Chapter 1 Forward. By William Plain

R’esum’e-William Plain. History

2011            Emeritus Professor,  Nagoya University of Foreign Studies 

1998-2011    Nagoya University of Foreign Studies, professor, Educational Linguistics 

1993–98       University of Tsukuba, Japan, professor, Educational Linguistics 

1990-93        Niigata University, Japan, professor, ELT 

1986-90        University of Torino, Italy, lecturer 

1989            Teacher Trainers course at Pilgrims English Language Courses, University of Canterbury (Great Britain) 

1987-89       MA TEFL from the University of Reading (thesis: ‘Awareness Training in the MA TEFL classroom’) 

1988            University of Reading, Great Britain, teaching on EAP summer course 

1985-88        Bank of San Paolo, Torino, Italy, teacher 

1980-85        Independent Teaching Service, Geneva, director 

1980            Development studies course at the Institut Universitaire des études de développement, University of Geneva (Switzerland) 

1978-80       Certificat en français moderne, University of Lausanne (Switzerland) 

1978-80        Cours Commerciaux de Genève, Switzerland, teacher 

1976-78        University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, lecturer 

1977            TEFL course by Pilgrims English Language Courses, University of Canterbury (Great Britain) 

1975-78        British Institute, Guimarães, Portugal, teacher-in-charge 

1974-75        British Institute, Bologna, Italy, teacher 

1972-75        Diplomas (4) in areas of natural medicine from British colleges 

1971-73        Export consultancy concerned with SE Asian – Australian trade 

1969-70        Australian Department of Trade and Industry, export research 

1965-69        BA (major in English Language and Political Science), University of Sydney (Australia)

Dear Bill Plain {my letter to William Plain 8th December 1922 seeking his support}

Re

Letter to Decimillennial Australia:

A Voice to the Nation

This edict of yours so impressed me when I started out to publish a book of Poems and Prose on the demise of the Lachlan Valley in Central Western New South Wales.

I have used it with acknowledgement and remuneration in both an e-book and a hard copy script. This is the link for the e-book https://books.apple.com/us/book/id6443457866

I’m in the process of launching the hard copy.

I have used it as an adjunct to voicing and reinforcing my opinions by way of poetry and prose.

I did go to school with you at Saint Francis Xavier in Lake Cargelligo.

But a  bursary took to you further on.

Sincerely 

Edgar Vagg

Ps. I wrote this letter earlier to let you know what I was doing. And now I have this wonderful letter from you. The flooding in the Lachlan is easing. At its hight it broke all records. Broke levies and flooded houses. But mine was high and dry.

{William Plain related to me sixth of December 1922}

Ed,

imagine my surprise to see someone making a contribution for my work on creative discussion, and in doing so providing a connection to a period aeons past when we sat in the same classroom in Lake Cargelligo, as though your gesture somehow establishes that year as a point of departure towards my lifetime of attempting to make sense of a few simple ideas, leading to my website, creativediscussion.org, arising from the insights of thousands of students, and the more recent earthsight.org, attempting to communicate with a much more recalcitrant audience of politicians and decision makers.

Your communication leads me to update my Earthsight project, and, in grateful recognition of your reminder, I have just now added a submission to parliament, “Act on Climate”, that I made in 2020 but hadn’t yet added to earthsight.org. Many thanks.

Eddie Vaggs description of this image (The magpie goose. We don’t usually see them in Cargelligo wetlands. But they were here in numbers in 2019 a particularly wet Summer.) Photo courtesy of Craig Cromlin and bureau of meteorology

Looking through my records, I find this email I am now replying to, and your reading of “A Country under the Weather”, with the insightful observation of “a people who knew that no land is won or lost by war”. In today’s moment of constitutional recognition, the assertion that “no land is lost by war” is a positive reminder that Australia has not been lost by a mere 2 centuries of invader wars, not when 2 millennia, 2 decimillennia, more accurately 6 or even 10  decimillennia, have created a civilisation, an exceptional people, with a unique export, a continental civilisation based on peace (peace between peoples and peace with country), as observed by Bruce Pascoe, as well as the transformative “I am responsible for country” (today we need to add: “and planet”).

In many of my Earthsight papers I have included a reminder from ancient wisdom that “insight is the key to creativity”, easily accessible in the simple process of Earthsight Discussion, a term I now use to refer to “Creative Discussion using Plain Pair Groups”, occasionally wondering whether this practice may unfurl the wings of the butterfly of chaos theory.  

“Act on Climate” is my latest attempt to make a little suggestion, while “Decimillennial Australia” (earthsight.org, March 2019) indicates who we need to be listening to: the “product of wounded country”, who might even be helped by helping the larger world to actually see.

Decimillennial Australia has probably done this before, recovering from major catastrophes; surely the separation of Tasmania and loss of coastal plains (continental shelf), what we know as the Deluge, was one, and the present ongoing Anglo deluge calls not simply for a Voice to Parliament, but even more, a “voice to the nation”, First People generated and totally independent, arising from creative interaction within multiple communities, which, who knows, might perhaps be facilitated by the “creative ideas (that) ripple out across communities and organisations” of Earthsight Discussion.

Perhaps planetary change can start down along River Road. 

Speaking of rivers, I hope you are not being flooded out at the moment. I’ve never driven along River Road, but using Google Earth I can imagine you may be at considerable risk. Murrin Bridge seems to be even more at risk. 

Regards,

Bill

William Plain
Emeritus Professor 
www.creativediscussion.org & www.earthsight.org
plain@earthsight.org

On 30 Oct 2019, at 09:43, Edgar Vagg <edvag@me.com> wrote:

Bill.

I met you in Lake Cargelligo at your mother Molly ne Chanter”s funeral memorial service. Was impressed withCreative Discussion using Plain Pair Groups

The drought and the severe stress created in the Lachlan Valley has brought a small group, Cargelligo Wetlands together. Conventional meetings are still being held and I will eventually bring up your ideas of plain pair groups. At the moment I have another important agenda. To release my book of poems spanning my life experiences in Lake Lake Cargelligo . I’m working on an EPUB for Apple Books of the contents. It’s poems and prose I have written and gathered together over the years . They are mainly environmental. And push the same agenda as you that humans are stupid. I have mentioned your work from 

creative discussions.org. I can send you a link for your perusal. It’s a draft at the moment. Created on Pages on an Apple MacBook Pro laptop. I’m aiming to have an impact on citizens attitude towards global warming with its release. At First an E-book with audio readings of the poems on Apple Books and eventually a hard copy with audio included. I’m including  a sample poem in audio in a following email.

Edgar Vagg 

703 River Road

Lake Cargelligo 

NSW 

2672

Phone 0428981287

Billy Plains Edict

This his his letter to Decimillennial Australia.

A Voice to the Nation published in Earthsight.org in March 2019

Description of image by Eddie Vagg (Lake Ballyrogan an original ephemeral lake against the Lachlan Range not far from ‘”Atholstane” Bootawa Road where William Plain was raised. It was converted in the 1950s to Lake Brewster water storage linking it to the Lachlan River.)

The already established Anthropocene Mass Extinction, the 6th major extinction, for which the dominant world civilisation is responsible, is now leading us in the direction of exponential global warming and civilisation collapse, or even worse.

We need help, the world needs help, and the urgent need for long-term global sustainability seems to point to First Peoples, and particularly the Australian indigenous civilisation, as among the few who hold the keys to the future. The very long term continuous and highly successful nature of Australian culture and land management over multiple tens of thousands of years means “Decimillennial Australia” needs to establish a “voice to the nation”, to advise on the best way to transform the totality of our civilisation so as to assure that there can be a future. There is a continuum from homo sapiens sapiens to homo stupidens stupidens which englobes whole cultures, entire continents, over centuries and millennia. Ours, the so-called ‘western civilisation’, in many key respects is at the homo stupidens stupidens end of the spectrum.

(Francis Xavier School Lake Cargelligo. William plane received a bursary from here to further his education.)

The Australian decimillennial culture in its historical dimension is undoubtedly at the homo sapiens sapiens end. I am inviting those in the indigenous community with ‘access’, to reach back beyond 1788, beyond the two centuries of destruction and belittlement, back into the depths of that culture, and bring forth the knowledge, the wisdom, the essence of 100,000 years of an ever-developing culture, community and responsibility for the earth. Today, this century, that knowledge may well be the key to the future, the key to there being a future. The new Australian culture of two centuries, along with that of much of the present world, is destroying our planet. That’s the meaning of the term, ‘the Anthropocene mass extinction’, which has its origins with the industrial revolution – about the time the doctrine of Terra Nullius arrived on Australian shores. 

Caption

(Governor Phillip. “We decided to compromise. We keep the land. The mineral rights. Natural resources. Fishing and timber. And in return we will acknowledge you the traditional owners of it”.)

We don’t realise what we have done, and don’t know how to change. But our problem is now the problem of all peoples, those who have caused the present situation, as well as those who have always worked to contain the damage and respect the planet. It is to be hoped that the most ancient of those wisdom cultures, perhaps the most peaceful and the most responsible, can now become the guide that can advise our leaders and our people – and find ways to lead them to listen and be informed. Looking at the world today, much of the planet is the detritus of the brutality of the Western search for domination and conquest – ever perfected by today’s corporatocracy, financeocracy and oligarchy. The Earth herself is now looking to you, to the people who have tended the earth for 100,000 years, spanning geological catastrophes that today we seek to ignore, while closing our eyes to similar ecological catastrophes we have already created in ‘our’ epoch of the Anthropocene. The 10 millennia that has seen the development of what is now the ‘western civilisation’ that dominates, destroys and is slowly reducing to detritus the major part of the entire world population and its natural diversity evidently do not carry the seeds of wisdom we are desperately in need of today. On the contrary, the 10 decimillennia of Australian civilisation, the peoples who eschewed the deceptive riches of quantity for the wealth of quality, can present the essential understanding that can lead this country, and the entire planet, to a new world, a world of people and planet, rather than a world of profit and power for the few.

We need your assistance to avoid a futurecide that could be worse than the Permian Mass Extinction. The dominant world culture does not have the answer. Any attempt to avoid the risk of exponential warming while using the same technologies and structures that caused it is doomed to failure. We need something new, something ancient, the wisdom and expert knowledge that guided the most successful and sustainable culture and land management of all time, with its respect for life, for community, for country, for planet. There we may find a guarantee of a long-term future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren, and beyond. This process of creating a new world, a world with its origins in so many and varied traditions of sustainable agriculture and supportive communities around the world, would certainly make judicious use of the multitude of non-impactual aspects of the present world; much of our science and technology and culture can be compatible with a ‘planet with a future’. We also need to sustain a deep confidence in the evolutionary direction of the living planet over 4 billion years of dynamic homeostasis, despite the 5 major extinction events to date. We have now initiated the 6th, the first ever where a single species is uniquely responsible. But because we have caused it, through a species-wide reevaluation of our role in the ecosphere, we can initiate a process of fundamental and radical change that can make the world a much better place to live in, for all, and at the same time guarantee a future, for all. The threat of global warming can dissipate by quickly – very quickly – eliminating the causes of the Anthropocene extinction: the excessive human footprint and the carbon overload as well as the massive exploitation of both planetary and human resources.

To do this we certainly need to reevaluate the type of society and economy, the type of leadership, that have developed over centuries, if not longer. The important work of identifying and promulgating the values and the ways-of-being that can help us to draw back from the brink is the most urgent challenge our species has faced.

It seems this type of world that can guarantee that there will be a future has already existed, perhaps in many parts of the world, but on a very long-term continuous basis it has flourished most importantly in Australia. Today such a world desperately needs to be imagined, guided and nurtured into existence by those who have access in the not so distant past to a living culture that can inform our world today. By itself, our world seems incapable of achieving this.

Eddie Vagg.Member of Cargelligo Wetlands and Lakes inc.

I would also like to acknowledge the Wetlands Warriors in the boat on this cover post. Peter Nilsson and Richie Suckling who have allowed me to use their home turf to explore the Robinson Crusoe island and the extensive Cargelligo Wetlands adjacent to these properties. Photograph by Craig Cromlin

from left Richie,Peter,Eddie

photo by Craig Cromlin