Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection
I have grown past hate and bitterness, I see the world as one; But though I can no longer hate, My son is still my son.
All men at God’s round table sit, And all men must be fed; But this loaf in my hand, This loaf is my son’s bread.
Nationality, Mary Gilmore
All life is precious. But each of us has an in-built scale that determines what particular lives are more precious. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us estimates the comparable value of particular life-forms through variables that include the time we are born into, the cultural frameworks we use to make decisions, the religious or political or ideological creeds we adhere to, among a raft of other factors.
There are, however, trends that persist across the differences of creed, culture and communal beliefs. Australian poet Mary Gilmore, for example, (she is featured on the other side of Banjo Patterson on the Australian ten-dollar note) was a pacifist deeply opposed to the taking of life. But no matter her embrace of the credos of egalitarianism, of rationality, of anti-violence, her poem Nationality, written in 1942 during the Second World War, is a paean to that short, sharp, self-aware realisation that all the convictions of faith, all the certitudes of conceptual analysis, all the intellectual rigour of impartial rationalist thought, fall to one side when faced with the visceral call of blood-ties. At the time of writing, Gilmore’s world was being torn apart; her poem belies the contradictions of yearning for a sense of global connectedness while acknowledging the deep unwavering connections of genetic networks.
In today’s world, experiences of fracturing and connection