To the pure, my mother used to say, all things are pure. We live in a very impure age. An age where ‘pride’ is somehow conflated with the most depraved kind of public exhibitionism. Where friendship cannot be conceived as anything other than sexual. Friends can only ever come ‘with benefits’.
Case in point: the legions of stunted-brain moderns who can take only one lesson from The Lord of the Rings (the films, of course: books have been displaced in such tiny minds by the conviction that movies are ‘texts’): ‘Frodo and Sam are gay for each other’. Long ago, Tolkien’s great friend C S Lewis skewered such depraved mentalities:
Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
The same small-minded prurience is in full display at the Australian taxpayer-funded left-wing propaganda machine ‘state broadcaster’, to the surprise of absolutely no one. As a result, we are forced to pay for such pathetic sniggering as this:
Matthew Flinders’s steamy letters reveal a hidden side to the man who circumnavigated Australia.
How very drearily predictable – and, it goes without saying, completely wrong in its snide insinuations.
The ABC wallows in the only mire the modern left knows: sexualising everything it touches. Flinders’ letters to his friend George Bass get the full treatment. “Things get saucy,” the piece leers. There’s talk of a “crush”, a “torrid” letter, a “more-than-friendly relationship”, and “steamy” sections. The obligatory nudge about Bass’s wife disliking Flinders is trotted out like Exhibit A in some tawdry courtroom drama.
Yet even the ABC’s own consultant scholar, Alecia Simmonds, kept trying to drag them back to reality.
As Simmonds points out, “this was an age of sensibility and Matthew Flinders is a man of exquisite sensibility. He embodies his age … he is tender and full of feeling and, in so many ways, that’s actually what 18th century masculinity was all about.”
She says the kind of deep attachment that existed between Flinders and Bass was not unusual between men (or women) in this historical period.
Unfortunately, “We live in an age where friendship is quite culturally devalued,” Simmonds correctly observes.
Flinders took friendship seriously in a way our hollow, hyper-sexualised age cannot fathom. He wrote effusively to multiple friends. He was devoted to his wife Ann, their long separations (par for the course for married navy men) marked by tender letters. None of this requires the ABC’s grubby modern lens.
But the state broadcaster cannot help itself. Despite Simmonds’ evidence, the journalist still resorts to the trite nudge and wink:
“we probably will never know the true nature of these naval men’s relationships”.
Matthew Flinders was a giant of Australian history. Navigator, cartographer and explorer. The man who first circumnavigated the continent and gave it the name Australia. Imprisoned for years by the French, he still produced maps and writings that shaped the nation. His A Voyage to Terra Australis remains a foundational text. That the ABC feels compelled to slander his name with grotesque, evidence-free insinuations tells you everything about their institutional sickness.
This is what taxpayer money buys at Ultimo: not journalism, but the relentless sexualisation of history to fit a squalid modern ideology that cannot conceive of male friendship, loyalty or honour without dragging it into the gutter. Friendship, once a noble bond celebrated across civilisations, is now reduced to fodder for sniggering podcasts and drive-by character assassinations.
Flinders embodied an age that valued deep, non-sexual, devotion between men. We have replaced it with an age that sees Eros everywhere and virtue nowhere. The ABC’s pathetic performance is not scholarship: it is cultural vandalism, funded by the very people whose history they traduce.
It is just as well, to borrow the name of the podcast in question, that The Dead Can’t Sue. Otherwise, the prurient ABC journalist might well find herself in court, facing a furious Flinders.
