Not Too Many Questions or Too Much Eye Contact Please: Finding and Caring For My Introvert Self

“You don’t talk. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.” 

Working on the conveyor belt sorting out small silver spheres that would eventually be shipped to the US to be minted into quarter dollar coins, my workmate’s attack was as vicious and blunt as it was unexpected. Up until then I had quietly been listening to the swirl of chatter bubbling up from the women who were working the belt alongside me. I was floored and didn’t know what to say. Being young and full of vinegar I might have snapped something brief and snarly back but I realised then that quietness was no longer really an option for me in my workplace. I needed to force myself to pretend to be what I really wasn’t: an extrovert, a people-person. I would have to force myself to make small talk and every time I did it, it would be death by a thousand, tiny cuts.

I worked my factory job for a little over a decade and every day I would come home dirty from the grime and sweat of the workday, sometimes physically exhausted from the heavy work. But arguably the heftiest toll was the mental and emotional depletion caused by the constant interaction that the work day obliged. Being quiet and a good listener, bored workmates would sometimes unload onto me, not understanding that my sensitivity led me to feeling almost injured at times by some of the details and things they told me about their private lives. Things I didn’t want to know. I came to my workplace to earn my crust. I wasn’t there to make friends or bond with people and yet it became hard not to care about these people because I knew too much about them not to. Sometimes my supervisor or leading hand would take pity on my exhausted looking self and knowing that I enjoyed solitary work, I would be offered a few hours of solo work but even then they themselves would come into my work space to make desultory chit chat. The only place I found solitude during my working hours was when I locked myself inside a grimy toilet cubicle. For those precious moments I could rest and recharge.

To be an introvert is to be quite misunderstood at times. You are frequently seen as a troublemaker for not integrating better into cultures often dominated and set by the standards of extroverts. Your quietness and strong desire to be left alone is regularly misinterpreted as anger, sullenness, surliness, bitchiness, coldness or superiority. To this day I don’t think some members of my own family accept that I am an introvert with many of the accompanying needs and quirks that being an introvert entails. The only person who really accepts me as I am is B, a fellow introvert. His own friendship group once expressed disbelief at how we can be together all the time but what they don’t understand is how introverts share space: together yet alone. B and I are often wrapped up in our own pursuits, happy to be in each other’s presence but giving each other plenty of space to be. After we have had sufficient “alone” time together, we’ll reconnect and chat about what we’ve read or seen or we’ll binge watch some Netflix. Currently we are watching an amazing series called Fauda. I highly recommend it.

But the truth of the matter is that for the longest time I thought there was something really wrong with me and my lack of socialising. I strongly felt that I needed to have vibrant social outlets in order to be ‘normal’. Thus, I forced myself to do things like cosplay, to participate in community projects in my local neighbourhood and join various online chat groups like Discord. It was all quite terrible at times. I enjoyed some of it but most of the time the overstimulation of the experience meant that I was locked into a cycle of activities that left me feeling exposed, frazzled and drained. It’s been only very recently that I have given myself permission to step into my comfort zone and let the noise and clutter of my social life fall away. I do socialise still but not very much and only with a very small circle that you can count on one hand. Without really intentionally doing so, I discovered my introvert self and saw how beat up and haggard she was and I took her to my heart and said, “enough.”

Part of this process began several years ago when I discovered that I might be HSP: a Highly Sensitive Person through a marvellous TED talk by Elena Herdieckerhoff which I will link here: The gentle power of highly sensitive people. However enlightening this TED talk was for me, the real legitimising framework for feeling comfortable enough to allow myself to be the introvert that I am came from reading The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World by Jenn Granneman. It was equal parts comforting and shocking to read my personality traits jumping out of this book. It explained and talked about so much of what I knew about myself in a positive light whereas for most of my adult life, these traits and quirks have persistently been discussed with me and about me in mostly negative terms. I agree with Granneman that sometimes labels can help. In my particular case, calling myself an introvert has been a profound relief because I am no longer just a weirdly unsociable person who may or may not be maladjusted. Instead, I am someone who contributes differently and quietly, in my own way, in my own time and on my terms. It gives me great confidence to frame my personality in this way and by perceiving B as a fellow introvert, I can also understand him better now too.

Blogging is my way of reaching out in the world and I thank every reader who stops by here or the music blog. Blogging allows my inner world to reach outwards. I am so grateful to have a place where I can write and share my thoughts and I look forward to writing again next time.

Sentinel States: A Look at Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena by Clinton Fernandes

For the longest time B has been hassling me to read Sub-Imperial Power and after finally doing so, I can understand why. It is a small but quite mighty book that helps to define in somewhat new terms, Australia’s place within the current world order and how that has affected the country domestically. Since being published in 2022, it has rapidly become a recommended book for political, international relations and foreign policy wonks because it discusses in clear and understandable terms, a new and highly useful paradigm for analysing Australia’s international role in the world system: sub-imperialism. 

Fernandes walks us through their reasoning as to why Australia could be classed as being part of a sub-imperial network as opposed to being a middle power, such as Norway. The primary reason is based on an analysis of the nature of Australia’s economy and Australia’s defence strategy. Fernandes states that Australia is a ‘wealthy but dependent economy’ and elaborates on this by writing:

During the colonial period, British investment fostered vertical economic ties with London more than horizontal economic ties integrating the economies of the Australian colonies. Typically found in imperial-colonial relationships, such vertical economic relationships result in monocultural economies that produce mineral resources and agricultural goods for export. That legacy remains with us (Fernandes, 2022, p.21).

As an Australian, it has always struck me as rather odd that this country’s economy seems to shrink away from becoming a more complex economy and selling more than just raw materials to our trading partners. In light of climate change, it seems tenuous that our primary exports are chiefly the minerals we dig out of the ground and agricultural products we more often than not ship out as unprocessed, raw goods. Diversification and thus increased complexity of our economy seems to be something that we ought to embrace but have not. As Fernandes points out, this makes the Australian economy highly unusual in the developed world in that Australia is a developed, prosperous, stable and functional nation state but it also has the economic complexity of a developing nation such as Cambodia or Kazakhstan, thereby making it a wealthy but dependent nation (Fernandes, 2022, p.22). 

Why has Australia fostered this dependency and/or allowed this dependent state to continue? Some of this can be explained by examining who owns what in Australia and also by looking at how Australia and its exports integrate into the world economy. Outside of minerals and agricultural products, Australia boasts relatively small sectors of specialised manufacturing such as aircraft manufacturing and repairs and some automobile manufacturing. Australia, like many nation states, is part of a system of global value chains (GVCs) where a company’s headquarters, design and engineering, finance, raw materials and manufacturing are often located in separate countries (Fernandes, 2022, p. 24). Fernandes notes that GVCs are the dominant international corporate model of the present day with approximately 80 percent of international trade comprising of the movement of goods and services across international borders between the departments of the same company (Fernandes, 2022, p. 24). Foreign investors are largely comfortable with GVCs and their ability to generate substantial wealth removes much impetus for either international investors or nation states to embrace increased complexity within some economies (Fernandes, 2022, p.24). This is one reason why Australia remains largely economically un-complex and highly specialised in some areas in regards to its exports.

Another factor, as mentioned previously, is ownership of capital. Fernandes draws our attention to the fact that according to data obtained from the Bloomberg Professional Terminal, approximately three quarters of the shares in the top twenty companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) are foreign owned (Fernandes, 2022, p.22) Given the relatively small market capitalisation of the ASX, this accounts for roughly half of the market capitalisation of the entire exchange (Fernandes, 2022, p.22). Without doubt, mining and fossil fuels plays a dominant role in Australia’s economy and it was surprising to discover how much of it is US majority owned. BHP is 71 percent US owned, Rio Tinto is 77 percent US owned, Woodside Petroleum is 63 percent US owned, Newcrest Mining is 53 percent US owned and South32 is 47 percent US owned (Fernandes, 2022, p.48). The only big hitter not US majority owned is Fortescue Metals with the majority of the shares owned by the Forrest family through its commercial group, Minderoo which was rebranded as Tattarang in 2020 (Tattarang, 2020). 

As it can be seen, foreign investment in Australia plays a predominant role in Australia’s largest and most influential corporations which in turn accounts for a substantial portion of Australia’s business interests. It’s particularly enlightening to note the high proportion of mining companies that are US owned. Thus, it can be argued that Australia’s economic interests are irrevocably tied to the creation and maintenance of US led world order that emphasises a benign environment for international investment that does not threaten US hegemony (Fernandes, 2022, p.22). Interestingly, Australia’s largest trading partner is China and it goes to show the complexity of wealth generation today with US majority owned companies selling minerals and fossil fuels to undoubtedly its most virulent potential rival for hegemony in the new century, China, via Australia’s raw material and export network. This conflict embedded within the current capitalist system supports Alex Callinicos thesis that the world we are facing today is more reminiscent of the situation the world faced before the outbreak of World War One rather than the Cold War primarily because the great powers of the world today have complex, highly interconnected yet conflictual trade links with each other (Callinicos, 2023). History has therefore demonstrated that a global and complex capitalist world order does not necessarily inhibit the outbreak of conflict between rival great powers. 

What is also of note is how fluidly Australia exchanged dominant investors from Britain to the US as Britain lost its ability to project power in the postwar period and the US repositioned itself as a superpower alongside the USSR. But Australia’s role within the economic and trade network of a greater, imperial power remains the same: to be primarily a supplier of raw materials. Australia’s dependent role could be said to be partially enforced through the persuasion of ownership of capital and the nature of GVCs but it's also a role Australia willingly cultivates. Australia’s economic contribution to the US global economy enmeshes it with America. It puts Australia within the imperial network of this global power and it is a place Australia very much wishes to be. 

Australia has always seen itself as part of an imperial network, firstly it was part of the British colonial empire and since the postwar period, Australia has rallied to be part of the US foreign policy plans to establish sympathetic and US armed sentinel states in the Indo-Pacific region that ideally would include Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and India (Fernandes, 2022, p.43). America’s ability to project power in part lies in the concept of interoperability with sympathetic, junior, partner nation states adopting similar aviation, ground combat and air defence networks to that of the US, making the militaries of these countries almost interchangeable with the US in regards to operability and the ability to deploy in a coordinated fashion (Fernandes, 2022, p. 9). The US also projects power through a network of international military and surveillance bases that allow it to survey and deploy assets and resources in an area stretching from Western Europe, East Asia and into the Eurasian landmass (Fernandes, 2022, p.13). As Fernandes notes:

It is the only country whose military is designed to leave its own hemisphere, cross vast oceans and airspace, and then conduct sustained, large-scale military operations in another hemisphere. This imperial objective is why the US Navy has eleven aircraft carriers while most countries have no more than two; it aims at influencing the entire land mass from Portugal to Japan, from Russia’s Arctic coast to India, as well as all the fringing islands such as the United Kingdom and Ireland, Sri Lanka, archipelagic south-east Asia and Japan (Fernandes, 2022, p. 13).

In keeping with our long held sentiments about our place in the world as part of an imperial network, Australia has often shied away from independence. The British parliament gave up control of the Australian parliament through the passing of the Statue of Westminster act in 1931 yet four Australian Prime Ministers delayed adopting it until 1942 (Fernandes, 2022, p. 25). It makes cultural and historic sense that Australia would seek a place within America’s imperial, postwar system and that Australia would find it comforting to become a junior partner with a greater power that culturally bears many similarities with Australia as well as having a similar world view. 

But what makes Australia not just a junior partner but sub-imperial? Why are we not a middle power? Our determination to make our military interoperable with the US military as evidenced the recent purchase of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines as part of the AUKUS partnership which seeks greater and deeper military activities and ties between Australia, the UK and the US and our foreign policy objectives such as the decision to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq is indicative of Australia’s near total alignment with the geopolitical, foreign policy objectives of the United States ( Fernandes, 2022, pp. 28-29). Australia actively supports America’s imperial objectives in much the same manner as it did when it was part of the British colonial empire:

Military historians are well aware that Australian governments have not gone to war for sentimental reasons or because they were duped. Upholding the imperial order was an essential component of Australia’s security, properly understood: the security of economic interests and the military-political order that secured them. For a subimperial power, imperial wars are never ‘other people’s wars’ (Fernandes, 2022, p. 35).

This explains why Australia has often involved itself in far-flung wars. Australia’s security is dependent upon helping to uphold the geopolitical and foreign policy objectives of a greater power to whom we are in junior partnership with. Australia by and large does not have nor does it seem to want a separate military strategy outside of a dependent and junior partnership with a larger, imperial power. But Australia’s economy, military and intelligence services are not the only reasons why Australia could be deemed as being sub-imperial. As a nation state, Australia also seeks to have its own small sphere of influence in Timor-Leste and the south-west Pacific (Fernandes, 2022, p. 16). 

Australia accepted Timor-Leste’s independence in 2002 but it effectively prevented Timor-Leste from obtaining its economic independence by refusing to negotiate a maritime boundary along the median line in the Timor Sea and withdrawing from the maritime boundary jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea in 2002 ensuring Timor-Leste could not assert its legal right at these forums (Fernandes, 2022, p.55). Both of these actions amounted to the denial of Timor-Leste’s right to its sovereign oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea (Fernandes, 2022, p. 55). Though a treaty between Timor-Leste and Australia was eventually signed in 2018, Australia refused to compensate Timor-Leste for any past exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, some of which should have gone to Timor-Leste had a median line been established in 2002 (Fernandes, 2022, pp.55-56). Australia has also encouraged the cultivation of a small but politically powerful middle class, urban elite within Timor-Leste who are in general, favourably disposed to the creation of shared habits and procedures with Australia, joint military exercises and making Timor-Leste compatible and receptive to international investment (Fernandes, 2022, p.56). Though independent in name, it could be argued that Timor-Leste functions with degrees of imperial oversight by Australia who has had a hand in influencing key decisions of Timor-Leste as well as obtaining some level of control over its natural resources (Fernandes, 2022, p. 56).

Australia also seeks to assert influence in the south-west Pacific though with arguably less effectiveness. In April 2022, it was revealed to the shock of many Australians, that China and the Solomon Islands had made an agreement regarding ship visits, logistical replenishment and other associated activities (Fernandes, 2022, p. 94). Australia often seeks influence in the region through the provision of aid but unlike Chinese aid which tends to remain within the Solomon Islands, Australian aid tends to flow back into Australia through the payment of Federal Police, civil servants, magistrates and private contractors who work in the Solomon Islands (Fernandes, 2022, p. 96). Aid monitoring group Aid/Watch observed in a submission to the Australian Senate in 2014, Australia is the “largest direct recipient of its own aid funding” (Fernandes, 2022, p. 97). Despite not always obtaining its desired outcomes in the Solomon Islands, I would concur with the notion that Australia does seek to influence the domestic and international decisions of key sovereign states within the south-west Pacific region in a manner that has imperial overtones. 

Sub-Imperial Power finds its most convincing and persuasive narrative when it discusses Australia as being a sub-imperial power. It somewhat loses focus and effectiveness when it strays from this and when it tries to frame multiple aspects of Australia’s political and cultural life through the single paradigm of being a sub-imperial power. The idea of Australia as being a sub-imperial power is a highly relevant and useful concept for understanding Australia both internationally and domestically but I believe it is not Australia’s complete totality as a nation state. Rarely does a single narrative or conceptual framework explain how and why a nation state manifests itself domestically and internationally as it does. I also felt that Fernandes’ analysis could have benefited from examining China with more critical rigour than what was presented in the text. However, overall Sub-Imperial Power deserves the praise it has been given because it has launched into the general discussion regarding Australia’s place in the world, a relatively new and highly useful concept. It is an accessible text that is deliberately small and simplistic in its analysis for ease of consumption. Like the Communist Manifesto and other such pamphlet-like material, it is designed to be read by a broad readership with ideas and thoughts that are digestible. Its contribution to the discourse is much appreciated and worth reading if you are interested in foreign policy and understanding modern day imperialism. 

References:

Callinicos, A. (2023). The New Age of Catastrophe. Polity Press. 

Fernandes, C. (2022). Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena. Melbourne University Press.

Tattarang. (13 May, 2020). The Minderoo commercial group rebrands to Tattarang. 

https://www.tattarang.com/news/2020/the-minderoo-commercial-group-rebrands-to-tattarang/

Introduction

Hi. I'm HammieRiffs and alongside this blog, I also write a music blog called This Metal Road.

This Metal Road started my writing journey but however much I love music and writing about music, the tumultuous and rapidly unfolding of events of this century has made me want to embrace the two concepts of libertate: that is, the freedom of expression and in mundo, being in the world. Thus, this blog will mostly be about ideas, politics, history, current world issues as well as a sprinkling of some personal writing. 

Thanks so much for stopping by. 

Hammie.