Fingerprints have associations of guilt, but the footprint traditionally speaks of innocence. Think of Good King Wenceslas and his pageboy, crossing the moonlit snow to deliver food and fuel to the poor:

Mark my footsteps, good my page,
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.

Legend has it that the saint went barefoot on these nocturnal journeys. Pope Pius II is said to have walked barefoot in the snow in recognition of the ‘footprint miracle’ by which Wenceslas transmitted his radiant warmth to his follower. The footprint speaks of an innate sense of human limits, shared even by the wealthy and powerful, because it expresses a literal kind of grounding, a connection with the earth marked from childhood and remaining unbroken, no matter what more sophisticated means we resort to in getting from place to place.

I will never forget the euphoric moment on Glenelg beach when I turned to see a trail of perfectly contoured shapes left behind me in the sand. I was six years old at the time, recently arrived in Adelaide, and the only beach I’d known before was at Hastings in England, where I had to wear rubber paddling shoes to protect my feet from the bruising mess of pebbles heaped up on the shoreline.

When I revisit Glenelg now, I hardly recognise the place. There’s a marina where yachts and speedboats are moored, and the beachfront is lined with multi-million dollar real estate. These are footprints of another kind. Footprints are changing, losing their innocence as they get bigger, and their meaning is expanding, to acquire new metaphorical inflections that reflect the altered and altering relationship between the land and its human burdens.

I am drawn to this expanded terrain of metaphor. As I look out over it, all kinds of stories seem to rise there, stories from different times and hemispheres, but calling for connection with an insistency I have decided I can’t ignore. I must play the role of go-between, if that’s what I’m being called to do. But first I must do my exercises.

I check my ecological footprint online, and the results aren’t good. A terse message at the end of the quiz tells me it would require 4.6 planet earths to keep me going in my present way of life. That’s pretty much average for my demographic, but not exactly a comfortable state of affairs, so I redesign the avatar on the screen (selecting a choppy haircut and patch-pants), and set out to create a profile that will get me within the one planet budget.

Even when cheating, it takes three attempts before I get the green tick. On the first pass, I shrink the car and the house, put myself on a diet of fish and chicken, reduce my wardrobe acquisitions to a few T-shirts and cut the flying time in half. That barely comes in at the three-planet mark. I restart, adjusting the strategy from mild dishonesty to ly-ing in my teeth. After becoming a vegetarian, ditching the car for public transport and eliminating air travel altogether, I’m still on 2.1 planets. In order to squeeze into one planet, I have to downshift to a small solar-powered residence shared with three other people, get around on a bicycle and turn vegan.¹

My first reaction is: do I have to? Do I really have to get rid of that much of the furniture of my mind, let alone the furniture of my life? Who’s going to make me? My conscience? Conscience pushes you into and out of all sorts of things, but it can’t be allowed to go too far. It must be balanced by pragmatism, and besides, there’s surely room for some measure of scepticism. Margins of error – considerable margins – must be allowed for, and there are still voices arguing that the planet Earth crisis may be a false alarm. This is not the first time we’ve had announcements of the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it. The alarmists will go on ringing in our ears like tinnitus and we must neither let their noise attract our continuing attention nor ignore it completely. Well, that’s the kind of message mixture that is going the rounds in the media, but what keeps intruding itself on my attention is a cautionary tale, a story I’m somehow reminded of by the picture of that cartoon avatar whose forward march on the screen draws a boundary line round all the resources she’s using up.

The story is by Leo Tolstoy. I used to read Tolstoy when I was a student, but now I’m rather wary of his writing, especially those quietly pulsing short stories. Open them up, and before you know it, the whole universe starts to unpack. I first read this one when I was about eighteen, and certain images from it are permanently lodged in my mind. James Joyce called it ‘the greatest story that the literature of the world knows’. Its title, in literal translation, is ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ That’s really not a very good title, I’m thinking, as I find the page. Fiction should not wear its moral messages on its sleeve, and what’s more it should pick messages that are subtle, unusual or incisive, and not proposition its readers with slogans. All the same, fresh from my experience on the website of the Global Footprint Network, the question had a certain ring to it. How much land does a man need? The GFN could answer the question instantaneously: 1.8 hectares of bio-productive land. Well, that’s how much there is to go round, from a planetary point of view, and from a biological point of view, a human life should be sustainable on that measure of the earth’s resources.

Leo Tolstoy, 1854

Tolstoy’s narrative opens with an argument between two sisters. One is a peasant’s wife living on communal pasture; the other has moved to the town and is boasting about life in fashionable society. It’s the age-old stand-off between the town life and country life, the world of traditional sufficiency and the one filled with novelty, style and indulgence. The peasant’s wife cuts off the discussion with an old proverb. ‘Loss and gain are brothers twain.’ Then her husband, a man called Pahom, who is taking his afternoon rest on the stove-top, mutters a background comment of his own. Life on the land is fine, if there is land enough. ‘If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear the Devil himself.’² But the devil, who happens to be loitering in the hot air behind the stove, also overhears, and the story shifts gears. The received wisdom of a trite folk tale is about to take on metaphysical proportions, with a sinister edge. And the size of the human footprint is precisely what is at issue. Just how precisely is a matter for only the devil to foresee, and his design unfolds gradually.

The peasant’s family is part of a commune, sharing a small herd of animals on an inadequate expanse of pastureland, but a few months after the opening scene of the story, there is an opportunity to buy some land independently when a local estate is being sold off. Pahom successfully puts in a bid, and his first taste of land ownership is expressed as a poor man’s epiphany. ‘When he went out to plough his fields, or to look at his growing corn, his heart would fill with joy. The grass that grew there and the flowers that bloomed seemed to him unlike any that grew elsewhere.’

These are good feelings, and people of good heart would surely warm to them, but so does the devil, who is no longer skulking but energised and on the move, stirring up the neighbourhood. There is wrangling about boundaries and encroachments. There are frustrations, problems to be solved, and, as the devil knows, the road to hell is paved by problem solvers. He pays another visit, in the guise of one of the new breed of traveling real estate brokers. There’s a place further up the river, he reports, where land is going cheap. Actually, it’s a long way further up. Pahom takes the steamer as far as it goes, but still has to walk three hundred miles to the destination. If you want to enlarge your footprint, don’t you always have to go abroad? Isn’t this how the global economy came about in the first place, through the geographical outreach of venture capitalists? But this is no story of sudden transformations. Tolstoy lets time as well as space stretch out in his narrative. It’s a case of one thing leading to another, and, of course, removal to the new pasture-land is not the end of Pahom’s journey, or of his story, or the devil’s doings, which create trouble in the neighbourhood of just the same kind as before, so that, just as before, the landowner must solve his problems by moving on, to gain more expanse and better control.

The opportunity this time has a certain romance about it. It involves a frontier adventure in the remote steppes near the southern border of Russia, where the Bashkirs have been persuaded to sell some of the vast tracts of prime pasture-land over which they have traditional ownership. Being nomads, so the rumour goes, the Bashkirs don’t value the land, and are amused to find that people are prepared to give them money or valuable goods in exchange for it. Pahom’s journey takes him up the River Samara, a tributary of the Volga, into the region where Tolstoy himself, in a state of mid-life restlessness and depression, went to buy up land in the early 1870s. The wraiths of the author’s conscience hover about this phase of the story, for Tolstoy, unlike his simpler protagonist, never got the better of conscience, which may have restrained his approach to the bargaining process so as to avert the fatal consequ-ences towards which Pahom is making his way, like some cheerfully oblivious alter ego.

During his journey, Pahom collects a few luxury gifts of the kind he thinks might appeal to the Bashkirs, and mentally prepares for a bargaining process in which his goal is to get as much as possible for as little as possible. On his arrival, he is entertained with high good humour by the Bashkirs, who tell him that the price of their land is one thousand rubles a day. He doesn’t understand. One thousand rubles, they explain, for as much land as a man can get around in a day, on foot, between sunrise and sunset. At dawn, the Bashkir elders will gather at the agreed starting point and remain there until the sun is at the opposite horizon line, to seal the bargain. The purchaser leaves markers as he goes, and a ploughman follows on to create a boundary furrow between them. Over a restless night before the crucial day, Pahom calculates that he can walk about thirty-five miles between dawn and dusk, which should equate to around 150 acres. That’s one big footprint. For Pahom, at last it will be enough.

At sun-up, he sets out from the starting line at a robust though steady pace, but as the sun rises higher, enabling him to figure out the lie of the land, he is prompted to go more briskly. There is a wooded hill that he can take in, and a valley, perfect for growing flax. From every vista, visions arise in his mind of the future abundance that will grow there, but his body is sending other kinds of messages. It’s getting hot. He’s taken barely any food or drink, and his feet hurt. Stopping briefly for a rest on the rise of the hill, he sees the elders gathered round his goal-point, so far away that they look like ants.

Pahom’s home run is a gathering nightmare, as the distance towards the finishing post stretches out in front of him, while the sinking sun closes on the line of hills at a rate he cannot match. Drenched in sweat, lungs ‘working like a blacksmith’s bellows’, he suffers a massive heart attack. The chief of the Bashkirs takes up a spade to mark out all the land their ambitious customer will now require: a six-foot grave plot.

There’s something primal about the theme of over-reaching our properly delimited claims on the earth. Yet how do we draw the limit? The 150 acres, or sixty hectares, Pahom was targeting in his last run would, in the current economy, serve to maintain four residents of one of Sydney’s wealthier suburbs in the style to which they are accustomed, but the distance between these two situations in conscience and consciousness is hard to measure.In the urban landscape, our feet are rarely on the ground in the true sense, since the lie of the land has been transformed by architecture and engineering. As Paul Carter puts it, ‘many layers come between us and the granular earth’.³ Pahom is right there in the primal space, caught between sun-up and sun-down, between the limits of his body and the reach of his imagination.

His story illustrates, amongst other things, the genesis of economic consciousness, which is sometimes confounded by the very principles of measurement out of which it is born. In taking the measure of things, systems of calculation come into play, but there may be strange incommensurabilities between one system and another. The Bashkirs evidently had a shrewd grasp of the principle of incommensurability. One thousand rubles a day. It’s an equation that taxes the economically literate mind by confusing the primary principles of time and space. Money is what brings them together, but not money alone. This is not a rental agreement. Something besides money is on the line, and in this case it is a human life: heart pumping, blood circulating, lungs drawing in and pushing out, feet on the ground. Eyes on the prize. Motion and motivation create another equation that crosses between dimensions. That they should be brought into collision with such finality, and with the animal physiology of motion deciding the matter over and above the most highly charged determinations of the will, is a shock to the system. But whose system? Certainly not that of the traditional owners, though their bargaining strategy may well have saved them from an exchange with fatal consequences to their way of life.

Here is a view of economic acquisition and indigenous occupation as two radically incompatible forms of relationship to the land. In this instance, the Bashkirs manage to turn the culture of acquisition, with all its fatal momentum, against itself. These nomads,bemused by the fixations of boundary-minded foreigners, evidently have some mischievous inkling of how the boundary is a weapon that can cut both ways, and have found a tactic for controlling its deployment. They have devised a trick for delimiting the footprint of economic man, though it must be said that the trick can only work in a situation where some formal bargaining approach is made.

In Australia, under the principle of terra nullius, stories of traditional ownership and economic acquisition pan out quite differently. We can mark the very day on which economic consciousness entered the relationship between this land and the human species: 29 April 1770, the day of James Cook’s first landing at Botany Bay.Cook’s journals testify to a world known by numbers and quantities. He records the longitude and latitude of the Endeavour’s positions, the depths of the sea around it, the wading distance to the shore, the sun’s meridian, the time of the moon’s rising. Details about the weight, with or without entrails, of two stingrays that have been caught evidently interest him less. He crosses out the statement, leaving the numbers blank. It is the task of Joseph Banks to know the particulars of what lives and grows in the environment; Cook’s responsibility is technical orientation. Schooled in the most advanced disciplines of measurement available in his time, the measures he needs to take are those of the land itself, in its larger global setting, and by doing so he enables its possession as a whole, within the system of empire. In his adventuring, Cook set the bounds of empire wider than any human individual before him. As a recent biographer puts it, he ‘twice put a girdle round the earth’.⁴

‘In his adventuring, Cook set the bounds of empire wider than any human individual before him’

Once settlement gets underway, the scale of the story downshifts and the narratives start to multiply. Fiction exploits the licence of memory, individual and cultural; through deepening story lines, memory harks back to a state of innocence, then becomes heavy with the loss of it. At the innocent end of the spectrum is the semi-autobiographical We of the Never Never (1908), which chronicles the lives of the settler community on the Elsey, one of the largest cattle stations in the Northern Territory. The recollections are those of Mrs Aeneas Gunn (Jeannie Gunn), a model of pluckiness, in whose eyes the blackfellas around the homestead are a jovial community of willing helpers. She expresses an ingenuously reasonable view of their rights: the white man has taken their land – for which the justification is tactfully assumed, without elaboration – but they should be free to come and go on it, and to take whatever essentials are required for their simple way of life. The white pastoralists are lucky to have their own needs met. Food, fuel and shelter are hard won, and their situation is an ironic reversal of the conventional equation between expanse and affluence. This cattle station extends over a million and a quarter acres, so the process of working it involves arduous journeys out into ‘sun-baked, crab-holed, trackless plains’. The front gate is forty-five miles from the house and 130 miles to the next outpost of human habitation. In these circumstances, the containment of a modest homestead is welcome and ultimately, as Jeannie Gunn records (without any need to associate herself with Tolstoy), ‘“enough bush to bury a man in” … is all these men of the droving days have ever asked of their nation’.⁵

In February 2000, a native title claim for Elsey station was settled on behalf of the traditional owners, the Maharri people, and the area with its township of Mataranka is now under the governance of the local community. Its history has not been untroubled by disputes, but the Mataranka website invites visitors to the Never Never as ‘genuine frontier country, a wilderness area untouched by development’.⁶

We of the Never Never has acquired quasi folk-tale status, and has a counterpart in Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice (1950), a novel set in a similarly remote place just across the Queensland border and also concerning the experiences of a young white woman facing the challenge of life on a cattle station. The two books sit in company with each other on the shelves of the airport newsagent in Alice Springs, as essential reading for those on the outback touring circuit. That’s in fact where I bought my own copies, and I read them in the air-conditioned cafés of Alice, between swims in the hotel pool. It wasn’t doing my eco-footprint any good, but who wouldn’t want to spend time in that way, in a place like that? It’s the life Jean Paget in Shute’s story dreamed of creating for the white women of outback Australia, and she would have added a few extras to my scene of indulgence: an ice cream soda, a trip to the hairdresser, lotions to cool the skin, and a new pair of shoes in the finest crocodile skin. Restrictions to the footprint were not anywhere on Jean Paget’s agenda.

Her story begins two generations later than Jeannie Gunn’s, and she arrives by plane in the Gulf country of north Queensland, bringing with her a recently inherited legacy and several years’ experience as a secretary with a London shoe-making business. Not about to resign herself to a life of hard labour and material deprivation, she immediately sets out to reform the conditions she sees around her, especially those in the local town. Willstown (a fictional place based on Burketown) is a former gold-rush settlement that has been steadily depopulating. Writing home, Jean reports on a set of negatives: there is no cinema, no dress shop, nowhere to buy a newspaper or an ice cream, no radio to listen to, and no supply of fresh produce. The store trades in dried peas, hardware and all-purpose cleaning fluid, and the only entertainment is lighting the aura of gas around the spouting artesian bore in the main street. Women will not stay in a place like this, and the men lead arid bachelor lives.

Jean has visions of turning Willstown into a flourishing town like Alice Springs. She will establish a small shoe-making business to exploit the local availability of good alligator skins, with employment for half a dozen young women. And there must be an ice cream parlour so that they will have somewhere to relax and spend their earnings. A shrewd businesswoman, Jean has no trouble turning these visions into reality. Before long, the shoe factory has doubled its staff and the ice cream parlour has diversified into an all-purpose centre for female indulgence, selling cosmetics and fashionable clothes in addition to the treats served at the glass-topped tables. Air conditioners are installed, and large refrigerators. Machinery proliferates in the factory. At this point, Jean decides they also need a swimming pool, one with diving boards and change cabins, surrounded by irrigated lawns. At ‘a bob a bathe’, it can’t fail to be a going concern.⁷

In A Town Like Alice, commodity culture sprouts with shining innocence, as a form of community benefit. The novel is, unwittingly, also a chronicle of the advancing ecological footprint, impelled by the needs and desires of white women. Such a view is of course one-sided, and somewhat sentimentalised. As a portrayal of settler culture, it is oblivious in relation to the bigger picture, which soon begins to show itself in a town like Alice.

It doesn’t take long to realise that the place harbours two economies, their separation marked by the parallel lines of the Todd Mall and the Todd River. The river is dry most of the year, and its sandy bed is where dozens of Aboriginal people sleep and hang out. The cafés are the whitefella hangouts – blackfellas don’t go in them. Sitting in one of those cafés, with my book in front of me, spooning the froth off a cappuccino between paragraphs, I looked out through the tinted window onto the mall as a group of blackfellas cruised past with their dogs, and was overwhelmed by some feeling I couldn’t identify. Guilt would be an obvious label for it, but it was something more physical, a sense of being bodily out of place, or more than that, I felt almost as if I wasn’t there at all, was not a presence in this place, just some random projection, teleported in a glass capsule with the material attachments of the book and the spoon.

Towards evening, I walked out across the riverbed, taking off my shoes so I could feel the sand under my feet. I wasn’t sure I should be walking there. I was not at all sure I had the right. This was a place of dreaming, and if you are going to tread on dreams, shouldn’t you at least have a Wenceslas to lead the way, an elder who knows about crossing over between one human world and another? But the culture I belong to doesn’t have elders like that any more. I had to watch where I planted my feet, because there were things in the sand. Cigarette packets, cans, broken bottles, food cartons, the odd shoe: scatterings from the supply lines tapped into the town economy. Leakage from an open wound, where another kind of lifeline has been torn away.

An Aboriginal woman was sitting on the grass watching me as I approached the opposite bank. She beckoned me over, evidently quite relaxed about my being there. She wanted to sell me a painting, for $15. It’s the going rate for small freshly painted canvases sold on the streets around the town. ‘This. River. Women’s Dreaming. This here. The women.’ She points to a row of shapes like half-curled caterpillars arranged beside the wavy line of the river. Those contained outlines of the women’s presence, one of the most familiar symbols in Aboriginal art, say something about how human beings keep to scale in indigenous tradition.

For Australians outside this tradition, ours is a country of confused outlines. Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) begins with a night scene from early colonial life near Sydney. A man stands in the doorway of his hut, a structure in which there is ‘hardly a door, barely a wall,’ and looks out into the textured darkness. He fears the encroachment of its silent natives, with their gift for camouflaging themselves in almost any conditions of light and darkness.⁸

William Thornhill is a freed convict who later plans to move his family to a patch of land on the banks of the Hawkesbury, where he intends to make a living. At the end of the novel and after a passage of many years, this same man is on the verandah of his fine house at sunset, surveying the land through a telescope. He owns three hundred acres now, and has a piece of paper to prove it. His boundaries are firmly marked, and fenced. The new house is sturdily built on a European model, with lockable doors. There are high walls round his garden and a fine pair of gates guarded by imported stone lions. Still, though, the land around him refuses to settle down into any kind of perspective. Through the telescope, its scale is delusory, and it wobbles like a mirage in the angled light. Thornhill knows there is something wrong between him and the land. It belongs to him but he doesn’t belong to it.

That the land itself is the senior partner in any transaction for ownership is a principle that those in the settler economy can’t afford to understand, but it has ways of coming home to them. With The Secret River, we’re back in the primal scene of land ownership, a scene in which the psychical ingredients of Pahom’s experience are replicated. The hemispheres of the globe don’t keep these experiences apart. It’s as if they are always there, lying low in the landscape, waiting to claim some human unwary enough to go out there looking for property.

It all starts quite innocently – apparently – stirred by the breath of free enterprise, driven by the problem-solving imperatives that accompany any bid to make a sustainable living from scratch. In this case, the scratching is a simple form of tillage, so that corn can be planted, and signs of tillage are the first signs of a land claim on whitefella terms. In the absence of fences or other boundary markers, one of the initial problems is the difficulty of telling whether a particular tract of riverside land is free to be ‘taken up’.

Once he’s determined that there is vacant possession on his chosen patch, Thornhill starts the transactions for occupancy: money is obtained on a loan, a deed of purchase for a hundred acres is signed, a bigger loan is negotiated to cover the purchase of a trading boat. All this will have to be repaid, through labour and industry. The line of acquisition is being fed out as the vision expands, but the point of closure must always be kept in view. Thornhill has a limited time frame for closing his deal, so the clock is ticking and he must work at full stretch to return the sum within the period of agreement.

Tolstoy might have seen him as having already contracted with the devil, but for the first twenty four hours he feels like Adam before the Fall, revisited by the innocence of the world itself. This place is his own, he realises, ‘by virtue of his foot standing on it’. In his moment of epiphany, he echoes Pahom’s luminous sense of connection to all that he sees: the grass, the blackbird, the sunlight, even the mosquitoes. Later, as he lies down to sleep, the sense of elation expresses itself as a new calm. ‘To be stretched out on his own earth, feeling his body lie along ground that was his – he felt he had been hurrying all his life, and had at last come to a place where he could stop.’ Here, ‘stop’ means a number of things other than the physical process of coming to rest. It means a stop to cravings and hankerings, to those dissatisfactions and deprivations that give rise to the unrelenting sweated labour of mind and body.

Stopping in such a way – arresting the gathering momentum that ultimately drives Pahom to his death – is a transient experience for Thornhill, a moment of equilibrium that is not sustainable. On this thought, I want to stop also, between the two stories, for long enough to catch another thought that needs to be approached from a particular direction: a thought about ‘sustainability’, which is a word so overused in the current climate change debate that it is threatening to blank out on us. It’s a policy word, relating to strategies, resources and technologies, and it carries with it a corporate approach to conscience and behaviour management.

‘The quest for sustainability has to get outside the dynamic of problem solving if it is to avoid defeating itself in a mess of hustling intentions’

Something’s missing here. The quest for sustainability has to get outside the dynamic of problem solving if it is to avoid defeating itself in a mess of hustling intentions. You don’t have to believe in the devil as a cloven-hoofed domestic intruder to get at the depth-charge that is planted in the short story about how much land a man needs. The mischief at work in the scenes of Pahom’s downfall is a busy principle that also has a secular face. From a social and economic point of view, it is not mischief at all, but good behaviour. As Thoreau says, after dropping the burdens of middle-class life to make his retreat to a fifteen-by-ten-foot hut beside Walden pond, ‘Whatever possessed me that I behaved so well?’9 For the last couple of decades, most of us have been behaving too well as ‘the economy’ has demanded more and more of us, pushing the imperatives of growth, profit and escalating work rates to a new peak of intensity and characterising anyone who didn’t get on board as ‘resistant to change’. It takes a very special order of consensual stupidity to allow slogans like that to rule the channels of public communication, and we surely have to recover from consensual stupidity before we can really start recovering from ecological delinquency.

The starkly simple question underlying the buzzing business of sustainability is, can we stop? Not, can we make this or that last in our systems of energy and commodity supply, but can we stop, we the human species, with our needs and wishes and anxieties and problems? Such a proposition is beyond the reach of policy-making and serves, perhaps, as a reminder of why we need literature. Or at least, stories.

Kate Grenville (photograph by L. Graham)

To return to The Secret River. Grenville’s narrative plants the dynamic of acquisition in a social world, where the motivation of the individual tangles with the determinations of others, which is how Thornhill is dislodged from his brief experience of equilibrium. There is no clear outline to Thornhill’s share of responsibility for the horrific debacle to which his enterprise leads. On one side of him are fellow settlers with whom he can establish the beginnings of a trading network. Good relations with them are vital to the survival of his economy, but there are some rocky temperaments amongst them. On the other side are the indigenous inhabitants. Although indigenous ownership of the land is factored out of consideration by the new settlers, the Aboriginal presence raises boundary questions of several kinds. First, there is the anxiety of who has been digging over the soil in the midst of Thornhill’s chosen patch, and here the fatal trail of problem solving begins. Both he and his wife Sal attempt some dialogue across the racial divide, she more effectively than he, as a group of Aboriginal women establish a relaxed activity zone near the hut, and begin to offer their bowls and digging sticks in exchange for portions of sugar. It is the white men, though, who decide the terms of engagement. Stories are exchanged about the bloodthirsty cannibalism of the blacks, and the acts of atrocity they are liable to commit at any opportunity.

Where there’s room for interpretation, there’s scope for paranoia, and paranoia has some strangely essential relationship with the acquisitive mindset. ‘Loss and gain are brothers twain,’ as Pahom’s wife says at the beginning of the fatal adventure. Gain is inevitably accompanied by a nagging sense that the world is owed a loss – and may be plotting to take it, through the agency of who or whatever is conveniently available. Grenville is especially good at stalking the operations of paranoia in the early colonial environment, where land acquisition is accompanied by violent imaginings that are stirred up in every conversation about ‘the blacks’. In the absence of physical boundaries, anxieties about encroachment or invasion are ever-present; interpreting the movements of the blacks becomes an increasingly fraught process. A crisis point is reached as the Aboriginals gather for a corroboree and start to pound the earth with their dancing. This happens in the section of the novel that Grenville entitles ‘Drawing the Line.’

A fence must be built around the hut – more than a fence, a barricade – but there is no keeping out the paranoia, surely the most dangerous of all human demons, and lines of personal determination converge on the inevitable catastrophe. There is a massacre, as brutal as anything in the annals of human brutality. Afterwards, a kind of calm sets in, a synthetic version of the equilibrium Thornhill knew so briefly. His future extends through phases of growing prosperity, but there are scars in the lifeline now, stretching out into future lives in the growing economy of the colony. In the last scene of the novel, before he takes up his telescope to survey the scene, Thornhill watches an old blackfella smoothing the dirt with the palm of his hand and, in the second epiphany of fallen nature, realises that his own connection to the earth has been lost.

White Australia has at last apologised for the abuses in its history, but where do we look for a model of sustainable coexistence between indigenous economies and those of industrialised commerce? The very measures taken by fuel-guzzling nations to reduce their carbon footprint have been directly instrumental in reducing the food supply and escalating the price of essential grains in parts of the globe where food is all people can afford. Sustainability is one of the hallmarks of many indigenous economies, but it cannot withstand the dynamics of economic growth and industrial development. In his recent book Blessed Unrest (2007), Paul Hawken makes an inventory of local indigenous economies jeopardised by specific industrial enterprises, with examples from Borneo, Nigeria, Colombia, Guyana, Honduras, Chad, Botswana, Chile, Morocco, Brazil, Norway and Australia.¹⁰ The secondary damage knows no bounds, as climate change spreads the impact of global enterprise throughout the natural world.

‘White Australia has at last apologised for the abuses in its history, but where do we look for a model of sustainable coexistence between indigenous economies and those of industrialised commerce?’

While the boundary line is one of the founding gestures of a culture of acquisition, this culture in its most advanced forms has become fiercely intolerant of boundaries, reconceived as ‘trade barriers’ for protectionist enclaves. The acquisitive life eventually leads beyond all bounds. There is no stopping it. Notions of global free trade have taken over the airwaves with a heady aura of unbounded possibility, yet the globe itself is a circle, that most ancient and potent of boundary lines. Plant a foot in it, and you are grounded in the materiality of a physical world that is incommensurable with the figural space of economics.

When William Rees introduced the concept of the ecological footprint in a book co-authored with his research student Mathis Wackernagel in 1996, he must have been aware that he was attempting nothing less than to bring two orders of reality into a common analytical framework.¹¹ Rees, a professor of environment and resource planning at the University of British Columbia, had been modelling the ecological footprint in his lectures, to illustrate the principle of ‘carrying capacity’: the number of individual humans a specified area of land can support. Extrapolate this principle to a whole-earth scenario, and you have a stark picture of the ultimate budget.

A cognitive switch is being thrown here, though the logic is disarmingly simple. If you calculate the average human footprint, in terms of how much bioproductive land is required to support individual consumption patterns, then multiply this by the number of people in a particular city or country, you can see how far their earthly support base extends outside their actual dwelling zone. The Netherlands (one of Rees’s textbook examples) boasts an agricultural surplus, in spite of the density of its population, but this is sustained through the importation of fodder for livestock. The fodder is grown over an area several times larger than the bio-productive land base within the country, which is used to turn the low value animal food-stock into high value human consumables such as cheeses and processed meats. As Rees puts it, ‘the Dutch don’t live in Holland’.¹² Suddenly, an economist’s picture of successful overdrive flips to a deficit model.

On the same principle, the urban powerhouses of the world’s major industrial economies are all deeply in ecological deficit. Cities are human feedlots, whose maintenance requirements stretch over vast tracts of land that most of their inhabitants will never even see. In an urban society, cultures of consumption are governed by monetary exchange. Money is what the urban consumer is immediately, and sometimes exclusively, conscious of having consumed, and ‘budgets’ mean financial outlays within funding limits. Budgets can always be expanded, however, in an indefinitely expanding economy. The sub-prime crisis in the United States was created by the consensual delusion that when money runs out, debts can be converted into assets and sold off on the stock market, where they are reported as profit.

There are no footprints in economic hyperspace, only incessant trans-global movement that defies the gravitational pull of the earth’s body. It is our money that’s running away with us, spinning out a dizzying array of manufactured wants that undergo rapid cultural conversion into needs and essentials. At the level of the individual, there is the debt burden, beginning as an expansionary adventure, in which the progressive stages are marked by the leather lounge suite, the plasma television, the car and the mortgage. As the repayment schedule forces an ever-accelerating rate of work, anxiety begins to chase euphoria, and the point of closure once dreamed of becomes a point of foreclosure. At the corporate level, the company builds its value through a program of strategic borrowing strategies, which enable a succession of takeover bids and an escalating schedule of profit reports, until the schedule of returns begins to fail, the superstructure of traded debts implodes, shares tumble and wholesale debacle becomes inevitable. The same essential pattern is now showing up at the level of the species: acquisitive habits drive us to create an ever-expanding footprint on the earth, but the earth has its own reckonings and we have too blithely assumed we could negotiate them. Suddenly we are aware of a tipping point, and our almost certain incapacity to head it off by reining in the boundary line. How much consumption will fit into one planet? Finitude must return to economics.

‘Downsizing’ is a response to this imperative, but compared to the up-scaling imperatives built into our major national economies, downsizing will remain a weak and uncertain dynamic unless it is infused with a new kind of cultural energy. Rees is concerned about how such energy might be sourced, and suggests that the heart of the problem ‘is the fact that people today rarely think of themselves as biological beings’. Perhaps if we had physically to perform the run around the boundaries of our ecological footprint we might be reminded, but the kind of running we have to do to keep up the supply lines for our expenditure puts a different kind of strain on us. Mental stress has physical repercussions that, typically, we don’t see coming.

The psychological euphoria of acquisition is countered by states of bodily dysphoria. Loss and gain are brothers twain. But while the euphoria takes over certain localised areas of the brain, anxiety pervades the whole being, generating symptoms that are just as sure a recipe for heart attack as a mad dash across the landscape in a state of acute dehydration. Acquisition is a drug, and there are social and personal predispositions that cause us to crave it, but there’s a paradox: as physical beings, we don’t like it.

Cultural evolution in the developed world hasn’t made us too smart about negotiating the terms for our physical existence. How much have we gained by swapping hunger for eating disorders, heavy labour for heavy liability, overworked muscles for hypertension, inadequate housing for overwhelming mortgage stress? Maybe the balance sheet is in our favour at the negative end of the spectrum – let’s not underestimate the privilege of being in an economy that makes death from starvation or exposure a rare phenomenon – but what about the positive end? The continuing appeal of Thoreau’s Walden has much to do with its infectious euphoria, as Thoreau invokes the pleasures of watching the changing light, of a dinner made from fresh caught fish or hand-reared vegetables, of warm fire after a cold walk, of letting time pass in meditative calm. After rereading this book, it occurs to me that the escalating concern about climate change amongst the general public may have something to do with a deep-seated component of human nature that actually craves the dismantling of much of the economic superstructure of our lives, and that is resistant to change in a way never envisaged by the phrase-mongers of the commercial world. What we like and don’t like aren’t always coherently realised in our own minds, especially when those minds are not tuned in to our bodies.

In the late 1980s, a young college student from Emory University in Atlanta was reading a heady cocktail of stories: pieces by Tolstoy, Melville, Gogol, Jack London, Pasternak, laced with shots of Thoreau. Friends became alarmed as they noticed spartan changes in his lifestyle. The furnishings of his room were stripped back to a thin mattress and a couple of milk crates. After going through his graduation ceremony in May 1990, Christopher Johnson McCandless wrote a cheque to Oxfam for some $24,000 (what remained of the sum bequested to him for his education) and went on the road.

What McCandless wanted was, in economic terms, next to nothing – a footprint just large enough to keep body and soul together, somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness. He arrived at his destination at the end of April 1992, after hitching a ride out of Fairbanks, and found shelter near the foothills in a derelict bus, stationed there by the Yutan Construction Company as temporary shelter for workers employed to upgrade the trail. McCandless cleaned up the interior, made himself a bed and a writing table, and survived there for 112 days on a diet of berries and small wildlife, keeping a diary in which he recorded the moods, challenges and inspirations of being alive in the wild. The last entry was a desperate plea for help, as he succumbed to the terminal stages of starvation.

Emile Hirsch as Christopher Johnson McCandless in Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn (Paramount Pictures, 2007)

The discovery of his body two and half weeks later made a small item in the newspaper, with just enough detail to arrest the attention of John Krakauer, an adventurer himself, and a journalist. Krakauer made further investigations into the story for Outside magazine, which published his 9000-word article on McCandless in its January 1993 issue. The response was unprecedented, and fiercely divided. One way or the other, this was a narrative that got a grip on people, and there didn’t seem to be much middle ground in the spectrum of reactions. At one end of it were readers – many of them Alaskans – who castigated the young adventurer for his narcissistic delusions about the wilderness experience; at the other were those who found the story inspirational. Krakauer himself admits to something of a fixation on the McCandless case, and developed his article into a book, Into the Wild, which was published in 1996, and subsequently made into a film by Sean Penn.¹³

The film tells the story with mature ambivalence, as a romance of the spirit and a physiological tragedy. In the opening sequence, McCandless gets out of the car in which he’s hitched a ride to the start of the Stampede Trail, which he plans to follow into the remote landscapes across the Teklanika River. He accepts the driver’s gift of a pair of rubber boots, and the camera pans back to show him striding out across the pristine surface of the snow, leaving a trail of footprints.¹⁴

McCandless’s tragedy was that he couldn’t make a large enough print. Day by day, in agonising degrees, his body shed weight and muscle as he failed to supply it with a subsistence level of nourishment. He fought hard for survival, using all his skills and his wits, fighting at the same time to sustain the vital joy of being alive. Sustainability eluded him. He’d found a place to stop, but he couldn’t stop the process of natural attrition that got him in the flesh.

All the same, he left his story, and that just seems to keep on spreading. A sign, surely, that it touches a raw nerve. Conscience stirs. Shouldn’t we all be doing something like this with our lives? If we don’t, can we really say we’ve been alive, woken up to the world, measured our being against the vitality of the planet? On the other hand, should McCandless have had more concern for his family and friends, been more realistic about social dependency, been more competent and hard-headed about the business of survival, in which poetic awareness can become a hazardous distraction?

Should and shouldn’t go into a tailspin and conscience starts to eat its own entrails. Whatever possessed me that I behaved so well? The argument in the head is as incessant as that in the public sphere, and with all that noise going on, how are we to concentrate on the business of getting the footprint right? That, after all, was what Tolstoy and Thoreau, and their disciple McCandless, were actually trying to do. None of them offers us a model we can copy. Tolstoy became a censorious recluse. Thoreau cheated by conducting his subsistence experiment on what was ecologically a five-star billet, with rich soil, fresh water, abundant timber and enough fish and small game to provide good dinner menus all year round. McCandless starved himself to death socially as well as biologically, and if the second of these outcomes was a tragic error, the first resulted from an entirely deliberate refusal of co-dependency.

Even so, their stories call, and it’s the calling that counts. Models can lead to imposition, and humankind has a poor track record when it comes to imposing mandatory forms of equity and economic limitation. How could we even contemplate it, after what happened in Russia and China under communism? Not to mention Czechoslovakia, where the statue of St Wenceslas in Prague Square has looked down on too many scenes of imposition, and too many horrors arising from attempts to protest them.

What is needed, according to Václav Havel, in his extraordinary opening address to the international delegates at Forum 2000 in Prague, ‘is for something to change in the sphere of the spirit.’ The only way ‘to stop that blind perpetual motion dragging us into hell’ is ‘an existential revolution.’¹⁵ Havel is one of the few voices in the current debate to insist on the metaphysical dimensions of ecological thinking. He speaks from a tradition of Czech philosophy that calls for a return to the natural world as a world of primary experience, through which humanity can be reconnected with ‘a vital sense of good and evil’.¹⁶ In order to fend off planetary devastation, some authority other than that of the political or social order must be brought into play. ‘We must revise not our procedures but our view of reality. We must subject ourselves to an authority now ignored – of real persons in their life world.’¹⁷ There is no political machinery or green technology to assist in promoting this appeal.

‘Havel is one of the few voices in the current debate to insist on the metaphysical dimensions of ecological thinking’

The statue of St Wenceslas is mounted on a charging horse, high above the square in the centre of Prague. This is not the barefoot, grounded elder celebrated in the English carol. From his vantage point, he’s seen the capital development that made the Square into a headquarters for banks, hotels and stores; the bombardment that destroyed many of these during World War II; the communist putsch of 1948; the festivities of the Prague Spring in 1968 as the constraints of communist censorship were loosened; the Soviet tanks rolling in, to reinstate the controls with a vengeance. And one day, in the depths of the following winter, practically at the feet of the sculptured figure, twenty-one-year-old student Jan Palach set himself alight in a suicidal protest against the occupation. Here was a youth for whom the saint’s magical protection didn’t work. Wenceslas has lost his innocence, and the only elder whose voice can be heard is that hoary old demon conscience, which, as Havel proclaimed to the US Congress, is in charge of our relations with the global ‘order of Being’.¹⁸

William Rees thinks conscience needs some help, and calls for a new kind of myth-making, the creation of unifying stories to foster those aspects of human nature that are biologically and ecologically tuned in. It would be, he says, ‘a purposeful act of social engineering’.¹⁹ Another kind of modelling, in other words. Stories don’t work like that, though. Good stories – and none more so than those written in the barefoot prose of Tolstoy – are more like ecologies than technologies. They work through living networks of interdependency, and pulse with energies too nervous to resolve themselves into any parcel of messages. Instead, they generate images and associations that cross-flash with uncanny complicity between the hemispheres of the globe, from one era to another as if, through them, we were trying to tell ourselves something.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Helena Grehan, Sylvia Lawson and Stephanie Dowrick for their generous engagement with earlier drafts of this essay.

Endnotes

1 http://www.footprintnetwork.org/calculator

2 Leo Tolstoy, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ in The Raid and Other Stories, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp 213–14.

3 Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 2.

4 John Gascoigne, Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds, Hambledon Continuum, 2007, p. xiv.

5 Aeneas Gunn, We of the Never Never, Random House, 2000, pp 38, 107.

6 http://www.mataranka.nt.gov.au/council/

7 Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice, Gecko Books, 2006, p. 411.

8 Kate Grenville, The Secret River, Text, 2005, p. 3.

9 Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Penguin, 1986, p. 53.

10 Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, Viking, 2007.

11 William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (1996)

12 W.E Rees, 2004, ‘Is Humanity Fatally Successful?’ Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis, pp 30–31: 67–100 (2002–03), 90.

13 John Krakauer, Into the Wild, Random House, 2007.

14 Into The Wild, dir. Sean Penn, Paramount Pictures, 2007.

15 Václav Havel, Statement delivered at Forum 2000, Prague Castle, 4 September 1997, 3, 5. Online at http://www.cts.cuni.cz/conf98/vhavel.htm

16 Walter H.Capp, ‘Interpreting Vaclav Havel’, Cross Currents, Fall 1997, Vol.47 Issue 3, 6. On line at http://www.crosscurrents.org/capps.htm

17 Václav Havel, ‘The Politics of Hope’ in Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. Paul Wilson, Vintage Books, 1990, p. 189.

18 Václav Havel, Address to A Joint Session of the U.S.Congress, Washington DC, 21 February 1990. Full text available online at http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=322_aj_projevy.html&typ=HTML

19 Havel, ‘The Politics of Hope’, pp 96.

DIAMETRIC OPPOSITES

Dear Editor,

I concur with Daniel Thomas’s high opinion of the collection of Eva and Marc Besen and of their TarraWarra Museum, and share his admiration of the essays by Christopher Heathcote and Sarah Thomas in his review of Encounters with Australian Modern Art (February 2009).

I have never been good at violence. Not even at mild arguments. So when the brick came smashing through our bedroom window in the middle of the night,I leapt from our bed and screamed. Our children came running in, more worried and frightened by the noise I had made than by the brick or by the glass scattered on our floor. This is all history now. Well, not quite. As with all history, even when the telling is done, there are repercussions we are still dealing with, still pondering. My scream was instant but also premeditated. It was directed at whoever was throwing the brick, and we all knew pretty well who was doing that, because it was the second time it had happened in a week. I wanted the brick thrower to be chilled by my scream; to have the night marked not by the satisfying sound of breaking glass but by the unexpected sound of a man’s prolonged scream.

We had been living with violence and threats of violence from our neighbours for nearly five years. During this time, we had been talking to friends and family, hoping for useful advice or even some insights into our situation. Sometimes we were asking for protection. So when I noticed that the enigmatic and publicity-savvy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek had just published a series of essays reflecting on the violence that, he says, is not only all around us but that is the basis of our late capitalist ‘post-political’ life, I was drawn to read his book. It might give me the understanding I needed to find a way through the issues thrown up by our neighbours’ violence. As far as I can draw a thread through his argument, I understand that Žižek shares with an earlier philosopher of modernity, Michel Foucault, the view that peace is war by other means – that there is a subterranean river of violence feeding our thirst for its unlimited promises. Those acts of violence, rare and shocking, which we experience as individuals, he calls subjective violence. Objective violence – the violence that language itself and the state system practise so smoothly on us, he says, is so prevalent it is almost invisible. This idea of objective violence calls to my mind Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology: the less we are aware of it, the more surely we are subject to it.

‘When the brick came smashing through our bedroom window in the middle of the night,I leapt from our bed and screamed’

I am one of those Žižek labels an ‘anaemic liberal’. I have no religious belief worth talking about, my life is relatively comfortable, and I am safe. Violence would be an aberration in my life. I think that Žižek means to point to people such as myself as examples of those who take advantage of the state’s objective violence in order to avoid the very visible catastrophes of subjective violence.

After reading some of his essays, I looked for examples of the kinds of violence he identified. Two incidents stood out. The first was a report in the newspaper of a woman attacked by eight policemen who booted in her front door, broke her jaw, shattered her nose and beat her unconscious. For twelve years she had been seeking compensation from the Victorian government for her assault and false imprisonment following a dispute over an unroadworthy car. Despite four of the officers and the state being ordered to pay damages in 2001, the state government has relied on a Police Regulation Act and a 1906 precedent to appeal successfully against the order, claiming it has no responsibility for the actions of the police. The woman is now seeking compensation through the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

Are these legal acts by the state the objective violence that Žižek speaks of? It does seem to be the more or less invisible violence-upon-violence a state can administer to its citizens as part of a due process. The process has no heart, though at every step of the way there is a human being processing pieces of paper, writing reports, following a set of well-ordered practices.

The second incident happened as I arrived at a local library one afternoon, seeking more books by Žižek and a new detective novel by Henning Mankell. At the centre of the lawn outside the entrance, opposite a school, there was a small placard stuck in a patch of earth covered by bark chips. I went over to read the placard. It explained that until five days ago there was a lemon-scented gum at this spot, planted by students who wished to commemorate a fellow student who recently died. The writer supposed the tree was uprooted by other young people after a big night out; more trees nearby had been attacked that night. The violence had caused intense pain to the family and friends of the young man. They could replace the tree but could not repeat that first symbolic planting. This is the subjective violence we can find so disturbing, and in the phrase of my nineteen-year-old daughter, ‘totally random’.

From my childhood, I can recall two incidents of violence. The first happened one afternoon on my way home from school. I was crossing a vacant stretch of land before the housing estate where we lived, on the edge of the city. We were close enough to the countryside to be worried about fires in summer, but still connected to the city’s urban sprawl. A group of noisy schoolchildren was standing round two older boys who were fighting. They were big boys, final-year students or recent graduates, out of work. One of them was on the ground. I saw that his eye had become dislodged from its socket. It was lying on his cheek. I ran home, too shocked to mention it to anyone. I kept it inside me, where it is now.

The second incident was a fight I almost had with another boy at school. He had fought with most of the other boys in the class. Generally I avoided him, but that day we clashed over something – I can’t remember what. We agreed to settle our differences with our fists after school, in a nearby public garden. I was in a panic all afternoon, shocked that I had agreed to fight him. When we met he was ready for me. I stood in front of him, trembling, and shouted at him. I kept shouting until he went away.

I was like the strange man Heinrich von Kleist described: a man who clung to the back of a coach in the Alps in the early nineteenth century when Heinrich was a young passenger. The coachman whipped the stranger until he fell from the coach, then the coach stopped and the passengers drew their swords. They asked him what he wanted. The man stood and roared and kept raging until they left him there, his screams echoing through the valleys, bouncing off the mountains like the screams of twenty men. For Kleist, this became his emblematic image of the artist or the philosopher trying hopelessly to make sense of the world.

I avoid violence. That boy at school who wanted to fight me would have called me a coward. Of course it is not cowardice, for it takes fierce resolve to refuse to engage with an attacker. But there is also a part of me that knows there is no intrinsic virtue in this refusal. What is the pathetic accomplishment of one who lives a few more years than another by keeping safe, or of one who dies in old age with fewer bruises and fractures than another? This is the kind of argument that Žižek would advance. He likes to confound intuition. Žižek states, in one surprising passage, that most people are spontaneously moral. He argues that it is atheists who stand most forthrightly by notions of tolerance, restraint, freedom and responsibility in contemporary society. The true allies of fundamentalists and religious extremists are those atheists who work to protect every person’s right to their beliefs and values.

‘That boy at school who wanted to fight me would have called me a coward. Of course it is not cowardice, for it takes fierce resolve to refuse to engage with an attacker’

I was raised as a Catholic, educated by nuns and priests, and entered a seminary as soon as I completed school. I spent two years there, filled with belief and faith, praying, meditating and studying. Since then I have become an atheist, though this was not a matter of conscious or deliberate choice. Faith is like that. It can take itself away. But what has remained is a way of living based on a Christian notion of love and tolerance that still makes sense, though it is much less sure of itself. Tolerance is easier to embrace if one is an atheist. Pacifist values, too. Atheists are not constrained by religious authority, promises or threats. I am not a pacifist. I believe that there are limits to tolerance, sometimes violent limits. The difficulty lies in knowing without the guidance of a book or a priest when to resist peacefully and when to meet violence with violence; where the usefulness of imagining oneself in another’s shoes might end.

I suppose our neighbours may have felt they were defending something important when they attacked us, but I can also conceive that they were heady with the reckless power that administering threats and violence could deliver into their hands. Surely, if we look at what we do as a species, it is clear that people are not spontaneously moral. Throughout these episodes with our neighbours, I found myself having to resist the spontaneous urge to resort to violent responses that came physically, emotionally and imaginatively to me.

Our neighbours hated us, and I became deeply afraid of them. I kept asking myself, how did this happen? They had thrown bricks through our windows twice, intimidated us with a savage dog, sawn the end off our front fence, threatened to burn our house down if we went on holidays, fabricated accusations of an assault on one of their daughters, and told us to watch out for our children. I was to have my face smashed in at a time that suited them, they told me. When I told people about some of these attacks and threats, they asked me what I had done to provoke my neighbours; these people could not simply be wild beasts or mythical barbarians risen to wreak havoc for fun. I joked that we lived next door to trolls escaped from some truly grim fairy tale.

Whenever there is conflict, each party has a long preparatory story of slights, insensitivities, insults, threats, incursions and other provocative behaviour that, in the end, can no longer be endured without the situation becoming violent. I suppose this is how wars begin. Or am I wrong? Do some people desire a violent edge in their lives, regardless of the consequences? The quandary is in the boundaries between us. Behind the meaning of those boundaries, there might be separate languages, cultures, values and ways of dealing with trouble. What I don’t want to do is to give you a long account of their unreasonable behaviour or to detail the tolerance we displayed until we could no longer endure the trouble and provocation. It wasn’t like that at all, I want to be able to say, though it felt like it. In truth, it must have been a series of sad misunderstandings and badly judged acts by all of us to bring us to this: me screaming in the bedroom in the middle of the night, the window smashed, the police saying they were tired of coming to both our houses.

In my mind, it all began when the young daughter of the family (we’ll call her Halia) came to visit us shortly after we moved into the street. We had moved to the street about the same time as them, so we were happy to make neighbourly contact. Halia, then at primary school, liked to play with our children. She would visit most afternoons, so often in fact that our daughter began to complain. Things drifted along.

One day, while Halia was playing outside in the street with a shopping trolley, she accidentally ran it into our car and put a small dent in the side. Our daughter, Sarah, had been watching this from the front window and told us, so we went to talk to our neighbours in the hope that Halia would be more careful. I am not sure what happened after this, but I do remember the older daughter (let’s call her Melina) roaring at us and calling us fucking liars. The father, after matching the trolley to the dent, pulled money from his pocket and asked us how much we wanted, while the older daughter shouted at him that if her sister said she didn’t do it, she didn’t do it, and that these people (pointing at us) were fucking liars and troublemakers. Sarah became upset at this and felt guilty, thinking that she had caused this trouble by witnessing Halia denting our car.

The next morning we found our car’s front-passenger window smashed in and the glovebox raided. We became afraid to park our car directly outside our house. Fortunately, we have a small driveway, so we kept our car there every night after the shopping trolley incident.

This was the beginning of the intimidation. It might have been a coincidence – the car break-in following the anger of this family at our accusing their daughter of denting our car – but it didn’t feel like a coincidence. We began to watch them warily, and avoid them.

People walk along our street to the railway station at one end or to the small recreational parkland at the other. One old woman, Katya, used to push her shopping trolley past our place on her way to the shops. Her husband would walk the streets with their little dog in a carry-bag. Katya had cared for her husband for more than ten years, past the time when he knew who she was. We liked her, and she loved to have our children to her home for afternoon tea. She would bring out her best china cups and serve sliced gherkins on salty biscuits. She was fond of my partner, Jane. It was as though these two women shared some knowledge of life, something I could witness but not be part of. They treated each other with care, politeness and attentiveness. I imagined that, sitting there, each of them looked into a mirror of the self fifty years ago or fifty years hence.

Katya’s son had died at thirteen. She and her husband had been put to work in Germany during World War II, and had later made a life for themselves in Australia. Katya still had her husband’s books, history books about the war and about communist Russia. Katya read romances, one after another; her house was full of them. In one room was the jigsaw puzzle she was always doing.

As we visited her more, she began to tell us about her fears. She said that our neighbours were terrorising her. The father had borrowed money and not paid it back. He had taken her husband’s good tools from the house and replaced them with rotten ones. She said her husband’s shirts and shoes (he had a mania for buying shirts and shoes) had disappeared from her cupboards, and that the oldest daughter had chased a possum from Katya’s ceiling and taken it to her garage where she beat it to death. She said they were making phone calls to alarm her, and that someone in a balaclava had frightened her at the front door. She was sure it was Melina, the oldest daughter. She asked us to help her change the locks on her house, because these people were coming and going as they pleased.

At first we thought these were the fears of a timid woman whose mind might not be as sharp as it once was. We did nothing. She kept begging us, worried that the intruder in the balaclava would return and break in. She told us that they expected her to leave them her house in her will, and she was too afraid to tell them they would get nothing. She had already given them sums of money which they had not repaid (they claimed to have done maintenance and repair work for her, so they were even). In the end we did help her to change her locks. This made our neighbours even madder at us. Halia shouted at us that all we wanted was the old woman’s house.

About this time I used to see Melina, then nineteen or so, limping down the street, her leg seemingly getting worse week by week. Once I saw her sitting in the gutter by the railway station. Halia had stopped going to school and did not seem to work. There was a lot of shouting and banging in the house, with loud music during the day, and loud cars coming and going on weekends.

Katya began to say she did not want to live any longer. Then, suddenly, she was in hospital dying. Her body shrank down into the hospital bed. When I visited her, they had removed her teeth, making her look even smaller, almost unrecognisable. She is buried now. Her house went to a good friend who had loved her.

Our neighbours acquired a dog, a part pit bull. They named it ‘Brick’, though it sounded to me like ‘Prick’. It spent its days banging its body against the fence between our houses until one day it burst into our yard. By then we were frightened of it, harmless and loving though its heart may have been. I had been told that pit bulls were known for locking their jaws on another creature so tightly that nothing short of death would loosen their grip. I had no idea if this was true, but I didn’t want that dog near our family. When it was in our yard, we could only see its jaws and its muscular chest as it bounded around. They came and collected it. Then Brick came crashing over again, and again, so we called the council ranger who told them to erect a trellis or to keep their dog from the fence. They did put up a trellis, but it was incomplete and the dog managed to clear the fence again.

Halia, by now an overweight teenager in a dark, shapeless tracksuit, her hair long and dank, came to our door and shouted at us, demanding to be told why we had her dog in our backyard. We called the police and said we wouldn’t release the dog until the police were present. (You may be shaking your head by now.) I wanted to stop the dog from terrorising us. I wanted these people to see how much the dog scared us, how important it was to keep the dog in their own yard. But I could not talk to them. Whenever they shouted at us, my heart would race and my thoughts would freeze. The boyfriend of the middle daughter (we’ll call her Hera) pointed at me and said, ‘Say something! You just stare at us! Say something you fucking moron!’

The police took a long time to arrive. I guess there were other emergencies and more serious crimes happening around the suburb. Our neighbours’ friends arrived in noisy cars. Halia shook our front fence and banged on the letterbox, denting it. Finally, I opened the side gate and the dog bounded out past me into the street. They had no idea how to call it back. They had to chase it round the neighbour-hood before they could get it back into their yard. For the next two years they accused us, whenever they could, of chasing their dog into the street where it might have been run over. When the police did come that day, they were still shouting at us, Halia calling Jane a racist slut and an Aussie bitch. The police asked her why she was calling Jane racist, and she said, ‘Because she’s friendly to all the Aussie people in the street.’

Afterwards they came to our front door, Halia, Hera and her boyfriend. ‘We know where you live,’ they said. ‘Don’t you realise you have children? If we lose our dog you’ll pay for it, you’ll see.’

We decided to look for another place to live. I have seen American men on television defend their ownership of guns by saying that they are the fathers of children, and a father must protect his children. A voice in my head kept asking me what I was doingto protect my children. But I could laugh at my neighbours too, couldn’t I? Surely they didn’t mean what they were saying. Surely they wouldn’t carry out such threats. Just because they shouted threats, that didn’t mean that they were serious? In fact, isn’t shouting just letting off steam, and shouldn’t their words be disregarded?

We listened to them screaming at one another in their house. When words failed them they revved their cars. Hera’s boyfriend, when angry, would screech around the block. His car had an enormous exhaust pipe, booming bass stereo speakers in the boot and a ‘spoiler’ on the back. He made short, noisy trips in the car, at all hours. There were dents all over it. He would call Hera a fucking slut over and over again during their arguments. Doors would slam, walls would be punched (at least I imagined the noises I heard were walls being punched). Yet when Melina, who had moved away from home with her new infant daughter by then, visited them, they would be out the front of their house hugging and calling out ‘Love you, love you!’ as they farewelled one another. They were apparently fiercely loyal among themselves. And they loved their dog, they said.

Were they putting on a show for us, being so sweet on the street? Or did they genuinely love each other? How could they? Were they hypocrites (and what does that mean?), conscious of the miserable anger they showered on each other and the world, but determined to live with what Žižek calls a ‘pragmatic contradiction’? Žižek remarks that only the ethically naïve are surprised to find that the very same people who commit terrible acts of violence towards their enemies can display warm humanity and gentle care for the members of their own group. Stalin was a loving father. My neighbours love each other – or profess to. Žižek suggests, ‘the experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is fundamentally a lie – the truth lies outside, in what we do’.

I am not only curious but deeply worried about the connections between what these people think and what they do. In Žižek’s possibly naïve view of the meaning of ‘neighbour’, such people are unnatural hypocrites. ‘Refusing the same basic ethical rights to those outside our community as to those inside it is something that does not come naturally to a human being,’ he writes. ‘It is a violation of our spontaneous ethical proclivity. It involves brutal repression and self-denial.’ I would like to agree with him. But as soon as I put them outside my community-of-the-civilised, which I imagine I belong to, I am as guilty as them of hypocrisy. What has become of my universal ethic of equality and brotherhood? I come up against not only the limit of my liberal tolerance but the limit of my imagination.

My failure is that I cannot imagine them. Once someone becomes your enemy, you must face the question contained in Žižek’s essay titled ‘Fear Thy Neighbour as Thyself!’ – ‘How can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a flat biological machine lacking depth?’

The father of this family (we will call him Demophon) is a dour, hunched, thick-bodied, slow-moving man who always has a thin half-smoked cigarette in his hand or mouth. It makes him squint. His eyes swing round suspiciously at everything. He seems about to lurch or attack. He likes to spit when we are near him and to mutter words that are probably blasphemous or obscene. Every morning he goes off dutifully to work. Sometimes he rolls out a gas barbecue in the driveway and stands there cooking lamb or sausages and drinking beer. His voice becomes louder then, and he is more open in his abuse of us if we pass in the street. Several years ago, on New Year’s Day, I thought we might be able to make a new start as neighbours, so I walked up to him to shake his hand and express the hope that we could put our misunderstandings behind us. His response was to call my daughter a slut. I think he has no respect for women, so it is a neat turn of fate that he has fathered three daughters. You see, I can’t imagine him as anything more than that flat biological machine.

Perhaps, though, offering them the possibility of being imagined as complex humans, I can recognise the hypocrisy of this family because I know it in myself. I have experienced it in my own family, where relations will close ranks round one of their own, no matter how vile, mistaken, foolish or criminal their sibling’s or their child’s act has been. My father is one of those fathers to whom family is everything. ‘Humanity’ does not come anywhere near calling up the passion that family – tribe – does.

Heartless exclusions are at the (false) heart of any universal ethical stance, Žižek proposes in his book. What about the cruelty administered to factory-raised pigs, he asks, or the abhorrent treatment of those hens and calves which we consume? What about the torture and maiming we know is happening in the world? What about the exploitation of Third World workers who guarantee our supply of consumer goods? None of this overly disturbs us. Žižek, mischievously, wants to remind me of my own hidden hypocrisy. Since Freud turned the mind inside out, we have largely accepted that our fear of others and the sins we see in others are images of what we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. This insight, though, seems to miss an important point. When I discuss this with Jane, she says Žižek is playing games with the word ‘violence’. She is not impressed by his dexterity with ideas.

‘Since Freud turned the mind inside out, we have largely accepted that our fear of others and the sins we see in others are images of what we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves’

I cannot flatter my neighbours by investing them with the depth required to think of them as hypocrites, for I cannot think of them giving lip service to ideas of equality and compassion, not even among them-selves. These ideas to them would be weaknesses, I imagine. Any affection they feel for one another is, I suspect, a series of brief and passing puzzlements. What Žižek wants to reveal is the difficult truth that the person who aspires to an ethical life has little cause for complacency. My version of my neighbours does some kind of violence to them, he would argue, pointing his philosophical finger at me.

Jane saw Brick kill a cat at the end of our street while being walked on a leash by Halia. Later, Brick attacked a small dog in front of their house and mauled the owner who tried to rescue her dog. Brick was put down after this attack. More than one cat in the neighbourhood had been killed, we were told. A sheep replaced the dog for a few weeks. It kept to itself but never seemed at home in the cramped backyard.

Now that I have begun unravelling this series of incidents I must go on, even if I am being unfair to these neighbours by exaggerating the worst of their behaviour. I trust you to see through my account. I don’t trust my memory or my self-interested stance, but what else do I have? In the 1980s two of my dearest friends were in love. Instead of being wedded, they decided to be ‘welded’. We had a weekend-long welding ceremony in the country. They are still welded, nearly twenty years later. I am welded to my memories. I can’t (perhaps won’t) alter them, though I can write them down and stand back from them. And you can see through them.

Around this time, Halia, bored and pretty low in self-esteem by then, I suppose, unemployed and stuck at home as she was, began targeting Jane. Halia would stand at her back door with her little niece, a frequent visitor. Whenever Jane was in our back yard, she would coach the girl to shout, ‘Aussie bitch! Racist slut!’. When Halia saw Jane in the street or in the local shopping centre, she would shout the same insults at her. This was distressing and debilitating. Jane became afraid each time she stepped out of our house. I could see how tense and drained she was becoming. It was intolerable. We talked more about moving, began studying the housing market. Our children were tense, too, all of us much too alert to every noise and movement from next door.

As I left our house one morning, Hera’s boyfriend snarled at me as I passed, ‘What’re yer lookin’ at yer fuckin’ dog?’ I kept going. I tried to be amused by what he had said, imagined using his line to begin a poem or short story. Added to Jane’s suffering at Halia’s abuse, it was too much to endure. I let it go until one evening when Jane’s sister came to visit. She lived further down the street, so was often walking past this family’s house. The father had taken to standing in the driveway of his house in the evening and spitting loudly behind Jane’s sister whenever she passed. This particular evening, he muttered something like ‘fuck off’ at her. She stopped and challenged him. He became angry at being accused of swearing when all he was doing was speaking in Greek to his wife. She left it at that, but on her way home an hour later he was still there, still wanting to abuse her for challenging him. I went out when I heard the raised voices. I complained to the father and the mother about their daughter’s boyfriend swearing at me as I left the house. When I told her that he had called me a fucking dog, the mother said, ‘No, we don’t have a dog any more.’ ‘He called me a dog,’ I said, and she looked at me, puzzled. ‘There’s no dog,’ she repeated.

During discussions about these events, one friend offered to use his contacts with the Lebanese mafia to ‘send them a message’. This appealed to my fantasies about paying them back for the suffering they were causing, and for the disruption it would be for us to have to move house because of them. This payback would be a fitting solution. But I couldn’t take that step. I’m not sure what held me back. It was not an ethical or moral decision, but more a postponement. If things got any worse I might call upon my friend’s contacts in the criminal world, where the logic of conflict was easy to understand, even if it did flirt with chaos. For the time being we did nothing.

One Saturday morning as I was sweeping our driveway, the boyfriend pulled up in his car with a friend. He climbed out and walked towards me, saying that if I ever spoke to Hera’s mother again he would smash me. I told him I didn’t want to be abused in the street outside my house. ‘I can say what I want and you can’t fucking stop me,’ was his response. I asked him his name. ‘None of your fucking business. Have you ever had your head smashed in, eh?’

Since those brief experiences in childhood, I have had my head smashed in, twice. The first time was after a party at a local hall, in the toilets, when I was about sixteen. I ran away fast enough to avoid the worst of it. The friend I was with enjoyed himself, I think. He was stimulated by conflict. He wasn’t an easy friend and may well have provoked the attack. The second time, I was walking along a street in North Melbourne with my girlfriend. A group of people was drinking on the footpath. They accused me of looking at them. One came up and cracked a beer bottle over my skull while the others tied my girlfriend’s beautiful dark red coiling hair round a lamp post. As they hit me and tormented her, I cried out, ‘Why, why, why are you doing this?’ – as if they would be bothered to provide an answer or debate their motives. My question only incited greater violence. My inspiration was to start calling, ‘Police! Police!’ At this they ran away, as though an instruction had been given that they could not refuse.

By this stage, I was scared of the boyfriend next door, though he was thinner and smaller than me. He was convincing when he said he could do and say whatever he wanted and ‘no fucking one’ could stop him, not even the police. ‘Go on, then, go to the police,’ he taunted me. I began shouting at him over and over, ‘Go away, go away, go away.’ Jane and my son came out to see what was happening, and took me inside. I was inwardly furious at not being able to sweep my own driveway without being abused, and at the same time I was humiliated by the exchange, possibly because it was so much like that childhood encounter with the boy who had wanted to fight me. I was the roaring man.

My bluff had been called. If I did not go to the police, then it was accepted that this weedy young man with the loud car could order us around and make whatever threats he wished to make, perhaps even carry a few of them out. I felt I had no choice but to go to the local police station and report the incident. The officer who took my statement informed me that what the young man had done constituted assault, but that he would not press charges until I secured an intervention order against him. An intervention order would, he told me, make it a criminal offence for the man to approach me again.

Jane and I went to the magistrate’s court where they accepted our request for a temporary intervention order against both Hera’s boyfriend and Halia, but advised us to seek mediation through the free service provided by the courts before a formal hearing in front of a magistrate. We had a long discussion with a clerk about the likely timing. Documents were typed out, our statements taken down. We returned home with the court documents and pamphlets about mediation. It was as if we were now cocooned from the neighbours by this reassuring state system of law.

The slow and bureaucratic process of law promised us an outcome that might stop the escalating conflict. We were novices at it, so it had its own fascination for us. The wood panelling in the courts, the respect accorded the magistrates, people sitting in groups around the wall of the waiting area, the small discussion rooms like confessional boxes, the confident and casual manner with which staff moved files from place to place – files that recorded pain, confusion, hurt, failure and embarrassment. Suddenly we were not unusual, and our troubles were far from the worst.

While we waited for the court hearing, we had letters of invitation sent to each member of the family, inviting them to attend mediation. They refused. Then they refused a second time.

When we arrived at court on the day we had agreed upon with the clerk, we were told that the case had been heard and dismissed the day before. We had failed to notice that the clerk had put a different date on the notice sum-moning us to the intervention hearing. We were caught in some strange joke. Our neighbours had appeared in the court prepared for arguments and accusations, and we had not arrived. Perhaps they thought we were playing with them or that we had lost our nerve. Slowly we were learning that the courts are not cathartic, that they make a clumsy, very human system that stumbles on its way between ideals, desires and violence. After several more incidents we reapplied for immediate temporary intervention orders and these were accepted. Dates for new court hearings were settled.

‘Slowly we were learning that the courts are not cathartic, that they make a clumsy, very human system that stumbles on its way between ideals, desires and violence’

Things were quiet for a while. Halia was not at home for several weeks. We thought she might have found work somewhere else, or been sent away.

Then one Friday afternoon Jane phoned me at work asking me to come home as soon as possible. The boyfriend was breaking the pickets off our front fence with a bar and cutting the fence away with a power tool. When I arrived home, Halia was standing by the damaged fence, three or four pickets scattered on the footpath. A police van was parked outside our house, and the young man was being ushered into the van by two officers. Jane told me that police had come and told him to stop, which he did. Once they were gone, he returned and continued cutting the fence away. Now he had been arrested, to be charged with criminal damage and with breaking an intervention order.

At 9.15 p.m. that night a brick came through our front window. By the time we ran out to the street, there was no one there. Then Melina’s car came past, drove into the car park at the front of the block of flats opposite our house, where someone opened and shut the car door. She drove away at speed. We called the police. They spoke to the family next door, but told us they could do nothing without evidence or witnesses. We sat up most of the night waiting for the next brick.

Two days later on the Sunday evening, my good friend Charles visited. As he came to the gate he met Jane’s sister. She pointed to Halia, who was standing a few metres away on the footpath, with some of her friends. Halia had just walked past our house making noises and laughing. Charles was visiting because he knew they were harassing us again. He approached Halia. She made another one of her noises, which he imitated. Halia began screaming, ‘Who are you? Are you threatening me? Who are you?’ He said, ‘You don’t know who I am and you don’t scare me. I’ve been locked up, you don’t scare me at all.’ By this time the family had come out, including the boyfriend. We took Charles into our house. I was shaking with fear by then. Not long after this, an ambulance arrived with a police car. The ambulance officers went into our neighbour’s house and the police soon came in to speak to Charles. They said the ambulance officers were inspecting Halia, who had accused Charles of assaulting her by throwing her to the ground and kneeing her in the back. Once they realised Charles had indeed been in prison, they took Halia’s accusation seriously. All of us scoffed at the story and assured the police that no one was close enough to Halia to touch her. They were not convinced.

I was imagining that Halia had gone inside her house and got her family to hit her so that the ambulance officers would have some evidence of an assault. Charles would be taken away, there would be terrible court appearances, injustices would be done, all because he had been solicitous of our safety in wanting to warn the woman to leave us alone. The police went next door then returned, saying that their story was convincing and that they were inclined to believe them. I sat with Charles as he was questioned again. He said, over and over, that the ambulance officers would find no mark on her because nothing had happened. He asked the police to examine her clothing to see if she had been pushed to the ground.

Eventually, the ambulance officers left. The police went out to their patrol car and Halia and her family followed them, asking what they would do about the assault. The police explained to them that the ambulance officers had found no signs of an assault. There was not a mark on her. They could do nothing. ‘Are you calling us liars?’ they shouted. ‘No, we are saying there is no evidence, so we can’t act on your word against theirs.’ ‘You’re calling us liars!’ they shouted. ‘They get to call the police whenever they like, and we don’t,’ Halia complained to them.

When the police were gone, we sat round the kitchen table, drained and amazed at what had taken place. We decided to drive Charles home, but as we went to our car we saw that several cars in the street had their engines running and that Demophon himself was driving up and down the street. We waited a while, but they didn’t leave their cars. We called the police again to tell them we were afraid to leave our house, that we could not safely get Charles home with our neighbours out there. The police returned and asked them to go back inside their house. They complained that they had a right to be on the street, and anyway they needed to know where our friend lived because he might assault their daughter again. Once they were back inside, the police escorted our car out the driveway and later back in safely. By then our neighbours had come back on to the street, where Halia shouted at us, ‘You wait till tomorrow!’ I turned to the police sergeant and asked him if he had heard that. He told me to go inside. Halia stood by the police car, listing her complaints against us. ‘Every three days we get letters from them asking us to go to mediation, but we don’t want to talk to them, they’re idiots.’ With the police there we thought it was safe for Jane’s sister to walk home past the house. As she walked between the police car and the house, someone said, ‘Racist fucking slut’, so she asked the police what she could do about this abuse. The boyfriend turned the garden hose on her. The police sergeant leapt from his car and threatened to arrest him for assault if he did not stop hosing her.

That evening the second brick crashed through our bedroom window and I screamed. This second brick shook me more than the first. It seemed that conventions, restraint, that law had all been thrown aside. We went back to the court and applied for temporary intervention orders against the rest of the family. We engaged a barrister and solicitor for the coming hearings. A few days later, Halia stood outside our house and shouted, ‘Every dog has its day, you have made a big mistake. You’re going down, down!’

We did think we might have made a big mistake, but these pieces of paper from the police and the courts were all we could rely on. We resumed out discussions about selling the house and moving away. We invited the family again to come to mediation.

Finally, three of them agreed to attend mediation, though not Halia or the boyfriend. We spent most of one day sitting across a table from Melina, Hera and Demophon, with two mediators taking us through our turns to speak, explain, accuse and rebut. Melina was the loudest and angriest, as she had always been. She was convinced that the front fence was the source of our unhappiness and anger with them. The shared fence between our properties encroached on our legal title by about ten centimetres, and it was this ten centimetres that they were claiming, or reminding us was theirs, when they cut the end off our front fence. Even more passionately, they did believe we had dragged the dog into our yard just to spite them, and that we had deliberately let it loose in the street. Demophon mocked us most of the time. They complained mostly that we looked at them – stared at them, in fact. I cannot remember clearly all that was said, but at the end of the day, surprisingly, we signed a document in which Jane and I agreed to remove our applications for intervention orders and to be careful where we looked when we were in the street. In return, they would leave us alone.

Did this experience of listening to them recreate them in my mind, beyond the image of flat biological machines that they must be as an enemy? It did do something like flesh them out, though it confirmed, too, the impossibility of living beside them safely. They showed no interest in finding common ground, in deepening their understanding of us, in finding a way to be neighbours beyond the truce they signed on condition that they would not have to appear in court. There was nothing simple to conclude after a day spent with them, and there was, at the same time, a simple conclusion: we were all pleased to walk away from each other as soon as the mediation was over.

The next day, Halia and the boyfriend requested a mediation session, but we refused. Why? Perhaps we had reached that hard place where one cannot keep digging into reserves of empathy. Perhaps we understood that we would not receive any truthfulness or fairness from those two. We did not believe they were genuine. We needed the protection that an intervention order would bring us. It was too late. We were exhausted. I don’t know.

There was a series of court appearances, none of them decisive or cathartic for us. They didn’t attend most of them, so the intervention orders were put in place formally and the boyfriend was convicted of causing criminal damage. The court appearances were characterised by hours of waiting, then having our appearance postponed. It was expensive, but the street did quieten down.

Neighbourliness, I remind myself, is about distance, not closeness. The best neighbours are those who know how to be distant, despite proximity. My friend talks to me about apartment blocks in New York where the issue is how to prevent the dogs from urinating in the lobby, how to manage living so close to each other without conflicts between neighbours or their pets. It requires skill. It requires curtailment of desire, containment of curiosity, an acquired insouciance about the lives others lead right in front of us. How to manage to be distant when so close?

How did we mismanage our neighbourliness so badly? Was it a question of management? Žižek opens his essay with the claim that the predominant mode of politics today is ‘post-political bio-politics’. By this he means that we are now historically beyond conflicts of ideology and ideals, for we are concerned with questions only about the management of our comfortable lives. Our politics – our passions – are confined to issues that provoke fear: fear of harassment, fear of excessive behaviour. We are frightened people, he claims. When I read this I sense my fear, but I suspect my response is like that of a hypochondriac to the rumour of a new illness. Have I got it? I must have it if I have the symptoms. My neighbours, it would appear, have refused to be caught in fear. Perhaps they are to be admired for their chaotic energy, their sheer aggression against a world that is over-managed and over-fearful. Perhaps the presence of my left liberal pacifist-looking self (riding a bicycle to work, my beard, long hair, our engaging a consultant to design our garden, my valuing talk above open conflict) was both an opportunity and a provocation to them. Fear did overtake us, I know that. But something else emerged in us as well. We did keep going to work; our children passed their exams at the end of each year; their education progressed in music, sport, language and literacy. We kept on seeing our friends. We did not collapse, though inside it felt as if we had. We persevered with what Žižek might want to call only another form of violence: the systems and the language of justice and analysis. Our ‘pragmatic contradiction’ was to keep going as if our ethical position did work, as if there was enough tolerance, enough resistance, enough checks and balances in the wider society to protect us.

‘Our ‘‘pragmatic contradiction’’ was to keep going as if our ethical position did work, as if there was enough tolerance, enough resistance, enough checks and balances in the wider society to protect us’

We continued to look for a place to buy, thinking we had no choice but to move away. Every loud noise they made, every time they revved their cars or raced up the street, we were aware of them, worried we might be attacked again. Each night, returning to our street, I worried what damage to our house I would find. One morning as I rode my bicycle down the street, the boyfriend glided up beside me in his car with the passenger window down. He kept pace with the bike for a short distance, then began moving his car in towards the bike, squeezing me against the parked cars on my left. I could not stop riding or I would fall under his car, and I had to keep a straight line or I would crash. Towards the end of the street he moved away, having made his point. Next day, I returned to the police station and made a statement, which the police diligently followed up; but of course he denied it had happened.

We found a photograph of their house on the Internet. It was for sale. They had no sign at the front of their house, no advertisements in the papers, no auction scheduled, but the house was for sale. This was not just the relief we needed, but an irresistible opportunity. Why not buy the house from them? What a circle that would be. Would it be possible? How could we do it without their knowing? It was possible, and though we were able to keep at a distance from the sale as it took place, we had to make our identities clear before settlement. By the time they knew we were the purchasers, the sale was sealed. We have spent the past month cleaning, painting, carpeting and repairing the house and advertising it for rent. Soon we will have new neighbours.

Reference

Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Profile Books (Allen & Unwin), $35 pb, 218 pp, 9781846680175

Rarely does an image on a novel’s cover appear exactly as you, the reader, imagine the character to look. But Mae Ruth Perkins, on the elegant scarlet cover of Linda Jaivin’s new novel, definitely does. Bordello eyes, boudoir lips and all: the face in an early 1900s photograph is Mae’s own. The jewellery, faintly visible, is hers too, just as Jaivin describes it: ‘He helped her tie a black ribbon with a silver horseshoe charm around her neck, the open part facing upwards … She asked him to fasten a delicate platinum chain with a vertical triplet of gold hearts around her neck as well.’