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David Arnault

Mirboo North, Victoria, Australia

I dropped out of UW in 1970 and traveled, catching up with friends who were volunteering at L’Arche, Jean Vanier’s wonderful community outside of Compiegne. I ended up spending the better part of a year in Paris, wandering the streets like a bum and writing very bad poetry. I returned to UW in 72 and finished a degree and working as a turnkey in the Campus Centre. My good friend Dennis McGann introduced me to the Chevron and I did a little bit of work on the paper. Near the end of this time at Waterloo, I also worked a bit with Tony DiFranco and Gord Moore on a literary journal they were producing. I was out of my depth, to be honest, but I admired those two people greatly. 

But I was ready to move on and I flew off again, hitting Europe at the time of the oil embargo following the six-day war. I get to saw European capitals not choked with cars and buses and that was a gift. I also learned how close the poor in the UK and elsewhere were to the edge, where friends had their working weeks reduced to two or three weeks and couldn’t pay the rent. Life was anxious for many but not all, a lesson we’ve been reminded of time and again.

I spent two years in Australia at a time when tertiary education was free and picked up a post graduate degree in education, then six months in New Zealand hiking, hiking and more hiking, learning to love the mountains. 

Returning to Canada and KW in 1976, I found many people still knew me as Jacob, Jacob Arseneault. The Jacob was a nickname I’d been given when I was an undergraduate, while Arseneault was a good Acadien name which, in a very low point in my life, I felt I had to change. And I did, to Arnault, and I still regret having done that. We need to sit with our pain, to befriend it: I would learn this in the years to come, but the decision still disappoints me.

Afte two years at Dumont, which I’ll talk about elsewhere, I get a job as production manager on the Imprint. This weekly was set up after the Chevron had been taken over by Larry Hannant and his Marxist Leninist colleagues. It was a pretty interesting time, and again I felt a bit in over my head, but Brenda Wilson and Sylvia Hannigan were working with me and kept me sane, more or less. After two years, I moved to Victoria and then to Whitehorse, where I lived for six years. I married Robyn, an Australian woman I’d met in New Zealand, and we had two daughters and eventually moved back to Australia. I worked in management for a couple of years before quitting and becoming a consultant, focusing on corporate environmental reporting. When my daughters had grown up I cut back my work to spend more time writing fiction, which I am still doing. 

In 2016, I went to Manila to take part in the climate leadership program started by Al Gore. Prior to that I had been writing about climate change, producing a fortnightly newsletter. I’m still working in that space, still writing fiction, still trying to undermine the gangsters running the planet, still trying to wake up the electorate. In 2018, I ran as a candidate for the Greens in the state election. I never believed I would win, but I felt the need to try to get people to at least THINK. Things have changed since then. We’ve had fires and floods and unparalleled destruction, and the gangsters have hunkered down and are becoming more outrageous. Outrageous: that is an adjective that can easily applied to most governments here and, sadly, in Canada. But we shall see … we shall see. 

In the photo, I am at home with a bowl full of feijoas and a very healthy mandarin tree behind me.    

Dumont and a life’s reflection

May 03 21

David Arnault

This story is about me, but it is more about how profoundly the people of Dumont changed me. I can look back now and see how markedly the course of my life altered, and it took place in and because of Dumont and for that I shall always be grateful.

In 1976, I returned to Ontario after three years overseas with absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do … worse what needed doing. The world seemed smaller than when I’d left KW, smaller and more like the planet James Lovelock would describe to me in later years. Somehow, I got a job at Global Community Centre, not that I had any particularly useful qualifications to work in Development Education, but I had a camera and I had been in Australia at the time of Gough Whitlam, a prime minister who had talked about a just society and who convinced me that we all had to work towards that goal. As PM, he had committed himself to finding a way toward social justice, including a path for the indigenous people of this nation to resolve the crimes of invasion. Keep in mind, this was not long after the last of the British nuclear tests of their nuclear weapons; I think ten of these bombs were exploded on Maralinga Tjarutja country, in what is now South Australia, and at the time few efforts were made to ensure that those people on country were safe.

Australia was not … is not unlike Canada in its relationships with our respective indigenous nations. I had travelled to Grassy Narrows while working for Imprint, and had interviewed the school principal and some of the kids and mums in the community, and the injustice I saw there (and read about before and after) branded me. Such injustice seemed beyond comprehension, and it seemed that way here.

Whitlam also took Australia out of Vietnam and it was a time when unions imposed green bans to prevent rogue developers from destroying green space in the cities. 

Suddenly, this ended. I was teaching at a catholic high school in the suburbs of Melbourne, and my principal, imagining Nixon’s resignation would be significant for me as a Canadian, called me out of my class, but he made no remark to any of the students or teachers when Australia’s own Prime Minister was removed by a coup. Odd, n’est-ce pas? For his egregious sins, Whitlam was removed from government through the duplicity of the opposition, governor general and rupert murdoch. This was the time of the Club of Rome’s dire predictions about the planet’s future. 

So perhaps my work of assisting with the production of ‘The Tomato Papers’ for Global’s development education program was the next step for me, the one just before Dumont, for when the funding ran out at Global, I was able to apply and joined a large intake of five including Kay Elgie, Lake Sagaris, Barb Droese and  Kerrie Atkinson. 

My eyes were opened further at Dumont. I can’t begin to tell you how wondrous were the steps involved in producing a publication, all of the steps, the Merganthaler computer, the fantastic Robertson graphics camera, with its lens lens in one room and the vacuum plate that held the negative in another. And mostly the human touch, the care that was taken to proof and double-proof the text. I can still see Moe and Alison going through the text, word by word, comma by comma. There was a care and a dedication present in that old building that was new to me. 

These skills, which I learned and which are still valuable to me, and the importance of the written word I found at work in that old warehouse, have shaped me over the past forty-five years, as did my colleagues, who all seemed to have a better understanding of politics and life, nuance and design, editing and purpose. I have no hesitation in claiming that those I worked with over those two years at Dumont nurtured the seeds planted during my three years outside of Canada. There have been many times in my life when I felt like I was swimming in murky waters, but Dumont was not one of those times. On the contrary, it was an institution of purpose and commitment, and the many hours we spent collectively helping other groups, Hysteria and Between the Lines, to name two, in producing important publications were part of my journey. 

As context, I went to Michael Power, a Catholic high school in Etobicoke for five years (I even taught at a similar school in the suburbs of Melbourne) and, in a way, my two years at Dumont was the first time I had the experience of collaborating with women, and let me say, the women at Dumont were intelligent, creative, purposeful and wiser than the boy I was back then … probably wiser than the old fart I am now … and they were exceptionally dedicated. I couldn’t be more grateful for the experience. I’m not downplaying the men I worked with back then … not at all … but, given my background, it was the Dumont women who stood out for me. 

It is important for me to say that now, for this is a time of push-back, a time when way too many men have become noisy and angry, when here in Australia cabinet ministers are commonly accused of bullying women, where the minister for justice has been accused of rape, where male government advisers get drunk and, on one occasion at least, rampaged through the parliamentary offices and masturbated on the desk of a female cabinet minister. It’s hard to believe … or rather, sadly, it is not hard to believe this, for we know that we live in a time of entitlement where the powerful are sociopaths. This is not a time, ironically, when we entitle the native people and learn from their wisdom, but when we entitle well-connected knuckleheads and pay them egregious amounts of money. We allow this … we consider it natural and we fawn over these people. Here it is often the result of private schools and old boy networks where such things appear to be nurtured … often but not exclusively. The good news is that women, indigenous people and the gender diverse are fighting back, but we are all struggling against this world of injustice and impenetrable obfuscation, where the entitled consider power to be their birthright.

For example, in my 30 years in Australia, there have been 495 Aboriginal deaths-in-custody and not once has there been a conviction. There have been five more of these deaths in the past fortnight. There have been many royal commissions and many, many recommendations, but none of these have been implemented by governments of any stripe. Children of eight, nine and ten are arrested without legal reason, for cursing, for looking like they might be up to mischief, hauled away and introduced to the criminal justice system, which subsequently changes them, draining them of everything but anger or despair. Sorry, that’s not fair. There are remarkable indigenous people here, certainly more intelligent, more compassionate, more knowledgable than the knuckleheads filling the benches of government. Knuckleheads is not my expression, but one used recently by a white journalist. And now, the government is planning to turn the Northern Territory, the last remaining symbol of Aboriginal country, into a gas field. Not long ago, on the day in the USA when the killer of George Floyd was convicted, a police conference was held in Queensland where some speakers were encouraging the police to surveil children as young as five, describing them as budding problems for society. Increasingly, the police in this country look and feel like a military force from some mean country. 

I won’t even go into climate change. I imagine the reputation of Australia is common knowledge. Frighteningly, Canada’s is not any better. I became a climate leader when I traveled to Manila for one of Al Gore’s training sessions and I love this work and will continue with it, but it’s up to the young now. My generation (and possibly the one following it, and the one following that) has done the damage. We must do what we can to help, but only the young can undo our laziness and complacency.

In Australia, rupert murdoch’s empire has a stranglehold on 65 percent of the media and hardly anyone is concerned. And now, we find ourselves on the threshold of unfathomable change. As I said on my profile, I ran for the Greens in the state election in 2018. It was a hopeless cause in this rural area of Australia, and I’m not Don Quixote, but I did it because I’ve been trying to at least get people thinking and discussing climate change, but so few were listening, and there was nothing in the media about climate change. I’m considering running as an independent in the next state election with only two policies: lowering the voting age to 12 and removing the right to vote for everyone over 60. Of course it’s silly, but how can we wake up the complacent, how can we even get them to think, to reflect, to struggle with contradictions, to face up to dissent, to really THINK and to reason and not be afraid … and even when we are fearful, to move forward anyway?

Action will be taken in time, but it will be action that protects the entitled and screws the poor … of that I am sure. The class warfare is ongoing.

I know I should be casting back my memory to Dumont in the seventies, and not shouting from a soapbox, but my memories from Dumont are now vague, and out of all that time I have been left with a smattering of details, but there are many times that do stand out clearly: late nights proofing and pasting two line corrections, darkroom work with the large negatives, meetings, lots of meetings, the rich vocal range of the Merganthaler, taking the plates to the Record for printing, talking to old typesetters there, examining the racks of hot lead type. I remember the first time I looked at the tape punched out by the Merganthaler and realised I could read it: amazing, even as I realised I was far from fluent. I remember good people, people I looked up to, wise and serious. Details? No there are few. I remember very little from the two retreats I went on. I’ve always disliked meetings, and I’ve attended a life-time of them, but what comes back to me from the retreats was the bonding, the music and fun, and once, at some lake, north of the city, I lay on a dock and watched the strangest creature climb up out of the water to get in the sun; it took few minutes to dry itself and then its shell split open and the dragonfly emerged, still larvae-like, but in thirty minutes it took on the full imago form, its wings glistening and it was gone. I was a city kid and this was a wonder. 

So here I am, 73 years of age, unmarried and a fabulously unsuccessful novelist of 20-odd offerings, missing my homeland with an ache, but with two beautiful daughters, five grandchildren and many good friends. I am watching the planet go to hell in a handbasket, the rich folk using snow shovels to push the wealth their way, the middle class up to their ears in debt, but supping on complacency, shopping and sport, the poor getting poorer every year, the government and opposition in lock-step in treating asylum seekers like cockroaches, locking Aboriginal children up, literally for no crime whatsoever, trying to open new coal mines for export and appropriating the places of beauty for their friends. And the women? At every step of the government’s response to Covid, men were given a helping hand and women (and children) were not; and while so many were doing very well and buying second and third homes and investment properties, all of which lessen the tax they pay, the young and unemployed were slipping further behind. What kind of people punish their own young? Last weekend the PM told a conference he was doing god’s work, laying hands on the people and doing god’s work. I want nothing to do with any such god.

I don’t understand any of it: maybe Dylan was right about not trusting anyone over 30, and maybe I should amend my policy. 

Nevertheless, I continue to resist, a foolishness inculcated in my being by those good people of Dumont.

With me are two of my grandsons, Oliver and Thomas. 

Onya Gabe!  Merci mille fois.

 

 



1 more photos in this story.