https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/20bos/venues/cockatoo-island/
It’s a travesty.
This island could so easily have been the single most superb industrial museum in the country.
Set in the middle of Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island had been a centre for ship building enterprises since the earliest days of the colony.
There were still the holes in the ground where convicts were thrown for months or years of isolation. The giant, atmospheric warehouses held the history of industrial advancement, with some of the machinery dating back to the 18th Century. Girlie posters still hung in the kitchen areas.
The Labor Party was in power at the time.
And the political party purporting to represent workers oversaw one of the worst cases of the pillaging of the industrial and working class heritage in Australia’s history.
Kim Beazley was a senior member of the Hawke government at the time, later to be Australia’s ambassador to the US and one in the endless “congaline of assholes” to excuse Australia’s endless obeisance to America’s wars. From what I could tell, he seemed to think it was all a jolly good show.
I remember calling his office. I got nowhere. Of course.
Beyond the official line.
My respect for Beazley has been non-existent ever since.
He could have stopped the ransacking of one of Australia’s greatest, most beautiful, most historically rich and industrially tapestried pieces of architecture and landscape in the country
These people are barbarians. They sop up public funds. They preen themselves, in front of everybody, And they have betrayed their heritage, their voters, their own ideological genealogy.
Much of what was sold off that day was shipped straight to Beazley’s home state of W.A., on the other side of the country.
Straight to Beazley’s mates. All of these things, these jobs, are time dependent. What can be written is entirely dependent on the time available. And who picks up the phone when you ring them. How many views, how many dissenting voices, how much, in a sense, truth, can be provided in a story all depends on deadlines. I got back to the office from this job around four p.m.
At the time, I was very close to the photographer Greg White. We had the picture, we had a kind of story, but I was a reporter, I couldn’t tell the truth unless someone else said it for me. Try as I might, on that day, on that hour, I could
Most often, they look blandly beyond eye-to-eye contact. They have no idea what I am talking about.