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As we write, the new Australian Prime Minister is winging his way to Washington, Europe and China on his first diplomatic foray overseas. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says Australia needs to become more internationally engaged. He says Australia has a lot more to offer the international community. ‘The truth is that Australia’s voice has been too quiet for too long.’1
That will be music to the ears of Australian internationalists, both economic and cultural. Global thinking with the necessary touch of independence: Venetians to the court of Kublai Khan. Just in case you have not caught up with this, globalism arrived in Australia in all its forms and force quite some while ago. We are connected and affected, and it is not just the weather and the economy. For an elementary demonstration of techno-globalism’s invasive immediacy and its influence on our ever-shrinking planet, look only to China’s floodlit discomfort as Tibet revolts, for all the world to see.
It is such a golden time for analysts, soothsayers and players who can find themselves a place, as human societies drift with tectonic force towards convergence, collision or synthesis. Will globalism bring the curse of sterile monoculture and authoritarian coercion, or instead, the ‘Oh sweet Holy Grail’ of perfectly balanced anarchy, our evolutionary salvation? Next stop, infinity and beyond!
Which of course brings us to culture, Australian culture, and to ever-pleasant pluralist Adelaide—by any global measure a paradise of calm orderliness, manageable scale, modernity and quaint heritage—where the city’s twenty-fifth Adelaide Festival recently concluded. The Adelaide Festival, not unlike the Biennale of Sydney really, and Brisbane’s Asia-Pacific Triennial too, bringing the world to Australia and making it ‘local’!
This year, outgoing... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline