Border tales - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 19: Re-imagining Australia
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tim Chandler
ON AND OF THE BORDER, the city of the Gold Coast exists on the edge in many respects. So close to New South Wales, its residents are the loudest proponents of daylight saving. A thin strip of intense development, the ‘Coast' is intrinsically littoral and liminal, a border outpost mutated into a holiday metropolis. Nevertheless, the concrete roundabout monument that marks the border at Coolangatta-Tweed Heads symbolises much less than the decrepit fence running along the south ridge of Currumbin Valley and up into the green mountains. Without force, the fence still retains authority.
What's more, the old fence's presence reminds hikers of the imagined communities that lie to either side. Though not a follower of the Rugby League State of Origin games, state identity nevertheless shapes who I am, and legally determines how I live my life. Benedict Anderson's concept of the imagined community applies just as well to intra-nationally bounded lands as it does to international nation-states. Anderson's theory holds that, as the citizens of a state can never know all the citizens over which their government presides, the community is imagined, insomuch that it exists psychologically and the distinctions between ‘us' on this side of the border and ‘them' on the other are hegemonic constructions. In Australia, our state identities operate as important distinguishing factors in people's identification of themselves and of others, established categories in which individuals may be easily packed up. Despite their quotidian importance, the relevance and power of state boundaries diminishes when we bring the internet back into our focus. Though the internet may incorporate barriers (e.g. user-pays access or government-produced net filters), it operates more or less borderlessly; therefore, as an additional platform from which people may act out certain (and no less important) aspects of their lives, it offers tantalising prescience of a borderless world.
The online game Second Life represents the most fully realised manifestation of the internet as an ulterior universe. An immersive, three-dimensional virtual world, or metaverse, Second Life incorporates real financial transactions, including a virtual currency that trades for a bit less than half a US cent. Users own property and conduct business, socialise, recreate, even pursue religious concerns. What's more, real-world organisations (including some governments) have established offices in the metaverse in order to engage users in an even more interactive manner than websites. Though philosophers and physicists have long supported the possibility of alternate realities or parallel universes, the transition from clunky and pixelated ‘virtual reality' games of the 1990s to ever more credible and intricate ulterior universes makes for interesting philosophical debate. So it was that an intriguing headline in the New York Times (online, of course) caught my attention in August 2007. Entitled ‘Our Lives, Controlled from Some Guy's Couch', the article discussed the hypothesis of Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom that our universe may itself be a computer simulation. He believes there is at least a one in five chance we are the product of a devoted gamer using the latest Apple MacBook to pursue a hobby in the library between classes, some time in the future. Putting aside the credibility of Bostrom's theory, it is difficult to doubt the possibility that (provided there is no environmental apocalypse) humans will before too long develop the technology to build a supercomputer capable of simulating a universe as intricate as our own.
STANDING ON MOUNT COUGAL, looking over the rugged remains of a volcano millions of years old, I forget all these things pretty quickly. The border fence gives out exhaustedly amidst a cluster of giant spear lilies, their large red flowers blazing in bright spring sunshine, a hundred or so metres down the path from the summit. Though television-transmitting towers top the hills to the east, planes fly noisily in and out of Coolangatta, and I am almost always within sight of circulating satellites, the simple fact of my being in and experiencing this place – a region in which my personal story is ecologically embedded – trumps all other concerns, even if only temporarily. As I stare down a cliff face a few hundred metres high (in some parts, bare grey rock; in others, festooned with wind-shaped plants) and down at the thick canopy of manifold greens below, down into a self-losing, oblivious and tangled complexity of rainforest, the fact of the interstate border in that moment counts for nought. Gary Snyder wrote that ‘the world is places': it consists of experiences of being there. The impacts of borders in our lives are a part of these experiences. Snyder's point rings true for me: no matter where I am, the place I am from and the one I am in ultimately determine who I am. ♦