Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. I am going to look to the Titanic, which is a wonderful metaphor for what we are discussing tonight in legislation. In a way the Titanic personifies human folly or the hubris of humanity. I turn to a poem by Thomas Hardy, who is probably better known as an author than a poet. It is one of my favourite poems. It is called The Convergence of the Twain, which he wrote a year after the sinking of the Titanic, and it was the verse contained in the anniversary booklet which was handed out at the service when people gathered together to commemorate the loss of lives on the Titanic one year on. It is quite a long poem, so I will not quote the entire poem. I know the minister would be keen to have poetry read in the chamber. It is a villanelle; it is quite a strange poem. To set the scene, some fish are talking at the bottom of the ocean at the wreck of the Titanic and they are saying, ‘What the hell is this doing down here?’ Hardy wrote:

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’…

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate

For her - so gaily great -

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history …

That is what we are talking about here: the world, civilization, has progressed over the last 5,000 years or so. We are coming up to a time where we have evolved; we have developed industry; we have developed so many wonderful things; technology has advanced us—the world wide web et cetera. But we are now coming up to a crunch time similar to when they were creating the Titanic, which at the time was celebrated as the pinnacle of human endeavour—unsinkable—where humanity had triumphed over the sea; humanity had triumphed over Neptune. Obviously, things did not turn out so great for the Titanic.

I see that the member for O’Connor is in the chamber, so perhaps I could have gone with a slightly different metaphor rather than something literary.

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