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June 5, 2004
Trevor,
Some late night speculation.
Australian philosophy (empiricism) has remained in the thrall of a spectatorial epistemology based on a subjectivist self, reflecting on an objective world exterior to it.
Its rhetoric is steppped in visual metaphors of clarity, theory is based on observation, science was centred on manipulation and control of nature, an interested science is based on visual manipulation; the modern humanist subject stands apart from the world he surveyed and manipulated.
That is the philosophical core of our Australian culture. This staring aggressively at the land was embodied in in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme of the 1940s. The engineers and technocrats never saw themselves a part of,or situated within, the ecology of the country.
The ecological devastation of that scheme for the Murray-Darling Basin was what remained hidden. It was disclosed 50 years latter.
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