The present state of global tension locks in rights of movement between borders into increasingly smaller versions of a nation states. The definition of a nation-state being a moot point let us place, Australia, as an exemplary one, for the purpose of this discussion, where borders are closed and opened at whim, of various sorts of danger, some real, many politically imagined. This is a basic point of negation for the belief that advances in digital technology has resulted in any form of a global village. Or that cultural forms and practices are becoming increasingly fluid as part of this opening up and coming together of the inhabitants of planet earth. The arguments at the center of the notions of modernity and globalization are integral to any discussions on the flow of culture. And these are arguments that vary as much as individual mood swings.

Let us not for a moment doubt that cultural flows transcend borders, it is all around us, Hollywood, hip-hop, Nicole Kidman, even Bollywood, cashing in with their naach-gaan/song and dance troupes from London to LA, or as Gurinder Chader’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as Bride and Prejudice in English, or in Hindi as From Amritsar to LA, Balle Balle. Or the Merchants of Bollywood, an ensemble stage production, on tour in Australia in 2005, of the increasingly globally popular world of Indian film song and dance melodramas.  The adaptation of Jane Austen brings with it particular cultural politics of popular culture forms in films, for example, the crossover genre of films from Bollywood intended for international global markets. Or the marketing of poverty in the ‘art’ genre of films from the traditional margins of third world cinema, even if it is from India, the worlds largest producer of films.

This happens despite the markers of ‘independent’, ‘art’, or even ‘popular cinema’ that such films can carry. As such as a cultural form it no longer flows freely between borders. Despite the fluidity of cinema as the turning of pages of a narrative at various film speeds, as a cultural artifice it is invariably caught up in the politics of cultural commodification as forms, processes, and product. This commodification of culture controls the flows of all forms of culture, from films to music, literature, food, fashion to all its fusions and crossovers, in most instances, from let us appropriate the problematic reductive constructs of the West and the rest.

In both examples of crossover or art cinema, the flow of culture, supposedly transglobal in appeal and spread, becomes a marketing exercise of a cultural form, as a commodity. It is as commodity that its cultural flow is decided and directed, funded and market, viewed and critiqued.  Cultural forms in flow thus becomes dependent on the steel meshed grip of the ‘world free markets’ so that the cultural flows are performed for various beaters of drums or wielders of power in the world of art and literature or popular culture forms. Or definitions by political leaders like George Bush, Tony Blair and even John Howard, of the division of the first world order (theirs-largely Anglo-European in origin or control), the emergent large population nations (Brazil, China and India) and that is where it ends. For much of the rest of the world than becomes a place to go to as in tourist brochures or places to send goods/aid to, or to place them in a basket case of definitions, that has not changed much since Tasman and Cook sailed down the Thames.

What worries me is that in this celebration of the global flow of culture, there is the assumption that somehow all differences and exclusions of class, gender, the child/the aged are subsumed under some nebulous artifice, rather like sending money as remittance home through Western Union.  A digitalized coding of numerals in this archive of remittance that connect the plastic hologram enhanced dollars bills of the West, say from Australia, to their well worn Pacific Tongan pa’anga, or the Samoan tala.  Culture thus is coded in the same sort of way, as an artifice that takes on a numeral code as the digital technology that most of us here have at our fingertips. Not so for the recipients of the remittance in most cases in the Pacific islands as they stand in line outside the bright yellow and black signage of Western Union. The name of the company itself a constant reminder of the unchanging nature of global politics from its original colonial projects. So it is in the Western as Union that is the metaphor of the remittance and it presents the new ‘colonial’ project of producing, processing and placing as construct the cultural idioms that we assume will slip borders and transform the world.

Extending the remittance metaphor, we have the particular conditions of the ‘sender’ of money from the West, again Australia suffices as an example, and the ‘receiver’ of the remittance in the Pacific. Much like the process of sending colonial dictates initially via ships and later by wire across the Pacific from New South Wales or Wellington to the outposts of the larger British colonial project, through their intermediaries of the white colonial extensions in Australia and New Zealand. To decide the everyday lived spaces of people in faraway islands that most of us now see in tourist brochures or in badly researched and presented current affairs programs, such as a recent Foreign Correspondent piece on the Australian Broadcasting Commission television on Fiji, its army and the problems of being a paradise.

There is inherent in the remittances, tourist brochures and bad documentaries, once again, the old process of constructing backyards to gloat over, in this case the whole of the South West Pacific for Australia and New Zealand as the child-empires of Britain, to play house with. Just as there is the old reductionism of people and places under notions of the global flow of cultures. Of that there is not doubt. However, what matters here is not so much that it exists, but how it exits, and who controls its particular flows, or to be abstract and confusing, as much of global ‘aidspeak’ the existence itself of this cultural flow. It does not exist as a free and friendly exchange of cultural or intellectual capital, neither does capital and labour, in the big and friendly free market economy, as we are all aware.

Let us move on the rugby field, as a space of contention, even as a common denominator between Australia/New Zealand and now Japan/Hong Kong/Singapore and the Pacific. Australia and New Zealand are very happy to poach and play rugby players from the Pacific, even to the point of cynically naming players as internationals, so that under current International Rugby Board laws, they are in-eligible to play for their island nations, in the course of their playing careers.

The cultural colonialism in sport is not a two-way flow, apart from the immediate benefits to the players and their families by way of contracts and once more the remittances.  Yet, they are reluctant to invest in the game in the islands in any way, the same places from which they leech on to a Lote Tuqiri or various Jonah Lomu’s and other numbered flying machines on numerous rugby pitches at all levels. I am appropriating rugby as a cultural form here that does not find gaps to weave through in the supposed field of global free flowing cultural exchanges, it is a one way flow in most parts, excepts for a few stars of the games, as it is for a few stars of other popular culture forms in music or film, or stars of academia and the literati. For them borders are opened, their cultural-sporting or popular culture expressed much lauded, and once past their usually limited use by dates, discarded and new replacements sought, from the backyard of the Pacific, among other places.

Nothing changes for those not part of this magic. They are left behind or excluded from such a global flow. This of course is not limited to these sports stars. Australia at whim, for example, provides European backpackers, with working holiday visas, but will not allow Pacific Islanders temporary fruit picking work permits. Perhaps the Australians are missing out of the logic of rugby here, for people who can run as fast, and pick up round/oval spherical objects off the ground and deposit it in a marked off area, sound like ideal qualifications for working in orchards. For rugby is not unlike the process of fruit picking, if it was turned into a sport. No doubt then, the Pacific Islanders would be at the top of the wish list, for the Riverina Granny Smith Runners in the (AAPL) Australian Apple Picking League.

I have indulged for the most part in this discussion paper on fairly left field examples of how like the immigration borders, the cultural borders are mostly closed off, except for a lucky, or talented or qualified few. It is a process of elimination via immigration profiling that stops one at a border, or allows for people to be washed overboard and to provide pixels for political propaganda, as part of border security. For our part, as writers, we need to carefully scrutinize the politics of border controls and security that watch over the so-called free flows of the cultural, whether it is as identity, as a representation in a popular culture form, as academic debate or the written word. There is much to read in between the numerals of the remittance slips from Western Union as there is in the contracts of rugby players, as there is in the assumption that globalism and modernity, and the underpinnings of the digital world of coded numerals, makes possible for cultures and identities to engage and transform as free agents.