Off Course Discourse

List of podcasts included at the end.

I’ll start with a nod to a podcast that was mainly on politics and media but digressed momentarily to colonialism, and then returned to a career in news and political news – the 2024 John Button Oration, introduced by Natasha Mitchell on the Big Ideas podcast, and delivered by Laura Tingle at the Melbourne Writers Festival. I’ll also add a few words on how it’s not surprising and provide some examples of sci-fi that support the developments we’ve seen.

Our relationship with other countries, other ethnicities, is changing. For instance, half a century ago I’d not have used the word “ethnicities” and instead used the word “races.” It was a much more loaded term back then, but we also had fewer qualms about how we referred to them. And of course, we now call them UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) not the equally loaded term “UFO.” Our attitudes to a lot of things changed in under a century, and even in the last few decades.

Which brings us back to the Big Idea podcast now. It’s audio worth putting the earbuds in and reserving 44 minutes for. It’s mostly about how political reporting changed over the course of Aussie history, and as such it does include a few golden nuggets. John Button himself was always a charmer even as he was eviscerating someone, I remember my father outright guffawing sometimes as he read the papers or listened to the radio.

But there are also disturbing bits. Ms Tingle’s speech begins with the downright disrespect that was given to the indigenous notion of “Country” and the acknowledgements of the Country one was on when delivering speeches etc. For reference, I’m on Boonwoorung (Bunwurrong, Bunurong in simplified form) land here. This is probably one of only few times I’ll acknowledge traditional owners’ lands here, I don’t disagree with it, but have reasons. I lived in a town where quite a few of my school besties and neighbours were Yamagee tribe.

Laura mentioned how the country was formed and became “English colonists and Irish convicts” and then followed that with the English bastardised pronunciation of “reportidge” instead of the French “reportahhge,” thus denying the French – as the English always have. I’m not sure why that’s become popular, to not use the native pronunciation of other languages and instead bastardise it, but there it is.

From Americans pronouncing Muslim as “Mahslim,” to mispronouncing native country names, disrespect for other cultures seems built into us. As I listened to the podcast I began to see why much of the world is disenchanted with the British and US Empires. (And, I hasten to add, the Aussie tourists…) But really, when you look deeper into it, you begin to see that very very VERY few countries and cultures are truly tolerant yet. We are striving to be, though.

We had other things to disrespect less than a century ago, and yet a mere two centuries ago it was drilled into us that when you went to a different land, a different culture, you respected the land, the people, the culture. (Until you went to war with them and decimated them. But until that point, you were the stranger in their land and behaved accordingly.) And even my grandparents, children of the late 1800s, taught me cultural sensitivity and appropriate behaviours when I a strange land.

I’ve always felt that was a good grounding for me, because I’ve always been a language/culture/country respecter. My parents moved from Europe to Arabia to India to Australia before I’d turned ten, and that left me with some profound love for different cultures and their customs, languages, foods, and religions. The people were such a diverse lot, and each place I visited left me with revelations, teachings, foods, friends, and languages. And I still cringe when people diss others on any of those bases.

I was also an early reader and enjoyed Tintin, Mickey Mouse, HG Wells, Asimov, textbooks on geography, maps, (not history – eucchh! – that was just people doing the opposite of what I reckoned they should have done!) science, technology, and sci-fi. The former was about places I’d been, people and foods and scenery I’d known, and latter three were about what was left to explore, to discover. I was all about discovering.

Sci-fi made me realise that what was in the science and tech books wasn’t immutable fixed in stone and was often changed and updated, that the way the Ottoman Turks lived and the way that Western Europeans lived, were not the only cultural “norms” to abide by and were always changing and being replaced by new morals and standards. That the greatest recipes to serve in the 1960s would be smiled about twenty years later and been replaced by something equally tragic – but accepted in the newer time.

Our food ideals change, our body ideals change, our cultural ideals change – and I noticed that many sci-fi stories took current cultural norms and projected them forwards, often to the point that when the stories were published, they were snorted about – “As if that would ever happen!” – while those very things were just starting to creep into fringe culture, and then suddenly became the the new norms…

And now I’m listening to podcasts of “old” sci-fi and I realised that we as a species have followed this path of respect, pillage, denigrate, upgrade for all of history. Some of the podcasts are taken off radio station master tapes and include 50s 60s 70s ads. Some of it seems extremely dated to me, some extremely prejudiced, some casually rude and abhorrent. But it was the spirit of each age they were written and performed in.

It also pointed out how far we’ve come in under a mere century or so. Early science fiction stories were still very like steampunk. Industrial magic could perform miracles. Women played no part in this except to act as scene settings. Everything was about men conquering planets and fighting off the strange aliens, taking the planets. Colonising space, as it were. And that’s the reason why I started writing this article, actually.

But then a more hopeful spirit kicked in – we’d seen rockets launched, so instead of flying a super-balloon to Mars we launched rockets. Rocket science was where it was at, and women became more involved – unfortunately usually just to provide a more racy, sexy scene setting. Women stopped being dummies and became dolls, men were still men and conquered/colonised everything, and robots began to appear in plotlines.

It’s really only been in the years of Star Trek and other shows that women stopped being a convenient way for the author to explain things – generally by making the woman ask questions that were then patiently mansplained – and became integral characters with roles.

It’s only since those TV series years that Star Trek slowly went from being conquerin’ fightin’ bitchin’ brawlin’ men – to shows that culminated in The Orville and Galaxy Quest, with their far more equitable treatment of ALL characters. It seems it really was only then that we stopped trampling on every racial and gender stereotype and started becoming involved in a culture that spans the Universe.

And of course, sci-fi is always based on the contemporary society but projected along the timeline by the authors. What was foretold about human relations in the middle Star Trek series is what’s only just becoming a new norm. Such as acknowledging traditional lands and peoples.

I notice that contemporary sci-fi is slowly adapting to new ideas, and I hope we end up with sci-fi that points the way to a new and better planet, one where we may just start to be respectful not just to each person’s “country” but also to the idea that this planet is our spaceship, our world, and our life support system not some great big glittery toy to wreck because we can’t understand why anyone else should be upset when we pull the wheels and arms and legs off it.

I think we should stay tuned in. Things might go better from now on.

Podcast Links:

Here’s a list of podcasts that showcases the progression of sci-fi, and also a selection from our ABC Radio here in Australia:

• ABC RADIO PODCASTS
• ABC Big Ideas
• Conversations
• Rum, Rebels & Ratbags
• (just a small selection to start you off…)
• SCIENCE FICTION PODCASTS
• Asimov’s Science Fiction
• Makeshift Stories
• Escape Pod
• Relic Radio Sci Fi
• Lost Sci Fi
• The Other Stories

The above are just a small, tiny, infinitesimal even, sample of the podcasts that I’ve listened to and that bear some small relevance on this story. Mostly, I just wanted to share a few of them with you. I suggest you search multiple podcast catalogues to find the real gems – for instance, the Book Of Enoch has been turned into a multi-episode podcast if you want a real eye-opener about the Apocrypha of the bible.

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