AUSTRALIAN ODYSSENE Abstract

AUSTRALIAN ODYSSENE
Abstract


In one sentence

A small town is transformed into a community by an amazing event, and becomes a catalyst  for the end of civilisation as we know it, and the renewal of the face of the earth.

In a slightly longer sentence

The residents of a small town are gradually transformed into a community by an amazing event, the nature of which unfolds as they deepen their commitment to a new way of life, and become instrumental on the one hand in unmasking and immobilising civilised institutions that have attempted to impose uniformity on people everywhere, and on the other, in precipitating local community on a global scale, facilitating the fullest identification of its inhabitants with the landscape.

Part 1

CROCODILE DANCING
The residents of a small town (after a brief and, at the time, inexplicable experience of horror) explore and celebrate with ever increasing wonder, the shared insight that has penetrated their lives, plunging themselves with insatiable curiosity and vigour into a variety of creative activities and changing their relationships so radically that they attract the unhelpful, because uncomprehending, attention of the media and others, which drives the incipient community deeper into itself, yet at the same time triggers internal scrutiny that yields clarification of the breathtaking role to which their amazing experience challenges them, and effects their definitive transformation into a community.

Part 2

DIPLOMACY BY OTHER MEANS
An awesome breakthrough at the interface of two cultures triggers fundamental changes in relationships that provokes a backlash of unprecedented ferocity involving, among other things, an appalling act of contempt towards a small town which, contrary to prevailing expectations, succeeds in calling forth widespread public outrage and exposing the criminal intent of those in power, leading to such all out confrontation of opposing interests that civilised polity collapses, leaving the military, itself thoroughly transformed by the crisis in which it has shared, as the reluctant custodian of power.

Part 3

CARDWELL DREAMING
A small town is overwhelmed and devastated by the contempt of unrestrained external power, but is then helped by another outside agency to recover its dignity, and achieves such unprecedented integration as a community rooted in the landscape in which it is situated, that it transcends all the means by which it previously shared in the widespread degradation of the earth, and develops a global network of relationships that, at a moment when the ‘monoculture’ of civilisation is vulnerable to extinction, triggers the transformation of the Global Village into a globe of villages.

What it’s “about”

1. See civilisation for what it really is - unsustainable and wasteful magic: life organised to indulge the world view generated in the CIVIS, where the relationships, needs and limitations of the landscape that sustains all life are lost sight of, denied and repudiated by the strong man’s priorities, which also subject and diminish the creative human potential of all others, even those closest to him and in a position to influence him, but always by his leave.
2. Recognise the word community as naming the opposite of civilisation - sustainable and mutually satisfying fruitfulness: life unfolding from mutually acceptable (and probably constantly negotiated) relationships grounded in a knowledge of and partnership with the landscape in which people live.
3. Accept each as the Shadow of the other.
4. Imagine integrating them so that they both serve the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

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