Listening to news of the new Australian Wool Innovation board, and how it has given the (cautious) finger to militant animal liberationists, somehow prompted me to think of Jim’s war.
Jim was an old pug who was the caretaker of the Kalgoorlie Miner newspaper building, back when I started working in journalism in that lively city nearly 20 years ago. His career in the ring had given him a cauliflower ear, and a nose that wandered down his face like a floodplain river. He lived in misanthropic isolation up on the building’s top floor with an equally-battered, mostly Border Collie dog, who led a pack of other assorted scoundrels on nightly bin-and-bitch raids around town.
During World War II, Jim and his brother fought the Italians and Germans in North Africa, and then the Japanese in New Guinea. He seldom spoke about his war experiences, but when he did he was concise.
“Mate,” he told me, “those wogs was like herdin’ fucken sheep. The nips was crazy bastards—they’d run ‘emselves straight on t’ yer bayonet. But those fucken Germans … they scared the shit outa me.”
Jim’s war and AWI’s ongoing struggle with PETA and other anti-mulesing groups have some parallels.
The assessment of the new AWI board members, and the woolgrowers that supported them, seems to be that AWI’s handling of the mulesing issue to date has been along the lines of the Italian infantry’s performance in North Africa. The Italian footsloggers in that sphere of the war were famously reluctant soldiers who sensibly thought surrendering far preferable to being shot at. (They were, however, good POWs. Quite a few who were interned in Australia came back to be upstanding citizens after the war.)
The new directors who have stormed AWI seem to be more in the Japanese mould. No surrender to animal libbers, they seem to be saying. Banzai!
I heard Wal Merriman, AWI’s new field marshall, comment on radio that the market needs to decide the mulesing issue. That’s absolutely correct. The question is, what will the market decide if PETA is flogging it with the wet end of a lamb’s tail?
This isn’t a discussion between the wool industry and the market. It’s a discussion between the wool industry, the market, and PETA, and to imagine anything else is to invite high-profile activity from public relations terrorists.
For the big retailers, the worst that can happen if they demand that the wool industry sticks to a 2010 deadline, “or else”, is that they have access to fewer wool products. If on the other hand the retailers decide, with AWI, to sideline PETA and associated hardliners, they face having their carefully-crafted marketing image dragged through pools of blood from tortured animals … or something like that.
If you were a retailer, which would you choose?
I'm sure the AWI board is acutely aware of its predicament. It's only the 2010 deadline, and not mulesing itself, that has been taken off the table. But the board has a much wider brief: to regroup a battered industry and create a new and profitable image for wool. An image that doesn’t invite the unwelcome interest of animal rights groups.
AWI and the wool industry might take some lessons from the great WWII German general Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps, the formidable military machine that scared the shit out of Jim.
At least in the early stages of the war, the Afrika Korps were technologically superior to the Allies, had better intelligence, fought as tight unit, and were led by a master tactician.
How much of this applies to today’s wool industry?
If the industry currently lacks a few things, it has one quality in bucketloads: sheer bloody stubborness. It was stubborness, along with unity of purpose (i.e. survival) that allowed the Australian 9th Division, “the rats of Tobruk”, to hold Tobruk against Rommel for 240 days in 1941, a year when the Afrika Korps otherwise marched from victory to victory in North Africa.
It’s going to take strategy, unity, stubborness and a flash of genius to set the wool industry to rights. It remains to be seen whether doughty campaigners like Wal Merriman and Roger Fletcher can mix all these qualities together, and then ignite them.
They might recall, though, that in the end, Rommel lost.
By 1943, Allied air defences had starved Rommel of supplies, helped by jealousies back at German High Command (sound familiar?). When Montgomery finally surrounded Rommel’s army at El Alamein, the Allies had 500 tanks to Rommel’s 20—and those were nearly out of fuel and ammunition.
Before the war was over, the man considered the greatest German commander of WWII was forced to take poison after being implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
It reminds me that a foreign-language paper, reporting on Barack Obama’s presidential win, had a headline that translated as, “Black man get’s world’s worst job”.
There may be worse jobs than being on the AWI board, but if recent history is anything to go by, it’s one of the world’s most thankless. Here’s hoping that’s about to change.
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