... because we humans can only work for a future we can imagine.

'PAINTING THE FUTURE REAL' LAUNCH

'Painting the future real' was formally launched at the Footscray Community Arts Centre on Friday 31 May, 1996, by Paul Clark, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University of Technology and Deputy Chairperson of the Western Regional Development Organisation (WREDO), and Sandy McCutcheon, producer/presenter of ABC Radio National's 'Australia Talks Back'.

Paul Clark: I'd like to welcome everyone and draw a link with some of the people here this evening who are associated with Habitat, an organisation I was first introduced to some years ago when we were looking at how development should be addressed in the western region of Melbourne. At the time, we'd spoken to a lot of people and asked them what the primary issue was for the western region. And the word that came back to us was -- 'image'. It mattered not, at the time, what the reality was. It mattered only that people had a negative image of the western region of Melbourne, and no matter what changed, that was the image they carried with them. It seems to me that one of the common elements of the two launches we are participating in today, is that as far as the western region is concerned, it's the future that has to be the positive 'image', and not the past. But how do we move people from one to the other?

I often listen to the 'Goon Show' on ABC Radio National and so sometimes catch the 'Science Show' which comes on immediately afterwards! Not long ago, there was an item concerning how people listen -- and apparently we listen best and understand best when we have a visual image in front of us. If we don't have a visual image to focus on, we don't learn, or listen, or absorb information as well as we could. And Imagine The Future is clearly an organisation that is trying to create positive images of the future for the inner eye, the imagination we carry with us.

Early on in the process that led to this project, Merrill put a great deal of thought into trying to understand how people see the future. She recounts how she once saw a collection of young people's art work in which they had been asked to draw images of the present and the future. Their pictures of the present were active with lots of things going on, and some students had included themselves in their drawings. Their pictures of the future, however, were either very content-free in that there was nothing greatly exciting happening in them, or they were fairly depressing. And that has been the way young people, in particular, have viewed the future for some time -- although I have noticed over the last short while, that some people seem to be seeing things much more positively, which is a good sign.

As far as the western region of Melbourne goes, there are many things either currently happening or about to happen that will generate very positive views of the future, comparable to the positive image people clearly had of this region years ago when it was one of Australia's primary manufacturing and industrial areas.

'Painting the future real' started for me when Merrill and I met in my office at the Footscray campus of Victoria University. She mentioned in her introduction tonight the fact that I'm a physicist, and I have to say that it is relatively unusual for a physicist to have someone come into your office and say 'I'm from Imagine The Future'. As a physicist, you're immediately suspicious of anyone who even runs those three words together! But we kept talking and she told me she had this wonderful idea that, as an artist, she needed support for. That was fine because I had this immediate picture that artists are people who need garrets and I could probably find a garret around the university somewhere! But no, this was a different sort of artist. This was somebody who was an artist for the future. So I wasn't asked for a garret but rather 'do you have a connection to the internet'!

What was very positive about this interaction, was that we managed to find common ground pretty early. What was even more productive from the University's point of view, was that after I had facilitated the discussion between Merrill and Rodger Eade of our Faculty of Arts, he was able to not only make the internet connection possible, but to also find a room on the St Albans campus that was surrounded by a lot of other people. So that space became not only somewhere Merrill could use as a base, but also a place from which she could involve other people in the project and move on to the activity and outcomes we'll see a little of today when she and her colleagues present their preliminary 'work in progress'.

Sandy McCutcheon, the guy without a suit over there -- although he assures me he does own one, but like all good suits, it's hanging in the wardrobe -- has flown from Brisbane today to be our main speaker at this launch. Some of you will have heard him on ABC Radio National and that should immediately tell you he's a New Zealander! Sandy produces and presents 'Australia Talks Back' five days a week. He finished his show at 1 pm today, then, having done a full day's work, leapt onto a plane and came down here. Melbourne has turned on its standard weather for you Sandy, but more importantly, it has turned on some wonderful people for you to talk to. So I 'd like to ask you then, to take us to the next stage of 'Painting the future real'.

Sandy McCutcheon: I'd first like to say that I'm actually terrified in front of this microphone. I'm used to having a microphone sitting on a desk in a studio with none of you anywhere in sight! The other thing that terrifies me is having to follow Barry Jones! The depth of knowledge and wit which that man can draw up is legendary! If I could pick the person I'd like to follow, it would be Pauline Hanson because then I'd have something to say! (Pauline Hanson is a Queensland member of Parliament whose remarks on Aboriginal people caused have outrage.)

I became involved in this project because I shot my mouth off on air a few times about the state of urban design in Australia, and for my sins, was invited to a national urban design workshop in Canberra earlier this month (May '96). At that workshop, there was one kindred spirit who was not wearing a suit, who was not a professor of something, and who was not pushing a particular barrow -- and that was Merrill Findlay. We sort of exchanged glances and thought 'OK, we can speak the same language', and then she asked me to come down here to Melbourne to launch 'Painting the future real'. That was fine, but then I had a look at what the project actually was, and realised that it needed a lot of thought.

But I too have seen drawings from children trying to imagine the future. The staggering thing that came through to me when I read Merrill's description of the bleak pictures of the future young people paint, was that the pictures I saw -- and they were in many ways almost identical to the ones Merrill described from young Australians -- were in a refugee camp in Mozambique, and a bombed out village in southern Sudan where the children were so traumatised that they couldn't speak. Some of them hadn't spoken for five or six years. But they could draw the present and they drew it as a very pleasant place. They could also draw the past -- which for them, was horrific. But when they were asked to draw the future .... what they drew was identical to the past. Those same horrific images.

Which brings me to the point that we can have all the academic speakers, all the physicists, all the environmentalists, all the internet experts in the world getting together to talk about the future, but it won't make one iota of difference to the future, if we cannot imagine it. So I'd like to paint a scenario about how it's possible to imagine this future.

When I arrived here this evening, I walked in and watched a river flow. (The Maribyrnong.) To me, the future, the past, and the present are a bit like that river. There are so many conflicting eddies in any moment, that trying to alter it seems almost impossible. If you dam the river, you're courting all sorts of disasters unless you really now what you're doing, as any environmentalist will tell you . So damming is out. But there is one thing you can do, and I'll get to that a little bit later.

I want to talk about the other bit of research I did for tonight. I went and talked with a group of young people in Brisbane about how they imagined the present, and how they see it being translated into the future. These were seventeen and eighteen year olds and their images of the future were expressed in words rather than pictures. And there were some rather interesting things that were part of their dreaming. The images they came up with were like a more subtle version of George Orwell's '1984'. Just as nasty as '1984' but much more subtle. The biodiversity on the globe being destroyed minute by minute as we speak, the gene stocks of plants being reduced in number, agriculture destroying land and not actually being sustainable for the future .... these issues were really strong in the young adults' minds.

These students also pointed out to me, that in a week we call Aboriginal Reconciliation Week, we have the thoughts of someone like Pauline Hanson in the ascendancy. Research done by the Reconciliation Council -- and I talked to Council chairperson Pat Dodson about this only a couple of days ago -- shows that a majority of Australians hold the same views as Pauline Hanson, it's just that she is articulating them. To me, that's a horrifying thought.

We often get together in groups like this and know that we are amongst like minded people. But the political agenda of this country, the ideas, the dreaming of this country, is being set by 'A Current Affair' and 'Sixty Minutes', not by the '7.30 Report', nor by the preachers in the pulpits of this country. These people produce their shows without a single consideration for the victims they leave along the road -- and here in Melbourne, you'll know who I'm talking about -- and they do it at the cost of both truth and of decency. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is often criticised for being biased as you know, and I for one, will put up my hand now and say 'yes, I am biased': I think that where there is a truth to be spoken, it should be spoken.

Now I know you have listened to a light hearted speech from Barry Jones, and I'm sorry, but I can't do that, because I think this imagining the future is incredibly important. And unless we get passionate about it, unless we turn around our own dreaming and the dreaming of our children, then we are going to be swept down that river into a future where we don't want to be.

But the one hope is the chaos we see around us -- because the opposite side of the coin of chaos, is opportunity. Where there is chaos there is opportunity. And the like-minded people can grasp this opportunity to dream a future that is as real and possible as they can imagine. But they need to find some way to alter that river I was talking about before, to bring that future about.

A long time ago, I was very lucky to be mountaineering in New Zealand. Up on top of this glacier, was a small stream and while I was idly sitting beside it, I flicked a few stones over, and sent the stream down the mountain in another direction. That incident came back to me the other day -- because that is exactly what we need to do. We need to go back to the core of the river, to the core of our dreaming, and ask ourselves 'how can we change this?' How can we set a template in place that will create pure water, if you like, further down stream. And it came to me that the one thing we can do, is have a very simple template that we apply to everything we do in our own lives, and pass that on -- as educators in the university, as multimedia artists, as contributors to the internet, whatever we're doing in our own lives.

Whether we're architects, whether we're urban designers, whether we're academics, whether we're unemployed, we should remember one thing: that nothing that is not based on social justice is sustainable. It's a very simple concept and we lose sight of it time and time again. If it is not based on social justice, it is not sustainable. If you put that at the core of your blueprint, if you put that in your urban design and your city plans, then maybe you don't end up with your parks being turned into race tracks, or your river banks into casino sites. You actually get something that is there for the good of the people, that is contributing to people's lives in some positive long term way, rather than something that is for short term economic rationalist gains.

That economic rationalist dream is a nightmare. It's a nightmare that tramples over people, bulldozes over people, and we need to stand up and say that. I'm in a really privileged position because I get to talk to an awful lot of people all around this country every day, and through Radio Australia, to people all around the world. And we have another broadcaster here who speaks to the Vietnamese community within Australia and though Radio Australia, to people in Vietnam. But we need not just people in our position, but everyone to start thinking about this: that if it's not based on social justice, it's not sustainable.

We're participating in the launch of this project tonight, and I know from checking out the credentials of the people involved, that they have those values at the core of what they're doing. The reason they are doing what they're doing, is that they believe they can change things for the better. And we've all got to start having that belief as the simple template that becomes the imperative for everything we do.

I've said enough for you to perhaps find a couple of thoughts that are useful, but I'll leave you with the words of an old Buddhist teacher of mine, a Tibetan Llama. The very first thing he taught me was that there are four noble truths in Buddhism, and then he taught me a prayer. Whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jain, a Hindu, or a non-believer, or if you can't get your head around the statement 'If it's not based on social justice then it's not sustainable', then please put your head around this very simple Buddhist prayer:

May all beings have
happiness and the cause of happiness,
and may all beings be free of
suffering and the cause of suffering.

If we live our lives like that, then we ARE talking about sustainability. And with that, I have officially launched 'Painting the future real' and I wish it all the best.

The launch of 'Painting the future real' was preceded by the Australian launch of 'The Foresight Principle: Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century' by Richard Slaughter (Adamantine Press London 1995), by Barry Jones AO, Federal Member for Lalor. Both events were organised by Imagine The Future Inc and Habitat Melbourne Trust, with the support of Victoria University.

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[Page history: created and first published on www.ecoversity.org.au as part o f Painting the future real (1995-97), the prototype for Redreaming the plain (1998-2002); taken off-line in 1998 and re-posted in its original form in July 2004 as a web archive. For more information contact redreaming@rmit.edu.au.]