A Writing Revolution

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the volume of correspondence travelling both across the world and within Australia grew enormously; for the first time in their lives, ordinary people with little previous experience of writing started to write to absent friends and relatives as a matter of urgency. The democratisation of writing practices took a quantum leap forward in the decades leading up to, and including, the First World War. A writing revolution occurred, and it was partially fuelled by mass emigration from Europe to various destinations including Australia. Sending and receiving mail to and from ‘home’ was vital to emigrants’ well-being and mental equilibrium, as their letters sought to re-connect writers with the familiar social world from which they were separated. Before discussing emigrants’ letters, however, it is appropriate first to examine the conditions in which they wrote and received their mail. A study of the postal infrastructure which determined the cost, rhythm and security of epistolary exchanges is a necessary preliminary to a consideration of the correspondence itself.

In 1840, Rowland Hill revolutionised the English postal system by introducing a flat rate of one penny and, more importantly, abolishing the payment-on-receipt system, and replacing it with pre-payment represented by postage stamps. In 1849–1850, the Australian postal system was transformed in the same way. A quarter of a century later, another innovation simplified and further expanded the volume of correspondence in circulation: the invention of the postcard. These changes contributed to the upsurge in demand for mail services in the second half of the century.

What do poems do? asked Anthony, and off we went in a long meander through activist anecdotes, one of them about you (John) stopping a bulldozer with a poem: a Metallworker’s unionist got down from the cabin and got yakking with you about how his boss was a bastard. That meandering answer to Anthony’s question was a foretaste of the later walk through the old town, past the Baroque Jesuit College (not Jesus College mate!), past Hegel’s pub, across the market place and up the incline next to the Townhall with the dates of all its successive avatars since 1500, around the bottom of the Schlosssteige, then past the Stift, where Hegel and Hölderlin and Schelling once swapped stories of history and revolution. Down the Schlosshalde and its steep cobbles under the towering ramparts of the castle, to the Neckar and the island where the river splits to flow around either side of the alley of huge old plane-trees. Riverrun. A meander around the old town that continued on as we skirted puddles, took a tangent around the quietly neglected fascist statue with its Wehrmacht helmet and its half-moon of a low wall to welcome some forgotten Thing. And there, on one of the enormous planes, a cawing and careening as the rooks settled in for the night ten meters above our heads.

What Is the Church Planting Movement?

David Garrison defnes the Church Planting Movement as “rapidly multiplying indigenous churches planting churches that sweep across a people group or population segment […]” Garrison argues that the key to the Church Planting Movement is that it occurs at high and recurring rates, with a known and identical pattern of action, accelerating the local growth rate and aiming to reach the maximum number of people in the community. The second signifcant part is replicating the founding of churches from the home camp to increase the number of believers, which is why churches set goals to add more churches in the same city, district, or state in which they operate. Finally, there are additional parameters, such as the internal duplication of congregation members who set out to establish new churches in the same community and the possibility that these churches will be able to convey the message, thus changing the lives of devotees.

Jonathan Edwards puts his fnger down on Falwell's 1971 speech, called “The Church at Antioch,” which was spoken before a group of fundamentalist church leaders, as the speech that advocated for the church planting methodology. In this speech, Falwell distinguished between two types of churches. On the one hand, ethereal, transparent, universal and intangible churches attempted to conquer the entire world but lacked any members. He referred to them as universal churches, belonging to the national umbrella organization of churches that dealt with universal issues.

for Drew

Sleep is not viable and aloneness is a convenience I don’t fit with—all stories of filled space further erode these hills.

where they’ve been asked not to go by Elders, and it just keeps on, this injustice. The words ‘weather’

I suppose thought is of snow-wreaths because snow is predicted to fall on the southern ranges and walkers will go

and ‘climate’ won’t take the pressure of cascading meanings, that melt of wet-dry irony. And movements

of people are ticketed and ‘wave machines’ to send back dinghies to France are conjured by Tories.

Yes, Australia has been equally inventive— export-import…balance of trade, and the fruit from the lime tree has been

a dose of scurvy on the boat ride, dungeons at sea for animals and convicts, a tub of pianos, printing presses, tools

for cultivating a pastoral impetus, routes and roots and alliances and ‘solutions’— ‘policies’ of abandonment and claim.

—JK

Selective authority sharing Natural selection. Choice. Range of mildness. Adjustment. Variation. Application. ‘Measured approach’. Value-adding. Added to good measure. Steady as it goes. Flows. Each response. Each differing value. Each integrity and virtue. Contractually bound to code of extraction and armour— love for fellowship, love of one another, lovely economies.

Conventions of integrity at the coalface and conflict zone— starvation trade technology mining know-how officer values. Easy to riff on a statement, declaration, refrain, chapter & verse, anthem, meme, chorus, motto, catchphrase… apophthegm. Codifying values some swap a phoneme for a ruling, a phrase for a judgement, an action for a discipline.

Whistleblowing blow blown away values blowhards high-pitched annoying ear rustle go away ear rustle anguish away away! low level of wellness and cherish healthy decision-making and bothering courage quotas bothering brave industry standards in mining defence technology related areas of high standards integrity deep values well-oiled true tried and tested against extinction across the board.

Measured egalitarianism measured justice measured values measured integrity measured behaviourals measured. Stress value values tenses valued customer valuation of frightened few mocked mass behaviour mocked and ridicule of people by people by values by measured regular rhythmic bowel movements of nation names on cenotaphs sunrise language deletion. Heaven scents.

Try: occlusion. Try what you erase, delete, will alter to suit your taste.

Does that mean suffering you don’t get to define place? That’s possible. A determiner

of rights to pass through, to lock onto, to rearrange as you tell another

elsewhere what you see when you step out of the containment field?

Try: unjust. Adjustable humanoid. Memorable for those who are there, a tangent in the rebuilding

peer to peer. Baroque augmentations projected as liberty.

An insect dying is barely noticed by some [of us?], by few

[‘observers’?]—the body of a little egret noticed, processing cryptographically to increase the bits of output, more bits sucked of essence. Who else noticed,

specifically outside it’s [all] being ‘in place’?

—JK

‘The Future Library’ is a project initiated by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson and implemented in a remote forested area north of Oslo, Norway (Future Library 2020).1 In May 2014, Paterson planted one thousand Norwegian spruces in the Nordmarka area. The trees will be felled one century from now and will be milled to create the paper upon which a slowly accumulating anthology of fictions by internationally renowned writers will be printed. The anthology, to be slowly collated over the course of the century, will be entitled ‘The Future Library’. Every year since 2014, one author has presented a previously unpublished manuscript at a ceremony at the Nordmark plantation. So far, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Sjón and Elif Shafak have contributed to the project. (Karl Ove Knausgård was slated to hand over his manuscript in the forest September 2020, but the event was postponed because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. After a hiatus of two years, 2022, Knausgård, Ocean Vuong and Tsitsi Dangarembga came together for a common handover.) Each manuscript is deposited, sealed, in the new Bjørvika branch of Oslo's public Deichmanske Library, in a special Silent Room created from wood felled to make space for Paterson's replanting. Over the span of a century, this ‘Future Library’ will gradually accumulate until it reaches maturity in 2114 and will be released for publication.

Several of the authors have commented on their sense of placing a literary message in a bottle and posting it to the future by participating in such a project (Flood 2015; 2017; 2019). The project relativizes one's sense of the human life-span and the temporal dimensions in which one writes. There is always a delay between writing and reading.

Are you in pain? Creative Health may be able to help. But frst, let me speak more generally.

Creative Health is a way of paying attention. Creative Health is what you do, how you do it, and who you are as you do it. This means that Creative Health is all-encompassing: your dynamic response to everything that happens in your day and everything that happens in your musical life.

For some people, health might mean a series of numbers: red blood cell counts, cholesterol, weight, blood pressure. If your numbers are okay, you’re okay. This is a narrow defnition, and I’m using it here just to make an argument. It doesn't matter if few people believe in this defnition.

For other people, health is a broader concept. Diet and exercise, relationships, sleep patterns; posture, manner of dress, manner of speech; family life, work life, spiritual life: the list is long. You might have an unhealthy job, for instance, or be in an unhealthy relationship; your bed might be uncomfortable and causing you short-term or long-term harm; you might be addicted to irritation and frustration, to cynicism and arrogance. Health, good and bad, becomes synonymous with your entire existence. And taking care of your broadly defned health is a full-time job.

It's possible to have a healthy or unhealthy relationship with your musical instrument, with your colleagues, with the stage; with the scores that you study and interpret; with the totality of your career.

We walked point-to-point where we’d earlier walked. Whom does ‘we’ belong to if not us and the deceased?

Out of James Joyce, through Deleuze and Guattari, across the nexus of speech inscriptions, onion domes.

City of your birth-country you return from – to Berlin, to Mexico City, past the interrupted silhouette of Zwingli.

Nothing competitive in the ruction of citizen, false gods strewn along the banks of commerce.

I saw a swan dip and pull up a strand of ‘doublespeak’. I saw a machine questioning another machine’s existence.

A fountain spat and heavy clouds followed us into the bookshop where we read lacunae.

The surviving half of a co-operative, a duality of making, searches for words never spoken that you might speak now.

—JK

‘Pa is goin’ to write a whole letter by hisself’

Sybilla, the young, egotistical protagonist of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, carefully observed her employer M’Swat sitting down to write a letter. Her straitened family circumstances had compelled her to enter gainful employment as a governess in the M’Swat household, which she identified as a place of squalor, dirt and ignorance. She hated being there and wanted to leave. She wanted her parents to rescue her, and she needed a letter to this effect from the M’Swats. Now she looked on as:

‘A journal is a delightful thing’

In this and the following chapters, the focus shifts away from the autobiographies which in previous chapters provided us with rich evidence of Australian reading practices. Instead, it changes gear, to concentrate on other kinds of ego-documents and other uses of literacy, namely diaries and correspondence. Historians have usually analysed personal diaries for what they reveal about social realities beyond themselves, as this book has done in mining ego-documents for data on reading practices. John Castieau's diary, for example, gave us information on his admiration for Dickens and Bulwer Lytton, his book purchases at Melbourne auctions and his visits to clubs and libraries to read the newspapers. I approach everyday writings from a different perspective. Diaries like Castieau's are not merely vehicles for information; they also speak about themselves. They are, above all, texts, composed according to certain codes, rituals and traditions through which the data extracted by historians is mediated. As with any text, we must measure the importance of its rhetorical devices and narrative strategies.

I spoke to my mother on the phone in Melbourne this morning. The skype connection kept breaking down (how much that dates this piece!), but nevertheless, it was as if she was just down the road. She told me that Queensland is currently struggling with hundreds of bushfires. Also that one of our cousins has just been elected Green member in the State Parliament for the seat of Brunswick, having snatched it from Labor. Yesterday, she said, thousands of school children all over the country went on strike and marched on the state parliaments, demanding that the federal government undertake more concerted efforts to curb the headlong progress of global warming. The other day on the phone my father made the same remark: that the reality of global climate change has now settled in the consciousness of the broad majority of the population, and with it, the awareness of the degree to which governments have been inactive since the early 1990s when it was becoming definitely clear that climate change was a reality. The same trends can be seen here. This morning, on the eve of the Climate Change Conference due to start tomorrow in Polish Katowice, 36 000 people gathered in Cologne and Berlin to demand that the German government finally close down the coal industry (Demos 2018). And recently a group of scientists and activists lodged a lawsuit against the German government at the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe for dereliction of duty with regard to climate change and the responsibility it bears for the long-term well-being of its own citizens. No-one believes that there is any likelihood of the case being successful, but it’s an important milestone (Döschner 2018).

The intersection of religion and politics in the United States has often been a potent force, shaping not only domestic policies but also international relations. Among the many religious movements that have infuenced American politics, the rise of Christian Zionism stands out as a particularly powerful and complex phenomenon. This book, Jerry Falwell, Liberty University, Church Planting, and the Rise of Christian Zionism in the United States, delves into the life and legacy of Dr. Jerry Falwell, a man whose vision and actions have left an indelible mark on both American politics and the relationship between the United States and Israel.

This book is an extension of my doctoral dissertation, which was awarded by the University of Haifa in November 2023. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive examination of Dr. Falwell's impact on American politics, particularly through the lens of the church planting movement initiated by Liberty University graduates and the unique relationship Falwell cultivated with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

From its inception, Liberty University was envisioned by Dr. Falwell as more than just an educational institution; it was to be a hub for training and mobilizing a new generation of Evangelical leaders who would carry forward the conservative Christian agenda. This agenda was not limited to domestic issues; it had a signifcant international dimension, particularly in its support for Israel. The book traces the roots of this movement, exploring how the Evangelical community in the United States, under Falwell's leadership, became one of the staunchest supporters of Israel, infuencing U.S. foreign policy in profound ways.

When Joseph M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840, the impact of this painting at the height of the Industrial Revolution proved to be transformative, amplifying a debate on the atrocities of slavery on the occasion of the World Anti-Slavery Convention being held in London. The massacre that had occurred aboard the British slave ship Zong in 1781 (the subject of Turner's painting) proved to be consequential, fueling outrage while also standing as an important precursor in the context of debates on climate change, and “as a landscape painter his artworks show a sensitive awareness of the efect that the industrialized world was having on the environment.” Artistic and literary works ofer alternatives to racist and xenophobic media and political discourses and have an important role to play in critical thinking.

The Textuality of Empire

In the long-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, which began life in 1942, celebrities are invited to imagine themselves cast away on a remote island. They are ‘allowed’ to select certain items to accompany them in their imaginary exile: eight discs, usually musical works which occupy most of the programme, and one book. Only one, because they are all already automatically issued with a copy of the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare. The absolute necessity of those two items was taken for granted. British emigrants who found their way to Australia, whether by choice or by order of the state, had similar priorities. They showed the same disregard as the BBC for the cultural, religious and linguistic diversity of British society; and they too held fast to a small number of ur-texts which represented, as they perceived it, their heritage, their roots and their cultural epitome. These were, inevitably, the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare. The role of the Bible for early Australian readers will be discussed in Chapter 6; and here I add three further pillars of literary Englishness to the master-library of the nineteenth-century emigrant: Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In the chapter's final section, I look further afield, just as Australian readers often did, to recognise that although their reading tastes were oriented towards Britain, they often looked elsewhere for entertainment and instruction.

The key texts of the English canon were not simply emblems which reminded migrants constantly of home, although they may well have fulfilled this function, too.

The Beginning of Jerry Falwell's Journey

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) was a Fundamentalist Evangelical Baptist denomination pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia. He was born on August 11, 1933, into a family that sufered trauma. His father, Carey Falwell, killed his uncle, who was considered Lynchburg's “troublemaker.” This event shaped the future of his father and the rest of his family. Although the court acquitted his father, it did not change the course of his life. Instead, he became an alcoholic and sufered from it until his death. Jerry was only 15 years old at the time; however, his father's memory continued to shape his life over time. His father's fondness for alcohol was a signifcant trigger in his life to engage in the rescue and healing of alcoholism: “I believe that observing my father drinking heavily throughout my childhood has afected me, and that's why I have a hatred for that bitter drop, and why it has never been a problem in my personal life.” The Mother, Helen Falwell was an Evangelical Born-Again Christian who grew up in a family of 16 siblings, all working in their father's tobacco feld, harvesting tobacco leaves. Jerry's mother raised her children according to Evangelical Christian values, and he absorbed his love for Christianity from her. “I owe my personality to my mother; there's no question about it.

Imagine a world in which the forests of the earth are replicated in an almost magical way by a host of oceanic thickets – underwater woodlands whose canopies wave in aquatic breezes, and whose understoreys offers cover and nutrients for sundry sea-creatures. This is not some psychedelic ‘tale from topographic oceans’ (Yes 1973) but simple ecospherical fact. So-called ‘kelp forests’ are stands of giant tree-like seaweed plants growing on the coastal shelves off Tasmania, California and Ecuador and many other locations. Like their land-based kin, these algae forests are responsible for sustaining life on earth. ‘Kelp forests’ are primary producers: using photosynthesis they combine light and CO2 to produce the elemental organic (vegetable) matter that is at the base of the entire global food chain, contributing 1% of the earth's net primary production (Blakemore 2018, 5, fig.3). Warming seas, a major indicator of global climate change, currently threaten their existence, with effects not dissimilar to deforestation on land (Krumhansl et al. 2016). This is the scenario evoked by a recent poem by John Kinsella:

For over three decades now, I have been writing a series of ‘graphology’ poems – poems ‘about’ writing, identity, imprint, signature, the self in terms of community and inscriptions of the ‘natural’ world on the human, and vice versa, and where they do and don’t converse, always heavily intertexted with other texts (ranging from, say, the medieval poems of Villon to newspaper articles on the Sydney Olympics). In recent years, I have been writing ‘graphology endgame’ versions.

This is not because I decided to give up in my resistances to the ecological and social destructions of the increasingly fascist imposition of a ‘world order’ from the micro to the macro, not because of accepting we’ve gone beyond a planetary point of no return, but because I feel a need to write out of a figurative dynamic of actuality, and comment on the ‘state of things’ from that point. An earlier graphology poem, for example, was on ‘peak oil’; a later one ‘on the last three great flocks of Carnaby’s moving through the lower central wheatbelt’.

At present, I am in the ‘graphology spectre’ cycle, not only as an intimation of Marx and William Blake (along with Emanation, Shadow and Humanity, which constitute the fourfold structure of the human psyche in Blake’s imagination):