Abstract:
Having been born and bred in parched southern Australia, I was at my wits end worrying about my poor tomato plants and had spent meticulous hours recycling shower water to save them. The tomatoes were my barometer for my greater anxieties about the world’s thirsty end, so when I arrived to live in Geneva I stared at the Jet D’Eau (water jet) as it shot 140 metres out of the lake into the blue sky and felt dirty, like I was indulging in some environmental pornography. The surrounding green mountains reassured me this was a place where tomatoes grew easily, but my first impressions of Geneva remained disturbing. It was election time and I was assaulted by the Swiss People party’s poster, in which a giant white hand swoops on the only black sheep in the Swiss pen, booting him out so that the innocent white sheep are left in peace. Joseph Conrad called Geneva ‘the perfection of mediocrity’ and these days it houses a mass of global civil servants, international banks, multinational corporations and thousands of physicists. Despite these warnings, I came anyway.
Details / PDF:
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