Thursday, November 22, 2007
Walking Away From Perth
Perth is beautiful in the early summer. We are here for my last RCS faculty meetings and the students’ Final OSCEs. Flying in the other day we looked down and saw huge blooming clouds of purple jacaranda trees. The roses are all in bloom and the cities has a fresh-scrubbed feel, like it’s straight from an early morning shower and shave. Steel towers soar over their reflections in the Swan River and no one is seen sleeping in the meticulously manicured parks or wandering homeless in the streets.Andrew, one of the Coordinators, currently practicing in Kalgoorlie, is hitching a ride with me back to the hotel, when we get to talking about this. He and his wife practiced in Derby over 10 years ago. “When I first came back to Perth” he says, “for two weeks I just wanted to open the window and shout at everybody ‘Don’t You Know What is Going on Up North?!’ “. He found the contrast between the communities so outrageous that he could hardly stand it. It is a larger culture shock to travel from Derby to Perth than it would be to go to China or India, because the two places are such universes apart.
Vicki and I observe Perth through very different eyes, compared to last January. This Sim-perfect-City is just as beautiful, clean, neat and tidy as it was then. I’m sure its one of the most pleasant and comfortable cities on Earth, with its cool green spaces, tidy urban planning and gorgeous Indian Ocean beaches. But we both feel we could not be comfortable living here anymore, knowing what we know now. It is a moral conundrum. I am reminded of Ursula LeGuin’s little story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. In that moral fairy tale people live in a perfect village, in peace and prosperity. But this perfection is maintained by an unbreakable magic spell, which requires one small child to live in hideous degradation in the deepest basement of the town. The dark power of this child’s misery prevents the entire town from sliding into chaos, filth, pestilence and mayhem. Everyone in the town learns this is the case when they come of age. And from time to time, a lone figure will walk away from the town, never to return.The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.LeGuin poses the question: “Are you, the reader, one who would also walk away?”
This is a question I can’t shake, as I walk around Perth, with the dust of Derby still on my shoes. How might I walk away from Omelas? And am I sure, really sure, that the spell is truly unbreakable?
