago, to see roads without sidewalks, pedestrian crossing lights not working, to find places it was impossible to walk to, and to hear my taxi driver's explanation that living in a car-only suburb was considered a status marker - I guess it forces criminals to drive to get into the suburb, presumably selecting for a better class of criminal.

We, as a population, have been sleep-waltzed into a belief that a government has the right to selectively grant or revoke permission to drive while at the same time it systematically closes off all other means necessary to move about, and hence to live.

I remember, as many would not, the days when a car was a rarity.  In those days the means of subsistance were delivered to the door - bread, milk, vegetables, even meat were transported to walking distance of a house.  Vendors of same were within walking distance of houses, because the land use provided for it.

Those days are long gone, and with them any semblance of validity for the contention that driving is a choice.  As it is not a choice, nor can it be a privilege.

Auditors: Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.

I was listening to an ABC Radio National Programme "auditing the auditors" which painted a pretty bleak picture of the way public companies are audited, and the cozy collusive atmosphere which almost forces companies to lie to their auditors and auditors to lie to the public.

In short: if corporations can make money by telling lies, auditors make money by making sure the lies aren't revealed.

This is, of course, the very opposite of what auditors are supposed to do - they are supposed to ensure that the operators of a company (management) aren't misleading the owners of the company (shareholders.) According to the Radio National programme, the historical function of an 'auditor' (Latin: one who listens) was to listen to the accountant tell the feudal lord about the running of the feofdom, and to report any inconsistencies. It appears, increasingly, that the auditor and the accountant are in cahoots.

The programme also suggested that the Big-4 auditing firms are too big to fail. Corporations are so large and complex that (to hear them tell it) you need almost equally large and complex corporations to audit them. Now that Arthur Andersen has been destroyed, there are only four firms left in the world who can audit the corporate giants astride our globe. So they say.

There may be another angle to approach this problem though: The Short Seller. Short selling is essentially betting that the share price of a company will fall. It's been banned in some places, but should it have been?

Apparently, and in retrospect fairly obviously, there are companies like this which appear to specialise in finding the unpleasant truths about a company and exposing them ... presumably allowing the savvy seeker-after-truth (and profit) to take a short position on that company's shares. These guys are paid to uncover lies when auditors are paid to cover up.

I'm no big fan of free market capitalism, but it seems to me that this kind of short selling would do what the (very poorly) regulated auditors won't: tell the truth. And the truth shall set you free ... maybe.

Dear Mr Naismith: What on earth is 'fell running'?

William Naismith, of "the Rule"

Naismith's Rule is "a rule of thumb that helps in the planning of a walking or hiking expedition by calculating how long it will take to walk the route, including ascents."

It is taught in Scouting, and expected to be learned and applied to hikes over a significant distance. It's roughly that a fit person can walk 5km/hr, with adjustments for the roughness of terrain, and for acent and descent. The rule implies that 1m of ascent is equivalent to about 8m of horizontal travel.

Problem: Naismith was a mountaineer and an optimist.

It was developed in 1892, 120 years ago. My grandfather used to walk his brothers' lunch out 10 miles to where they were making charcoal in the 1920s. Bushwalkers before WW2 used to compress very long journeys into the day-and-a-half weekend before the 40 Hour Week gave them the whole of Saturday. But: in 2000, as a fat creaky hiker leading kids who're driven to school every day, 5km/h is a figure I don't ever observe even on pavement.

Naismith's Rule has been confirmed empirically by reference to records of 'fell runners' ... but what the hell is that? Turns out it's a kind of race run through the UK countryside by athletes. They aren't carrying 15kg packs, they aren't scrambling up rocks, and they're not going anywhere on 35C Sydney summer days. There are adjustments you can make for 'fitness' ... but how on earth do you calibrate that? The empirical study suggests that men use an 8:1 figure for ascent, but that women use 10:1 ... that's a 25% difference!

So how applicable is it really to hiking in Australian bush? Even on track, we're lucky to average 3km/h with scouts. Get into a bit of dense undergrowth, and you can be lucky to travel at 1/10th of that doughty Scot's speed. What about the load being carried? What about the temperature?

Apparently Naismith used 'trigonometry' to arrive at his rule of thumb, and that's ok, but man is not a purely geometrical being. It's fundamentally a flawed assumption, like the ideal weight calculations which model human bodies as disks.

Hiking is about the expenditure of energy. Converting chemical potential into kinetic in a field of gravitational potential to perform the useful work of holding the body (and pack) off the ground while covering terrain. The efficiency of the conversion depends upon fitness, ambient temperature and humidity. The work to be done depends on terrain - rocky, steep, overgrown.

With DEM data down to 30cm vertical and sub-meter (ie: sub-step) horizontal resolution why aren't we able to point a program at a path file and calculate with exquisite precision the energy consumed by an ideal human physiology under specified load, temperature and humidity. In CGS, dammit! This is not rocket surgery.

Having determined the energetic expenditure required to cover a given terrain-load-temperature-humidity and adjusting for roughness of terrain, one might (just might) be able to accurately forecast time to complete.

Edit: In a kind of Rule34 for Geeks, someone's already had a bash at this problem.

Stupidity

Why is there less variance in the opinions held by stupid people?

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"Understand it for me."

Anamnesis and Education

From the derivation of 'education': "The Romans considered educating to be synonymous with drawing knowledge out of somebody or leading them out of regular thinking."

There are two antithetical meanings in this derivation. Depending upon whether one considers the object to be drawn is the knowledge, or the student. In my day, it was clearly stated that knowledge was the object of education. These days the student has become the object., The deliverable product of institutional education has increasingly become more quantifiably and concretely 'the graduate' and no longer an abstract 'knowledge.'

Anamnesis is to recollect what one already always knew.

Chomsky, in a public lecture I attended in the 1990s, suggested that we all know what is right and fair, in social interaction. He further stated that the state has worked on its populace for hundreds of years to convince us that we don't.

Without wishing to fall into the trap of 'truthiness,' my gut tells me Chomsky's right. I think humans have an inbuilt theory of mind which permits (but does not materially entail) empathy. I think we are innately imbued with a facility to projectively imagine the position, feelings, available options and disposition of the Other in any interaction. I think there is sufficient reason to suppose that 'a fair go' is an optimal goal in societal interaction, if only because the iterated prisoner's dilemma suggests it. Without recourse to 'truthiness', I think it is true to say that if we live in a society whose values turn our stomachs, we are right to respond viscerally.

(I exempt from this consideration people who are autistic (whose ability to projectively imagine the Other appears to be undeveloped or absent) and sociopaths (who don't value the Other) but for the most part, people know what it is to be fair to another, and people have a sense of what's right. It would seem to be a neat exercise in deconstructing 'empathy' to learn to empathise with the unempathic.)

Hypothetically: this sense of what is right can be drawn from anyone by a structured enquiry into their values, into what matters to them, and empirical consideration of the implications of the expression of those values. It may be drawn from what Python (after Gurdjieff called) a process of guided self-observation. Python's reading of Gurdjieff goes on to say that such developments are "rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia." Current educational policy departs from a process of guided self-observation to focus on trivial 'attainment of learning outcomes.'

These 'learning outcomes' (we are told) render graduates for economic life, and as Nietzsche said (in "The Eulogists of Work")

At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work -and what is

invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late- that such work is the best policy, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess.

Education which "always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions" is the antithesis of the guided self observation prescribed by Gurdjieff. It is consistent with education in which the student is drawn along (like a donkey in harness) and antithetical to an education which draws out knowledge, or leads the student to anmnesis.

I understand the societal goal of primary and secondary education in a democracy to be, rather, to provision the populace with necessary and sufficient means of participation in the government of the society. To the extent that this goal has been subverted to serve the production of a skilled workforce, society is being asked to socialise costs which ought properly to be borne by the consumers of the skills imparted and is being robbed of its ability to perpetuate itself as a democracy.

I once had the privilege of speaking to an elected representative, one Michael Photios, when he had the slimmest of paper-thin majorities. Michael put it to me that without 'leadership' by elected representatives we would still have capital punishment. In this, I think, he was seeking to distinguish an elected elite value system from a broad societal one. He was asserting that the long and hard-fought campaigns of people like Koestler (Reflections on Hanging) and Orwell (A Hanging) hold no value except insofar as they might influence that elected elite.

It seems to me that if Michael Photios' assertion is correct, it means that the masses of people, the population as a whole, are incapable of understanding the case against capital punishment, or that the case is not entirely made. I think that this implies a systemic failure of education in its presumed goal of giving the masses an ability to meaningfully participate. Michael appealed to my prejudices (that capital punishment was unethical) to prove to me that direct democracy couldn't work.

It's taken me twenty years to see it, but I think I have my rebuttal: If he and I can conclude that capital punishment is wrong, yet the masses can't, this means our system of primary and secondary education has failed them. If we, as a democracy, cannot provide the masses with the means of their own proper government, we have no right to the name. If we, as presumed elites, sit satisfied with our right to overrule the baser instincts of the people, to protect them from themselves, then we have failed to govern democratically.

It may be a pious and unevidenced belief, it may be false, but I suspect that what leads the masses to desire their own repression is a systemic programme of education to that end.

The Problem with Probability is that we don't teach it to everyone, although it's a minimally necessary life skill ... so people build in flood plains, they embezzle to put the proceeds (and presumably their life savings) through poker machines.

Michael Photios supported his assertion that the masses support capital punishment by reference to polls. Polling suggested that capital punishment was popular. Reminds me of John Cooper-Clarke's "Suspended Sentence" in which a tabloid stampede makes capital punishment mandatory.

Is Michael Photios' blithe acceptance of polling as evidence of the immutable will of the people acceptable in a politician? What of Paul Keating's statement that he didn't seek popularity, but the "regard of serious people?"

In a democracy, we're supposed to educate people enough so they are able to hold a valid opinion. Remember?