So what?
I can't remember if I shared this story before, but one of the most useful pieces of feedback I ever received came in first year uni where one of my tutors said 'you've told me what but now you have to tell me 'so what?''
I have always found this a really resonant piece of advice because I, like a lot of people I think, have a tendency to go down rabbit holes, get into discussions and talk in circles, often missing the more important picture.
I've been thinking a bit about the 'so what' as I keep working more and more with dingoes. Dingoes are the subject of a maddening number of completely asinine debates, many of which are justification for killing the animals and all of which miss the larger point.
One totally stupid debate is all about the purity of the animals. Are the dogs that we call dingoes PURE ENOUGH to be real dingoes? Are they genetically pure dingoes or have they met non-dingo dogs since white people arrived and become something else? Is 95% DNA purity 'real' dingo? Is 75%? Where's the line?
Here's why this is stupid: it doesn't actually matter. What matters is that the animals are a wild species of apex predators that have a role in the ecosystem. That role is important and they perform it whether they are 99.9% dingo or 95.4% dingo. Killing them means they aren't able to perform that role, and you can't know how pure something is before you shoot or poison it. So it's a stupid debate. The discussion completely misses the 'so what' of it all. So what if these animals are not 100% DNA of dingo? Nothing changes.
By the way, if you're interested: 99.91% of wild dogs tested in Australia are dingoes. So it's also a stupid debate because the 'impurity' is so small as to be a non-factor, let alone a justification for policy.
Another stupid debate is that dingoes are not as native as other native species because they arrived in Australia later than other animals. While the exact date isn't settled, somewhere between 5000-15,000 years ago dogs first came to Australia and now they are dingoes. The environment - everywhere but Tasmania - has had millennia with these animals as apex predators. So while they might not have been here as long as, say, an emu or a shark, certainly they have a role in the ecosystem that's long established, symbiotic and necessary. So who the fuck cares if they arrived 1000, 2000 or 200,000 years ago? Obsessing over that misses the point.
But it's not just these pockets of animal debates that you can observe the detail obscuring the point. In the art world someone asked 'is fine art photography a useful term?' and a bunch of online commentators had their completely irrelevant opinions. These opinions are irrelevant because the phrasing doesn't matter; the work does. If someone is moved by your creative output then THAT IS THE GOAL. You don't exist to sit inside a box, or pompously debate the exact right phrasing to describe your medium. What matters is what you do with it, not what you call it. Does the music make you want to dance, or sort of fall flat? That's the point, whether you call it x, y or z there's something more important at play. Does the novel totally entrance you, or is it sort of ham-fisted and stilted? That matters so much more than whether it's called 'literature' or 'fiction'.
I find it so amazing, and sort of frustrating, how much effort the collective puts into having these breadcrumb discussions. It seems like there's so many people with a magnifying glass staring at the road trying to work out if it's gravel or dirt, but totally uninterested in if it's going somewhere cool, or a beautiful track, etc, etc.
Anyway, I don't really think purity matters, I don't really think labels are very important and I do think it's much more rich and joyful to think about the purpose and bigger picture, rather than the persnickety descriptions. You can waste a lot of time debating the difference between fashion and style, or you can just wear the clothes and enjoy it.
In other news:
1) I was recently interviewed by Monster Children, which is a very gen-z skate publication. While the copy editing is a bit dodgy, and I think I come off as unhinged, it's still a totally bizarre read.
2) Phuong Nguyen Le and I are launching his book Sunshine in Sunshine on March 9th. If you'd like to come to a dinner and watch his work projected on a HUGE building we have tickets available here.