Package Tour, was of a similar scale to the Cordial Home Project. Rick, sculptor and friend of ours remarked, “It’s a total stoner work. I can imagine someone in a lounge room after pulling a few cones, going: “Dude, wouldn’t it be cool if we put a tank on the cliffs of Bondi”, and you guys did it!”

Well, hopefully there was more to the piece than that, but it was a refreshing sentiment. I had had mixed feelings about the 2003 Bali bombings. I felt very sorry for the Australian tourists and local residents involved and their families and friends. It was a dirty thing to do. But as usual, the media coverage exposed the attitude that may have got us into this situation in the first place. As soon as the tragedy occurred phrases such as: “Bali, Australia’s playground”, or “Bali, at Australia’s doorstep”, were splashing around like only the media can do. I personally don’t think Bali is an Australian playground nor is it Australia’s doorstep either. It’s part of the Republic of Indonesia, it’s a people’s homeland; these kinds of remarks uncovered the colonialist attitude tourism carries with it and partially enlightens us about why a group of insane people might get the idea to bomb us in the first place.

The link between tourism and force is underlined in the title of the piece, Package Tour. A package tour is a notorious way to travel the world, a predetermined itinary, a lazy holiday for a lazy individual. But a tour is not only a holiday, it can also be a military tour of duty. Problems arise when these two concepts merge.

Sometimes you hear tourists whinge about a foreign country saying: “they couldn’t even speak English”. This is a pathetic attitude to take whilst traveling. During war, it’s fatal for the civilians who soldiers are meant to protect. This kind of lack of foresight is hopefully shown within the piece. The army tank, a symbol of military strength and mobility is stuck in place, like a caravan in a trailer trash park (and why not? When so many people within the American military come from lower socio-economic strata, searching for a way to get ahead in life.) As we said in the catalogue, “A brief stopover can often turn into a protracted stay”. This is a direct response to the situation in Iraq. Didn’t Donald Rumsfeld watch Three Kings? Even Hollywood admits that America fucked over the Iraqi rebels after the Gulf War. As if the people would rise up and join the road to American style democracy. Maybe the warlords decided to embrace the George and Jed Bush version of democracy. So now there are thousands of Iraqi people dead and hundreds of Americans and a few Italians too. All because the American government believed their own propoganda.