ECHIDNAS ARDREY AND PECKINPAH

My wife likes to listen to the radio while she falls into sleep at night. The radio often stays on until morning. So it is that when going to sleep or waking-up at night I often hear the stuff on this chirping box. Last night I heard a story about the sex life of echidnas, a mammal which inhabits the island state of Tasmania in Australia where I live. This prose-poem will not outline in detail the mating habits of this member of the mammal family or, rather, the mammalia class, montremeata order and tachyglossidae family. Readers here can google in fine detail what scientists have discovered in the last four years(2007-2011) about these randy little chaps who often engage in group sex. Those humans who would like to explain, or perhaps justify, their own sexual proclivities outside the bonds and bounds of faithfulness, outside what is still the normative monogamous nuclear family structure dominating our civilization, can turn to this egg-laying mammal who diverged, according to the fossil record, from the platypus about 25 MYA who was the last common ancestor about 160 MYA.1

I could not help but reflect on my exposure in the 1960s and 1970s to: African Genesis(1961) and The Territorial Imperative(1967), two of Robert Ardrey’s(1908-1980) most widely read works, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (1966), Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape (1967), and Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). These books were key elements in the public discourse in the 1960s and early 1970s on the subject of the origins of and the explanations for conflict. Of course, as in most subjects outside the most popular of popular culture, these books were read and discussed only by a coterie. The anthropological assumptions on the Stone Age roots of human aggression, indeed, the entire intellectual milieux that examined aggressiveness and conflict in the human species both in history and in contemporary society was part of the immense backdrop in the social sciences and humanities for my work as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and editor in the 1970s.

By the time I began teaching in high schools and post-secondary educational institutions in Australia in the years 1972 to 1974, and engaging in that embryonic community-building in/for the Baha’i Faith in the dry outposts of South Australia,2 these books had become part of that ongoing dialogue. But like most dialogue in the last half of the 20th century in which I grew into the various phases of adulthood, the lance and parry became increasingly complex. Perhaps that dialogue always was complex, but my life of memory did not begin until 1947. Did these books and these writers have things to say to help explain the anti-authoritarianism of the new generations of students I came into contact with by the 1960s? As a teacher of trainee-teachers in Tasmania, and then of other students training for different professions, I drew on these books, albeit in a cursory fashion because I was a generalist teaching many subjects in the humanities. Ardrey’s ideas notably influenced many others: Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the development of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as American filmmaker Sam Peckinpah(1925-1984) who made the Western epic The Wild Bunch (1969).3 –Ron Price with thanks to 1“Echidna’s Sex Life Under Study,” Science Daily, 28 August 2007, 2 especially the port-city of Whyalla, and 3Wikipedia, 12 January 2011.

The sex life of echidnas has resulted
in this prose-poetic reflection on half
a century of living and reading, & of
teaching and my sex life, a little of…
Audrey and Lorenz, of Morris and
Fromm with a touch of Kubrick &
Peckinpah thrown-in just for good
measure. It has been a wild bunch
of years, of decades, right back to
my first memory in 1947 in a wet-
spring in southern Ontario with the
mud-pie and mechano-toy making
things tidy and even as I have been
trying to do ever-since over more
than sixty years into the evening of
my life and, I’m sure, the syllables
of my recorded time still yet to live.

Ron Price
12 January 2011