Kalgoorlie Miner (12): Trust

In the Kalgoorlie Miner earlier this year, a lady visitor was asked what she thought of Kanowna during “Back to Kanowna Day”. Her response was stunningly blunt, but absolutely correct: “There’s nothing here”.

Initially I just giggled and turned the page, but in the ensuing days her words drifted around my brain like a ping-pong ball traversing the Sahara. I was unnerved by her candor and acute powers of observation and began to wonder whether she was simply stating the facts - in which case I admired her cutting forthrightness - or shrewdly implying that something far more sinister was going on.

Was she calling the very existence of the town into question? Where I had seen - in my imagination - Father Long preaching endless riches from the balcony of the Kanowna Hotel, had she seen nothing but bare ground and the ever-present fragments of tin and glass? When standing atop Warden’s Hill, had she looked out and seen a monumental conspiracy, where I had been naïve enough to picture a bustling township?

I’m sure the lady wasn’t so skeptical, but her comment reminded me that a trip to the Kanowna townsite, like many aspects of life, is largely an exercise in trust. I never personally had a rum can in the White Feather Hotel after a hard day's labour at the battery, but historians assure us that such places existed and I have no reason to doubt them.

We need to have some trust in those better informed than us, or else we could only ever know that which we had seen with our own eyes. Think about what you would know if not for a trust in others.

Problems arise though when experts attempt to convince the public of facts that cannot be "seen", which goes a long way towards explaining the reluctance of some to accept the science behind global warming. I've never seen global warming but, being a scientist myself, I have faith in the rigorous scientific process. I’ve never seen love but I believe that it exists because I’ve seen hardened men dragged into shoe shops, heads hanging low, by gorgeous womenfolk.

I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" last weekend and yes - like all documentaries - it aims to make the viewer feel a certain way, but what makes it so utterly compelling is it's use of graphs and images to present global warming, thereby allowing the layman to "see" the evidence.

The first courageous step, to paraphrase Alcoholics Anonymous, is to admit that we have a problem, and I feel that to continue to deny the phenomena's existence, or our contribution to it, or the urgency of the situation after viewing the film is to put oneself on a par with members of the Flat Earth Society.

So surely the debate must now move on to solutions, where for once - and I feel dirty saying this - I am partially in agreement with the Howard Government: we certainly need to reduce our own emissions, but by far the biggest contribution we can have as a nation is to use our world-class scientific resources to develop technology that will help out the world's biggest polluters.

Hooray for science!