Fury Road

Death cults and more ... Abbott is in heaven with the latest in the Mad Max franchise ... The Septics are eyeing the Cocos Islands for a base ... Tearing down Cecil Rhodes ... Memorials that give the other side of history ... Procrustes blogs 

The latest Mad Max gives us death cults galore

CASTING off his gout induced pallor, your scribe was off to the premier of Mad Max: Fury Road, and what a furious trip it is, with antecedents stretching back not just to the three decades and more since the earlier Madnesses, but to similarly, now antique pieces such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. 

The similarities, at least between the two bookending road chases and the interval dealing with enslaved children in the latest Max, and the chase and enslaved children in the second half of Doom, were striking, although Max has much the better of the vehicles.

It's not just the weirdness of the headgear on the leading protagonists for Evil (again, Max has cornered the market in bizarre), it's the recurring theme of a death cult in both movies: skulls and skull motifs everywhere.

TradieTony will just love Max, as perhaps only now he will realise he should retrospectively love Temple of Doom. But again, Max surpasses its predecessor, with the cult elaborated: populations enslaved (emphasis on children) in thrall to a messianic monster (Immortan Joe); women treated with utter contempt; young men (warboys) induced to wantonly kill in the name of the messiah and in the prospect of a glorious afterlife. Valhalla beckons.

But elevating Max from the merely mundane road movie monster genre, there is a glimmer, just a glimmer of humanity as a warboy sides with Max and Imperator Furiosa (played with some aplomb by Peta Credlin), and in between machine gun bursts discovers himself falling in love with one of Immortan Joe's concubines, who was being smuggled to freedom by Furiosa. 

Furiosa, with goggles

Such a simple human response, but it has the same effect as the closing pages of Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December where the intense young British jihadist is steered off his intended bombing of a hospital by the simple expedient of an emotional intersection with a cuddly woman.

Death cults, Valhallas, Posthumous virgins - is the answer as simple as encouraging healthy sexual relationships (and I write that noting the 35 deaths of Australian women so far this year at the hands of their male partners). As a society we have a way to go, but reducing the urge to jihad would be a start.

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Shear: misspeaking

Meanwhile, David Shear, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific affairs, told a US Senate foreign relations committee hearing in Washington DC that US bombers would be based in Australia.

This brought denials from all sides - Shear had "misspoke". We'll see.

Darwin might be a stretch, but the example of what Uncle Sam got away with in the Chagos Islands is too tempting not to call for repetition. The Cocos islands are very far from mainland Australia, nearer to potential trouble in the South China Sea than Darwin, and susceptible to being depopulated (this is the big advantage) by an Order in Council, and not an Act of Parliament, which is to say, quietly rather than in the public eye.

The Yanks want bases that are remote (easily secured) and without a local population (which make security more difficult).

They got what they wanted from the Brits - an air and naval base in the Indian Ocean capable of dominating southern Asia and the Middle East. The Cocos would extend that range north and east. Keep an eye open.

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Cecil Rhodes: on his way out from the University of Cape Town

Enough of Procrustes' crystal ball - what of the decaying past. Your scribe was amused at the antics in Cape Town re the statue of that child of Empire, Cecil Rhodes.

Excrement and paint - the old boy received a regular makeover. Students at the prestigious University of Cape Town demanded the statue be removed in the name of political correctness. Rhodes' record as a racist plutocrat was too much to bear in a public monument.

What to do with the reminders of a past that lacks congruence with a much perfected present? The Russians took to storing statues of Lenin in parks dedicated to the theme (although the poorly embalmed body remains in Red Square, along with the much flower bedecked tomb of Stalin).

Stalin of course altered the photographic record in time with his purges. Past snaps of the Central Committee would be rejigged to remove the offending and now dead traitors.  

We have a splendid example in Australia, in a Fremantle park. Erected in the nineteenth century, a grandiose memorial stands to the deaths of three white bushmen, slain, so the legend on the statue runs, by "treacherous natives" (sic).

In 1994 a mildly bolshie Fremantle Council allowed protestors to place the following plaque below the tale of murdered explorers:

THIS PLAQUE WAS ERECTED BY PEOPLE WHO FOUND THE MONUMENT BEFORE YOU OFFENSIVE. 
THE MONUMENT DESCRIBED THE EVENTS AT La GRANGE FROM ONE PERSPECTIVE ONLY: THE VIEWPOINT OF THE WHITE 'SETTLERS'. 
NO MENTION IS MADE OF THE RIGHTS OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE TO DEFEND THEIR LAND OR OF THE HISTORY OF PROVOCATION WHICH LED TO THE EXPLORERS' DEATH. 
THE 'PUNITIVE PARTY' MENTIONED HERE ENDED IN THE DEATHS OF SOMEWHERE AROUND TWENTY ABORIGINAL PEOPLE. THE WHITES WERE WELL ARMED AND EQUIPPED AND NONE OF THEIR PARTY WAS KILLED OR WOUNDED. 
THIS PLAQUE IS IN MEMORY OF THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE KILLED AT LA GRANGE. IT ALSO COMMEMORATES ALL OTHER ABORIGINAL PEOPLE WHO DIED DURING THE INVASION OF THEIR COUNTRY.
LEST WE FORGET MAPA JARRIYA-NYALAKU

It was home invasion by the white bushmen, as it was for Collet Barker, after whom Mt Barker is named in both Western and South Australia.

But he got on the wrong side of a tribe at the Murray mouth in 1831, and they did for him. His plaque in St James, Phillip Street, refers to him having been killed "treacherously by Aboriginal natives".  

Surely the lesson for St James and the Rhodes-removers is that "the past is never dead. It's not even past". 

Better to do a little educating, à la the Esplanade Park in Freo. Rhodes' statue, wherever it ends up, should carry a plaque explaining that this force of nature understood the potential for extracting South Africa's mineral wealth as no predecessor had; that he was ruthless in execution of his megalomania and was in the process casually racist in the highest degree; that he invaded an area that later comprised the sovereign States of Zambia and Zimbabwe using machine guns, thus exterminating the opposition of local inhabitants; and best of all he fomented a plan to topple the government of the Transvaal, in the shape of the Jameson Raid in 1895, from which failure he then insulated himself by backstairs arrangements with the Colonial Secretary in London, Sir Joseph Chamberlain (with Chamberlain, himself deeply implicated, chairing a parliamentary enquiry into the raid in 1897).  

And if you want a rollicking good read that explains the South African gold and diamond industries, try Geoffrey Wheatcroft's The Randlords.