Macropus rufigriseus
In the year 2000 I went to see
the film the Dish. It was a well-reviewed film with a good
pedigree: the second effort from the people who’d made the universally beloved
Australian film the Castle, in
addition to numerous acclaimed TV series.
I went with some anticipation. I
came out angry.
The film tells the story of how
the Parkes radio telescope in New
South Wales was responsible for receiving footage of
the moon landing and transmitting that footage to the world. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed, with
Michael Collins in orbit around them, the earth’s spin had turned the USA away from the moon; only NASA’s tracking
stations in Australia
were in a position to receive the pictures beamed from Apollo 11. The world only saw that first moon landing,
and only heard Neil Armstrong’s famous words, because of Australia. Before the
Dish was made and released it was a story most people didn’t know. It was a story well worth telling.
Yet the Dish angered me. Not
because of the weaknesses of the film’s structure or screenplay – though in
truth the film is a half-hour sitcom episode stretched to feature length – but
because of its dishonesty. The film claims
to be a true story. It is not.
I’m writing this post on the 21st
of July 2014. Some dates stick in our
mind easily, because of their immediacy – either a temporal immediacy (today’s
date), or an emotional immediacy (“Where were you when...?”). That emotion can be cultural as well as
personal. I wasn’t anywhere on the 21st
of July 1969, forty-five years ago today, when Neil Armstrong became the first
human to set foot on the moon – I wouldn’t be alive for another ten years. But because I grew up in the world after the
moon landing, the moon landing is part of my life.
It’s not possible for me to
remember the moon landing, but I can remember walking to Honeysuckle Creek
campsite, in the Australian Capital Territory
not far outside Canberra. I can’t remember what year it was but I can
remember on the approach to the campsite seeing a Red-necked Wallaby – the
first I’d ever seen – and then I can remember seeing scores more at the
campsite itself, feeding on the soft grass in the open spaces there. I can remember lying next to my father in our
tent that night, being kept awake by the sound of wallaby teeth tearing at
grass just a few feet and a couple of thin layers of tent material from my
head. I can remember, too, looking at
the heaped and terraced earth at that campsite where buildings used to be, and
I can remember reading the plaque affixed at the edge of the old buildings’
foundations.
I can’t remember exactly what
that plaque said, but I remember one phrase precisely: the Honeysuckle Creek
deep space tracking station had been closed down in 1981 as part of NASA’s
“worldwide consolidation program”. In
the manner of all razor-gang language it’s a phrase that tries so hard to be
opaque that it becomes transparent: budget cuts. Keeping Honeysuckle Creek open was
uneconomical.
The Honeysuckle Cree tracking
station opened in 1967; it was operational for only fourteen years. It’s a short life for such a major
installation. But the highlight of its
career came just two years after it began operation: forty-five years ago
today, on the 21st of July 1969.
As depicted in the Dish, the Parkes radio telescope did
indeed play a vital role in bringing the moon landing to the world. The
majority of the mission’s images and sound were received and relayed by Parkes,
which had the clearest signal. But the iconic
moment, Neil Armstrong’s descent down the ladder, his “one small step” – when
the world heard and saw that extraordinary moment of history, it was because of
Honeysuckle Creek. It was to Honeysuckle
Creek that the words and pictures were beamed, and it was from Honeysuckle
Creek that they were disseminated into the humanity’s collective consciousness.
It’s a story that hasn’t been
adequately told. It’s a story that was
pointedly denied when the one major depiction of Australia’s role in the moon landings
was told. I came out of that screening
of the Dish fourteen years ago angry
because I knew the story and I was outraged that the makers of the film had so
thoroughly obliterated it. They couldn’t
have made their film at Honeysuckle Creek – unlike the Parkes installation,
Honeysuckle Creek’s dish has long since been demolished – but they could at
least have acknowledged its role. Even
its existence. They could at least have
made an effort to tell the true story just as they claimed to be doing.
I saw the Dish in Canberra,
where I grew up. I saw it in the Greater
Union cinema in the Civic bus interchange.
If you search for that cinema in Google Maps now you get the subtitle
“permanently closed”. Consolidated, I
guess. Center Cinema, just around the
corner from Greater Union, has closed too; so has Electric Shadows at the other
end of Civic. In a couple of generations
few people will remember them but they might remember somehow that these places
once existed: for communities, large and small, pass on such information, and it’s
by the slow accumulation of such parochial stories that communities gain their
identity.
Such stories are important for
all communities; but they may be more important for some than for others. Ask any Australian what they think about Canberra and nine times
out of ten you’ll hear the same list of scornful complaints: it’s boring; it’s
freezing; it’s a parasite on the rest of the country. I’ve had people say to my face that Canberrans
aren’t “real” Australians – as if the life of any person can somehow possibly
be more or less real than the life of any other. When I tell people here in Melbourne
that I grew up in Canberra
their response is almost always the same: they smile and congratulate me on
“escaping”. And sometimes, to my shame,
I play along with it – after ten years of living in Melbourne I’ve heard the
line so many times that I can’t always be bothered to resist it; I don’t always
have it in me to explain that actually I adore Canberra; that I moved to
Melbourne largely because all my friends had; that one of the persistent small tragedies
of human life is that we can only live in one place at a time. So sometimes I just sit and listen and bite
my tongue while the people around me tell the same old rote jokes about
politicians and roundabouts and a supposed lack of nightlife.
These are the stories that Australia tells itself about Canberra, over and over. But Canberrans know that the stories of their
city are greater and more varied than that.
Stories are important. They give
us roots and they bind us to the places that we love. They bind those places – a city, a valley, a
farm, a river – to us, too. They give us
confidence in our homes and they give our homes a place in the wider world. They assure us that our homes, our beloved
places, have worth. Sometimes they
provide a counterpoint – a truer view – to the stories that the world tells us
about our homes.
But no matter how well as we know those stories we
want other people to know them, too. We
want other people to appreciate the places that we love instead of just
unthinkingly dismissing them. The story
of Australia’s
role in the moon landing has been told once, and told untruthfully. The reach of this blog is tiny, and compared
to the reach of a feature film it’s as our moon is to the Milky Way; but all
the same, I’d like to tell you a story.
It’s a story about a place just outside Canberra, where there’s a big mound
of grass and a brass plaque and so few people or human activity any more that
the wallabies are bold and plentiful.
It’s a story about how a place helps make history and history helps make
a place.
Image sourced from http://uk.wikipedia.org
