S Sorrensen
Brisbane. Sunday, 12.30pm
Many of the people here I haven’t seen for 40 years or more. I’m nervous. The sweat running under my shirt isn’t just from the intense Brisbane heat.
I struggle with names at the best of times. My sister, who has kept in touch with the clan, prepped me on names and family connections in the car on our way here. Still, I’m overwhelmed. (I would like name tags.)
This is a gathering of first cousins – and I have 20 of them. We are bound by blood and a shared European heritage: Viking adventure, German industry, Irish laughter.
My father had four sisters and, apart from him, the five siblings were prolific kid producers. Yes, you guessed it; it’s a Catholic clan, curbed on contraception, committed to expanding the congregation. First there were five; then 22; now… Lord knows how many children and grandchildren there are. (They’re not here. This is a house, not an arena.)
How quickly population expands. When I was born, there were 2.7 billion people inhabiting this planet. Now, there are 7.2 billion. (It’s not all due to the fecundity of my family clan, okay?)
As kids, my sister and I would often visit the aunties’ places. All of us kids would run wild – in a bare-footed, stay-out-of-the-house, don’t-climb-the-TV-antenna sort of way. It was a lot of fun. We were well fed, well looked after and were growing up in an age of increasing prosperity. The future looked rosy.
Then my dad died. My wanderings, geographical and philosophical, took me away to remote places, and I had a think about things.
Since 1500 (population: half a billion), we Euro-western humans have been on a global rampage of loot and pollute. Constant expansion, with the aid of new technologies, and incredible riches from the exploitation of natural resources accessed by the extermination of indigenous cultures, has made capitalism (and our consequent luxurious lifestyle) almost seem normal. But it ain’t. Crunch time is coming.
I recognise the faces, even if I can’t name them. The familial traits are so strong they survive the distortions of aging. The cousins look like their parents. Sometimes the similarity is so strong I’m looking at her mother or his father. I look like my father, I’m told, and am enveloped in hugs and smiles. Barriers built from long separation quickly crumble, and the smiling vikings whelm my wary ways.
The cousins are much richer than their parents were. Their houses are bigger, their holidays are global, their televisions huger. We are richer than ever before. But a dark cloud hangs over us. A storm is brewing while we watch the cricket and our cars park themselves.
Contemplating longer-term, more abstract peril is not one of the survival skills developed in humans through evolutionary adaption. Immediate danger is more easily met. If I were to see an angry mammoth charging through the eskies piled on the lawn, say, or (more likely) a bloke in a P-plated Corolla careening through the louvres, then 200,000 years of natural selection for the Homo sapiens brand would provide me with an effective response: Run!
But give me a planet where a cocktail of capitalism and copulation will trigger global ecosystem collapse and… I don’t know how to respond.
What’s a poor boy to do?
I tried saving the planet, but then I had to go to work.
I tried to lose myself in carousing denial, but my liver put its foot down.
I tried to discover if all you need is love. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
But here and now, I am returned to the family. I’m reconnecting to a human caring-ness which may be a key…
I feel like climbing a TV antenna.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
