Lines in the sand
I'm standing at the edge of a lagoon near the small town of Nyngan in central New South Wales, talking to Aboriginal children about their futures. These bright tomorrows go under the rubric of learning and earning', a program that has been developed elsewhere using a predictive process I am not familiar with. I'm here to sell them that vision: I'm supposed to be a role model, telling them they can achieve anything if they work hard and show up and smile a lot. So I show up for this excursion to Nyngan. I smile and get to work trying to teach black kids in the bush about their bright economic future while grounding them in the proud traditions of their past.
In the sand I draw lines to represent the scene laid out before us across the lagoon and beyond three lines representing the river, the old disused railway bridge and the newer highway bridge. But you can't really understand those unless you understand the different eras and economies that used each of them as part of a supply chain, so more lines are added to represent these elements. You also need to know what happened before that; map out all the relationships and you might see a pattern that represents the future, because all time is one time. But when I do that, the future I'm seeing and the future I'm selling are two different things.
There is an old rusted fish trap on the bank, left over from mission times. Beside it I sketch out the shifting economies represented in this vignette-traditional river-based economy, to mission economy, to riverboats transporting cotton and wool, to rail doing the same after the river was destroyed, to the highway with oil tankers and trucks filed with low-grade ore buzzing past. From settlement onwards, locals in each era believed the system to be stable and planned their futures around it.
They thought, 'We will farm sheep!' and invested all their money and training and time in that, raising their children in it. They thought the incredibly abundant pasture would last forever, not being aware that these fields had ben carefully cultivated by the Aboriginal people who were custodians of the river country, and that the cessation of this custodianship combined with the introduction of rapacious sheep would destroy this resource completely, along with the topsoil. They didn't count on the industry becoming dominated by a few giants that would squeeze them out, either.
Economic refugees from that catastrophe thought, We will become shearers!' and invested all their training and time and effort in that career, raising their children to follow the family trade. But the work was variable and not well paid. Some got jobs on the steamboats shipping wool along the rivers, or on the docks. Children had aspirations of becoming steamboat captains. We can all be steamboat captains if we work hard enough! People were trained and educated and built lives around this as though it would last forever. But when the scrub was cleared and the last of the topsoil ran into the river, it silted up and the steamboats stopped running.
Railway! Human ingenuity to the rescue! There were no longer as many sheep or as much wool. They planted out cotton and other things in the depleted soil, brought fertiliser on the trains to coax crops out of the dead ground.
Copper was mined and transported. Children had aspirations of becoming train drivers. We can all be train drivers if we work hard enough! People were trained and educated and built lives around the rail and the cotton fields as though it would all last forever. But those train tracks now are twisted, rusted, abandoned. Years later, most had to admit that farming was not viable on this devastated land-base and left in droves. Suddenly there were agricultural towns in the region with a majority Aboriginal population again. With the alarming potential of these lands returning to their traditional custodians, policing became the only growth industry in the area.
But the next layer of bridge and highway did well for a while. The last of the copper was doggedly scraped from the earth; oil and gas were found further inland and people became miners riding a boom. Infrastructure projects for the mines would provide jobs forever! Children had aspirations of leaving school as soon as possible and earning more than the school's principal just by holding a stop sign in a mine. No particular skills or knowledge were needed.
They bought quad bikes and jet skis and discovered new and exciting uses for the choked and muddy river.
At the end of the mining boom, as construction jobs dried up and unemployment rose and interest rates fell, the next generation of infrastructure—towers with broadband signals offered hope of new lands, cyberspaces to colonise. Children had aspirations of IT careers and moved away to the city, where they served coffee and rubbed the bloated feet of baby-boomers while finding entertain-ment, if not employment, in their electronic devices. In their digital ghettoes there were endless new worlds and resources to discover and this could last forever, without limits, Or at Icast until the rare earth metals required to power their devices ran out.
I tell those children who are thinking of dropping out of school and going to TAFE or trying for a job in a super. market that these economies fall apart fairly regularly and you don't want to be on the bottom of them when they do. I look around at their faces, either blank or scared or angry, and realise that nobody wants to hear this. I need to show them how to read patterns and see past, present and future as one time, and let them navigate the system themselves.
With another group of young Aboriginal protégés in Western Australia I take them on regular excursions walking Country with Noel Nannup, who is a local Elder here. He says things like, 'It is going to rain in twelve minutes, and the kids time it on their phones and laugh in amazement when his prediction comes true. He predicts events like an annual emergence of flying ants from the ground, then follows seasonal signals, winding through the bush with us to stop under a tree, then snaps his fingers-Now! —as the ants explode out of the ground in that instant.
What can I do with that? Say it is amazing and ask him to tell the kids stories about growing up in the bush?
Ask him to make us a damper and show us how to throw a boomerang and tell the kids they can follow their dreams and do anything? Nah. I ask him to explain the patterns of his thinking in making predictions, and whether the kids could apply those patterns to contexts beyond the bush. So he shows them his process of pattern thinking and even shares how he uses it to follow stock markets and economic trends. His process is all about seeing the overall shape of the connections between things. Look beyond the things and focus on the connections between them. Then look beyond the connections and see the patterns they make.
Find the sites of potential risk and increase, like judging where the ball will go in a football game.
Later I do a workshop with those Western Australian children on the monetary system, reminding them of what the Elder showed us. I get them to make a pattern from this symbol:
The pattern over the next hour spreads intricately over a massive sheet of paper, in between reading, viewing videos and talking about the structure of the monetary system. At the end of the lesson they have to find patterns in the random, complex image on the paper and align these with patterns they discern in the monetary system. They are a little alarmed at the sustainability issues that emerge in their analysis.
One student in particular develops a high level of understanding of pattern thinking that he can apply to nost problems. In another session, he is present on an excursion to a beach that is eroding into the sea and must be fortified with concrete and sandbags to protect the buildings and property there. The children are asked to design an engineering solution to the problem.
It seems as though this boy is not engaging with the task. He stands under a clump of she-oak trees and stares out at the sea while the others draw and build models of walls and spits and elaborate engines. A non-compliant student, looks like. Misbehaving. Maybe I should punish him, humiliate him in front of his peers until he complies with the work task. He is not achieving outcomes. Not delivering against performance indicators to close the gap.
I walk over and ask him what is going on. 'Well, it's all fucked,' he says. Maybe I should pull him up for inappropriate language. Instead I ask him what he means.
He talks about what he's learnt from Pop Noel about the she-oak trees and underground freshwater flowing beneath them where they grow like that on the coast. He points out those flows into the sea and tracks the subtle movements of the sand out there in the tides and currents, tracing the pathways of constant motion all along the coast, infinite white grains swept up and deposited on new beaches in cycles of cleansing and renewal. He points out a spit in the distance that has been built to block that flow and keep the sand on one beach for its residents, noting that new sand can't be deposited here now because of it.
He mentions dozens of other constructions like this along the coast, and the dredging of sand further out to sea to deposit on the beaches and maintain them as real estate and public facilities.
Then he turns around and points at the buildings, observing that they are mostly made out of concrete, which is made mostly out of sand, much of which is dredged from the ocean floor leaving holes and gouges in the seabed that fill up with sand again. That the sand moves around in its cycles, but never makes it back to the beach. Or worse, the seabed slumps into those holes and the beach then collapses further into the sea. 'You can build all the levies you like, but those fuckin' buildings are gunna go back into the sea where they came from.'
Well. As I always say, if you want to find the next generation of great thinkers, look in the detention room of any public school.
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