Swancon 2018, Cleverman, and putting the apocalypse in perspective
Spent Easter at Swancon as has been our habit for… well, most of the current century (Swancon 2000 was my first, and I’ve only missed a couple since). I don’t usually get around to saying much about the con (and even this post has been delayed thanks to a weird tumblr punctuation glitch that fortunately looks to be fixed now) – but there was one panel in particular this year that stayed with me.
Context: our guest of honour this year was Ryan Griffin, one of the creators of the Cleverman TV series – the world’s first ‘superhero’ show inspired by Australian indigenous mythology. Like most old fandom cons of that era, Swancon is still pretty white, but does make more-than-token efforts towards inclusivity nowadays. I don’t think we’ve had an indigenous guest of honour before, though – and quite apart from bringing us a behind-the-scenes look into one of the few original Australian sci-fi series to come out in recent years, Ryan was an all-round great guest.
The panel was 'Post-apocalyptic Australian landscapes.’ Surprisingly, this didn’t turn into one hour of discussing the Mad Max franchise, which is what I’d mostly-expected going in. The first to speak (and old white woman called Davina, who’s been part of the Perth fan community for I-don’t-know how many years) talked about her experience arriving in Australia at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, travelling with her husband to her new home out at Woomera – not only in the middle of nowhere, but also the site of an Australian Air Force base (and one busily running missile tests, for maximum omnipresent reminders of the worst-case-scenario). She painted a stark picture of her first impressions of the desolate Australian landscape, travelling through vistas of bare rock, empty even of the famous Aussie red dust, sometimes broken only by a single tree as far as the eye could see. Moving through that land, she said, it was far too easy to believe that the world wasn’t just ending, but had ended already.
The other panelists (one writer and one scientist) added their own perspectives of how they’d envisaged the apocalypse taking place in this country, whether in urban or rural landscapes, through climate change or war, flooded cities and post-carbon economies, etc.
And then the moderator got to Ryan, introducing him with a few words to the effect that she knew he had his own very different take on what post-apocalyptic Australia would look like.
(And this is the moment where a little voice inside me went “Oh, shit” because it was completely fucking obvious where this was about to go, and I am ashamed to admit that this angle had not even occurred to me until that very moment)
Well, said Ryan, as far indigenous Australians are concerned, the apocalypse has already happened. He went on to talk about the decimation of their populations after white colonisation, all the languages and stories that are gone now, and never coming back…
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