Amidst all the manufactured excitement attached to the arrival in Sydney of round-the-world sailor Jessica Watson consider this: Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister who condemned the work of Bill Henson on the basis of its alleged exploitation of teenage girls and taxed alco-pops for the binge drinking they “encouraged” among the same, is now turning up to celebrate the fact that a teenage girl was allowed to risk her life by sailing round the world for no better reason than to “break a record”.
It is just one absurdity among many in the Jessica Watson saga, a story that every day feels more and more like an episode of Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes.
Adventure is on hard times. Once, those journeying into an untamed wilderness further than any man (or teenage girl) before them excited the public imagination not merely because what they were doing was dangerous but because they wished, to quote Tennyson’s words carved in memorial to Robert Scott, “to seek, to find and not to yield.”
These days, exploration has been replaced by “records” which serve no purpose whatsoever – every ocean has been sailed, every mountain climbed, every orange rolled with someone’s nose across the terminal of JFK airport (really).
In a time in which there is even a world record for holding the most world records, “records” must occupy ever more novel niches: first woman to sail solo round the world in a wooden boat; first man with one leg to sail solo round the world backwards; first man with one leg to sail solo round the world backwards in a wooden boat while wearing a Snuggie. As Homer Simpson once said when told he would have to run around the room pulling faces for three years before he could claim the world record for running around the room pulling faces, “Fine, I’ll just play the banjo with this cobra.”
For all the hype, Watson’s journey is just another variation on the same tired buccaneering that saw Tony Bullimore pulled from the sea in 1997. At the time, Bullimore was the subject of enormous public opprobrium for what was deemed his irresponsibility and the heavy burden placed on Australian taxpayers. Had Watson also required rescue or, heaven forbid, died, then her story would, presumably, have attracted a great deal more sympathy, she being blonde, young, female and, most importantly, Australian.
Had the worse happened, one can easily imagine the grand narratives of tragic heroism – the stoic declarations that “Jessica died doing what she loved” – that would have been required to expunge our national guilt for having allowed such a stupid enterprise to happen in the first place.
In an age in which there are perfectly safe methods of crossing the world’s oceans, Watson’s journey is nothing more than a dangerous, narcissistic indulgence. After all, what has she achieved; what do we know now that we didn’t before? That some 16 year-old girls are good sailors? That some 16 year-old girls are incredibly lucky to be alive? That Kevin Rudd is one step off turning up at Melbourne gangland memorial services in an effort to win votes? She’s not even sponsoring a charity!
On her website Watson’s feat is described as “the Everest of sailing”; appropriate considering that Mount Everest is the perfect symbol of our obsession with adventure in an age when the notion is increasingly irrelevant. As one of the most over-climbed mountains in the world, Everest is now strewn with garbage and human faeces. Every day dozens of people walk to the summit, all on the manufactured “adventure of a lifetime”, some breaking “records” – oldest, youngest, blind, one-legged. Far from inspirational these journeys seem to me an indictment of a western obsession with the self, our cult of “experience” and an increasing reluctance to look inward for meaning.
I’m glad Watson made it home alive, but you’ll forgive me if her “record” doesn’t exactly float my boat.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
Ukraine song pinches chord progression from The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Fo real #sbseurovision
RT @GerardDaffy: @antsharwood all the talk over there is the grannies will win.they entered to get a church built,feelgood story
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
We don’t deserve this huge, exciting scientific project
I’d like to be able to say that sharing the world’s largest radio telescope with South Africa…
Mining money talks the loudest in Australian politics
When North Queensland Liberal MP George Christensen got the idea of launching a new political organisation…
Please enter your password
Help! I’ve succumbed to a crippling modern illness that can strike at any moment. Symptoms include:…
Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented