Welcome everyone to the World Transformation Movement (WTM).
My name is Tim Macartney-Snape and I would like to introduce to my very close friend
and fellow Patron of the World Transformation Movement, Jeremy Griffith.
Jeremy is an Australian biologist and the author of many books and publications about
the human condition, the subject that has previously been described as the most hostile
and forbidding realm of all for humans to venture into.
Jeremy is an Australian biologist and the author of many books and publications about
the human condition.
Because the issue of the human condition has been such a hostile realm I think it will
help everyone to know something of Jeremy’s background and the initiatives he was predominantly
involved in that led to the establishment of the World Transformation Movement.
So while I’m known for climbing mountains—Jeremy is renowned for scaling far more difficult
and, in truth, treacherous terrain, the mountains of the mind.
Jeremy was born on the 1st of December 1945 and raised on a sheep station in central New
South Wales, Australia.
Jeremy and I were both beneficiaries of the influence of the soul-rather-than-intellect-cultivating,
Platonic, education system established by Australia’s greatest ever educator, Sir
James Darling, at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria.
Jeremy played a lot of rugby union football in his earlier days and in 1967, prior to
completing his biology degree at Sydney University in 1971, he made the trials for the national
side, the Wallabies.
Over a six-year period in the late 1960s and early 1970s Jeremy undertook the most thorough
search ever conducted for the now believed to be extinct Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger,
the extraordinary marsupial equivalent of the wolf.
The tiger’s jaws were capable of this incredible gape.
This is some rare black and white footage of ‘Benjamin’, the last known tiger who
died in Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo in 1936.
Setting off with nothing but his own enthusiasm, initiative and ingenuity–as these next photos
illustrate–Jeremy tried to rediscover and save the tiger from extinction.
In time his efforts began to draw a lot of support, in particular from James Malley and
Bob Brown, who appear on the right in this photograph.
Bob of course went on to found and lead the Australian Green Party in Australian politics.
In 1972 Natural History, the official publication of the American Museum of Natural History,
published a story written by Jeremy about his search for the Tasmanian Tiger–and in
1973 an episode in the highly regarded Australian television series A Big Country was shown
about Jeremy’s tiger-seeking adventures in Tasmania.
In 1973, after reaching the sad conclusion that the tiger was indeed extinct, Jeremy
began manufacturing furniture to his own natural designs.
Not only was it Jeremy’s ideas about the human condition that first attracted me, it
was also the simplicity and remarkable ingenuity of his furniture.
In fact all the furniture in this theatre is from Jeremy’s Griffith Tablecraft furniture
business.
When Jeremy sold his interest in the business in 1991 it had a staff of some 45 people and
his extraordinary pole framed workshop and showroom complex was one of the major tourist
attractions on the north coast of New South Wales.
For a more detailed account of Jeremy’s successful furniture business, go to .
Jeremy began writing about the human condition in 1975 and he has steadfastly continued his
practice of writing about the subject (which he does in the early hours of the morning)
to the present (which at the time of recording this presentation is late 2009).
This means there are some 35 years of intense work behind the ideas that Jeremy will be
presenting today.
In 1983 Jeremy established the Centre for Humanity’s Adulthood for the study of the
human condition.
Jeremy had to establish his own institution because, as he will explain in his presentation,
the strategy of conventional mechanistic, reductionist science has been to avoid, not
confront, the issue of the human condition.
In 1991 the Centre was incorporated as the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood (FHA),
of which I am a founding Director and now a Patron.
The FHA, now the World Transformation Movement (WTM), is a non-profit organisation with the
aims, as set out in its memorandum of association, of ‘understanding the human condition’
and ‘ameliorating the human condition’.
The WTM is based in Sydney where we have a long-standing foundation membership of some
50 individuals supporting the activities of the WTM on a full time basis.
Although it is the underlying issue in all human affairs, and the issue that had to be
addressed for there to be a future for the human race, the issue of the human condition
is an extremely difficult subject for humans to face.
But despite the resistance our work has encountered because of its extremely confronting nature,
it is, as I said, the all-important issue that had to be addressed and explained for
there to be a future for the human race.
As Sir Laurens van der Post, who has been the greatest influence in Jeremy’s work.
This is a photo of Sir Laurens with Jeremy and me when we visited him in London in 1993
shorty before he died.
Sir Laurens once said, ‘We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry
to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time,
1976, p.239 of 275).
The purpose of the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood was to lay the foundation for a
human-condition-reconciled new world for the human race–basically to endure the inevitable
initial onslaught of resistance to having this most contentious of all subjects of the
human condition opened up.
With that stage now completed after some extremely harrowing experiences, it becomes appropriate
to take understanding of the human condition to the next stage of actually ameliorating
or healing that condition.
For this next stage, the FHA has this year, 2009 (at the time of filming), become the
World Transformation Movement.
As Jeremy will explain, the human condition–this issue of ‘good and evil’ in our human
make-up–has long seemed inexplicable: how can we possibly make sense of the bewildering
confusion of paradoxes in our human make-up or condition, especially the question of ‘good
and evil’?.
Jeremy, before you start I think it would be a good idea to show people something of
the simplicity, originality and freshness of your furniture designs.
It will give people an insight into the simplicity and cleanliness of the way you think.
Jeremy Griffith: This is a carver chair because it has armrests.
Like all my designs, this chair is designed as simply as possible.
After seasoning the slabbed logs in a solar kiln that we built, we took the biggest and
best slabs to make the tables and we progressively sliced the other slabs up into multiples of
the thickness of the basic slab.
So that’s a single thickness on the legs, that’s a double thickness on the sides,
there’s triple thickness in the sides of lounges and so forth–so all the parts are
multiples of this one thickness–so it’s very simple.
There are no curves, carving, molding or turning, there’s no glue, or nails or screws–it’s
all dry jointed and simply put together with pegs.
So this leather backrest just slides off and it all comes apart.
The seat cushion slides off it like that.
These are slats tied on to the frame that the seat slides over.
The frame is held together by what is called a Spanish windlass, which is a twitched rope,
which is very powerful.
Then it all packs up into these squares.
So that’s a carver chair.
Over here is a side chair, which is even simpler.
A chair is the hardest part in a range of furniture to design but we made sideboards,
book cases–there’s a small one there–tables; we made the full range of furniture all based
on this simple idea of dry joints and straight, clean pieces of wood.
I might just say that trying to save a threatened–well, tragically now extinct–species and trying
to build a range of furniture that is simple and free of escapist, materialistic ornamentation
and embellishment was all very well, but I came to realise there was a much, much deeper
and far more serious issue and problem to address in the world, and that is: why are
we humans so destructive and needing such escapist, materialistic embellishment in our
lives?
So these are the very profound and serious questions that we are going to be dealing
with next.