Week 19: Botanic Days
Week 19: Botanic Days
A trip to Melbourne's Botanic Gardens, the loss of the ethic of design, and school sucks.
A friend of mine from India recently arrived in Melbourne for her PhD, and so this week I showed her around some of the key landmarks in the city. I love being a tour guide. I have a pretty good knowledge of the city’s history, and plenty of (insufferable) opinions about what it has done well and not so well. The centre of Melbourne is a great walking city, with lots of interesting nooks and crannies.
One place I love to take people new to the city is the Botanic Gardens. Which has some lovely paths to meander through. Especially on hot days there are areas of great density, anchored by the mighty Moreton Bay Figs, that can allow you to be outside without facing the wrath of the sun. Although a stroll in the cool Autumn air is also lovely.
Melbourne’s initial city planners had a great vision for taking what is geographically a rather unremarkable plot of land and transforming it into something quite pretty (at least from the ground, it looks fairly rubbish from above). Central to this are the gardens that border the Central Business District. To the east the Fitzroy Gardens and Treasury Gardens, the Carlton Gardens to the north, the Flagstaff Gardens to the west, and across the river to the south, the Domain Parklands – an enormous parcel of land which includes the Botanic Gardens, The King’s Domain, Queen Victoria Gardens and Alexandra Gardens.
The enormous wealth generated from the Victorian gold rush up until the end of the 1860s greatly helped drive this investment in public parks, and can be seen in many of the city’s best buildings too. However, I feel that this care and attention to city planning is something that has slipped in Melbourne. Our culture has dramatically shifted since this time, and the value of compelling public works and the necessity of good design have fallen from our dispositions.
We’re a functional people now. If it works it’s good enough, anything else is pretentious or fruity. It’s an attitude that has given Melbourne the world’s most embarrassing looking trains and trams, much to my permanent chagrin. And unfortunately hinders our recent urban renewal projects. And our civic pride.
That said, there is a new gate at the city end of the Botanic Gardens where at least someone has spent some time thinking of an interesting design, not simply a functional one. And, of course, the ground staff at the various gardens around central Melbourne do an incredible job of maintenance and upkeep. We thank them for their service.
The Botanic Gardens also hold a special place in my heart as I used to spend a lot of time there when I was wagging (skipping) school.1 School wasn’t for me. I didn’t enjoy being there, and it wasn’t structured in a way that enabled me to learn. So I rarely turned up in my final years. I received a bare pass upon graduation, but I suspect that this was due to the school looking to protect its reputation, rather than me actually completing the criteria to pass. It wasn’t the kind of school that could handle a blemish on its statistics.
Looking back, I feel a little disappointed that there was no-one at the school who saw any potential in me and was willing to work with me to find a pathway for me to engage. I was probably just dismissed as a waste of time. Maybe schools are better these days at identifying kids to whom formal learning is difficult?
That said, wagging school and hanging out in the Botanic Gardens where I could listen to music and read the things I wanted to read was awesome. I’ve always loved being by myself and having the space to sit and think about my own ideas, and it’s the perfect place for that. Not that I am encouraging kids to wag school, but I probably wouldn’t be able to do the variety of things I do now in the manner I do them if I had confined myself to formal and structured learning. So I have both the Botanic Gardens and a neglectful school to thank for that.
This Week’s Reading
Robin Jeffery – Inside Story
“This election is not simply about the BJP winning a third term; it is an election about the essence of India.
The BJP and its ideologues see only one way of being true to the nation. To validate that vision and be able to say that it is the view of the people, the party needs endorsement from regions where it has not yet been dominant — the south, the east, northeast and the northwest. The states on these fringes return 214 members to parliament; the BJP won about a third of them in 2019.
The BJP envisages India as a single unit from time immemorial, united by the wisdom of ancient Hindu texts and practices. That unity, however, has been torn and attacked for a thousand years by foreign invaders, Muslims and the British. The BJP project is to retrieve and enhance that natural, all-embracing, Hindu-dominant unity. The doctrine is called Hindutva, the creation of a Hindu-supremacist state.
The contrary view, and the one that has largely prevailed since 1947, is that India is a mini-miracle: a democratic federation, more than twice the population of the European Union and more diverse, that has grown relatively peacefully for more than seventy years. The Indian union, in this view, draws on India’s cultural commonalities, accepts its local variations and allows its states to deal with local issues while willingly embracing the political union.”
Timothy Synder – CNN
“Beneath the Russian particularities, history offers a more general and still more reassuring lesson about empires. Russia is fighting today an imperial war. It denies the existence of the Ukrainian state and nation, and it carries out atrocities that recall the worst of the European imperial past.
The peaceful Europe of today consists of powers that lost their last imperial wars and then chose democracy. It is not only possible to lose your last imperial war: it is also good, not only for the world, but for you.
Russia can lose this war, and should, for the sake of Russians themselves. A defeated Russia means not only the end of senseless losses of young life in Ukraine. It is also Russia’s one chance to become a post-imperial country, one where reform is possible, one where Russians themselves might be protected by law and able to cast meaningful votes.
Defeat in Ukraine is Russia’s historical chance for normality.”
The Director’s Chair (podcast) – Lowy Institute
“In this episode of The Director’s Chair, the Lowy Institute’s Executive Director Michael Fullilove is joined by UK Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
They discuss David Lammy’s journey from cathedral chorister to the House of Commons, what kind of prime minister Keir Starmer would make, foreign policy under a Labour government, the UK’s relationship with Europe, China and the United States, how he was influenced by the revered West Indies cricket team of the 1970s, and how Australian manager Ange Postecoglou has reinvigorated his beloved Tottenham Hotspur.”
Defending Taiwan by Defending Ukraine
Jaushieh Joseph Wu – Foreign Affairs
“With China and Russia in such close alignment, it is all the more imperative for democracies to act in coordination. To that end, the democracies of the world, led by the United States, must sustain their military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The objective of this support goes beyond returning to the status quo ante in the European continent. By helping Ukraine, democracies can increase their relative strength against the Chinese-Russian coalition.
In this spirit, Taiwan welcomes the U.S. Congress’s recent decision to continue American military support for Ukraine. Such a display of unabated and unquestionable resolve to safeguard democracy does not detract from the defense of places such as Taiwan: in fact, it is a key deterrent against adventurism on Beijing’s part.
Taiwan is a responsible member of the international community, and its position on maintaining the cross-Strait status quo will not change. But it needs the world’s democracies to do their utmost to help maintain peace through strength and unity. By continuing to support Ukraine in its fight for survival in the face of Russian aggression, the world’s democracies have demonstrated exactly the kind of resolve and moral clarity that Taiwan also needs from them. We cannot allow this century to witness the birth of a world order in which authoritarians can stamp out justice and freedom. In the coming years, the fate of Taiwan, like that of Ukraine, will be a crucial test that the world’s democracies must not fail.”
East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse
Nicholas Eberstadt - Foreign Affairs
“Given that a very large share of East Asia’s 2050 population is already alive, demographers can speak about the outlook for the region’s countries with a high degree of confidence. What they have to say does not sound especially positive. By 2050, the population in every one of the region’s countries will be smaller and older than it is now. The China of 2050, for example, will have many fewer people under 60 than does today’s China. But it will have two and a half times as many septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians as today—another 180 million of them—even though the country’s total population will decline. In other countries, the changes will be even more drastic. In 2050, Japan will likely have fewer people than it does today in every age cohort under 70. Taiwan will have more people over 75 than under 25. In South Korea, there will be more people over 80 than under 20.
This demographic shift will cost these countries more than just their youth. It also threatens to sap them of economic vitality. As a rule of thumb, societies with fewer people tend to have smaller economies, as do societies where the elderly make up a disproportionate share of the population. The elderly work less than the young and the middle-aged: there is a reason why demographers conventionally refer to people between 15 and 64 as the “working age” population. And although East Asia’s working-age cohort grew until 2015, the region’s labor pool is now shrinking. If projections hold, China’s working-age population will be more than 20 percent smaller in 2050 than in 2020. Japan’s and Taiwan’s will be about 30 percent smaller, and South Korea will be over 35 percent smaller.”
No One Knows What Universities Are For
Derek Thompson – The Atlantic
“Bureaucratic growth has a shadow self: mandate inflation. More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organisation, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices, advancing diversity in humanities classes through DEI offices, and ensuring inclusive living standards through student-affairs offices. As these missions become more important to the organization, they require more hires. Over time, new hires may request more responsibility and create new subgroups, which create even more mandates. Before long, a once-focused organization becomes anything but.
In sociology, this sort of muddle has a name. It is goal ambiguity—a state of confusion, or conflicting expectations, for what an organization should do or be. The modern university now has so many different jobs to do that it can be hard to tell what its priorities are, Gabriel Rossman, a sociologist at UCLA, told me. “For example, what is UCLA’s mission?” he said. “Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”
Sam Kahn – Persuasion
“The basis of an organisation like PEN is that it transcends politics. Whatever the political gusts of the moment happen to be, there will still be people writing and PEN sees itself as supporting those writers and their freedom of expression. Maybe that seems like tepid neutrality, but it is actually a principled position that requires a great deal of institutional courage and clarity of vision. For an organization like PEN to cancel its events because of political pressure sends a clear signal that its commitment to writers and expression is not so ironclad after all, that political considerations prevail.
At the heart of that failure of nerve is a misunderstanding of the nature of an institution. To be an institution involves walking a thin line. It’s not about being morally right or wrong in every case. It’s about having core values—and sticking to them. American society is being pulled apart more than it has at any point in my lifetime. The extremes are having their say—and doing so with ever-greater vigour. To get through this period with something like the social fabric intact, the institutions will have to do something that they haven’t in a long time: They will have to find their backbone and reason for existing. They will have to continue with their organisational missions even when it hurts.”
While autumn in Melbourne is generally glorious, high-teens and sunny most days, we are rapidly heading towards winter. In winter, Melbourne is the coldest city in the world, despite it never snowing or dropping below zero (occasionally the wind chill does). I don’t know why this is, but it is a universally acknowledged quirk of the city. Maybe it’s a mental thing, we sit on the precipice of cold weather, and our bodies struggle to comprehend the state of limbo. More obviously it is our poorly insulated homes, which are all built for days in the high-30s, not single digits.
It makes Melbourne an intriguing winter city. The skeletal London Planes that line our streets, the puddles that form in the bluestone cobbled laneways, and the trams that always seem to run more slowly in the winter. And it’s our morose bands, and their Cold Feeling.
Wagging being the local term