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RENODESIGN.COM.AU R33011
WHAT DOES
IT TAKE
TO BE A
SUCCESSFUL
WRITER IN
AUSTRALIA?
alan gould
draws on his experience of
more than forty years as a published poet and novelist to explore the ways
in which poems and novels are written and read. No Australian has a better
understanding of the writer’s craft and, in the clear, original style that is his
hallmark, Gould shares his successes and failures as a writer, his knowledge of
Australian literary culture, and the motivations and reflections that underlie
the writing life. He also assesses the work of some of his contemporaries—
from rosemary dobson and alex miller to philip hodgins
and sonya hartnett.
alan gould has published twenty-three books of fiction, poetry and essays. His third novel, To the Burning
City, won the 1992 National Book Council “Banjo” Award, his seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was shortlisted for
the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction, and his collection, The Past Completes Me: Selected Poems 1973 –2003,
won the 2006 Grace Leven Award for poetry.
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POST Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia
PHONE (03) 8317 8147 FAX (03) 9320 9065
ovember 2014
N
No. 511 Volume LVIII, Number 11
Letters
Chronicle
quodlibet
the middle east
politics
religion
diplomacy
history
society
philosophy & ideas
art
poetry
literature film
stories
books
ryan
Poetry
2 Ken Harkness, Christopher Heathcote
3 Keith Windschuttle
5 Peter Coleman
7 The Case Against the New Iraq War Tom Switzer
12 The Case for Smothering the Islamic State in Its Sandpit Keith Windschuttle
18 White Swords and Black Pages: The Damnatio Memoriae of Abu
Tammam Matthew Omolesky
24 Tony Abbott: Right Person at the Right Time Daryl McCann
30 Unrevealing Secrets of the Self-Important Gregory Haines
33 September was the Cruellest Month Michael Connor
36 Secular Prejudice and the Survival of Religious Freedom Peter Kurti
41 The High Court’s Ambassadors Abroad Philip Ayres
48 Charles Bean and the Origins of the Anzac Legend Mervyn F. Bendle
56 New Myths about Australia’s Dangerous Drinking Philippa Martyr
62 Hannah Arendt’s Impact on Australia in the Sixties Peter Gilet
64 The Sacred and Profane in Aboriginal Art Gary Clark
72 Geoffrey Lehmann’s Journey Nicholas Hasluck
76 Revisiting The Secret River Jenny Stewart
80 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation Christopher Heathcote
90 The Next Creation Story, Perhaps Michael Giffin
96 A Dark Operatic Triumph Neil McDonald
98 Archaeology Morris Lurie
100 Norseman Sean O’Leary
108 Tree Palace by Craig Sherborne Alan Gould
109 Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper by Robert Bryce Tony Thomas
111 Dogs, Balloons and Their Humans Peter Ryan
17: A Short History of Haplessness; Vegan Geoff Page; 22: In the
Skocjan Caves Knute Skinner; Releasing the Frog Lisa Jacobson;
23: i hate poems about poetry; visitors Edith Speers; 55: Blessed and
Certain Christine Paice; Gifts Victoria Field; 60: If Life Were a Sonnet
Peter Jeffrey; 61: The Bad Banker’s Confessions John Whitworth;
63: Coming to Grips David Chandler; 70: Contemplation with Nuns
and Ducks; Broome Moon Christine Paice; 71: Digbeth Bistro; Your
Language; Muntjac Deer at Freeland Olivia Byard; 79: Old Postures;
Ringing the Number Knute Skinner; 89: The Red Napoleon;
If Good News Sold Newspapers Joe Dolce; 95: My Country; A Bunch
of Flowers Patrick McCauley; 97: Candyman John Whitworth;
110: Photograph of Albert Tiggy Johnson
L e t t er s
E di tor
Keith Windschuttle
[email protected]
L i t er a ry E di tor
Les Murray
D epu t y E di tor
George Thomas
C on t r i bu t i ng E di tor s
Books: Peter Coleman
Film: Neil McDonald
Theatre: Michael Connor
C olu m n is t s
Peter Coleman
Peter Ryan
E di tor , Q ua dr a n t O n li n e
Roger Franklin
[email protected]
C h a ir m a n of t h e
B oa r d of D ir ec tor s
Elizabeth Prior Jonson
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2
More than values
Sir: Edwin Dyga (October 2014)
distinguishes political conservatism (as practised by mainstream
political parties) from the cultural
conservatism of marginal political
movements—concerned that, as a
result, political conservatives are
being absorbed into the dominant
progressive paradigm.
Although Dyga does not do
so, those defending traditional
values commonly refer to them as
“Christian values” or as part of a
Judeo-Christian tradition, which
they are. Yet these terms are themselves a subtle denial of what they
seem to defend, as if creeds were
irrelevant and the Christian community a kind of family values fraternity. “Christian values” are the
mere limb of the whole. To separate them from Christian faith is
to sever an arm and expect it to lift
things. Christian scripture and doctrine are all about God and Christ,
family values being a third-ranking
concern.
Experiencing the love of God in
our hearts, Christians are drawn to
the higher demands of Virtue—just
as a child who delights in the love of
good parents honours them through
a good and useful life, anxious to
please and not to shame them. It is
the condition of the heart, not the
values, which really matters.
Secular conservatives recognise the culpability of those who,
with sincere intentions, recklessly
led great nations into poverty and
brutality on the strength of Marx’s
untested canon. They less recognise
their own culpability in helping to
lead millions away from religious
orthodoxy into materialist despair
and moral anarchy on the strength of
no canon at all.
It seems irresistible to clever
people that the mind, not the heart,
holds the answer to our woes. But, in
Quadrant November 2014
a free society, honouring traditional
values demands personal discipline,
and the strength to maintain that
discipline is not to be found in the
materialist paradigm. If we are to
empower cultural conservatism, we
will first need to name its Power.
Ken Harkness
Sydney, NSW
The new apartheid
SIR: Your October editorial clicked
with some of my own thoughts
about our universities. I spent last
year back at La Trobe University and
was disturbed to see how university
life has been changed to accommodate Islamic students.
A small former lecture room
in the old Humanities block has
been converted into the Islamic
prayer “room”. Fine, let them have
it. But the “room” has been actually
been divided into two rooms with
separate doors: one room for men,
the other for women.
Changes have also been made to
the toilets in the adjacent corridor.
Some of the toilets have signs indicating that they are for Islamic students. There are more toilets right
next door which are general toilets—for use by us infidels.
How is it that regulations about
gender equality are waived for
Islamic students to put men and
women in separate rooms? How
is it, also, that Islamic students
are given their own special toilets?
This smacks of apartheid to me.
Islamic students are claiming facilities and privileges for themselves,
demanding segregation.
I campaigned in the student
movement against apartheid.
We were offended at societies
where there were “white” toilets
and “coloured” toilets, and so forth.
Now apartheid is being introduced
in our own universities, and anyone
who objects is bizarrely called racist.
Christopher Heathcote
Keilor, Vic
C h r o n i cl e
K eith Windschut tle
Unimaginable things can happen now, things that
Australians have only read about in books. Now officials
can break the law with immunity from prosecution—
and without having to answer to a court. They can act
in total secrecy. They will decide what they do and to
whom and when. They do not have to ask permission.
They will choose when to interfere in your life and
when they won’t. Sometimes they will do it because it is
necessary to fight crime. Sometimes because they enjoy it.
—Alison Bevege, Sydney Morning Herald, Age,
September 29, 2014
that fundamentally alters the balance of power
between the media and the government”. It did
this by giving the government the ability to declare
a particular topic a “special intelligence operation”
and thus prevent journalists from publishing classified information leaked to them by a public servant.
Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson agreed
the legislation restricted press freedom.
At St James Ethics Centre, director Simon
Longstaff said the government was justifying its
curtailment of liberty on the grounds of the need
to keep the Australian people safe. “The governhis passage from the Fairfax Press discuss- ment’s assumption is that the Australian people lack
ing the powers allegedly given to Australian the courage and commitment to choose liberty over
intelligence officers under the new National security; that we are not brave enough to defy the
Security Amendment Bill was written by a journal- terrorists’ threats and accept the cost of our freedom.”
ist who argues it turns Australia into “Stasiland”, an
Most of this commentary was nowhere near the
equivalent of the former communist regime of East mark. The legislation was targeted not primarily at
Germany.
journalists but at public servants. As one of the few
Unfortunately, her appraisal of the new legisla- informed analyses, by University of Queensland legal
tion was not alone. In her wake came a horde of sup- academic Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, pointed out, the
porters from the news media and politics. Speaking offending clauses were designed as a response to
on behalf of his members, the secretary of the jour- the actions of dissident public sector employees like
nalists’ union MEAA, Chris Warren, declared:
Edward Snowden, who illegally downloaded and
disseminated American intelligence information
This Bill criminalises legitimate journalist
to the world’s press. In a piece for the Conversation
reporting of matters in the public interest. It
last July, long before the recent controversy arose,
overturns the public’s right to know. It persecutes
Ananian-Welsh wrote: “The bill makes it clear that
and prosecutes whistleblowers and journalists
the Australian government is seeking to protect itself
who are dealing with whistleblowers. It imposes
against a Snowden scenario. The provisions place
outrageous surveillance on journalists and the
severe limits on ASIO officers’ capacities to handle
computer networks of their media employers.
intelligence information as any mishandling will
risk criminal penalty.” She quoted George Brandis’s
Although Labor did not vote against the legisla- speech in the bill’s second reading:
tion, much the same response was made in the House
As recent, high-profile international events
of Representatives when it was debated. Independent
demonstrate, in the wrong hands, classified
MP Andrew Wilkie said it was exploiting fears
or sensitive information is capable of global
about terrorism to turn Australia into a “police state”.
dissemination at the click of a button.
Greens MP Adam Bandt said the legislation would
prevent journalists from reporting that ASIO had
Unauthorised disclosures on the scale now possible
killed people in special operations. In fact, he said,
in the online environment can have devastating
journalists could go to jail for ten years for simply
consequences for a country’s international
reporting the existence of special operations.
relationships and intelligence capabilities.
Even some prominent conservatives joined the
In a bid to hose down the commotion, Brandis
fray. Foreign editor of the Australian, Greg Sheridan,
described the bill as “a terrible piece of legislation himself entered the debate on October 14 with an
T
3
chronicle
opinion piece in the Australian. He observed that
complaints about the legislation had come “not just
from the usual suspects of the paranoid fantasist
Left but from reputable conservative commentators
including Greg Sheridan”.
He pointed out that the new law was not directed
at journalists but had general application. He said
counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, by their
very nature, required covert operations. And covert
operations, such as the penetration of terrorist cells,
should be kept secret. Such operations were in the
national interest and so should be protected by the
law. “To make it unlawful to disclose that which
must remain secret does not seem unreasonable,” he
observed. “To suggest otherwise fails the common
sense test.”
Moreover, his legislation was nothing new,
Brandis said. It simply extended to ASIO a protection in force since 2010 to operations by the
Australian Federal Police and other law enforcement
agencies. He said the recent hubbub missed the
point. Far from turning Australian intelligence services into a local version of East Germany’s Stasi, the
new provisions were merely an extension to ASIO
of a legitimate and pre-existing legal regime, under
which there had so far been no prosecutions.
In retrospect, the whole outburst resembles a
return of the attitudes about Australian intelligence
officers that emerged more than sixty years ago during the Cold War. These notions have long lain
deeply embedded in Australian culture, and have
now re-emerged just at a time when we don’t need
them.
In response to the formation of ASIO in 1948 and
the successful entrism of the Communist Party into
the labour movement, party supporters developed
what turned out to be the effective tactic of ridicule.
Anyone who suspected a body like a trade union, a
peace organisation or an education association might
be infiltrated or controlled by the party—as many of
them at the time were—could be accused of “looking for reds under the bed”.
Judging by Greg Haines’s review in this edition
of Meredith Burgmann’s collection of memoirs by
old Sixties leftists, Dirty Secrets, many of the generation who came of age in that decade still think the
same. They deride ASIO’s bumbling efforts at surveillance. Former High Court judge Michael Kirby
observes in the book:
Looking back at my story, my little file in ASIO,
you can see how futile, how pathetic, how
wasteful of resources it was to be following me
around and taking solemn notes of what I was
saying to the Council for Civil Liberties, or to
other bodies.
4
In Kirby’s case this might have been true, but
most of the memoirs in Burgmann’s book are written by people who were members of the Communist
Party or its front organisations, and were true believers in the party’s objective of socialist revolution. At
a time when world communism had gained control
of more than one quarter of the population of the
world, it was no joke. It was a formidable movement
that deserved the surveillance ASIO gave it.
Nonetheless, you can still find much the same
sentiments alive and well today among a number of
younger left-wing academics who have recently colonised the field of terrorism studies. In a book published last year, Spooked: The Truth About Intelligence
in Australia (UNSW Press), the dominant attitude
of its authors is the same as that of Michael Kirby—
ASIO is pathetic, wasteful and a bit of a joke. Only
today instead of communism, the intelligence community’s main target is terrorism.
The book’s lead author, Christopher Michaelsen,
lecturer in law at the University of New South
Wales, is confident ASIO has got it all wrong again:
“Although portrayed as an unprecedented security
issue, Islamist terrorism hardly constitutes a threat
of significant concern for Australia.” Similarly, the
book’s editor, Daniel Baldino, Head of Politics at the
University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, thinks today’s
public attitudes deserve feeble jokes:
while the word “terrorism” triggers a range of
strong emotional reactions, and despite the
horrors of 9/11, a lot more people will die annually
from traffic accidents and lung disease than of
terrorism. Maybe we should declare a bonus war
on cars and cancer (although sending a drone
after cancer might be unwarranted overkill).
It is not easy to say which is the worse of these
views: the witless complacency of people paid to
study the issue at a time when ASIO surveillance is
uncovering Islamic terrorist cells plotting homicide
in our major cities; or their inability to see how bogus
is the comparison between deaths from accidents and
disease, which are morally neutral, and deaths from
murder and terrorism, which are morally culpable
and demand justice.
The supercilious attitude of the authors of
Spooked, coupled with the kneejerk hostility to
George Brandis’s new security laws, confirm how
deep-seated the culture of contempt for our intelligence services remains today. And this is at a time
when the most practical and successful response to
domestic terrorism has proven to be ASIO’s intelligence surveillance and homeland security. Yet again,
our intellectual class has proven itself not part of the
solution but part of the problem.
quodlibet
P eter C olem a n
W
hat did you do in the Cold War, Daddy?
This is the theme and title of an absorbing
new symposium which aims to show
how the Cold War felt to children growing up in
partisan, usually communist, families. Edited by
Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi, it anthologises the
memoirs of people mainly born in the 1940s whose
parents remained communists despite everything.
This may also be a reason for the book’s limitation.
It does not require enormous empathy to psych one’s
way into the souls of those who became communists
in the 1920s and even the 1930s during the crises of
the Great War, the Great Depression, or the rise
of Fascism and Nazism. But to remain communist
in the 1940s and 1950s—after the well-documented
revelations of the Soviet grand guignol—the Gulag,
the Ukrainian famine, the Moscow trials, the
Hitler–Stalin pact, the Stalinising of Eastern and
Central Europe, and the servility to Moscow of the
communist parties of the world—calls for a special
degree of wilful blindness which should surely be
noted in a memoir. But there is little acknowledgment
of any of this in these family stories. It is not much
help to be reminded by Saul Bellow that “a great
deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is deep”. Why was there
this need? In any case it is not a good habitat for the
rearing of children.
In their introduction the editors regret the
narrow range of almost all their highly ideological
contributors. They say they simply could not find
a writer from a Liberal Party or conservative
background who grew up in a Cold War anticommunist ambiance and now wanted to write
about it in a symposium with communists and
their sympathisers. They asked several children
of Cold War conservative families to contribute
but were always politely turned away. Perhaps
they should have tried harder, but they came to
the doubtful conclusion that the Cold War did
not affect conservatives as “viscerally” as it did
communists, leftists and other ideologues. Cleaving
to the Australian, or as some saw it, the British way
of life, the conservatives despised and dismissed
communists as fanatics, war-time strikers and
saboteurs—not the sort with whom you wanted to
get together and talk about the old days. Let time
heal the wounds.
As it is, most of the contributors thank god
their parents remained loyal communists. They
seem to think they were on the right side of history.
They look on defections from communism not as
liberation from a god that failed but as regrettable
mistakes. One of the contributors, the historian
Lyndall Ryan, appears to feel that the bitterness
of her father, Jack Ryan, over his expulsion in 1930
from the Communist Party, as masterminded by a
blow-in Stalinist and Comintern double or triple
agent, led him to lose his socialist vision: “Jack never
recovered.” He even became an anti-communist
or rather anti-Stalinist, a sort of Trotskyist. John
Docker, whose father had co-operated in Ryan’s
expulsion, cannot look back on this family episode
without “misery and nausea”. It is hard to see
how most conservatives could readily join these
exchanges. But their absence is still a pity.
One exceptional chapter stands out. It is the
moving (and anti-communist) memoir by Martin
Krygier. He gives it the title, “An intimate and
foreign affair”. Intimate because it is about his
family, especially his father Richard whom he loved
and admired, and whose political trajectory, from
student pro-communist in Warsaw to uncom
promising anti-communist, deeply influenced him
in his youth and still does to this day. His parents
were non-observant, non-Zionist Jews for whom
their Jewishness was “a secondary part of their
self-conception”—as Poles and leftists. Foreign
because his parents’ formation was not in Australia
but in Poland where they endured nationalist antiSemitism (in one brawl his father’s jaw was broken);
observed the Moscow show trials of 1937; and
began to understand the “constant crazy lies” of
the communists including their denials of Stalin’s
“murders on a mega-industrial scale”. They fully
grasped the reality of totalitarianism in daily life.
Fleeing a Poland divided between Hitler and Stalin,
they arrived in Sydney in December 1941 a few days
before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
After the war many if not most Australians
could not comprehend the Krygiers’ experience. But
Richard Krygier now found his cause—combatting
5
quodlibet
illusions about Stalin and the USSR which were
entrenched among Australian leftists who should
have been, he thought, his friends and allies. To
characterise him with the anodyne term “activist”
is to underestimate him. Martin writes: “He was a
preternaturally energetic man. He was never still.”
He sought out people to help or influence. He
distributed books and information. He promoted
writers from Hannah Arendt to Milovan Djilas,
from Robert Conquest to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
He established the Australian Committee for
Cultural Freedom, published its bulletin Free Spirit,
and in 1956 founded Quadrant. He endured bitter
defamation, especially after he gradually if not
entirely turned against his old allies on the Left. But
he remained irrepressible. In this ambiance Martin
Krygier learnt about life and politics.
Martin also takes the story further—in keeping
with the theme of What Did You Do in the Cold
War, Daddy? In 1985 he made his first trip to
what he regarded as Occupied Poland. “It was a
profound experience. It changed my life.” He met
the partisans of the trade union Solidarity, whose
contempt for communism chimed in with his own.
When European communism collapsed, he greeted
it with apprehensive delight. “I only regretted that
my father had not lived to see it.” (His mother did.)
But he also moved on from his inherited views.
He re-read Leszek Kolakowki (“How to Be a
Conservative Liberal Socialist: A Credo”). He
delivered the Boyer Lectures—Between Fear and
Hope: Hybrid Thoughts on Public Values. He wrote
a major intellectual biography of Philip Selznick
(whose Organizational Weapon had been a manual
for Cold Warriors). But however much his position
today may differ from his father’s, he concludes his
memoir with this tribute: “What was fundamental
for him remains fundamental for me. He remains
for me exemplary as a human being, and a person of
courage, energy, selflessness, moral clarity, honesty
and warmth.”
It’s what one good man did in the Cold War.
J
ulia Horne, she tells us, grew up with a brother,
a tortoise, a canary—and a book. The book
was her father Donald Horne’s best-seller The
Lucky Country. She was speaking to a luncheon to
celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s first
publication in 1964. She did not read it until she was
an undergraduate. It had changed her father’s life.
He was a well-known journalist (and “advertising
man”) when he sat down to write it in his spare time.
He would probably have written it anyhow, but the
originating suggestion and deadline, she said, came
from Max Harris and Geoffrey Dutton of Penguin
Books, who urged Horne to do a book expanding
the ideas in his challenging article “Living with
Asia”, written for the fortnightly magazine the
Observer. Horne said it took him three months
to finish the first draft, which his wife Myfanwy
then edited. The first print of 18,000 sold out in
nine days. Sales soon reached 160,000. It turned
Horne from “ journalist” to “writer” who produced
a new book every year or two for the rest of his life.
What was the secret of The Lucky Country’s
popularity? Part of it was, Julia Horne said, due
to its “cheeky” style. But there was more to it than
that. Its timing was perfect. It came out at the
fag-end of that great exuberant post-war period,
the Age of Menzies. Australians were hungry
for new directions. Many thought they found
them for a moment in Whitlamism, of which
The Lucky Country was a precursor. Like Barack
Obama decades later, it said, “Yes We Can!” The
other secret of its success was its wonderful if
ambiguous title summing up Horne’s big theme
that the country was being run by second-raters
and owed its success to luck. This is the weak part
of the book: Australia’s success was far more due
to hard work, enterprise and, yes, imagination. But
the title caught on—even if often for the wrong
reason. Julia Horne tells how irritated her father
was when it was used to advertise a popular brand
of moselle. But it was a sort of homage.
T
his year is the fiftieth anniversary of another
important book, Henry Mayer’s The Press in
Australia. It was the subject of Murray Goot’s
Henry Mayer Memorial Lecture on October 7.
The book was never popular. In a Marxising mode
it mocked the pretensions of journalists and the
illusions of reformers. So it was soon forgotten. But
Goot believes it is the foundation book of media
studies in Australia. Time to look at it again?
This project has been assisted by the
Commonwealth Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
6
Tom S w itzer
The Case Against
the New Iraq War
F
or the third time in as many decades, the
United States is leading a coalition of allies
into Iraq. But unlike President George
H.W. Bush’s liberation of Kuwait in 1991—and
like President George W. Bush’s liberation of Iraq
in 2003—President Barack Obama’s war by any
other name in 2014 is bound to fail. Indeed, what
is amazing about the US-led mission in Iraq that
has expanded into Syria is the extent to which there
is already serious scepticism in America about the
strategy and prospects for success. When even proObama and pro-war media outlets, such as the New
York Times and Wall Street Journal respectively, slam
his war strategy, as they do all too often in their editorials, you know the President is on shaky ground.
At first glance, the mission to degrade and
destroy the jihadist terrorist group known as Islamic
State sounds like a noble and just cause. But as I have
argued elsewhere (Sydney Morning Herald, August
27, and Australian, September 11), if one wants to be
effective and not merely to feel virtuous, the process
of eradicating what is essentially a disparate group of
Sunni militants is complicated and fraught with the
danger of unintended consequences. All the more so
when we are dealing with artificial states and medieval societies.
Many supporters of the intervention posit three
main arguments: that there is no link between the
invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the mayhem that has
spread across north-west Iraq in 2014; that the threat
posed by IS represents a clear and present danger
around the world; and that the mission to degrade and
destroy the terrorist group can primarily be accomplished with air power. Each position is implausible.
Moreover, far from draining the swamps of jihadism
in Iraq and Syria, there is a danger that the new
military campaign could replenish them.
S
tart with the observation widely held among
neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists
that the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime has
had nothing to do with the demise of the Iraqi
state. The rise of IS in 2014, we are told, has to do
with Western inaction in Syria’s civil war, President
Nouri al-Maliki’s kleptocratic rule, and President
Obama’s withdrawal of US forces in late 2011.
There is, to be sure, some truth to each explanation. Syria’s Sunni terrorist fighters have spilled into
Iraq and destabilised the region. From 2006 to 2014,
Maliki had been more interested in seeking revenge
against his political and sectarian rivals, especially
the Sunni Arabs, than in building a nation. And
the withdrawal of US troops helped scuttle the semblance of sectarian peace that Washington had brokered following the surge in 2007.
But the taproot of this disaster was the decision
to launch a preventive war against Saddam’s regime
in 2003. It was this event that sparked the other
contributing causes to the debacle unfolding across
Iraq in 2014. (Disclaimer: from the outset, I opposed
the 2003 war not on the reflexive the-US-is-alwayswrong grounds that motivated many left-wing critics, but on an appeal to the classic conservative
virtues of prudence, scepticism concerning sweeping
ambition, and the dangers of hubris.)
The architects of the war—such as Vice-President
Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas
Feith in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, egged on by
neo-conservative thinkers such as Robert Kagan,
Charles Krauthammer and Max Boot, publications such as the Weekly Standard, Washington
Post editorial page and Wall Street Journal editorial page and Washington-based think-tanks such
as the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings
Institution, Heritage Foundation—thought that the
“liberation” of the Iraqi people from a brutal dictatorship would lead to a flourishing liberal democracy. But the goal of exporting democracy to an
arbitrarily created state and ethnically and tribally
fractured society was bound to be so messy and so
dangerous that it was not worth so much blood and
treasure.
The Baathists, like the Hashemites and British
before them, had kept in place minority rule, giving
Sunni Arabs a disproportionate share of power and
resources while brutally suppressing Shia and Kurds.
7
The Case Against the New Iraq War
By invading Iraq and toppling Saddam’s regime, the
US-led coalition ended that imbalance. The majority
Shia became the new winners; the minority Sunnis
the new losers. The result has been a violent rebalancing act in Iraqi society. As Vali Nasr points out
in The Shia Revival and Forces of Fortune, the Sunni
insurgency fought both the US occupation and
the Shia ascendancy it facilitated. The insurgents
wanted the Americans gone so they could restore
Sunni dominance over Iraq. And with the US withdrawal, the Sunnis escalated their bloody sectarian
war against the Shia-run government.
To repeat: it was the US invasion that shattered
the Sunni-run state, which allowed age-old ethnic
and sectarian tensions to resurface. The result has
been Iraq’s descent into anarchy and violence. If
one remains unconvinced about the link between
the invasion and the mayhem today, think about it
this way: before March 2003, there was no terrorism
problem in Iraq. Since “liberation”, however, Iraq
has attracted jihadists like flies to a dying animal.
Add to this the flawed justifications for the war
(weapons of mass destruction) as well as the unintended consequences (Iran’s strengthened position
in the region) and it’s no wonder the historian Tony
Judt called the Iraq invasion “the worst foreign policy
error in American history”. One can recognise that
Saddam was a murderous gangster and still believe
this Sound of Music-loving secularist, denounced by
Osama bin Laden as an “infidel”, had been kept in
his box via the tried and tested policy of containment
(sanctions, naval blockade, no-fly zone, deterrence).
It was this strategy that defined US Iraq policy
during the Bush Snr and Clinton administrations.
When he was Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney
defended Washington’s decision not to topple
Saddam on realist grounds. Shortly after the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, he said:
It’s not clear what kind of government you
would put in place of the one that’s currently
there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a
Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one
that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts
toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much
credibility is that government going to have if
it’s set up by the United States military when
it’s there? How long does the United States
military have to stay to protect the people that
sign on for that government, and what happens
to it once we leave?
Although Cheney expressed similar sentiments
during the 1990s, he jettisoned that logic after
September 11. America and the Middle East have
been living with the consequences ever since.
8
This history is important in understanding the
crisis in Iraq. Yet many supporters of the invasion
remain in denial, instead blaming Obama’s “premature” exit in 2011 for unravelling the fragile unity
government and removing all that was keeping the
sectarian rivals in check. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that it was the Bush administration that signed a status-of-forces agreement in
October 2008, which pledged to withdraw all US
troops by the end of 2011. During lengthy negotiations on keeping American forces in Iraq after 2011
the Maliki government—encouraged by its main
backer, Iran—insisted that all remaining US personnel be subject to Iraqi law. This was a demand
to which Washington could not possibly agree.
Moreover, Obama was fulfilling an election mandate to withdraw troops from a widely unpopular
war.
True, the US “surge” in early 2007 bought some
time to allow national elections to take place, but
never enough time to get the sectarian mess of
post-Saddam Iraq to try to resolve itself peacefully
and form a viable non-sectarian polity. Besides, it
was inevitable that once Washington withdrew US
forces, the hatred, rivalries and vengefulness that
are so much a part of Iraqi religious, sectarian and
tribal animosities would erupt. Would the critics of
Obama’s failure to reach a new residual forces deal
with Baghdad in 2011 really countenance staying
forever in Iraq?
Hawks insist that the invasion had nothing to
do with the formation of IS, because its operation
emanates from Syria. The truth, though, is that IS
is directly linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was
created in response to the US-led invasion and
subsequent occupation, not to mention the creation
of a Shia regime in Baghdad. Remember Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi and the torrent of horror his Sunni
extremists unleashed from 2003 to 2007? Although
the “surge” helped persuade the Sunni tribes to turn
against the jihadists, the withdrawal of US troops
and the Syrian civil war in 2011 helped allow the
insurgency-turned-terrorist groups to re-energise.
Hawks also maintain that if Obama had intervened more assertively in 2011-12 there would have
been less instability and violence, and the Islamists
would never have been able to exploit vacuums in
that war-torn nation. But it’s difficult to understand
the logic of this argument, given that about 180,000
US and coalition troops had occupied Iraq from the
invasion in 2003 to the time of withdrawal in 2011.
During that period, anywhere between 150,000 and
300,000 Iraqi civilians died and more than a million, including most of the country’s Christians,
fled the country. Islamist extremist groups, such as
Al Qaeda, which subsequently morphed into IS,
flourished during the US-led occupation. The point punditry and alarmist statements by politicians”.
here is that notwithstanding an assertive American
We are really talking about, as Professor Stephen
presence in Iraq—the kind of proactive interven- Walt of Harvard University has observed, a “lightly
tion that John McCain, Hillary Clinton and oth- armed group of bloody-minded radicals whose new
ers have called for in Syria since 2011—the barbarity ‘caliphate’ extends over a lot of mostly empty terand bloodshed that we’ve witnessed in Syria were ritory” in north-west Iraq. Yes, the jihadists have
also taking place in Iraq during the US occupation. seized modern military equipment and have the
Why then are Iraq and Syria so similar, even potential to gain revenues from some oil fields.
though the USA was heavily engaged in the former They also appear to be better organised than other
and not the latter? It’s because, as the American terrorist groups. But IS has about a standard US
historian of Syria Joshua Landis argues, the long- Army division of 20,000 troops (though the CIA
time minority rulers in both nations have nothing has claimed that IS has recruited an extra 10,000
left to lose. As mentioned earlier, the invasion radi- since the start of the US air campaign in Iraq in
cally altered the sectarian imbalance
August). It has no navy or air force.
that had been in place for generaIt can defeat small units of divided,
tions. This meant that the minorotwithstanding an poorly trained, demoralised troops
ity Sunnis embraced an insurgency
(such as the Iraq units it routed earassertive American lier this year north of Baghdad), but
that has morphed into a plethora of
Sunni jihadist movements.
not a decent military with resolve.
presence in Iraq,
The same thing has been hapIt’s a predominantly Sunni group,
the barbarity and
pening in Syria since the so-called
which will not be able to expand
Arab Spring in 2011 encouraged a bloodshed that we’ve into non-Sunni areas. IS, at least
rebellion that threatened to topple
Western help, can’t topple
witnessed in Syria without
Bashar al-Assad’s minority regime.
Assad, or Jordan, or the Shia regime
were also taking
The Alawites, the ruling sect in
in Baghdad (whose forces, together
Syria—like Iraq’s Sunni Arab sects
place in Iraq during with its Iran backer, outnumber IS
such as the former Baathists—are
to one).
the US occupation. by 100
fighting tooth and nail in a battle
Writing in the Washington Post,
for survival. It is really not clear how
Middle East expert Ramzy Mardini
US intervention in Syria would have
points out that IS’s “fundamenmade things better. In any case, the West could apply tals are weak”, that its “extreme ideology, spirit of
the old diplomatic dictum “the enemy of my enemy subjugation and acts of barbarism prevent it from
is my friend” with excessive zeal by forming an alli- becoming a political venue for the masses” and it’s
ance with the Assad regime (and its Iranian backer) “completely isolated, encircled by enemies”. Yes, the
against the Sunni jihadists. That seems unlikely.
group is a bunch of brutal thugs—beheadings are
especially grisly—but there is a danger in allowing
ur leaders, most notably Barack Obama, David its choice of execution methods to drive Western
Cameron and Tony Abbott, maintain that IS strategy. Make no mistake: the jihadists want the
poses a grave and serious danger around the world. USA and its allies to intervene in order to drum up
Some hawks even suggest that Islamist terrorism anti-Americanism and drive recruitment numbers
is such a mighty ideological force with the power to their cause.
to threaten the world that it is akin to Nazism or
If IS tries to conquer and occupy Baghdad, it
Soviet communism. But such analogies are inaccu- would find itself in a giant quagmire. Many Shia
rate and imprudent. As Owen Harries, a long-time would resist, and it’s likely the Iranians would
Cold Warrior, has argued: “It’s to belittle the his- commit overwhelming firepower to reverse any IS
torical experiences of World War II, not to speak of intervention. Even if, for argument’s sake, the Sunni
the Cold War, to equate the terrorists of today and extremists conquer all of Iraq, it remains unclear how
the damage they’re capable of with the totalitarian US core strategic interests are directly threatened.
regimes of the previous century.”
Realists could argue with some justification that a
But if IS really posed the kind of grave threat powerful Sunni Iraq could balance a Shia Iran, which
that many opinion-makers tell us, why are Western Washington has long feared is a terror-sponsoring
leaders so reluctant to commit ground troops? Besides, power that wants to dominate the region. After all,
US intelligence agencies have reached a different the US decision to back Saddam, a Sunni, from 1980
conclusion. According to the New York Times, some to 1988 was made in order to balance the power of
US officials and terror experts believe “the actual the new Islamic Republic of Iran.
danger has been distorted in hours of television
It is true that the locals in Sunni towns such as
N
O
9
Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah did not resist jihadist
intervention during the northern summer (despite
the fact that many are horrified by IS’s violence and
death cults). The same could be said of the Sunnis
in Raqqa, IS’s Syrian capital. But Iraq’s Sunnis (like
Syria’s Sunnis) fear the sectarian Shia-led regime
in Baghdad (and the Assad regime in Damascus)
and the pro-government militias more than they
do the Sunni militia groups. Since 2003, and especially since Nouri al-Maliki came to power in
2006, Sunnis insist the Shia-led government in Iraq
has marginalised and discriminated against Iraq’s
minority Muslim sect. All the available evidence
indicates that Sunnis will not feel represented in
Baghdad under Maliki’s successor Haider al-Abadi,
whose government is still dominated by Iranianfunded Shia religious parties. T
here is breezy confidence that this mission to
degrade and destroy IS—to “follow them to the
gates of hell”, as Vice-President Joe Biden has put
it—will be painless and relatively easy. But the task
is more complicated and potentially more hazardous
than many hawks appear to realise. Above all else,
the US-led coalition needs the prospect of a political solution as well as formidable regional ground
forces to couple with its air power. Both conditions
are seriously lacking.
The White House view, widely shared by foreign
policy analysts, is that the authoritarian Maliki was
the main obstacle to the creation of an inclusive government that would unify Iraq. If only the different
Shia, Sunni and Kurdish sects could reconcile their
differences—the argument goes—the prospects for
a genuinely inclusive and viable state would increase.
But this is foreign policy in service of Rodney King
and his question during the Los Angeles riots in
1992: “Can’t we all get along?” Alas, Iraqis can’t all
get along, because the hatred, rivalries and vengefulness are so much part of Iraqi religious, sectarian
and tribal animosities.
The West thinks a military attack is a justified
response to both the mayhem that the IS is inflicting across the region and the creation of a potential haven for a new generation of jihadists. Many
Sunni Iraqis think differently. For them, a US-led
campaign may reaffirm the potent narrative that
Washington tolerates, even facilitates, a violent
Shia offensive; and that when non-Sunni groups are
threatened, the Americans act on behalf of the Shialed government in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, if the Sunnis feel that their loss in
the post-Saddam era remains absolute, they may
decide their only recourse is to tolerate or even
support Sunni militia groups. To the extent that
such attitudes prevail, the new military campaign
10
will damage, perhaps irreparably, any prospects of a
genuinely inclusive government in Baghdad.
There is also a danger that the air strikes will
unite the disparate Sunni militia not just against
the Iranian-backed Shia-led government but also
against the US-led military coalition. Although IS is
certainly the most brutal and best-organised terrorist group, it is hardly alone in the region. According
to Jessica Mathews, president of the Washingtonbased Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
IS is only one of many Sunni militant groups. Then
there are the tribes of central Iraq, which have a
long history of resistance to any outside authority.
Mathews goes on to say that within the forces that
have proved so powerful in recent months are groups
with very real differences, even mutual hatred. And
although they are fighting on the same side today,
they won’t be together for long.
The US-led military campaign, however, could
cement their bonds. Indeed, it is already clear that
the strategy has turned two bitter adversaries—IS
forces in Syria and the Jabhat al-Nusra Front (an offshoot of Al Qaeda) who were fighting each other—
into allies in a fight against the West. Recall, too,
that in 2003 leaders of the “Coalition of the Willing”
claimed to be combatting only Saddam’s regime but
were shocked to find themselves combatting virtually the entire Sunni community in Iraq. Could that
happen again in both Iraq and Syria?
A
s for the strategy, there are limits to air power’s
capacity to wipe out an irregular force like IS.
The jihadists are not running big armoured divisions
that make inviting targets. Nor are they conveniently parking all their equipment in a nice depot for
US forces to bomb. They can disperse or camouflage
their armed trucks. Even if the intensive bombing campaign identifies them easily, they may melt
away, much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan. That
air campaign was seen as wildly successful in 2001,
but look at Afghanistan today. Ditto Libya a decade
later. Three years since the demise of Gaddafi, Libya
is in permanent chaos. Without an effective coalition
ground-force operation, militia groups have been
able to reduce the country to a bloody shambles.
This suggests that, as General Martin Dempsey,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated to
Congress in September, the coalition is not going
to win with air power alone. It also needs powerful
regional ground forces to, among other things, help
offer bribes to and make power-sharing deals with
local groups, tribes and sects. The Iraqi army is no
substitute for US ground troops. The only other two
nations that are willing and able to commit combat
troops to fight IS forces are Syria and Iran. Alas, the
stated US policy is to topple Damascus and refuse to
collaborate with Tehran. Neither nation even hosts
a US embassy.
To complicate matters further is the widespread
view that the new military mission is likely to far
outlive the Obama presidency. At this stage, the
American people overwhelmingly back the mission
by more than 70 per cent. These numbers are built
on a soft sand of support. There are already 1600
US ground troops in Iraq committed to advising
and training the Iraqi army and intelligence forces.
“The moment they start returning to America in
body bags, or are seen being slaughtered in [IS]
videos is the moment when the recent polling
uptick in support for this war will evaporate,” warns
Obama supporter Frank Rich in New York magazine. “That support is an inch deep, and Congress
knows it.” That might explain why both Democrats
and Republicans have failed to debate the war properly in Congress before the mid-term elections. As
Iraq and Afghanistan showed, although Americans
might be easily aroused to join the battle cry, they
lack the attention span and staying power to fight
indefinitely. And given that the Lebanon civil war
lasted fifteen years, the end will probably be different from what we foresee today. Ending evil is a
long, hard slog.
N
one of this is meant to criticise the US limited air strikes in early August to stop a bunch
of pre-modern barbarians from slaughtering the
Yazidis and other minorities in Kurdish areas in
early August. It’s just that the enhanced US-led
military role that will morph into a more ambitious
and open-ended conflict could reinforce perceptions
among even moderate Sunnis that Washington is
favouring the Shia, unite Sunnis against other sects,
and even boost anti-Americanism among Sunni
Arabs and recruit new numbers of young disillusioned Sunnis to the jihadi cause.
Ultimately, it’s the regional actors—not just
Syria and Iraq but also Saudi Arabia, United
Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Egypt,
Turkey, Kuwait and even Iran—that will contain
or defeat IS. The more the USA and its Western
allies intervene, however, the less incentive the
locals have to improve their conventional forces
and work together. Washington spent about a decade using military power, and military assistance,
to try to organise the politics of this ethnically and
tribally divided medieval society. But the costs in
blood, treasure and credibility were not commensurate with the investment. The idea that air strikes,
backed with some special forces, can eliminate
Sunni terrorism is fanciful. Meanwhile, the successful raids against Australian Islamist extremists
in Sydney and Brisbane show that the best response
to this threat lies primarily in intelligence, counterterrorism measures and homeland security.
N
ot so long ago, Barack Obama agreed with the
aforementioned analysis. As an Illinois legislator, he opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because
he believed the strategy of containment had kept
Saddam in his box. As a presidential candidate in
2008, he distinguished himself from his primary
opponent Hillary Clinton by his opposition to the
misbegotten venture. As president in 2009, he went
to Cairo to call for a “new beginning between the
United States and Muslims around the world”. And
when he ran for re-election in 2012, he campaigned
on the platform that “nation building begins at
home”.
During the debate on whether the USA should
launch air strikes on the Assad regime over its
reported use of chemical and biological weapons in
September 2013, the President warned:
Sometimes what we’ve seen is that folks will
call for immediate action, jumping into stuff
that does not turn out well, gets us mired
in very difficult situations, can result in us
being drawn into very expensive, difficult,
costly interventions that actually breed more
resentment in the region.
As recently as August this year, he cautioned:
History teaches us of the dangers of
overreaching and spreading ourselves too thin
and trying to go it alone without international
support, or rushing into military adventures
without thinking through the consequences.
But the Barack Obama that has now emerged
leading the new war on terror is a different man
from the one announced in the program guide and
shown in the previews. Instead of championing
the prudence and realism of George H.W. Bush,
he echoes the Manichean worldview of George W.
Bush. He is now a war president leading Americans
to what the New York Times warns will be “another
costly and potentially lengthy conflict in the Middle
East”. It’s a fair bet the new Iraq campaign will
damage not just Obama’s legacy but US credibility
and prestige—again.
Tom Switzer, a former editor at Spectator Australia
(2009 to 2014), the Australian (2001 to 2008),
Australian Financial Review (1998 to 2001) and the
American Enterprise Institute in Washington (1995 to
1998), is with the United States Studies Centre at the
University of Sydney.
11
K eith W indschu t tle
The Case for Smothering the
Islamic State in Its Sandpit
I
n this edition, Tom Switzer argues the root cause
of the present crisis in Iraq lies in the American
invasion of 2003. The truth is, he says, that the
recent formation of the Islamic State “is directly
linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was created in
response to the US-led invasion and subsequent
occupation, not to mention the creation of a Shia
regime in Baghdad”. The American overthrow of
the Sunni regime under dictator Saddam Hussein,
he says, radically altered the sectarian imbalance
that had been in place for generations. “This meant
that the minority Sunnis embraced an insurgency
that has morphed into a plethora of Sunni jihadist
movements.”
The ultimate fault, he says, thus lies with those
who persuaded President George W. Bush to invade
the country, in particular Vice-President Dick
Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, egged
on by neo-conservative thinkers such as Robert
Kagan, Charles Krauthammer and Max Boot. The
goal of exporting democracy to this ethnically and
tribally fractured society was a fatally flawed experiment that was doomed to fail. In short, the Islamic
State is an unintended consequence of the good
intentions but dangerous naivety of American neoconservatives. Iraq War III, he predicts, will fail for
much the same reasons.
I think Tom’s case needs to be answered because,
if it were true, we in the West are not just impotent
in the face of the latest awful developments in the
Middle East, where American and British civilians
are being openly murdered, but any intervention we
might contemplate would only make things worse.
And if the argument is true at this level then it might
eventually be seen to be even more valid in more difficult areas of the world, such as Russia and China.
Ultimately, its logical conclusion is the kind of
isolationism the United States adopted between
the two world wars of the last century, an isolationism that stood by and watched as the creeds of
Bolshevism and Nazism rose to global power.
Tom assures us his case is not based on old, leftist
anti-Americanism but on traditional conservative
12
virtues of prudence, scepticism and distaste of
hubris. He is not alone. There are other conservative
writers today, especially in the United States, who
are making a similar case. While this is a distinctly
minority sentiment at the moment, with 70 per
cent of people polled supporting President Obama’s
recent decisions, Tom is right to say this number is
built on a soft sand of support and might not stand
up so well when the going gets tough.
Tom’s perspective derives largely from his observations of the conduct and consequences of the
American-initiated, and Australian-backed, invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, I think his vision of
that intervention is flawed by his failure to reproduce
its historical context.
He wants us to believe that the “sectarian
imbalance” that prevailed in Iraq under Saddam
Hussein—a minority Sunni government ruling over
a majority Shia population—was kept under control by the brutality of Saddam’s regime. However
unfortunate this was for the population’s Shia
majority, it had the virtue of contributing to a more
stable Middle East. The historical record shows,
however, that rather than being kept under control,
this sectarian imbalance kept Iraq on a knife-edge
of seething internal resentment that helped provoke Saddam Hussein into external military forays
against his Middle East neighbours, which kept
the region in a state of warfare and insecurity for
decades.
In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew
the Shah of Iran and established a theocratic Shia
Muslim regime. This insurgency inspired ambitions
among Iraq’s suppressed Shia majority that the
Iranian revolution might be extended south to
liberate them from their Sunni overlords. Saddam
recognised the strength of this sentiment but at the
same time he also saw an opportunity to make Iraq
the dominant state in the Persian Gulf. By exploiting
the initial chaos of the revolutionary government,
he could expand his territory northwards into Iran
and at the same time consume some of the smaller
gulf kingdoms. In September 1980 he invaded Iran
The Case for Smothering the Islamic State in Its Sandpit
with this objective. After two years of fighting, Carter, the USA had previously declared Iraq a
however, the Iranians reorganised their forces and “state sponsor of terrorism”, for harbouring Islamic
brought Saddam’s advances to a halt. From mid-1982 militants, including the notorious Palestinian teronwards, the Iranian army took the offensive and, rorist Abu Nidal. However, as Saddam’s forces
as a result, the survival of Saddam’s own regime were driven back onto their home territory and it
became suddenly at stake.
appeared Iran would eventually prevail, the United
At home, Saddam launched a campaign of state States changed tack.
terror against those Kurds and Shias he accused of
The strategic prospect of a military victory by
disloyalty. Influential Shia clerics were executed and Iran, and of Khomeini replacing Saddam with a
some Shia villages were completely destroyed and theocratic Shia regime, led President Ronald Reagan
their occupants massacred. The Kurds suffered even to declare the USA could not afford to allow Iraq to
more. Saddam had all 8000 members of the Barzani lose the war. He removed Iraq from the list of terclan summarily executed and in the Iraq city of rorist countries, gave it massive loans, provided cruHalabja he killed some 5000 Kurds in a poison gas cial military intelligence, and sold it arms via Jordan
attack. The Kurds maintained guerand Israel. Thus America, along
rilla warfare against Saddam’s forces
with France and West Germany,
until the UN-brokered ceasefire of
became a de facto ally of Iraq. But,
ust as it was in the as
August 1988. By this time, more
Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait soon
than half a million combatants on spread of communism, demonstrated, it was a bad deal.
all sides had been killed, plus the
the root cause of all Tom Switzer’s concern that any new
same number of civilians.
Iraq campaign today could damthese actions was
During the war, Saddam used
age American credibility and preschemical weapons against Iranian
tige in the region is hard to accept,
the ideology and
troops and civilians, including
since
US support for Saddam in
ambitions of the
nerve gas which, according to the
the 1980s and America’s subsequent
perpetrators, not the about-face in 1990-91 meant those
CIA, killed 20,000 Iranian soldiers
directly and up to 100,000 others
response to them by qualities have long been seen in the
through the longer-term effects of
Middle East as fickle.
the civilised world.
exposure. Saddam also sought to
Hence, more than any of his
develop his own nuclear weapons
contemporary dictators in this perthrough a reactor built for him by
petually troubled region, Saddam
the French. However, in June 1981, Israel put an end was responsible both for its violent inter-creed
to his plan when its air force destroyed the facility.
hatreds and its regional strategic shambles. Tom’s
Even though Saddam could not defeat Iran view of him as merely a “murderous gangster” who
on the battlefield, by the end of their war he had could have been kept in his box via the policy of
devoted so much of Iraq’s resources to the conflict containment is too benign. He was an irresponsible
that he emerged with the fourth-biggest land army megalomaniac—literally imagining himself the new
in the world. In 1990, just two years after the cease- Saladin—who deserved the destruction America
fire with Iran, Saddam put these troops into action, eventually delivered him in 2003.
this time invading Kuwait to get control of its oil
om argues that the Islamic State in Iraq had
fields. His army overran Kuwaiti forces and Saddam
its origins in the American occupation of
declared he had annexed the country, renaming it
the nineteenth province of Iraq. This move gave him Iraq after 2003. It was one of the unintended
the Kuwaiti oil fields but also close access to those of consequences of President George W. Bush’s vow
Saudi Arabia, whose monarch King Fahd appealed to create a constitutional democracy in that country.
to America for military assistance. This drew the The barbarity and bloodshed that we are witnessing
United States under George H.W. Bush into the in Syria, he says, were also taking place in Iraq
conflict. What became known as the First Gulf under the US occupation. To a certain extent this
War quickly followed, which ended with Saddam’s is true. In 2005, the USA oversaw the creation of a
defeat, but with the first Bush administration allow- constitution, a National Assembly and the country’s
first elections. The predictable result was that the
ing him to cling to power under heavy sanctions.
One of the most unfortunate downsides of majority of Shia Muslims elected a Shia government
Saddam’s regime was the corrupting inf luence with Shia politician Nouri al-Maliki as Prime
it exerted on United States policy. Initially, the Minister. Just as predictably, the formerly governing
American government declared it would not take minority of Sunni Muslims resorted to violence, only
sides in the Iran–Iraq War. Under President Jimmy it was of a kind literally unimaginable to those who
J
T
13
live in the sheltered comfort of the West. Barbarity
is the right word for it.
Among the several factions of Iraq’s Sunni militants was a body formed in 2003 in opposition to
the American invasion. The following year, under its
Jordanian leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it pledged
allegiance to Osama bin Laden under the name Al
Qaeda in Iraq. By 2005, it had developed plans to
expel American forces by suicide bombings, to kidnap and murder Western nationals in Iraq, extend
the conflict to other Middle Eastern countries, and
re-establish the Islamic Caliphate under Sunni control. Zarqawi was killed by American forces in 2006
but later that year his followers declared an Islamic
State of Iraq throughout several Sunni-dominated
western provinces. The movement suffered badly
during the American “surge” under General David
Petraeus in 2007 and by 2010 Prime Minister Maliki
declared its remaining leaders had been found and
killed. The idea, however, has obviously proven
much more difficult to destroy.
So is the American invasion to blame for the
Islamic State? Well, it obviously gave some impetus to some Sunni insurgents who exploited the
opportunities available in the first three years of
the American occupation, before the surge targeted
and removed many of them from the scene. But it is
implausible to argue it was the major cause of either
the concept or the murderous violence of its adherents. All had been alive and well long before.
The use of terrorism against the West to generate support for a campaign to restore an Islamic
caliphate goes back at least two decades when Osama
bin Laden formed Al Qaeda and began to attack
American targets. He said from the outset his aim
was to re-establish a more puritan, fundamentalist
version of Islam, not only in the Middle East but
throughout the world. In February 1988 he signed
a fatwa in the name of “the World Islamic Front
for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” in which he
declared the killing of Americans and their allies
as the “individual duty for every Muslim”. In the
aftermath of his greatest triumph on September 11,
2001, Bin Laden declared:
The time has come when all the Muslims of the
world, especially the youth, should unite and
soar against the kuffar and continue jihad till
these forces are crushed to naught, all the antiIslamic forces are wiped off the face of this earth
and Islam takes over the whole world and all the
other false religions.
Some the best-known Al Qaeda assaults in this
cause that occurred before the invasion of Iraq
included:
14
• The 1992 bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in
Aden, which housed US Marines on their way to
Somalia;
• The bombing of the World Trade Center in
February 1993, designed to bring down the North
Tower, which killed six people and wounded 1000;
• The Luxor massacre in November 1997, which
killed sixty-two foreign tourists in Egypt;
• The 1998 massacre in conjunction with the
Taliban of 5000 Hazara civilians in Mazar-I-Sharif,
Afghanistan;
• The suicide bombing of American embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, killing 300
people;
• The suicide attack on the American destroyer
USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, killing seventeen US sailors;
• The September 11, 2001, attacks in New York
and Washington, which brought down both of the
Twin Towers, killing 2753 people.
In short, these incidents, which all attracted wide
media coverage, should remind us that for more than
a decade before the 2003 American invasion of Iraq,
Al Qaeda was waging an unremitting international
campaign of terrorist activity to fulfil its ambition of
cleansing the world of “Jews and Crusaders” and of
re-establishing a Sunni-dominated, puritan vision
of Islam in the world. Just as it was in the spread of
communism, the root cause of all these actions was
the ideology and ambitions of the perpetrators, not
the response to them by the civilised world. All the
signs are that, had Iraq never been invaded, they
would have still continued. Indeed, as we have seen
during the progression of the so-called Arab Spring,
the violent ambitions of Al Qaeda, the Muslim
Brotherhood and other Islamist factions have survived in most countries of the Middle East. At their
first opportunity to attain power, they have seized it.
This would have occurred whether or not America
took out Saddam Hussein. In fact, the secular
Saddam would have been one of the first dictators
targeted by the Arab Spring jihadists.
A
nother key point in Tom’s case is that the new
Islamic State is not all that much to get worried
about. However disgusting its videos of the murder
of American and British hostages, it does not pose
enough threat to major Western interests to warrant
the blood and treasure it will cost to put it down.
Tom quotes Owen Harries: “It’s to belittle the
historical experiences of World War II, not to speak
of the Cold War, to equate the terrorists of today and
the damage they’re capable of with the totalitarian
regimes of the previous century.” Tom calls the
Islamic State a “lightly armed group of bloodyminded radicals whose new ‘caliphate’ extends over
a lot of mostly empty territory” in north-west Iraq.
Second, IS should not be judged on what it is
All that is probably accurate, though some IS now but on what it has the potential to become. As
gains should be concerning. Between August 7 and I noted above, it is not the first in recent Iraqi hisAugust 19 its troops did occupy the site of the Mosul tory to proclaim an Islamic state aiming to restore
Dam and nearby villages, a key strategic position the caliphate, but so far it appears the most credible.
and Iraq’s biggest single source of hydroelectric Appearances are critical in the business of building
power. If the dam had been destroyed, it would have a political base, especially the appearance of havreleased enough water to drown cities and towns ing momentum on your side. Tom rightly predicts
downstream. Fortunately Kurdish ground forces that US air strikes will most likely cement bonds
and American air strikes drove IS troops from the between a number of the disparate Sunni militias
area. However, on October 4, a report from Reuters now operating in central and western Iraq and
said IS forces had just overrun the towns of Hit and Syria. He points to recent alliances between IS
Kubaisa in Anbar Province, close to the Haditha forces in Syria and the Al Qaeda offshoot Jabhat alDam, Iraq’s second main source of hydroelectric- Nusra Front who were once mortal enemies. I would
ity. The dam was still being guarded by Iraqi sol- argue that a far stronger motive for the forging of
diers, the report said, but it remained vulnerable. bonds than resentment at American air strikes is the
By October 10, Islamic State forces
prospect of the emergence of a new
besieging the northern Kurdish
Islamic state with theocratic rule.
city of Kobani in Syria were being
The appearance of success towards
he appeal of radical this goal will generate many allies,
bombed by US coalition warplanes.
Islam to young
Yet at the same time, the Wall Street
including some from unexpected
Journal reported IS soldiers had
sources. After Osama bin Laden,
Muslims around
still managed to breach the city’s
a Saudi, launched his early terrorist
the world has now assaults on the USA, he was soon
defences to hoist their black flag.
Nonetheless, as Tom rightly says,
been transformed. swamped with recruits from miliIS currently has enough strength to
tants in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, plus
The Islamic State
defeat small units of divided, poorly
at least two from Australia.
means they can join
trained and demoralised troops, but
Third, the number of foreign
not a decent military with resolve.
recruits
only grow. As I noted
a revolution in the in these will
In August, the CIA estimated IS
pages last month, the ideoMiddle East that
had between 20,000 and 30,000
logical contest here favours the radtroops, of whom 15,000 were forThe appeal of radical Islam to
icals.
has the potential
eigners. However, there are three
young Muslims around the world,
to make history.
major points of concern here.
especially to those politically active
First, apart from the Kurds, who
on university campuses, has now
run their own affairs and defend
been transformed. The Islamic
their own territory, the Iraqi government does not State means they can join a revolution in the Middle
appear to have the ability to field a decent military East that has the potential to make history. Like
with resolve. So far, its track record is dismal. Reports the communists who stormed the Winter Palace in
from the north of the country say that, when IS first October 1917, some Muslims will believe their time
appeared on the scene, the members of the Iraqi has come to take over the world. Owen Harries is
army deserted en masse, discarding their uniforms right to point out that IS today constitutes a puny
and walking away, pretending to be civilians. This threat compared to that of communism during the
is not surprising. Of all the countries in the world, Cold War. But in 1917 the Bolsheviks were just as
Iraq must be the most war-weary. After eight years weak. They had to surrender the best half of their
of war with Iran, two wars with the United States, country to the Germans in order to survive. A mere
a Sunni insurgency that was virtually a civil war, decade later, despite efforts by British Secretary of
not to mention huge death tolls in each case, its State for War, Winston Churchill, to “strangle the
surviving men of military age must be very difficult Bolshevik baby in its cradle”, their regime controlto rally around any government flag. American and led almost all the territory of the former Tsarist
Australian specialist forces might be able to train empire.
them but they can’t make them fight for their country
his last point poses a problem for one of the
or, as they probably see it, fight for this short-lived
strongest arguments in Tom’s case: his doubt
and temporary foreign-imposed government. On
the other hand, their radical opponents now have a that a radical takeover of all Iraq would damage
US core strategic interests. He says realists could
soldier’s greatest incentive, a cause to die for.
T
T
15
argue with some justification that a powerful Sunni
Iraq could balance a Shia Iran, which Washington
has long regarded as a terror-sponsoring power that
wants to dominate the region. However, a worldwide Sunni extremist movement with a powerful, romantic appeal to youth would not be just a
force in the Middle East. It would play havoc with
Western interests in all those Muslim countries outside that region, including the Indian subcontinent,
Indonesia, Malaysia, and much of Africa. It would
pose a strategic dilemma for recent American policy
towards Islam, which has favoured Sunni over Shia
because of the threat of a theocratic, nuclear-armed
Iran. It would produce a policy black hole: whatever
resources America devoted to the Muslim world,
nothing positive would be likely to emerge.
In fact, the actual existence of something called
an Islamic State has profound consequences for the
future of Western politics as well. As David Martin
Jones and Michael L.R. Smith, authors of the new
book Sacred Violence, argued in our October edition,
“this curious mutation of an Islamist dream into a
temporal reality” undermines many ruling assumptions of post-Cold War Western thinking about the
evolving new world order and the idea of a liberal
democratic end of history. They write:
Somewhat problematically for this historicist
teleology, recent events across the Middle East
portend something far more unpredictable.
Along with the developing power politics in
Eastern Europe and the South China Sea,
this intimates an era of instability, marked by
internal and potentially external or inter-state
war. In its Middle Eastern manifestation,
the Syrian civil war that began in 2012, the
slow-motion disintegration of liberated Libya
since 2013, the Israeli intervention in Gaza in
August 2014, and the fragmentation of Iraq
since 2011 announce significant challenges not
only to the wider region but also to European
and Anglospheric states not directly involved
in the crisis.
T
om’s article continues a critique he has been
making since 2003 about the role of neoconservatives in American foreign policy, especially
what he sees as their culpability for all that went
wrong in Iraq. Their idea that democracy could be
exported to a country so divided was, he says, never
worth the blood and treasure it cost.
He is right to label a lot of the views of the
early 2000s not just naive but hubristic. Who, for
instance, was the feminist social engineer who
thought it a good idea at the time to insert into the
democratic constitution of an Islamic country an
16
affirmative-action clause for 25 per cent of seats in
the National Assembly to be reserved for women?
But one of the worst foreign policy misjudgments
was the later American support for the Arab Spring.
At a Sydney lecture in 2011, I heard Paul Wolfowitz
arguing it was a sign of the appeal of liberalism and
democracy to those on rising incomes in the Third
World. Today that dream has become a nightmare.
However, one of the targets of Tom’s article,
Max Boot, is someone who deserves more respect.
I find Boot the most accurate and prescient analyst
of the immediate dangers the Islamic State poses for
the region. He also provides well-informed advice
on how to rejuvenate the flagging Iraqi forces and
how to deploy a limited number of American (and
Australian) special operations forces to best effect.
Boot knows what he is talking about. He was an
advocate for, and a close observer of, the “surge” in
Iraq by General David Petraeus in 2007-08, before
he went on to become defence and foreign policy
adviser to two Republican presidential contenders,
John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
Boot believes the Islamic State can be defeated
at this stage of its existence without the deployment of the huge forces George Bush sent to Iraq
in 2003. It would require boosting the Western
advisory and special operations presence in Iraq by
10,000 to 15,000 personnel and sending aircraft to
be based in Iraq, rather than at sea or from distant bases, to facilitate a more sustained bombing campaign based on better intelligence on the
ground. He argues that Western commandos such
as Seal Team Six, Delta Force and the British and
Australian SAS should also expand their operations to carry out the kind of intelligence-driven
leadership-targeting that was an important part of
the Petraeus surge. Moreover, these actions should
be complemented with greater aid to the Free
Syrian Army in order to fight ISIS on the other
side of the disintegrating border with Iraq. He recognises, however, that one of the major problems is
the current US commander-in-chief:
So far President Obama has talked only
of containing ISIS, of preventing it from
massacring Yazidis or taking Erbil. That’s not
enough. We should not tolerate the existence
of a terrorist state similar to Taliban-era
Afghanistan sprawling across Iraq and Syria.
Already thousands of foreign jihadis, including
many Europeans, have been drawn to Syria. If
left unchecked, this terrorist playpen is likely to
generate attacks not only on neighbouring states
such as Lebanon and Jordan but on Western
targets too. The West’s goal should be rollback,
not containment.
A Short History of Haplessness
Maybe it started with the Greeks.
Did Oedipus run out of “hap”?
The gods, no doubt, had plans for him—
they’re disinclined to take much crap.
True haplessness is smaller beer
and well down from the tragic hero—
and, no, it’s not just misadventure
that has them dialling triple zero.
The hapless seem, well, pre-determined—
akin, let’s say, to God’s elect
but in reverse and much more prone
to gurus or a dodgy sect.
“Poor” is not the same as hapless
though both, we’re told, are here to stay.
The truly hapless wish for what
eludes them more and more each day.
They fail, for instance, at romance,
disabled by a naive streak—
wedding invites out on Monday,
cancellations sent next week.
The hapless all desire a shop.
Eventually, as retirees,
they do their super and their house
on boutiques which they’re sure will please
the punters who, in glassy malls,
will look once, fondle, then pass on.
As landlord, bank and metaphysics
indifferently converge upon
the mandatory “Exit Sale”,
the “Shop-for-Lease” sign reappears.
Their nation speaks an ancient tongue
which has no word for “doubt” or “tears”.
Vegan
One day, beyond
the eyes of cattle,
the sad suburban
quietness of the ewes,
the vegetables themselves
prove sentient.
She hears the carrots
give a sigh
when ripped too rudely
from the soil;
she sees potatoes
neatly sliced
shrinking from the pan;
the lettuce, like a
pale-green brain
is cowering from the knife.
Even the wheat she
eats for breakfast
should still be waving
in the west.
She hesitates to
steam the rice.
In dreams, she’s on a
board of nylon,
waiting to be
sliced and diced.
Geoff Page
17
M at thew O molesk y
White Swords and Black Pages
The Damnatio Memoriae of Abu Tammam
Heavens, what a pile! Whole ages perish there,
And one bright blaze turns learning into air.
—Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
S
traddling the ancient high road to Tiberias,
not far from the fabled pasturage of Job, where
rocks were once said to shed out streams of
oil, lies the Syrian city of Jasim. It was there, on
March 18, 2011, that hundreds of townspeople took
to the streets in solidarity with their fellow protesters in the besieged city of Daraa. “People of dignity,
people of honor,” imams declaimed from their minarets, “your folks in Daraa are being slaughtered,”
and soon some fifteen hundred souls were marching into the centre of Jasim, assembling in a square
named after the city’s native son, the Abbasid-era
poet Abu Tammam. Under the gaze of a statue
erected in that poet’s honour, the crowd repeatedly
intoned the word silmiyyah (peaceful), while presenting a deceptively simple demand of “freedom”
to discomfited Baath Party officials arriving on the
scene.
It was a moment of infectious optimism, but
Abu Tammam himself would perhaps have urged
caution, for in his poem on the occasion of the sack
of the Byzantine fortress of Armorium (838 AD) he
asserted that “it is the white blades of the swords,
and not the black pages of books, which are decisive in removing doubts and uncertainties”. Abu
Tammam’s inversion of a certain hackneyed apothegm would be vindicated in short order by developments in present-day Syrian affairs. The blinding
flashes of armaments indeed lit up the region, and
the black pages revealed themselves not to be those
exquisite Islamic manuscripts with their parchment sheets stained with concentrated indigo, but
rather the smouldering wreckage of looted libraries
and other cultural institutions bestrewn across the
sepia-brown Syrian badlands.
A little more than two years after the Jasim
protests, it was the turn of members of the Jabhat
al-Nusra militia to file into Abu Tammam Square,
18
but their intentions were anything but peaceable.
They had come to destroy the poet’s statue, and so
they did, using an explosive charge to perpetrate a
gratuitous act of modern-day iconoclasm. As if that
indignity was not enough, militants belonging to
the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took
the opportunity, in June 2014, to destroy another
representation of Abu Tammam, this time in his
final resting place of Mosul.
Gone now are the monuments to the Abbasid
poet and his literary legacy, and while the percussion
of the militants’ munitions struck a plangent minor
chord distinctly audible to those familiar with that
legacy, the damnatio memoriae of Abu Tammam, at
least with respect to the Arab public square, seems
nearly complete. Again, it is probable that the target of these salvos would have been well suited to
grasp the nature of the events under consideration,
familiar as he was with loss and dislocation. “You
are not you,” a melancholic Abu Tammam once
wrote with characteristic prescience, “and home is
not home.”
I
n the midst of the present upheaval in the Arab
world, with hundreds of thousands of individuals
killed, maimed, poisoned, displaced and continually menaced in what has become a vast hecatomb,
any undue concern regarding the destruction of a
couple of statues of a relatively obscure ninth-century versifier would appear to be an indulgence at
best and a callousness at worst. Yet the systematic
destruction of Syrian and Iraqi cultural patrimony,
taken as a whole, is a matter of no minor significance. Even if its toll rather pales in comparison to
that of the innumerable lost and shattered human
lives scattered about the devastated cityscapes,
jerry-built refugee camps, and besieged mountaintops of the region, the ongoing despoliation of heritage sites and lieux de mémoire constitutes another
truly terrible chapter in the purple testament that
has been opened in these our troubled times.
Hardly a day seems to pass without the breaking
blew to bits the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan.
of some grim news regarding the obliteration of
Western leaders wrung their hands but took
cultural sites, from mosque complexes and shrines
no substantive action. A few months later, the
to museums and memorials, and even a centuriesjihadists attacked some of the most spectacular
old tree in the town of Atmeh which, according to
icons in the world: the skyscrapers of the World
Salafist militants, was being worshipped “instead
Trade Center in New York City.
of God”. Not long after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s
forces arrived in Mosul, officials in the soi-disant
The vengeful treatment of Syrian and Iraqi
caliphate promulgated a draconian city charter,
Article 13 of which declared that all “false idols” patrimony by ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra militants
faced elimination. Thereupon did bulldozers and can likewise be seen as prefiguring a broader camdemolition squads fan out across a region that paign of cultural extermination and even outright
features some 1791 registered archaeological sites genocide.
and countless other cultural treasures. This wave of
espots, be they of the religious or secular ilk,
destruction claimed the Tomb of Jonah, a sepulchre
have from time immemorial demonstrated a
containing the earthly remains of the thirteenthcentury historian Ibn al-Athir, the aforementioned certain libido dominandi when it comes to the inconstatue of Abu Tammam, and numerous other venient past. As Chateaubriand observed, though
a tyrant “dominates the present, the past defies
irreplaceable monuments.
ISIL’s vandalistic campaign is reminiscent of him, and I retain my liberty in all that has prethe Taliban’s targeting of the “shrines of the infi- ceded his glory”. Little wonder, then, that sites and
monuments are so often marked
dels”, that sustained assault which
for damnatio memoriae by human
included the notorious obliterarights
malfeasors. The destruction
tion of the Buddhas of Bamiyan
ulldozers and
of memory is doubly tragic, howin 2001. For fifteen centuries those
demolition squads ever, impacting as it does on both
Buddhist statues looked out over the
fanned out across a our collective past and our collecBamwam Valley of Afghanistan’s
tive prospects. The Cambridge acaHazarajat region, their carmine
region that features demic
Garth Fowden, addressing
pigments fading, their stucco coatsome 1791 registered the so-called “paradox of the moning sloughing off, but their sandstone cores showing such resilience
archaeological sites ument”, proposed that the “unstable polysemy” of a cultural heritage
that the Shi’a Hazara minority
and countless other site
“ends up making of it the startof the region dubbed them Solsol
ing point not only for historical
cultural treasures.
(“Year After Year”), in recognition
memory of a fixed moment in the
of their perceived immutability.
past, but also for desire, and a new
In March 2001, however, Mullah
Mohammed Omar ordered these cultural icons journey”, such that “the stories the monuments tell
dynamited, primarily as an act of religious icono- are our own”.
It stands to reason that the annihilation of the
clasm, but also as a warning to those in the restive
Hazara community who had traditionally sought vestiges of the past constitutes the stillbirth of
potential outward journeys, and the distortion of
refuge in the valley’s ancient Buddhist grottos.
It was an obscenity that led the Indian poet cultural heritage into something crude, incomplete
Rajagopal Parthasarathy to conclude that the and fallacious. Hence the disgust with which one
“fabled Silk Road hangs in tatters now … leaving necessarily encounters statements like that of the
a gap in the world”, but it was more than mere cul- Serbian politician Branko Zujic, who infamously
tural vandalism. As the Daily Beast’s Christopher declared that “there never were any mosques in
Dickey noted, while discussing this year’s destruc- Zvornik” in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing
of that majority Bosniak town, thereby attempting
tion of Mosul’s patrimony:
to quarantine both the incontrovertible facts of the
past and the possibilities inherent in the future, and
Maybe this all sounds very distant. But the
somehow perfectly embodying Orwell’s “nightmare
jihadist appetite for violent iconoclasm already
world in which the Leader or some ruling clique
has proved to be tremendously dangerous for
controls not only the future but the past”.
the West. Those who claim to speak for a
Whatever comes of ISIL’s reign of terror in Syria
vengeful Allah take great delight in smashing
and Iraq in the coming months and years, it is not
idols wherever and whenever they can get to
hard to imagine a future denial of the very existence
them. Theirs is a war of symbols. In early 2001
of various kinds of tangible and intangible cultural
the Afghan Taliban, encouraged by al Qaeda,
D
B
19
heritage on a similar basis. In any case, wanton acts
of vandalism and iconoclasm encourage the slow but
definitive spread of cultural oblivion, to the growing detriment of our global patrimoine. All of which
is to say that it is more important than ever that we
commit ourselves, in the words of the tenth-century chronicler al-Masudi, the “Herodotus of the
Arabs”, to “snatching precious fragments of the past
from oblivion”.
One of these fragments, undoubtedly precious, and undoubtedly threatened with symbolic
consignment to oblivion, is the figure of the poet
Abu Tammam. Appropriately enough, it was Abu
Tammam himself who showed a particular commitment to that project in his own time. Whilst
travelling from Khorasan to Iraq, he paid a visit to
the estate of the bibliophile Abu al-Wafa b. Salama
in Ecbatana, only for a blizzard to prevent his egress.
“Do stay quietly here,” his host entreated him, “for
it will be some time before the snow clears,” and so
Abu Tammam ensconced himself in the library of
the Salama family and, amidst the storehouses of
the snow and the treasures of the hail, produced
five books on poetry, foremost among which is the
vast anthology of Arabic verse known as Al-Hamasa
(Fortitude). In this compilation, Abu Tammam
sought to demonstrate the “virtues most highly
prized by the Arabs”, while excavating the deep history of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry.
“For historical purposes the value of the collection is not small,” wrote the Victorian Arabic
scholar Sir Charles Lyall:
but most of all there shines forth from it a
complete portraiture of the hardy and manful
nature, the strenuous life of passion and battle,
the lofty contempt of cowardice, niggardliness
and servility, which marked the valiant stock
who bore Islam abroad in a flood of new life
over the outworn civilizations of Persia, Egypt
and Byzantium. It has the true stamp of the
heroic time, of its cruelty and wantonness as of
its strength and beauty.
The Kurdish warlord Saladin, for one, memorised the entirety of Al-Hamasa, relishing as he
did any opportunity to quote apposite passages,
and it was said that throughout the Ayubbid era
“people used to learn it by heart and not bother to
have it on their shelves”. Having produced such a
literary triumph alone would have guaranteed Abu
Tammam’s legacy in perpetuity, but in truth it represents only the final act in a remarkable literary
career, one altogether worthy of commemoration,
and one altogether unworthy of the current state of
remembrance.
20
B
orn to Christian parents in what was then the
modest qarya, or village, of Jasim, and later suspected of Manichean sympathies, Abu Tammam
spent his youth employed as a weaver in Damascus,
and then as a water-vendor in the Great Mosque
of Cairo, where it is supposed that he acquired his
knowledge of classical Arabic from the resident
Koran readers. Having embarked on a career as a
poet, he meandered across the Caliphate in pursuit
of patronage, all the while acquiring a reputation for
libertinage and religious non-conformism, enjoying
as he did “the cup, the lute, and the damsel”. As a
flummoxed al-Hasan b. Raga related:
Abu Tammam once visited me for a
considerable time when I was in Persia. Since
the rumor had reached my ears that he did
not perform his obligatory prayers, I ordered
a reliable man to watch him and discover
whether the rumor was true. It was proved to
be entirely so. But when I tried to arouse Abu
Tammam’s conscience concerning the matter,
he replied: “Do you really think I would omit
prayers because of the trouble of making a few
obeisances that would certainly be no trouble
to me—I who undertook the long journey from
Baghdad to come to you here—if I were really
convinced that their performance was bound up
with a future reward and their omission with
punishment?”
“On hearing these words,” al-Hasan angrily
concluded, “I felt that I should like to knock Abu
Tammam down but I renounced this idea, realizing that such an affair might have unpleasant consequences for myself.” Could such attitudes have
earned Abu Tammam his twenty-first-century
damnatio memoriae? Or was it his well-known comparison of the composition of poetry to the act of
coition? In any event, the protection extended to
him by his literary patrons is clearly no longer in
evidence.
Though Abu Tammam was not without his critics—some felt that he combined in his works “beautiful and bad poetry, both of the extremest kind,”
others that his style was “affected, but also pregnant; wearisome, but sometimes full of peace”—few
poets of his or any other generation have left behind
a legacy of the kind of admirable humanism evident
in his elegies and odes. While he could empathise
with those “who have already become the rust of
life, as if the world had become a prison to them”,
so too could he put his faith in him who “planted
his foot in the pool of death and said to it: under
your hollow is the place of resurrection”. For the
open-minded Abu Tammam, “whoever wishes to
gain praise for himself looks upon people as the
best ground and upon good deeds as the planting”.
He was ever the devotee of the Bedouin lifestyle,
and his Weltanschauung can be found in perhaps
its most distilled form in a qasida dedicated to alHasan b. Wahb, who had given the itinerant poet a
particularly valuable steed:
Whoever has a sorrow that sleeps quietly is as if
paralyzed; and a house to which you have grown
accustomed is a grave.
What a magnificent possession of this world
it is that a beautiful horse, neither small nor
heavy, offers you …
The static city, meanwhile, furnished a different
set of significations for Abu Tammam, particularly
during that martial era. When he encountered the
smouldering wreckage of Baghdad in the aftermath
of the great siege of 813, he observed of a capital that
had been founded only fifty years earlier:
Over Baghdad is stationed death’s loud herald—
Weep for her, then, weep for time’s rapine there!
Erstwhile, upon her stream by war imperiled,
When in her streets its flames were briefly bated,
Men hoped her happy fortunes reinstated.
Now all their hopes have turned to dull despair!
Since she, from youth to eldritch age declined,
Has lost the beauty that once charmed mankind.
Through his gimlet-eyed exploration of conflict,
impermanence and the “sharp edge of fate”, Abu
Tammam amounted to a poet very much of his own
time, and very much of ours as well.
It must be admitted that a great deal of Abu
Tammam’s work does not survive translation—
though the German Friedrich Ruckert and the
Englishman Sir Charles Lyall made spirited
attempts in the nineteenth century—given the
poet’s mannerism and reliance on paronomasia. It
is evidently nigh impossible to convey in any other
language than the original the sheer richness of
his compositions. What may seem like a standard, if somewhat exotic, elegy (“it is as if the Banu
Nabhan on the day of his death were stars in the
sky, from among which the moon is fallen down”)
may in fact contain particular Arabic expressions
borrowed from pre-Islamic women’s lamentations,
while other turns of phrase (“announce to every living being the death of the champion of the Arabs,
since he has encamped at the place of destruction”)
may reference archaic language specific to those
Bedouin riders tasked with publicly announcing
battlefield casualties to shocked communities. But
Abu Tammam’s erudition should add to, rather than
subtract from, his historical standing, providing as
he does such an array of insights into ante-Islamic
and early Islamic civilisation in particular and the
human condition in general. “Why don’t you write
verses that can be understood?” the poet was once
asked, and his reply was more than sufficient: “Why
cannot you understand what the poetry says?”
I
t was not so long ago that Abu Tammam was
recognised in his birthplace of Jasim, where his
Christian father worked as a druggist, and where
his Tayy forebears had alternated between nomadic
and sedentary lifestyles. And it was not so long ago
that he was memorialised in his final resting place
of Mosul, where he had been granted the generous sinecure of chief postmaster. Gone now are
the statues in his honour, and gone with them is
the likelihood of any meaningful material public
remembrance of the great poet in two of his most
relevant lieux de mémoire. It is a cruel posthumous
fate for a man who had done all he could in his own
lifetime to preserve the traditions of the distant
past, but given rather more pressing contemporary
concerns the chances for his public rehabilitation
seem, to borrow one of his delicate phrases, “slender
as arrows of willow-wood”.
This may seem to many a matter of minimal
importance at a time of geopolitical disarray and
mounting existential threats, but it should not be
given short shrift. It was back in 2007 that the historian David Fromkin furnished the debatable but
utterly grave opinion that “the Middle East has
no future”. By dint of the iconoclastic campaigns
of ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other belligerents,
whole swathes of that region are being threatened
with the destruction of the past as well. All that
would be left, then, would be a lorn and desolate
present. The treatment of Abu Tammam’s legacy is
part and parcel of this worrying trend, and should
neither go unnoticed nor unrectified, for the sake of
the preservation of international cultural heritage
writ large.
Ultimately, the illustrious career of Abu
Tammam should give the lie to his fellow poet John
Keats’s later claim that “no Man can live but in one
society at a time … We with our bodily eyes see
but the fashion and manners of one country for one
age—and then we die.” With his Christian familial
background and allegedly Manichean mindset, the
Muslim Abu Tammam journeyed from the Levant
to Egypt, from Armenia to Ecbatana, and from
Basra to Baghdad, all the while attired in Bedouin
robes, producing verses inspired by polytheistic
ancestors, and feeling utterly at home both in the
21
lonely caravan and the lush library. Although the
Middle Eastern world of Abu Tammam has been
much altered since that time, the present wrack
and ruin being wrought by civil war, internecine
conflict and widespread insurgencies with respect
to the last vestiges of ancient communities and historical landmarks could hardly bode worse for the
future of the region.
In one of his many astonishing elegies, the
Abbasid belletrist lamented the earthly state of
affairs in which “there is no end to our losing the
dead”, even those “whose abundant gifts once overwhelmed the calamities of Time”. The damnatio
memoriae of Abu Tammam, alongside that of other
historical figures—including the biblical Jonah, the
medieval Ibn al-Athir, and a myriad of others—
threatens to do the same, this time to the invaluable
bequests of the dead, thereby endangering civilisation’s rightful inheritance. If we cannot, at least
in the near term, undo the physical damage of the
ongoing campaign of iconoclasm in the Levant and
Mesopotamia, at the very least we might endeavour to preserve Abu Tammam’s less tangible “cloak
woven of praise”, and then rededicate ourselves to
preserving the remnants of the past on behalf of the
beneficiaries of the future.
Matthew Omolesky is a United States-based
human rights lawyer, cultural heritage preservation
specialist, and researcher for the Laboratoire Européen
d’Anticipation Politique, as well as a regular
contributor to the American Spectator.
In the Škocjan Caves, Divača, Slovenia
A drop of water.
On what’s left of my nose.
In time I’ll be a stalagmite.
Voices above me—
faint, then loud, then faint—
move up and down
slippery footpaths.
Some whisper. Some joke. Some laugh.
As I did.
Some grip the iron railings.
As I failed to do.
The tour guide will shut off the lights.
I’ll be left again with the flowing Reka
and the small, blind movements
of salamanders.
The day that voices fail
to come back again,
I’ll forget to remember myself.
By that time—it may be—
I will cease to care.
Knute Skinner
Releasing the Frog
Sitting beside my letterbox,
a large and elderly frog,
slack-bellied and scarce a pulse
beneath its double chin.
Even so I scoop it up.
Life stirs its porous skin.
River weeds trail weepily,
the banks softened by rain
that fell last week so heavily
the very sky collapsed
beneath its weight.
When I am dying, carry me
down to this same river.
Let the water do its work.
Let time shuck off my human form
and return me to the fish-scaled thing
that I once was; begin.
22
Lisa Jacobson
visitors
owl on the fence post
heron on the gate
hawk on the rooftop
not really an owl
but a tawny frogmouth
seen in the dark before dawn
a heron alright
although we call them blue cranes
never seen in the yard before
not any old hawk but a white one
as rare as a miracle
a blessing on the house
i hate poems about poetry
an eagle in the air
so massive we thought a cloud
had blocked the sun
some poets get to be carpenters
building houses of verse
well-structured and weather-tight
council-approved to lock-up stage
almost ready for occupancy
some poets get to be joiners
crafting cabinets or boxes
with perfect dovetail joints
buffed to a sheen from fine timbers
waiting to hold treasures
some poets get to be tailors
stitching sturdy fabrics into suits
or couturiers with swathes of elegance
bedizened with beads and sequins
for people to parade around in
and all the others too
wrens and robins and fantails
cockatoos and ravens and rosellas
they make us stop for just long enough
to feel like visitors
in somebody else’s house
Edith Speers
all i wanted to be was a gardener
maybe of native flora needing no help
or maybe nurturing a few tasty fruits and vegies
or maybe encouraging some blooms into being
for people and bees and birds to visit
but instead i get animal husbandry
with beasts that breed promiscuously
breach the fences
drive the neighbours hysterical
and then go feral
23
Da ry l M c C a n n
Tony Abbott: Right Person
at the Right Time
T
he Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, announced
on August 5 that his government would
no longer pursue changes to Section 18C
of the Racial Discrimination Act. Initially, at any
rate, the reason he offered for reneging on a preelection promise did not help at all: “We are also
determined to engage in ever closer consultation
with communities including the Australian Muslim
community.” In the opinion of Abbott, confronting
the ideology of the Islamic State—both here and in
Mesopotamia—required everybody, Muslims and
non-Muslims alike, thinking in terms of “Team
Australia”. But as Andrew Bolt, conservative columnist and casualty of the Racial Discrimination
Act, remarked: “Pardon? We must placate Muslim
Australians by restricting our freedom to say something critical of their culture; for instance, extremists being so prone to jihad?” Had Tony Abbott
taken a wrong turn? There were plenty of people,
including Liberal Party supporters, who thought so.
Events have moved quickly since then.
The last time those on the Centre-Right of politics were so conflicted was in 2009. Paul Kelly’s
Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor
Generation (2014) vividly depicts the then Liberal
parliamentary leader, Malcolm Turnbull, almost
bringing the Party undone in late 2009 with his
staunch backing for Labor’s proposed Emissions
Trading Scheme (ETS). At a time when 65 per
cent of voters were in favour of an ETS and only
25 per cent against, the Liberals were between a
rock and a hard place. While a significant minority
of its members were wary about global warming,
opposing Kevin Rudd’s ETS in the Senate seemed
to invite political suicide. Tony Abbott said as much
in an op-ed for the Australian in July 2009 and during a phone call to Paul Kelly: “Mate, you’re right,
we have to give Rudd his policy because we have
no hope in a double dissolution on climate change.”
Abbott, as we now know, replaced Turnbull
as Opposition Leader on December 1, 2009,
with the undertaking to defeat Rudd’s ETS—or
24
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)—in
the Senate. Something dramatic had occurred to
Abbott’s thinking between July and December:
“Abbott saw the tide running fast: support for Rudd’s
ETS would betray the Coalition base, weaken the
conservative side for years, hand Labor an immense
propaganda victory and make Rudd into a political
hero.” Better to keep faith with the Party’s old-time
supporters, and lose the next election—reasoned
Abbott—than pass into law what many Coalition
voters despised and he, as a sometime sceptic, did
not embrace.
There are two responses to Tony Abbott’s
change of heart in the second half of 2009. The
more cynical interpretation of his U-turn, and the
one propounded by David Marr in Political Animal
(2012), figures Abbott as an unscrupulous populist.
In Political Animal, Marr differentiates between
Values Abbott and Politics Abbott. According to
Marr, Values Abbott is irksome enough, since his
leadership of Australia ensures no prospect of “gay
marriage, drug reform, euthanasia, a republic or a
bill of rights”. But Values Abbott, with his social
conservatism and supposedly Bob Santamaria-DLP
sensibilities, is not without principles:
Values Abbott would work to cushion families
from the realities of economic life. And if the
Coalition parties allowed him, Values Abbott
would protect working men and women from the
full force of the labour market. Values Abbott is
not there to help the nation’s rich get richer.
The problem, in the opinion of Marr, is that “the
Abbott that matters is Politics Abbott”: a devious
character with persuasive charm but no moral
compass. According to Marr, in the latter half of
2009 Politics Abbott stumbled upon a formula for
destroying the prime ministership of Kevin Rudd
and the prime ministerial aspirations of Malcolm
Turnbull by adopting a patently bogus anti-ETS
position, conveniently putting himself on a trajectory
Tony Abbott: Right Person at the Right Time
to the top.
A more sympathetic account of Tony Abbott’s
elevation emerges in Paul Kelly’s Triumph and
Demise. The CPRS farrago played a definite role in
Abbott’s unexpected rise to the leadership of the
Liberal Party, but it was Prime Minister Rudd’s
handling of the attendant legislation in 2009 that
had the hallmarks of an unprincipled and opportunistic response to a complex issue. Labor negotiated
with Opposition Leader Turnbull, who wanted the
Coalition to support Labor’s CPRS bill—albeit in
a slightly modified form—and yet Rudd appeared
more interested in proving Turnbull’s “absolute failure of leadership” than in saving the planet. Not
even Senator Wong, Labor’s Minister for Climate
Change and Water, knew if her job was “to get the
CPRS passed or discredit the Coalition by proving
its refusal to accept climate change legislation”. Julia
Gillard was of the same opinion: “We should have
thrown our arms around Turnbull. And not sought
to keep taking a chip out of him.” History tells us
that Kevin Rudd won the battle to intensify discord
within the ranks of the Liberal Party—and undercut Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership—only to lose the
war and see his CPRS rejected in the Senate.
The record, as outlined in Triumph and Demise,
suggests that Tony Abbott did not set out to exploit
the Liberal Party’s mounting unease at Kevin
Rudd’s divisive politics for personal advantage. This
is not to say Abbott is without ambition and does
not possess a competitive, even combative, streak.
Abbott was an exuberant undergraduate anti-communist warrior, a plucky pugilist and a feisty rugby
player, but to be aggressively competitive does not
automatically consign him—as Marr does—to the
category of “junkyard dog”. The truth, as delineated
by Kelly, is that Abbott’s anti-ETS stance in the last
quarter of 2009 was existential as much as political,
and that safeguarding the unity of the Liberal Party
rather than unseating Malcolm Turnbull was the
priority. Abbott counselled Turnbull, from at least
October onwards, against investing his remaining
authority in the CPRS. He offered the same advice
to Joe Hockey. Abbott went into the December 1
Liberal Party leadership ballot expecting Turnbull
and Hockey supporters to form a united bloc
and eliminate him after the first round of voting.
Turnbull—due to pride or mulishness—threw his
hat in the ring and ruined Hockey’s chances. Abbott
could not have foreseen any of this.
A failing of Marr’s Political Animal is that
Marr’s enmity towards the conservative side of politics blinds him to all of its subtleties. Thus, Marr
attributes the following opinion to Tony Windsor,
former independent member for New England,
concerning his August-September 2010 negotiations
with the then Opposition Leader: “Windsor thought
Abbott would even have agreed to a carbon tax if
that would have made him prime minister.” This is
risible. Marr’s inclusion of such a line without further comment—as if it might actually be true—tells
us more about Marr’s pre-existing hostility towards
his subject than about Abbott. Abbott played a
strategic hand in opposing the CPRS on economic
rather than ecological grounds. This allowed sceptic and non-sceptic alike in the Liberal Party to
reject Rudd’s ideologically-driven legislation and yet
maintain, through its alternative Direct Action climate policy, some flexibility on global warming. The
purpose of all of this was to avoid taxing or regulating carbon-dioxide emissions—exactly what had
undone Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal Party
and thwarted Hockey’s ambition. Windsor’s assertion makes no sense, but never mind.
T
he CPRS saga does not substantiate David
Marr’s representation of Tony Abbott as
an unprincipled opportunist any more than his
stand on irregular maritime arrivals does. Abbott
always believed in John Howard’s Pacific Solution,
remained committed to it after the Coalition’s defeat
in 2007, and on forming a government in September
2013 reconstituted an almost identical border protection system. Marr, in Political Animal, makes reference to the “toxic politics of the boats” but (as I
argued in “How Boat People Brought Down Rudd
and Gillard”, Quadrant, July-August 2014) it was
PM Rudd, PM Gillard and then PM Rudd reprised
who repeatedly changed their position in order to
leverage maximum political advantage. Upwards of
1100 people lost their lives on the high seas while
these two played off their incongruent progressive
and traditionalist supporters. At the end of Political
Animal, David Marr made the prediction that when
irregular maritime arrivals “don’t stop arriving by
sea”, Abbott would “find himself exposed to all
the abuse he heaped on Rudd and Gillard”. Marr’s
prophecy, like so much else he says about Abbott,
turns out to be plain wrong.
Marr’s Politics Abbott/Values Abbott dichotomy is problematic on another count. Just as Politics
Abbott amounts to a caricature of the man, Values
Abbott also bears little resemblance to reality. In
Political Animal, David Marr insists that Tony
Abbott’s “years in the service” of Bob Santamaria—
“this strange Catholic warrior”—go a long way to
explaining our Prime Minister’s political philosophy (if not his political deeds): “From Santamaria
he took values rather than policies, values and
attitudes beyond the ordinary reach of politics in
this country. His conservatism is coloured clerical purple.” Santamaria was a mentor to the young
25
Abbott, but his longer-term impact is another matter. As Gerard Henderson, in Media Watch Dog 221,
April 2014, explains: “Bob Santamaria’s influence
has been over-estimated by his friends and enemies
alike. However, neither group would claim that—
from the grave—[Santamaria] influences the Prime
Minister. That’s (yet another) David Marr fantasy.”
Moreover, Santamaria—contraire Marr—did
not suggest, let alone instruct, Abbott to join the
Liberal Party; in fact, the old DLP/NCC stalwart
never made his peace with the Liberal Party and
“refused to provide a reference for Abbott when he
sought pre-selection for the Liberal Party seat of
Warringah in 1993”.
long-term investment in productivity-boosting
infrastructure negligible and the immense national
debt racked up by six years of Rudd–Gillard largesse out of control. A burgeoning economic emergency was upon us. The Secretary to the Treasury,
Martin Parkinson, spelt it out as simply as he could
for the doubters. Bill Shorten was having none of
this all-making-a-sacrifice and tightening-the-belt
malarkey, as evidenced by his official response to
the Coalition’s budget. While instructing Labor
senators to pass Abbott’s tax hike on the 400,000
Australians earning more than $180,000, Bill
Shorten spoke as if the Coalition had declared war
on the poor:
A
lthough the ALP and the leftist commentariat
Let’s call the Liberal Budget “emergency”
have been keen to depict the Abbott governwhat it is: An attempt to justify the Abbott
ment’s economic strategy as ideologically driven—
government’s blueprint for a radically different,
“neo-liberal” being a favoured pejorative—this is
less fair Australia. From a government that sees
hardly the case. In December 2013, for instance, the
the Australian people not as workers, parents,
Prime Minister announced in parliament the clocarers, patients or commuters but as units
sure of South Australia’s General Motors Holden
unentitled to respect.
manufacturing plant in 2017 and the loss of 1600
Bill Shorten’s act was partisan politics at its
jobs. Labor’s Bill Shorten asserted that “Holden was
pushed” by a coldly calculatingly Abbott and that if worst. The journalist Paul Sheehan summed up the
Shorten were Prime Minister it would never have situation for many: “We have a politician who will
sacrifice his career for the good of
happened. This was news to the
the country. We have an Opposition
Holden management team, who
cited a range of factors behind their
ony Abbott’s political Leader who will sacrifice his country for his career.” David Marr
decision—the high Australian dollar, the small domestic market, the thinking is informed wrote about the Coalition’s May
by a perpetual
2014 budget as the final demise of
high cost of production in Australia
Values
Abbott. No mention of the
and the fragmented nature of the
tension between
new tax burden imposed on the
global car market—none of which
notions of freedom, middle class—that would spoil the
suggested neo-liberal scheming on
the part of the Abbott government
individualism and narrative.
The main reason the evidence
to “sabotage” industries falling outside the parameters of economic innovation on the one fails to confirm Political Animal ’s
Darwinian theory. No doubt Tony
hand and morality, central thesis is because David
Marr is an ideologue (bohemian
Abbott did consider Holden’s decithe community and socialism)
whereas his subject’s
sion “a sad, bad day”, but nevertheless accepted that Australian tradition on the other. political philosophy is anti-ideology.
Though Abbott’s disposition owes
taxpayers could not go on subsidissomething to Edmund Burke,
ing the manufacturing of vehicles
to the tune of $2000 a unit indefinitely, especially his modern-day conservatism is unencumbered
when the same taxpayers favoured foreign-made by creed. Notwithstanding Marr’s outlandish
models for their own personal use. The closure assertion that Tony Abbott’s conservatism is
announcement at Holden, and later at Toyota, was “coloured clerical purple”, no dogma shapes the
not the victory of a callous ideology over the inter- Prime Minister’s decision-making process. Instead,
ests of Australian workers, but of common sense Tony Abbott’s political thinking is informed by
a perpetual tension between notions of freedom,
over Bill Shorten’s tribal politics.
Opposition Leader Shorten’s performance in individualism and innovation on the one hand
December 2013 was a rehearsal for his May 2014 and morality, the community and tradition on
response to Joe Hockey’s first budget. Anyone with the other, which means that even if he yearned to
even a rudimentary grasp of our financial state of be an ideologue—his every decision informed by
affairs knew the mining investment boom was over, a codified belief system—it would be impossible.
T
26
The only consequential dichotomy relevant to
the Prime Minister’s character is not Values
Abbott/Politics Abbott but circumspection versus
decisiveness. Some will label that as opportunism;
others might see it as judging each new issue on its
merits within a framework of guiding principles.
The only unyielding constant about Tony Abbott’s
policies would appear to be a strong sense of loyalty
to the Australian nation, past, present and future.
We might call that patriotism. On August 5, Tony
Abbott called it “Team Australia”.
T
he double announcement of August 5—the
Section 18C backdown and the revelation
of new security measures—will in all probability be judged as the determining moment in the
Coalition’s first year in office. Both friend and foe
in the media were quick to deride Tony Abbott
for his self-described “leadership call” that day.
The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) were so furious they took out a half-page advertisement in the
Australian to admonish the man who had proclaimed that freedom of speech was the basis of
Western democracy: “We agree, Prime Minister.
That’s why we will fight to repeal Section 18C of
the Racial Discrimination Act. Even if you won’t.”
I hope the IPA never gives up on Section 18C. If
the Abbott administration had been as decisive as it
was with Operation Sovereign Borders it could have
introduced—shortly after winning the September
2013 election—a limited proposal that removed the
words offend and insult from 18C. This might have
failed to pass in the Senate but at least the intention
would have been established. Instead, Labor was
given time to wage a dishonest campaign against
18C reform in which the guarantee of freedom of
speech was conflated with the abuse of freedom
of speech. In any case, the IPA should always be
acknowledged as the organisation at the forefront of
raising public awareness about the Gillard government’s notorious 2013 media “reforms”: the ALP’s
attempt to establish a government-appointed regulatory regime to ensure “fairness” in the media’s
treatment of—the ALP.
A less purist response to Tony Abbott’s August
5 backpedal—a libertarian-conservative one,
if you like—was more akin to disenchantment
than unbridled anger. It seemed like a case of
Circumspect Abbott winning out over Decisive
Abbott, which in the longer term would not be to
the advantage of his government. Time and again
Coalition administrations have done the hard work
of repairing Labor’s economic recklessness (the fiscal
frenzy of the Whitlam years and Keating’s 1996 $96
billion debt spring to mind) only to find themselves
caricatured as mean-spirited accountants and,
after a suitable period of time, replaced by a new
generation of oh-so-colourful Labor personalities.
Yes, Operation Sovereign Borders was a success,
the NBN farrago was brought under control, Julia
Gillard’s carbon-dioxide tax was rescinded, free
trade agreements with Japan and South Korea were
signed, relations with China were assured, relations
with India were reborn, relations with Indonesia
were sorted and so on, but the Left still commands the cultural heights. The ABC, for instance,
is keen to promote its narrow leftist agenda and
undercut the Coalition government at every turn.
Circumspect Abbott takes all this on the chin,
just as he did when Gillard demonised him with
her misogynist slur in October 2012. Abbott might
criticise the ABC on occasion—“I think it dismays
Australians when the national broadcaster appears
to take everyone’s side but our own ... You shouldn’t
leap to be critical of your own country”—but he
has not tackled the ABC’s political partisanship,
apart from axing its international satellite television service. While Coalition supporters, including the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party, have
called for the ABC to be privatised or at least overhauled, the Prime Minister insists that because he’s
a conservative he does not seek radical changes
to the public broadcaster. Accordingly, the “openminded” ABC will be campaigning against the
“close-minded” Coalition right up until election
night 2016, ever hopeful—as Kerry O’Brien might
put it—of a swing to the ABC.
Few commentators delighted in Tony Abbott’s
decision to take his proposed changes to 18C “off the
table” more than David Marr. According to Marr’s
article, “Freedom Riders” (Monthly, September
2014), here was proof positive that Politics Abbott—
the ruthless, cynical and amoral populist—had
never been serious about freedom of speech and
that his alliance with the IPA libertarians was
merely an election ploy. Alas, Marr’s Freedom
Abbott is no less a straw-man fallacy than his
Values Abbott contrivance. David Marr only
states the obvious when he writes that the Prime
Minister’s conservative sense of liberty and freedom
diverges in places from a classical liberal position.
The IPA invited Roger Scruton, the world’s leading
conservative philosopher, to Australia earlier this
year, which says a lot about the shared concerns
of contemporary conservatism and liberalism,
and yet not everybody was on the same page on
every issue. For the most part, libertarians and
conservatives alike affirm the sovereignty of both
the individual and the nation-state, and recognise
the interdependency of the two concepts, and yet
the libertarian is more likely to emphasise the
former and the conservative the latter. Nevertheless,
27
libertarians and conservatives can (and do) agree on
a whole range of things, including opposition to the
attempt by Labor and the Greens in 2013 to regulate
Australia’s news media in particular and a rejection
of the divisiveness and tribalism of Identity Politics
in general.
They would tell us that “Palestinian nationalism”
is a contemporaneous construct, a Trojan horse
designed to eradicate Jews “from the river to the sea”
and replace the State of Israel with a new Caliphate,
its capital Jerusalem. They would acknowledge
that a central impediment to their nascent Global
Caliphate (or Islamic State) is the existence of the
his last point is the fundamental connection modern nation-state and the attendant patriotism
between latter-day conservatives and liber- associated with such a secular entity. Their list of
tarians and every hybrid incarnation of those two enemies includes Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah
categories. We all abhor sectarianism. We have all al-Sisi (who is a Muslim), the Supreme Court of
embraced modernity. All of us feel comfortable, as Israel’s Salim Joubran (who is a Muslim) and
Roger Scruton contends in The Uses of Pessimism: Syrian Kurdistan’s Salih Muslim Muhammed (who
And the Dangers of False Hope (2010), with an evolv- is a Muslim). Nor would the Islamists much like
ing post-tribal paradigm. Unlike Islamic State, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott (who is, as
the Nazis, the communists and today’s proselytis- David Marr reminds us, a Roman Catholic).
ers of Identity Politics, we do not
Team Australia, or however one
subscribe to an ideology, because
might like to label it, is the only
ideology demands submission rather
game in town. Bill Shorten has
nlike Islamic
than settlement. We are beyond
been cordial enough to acknowlState, the Nazis,
that. The one thing that binds as
edge that the violent, apocalyptic
the communists and millennialism of Islamic State is a
together—to borrow again from
Scruton—should be oikophilia, an today’s proselytisers of genuine emergency for the wider
enlightened form of patriotism that
world and Australia as well: “When
Identity Politics, we it comes to fighting terror, we are
transcends tribalism and sectarianism. Without wishing to sound
do not subscribe to all in this together.” Admittedly,
patronising, individual Muslims
new-found sense of common
an ideology, because this
are capable of a cosmopolitan sennational purpose faltered somewhat
sibility, as evidenced by the lives of
when Shorten asserted that purideology demands
millions of Muslims in America,
chasing a fleet of Japanese-made
submission rather
Israel, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan,
submarines (at a saving of $20 bilthan settlement.
India, Indonesia, Australia and so
lion) would reverse the results of
on. This is what the anti-sectarian
the Pacific War: “This is a governand intensely patriotic Tony Abbott
ment with a short memory. In the
understood on August 5 when he simultaneously Second World War, 366 merchant ships were sunk
announced plans to combat homegrown terrorism off Australia.” So much for the superiority of the
and, in the name of Team Australia, dropped his ALP in dealing with our Asian neighbours. The
proposal for modifying 18C. David Marr, in his spirit of national unity and cheery patriotism has
“Freedom Riders” polemic, insists that Abbott “used not exactly been the hallmark of Labor since the
the Muslims to cover his retreat”. But then, this is halcyon days of Bob Hawke. Paul Keating’s “true
the same anti-Catholic sectarian who wrote The believers” triumphalism on election night 1993 conHigh Price of Heaven (2000) and The Prince: Faith, fused rusted-on ALP voters with the population at
Abuse and George Pell (2012)—and believes Tony large, and that style of us-against-them mentality
Abbott’s conservatism is “coloured clerical purple”. has persisted ever since. Shorten’s attempt to keep
The greatest threat to the world, not excluding his cohort of Abbott-haters in line is no easy task.
Australia, is Islamic revivalism. If Islamist activists Melissa Parke is one of a number of ALP politiwere honest with us, instead of engaging in taqiyyah cians who have not read the memo. In August she
(dissimulation), they would admit that the original tweeted: “Govt losing on unfair budget so it just
nakba (catastrophe) was the collapse of the Ottoman talks of terrorism.”
Caliphate and the partition of Ottoman Syria in
The tragedy for the ALP—and for Australia—is
the aftermath of the First World War, and not the that Identity Politics has driven Labor for so long
foundation of the State of Israel. They would come now that it may have rendered the Party ineffective
clean about the real intentions of Egypt’s Muslim in our current crisis. All the special pleading it
Brotherhood, the genuine connections between the encourages from the rainbow of discontents who
Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, and the paral- place it first (or, at least, second after the Greens) in
lels between Hamas and Al Qaeda/Islamic State. the ballot box, makes it tough for the ALP suddenly
T
U
28
to start being a unifying force in our country.
Keating’s anti-monarchy tilt was a divider, as was
his anti-Anzac invective. We already know—from
Labor insiders—that Rudd’s CPRS was meant
to split the Liberal Party and marginalise the
“Deniers”. The principle of divide-and-conquer
illuminates Kevin Rudd’s improbable fervour for
gay marriage before the 2013 election, while Identity
Politics explains Gillard’s misogynist smear and
why her government—against her wishes—became
more pro-Palestinian. How can winning a handful
of seats in western Sydney make selling your
political soul an option? In August this year, while
an apocalyptic death cult—Hamas—was firing
rockets at Israeli civilians, Labor frontbencher Tony
Burke expressed his admiration for the “bravery” of
Palestinian fighters who put their life “on the line
and at risk” and engaged in “politics in different
ways”.
The ALP, in search of electoral viability, has
taken the low road and found itself in a most
exposed position. It stands, as ever, torn between
its traditional patriotic supporters, who are repulsed
by the Islamic State and any further acquiescence of
Islamic supremacism in Australia, and progressives
or bohemian socialists who know that the real danger afoot—as Labor Senator Sue Lines disclosed—
is Tony Abbott’s “scaremongering”. The latter fear
the dawn of Orwell’s Oceania more than they do
dhimmitude and the Islamic State. However, they
are very much a minority in that regard. Labor
apologist Bob Ellis has wondered aloud on his Table
Talk blog why “all the fuss” about a few beheadings performed by Islamic State: “Beheadings occur
routinely in Game of Thrones. And no complaint has
been laid.” The dismissive tone of David Marr in
“Freedom Rider” concerning Tony Abbott’s August
5 announcements is only marginally less ridiculous:
“It didn’t help that depraved clowns with Australian
passports were cutting off heads for the Caliphate.”
Let not the rape and murder of Mosul, the Yazidis
and the Kurds get in the way of David Marr’s antibourgeois bohemian loathing for conservative politicians in Australia. Already, I am sure, the most
sophisticated leftist political writer in Australia
is working on a sequel to His Master’s Voice: The
Corruption of Public Debate under Howard (2007).
Pot calling the kettle black, I would have thought.
Annabel Crabb’s Quarterly Essay Stop at Nothing:
The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull (2007)
proved more than a little prescient. Though it came
out before Turnbull lost his position as Opposition
Leader on December 1, 2009, Crabb writes of a man
who is a sharp thinker, raconteur and astonishingly
successful businessman, and yet in the final analysis
more of a “hired gun” than a team leader. And then
there is the equivocating Joe Hockey. According
to Madonna King’s Hockey: Not Your Average Joe
(2014), Hockey was “a bit relieved” that he lost,
that Tuesday back in 2009. Despite being “filthy”
at the time with Turnbull for his alleged doublecross, Hockey consoled himself with the idea that
the downfall of Brendan Nelson and now Malcolm
Turnbull brought the moment of his inevitable triumph closer:
I thought, we are going through all these
people. We’re clearing the decks. Abbott won’t
last long and at least that gives me a free run.
I’m next, and if I’m next, I’m not going to have
all these people undermining me.
Hockey did not anticipate Abbott turning out to
be the right man at the right time for the Coalition.
To that we might now, hopefully, add—right man
at the right time for Australia.
Daryl McCann has a blog at http://darylmccann.
blogspot.com.au. He wrote an article on Hamas in the
October issue.
“It was too painful watching my socially-conscious environmentalist and wildlife-loving friends support policies that harm the planet, harm people, especially the poor,
and harm wildlife, often in the cruellest ways imaginable; so I wrote Carbon Is Life.”
Author Ron House is a physicist and computer scientist, and he is also a ‘magpie
whisperer’, who co-authored two books on understanding and communicating
with wild birds. Now he brings his skills to the table to denounce the “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” hoax. Going beyond the “nothing to
worry about, carbon dioxide is harmless” message, he tells why CO2 plant food is
a positive good, in short supply, and how bad science endangers us all. Carbon Is
Life makes an ideal gift for your green friends. In fact, why not give them How to
Identify Individual Birds and How to Communicate with Backyard Birds as well?
All titles available from bunyagrovepress.com (local Australian postage) and
Amazon; Carbon Is Life can also be ordered from any good book store.
29
G r egory H a ines
Unrevealing Secrets
of the Self-Important
Y
ou can have fun with the spy game, as happened when, in his 1959 film of the same
name, Carol Reed added to the comedy of
Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana.
The same happened less cleverly and more violently
with the various James Bond films. As well there
was the Get Smart television series and the 1999
film The Spy Who Shagged Me and many, many more.
Then again, the spy game can be depicted as
unendingly serious, as a thriller, as Joseph Conrad
did in his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, which dealt
with anarchists and a professor who was a constantly
armed, walking suicide bomber, or in the works of
John le Carré, the films deriving from them, and
the 1967–1972 English television series Callan. The
latter featured Edward Woodward as the eponymous reluctant, cynical spy-assassin and the supporting cast included the pathetic and aptly named
Lonely, played brilliantly by Russell Hunter, ironically a former stage actor for the Scottish Young
Communist League.
And Greene was there for the noir too: not too
many laughs in the screenplay he and Carol Reed
wrote (based on a Greene story) for the memorable
1949 film The Third Man. After the 1951 defection
to the Soviet Union of Guy Burgess and Donald
MacLean, British intelligence agents who infamously were part of what became known as the
Cambridge Five spy ring, some saw the film’s title
as pointing to Kim Philby. When Greene became
a British spy, his mentor was Kim Philby, perhaps
the most traitorous of the Cambridge Five. And
Greene defended Philby’s commitment to his higher
cause, communism, which he believed Philby truly
believed. Le Carré regarded Philby as a shit. Is
sincerity the sole touchstone for truth? Is Greene’s
position a case of genuine respect for the freedom
Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files
edited by Meredith Burgmann
NewSouth, 2014, 464 pages, $32.99
30
of conscience or simply an early instance of postmodernism, pre-postmodernism, moral relativism
or moral equivalence? It may be that Greene, like
many in the counter-culture movement, the habitually imitative protesters of the 1960s and afterwards,
had only dreamy-romantic foundations for all their
Antonio Gramsci-like passion, demonstrations and
vehemence against and towards key institutions of
the society in which they were nurtured.
In 1955, in the House of Commons, then
Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Harold Macmillan,
said Philby could not have been the infamous third
man, and so he remained as a mole until his eventual flight to Moscow from Beirut in January 1963.
Spy agencies and their masters may have made bigger bungles than this, but not many. (A notable,
painful, lesser one involved the mathematician and
science communicator Jacob Bronowski. Before the
Second World War he was secretly denounced to
British authorities as a Russian, a Jew and a communist, accusations which were to shadow him for
years.) The incredible consequences of the failure
to detect spies and disloyal personnel within the
last administration (at least) of US President F.D.
Roosevelt, people such as Alger Hiss, come to
mind. Soviet commissar, patriot and enthusiastic
slaughterer of his own people as well as those of
other lands too (the Ukraine offers a continuing
tragic example), Joseph Stalin, probably knew more
about the atomic bomb than did Roosevelt’s vicepresident, Harry Truman, until Roosevelt died in
Warm Springs in 1945 with Lucy Mercer, once his
wife’s social secretary and one of his mistresses, at
his side. Truman was probably loyal to his woman,
Bess, as he was to his country.
Whether comic or not, there are frequent elements in these explorations of the spy game including the cock-up or bungle and the manipulability
of young idealists (or, as John Wayne called them
in 1974 when speaking to students at Harvard
University, dissenters “by rote”). The unintelligent and bloody-minded head of a spy agency is
Unrevealing Secrets of the Self-Important
almost a stock character. The suspicion, founded or Hardy and Clive Evatt, are reported on by survivotherw ise, of underlying, perhaps sinister, politi- ing family members.
cal agendas rather than the stated national security
The editor’s sister, Verity Burgmann, former
purpose is never far from the front page of the daily Trotskyite and granddaughter of a radical Anglican
newspapers. In this bullying, suspicious, cynical (or bishop, winced when she opened her file and saw
comical) setting, the realities of loyalty, treason and that she was always in a bikini in the ASIO sursacrifice are easily overlooked. What might today’s veillance photographs. The picture on page 348,
intelligentsia think about, say, the disappearance in taken in New South Wales on April 24, 1978, durPortsmouth dockyard in 1956 of cigarette-smoking the International Socialists’ Beach Camp, and
ing English Secret Intelligence Service frogman obviously posed, displays a shapely Verity, despite
Lionel “Buster” Crabbe, who had been ordered to the poor quality of the reproduction. Verity did not
do underwater reconnaissance on a visiting Soviet write her piece. Instead the reader is offered a tranUnion cruiser? Patriotism has been out of fashion, script of an interview she gave to the editor.
gauche, for a number of seasons.
ach of the entries by the book’s twenty-seven
any of those who were young and politisubjects is preceded by a biographical sketch.
cally active in the democratic West during This format yields the predictable results: repetithe tense Cold War 1960s, especially those with tion, lack of serious analysis, and plain boredom.
obvious leftist leanings, came to the attention of Alan Hardy wrote of the contents of the many
spy agencies. Those in the compages in his father, Frank’s, file
munist East who disagreed with
as being mostly “banal and irrelpower sometimes had to contend
here is no sense of evant”. Journalist Tony Reeves,
with the military as well as the less
one of a number of the “So what
time or place. What or who?” characters in the book,
delicate methods employed by the
spy and surveillance apparatchiks
role did commercial was offended by the “disappointon duty there, including disappearsmall size of his ASIO dosteenage culture play ingly”
ance. And recently a few of those
sier. (Some of the other members of
in the lives of our
who feel they suffered from being
the so-what brigade are hero-judge
spied upon unfairly by their own
Michael Kirby, gardener Peter
rapporteurs? Or the Cundall,
government in Australia, or who
film critic David Stratton,
accompaniments to communist-born and later political
simply cannot bear the thought
of being forgotten, have begun to
gadfly Penny Lockwood, and selfthat culture: rock
record their uncontested version
described “opinion leader”, journalof their travails, real or imagined. music, flower power, ist Anne Summers.) One subject,
LSD and other
Earlier this year SBS television ran
a journalist, Frances Letters, who
a series, Persons of Interest, which
was
arrested along with the edifunny substances,
dealt with ASIO and a handful of
tor at an anti-apartheid demo, is
or grog, or sex?
people including Gary Foley and
included despite feeling mightily
Frank Hardy. Haydn Keenan, the
wronged when she discovered she
writer and director, told Margaret
had no ASIO file: “I protest! What
Throsby, when plugging this series on her ABC about all my writing, arguing, cajoling about the
Classic FM radio program, that ASIO’s files are “a Vietnam War, apartheid, racism and Aboriginal
little bit like the records of Auschwitz”.
rights during those notoriously paranoid years?”
Similar emotive demonising of ASIO is the red
Perhaps the Burgmann book might help bring
thread of kinship running through the old-Left’s about Letters’s apotheosis, and that of all the
memories as encountered in a large book edited by other would-be Moses figures it includes? Putative
Meredith Burgmann, Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files saviours all, or for the most part, but they dis(NewSouth, 2014, with taxpayer financial assist- play scarcely any humour or sense of fun, rather
ance via the Australia Council for the Arts). An like existing accounts of the life of Jesus—or the
exception, which shows balance, is that by Mark Prophet, for that matter. Clive James wisely wrote
Aarons. The rest seem to need to study the history that humour is common sense dancing. No trace of
of Buster Crabbe, at least.
jive, waltz, foxtrot or even tango (strange omission,
Burgmann persuaded a group of her “comrades” given the libertine professions and practices of some
(as—Gough-like—she salutes them) to obtain their contributors) is to be found in the book, no laughnow available ASIO files and write about what they ter. Phillip Adams’s self-deprecation is the notable
found there. Some deceased people, such as Frank exception: he grins at the reader, himself and the
E
M
T
31
Unrevealing Secrets of the Self-Important
silliness of the task he has nevertheless performed.
The uncontested recollections of the contributors,
taken together, raise some suggestions for further
study, if anyone is interested in any of the hydraheads of decaying socialism. It raises the question
of history and what may be called the Agincourt
memory. According to Shakespeare’s King Henry
V, those who battle with him on the feast day of
the patron saint of cobblers, Saint Crispin’s Day,
and survive, will on each anniversary of the fight
remember their deeds “with advantages”.
A
appears twice in the index. Many of the university
enthusiasts, in my view unfortunately for tertiary
education, acquired academic positions in political
and other social “sciences”, or arts faculties, or journalism, or positions with government, particularly
after the Whitlam gravy-train arrived at the end of
1972. How has academic journalism profited from
the dour and seemingly bitter, humourless influence of, say, Wendy Bacon or David McKnight,
and from proselytism or propaganda based around
leftist stereotypes, reading lists and bitter memories? A number of the contributors abandoned student radicalism for more prosperous careers with
the Australian Labor Party, or associated law firms.
s with all glorious memoirs, these need to be
considered carefully. Yet Dirty Secrets is almost
entirely context-free. There is no
hile Germaine Greer can
sense of time or place. What role
speak a good Marxist line,
did commercial teenage culture
rances Letters’s
books don’t make events, events
play in the lives of our rapporteurs?
complaint about not make books, and her presence in
Or the accompaniments to that
having been noticed the book might have made a difculture: rock music, flower power,
LSD and other funny substances, by ASIO exemplifies ference. The contributors to this
book follow a different historioor grog, or sex? Was going to a
demo a good way to get a good lay? this “me” component: graphical line. They tend to write
Apart from the fact that they
“What about all my like sociologists, using words like
meaning ful, supportive, innovawere the editor’s comrades, no justiwriting, arguing,
tive and progressive. And progresfication is provided for the selection
sive they are, adherents to a form
of the memorialists. Were there any
cajoling about the
of Whig history. And not just the
called who did not follow? What
Vietnam War,
impersonal gradualism of classical
of those who may not have been
apartheid, racism
Whig history, every day in every
called at all—Barry Humphries,
way things everywhere getting
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Virginia Bell,
and Aboriginal
a little better. No, they are perClive James, Michael Mansell,
rights during
sonal exemplars, effective agents,
James Spigelman, Germaine Greer
of those changes. Frances Letters’s
and Robert Hughes may all have
those notoriously
complaint about not having been
had ASIO files, as amongst the
paranoid years?”
noticed by ASIO exemplifies this
dead might Allan Ashbolt and Ted
What about ME! “me” component: “What about all
Wheelwright: did they or their kin
my writing, arguing, cajoling about
receive invitations? No sustained,
the Vietnam War, apartheid, raccogent assessment of ASIO’s likely
motives is offered, apart from the repeated claim ism and Aboriginal rights during those notoriously
that their work was politically motivated and paranoid years?” What about ME!
This book shows no sense of the sacred, the
directed. What motivated those who contributed
here? Are their memoirs little more than anticipa- numinous, the tragic, the thrilling, the comical,
no sense of beauty and art and mystery. It is all
tions of the obituary and the gravestone?
What these loose and flimsy memoirs do show is reduced to bully politics and violence and narcissomething of a pattern: radicalisation at university sism, and this from those who became academics,
during the 1960s, but mainly if not exclusively of arts judges, teachers and politicians, and a few too many
and social science students. There is no one in the nondescripts. Better read a sports report on a game
book like the communist sympathiser and professor of some form of football than this book.
of pharmaceutical chemistry at Sydney University,
Sydney Edward Wright, whose address ASIO Gregory Haines wrote on the SBS series Persons of
surely knew. Mark Aarons is probably as close to a Interest in his article “Persons of Less Interest than
blue-collar trade unionist as one gets: Jack Mundey They Think” in the May issue.
32
F
W
M ich a el C on nor
September was
the Cruellest Month
A
t the beginning of September comes the
rentrée, as France returns to home, work
and school after the summer holidays.
For publishers, it’s the most important selling
period of the year. This time there was the usual
flurry of new books; some of them even worth
reading. Popular authors clogged popular radio
and television broadcasts, publishers published
schedules of bookshop appearances of their stars,
book-chat gossips gossiped about contenders for
the big literary prizes. It was enjoyable, familiar,
and predictable, even to the publicists’ ever-hopeful
overuse of the word shock. Literary magazine Lire’s
front cover pushed their choice for “the shock book
of the rentrée”—Emmanuel Carrère’s non-fiction/
fiction about the beginning of Christianity. Instead,
a quite different and unexpected text came out of
nowhere, breaking sales records and pulverising the
competition—all without a single author interview.
The book exploded like a suicide bomber’s vest
inside the French president’s bedroom and left the
smoking ruins of the Élysée Palace looking like a
bomb-flattened bordello on the road to Vichy (circa
1940).
When, on Tuesday September 2, François
Hollande received advance warning of what was
about to happen, he managed to smile. The moment
has been captured on film. The documentary
maker who had been following him about caught
the scene on film—we will have to wait until 2015
to see for ourselves. It sounds like the moment
President Bush was told of the attacks on the Twin
Towers. Hollande’s dreadful moment was learning that a book by Valérie Trierweiler, on their life
together, was to be published in two days time. He
kept smiling. It wasn’t until almost midnight that
his staff managed to obtain an advance copy. The
Merci pour ce moment
by Valérie Trierweiler
Editions Les Arènes, 2014, 318 pages, €20
next day he was reportedly in a “black rage” (no
cameras this time) when he learned that the serious Left newspaper Le Monde was giving the book
credibility by publishing an extract. Coming from
Les Arènes, a small Paris publisher, Merci pour ce
moment (Thanks for This Moment) took France, and
its president, by surprise.
Trierweiler, a high-end-forties razor-wireMadonna, had been the companion of François
Hollande for nine years. For twenty months, after
his election as president, she had been beside him
in stiletto heels and designer chic as France’s first
lady. She was seen as a tough lady; in her book
she says she was called Hollande’s Rottweiler. In
January 2014 a sexual scandal, his, ended in dismissal, hers. An English newspaper described
her book as the “Rottweiler’s Revenge”. Her book
demolishes boundaries between public and private
in France: “I have suffered too much from lies to
tell any in my turn.”
Trierweiler and Hollande (she a Paris Match
journalist, he the General Secretary of the Socialist
Party) had publicly revealed their relationship
in 2007. Trierweiler, who had three children,
divorced her husband (who also worked for Paris
Match); Hollande left his partner Ségolène Royal
(the Socialist Party candidate in the 2007 presidential election) and their four children. During
that failed election campaign Royal and Hollande
had appeared to be a happy unmarried family unit,
and only after she lost was their break-up revealed.
Political ambition, not children, had kept them
together, in public.
Hollande decided 2012 would be his turn to run
for president. His campaign for pre-selection as the
Socialist Party candidate was helped when rival
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape
in New York. Trierweiler claims that Hollande’s
immediate reaction to the arrest was to calculate
its effect on his campaign—which simply shows he
sometimes has the right instincts. Chosen by his
party, he defeated Nicolas Sarkozy, and his most
33
September was the Cruellest Month
noteworthy achievement since the election appears shouldn’t have been told.” Some Left bookshops
to be receiving the lowest approval rating of any refused to stock the book because they objected
president in the history of the Fifth Republic.
to the “washing of dirty linen”, others grabbed
Merci pour ce moment called out to political junkies the money. No doubt they would have been just
and gossip lovers. Without much information as to as morally outraged (not) if the dirty washing had
what was actually in the book, apart from promises belonged to a right-wing politician.
of sex and politics, pre-publication orders quickly
Trierweiler’s Hollande is an egotistical, untrustpushed it to first place on Amazon France book worthy, scheming liar; her self-portrait is of a Uriah
sales—thanks to the internet marketplace a book Heep ’umble, simple, down-to-earth, faithful, carbuyer in faraway Hobart could obtain a copy before ing, family-devoted woman. At least one of those
sold-out Paris bookshops had restocked.
portraits may be news to her readers. The angry,
The huge first printing of 200,000 copies was account-settling narrative begins like a novel with
done secretly in Germany. In just a few days over Trierweiler’s attempted suicide after learning that
140,000 copies had been sold and by the end of the Hollande has been cheating on her—just as she and
month that had risen to 500,000
he had done to her husband and
copies. Le Figaro calculated that
Ségolène Royal.
the author’s royalties, even before
Closer magazine published phorierweiler’s
the end of September, were in
tos of Hollande visiting his mistress,
Hollande is
excess of 1.3 million euros. Scorned
actress Julie Gayet, and turned him
Trierweiler was suddenly wealthinto
a joke. They showed an overan egotistical,
ier than the president who had
weight man in black leather clothes
untrustworthy,
dumped her. The soberly jacketed
with an oversized face-hiding bikscheming liar; her
318-page revenge saga demolished
er’s helmet being carried on the back
the previous French publishing
of
a smart police motor scooter to
self-portrait is of a
sales record held by E.L. James’s
visit his mistress. He looked like an
Uriah Heep ’umble, overripe babushka doll. There was
sadomasochistic romance Fifty
Shades of Grey.
also a photo of one of his security
simple, down-topolicemen delivering the breakearth, faithful,
ust a few magazine covers offer
fasting couple a bag of croissants—
caring, familya short history of what hapTrierweiler is particularly scathing
pened to Hollande’s reputation
about “Croissant Man”.
devoted woman.
in a few days. Paris Match began
Before Closer published the phoAt least one of those tos, Hollande denied, to Trierweiler,
with a gentle-sounding, colleagueprotecting smokescreen, “My Life
the truth in the spreading rumours
portraits may be
with François … Exclusive: her
of his relationship. Then, only
news to her readers. hours before the publication of the
shock book reveals the story of their
passion” (the photo of Trierweiler
photos, he admitted they were true:
on the cover of this sell-out edibut then lied about the duration of
tion pushed the French marriage of Brad Pitt and the affair. That morning, in the privacy of their
Angelina Jolie into smaller print in the top right- apartment in the Élysée Palace, while France was
hand corner). Gossip magazine Closer summed the laughing, they were fighting. Trierweiler proposed,
book up in two words, “LA VENGEANCE”. News but Hollande rejected, playing the Clinton strategy
and politics weekly L’Express, who seem to have a of public confession and sorrowful partner offering
thick file of Hollande-looking-miserable photos, forgiveness. Her book denies the colourful gossip
chose a suitably dismal one. Their bold headline that she sent a priceless Élysée vase flying in the
glittered above an image of the unhappy man like direction of the un-helmeted presidential head but
the poised blade of a guillotine—“Voyage to the end does reveal a struggle over a plastic bag of sleepof HELL”; smaller headings locked in the tone of ing pills which tore as they fought. She grabbed
their coverage, “The president discredited … The and swallowed what she could. In the confusion
man humiliated … The five-year term massacred”. which followed, which Trierweiler imperfectly
Inside stories didn’t disappoint.
recalls, it seems she agreed on hospitalisation and
Reactions were polarised. On one hand Paris the story switches from Élysée Palace to a tranMatch: “Wounded woman. Valérie speaks.” On the quilised hospital patient in a public-health nightother, a scream of feminist anger in the Guardian shirt. Hollande’s visits were few, and fifteen days
(the WikiLeaks-leaking newspaper): “This score- and many drugs later he dictated an eighteen-word
settling memoir is a tragic and demeaning tale that statement for Agence France-Presse announcing
T
J
34
September was the Cruellest Month
the end of their relationship. She refused to make
it a joint communication.
V
alérie Trierweiler brought a sense of personal
illegitimacy to the Élysée—from the beginning she felt an outsider. She was not a wife, nor
a political collaborator accepted by his Socialist
Party colleagues. After his election she tried to be
both First Lady and a working journalist. Internet
insults, such as being France’s “First Prostitute”,
wounded her deeply. When Protestant Henri of
Navarre converted to Catholicism in order to take
the French crown he is supposed to have said, “Paris
is well worth a mass”. The modern couple, Hollande
and Trierweiler, may not have thought France was
well worth a wedding, but neither did they give the
impression of possessing an unforced affectionate
relationship.
Seen from another country she seemed a fine
candidate for First Lady. Capable, if necessary, of
hosting a televised tour of the Élysée, or talking
on France Culture of the books on the presidential night table, or adopting a suitable charity for
a photogenic disability. But politics, no. Though
she had been a successful political reporter and
commentator and wished to be involved in political decisions, she demonstrated a lack of political common sense. Her political ineptitude in the
Tweet Affair sullied the earlier stage of Hollande’s
presidency. When Ségolène Royal was standing in
a local election in June 2012 President Hollande
supported his ex-partner and political supporter.
Quite unnecessarily, Trierweiler created a political
and family scandal when she tweeted her support
for Royal’s opponent. In the pages devoted to this
debacle Trierweiler evades personal responsibility
for an action that undermined her partner’s authority, deeply offended her de facto step-children, and
embarrassed her own children. The conclusion to
her account of a stupid act draws from the familiar well of feminist excuse making: “by this tweet,
I touched the supreme symbol: the mother, the
untouchable. I am a mother, I also, but not of the
President’s children.” Royal is presently Minister
for Ecology.
When her book was published, Trierweiler was
in Madagascar working on a special report for
Paris Match. She made no public comment until
Hollande gave a press conference, only the fourth
he has given as president. As he was speaking she
retweeted a photo her young son had put online
showing a dish he had cooked at school that day:
roast duck with turnips. A canard can be a lying
newspaper report or false rumour, and lame ducks
are not unknown.
What Trierweiler suffered from the public infidelity of Hollande and his curt dismissal were devastating wounds for which he is responsible, but
when she broadens her attacks they seem smallminded divorce-court scratches. She doesn’t get
the big picture, she doesn’t get the small picture,
she only sees her own picture. Taking a moral ruler
to the book, and dividing political and personal,
socialist Hollande has angrily responded to his excompanion’s claim that he does not like the poor
and has joked of them as the “toothless”—sans
dents. It may be an indication of his loss of support,
even on the Left, that this damaging phrase was
chosen for inclusion in Le Monde’s book extract—
especially hurtful as it is the President’s favourite
newspaper. The expression immediately became a
widely used media joke.
H
ollande’s awful September began horribly, and
ended horribly.
On the second-last Sunday of the month Nicolas
Sarkozy announced his return to politics, seemingly setting in motion the 2017 presidential election campaign.
On the same day a French tourist was kidnapped
by Muslim terrorists in Algeria.
Throughout the week a strike at Air France
dragged on and on even as Hollande announced
the deployment of French military aircraft to Iraq.
On Wednesday terrorists beheaded the French
tourist, and posted the video online.
On Thursday Hollande delivered a serious and
statesmanlike speech at the United Nations.
On Friday Closer magazine had a mocking frontpage composite photo of a smug Hollande and a
smiling Gayet with a teasing and over-familiar
headline, “No, Julie hasn’t left him”. The accompanying story had them walking hand in hand inside
the Élysée where they shared a “pique-nique” in the
gardens on September 14—the specific date suggested the magazine’s writers knew what they were
talking about.
On Sunday the Right swung majority power
away from the Left in elections for the Senate—
for the very first time the far-Right National Front
won two Senate seats. Political life had just become
much more difficult for the president, and should
he resign (as many wish) or tumble from the back
of a scooter, presidential powers would be taken up
by a right-wing Senate leader until a new election.
On the same day Brigitte Bardot turned eighty.
35
P eter K urti
Secular Prejudice and the
Survival of Religious Freedom
I
n a recent speech on religious liberty delivered at the Law School of the University of
Notre Dame in Sydney, the Attorney-General,
Senator George Brandis, explored a relatively
neglected aspect of the culture war being waged
between the forces of religion and secularism.
Since most of the skirmishes in this protracted
conflict are in pursuit of control of the commanding heights of the notion of “the public good”, it is
significant that Senator Brandis’s main argument
offered a template for reconciliation between the
warring factions. He called upon his audience to
understand that the intellectual roots of Western
concepts of liberty are, in fact, to be found in
Christianity. But in a glancing reference, Brandis
also presumed to suggest that religious liberty has
been subject to frequent attack “from those who
dominate much of our political discourse, particularly in the national broadcaster and the Fairfax
media”.
Jonathan Holmes, a Fairfax journalist and
former ABC presenter, came to the defence of
his current employer and the national broadcaster. Holmes might have thought it helpful to be
reminded by the Attorney-General that the culture
of freedom we enjoy in this country was shaped, in
part, by the Christian faith. Instead, Holmes was
clearly offended and demanded proof: “Did Brandis
offer his listeners a single example of this onslaught
against religious freedom? ... No, he did not. Not
one. Which prompts me to wonder what the hell he
is talking about.”
Holmes was clearly sensitive to any suggestion
that Fairfax and the ABC may have an institutional
bias in favour of progressive social and political
values, and bias against conservative organisations
such as the Catholic and other Christian churches.
However, his cry of “Prove it!” is easily answered by
his own test: When was the last time Fairfax and
the ABC gave favourable coverage to a Catholic
organisation calling for support for traditional marriage or opposition to euthanasia?
36
The terms in which Holmes framed his response
to Brandis only confirm the tendency of progressive commentators to view religion with great suspicion. For example, he noted that a number of
senior Coalition ministers, including the Prime
Minister and the Attorney-General, are Catholics.
Apparently, the problem is just as bad on the other
side: “The Catholic Church still seems to wield
enormous influence in the ALP and the wider
labour movement.”
Questions of religious freedom are frequently
met with hostility by “progressive” commentators
from the Left. Religion, particularly Christianity,
is said to be oppressive and restrictive, to be discriminatory against women and non-heterosexual
people, and to deny the empirical foundations of
scientific knowledge. Far better to do without religion altogether, they say, and instead to embrace
the fruits of secular reason.
In many ways, Holmes’s response to Brandis’s
remarks is typical. If there is one thing that
inflames progressive sensibilities even more than
the pronouncements of prelates, it is the charge
that they themselves are hostile to religion. Yet in
focusing on what was only a very minor reference
in the speech, Holmes inadvertently confirmed the
very point that Senator Brandis was making: that
critics neither take seriously the place of religion
in our society nor understand that secular notions
of liberty have their roots in Christianity. Rather,
they maintain that secularism demands the exclusion of all religion from the common arena of life—
the arena sometimes known as “the public square”.
Small wonder that questions of religious faith and
freedom are met with hostility.
Far from being hostile to religion, however,
secularism, properly understood, actually has
its roots in religion; and more specifically, in
Christianity. As the intellectual historian Larry
Siedentop has remarked, “Secularism identifies
the conditions in which authentic beliefs should be
formed and defended.” Far from feeling intimidated
Secular Prejudice and the Survival of Religious Freedom
by an aggressive hostility directed at religion,
believers can draw confidence from knowing that
freedoms such as freedom of religion actually have
their roots in religious faith.
M
any people hoped—and even predicted—that
religious belief would wither in the heat of
twenty-first-century scientific criticism, but this
hope has proved to be unfounded. Of course, it is
true that the development of science has demonstrated that much of what the churches had earlier
claimed as “knowledge” turned out not to be knowledge at all. But the rise of scientific method did give
rise to a more pervasive mood of rejection. As the
philosopher Dallas Willard remarked in his 2009
book Personal Religion, Public Reality?:
That mood became an intellectual and academic
lifestyle and spread across the social landscape
as an authority in its own right. It branded
all … religious “knowledge” as mere illusion
or superstition and all of the sources of such
knowledge as unreliable or even delusory.
And so it came to be that mathematics and the
natural sciences were accorded the right to proclaim
what was meaningful, reliable and true. The very
idea of religious knowledge was almost a contradiction in terms.
Yet religion, with its concern for the primary
questions of life and existence, has refused to go
away. There are three factors, all quite closely linked,
which help to account for the raised profile religion
continues to enjoy.
First, we have seen the rapid spread of traditional, conservative expressions of religions, such
as Christianity and Islam, in recent years that have
claimed to be bastions of certainty in an uncertain world. Second, we are still seeing, and with a
heightened awareness, the terrible consequences of
religious zealotry. And finally, these developments
have been accompanied by a third factor: a greater
readiness on the part of religious believers to assert,
often aggressively, their right to the free expression
of their beliefs.
If we are to defend religion as a key component
of human flourishing and well-being—in other
words, as a public good—it will be helpful, at this
point, to come to some understanding of what we
mean by “religion”. It’s a vague and elusive term,
but the Australian Human Rights Commission
has offered the following very workable definition:
Religion can be taken to refer to an organised
form of maintaining, promoting, celebrating
and applying the consequences of engagement
with what is taken to be ultimately defining,
environing, totally beyond, totally other,
and yet profoundly encountered within life.
These activities are usually done by or in
association with a group, an organisation and/
or community.
However, religion can also be said to have its
roots in the awareness of a supreme being. Religion,
then, can be characterised by a belief in supernatural, transcendent agents and powers that makes
demands of its adherents by imposing a standard of
moral behaviour which sets criteria for conduct. It
is precisely because religion, as understood in this
way, helps to give shape to the way we live our lives
and pursue values and meaning that we can describe
religion as a basic human good. As the natural law
theorist Robert George remarked in his recent book
Conscience and Its Enemies:
The existential raising of religious questions …
are all parts of the human good of religion—a
good whose pursuit is an indispensable feature of
the comprehensive flourishing of a human being.
In other words, religion is one of the many ingredients necessary for a good, fulfilling and meaningful life. Robert George goes on to argue that if we
accept this understanding of religion, then respect
for a person’s well-being:
demands respect for his or her flourishing as a
seeker of religious truth and as a man or woman
who lives in line with his or her best judgement
of what is true in spiritual matters. And that,
in turn, requires respect for his or her liberty
in the religious quest—the quest to understand
religious truth and order one’s life in line with it.
Religious liberty is central to human flourishing
because unlike politics or culture, religion alone is
ultimately concerned with the search for the truth
concerning the divine (including whether or not
God exists) and the meaning of that truth for human
action and choice. It is fair to say that the assertive
religiosity I referred to earlier, often dogmatic and
uncompromising in its nature though it can be, does
contribute to the hostile environment in which religious believers today try to live out their faith. At
the same time, in the West, advocates of secularism
are hostile to the public manifestation of religion
because they believe that religion and secularism are
irreconcilable opponents.
The term “secular” can bear many meanings
but essentially describes a political outlook which
is neutral as to the existence or even relevance of a
37
religious dimension in public affairs, but recognises
the importance of religion to citizens. However,
a more aggressive form of secularism is hostile to
any manifestation or expression of religious belief
in the public sphere. As Rowan Williams put it
in a lecture delivered at the Pontifical Academy
of Social Sciences in Rome in 2006, this form of
hostile secularism “assumes that the public expression of specific convictions is automatically offensive
to people of other (or no) conviction”. It’s not hard
to find examples of this popular misconception of
secularism here in Australia. The Secular Party of
Australia, for instance, says this on the home page
of its website:
As 21st century citizens, we want to challenge
the power and privilege of religious institutions
in Australia. As secular humanists, we want
an end to religious interference in education,
health, civil liberties and taxation. As champions
of human rights, we want women, minorities
and the LGBTI community to be free of
discrimination and the dictates of archaic
superstition.
Interference, superstition, discrimination—these
are just a few of the charges commonly levelled
at religious believers today. And they are charges
coloured by an aggressive hostility to religion that
seeks to establish unbelief as the norm for our society. And they go to show that the issue of freedom
of religion is becoming increasingly pressing in our
society.
But this is not just an issue for members of religious communities. These threats to religious freedom raise concerns for all Australians, regardless
of whether or not they profess any religious belief
themselves, because they go to the heart of the relationship between truth, faith and freedom.
W
hat Senator Brandis was attempting in his
lecture was to remind us that it is a mistake to hold that human rights and the liberal
premises that underlie them are a product of the
modern world alone. “The governing ethical principle which underlies our modern understanding of
human rights,” he said, “that is, the moral equality of every human person and his or her right to
liberty which flows from that, has its origins in the
gospels.” The Attorney-General cited an important
new book by the political and intellectual historian
Larry Siedentop called Inventing the Individual: The
Origins of Western Liberalism, in which Siedentop
argues that liberal thought is the offspring not of
the Enlightenment but of Christianity.
The kernel of Siedentop’s argument is that the
38
ancient, pre-Christian world had at its heart the
assumption of natural inequality. The golden thread
linking the Western liberal principles of truth, faith
and freedom is the principle of individual moral
agency and the assumption of the inherent equality
of all human beings. Siedentop argues that this
thread can be traced right back to the Gospels, to
the writings of St Paul and his exposition of the
“The Christ” to describe the presence of God in
the world, and ultimately to the teachings of Jesus
himself which proclaim the supreme moral fact
about humans: we are all created in the image of
God.
As Siedentop puts it:
Delving below all social divisions of labour,
Paul finds, beneath the conventional terms that
confer status and describe roles, a shared reality.
That reality is the human capacity to think and
choose, to will. That reality is our potential for
understanding ourselves as autonomous agents,
as truly the children of God.
The genius of Christianity is that by investing every individual with the God-given capacity
for individual moral agency, human beings are no
longer to be defined by social location or status.
Rather, life “in Christ” creates what Siedentop calls
“a rightful domain for individual conscience and
choice”. In the course of the Middle Ages canon
lawyers and philosophers began to work out the elements of rights which needed to protect the notion
of individual identity and agency.
In this way Siedentop builds his compelling
argument that the foundation of modern Europe lay
“in the long, difficult process of converting a moral
claim [about the individual] into a social status [concerning individual agency and with rights to protect
the free exercise of that identity]”. This conversion
was made possible by the development of the notion
of the equality of souls, from which a commitment
to individual liberty sprang. “Combining the two
values gave rise to the principle which more than
any other has defined modern liberal thinking, the
principle of ‘equal liberty’.”
While never side-stepping the church’s shortcomings in upholding the ideal of individual liberty and freedom of conscience, Siedentop makes
the bold and, I think, truthful claim that because
of its central egalitarian moral insight about individual liberty, Christianity played such a decisive
part in the development of the individual and the
concept of individual liberty that it can be said to
have changed the ground of human identity.
This central insight is, in turn, the crux of “secularism”, in the more neutral sense to which I referred
at the outset: that is, the recognition of, and commitment to a sphere of conscience or belief in which
each individual is free to make his or her own decisions. In Siedentop’s words, “It rests on the firm
belief that to be human means being a rational and
moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for
one’s actions … It joins rights with duties to others.”
In this sense, secularism identifies the appropriate
ways in which authentic beliefs should be formed
and defended. The aggressive, hostile secularism
of our age has scrambled the proper relationship
between liberty and faith, and in doing so has also
distorted what should be a healthy relation between
secularism and religion.
institutional responses to the sexual abuse of children, as well as a marked lack of sympathy for some
points of view propounded by religious leaders on
issues such as human sexuality and voluntary euthanasia, have helped push religion to the margins of
public life.
Indeed, it is no longer widely considered
appropriate at all for religion to be practised in the
full glare of the social and cultural realm. For there,
expressions of religious conviction and belief might
jar with one another and conflict. Far better, many
people now say, for religion to be confined to the
private realm of the mind where it can be considered
almost a hobby or a taste preference with as little
capacity to cause offence as an enthusiasm for
t one time, the mark of the good citizen in astrology. And indeed, just as formal participation
the liberal state used to be the free and unself in religious institutions in Australia is declining,
conscious display of personal conviction about ideas so believers are under increasing pressure to
and beliefs and morals. That kind of open manifes- demonstrate that religious faith is a positive rather
tation of conviction has given way
than a negative feature of a liberal
to what can best be described as an
society.
ostentatious display of “open-mindethicist Oliver O’Donovan
he aggressive, hostile hasThe
edness” that attempts to appeal to
observed: “Civil societies are
the culturally fashionable values of secularism of our age necessarily tolerant to a degree, and
tolerance and diversity. This enthuintolerant to a degree; they punish
has scrambled the
siasm for managing diversity has
what they cannot afford to tolerproper relationship ate [and] tolerate what they cannot
its historical roots in the sincere
desire to eliminate discrimination
between liberty and afford to punish.” Efforts to redeon the grounds of race or ethnicthe boundary between the necfaith, and in doing fine
ity which gave rise to the Racial
essary power of the state to coerce
Discrimination Act, enacted by
so has also distorted and the right of religious freedom
the Whitlam government in 1975.
are frequently in the news.
what should be a
The Act was intended as a means
For example, when the High
healthy relation
of eradicating racism; however, its
Court recently struck down the
values have since set the tone for
between secularism National School Chaplaincy and
subsequent debates about equality,
Student Welfare program as
and religion.
social inclusion and tolerance.
unconstitutional, it did so because
Too often, this “tolerance” is
the program was not authorised
actually intolerant of traditional
by a specific head of power under
religious beliefs that are often ruled to be incom- the Constitution. However, the challenge was
patible with the values of the secular state. The motivated not by a concern to protect states’ rights
Australian scholar Samuel Gregg, who is based at but by secular objections to the open involvement of
the Acton Institute in the USA, has remarked:
religious groups in public schools. No surprises then
that when the High Court handed down its decision
Tolerance is no longer about creating the space
it was widely celebrated as a victory for secularism.
for us to express our views about the nature
Yet all citizens of a free society, whether or not
of good and evil and its implications for law
they are Christians and whether or not they are
and public morality, or to live our lives in
religious believers, should have a strong commitaccordance with our religious beliefs. Instead,
ment to upholding and defending religious libtolerance serves to banish the truth as the
erty. “Religious freedom doesn’t just concern our
reference point against which all of us must test
role as citizens in the public square,” says Samuel
our ideas and beliefs.
Gregg. “Religious liberty also concerns our freedom to choose in numerous non-political aspects of
Although it is a pressing matter, the issue of our lives, ranging from whether we attend church
religious freedom doesn’t seem to generate much on a given day of the week, to what we choose to
excitement these days. Controversy surrounding purchase.”
A
T
39
What this also makes clear is that in any
discussion of religious liberty, belief and practice
must be understood as being inseparable: freedom
to believe must surely be accompanied by the
freedom to speak, to associate, and to order one’s
life in accordance with one’s beliefs. The right to
religious liberty, therefore, is a fundamental right
that confers upon the citizens of the liberal state
the freedom to pursue their conception of the
good life. If one accepts that religion is about the
human pursuit of ultimate meaning and value, it is
not hard to see that the erosion of religious liberty
hinders the pursuit of a higher purpose that can
contribute significantly to deep human fulfilment
and satisfaction.
O
f course, this pursuit will not necessarily
be consensual. Those whose ways of life are
guided by the search for ultimate meaning and a
solemn obligation to live dutifully are highly likely
to clash with the values of the secular state—
whichever of the meanings we assign to the word
secular. And in any diverse, modern Western society, wrangling about questions of ultimate meaning among adherents of different religions is bound
to cause offence to someone.
So when we talk about religious freedom, what
we are essentially talking about is the extent to
which the state should permit both the free expression of religious belief and the attendant wrangling
about ultimate meaning and purpose. In the pithy
words of Australian philosopher Russell Blackford,
“Religious freedom is essentially a freedom from
state persecution, not a guarantee of a religion’s
ongoing credibility or its success in the contest of
rival ideas.” Blackford has got it about right in this
formulation, but the language he uses, which draws
upon the idea of the state and of the overcoming
of inequalities of social status, does make it sound
as though religious liberty is essentially a modern
notion, the creation, perhaps, of the era of intellectual development we call the Enlightenment. Yet
as I have argued, drawing upon the work of Larry
Siedentop, secularism and equality have their roots
not, as many suppose, in the Enlightenment, but
rather in Christianity itself.
Critics of Christianity, or rather of the
churches, remain unconvinced by this. Writing
in the Guardian recently, David Marr distilled his
scepticism about what he described as the “argument being pushed energetically by the conservative think tanks of the nation”:
40
That the churches are owed a great debt for the
liberty of the modern world. And the quid pro
quo being demanded is fresh respect for what
churches call religious liberty … But when the
churches talk about religious liberty in peril
these days they have only a couple of things on
their minds: the freedom of the faiths to define
marriage for everyone, and their freedom not to
have homosexuals on the payroll.
I admire David Marr but I don’t think he is correct about this. Whilst the churches certainly have
views about marriage, these views can be very different and do not coincide precisely. For instance,
opinions in the Anglican Church, to which I belong,
are divided, with people both opposed to and supportive of changes to the Marriage Act. Nor are
these views which the churches seek to impose on,
as Marr puts it, “everyone”.
Rather, the principle of religious liberty is being
urged to protect the churches from having a new,
secular meaning of marriage imposed upon them by
the state. As for the punishment of homosexuals, if
there is a threat to homosexual people in Australia
it is now far more likely to come from Islam than
from Christianity, although I think this is a point
David Marr has yet to develop. Religious liberty is
important because when religion operates in a world
of free choice, it will either flourish or fail. As such,
freedom of religion needs to be protected not just for
the benefit of religious believers but for the benefit
of every member of society.
However, if religion is to flourish in a world of
free choice, thereby allowing people to pursue lives
reflecting their authentic judgments about the truth
of spiritual matters, then an important challenge
confronts the secular liberal state. The challenge
is “to construct a constitutional regime that makes
room for religion without sacrificing the fundamental principles of liberal pluralism”.
Questions of religious value and fulfilment are
important. We must strive to ensure that religious
voices are neither silenced nor confined to the realm
of the mind. And we must be vigilant in holding the
state accountable for its responsibility to enshrine
and uphold the right to religious liberty as fundamental human right.
Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow in the Religion and
the Free Society program at the Centre for Independent
Studies. A footnoted version of this article appears on
Quadrant Online.
P hilip A y r es
The High Court’s
Ambassadors Abroad
Latham, Dixon and Stephen
S
ir Henry Wotton, a seventeenth-century
English diplomat, defined an ambassador
as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the
good of his country”. In explaining and defending
his country’s policies and advancing its interests, an
ambassador needs to be sociable and persuasive, as
well as an effective leader of his staff, which will
include an intelligence-gathering arm. He advocates for his country and advances arguments in its
defence—in that respect his role is comparable to
that of a barrister. He gathers evidence about what
he supposes to be the future policies and actions
of the host country, passing that information back
home, and in that respect he is like a solicitor. His
role is not at all analogous to that of a judge, who
weighs evidence from both sides of an argument
in the interests of fairness and justice. An international mediator is in an analogous position to that
of a judge, but an ambassador is supposed to be an
advocate for his country.
I’ll compare the effectiveness as ambassadors of
three High Court justices: Sir John Latham, Sir
Owen Dixon and, more briefly, Sir Ninian Stephen.
Dixon and Stephen also acted as international
mediators, and I’ll say something briefly about their
effectiveness in that role. I’m unconcerned here
whether or not it was proper for Latham and Dixon
to be given indefinite leave from the High Court
to serve as ambassadors. In looking at these men in
these roles, I will be quoting from shorthand transcripts and minutes of secret meetings, private diary
entries and other primary sources.
L
atham (who had been on the Australian
delegation at Versailles in 1919) and Dixon were
regarded as the top QCs at the Melbourne Bar in the
years immediately following the First World War.
Then, in 1922, Latham entered federal politics, was
appointed Attorney-General in the Stanley Bruce
Nationalist Party government, and from 1932 was
Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs
in Joe Lyons’s United Australia Party government,
as well as Deputy Prime Minister, before quitting
politics to accept the position of Chief Justice of the
High Court of Australia in 1935.
As Minister for External Affairs he led a diplomatic mission to China and Japan in 1934 and
arranged for the 1935 visit to Australia of the
Japanese Navy’s training flotilla, whose officers
included three Japanese Imperial princes, one of
them the elder brother of the Empress. Latham met
the Emperor of Japan, who made a personal gift to
him of two superb cloisonné vases, and he spoke to
large gatherings all over Japan, winning much good
will for Australia. For years he had been a connoisseur of Japanese culture—the rooms of his exquisite Victorian house in Flete Avenue, Malvern (still
there and newly restored), were filled with Japanese
art collected over decades. From 1935 he was founding President of the Japan–Australia Society. He
cultivated friendships with Japanese diplomats and
trade representatives in Melbourne and Sydney up
to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December
1941, and spoke some Japanese, though how much
and how fluently I cannot say. In any case he was
the ideal choice as the first Australian Minister to
Japan.
Appointed to the post on August 18, 1940, by
the first Menzies government, Latham met with
its Advisory War Council at its first meeting, on
October 29, 1940, just before leaving for Tokyo. The
minutes record Latham’s views. He said Japan was
anxious to be on the winning side in the war and
viewed Germany as the winner. Japan anticipated
the break-up of three empires, British, French and
Dutch, and wanted its share of the spoils in relation
to its so-called “Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity
Sphere”. There were many in Japan, he believed,
who had liberal and democratic leanings and were
friendly to Britain, but they had been submerged by
the extremists. There was a strong and general dislike of the United States.
41
The High Court’s Ambassadors Abroad
He thought some in Japan would wish to use his
appointment to drive a wedge between Australia
and Britain, and to gain benefits from Australia. On
the other hand he was determined not to appear to
be in the pocket of the British ambassador. He said
that in Japan Australia’s prestige was higher than
Britain’s, and that this would assist him in influencing the Japanese. He asked that the Australian
government let him know in advance of relevant
decisions on Japan and consult with him where necessary. He proposed to state the aim of Australian
policy towards Japan “as one of friendship on the
basis of mutual respect”. As the balance of trade was
in Japan’s favour, a bargaining point in that regard
was possible. His defence of the White Australia
policy would be based on economic arguments and
standard of living, not race. The Japanese would
understand, because they excluded Chinese and
Koreans from Japan.
Interestingly, he favoured ordering 500,000
pounds’ worth of aircraft from Japan, presumably
Mitsubishi twin-engined bombers and Zero fighters
(with ample spare parts in case of war, one assumes),
in order to put Japanese interests in opposition to
those of Germany. In my view this was a brilliant
idea, but it was not taken up by the Australian government. Latham thought Mr Kawai, the soon-toarrive Japanese ambassador to Australia, should be
warmly welcomed, as that would give us additional
credit in Tokyo. Latham was in command at this
meeting of the War Council. There were no demurrals to any of his suggestions and he obviously knew
what he was talking about.
How did he handle discussions with senior
Japanese, and what was the quality of the advice
he sent back to Canberra? In Tokyo on January
10, 1941, he called on Japanese Foreign Minister
Yosuke Matsuoka. Matsuoka had taken Japan out
of the League of Nations in 1933 rather than tolerate any more of the League’s criticisms of his country. Educated in the United States under the care of
American host parents, he became a Christian convert but maintained his attachment to Shinto, which
is not necessarily a contradiction. His diplomatic
career was stellar from the outset. He was on the
Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference
in 1919, where he may have met Latham, for
Latham’s admiration for Japan certainly went back
that far. Matsuoka spoke perfect English. He had
been instrumental in Japan’s joining the Tripartite
Pact with Italy and Germany in 1940, and believed
the United States wished to provoke Japan into war.
In Latham’s discussions with Matsuoka on
January 10 he was very frank. I’ll quote from his
secret report, based on the shorthand transcript
taken at the meeting:
42
Latham: I said that I noticed a great difference
between Japan in 1934 and in 1940. In 1934 I met
a bright, happy, smiling and friendly people.
The people were very different today. I was told
that many Japanese would be frightened today to
speak to me.
Matsuoka: Yes! That is so, but they will soon get
over it. A renaissance is taking place, and there
are always difficulties with a renaissance, and
one difficulty is feeling against foreigners.
Latham: Yes! But the reactions of Japanese
against foreigners appear to be so irregular
and sporadic. A week ago there was an antiAmerican meeting in Tokyo; in 1940 there
were anti-British meetings; in 1936 anti-Italian
meetings when Italy was attacking a coloured
race; and in 1934 anti-German meetings when
Hitler had proclaimed the superiority of the
Aryan race and had spoken in very disparaging
terms of Orientals.
Matsuoka: I do not believe in anti-Foreign
agitation. I repudiated it last year in a public
statement and I stopped the anti-British
agitation by speaking severely to the officers of
the Municipality of Tokyo.
Latham: Yes! I heard of your statement, and I
am glad to hear your views. I cannot conceal the
fact that Australian feeling towards Japan now
is much less friendly than it was in 1934. One
reason for this is to be found in statements made
in Japan with respect to a New Order in Asia,
and the occasional inclusion of Australia and
New Zealand in East Asia for this purpose.
Matsuoka: I assure you that in my view and in
the view of the Government, East Asia does not
include Australia or New Zealand. Japan has no
designs whatever upon either of these countries.
Latham: Our civilization is European. It is not
an Oriental civilization. Our own people will
determine the character of our civilization, and
are not prepared to have it determined for them
by any other power—even by Great Britain
herself, and much less by an Oriental power.
This discussion illustrates Latham’s forthrightness in representing Australia’s position. They went
on to discuss China. Matsuoka confided that he and
Prince Konoye were in a minority in the government—they both wished to treat China on the basis
of equality. Superficially this shows Matsuoka’s
frankness and the confidence he was reposing in
Latham, but was probably a deception. It was a
technique Latham seems not to have used—that is,
admitting to having a view different from one’s government. Latham asked “whether your Excellency
is aware of the extent to which Japan is not only
making herself unpopular but actually becoming give material support to that country. Presumably he
a subject of hatred in Asia?” He gave examples of meant military support. “It may be urged that such
the Japanese Army humiliating Chinese civilians action will bring about a Japanese attack on us,” he
in Shanghai, forcing them to bow before soldiers, went on:
for instance. Matsuoka agreed with him: “Such
but in my opinion it is more likely to make
Japanese actions are very wrong, but many of the
Japan pause, for despite the outcry in their press
private soldiers are very ignorant.” Latham retorted:
I do not believe they want war, especially as it
“But they have officers, and do not the officers conmeans American intervention, but seek rather to
trol them?” Yes, Matsuoka replied, but some of the
advance peaceably by slow stages, establishing
officers weren’t very good either. He was trying to
each position before they make the next move.
improve their standards of behaviour, and it was not
Compare with Hitler in Europe.
his policy to seek political or economic domination
over China. Latham replied that “if such a policy
He thought the United States would support
as this were published and really adopted, a very
different position would arise”. Whether Latham Australia if it moved to support Thailand, provided
actually believed in Matsuoka’s professed respect for Australia explained its position to the Americans
in advance. Latham’s cables, inciChina is doubtful. One can see in
dentally, were copied to Australia’s
the entire discussion the toughness
Latham brought to his role in Tokyo
e was as useful legation in Washington.
A key meeting between Latham
as well as his ability to interact with
Matsuoka at a personal and confi- an ambassador as we and Matsuoka took place at the
could have had in
latter’s private house on March 12,
dential level, drawing Matsuoka out
just prior to Matsuoka’s visit to
on contentious issues.
Japan in those dark 1941,
Berlin and Moscow for talks with
In Ma rch 194 1 Latham
pre-war days. He
Hitler and Stalin. In this meeting
addressed a meeting of welcome
organised by the Australia–Japan understood and liked Latham emphasised the determiand strength of Britain and
Society in Tokyo. Australia’s comthe Japanese people, nation
the Dominions in the war against
mitment to Britain’s side in its
war against Germany, he said,
and put Australia’s Germany and Italy. “I expressed to
him my belief that he would be subshould not be taken to imply that
position honestly
jected in Berlin to great pressure and
Australia was not an independent
and forcefully.
possibly to deceit to induce him to
nation, and our membership of the
agree to action which would not be
British Empire was entirely volunto the ultimate benefit of Japan and
tary; “There has not been a British
soldier on Australian soil for seventy years,” he might threaten the peace of the Pacific.” Latham
said—an implicit dig at Japan’s military occupation was referring to the possibility of a Japanese attack
of neighbouring lands. Australia’s commitment to on Singapore. Matsuoka replied that his only conthe British side in the European war, he stressed, cern was “for securing peace in the world”. Latham
had nothing to do with our policy in regard to Asia obviously disbelieved this.
Not many days later, in Berlin, German Foreign
and the Pacific, which was based on mutual respect
between Australia and Japan, and mutually ben- Minister von Ribbentrop urged Matsuoka to press
eficial trading relations. He thought we could also his government for an attack on Singapore. “Just
learn from each other culturally. “We seek to inter- go ahead and take it!” was effectively Ribbentrop’s
fere with nobody else. We are satisfied to live upon advice. Matsuoka replied that plans to invade
terms which will enable us all to live in our own and occupy Singapore were already in train. The
countries in accordance with our own ideas and ide- German minutes of the meeting report Matsuoka
telling Ribbentrop:
als upon the boundaries of this great ocean.”
This was pure idealism, of course. In reality,
his [Matsuoka’s] attitude toward the British
Latham was advising Canberra to draw a line in the
would appear to be friendly in words and acts.
sand in regard to any Japanese threat to Thailand.
However, Germany should not be deceived by
In a cablegram of February 4, 1941, he told Canberra
that. He assumed this attitude not only in order
that Japan’s negotiations with France over Indoto reassure the British, but also in order to fool
China, which it was soon to occupy (provoking
the pro-British and pro-American elements
American sanctions and embargoes), had secured it
in Japan just so long, until one day he would
a strong hold over that region, and our policy now
suddenly open the attack on Singapore.
should be to resist any incursions on Thailand and
H
43
On June 23, 1941, the day after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Latham advised Canberra
not to embargo exports of food items to Japan,
because Japan was obtaining supplies from elsewhere (the United States and Netherlands East
Indies), and prohibitions of exports on Australia’s
part would have no effect in Japan and only hurt
Australia. Also, since just twenty-four hours ago
Japan could no longer send supplies to Germany
through Siberia, so there was now no danger of
Australia indirectly supplying the enemy via exports
to Japan. This seems to me a reasonable and logical
position, though some might call it appeasement.
In September 1941 Latham went to Singapore
for discussions, fell ill, returned to Melbourne,
and was still in Melbourne when war broke out
between Japan and the United States. Judging from
the material I have seen (of which the above is a
small sample), he was as useful an ambassador as
we could have had in Japan in those dark pre-war
days. He understood and liked the Japanese people,
put Australia’s position honestly and forcefully, and
endeavoured to keep the relationship on as even a
keel as possible. In his advice back to Canberra he
could hardly advocate that Australia take directly
hostile actions against Japan on its own, with the
United States not yet a combatant and Britain otherwise engaged far away. Latham never minced
his words in Tokyo, and was a strong advocate for
Australia’s policies and interests in discussions with
Matsuoka and his successor Teijiro Toyoda.
W
hereas Latham’s host country had been a
potential enemy, Dixon’s was a wartime
ally. Dixon was appointed Minister to the United
States in April 1942, in place of R.G. Casey, who
had resigned. While on the High Court, Dixon
had been chairing key wartime boards such as
the Central Wool Committee, and accepted the
Washington post on the understanding he would
report directly to Prime Minister Curtin, not to
External Affairs Minister H.V. Evatt, whom he
disliked and distrusted. Evatt had sat on the High
Court with Dixon through much of the 1930s.
Although Dixon secured the supplies of aeroplanes and other materiel his government required
from the United States, he did not (unlike Evatt)
feel confident in endorsing his government’s hostility to the “beat Hitler first” policy adopted by
Churchill and Roosevelt—a correct policy in
Dixon’s private view and the view of most historians. His judicial mind would not allow him to put
forcefully a position he did not consider balanced
or persuasive. His closest friend in Washington was
Felix Frankfurter, a judge on the Supreme Court
with close ties to the President, and it was partly
44
this connection that pulled Dixon into the counsels
of the White House so that he became privately of
their view on many matters. After all, they were
devoting vast resources to Australia and the SouthWest Pacific.
In Washington, Dixon sat on the Pacific War
Council, chaired by Roosevelt, but his developing
friendship with Frankfurter brought him much
closer to the White House than that. He met
frequently with Roosevelt at the White House,
including in his bedroom, where the polio-afflicted
President often worked. Dixon also developed
highly confidential relations with Army Chief of
Staff General George C. Marshall, Chief of Naval
Operations Admiral Ernest J. King, Secretary of
War Henry L. Stimson, and senior people at the
State Department including Dean Acheson, who
became a close friend. I have dealt extensively with
Dixon’s time in Washington in my Dixon biography and in an article for Quadrant in April 2003
titled “Australia’s War in American Eyes”, so I will
concentrate here on defining Dixon’s diplomatic
strengths and limitations, and also illustrate some
of his personal connections.
His ability to generate the respect that facilitates
confidential relationships was based on his powers
of conversation and high intelligence and culture,
appreciated in a Washington that was still largely
the preserve of a Brahmin class. Dixon’s relations
with the key military men were good too, because
he shared their factual, empirical approach to
things (something that had long been evident in his
legal judgments). On the other hand he was compromised in American eyes by what they rightly
saw as incomprehensible strikes and go-slows on
the Australian waterfront, and by the shamefully
limited role of the AMF or Australian conscript
militia, which was constitutionally restricted to
fighting on Australian territory, in embarrassing
contrast to American conscripts who were being
sent thousands of miles from home to defend
Australia.
As I’ve shown in my Dixon biography, the
Americans had become very annoyed with Evatt’s
complaints about the “beat Hitler first” policy
agreed in January 1942 between Churchill and
Roosevelt that gave priority to the European war,
but the Americans came to see Dixon as his own
man, and they felt free to confide in him their
criticisms of the Australian government. Confide is
perhaps not quite the right word, because possibly
they hoped he would pass their “confidences” on to
Prime Minister Curtin.
Here’s an example. On July 3, 1942, Dixon met
at the Pentagon with General Marshall, a generous
and straightforward man with no political axe to
grind. The meeting was devastating. Dixon began which was true. It was a characteristic Dixon shared
by saying he had not worried Marshall because he with other diplomats there, including, for examknew that the general had been preoccupied with ple, Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov. I mention
the course of events, but that it was desirable that the Soviets because they were the third great ally.
the Chiefs of Staff “give some explanations” to the Litvinov had been Stalin’s Foreign Minister and the
Australian government “and keep it advised of strongest advocate in Europe for collective security
what was decided”. Marshall listened politely and against Hitler, but Stalin had feared that, given the
then extracted from Dixon a solemn promise not weakness of Britain and France on the issue, and
to tell his government what he was about to reveal. the ardour of Litvinov (a Jew), the policy would
He set out the history of the naval battles of the land him in a war with Germany, so Litvinov had
Coral Sea and Midway, saying that at one stage been replaced by the non-Jewish Molotov and relthe Australian government had nearly destroyed egated to Washington. On one of Litvinov’s private
Australia because they had said publicly that the visits with Dixon he let his guard fall. “We talked
Japanese forces had congregated in the Marshall alone of the situation, about which he is depressed,”
Islands, “a thing known only
Dixon recorded. Litvinov obvithrough breaking the Jap cypher
ously thought Germany would win
as the Japs must have been aware”.
n one of Litvinov’s the war (this was July 1942). They
Repeatedly the Australian governalone on other occasions too.
private visits with talked
ment had broken necessary secrecy
Dixon asked him about Stalin’s
and Marshall was very frightened Dixon he let his guard purge of the Red Army’s general
of them, knowing he could not tell fall. “We talked alone staff, which Litvinov explained as
them anything with safety. There
the elimination of the fifth column
was a great scarcity of aircraft for of the situation, about before war began. Their discusAmerican purposes and it was which he is depressed,” sions were frank, as were Dixon’s
impossible to imperil the United
discussions with the other allies in
Dixon recorded.
States for Australia, a country “to
Washington. He also got on well
Litvinov obviously with Litvinov’s successor, Andrei
which much had been devoted”.
There was no answer to that, and
Gromyko, who talked to Dixon
thought Germany
Dixon’s diary records none.
quite openly about the high morale
would win the war. of the German troops, though he
Dixon’s First Secretary at the
legation, Alan Watt, was critical of
believed, especially since the tank
Dixon, confiding to a friend that in
battles in the Kursk salient, that
his view, though Dixon was “a man of outstand- the Germans would be defeated—they were now
ing character and great ability”, “a very great man preparing to abandon Kiev, he said. This was in late
whom Australia might well be proud of having 1943.
produced”, in Washington he was “not only out of
In Dixon’s private discussions with Roosevelt
place, but possibly doing Australia unintentionally at the White House the President was frank in
considerable disservice”. “He is extremely witty,” he his criticisms of Australia’s contribution to the
went on, “but his humour induces admiration rather war. For instance, he queried the discipline of
than laughter. Irony makes few friends, least of all Australian troops and their combat effectiveness in
in the United States of America.” In his memoirs, New Guinea, but the harshest words came from
Watt later moderated some of these criticisms to Roosevelt’s closest assistant, Harry Hopkins. I’ll
the point of self-contradiction, saying, for instance, give an example. Hopkins invited Dixon to lunch
that Dixon’s laughter “was infectious”. On the other with him at the White House on April 7, 1943, on
hand Dean Acheson’s assessment of Dixon’s time the eve of a visit by Evatt. The patronising tone of
in Washington was positive: “Second only to you,” this private meeting shows the degree to which
he told Sir Oliver Franks, a senior British diplomat the Americans felt free to lecture Dixon, even on
of the 1940s, “he [was] pre-eminent in inspiring his diplomatic role in the United States. Hopkins
complete trust and confidence in us in his disin- pointed out that it was easy to exaggerate the
terestedness, wisdom and integrity.” The realistic importance of Australian expressions of dissent
view, of course, is that an ambassador is not paid from Allied plans, and Curtin’s messages of
to be disinterested or full of integrity, but exclu- criticism and incessant requests for “more, please”.
sively attached to the views of his government, and “They irritated the President, who no longer (as
a good manipulator. In that important sense Dixon formerly) took trouble in answering them himself
was ill-fitted for the ambassadorial role.
but flipped them over to someone else.” Dixon’s
Alan Watt thought Dixon inherently pessimistic, main function, Hopkins thought, was to influence
O
45
American opinion of Australia, and to influence
too the important post-war plans that were already
taking shape. Evatt “made Marshall mad”, Hopkins
said, and “also King”. The President “too might be
impatient”, he added, but “otherwise the [Evatt]
visit did not matter”. The war strategy had been
settled.
Hopkins’s conversation here clearly reveals the
attitude of Roosevelt, and one should add Marshall
and King, towards Prime Minister Curtin—essentially, “When will he take a wider view of Allied
strategy?” Dixon recorded nothing said by himself
in reply. By this stage the battle for Guadalcanal in
the Solomons (as close to Brisbane as Port Moresby
was) had been won by United States marines at
the staggering cost of 1700 dead and almost 5000
wounded. That said it all.
One might ask, had Dixon become the trusted,
sympathetic confidant of people with whom he
should have been struggling? Had he been “captured”? Some would say, “Yes.” However, one could
look at it this way: President Roosevelt, General
Marshall, Harry Hopkins and others—none of
them had anything to gain by giving Dixon the
confidential information they reposed in him.
He could do nothing for them, and nothing they
could say would broaden the attitudes of Curtin
and Evatt, which clearly did not matter much anyway—that was the bottom line. They were taking
the trouble to brief someone they liked and trusted
so that there would be no misunderstandings.
The same applied when Marshall saw Dixon
on April 8, 1943, and told him secrets no one in
Washington would ever have told Evatt:
To Pentagon to see Gen. Marshall who sd he
trusted me & wd tell me what I was not to say
to a living person. Told me of strategy agst
Japs. Thro Burmah, use of Chinese troops &
training. Intention to take Clark I. Present
operations in Aleutians.
Why did the general confide in Dixon? Because
this man, later Secretary of State, after whom the
post-war Marshall Plan would be named, considered Dixon “the most perceptive and understanding
of the representatives in the war”, as he later told
David Bowes-Lyon. At a time when its government
was not held in great esteem in Washington, one
could argue that Australia was fortunate in having a man there generating sympathy for his brief
through the respect and esteem in which he was
held. Curtin knew it or he would have had him
replaced. A more aggressive Australian minister
(Evatt, say) might possibly have gained as much in
aeroplanes and other war materiel for Australia, but
46
at the expense of goodwill.
In 1950, as United Nations mediator between
India and Pakistan following their first war over
Kashmir, Dixon strove to produce a solution
that could be endorsed by both sides. He spent
four months travelling to every remote corner of
Kashmir and conducting his own shuttle diplomacy
between Karachi and New Delhi (he “invented”
shuttle diplomacy), and finally produced a peace
plan that both sides still consider the closest to
satisfactory of any yet proposed for that seemingly
intractable issue. Nehru, however, had an election coming up and backed out at the last moment
because the compromises required might have cost
him victory.
In summary, Dixon’s diplomatic mind might
seem more judicious and impartial than Latham’s,
less advocatorial, but then the situations of an
Australian diplomat in 1941 Japan and in wartime
Washington were utterly different. Latham had the
advantage with his political bent and experience in
foreign affairs. His judicial experience seems irrelevant to his tough performance as an ambassador,
whereas Dixon’s highly analytical and judicial mind
is pertinent to his conduct in Washington, where
he weighed things up for himself, seeing everything within a wider perspective than he was being
paid to do.
O
ur third subject, Sir Ninian Stephen, was
also appointed as an ambassador, but an
“Ambassador for the Environment”. “What is that?”
you might well ask. Prime Minister Hawke gave
him this job at the end of Stephen’s period as governor-general. He was expected to put Australia’s
position on environmental issues at relevant world
forums. Frankly, the limited achievements of those
meetings have fallen away with time. Stephen
made a lot of speeches, mostly around what he was
briefed to say. He conducted one or two successful
negotiations, for instance negotiations in Moscow
that helped to bring the Soviet government on-side.
On the whole, however, compared to the work of
Latham in Tokyo and Dixon in Washington, it was
light-weight. Stephen was an eminent front-man
for Australia’s environmental push on the world
stage.
One wonders whether someone who has once
been governor-general should go on to undertake
such lesser activities. Stephen’s own attitude to the
job is illustrated by his reaction when, in the leadup to its culmination, the much-touted Rio Earth
Conference, he was approached to chair the second phase of the Northern Ireland peace talks. He
accepted at once, dropped the environment position, and someone else filled in for him at Rio.
More impressive was some of the international
mediation work Stephen undertook through the
1990s and early 2000s, examined in detail in my
Stephen biography. His chairing of the Northern
Ireland peace talks in 1992 brought all the parties
around a negotiating table for the first time. He
saw his role as a facilitator rather than a proposer
of solutions, but after several months those talks
came to nothing. Stephen has been criticised by
Lord Mayhew for not being sufficiently pro-active
in the role, not offering possible ways around political deadlocks, but it is probably fair to say that the
time was not then ripe for any substantive progress
towards peace. Ian Paisley told me he thought
Stephen deserved a lot of credit for starting a process that later built upon the work he did in London,
Belfast and Dublin.
Stephen’s 1994 mediation between the government and opposition in Bangladesh, on behalf of
the Commonwealth Secretary-General, failed to
provide a solution that the opposition was prepared
to accept, though the government was amenable.
Stephen brought his legal expertise to bear on the
inter-party conflict that was threatening to provoke
a coup d’état, and devised a range of possible compromises each based on the Bangladeshi constitution, which he had mastered to the last detail. As
with Dixon and Kashmir, this was probably a “mission impossible”.
His work for the United Nations in 1998-99,
devising a modus operandi for war crimes trials
for leading Khmer Rouge figures, produced, after
negotiations in Phnom Penh, a plan that was subsequently modified into something the Cambodian
government could accept. His work on behalf of
the ILO in Burma in 2001 and again in 2005, investigating claims of forced labour in remote regions
of the country, produced carefully-documented
reports but came to nothing because of the limited co-operation of the military authorities in
Rangoon. Stephen’s impressive work on the Hague
War Crimes Tribunal is outside the scope of this
paper.
It’s remarkable that he should have undertaken
these international mediatory roles in his seventies and early eighties, for they demanded physical stamina as well as sustained and concentrated
thought. Although the results were less than had
been hoped for, he was fitted for the roles, for he
brought to these tasks his expertise in constitutional and international law, and his deep concern
for justice.
S
ir Owen Dixon observed to Menzies that while
it is possible to make a decent politician out of
a lawyer, the process is irreversible. I wonder what
we should conclude about moving back and forth
between the bench and the embassy? Putting aside
Wotton’s dictum about lying for your country, can
a mind that has thrived in the salon of diplomacy
ever happily return to the straitjacket of the law?
Or is diplomacy just like a summer swim for a master of the law? In both these elevated worlds the
players must watch their words, but which is the
greater game?
This is the 2014 High Court Public Lecture, delivered
by Philip Ayres in Courtroom 1, High Court of
Australia, on September 10. A footnoted version
appears on Quadrant Online.
SUMMER SCHOOL HOBART
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From Plato to Postmodernism | Climate and Climate Change
Medieval Chivalry | Italian Opera
Information and bookings visit jane.edu.au/summer-school
47
M erv y n F. B endle
Charles Bean and the Origins
of the Anzac Legend
W
hat if the fates conspired to draw a new
nation, mortified by its convict origins
and unsure of its status in the world, into
the most cataclysmic war the world had ever seen,
calling forth vast numbers of its young men, eager,
bold and brave, to have them travel halfway across
the world, to be thrown into one of the greatest military gambles in history at Gallipoli, only to have
it fail, at colossal cost; and then to demand of the
survivors and even more young volunteers that they
venture on to France and Belgium, and to engage
there in even more battles of previously unimaginable carnage, leaving tens of thousands dead and
maimed, sharing a great victory, but scarring a generation and searing the soul of a nation; and what if
amongst it all there was a man with the right mix
of skills and knowledge, the energy, tenacity and
courage, officially commissioned to record it all, to
spend every waking hour in every battle zone he
could access, talking to every soldier he could, analysing and reporting on every battle, every blunder
and every triumph of the young nation’s army as it
plunged into and through the Great War?
It seems that certain people appear in history
destined to accomplish one great task, and that
family, circumstances and events conspire to equip
them for their mission. Nobody better exemplifies
this phenomenon than Charles Edwin Woodrow
Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent in the
Great War, the editor of the twelve-volume Official
History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (of which
he himself wrote Volumes I to VI), the driving force
behind the establishment of the Australian War
Memorial, and the man who first formulated and
gave shape to the Anzac legend.
Bean’s was a prodigious achievement that easily
surpassed the efforts of any other war correspondent or military historian of the war. Not only did
he publish his first volume before any other official
historian in 1921, he achieved an unsurpassed precision. As Denis Winter points out in Making the
Legend: The War Writings of C.E.W. Bean (1992), to
48
match the level of detail achieved by Bean in his
six volumes of the History relative to the number
of troops involved, the British would have had to
produce eighty-four volumes, but managed only sixteen. Moreover, Bean’s approach to his task was pioneering. As Winter recounts, he shunned the usual
official approach, based on the Prussian account of
its 1870 war with France, which produced a “narrative shorn of critical comment, devoid of controversy
and describing accounts from the single viewpoint
of the high command”. Bean’s perspective was quite
different: “His narrative switched from platoon
commanders in battle to corps headquarters in the
rear and all points between, with the mind of the
high command only one of several” perspectives
mobilised to reveal the full story. Moreover, he was
prepared to describe failed military actions in detail
and to offer strong criticism of military commanders. And above all, “Bean filled his pages with soldiers; some 6550 of them and each with a footnoted
biographical sketch,” as Winter notes. This was a
Herculean achievement in itself, which immortalised in the Official History the efforts of the mass of
the soldiers who fought for Australia in a manner
that also has no parallel elsewhere.
But Bean offered a vision also, declaring that the
main theme of the Official History “may be stated as
the answer to a question”:
How did this nation, bred in complete peace,
largely undisciplined except for a strongly British
tradition and the self-discipline necessary for
men who grapple with nature … react to what
still has to be recognized as the supreme test for
fitness to exist?
His answer was unambiguous. As he explained
in his tract In Your Hands, Australians (1918): “the big
thing in the war for Australia was the discovery of
the character of Australians. It was character which
rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held on there.”
Bean had come to the view that “the consciousness
Charles Bean and the Origins of the Anzac Legend
of Australian nationhood was born” on April 25,
1915, and this belief informed his writings, his vision
of Australia, and how the nation should honour the
sacrifice of the Anzacs.
Bean’s early volumes appeared at a critical time in
the writing of Australian history, during the nationalist first phase in the production of military histories of the war that Jay Winter and Antoine Prost
identify in The Great War in History (2005). Such
works were concerned with “the stuff of national
character”, and Bean’s work in particular “exemplified this approach to military history [as] the
chronicle of the birth of [a] nation”. The perspective Bean offered on the Gallipoli campaign transformed “a complete defeat [into a] noble sacrifice”,
worthy of a new country, making it “the backdrop
to what was essentially a national foundation myth”,
and it proved extraordinarily successful in dealing
with the social trauma of the post-war years. As
Geoffrey Serle observes in From Deserts the Prophets
Come (1973), Bean’s work was “unquestionably the
outstanding historiographical achievement of the
interwar period”, making “a fascinating contribution to defining Australian identity”.
It is therefore an indictment of the study of
Australian history in the iron grip of the Left that
Bean’s unparalleled contribution was marginalised for much of the past century. Nowhere is this
attitude better illustrated than in Joan Beaumont’s
Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013).
Beaumont provides some overdue acknowledgment
of Bean’s importance but then betrays the shallowness of this gesture by making an egregious error:
stating that Bean was born in England and was
English, when in fact he was born in Bathurst and
was Australian, a fact that is fundamental to his
formulation of the Anzac legend. Throughout her
book Beaumont pontificates on the Anzac “legend”,
“myth” and “charter”, in this qualified fashion, as
if it is a phantom, or something baseless, contrived
or discredited, and yet she is ignorant of this most
crucial fact about its principal progenitor, whose
singular sense of the soul of his country illuminated
that legend.
G
iven this situation, Ross Coulthart’s new
study, Charles Bean (HarperCollins, 2014),
must be welcomed as a worthy companion to
Dudley McCarthy’s stirring biography, Gallipoli to
the Somme: The Story of C.E.W. Bean (1983), which
has long been out of print. Coulthart’s book is very
accessible although it lacks the poetic grandeur that
McCarthy frequently achieves. Instead, Coulthart,
as a war correspondent himself, frames his project in
terms of Phillip Knightley’s book The First Casualty:
The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker
(1975), interrogating Bean’s histories, diaries and
other writings to answer the question:
How accurate an account of the real war did
Bean give … and what were the stories he didn’t
tell? And how faithful to the reality of what he
actually witnessed is the legend he crafted about
the diggers?
It appears that Coulthart set out to write an
exposé but, as he recounts Bean’s exploits, he discloses instead that Bean fought tooth and nail to
provide the most detailed and accurate account of
the exploits of the AIF that was humanly possible.
Ultimately, as Coulthart concludes:
Bean was unable to peddle the falsehoods and
mawkish bunkum spouted by so many other
correspondents because, unlike most of his
journalistic contemporaries, he was almost always
there on the spot to witness the grim reality of
the blood and the mud. Bean was obsessed with
the simple truth, the fundamental journalistic
tenet that the facts should tell the story.
Coulthart also describes many occasions when
Bean was confronted with the classic war correspondent’s dilemma: whether a demoralising military setback should be revealed to the public in its
stark immediacy or whether there is a deeper purpose to be served through restraint. Generally, when
Bean followed the latter path in his dispatches he
recounted the relevant events in unrestrained detail
in the Official History.
It’s notable that Coulthart goes against the grain
of most academic discussions of Bean and the origins of the Anzac legend by recognising that it was
indeed “character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli
and held on there”:
What Charles Bean realised as he roamed the
hills of Gallipoli and the battlefields of the
Western Front was that he was witnessing the
emergence of a distinctive, proud and resilient
Australian national character.
Coulthart suggests that Bean was “cast from
obscurity onto the national stage” as the chronicler
of the war, and to some extent this is true. More
accurately, it might be said that: “Cometh the
hour, cometh the man”, because it’s very difficult to
imagine that anyone else could have emerged from
obscurity or anywhere else with the unique set of
qualities that Bean brought to the task, or that in
his absence the Anzac legend would have taken the
form it did.
49
C
entral to these qualities was Bean’s affection
A further assignment took him into the outfor and instinctual responsiveness to Australia back to explore the wool industry. Searching for
as a frontier society and the values of bush stoicism a theme that would capture the reader’s attenit embodied. He was born in Bathurst on November tion, Bean focused on the people of the industry,
18, 1879, and educated there at All Saints’ College, explaining in On the Wool Track that, while “the
where his father was headmaster, and at Clifton wool industry turns out wool and meat … and
College and Oxford University in Britain, after many other things … the most important things
the family moved there in 1889. Uncertain of his it turns out are men”, men who possessed a unique
future upon graduation, he returned to Australia set of characteristics that Bean would later locate at
and worked variously as a lawyer, teacher, journal- the core of the Anzac legend. The book became a
ist and social historian before a series of events saw best-seller, appealing not only to Australians in the
him become Australia’s official war correspond- cities who had little idea of the outback, but also
ent, and eventually editor of the Official History. In to Britons and Americans fascinated by the Great
addition, he edited the Anzac Book (1916), which South Land that had just become a nation. It was
collected stories, poems, illustrations and cartoons a grim land, as Bean discovered:
produced by soldiers in the trenches. This became
The grass had long since disappeared; the face
a best-seller, and remains in print. He also wrote
of the country was shifting red and grey sand,
Anzac to Amiens, a popular one-volume history of
blowing about wherever the wind carried it.
the war that first appeared in 1946, along with earThe fences were covered; dead sheep and fallen
lier works that contributed to the Anzac legend as
trunks had become sandhills. Millions of trees
it developed.
were killed; the birds were dropping dead.
These books included On the Wool Track (1910)
and The Dreadnought of the Darling (1911), in which
It was also an atavistic land where the distance
essential elements of the legend can be found, as
Bean explored the epic vastness of Australia while between domesticity and savagery was small. Left
on assignment for the Sydney Morning Herald. untended, docile stock quickly devolved to their
He’d become a journalist once he realised that his primitive origins, with the descendants of domestic pigs long before released into
true vocation was to write. Finally
the bush now looming as “fierce
resolved, he left the law, taught
active brutes [with jaws] gnashing
himself shorthand, and became a
ean realised,
till the foam flakes away … For the
junior reporter in 1908, struggling
like Conrad, that
tameness is easy to rub off, but the
to survive on a pittance before his
initiative and herculean capac- civilisation was a fine wildness is not.” And, of course,
ity for work propelled him up the veneer, beneath which the same danger of degeneration
existed always for the people of the
ladder.
there lay darkness, outback. Unsurprisingly, some men
One of his assignments involved
would wake in fright, their “nerves
an epic 1160-kilometre journey
even madness.
broken down under the conditions,
to Broken Hill to report on the
and they had to flee from the back
rival proposed railway routes to
the booming mining town; another saw him on country in fear for their sanity”. Writing shortly
the roof of Australia, covering the opening of the after Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness,
Kosciusko Hotel; while another saw him on a river- Bean realised, like Conrad, that civilisation was
boat steaming down the Darling River; and a fur- a fine veneer, beneath which there lay darkness,
ther epic journey followed the footsteps of Charles even madness. In such a harsh and unforgiving
Sturt from the upper reaches of the River Murray land men and women had to stand firm before
to its mouth, where he sat on a sandhill, meditat- adversity, work hard, make sacrifices, co-operate
ing on the vast catchment of the Murray-Darling and help each other as they struggled to survive
basin that brought the waters of half a continent together and build a life. It was an environment
that didn’t encourage hierarchy or servility, but
to the sea:
bred instead the stoicism, egalitarianism and mateSo this is the end … I can see them, the
ship that Bean was later to locate at the core of the
freshes from the Queensland hills, the snow of
Anzac spirit.
Kosciusko, the Macquarie marshes, the Darling
The book’s connection with the Anzac legend
lakes, the Anabranch, the Warrego … sitting
was recognised by H.M. Green in A History of
here I can see them all, within 25 yards of my
Australian Literature (1961), where he remarked that
left foot.
it well depicted “the outback that has created some
B
50
of the most vital of the types that went to make up
the Anzacs”:
The outback Australian’s self-confidence, his
independence, his readiness to “work a point”;
his quiet resourcefulness, and also his terrible
habit of leaving a thing when it is “near enough”;
all these attributes are illustrated by anecdotes,
often humorous, occasionally tragic, always
picturesque … The description of the country
itself is only less interesting than that of the
people it helps produce.
In these books and during the few years before
he set forth with the AIF to far distant Gallipoli,
Bean came to realise the place that the land would
long hold in the imagination of his nation. As he put
it in The Dreadnought of the Darling:
The Australian, one hundred to two hundred
years hence, will still live with the consciousness
that, if he only goes far enough back over the
hills and across the plains he comes in the end
to the mysterious half desert country where men
have to live the lives of strong men. And the
life of that mysterious country will affect the
Australian imagination much as the life of the
sea has affected that of the English.
As Coulthart acknowledges:
When Bean later wrote about the feats of the
Australian men who became the soldiers of
Gallipoli and the Western Front, he was heavily
influenced by the memories of his time in the
outback.
B
ut there was much more to these crucial memories than Bean’s journalistic expeditions in the
bush as an adult; he’d been born on the expanding
edge of Australian civilisation and spent his formative years there. His parents, Edwin and Lucy Bean,
were a determined, educated and idealistic young
couple whose example he never ceased to admire
and respect. They had moved to Bathurst to begin
their lives together, taking on the challenge of running a struggling college in the oldest inland town
in Australia, 203 kilometres west of Sydney at the
end of the first road to cross the Blue Mountains.
Bathurst was initially intended as the administrative centre for further agricultural development of
the region, but it was transformed into a boom town
by the discovery of gold in 1851. Later it became
a centre for coal-mining and manufacturing, and
also a transportation hub for coach and rail services,
and in the 1880s it had a population of some 8000
people, with the surrounding district supporting a
further 20,000.
Physically, it was a vast, harsh world, and
Charles’s early years were marked by a drought in
which sheep and kangaroos starved in their thousands beside the brackish water of rivers reduced to
a string of waterholes. As McCarthy recounts, men
materialised out of the haze, as if they were “walking through a great sheet of glassy water”, swagmen broken in spirit, “plodding on from nowhere
to nowhere, knowing nobody, expecting nothing,
nothing to hope for, eyes fixed on the ground ahead
… looking neither right to left”; along with shearers, riding or on foot, “making their way over the
endless plains”, searching for work and prepared to
shear a hundred sheep for 17/6.
As a boy, Charles enjoyed all the adventure and
mischief that life on the frontier offered, including
endless horse-riding with his brothers and mates,
prospecting for gold amongst the ruined diggings,
shafts and old mullock heaps, or swimming in the
Macquarie River under the threat of a hefty fine
for bathing there between “8 a.m. and 4 p.m. in
view of the public”—a fine Charles’s grandfather
in Tasmania would happily have paid, as he had
offered the boy ten shillings if he could swim all the
way across the river.
Charles saw a great deal of the country as he
accompanied his father on visits to families on the
land interested in sending their sons to All Saints’.
And he began his lifetime habit of keeping a journal
and writing detailed letters about his experiences,
illustrated with detailed sketches and even paintings
of things he had seen, a skill that greatly enhanced
his later work on the war. Years later, Charles himself described his memories of this time:
a vast low-lying continent … the old house on
the hill with its red gables, iron roof and long
curved avenue of pines; a picture of a colliery
on the mountains, caught long ago haphazard
from the windows of a passing train—the tall
chimneys smoking angrily, a solitary wheel
turning over the pit’s mouth, and the steep sides
of the Blue Mountains frowning at you from
above …
Images and memories tumbled over each other
in these recollections as Bean recalled the rich and
indelible experiences of his childhood on the frontier, experiences that shaped his sense of the Anzac
spirit as it manifested itself at Gallipoli and the
Western Front. As McCarthy observes:
Of such as all of these, and many thousands
more like them, were the sounds and sights, the
51
observes, Tasmania was “a crucible in which the
extraordinarily diverse elements being poured
into it were being transformed”, and opportunities
existed for “new chums” prepared to make a go of
it. Within a decade he was married with a family,
and had become a successful educator. Alongside
ean’s attitude towards the British Empire and Lucy, as McCarthy recounts, Edwin pursued at All
his sense of its place in history were other form- Saints’ “that dream of … creating a school which
ative influences on his work. Predictably, Coulthart would become a centre in this new land for the
decries Bean’s “blind jingoism for imperial Britain”, propagation of the ideas and ideals which he most
his “tub-thumping … imperialist prophecy”, and his cherished”, and which had been nurtured at Oxford
“pro-British prism”. He deprecates an era when “the only a decade before.
British Empire was still seen as mythically great” and
Charles’s young adult life paralleled that of his
colonial administrators were imbued with a sense of father to a remarkable degree. Like Edwin, at Oxford
responsibility for the care and advancement of other he took Greats, and honed his Greek and Latin,
races. He also feels that the sense of imperial duty studied Homer, Virgil and the Greek tragedians,
that Edwin and Charles Bean felt
wrestled with ancient and modmust have been “crushing”. There
ern philosophy, and explored the
is a considerable degree of anachhistory of the classical world from
hey were both
ronistic thinking here, as Coulthart
the first appearance of democracy
acknowledges. In fact, it appears exemplary products of in Greece to the rise of the Roman
that Edwin and Charles found
the empire, brought republic, the vicissitudes of the
the roles they came to play in the
empire, the birth of Christianity,
to England from
empire anything but burdensome,
and its triumph over the pagan
and indeed to have been inspiring.
far-flung dominions world. He studied The Histories by
They were both exemplary products
Herodotus and The History of the
to receive an
of the empire, brought to England
Peloponnesian War by Thucydides,
education that left which provided epic accounts of
from far-flung dominions to receive
an education that left them seeking them seeking to realise wars that determined the shape of
to realise its finest ideals in service to
world history. He meditated upon
its finest ideals in
the empire and its peoples. As Niall
the decline and fall of the Roman
Ferguson observed in Empire (2003)
empire
and reflected upon its meanservice to the empire
about India under the Victorians:
ing for the British Empire that he
and its peoples.
they wanted it “to be ruled by the
and his father wished so fervently
ultimate academic elite: impartial,
to serve.
incorruptible, [and] omniscient”.
Years later, Bean would travel
Edwin Bean had been born in India in 1851, and to the birthplace of Western civilisation, sailing
like most Anglo-Indian children he was sent to through the Aegean with a huge company of modEngland to complete his schooling, first at Clifton ern warriors, past Troy, and on to Gallipoli on the
College and then at Oxford where he showed him- other side of the Dardanelles, where once again the
self to be a diligent scholar. However, his academic fate of empires would be decided. And later still,
results were insufficient to gain admission to the elite as Bean produced his dispatches and his volumes
Indian Civil Service, which would have allowed him of the Official History, the sense would repeatedly
to return to the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British surface that he was bearing witness to the unfoldEmpire to serve his people there. Engulfed by ing of Australia’s Iliad, as her young soldiers passed
shame and disappointment, Edwin never returned through war and into history. It was a theme also
to India, accepting instead an appointment as a pri- found throughout poems, newspapers, popular writvate tutor in Tasmania—a place he could barely find ings and histories that addressed the war, including
in an atlas.
Gallipoli (2001) by Les Carlyon, who asks the reader
A classics scholar stymied at the very outset of to visualise the scene at the Dardanelles: “History’s
his career but still instilled with the highest ide- stadium is much as it was. You are seeing pretty
als of service, Edwin set sail in 1873 for the other much what Alexander the Great saw.”
side of the world, prepared to try his luck in a place
Unfortunately, Bean suffered several serious illinfamous for a convict past of dreadful cruelty but nesses towards the end of his time at Oxford and
where, nevertheless, the institutions and values of his results were insufficient to gain him a position
British civilisation had taken root. As McCarthy in the elite Indian or South African civil services.
people, the memories and the legends, which
would form such a potent mix in those years as
later to impel Charles Bean across many great
battlefields with his countrymen, simply that he
might tell the story of what they did.
B
T
52
As his situation came to echo that of his father he
reacted in a similar fashion. After spending time
as a private tutor in Tenerife, doing some teaching, and gaining admission to the Bar, he decided
he should head for Australia, arriving in Hobart in
1904, just in time for Christmas with his overjoyed
grandparents, who had last seen him as a child.
Like his father he set out to make a life for himself
in the Great South Land, and the final decade in
the personal formation of Australia’s greatest military historian began.
A
ccompanying Bean’s intuitive grasp of bush
stoicism, his awareness of Australia as a frontier
society within the British Empire, and his classical
education and deep sense of history, was his lifelong enthusiasm for military and naval affairs. This
was derived from his father, who was a student of
military history and served in the Volunteer Forces
after the family moved to Britain. With England as
a base, the family embarked upon many continental
journeys, visiting the sites of numerous famous battles including Waterloo. Bean later recalled with a
characteristic eye for detail the museum they visited
there, remembering all of the 355 exhibits listed in
the official guide, which he still possessed, along
with many others. He and his two brothers scoured
the countryside looking for souvenirs, picking up
bits of old harness that became “imagined relics”.
As McCarthy observes: “It is likely that in these
roamings the seeds were gathered from which the
Australian War Memorial would ultimately grow.”
Also important was Bean’s time at Clifton, which
he entered in 1894. It was rich in the British imperial tradition and two ex-students had major roles
in the Great War: Field Marshal Douglas Haig and
Field Marshal William Birdwood; while another
Old Cliftonian was Henry Newbolt, remembered
as the author of the poem “Vitaï Lampada”, set on
the school’s hallowed cricket ground, “The Close”,
where a match serves as a metaphor for honour and
valour in battle—“Play up! play up! and play the
game!” Many Old Cliftonians served in the Boer
War, including some of Bean’s friends who died. As
Coulthart remarks, “it is not difficult to understand
the crushing sense of imperial duty that both Bean
father and son felt as alumni of Clifton”.
In 1895, Charles witnessed the elaborate reenactments and celebrations surrounding the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gravelotte,
a pivotal engagement in the Franco-Prussian War.
Fascinated by the manoeuvres and displays, he
recorded the scene in an accomplished watercolour
of the parading German troops, while also writing out from memory the music to which they
marched. Charles had demonstrated this attention
to military detail in 1893 at Portsmouth, where he
carefully explored Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship
at the Battle of Trafalgar, and the ill-conceived
Hero, designed with a ram as her primary weapon,
along with guns of sufficient power to endanger the
ship itself whenever they were fired. As McCarthy
observes, the thirteen-year-old Charles cast “an
almost professional eye over every inch of the Hero”.
On one side of each page he made sketches of the
ships, with a key to their written description provided on the other. Thereafter, he recalled during
the Great War, “I used to know most of the types
in the navy on sight [and] I read pretty well every
book I could get hold of about the navy”. At school
the Navy and Army magazine was his chief interest,
along with the Times’s naval news and the annual
Navy Estimates.
Charles subsequently joined the School Engineer
Corps at Clifton, contemplating a military career.
Even after he took advantage of several scholarships
and went to Oxford in 1898 to do Greats, he considered switching to mathematics and science with a
view to a career as an army engineer, before settling
for service in the Oxford University Battalion of the
Oxfordshire Light Infantry. (In 1908 this became the
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire
Light Infantry—usually shortened to the “2nd Ox
and Bucks”—and in August 1914 it arrived on the
Western Front as part of the British Expeditionary
Force, subsequently taking part in the battles at
Mons, on the Marne, and at First Ypres. In five
months the unit of some 1000 men sustained 632
casualties. The toll was similar in its many subsequent battles, and by the end of the war only sixtysix soldiers remained from the original 2nd Ox and
Bucks. Charles would most likely have served with
this unit if he had remained in England.)
Unsurprisingly, Bean used his knowledge of
naval affairs to establish his credentials as a military writer in Australia in 1905 during the RussoJapanese War. After suffering a massive defeat on
land, the Russians sent the imperial fleet from the
Baltic on an epic 33,000-kilometre voyage around
the world to confront the Japanese navy. Bean was
one of the few commentators who realised that the
approaching battle would be the first great trial
of the modern type of battleship, writing in the
Herald that it would be a vital test of “the whole
genus of armoured ships”, upon which the security
of the British Empire and Australia depended. As it
transpired, the Battle of the Tsushima Straits (May
27–28, 1905) saw the annihilation of the Russian
fleet. It also vindicated the theory that the key to
victory in such battles was battleships with a preponderance of large, long-range guns, and effective
range-finders, rather than a mix of large, medium
53
and smaller guns, as had been the prevailing pol- been lobbying desperately to accompany the AIF
icy. Bean had predicted that it would likely be “the on its mission, and eventually, in a fiercely contested
most important sea-fight since the days of Nelson”, ballot, he narrowly defeated Keith Murdoch of the
and this assessment was echoed by experts in naval Melbourne Herald for the Australian Journalists’
warfare.
Association nomination as Australia’s official war
In October 1905 the British began the construc- correspondent. Undeterred, Murdoch contrived to
tion of HMS Dreadnought, which adhered to the be sent to Gallipoli and later covered much of the
new policy and provoked the fateful naval arms race war alongside Bean, intervening controversially
between Britain and Germany. Bean later covered with the British and Australian governments on
the celebrated visit of the American Navy’s “Great various strategic issues.
White Fleet” during its epic circumnavigation of the
And so it transpired on October 21, 1914, that
globe, travelling on the redoubtable HMS Powerful Bean was aboard HMAT Orvieto, the flagship of
to Auckland and publishing With the Flagship in the the AIF transport fleet, ready to depart for the
South (1909), illustrated with excellent drawings and Middle East. He was thirty-four; he knew Australia
watercolours. It drew upon extensive
and especially the bush, the people
discussions with naval officers and
who lived there, and their stoic
grimly acknowledged that war with
posture towards the challenges of
bove all, he
Germany “would be desperate”.
life; he was a product of the British
knew the desperate Empire at its zenith and he identiBetween 1910 and 1912 Bean was
hopes Australia
the Herald ’s London correspondfied strongly with its civilising mishe’d made himself familiar
ent and, as McCarthy observes,
sion;
had invested in the with modern
“it seemed that nothing that could
military matters and
young volunteers
possibly be of interest to the paper
the officers who’d shortly be leading
escaped his attention … and every
his country in war. Above all, he
about to depart
thing he wrote bore the marks
knew the desperate hopes Australia
and he possessed
of most careful investigation and
had invested in the young volunteers
special knowledge”. This was espeabout to depart and he possessed a
a fierce desire to
fierce
desire to stand witness to his
cially so with defence matters, on
stand witness
which he wrote regularly, ranging
country’s birth in battle.
to his country’s
from the Balkan wars to the conHistory had now brought him to
this
spot, and he gazed down from
struction of the core of Australia’s
birth in battle.
first naval f leet, the two cruisthe high decks at his beloved father
standing on the Melbourne docks
ers, HMAS Sydney and HMAS
Melbourne, and the battlecruiser, HMAS Australia. below. He’d said a sad farewell to Lucy earlier—like
He also published Flagships Three in 1913, in which innumerable other Australian mothers she couldn’t
he explored the history of seapower, from a Viking face the trip to the wharf to watch their sons disapship unearthed from beneath the Scandinavian pear over the horizon into a war that was already
sands, to the Powerful, with her singular contribu- known for its indiscriminate and mass carnage. It
tion in the Boer wars, and the Australia, the future was a moment of immense loneliness, as McCarthy
of his country’s role as a naval power in the Pacific. recounts, and also grim exhilaration, but after
Called back to Sydney to become the Herald ’s sen- a time Bean brought his emotions under control,
ior leader writer, from June 1914 he wrote a daily turned and went below to his cabin, preparing to
commentary on the European crisis as it intensified greet men with whom he’d share the inconceivable
and moved remorselessly towards the outbreak of experiences of the next four years. In their company
the Great War.
he was beginning an odyssey that would define his
life, enshrine their exploits, and shape Australia’s
hen, in September 1914, Bean had his career- national identity.
defining “big break”. Australia, along with
the other British Empire dominions, was invited Mervyn F. Bendle has written extensively on the First
to attach an official correspondent to its military World War in Quadrant, most recently “Anti-Anzac:
forces as they entered the war. Bean had already The Authorised Biography” in the October issue.
A
T
54
Blessed and Certain
The most profound and moving experience of my life
was spending time with the body of my father
who had ascended already and was lying unconcerned
in a small room in a brick house in a small town midway
between heaven and earth
lots of parking and good coffee
he lay there a little pale but more relaxed than I had seen him
walls so thick they might have been expecting violent resurrection
uncivil unrest as the dead discover they are dead
the living try to make amends and offer up excuses and small lies
my father spoke even though his mouth was still
he held my shaking hands and said he had been thinking
deeply about this for a long long time
said he was blessed and quite certain
leaving that small room I burst into song I felt I’d seen
the truth of death and was walking forwards to the rest of my life
and all around me spring was falling.
Christine Paice
Gifts
after Czeslaw Milosz
A day of pilgrimage.
The rain’s held at bay and I’ve entered sacred spaces.
Vast candles of blossom lit up the chestnut tree.
It’s all the light I need.
The rosary walk hums with prayers.
Whatever the saint suffered, he’s now at peace.
I’ve walked through yet another day of my life.
I know my body is mortal and I can’t live here forever.
As I stand, the wide red mouth of the shrine calls to me.
A day so wonderful.
The geese gather under my bench. I sit and write.
Two mallards land in formation, slicing the water.
A heron stands on one leg on the island.
I have been given every blessing God has to give.
I have been spared so much suffering.
There’ll be difficulties to come.
In my body, there’s a power beyond my body.
As I stand, the blackbird’s melody falls from the tall tree.
Victoria Field
55
P hilippa M a rt y r
New Myths About Australia’s
Dangerous Drinking
I
n May 2014, a report was released called Alcohol’s
Burden of Disease in Australia. According to the
infographics helpfully released with the report,
fifteen people a day die in Australia from alcoholrelated causes, and a further 430 are hospitalised.
The immediate media response was satisfyingly
gloomy. Headlines included: “Our boozy culture is
killing us” (Age), “15 Australians die each day from
alcohol-related illnesses” (ABC Online), “Alcohol is
killing 15 Australians a day and experts want tough
new warning labels” (news.com.au) and “Australia’s
daily alcohol toll: 15 deaths and 430 hospitalisations” (Conversation). Media sources were especially
interested in reporting that Australia’s death rate
from alcohol-related disease had apparently risen by
around 60 per cent in the last decade.
But is any of this true? Are we a nation of
dangerous drinkers? Are we draining our health
system’s limited resources and mortgaging our
country’s future to the dubious joys of alcoholic
over-indulgence?
A
lcohol’s Burden of Disease in Australia is a solid
document of around 120 pages. It is well laid
out and clearly presented. Its arguments are mostly
consistent, and it is mostly honest about its limitations. However, a careful reading of the whole
document—rather than relying on infographics
and summaries—reveals some dubious straw men,
and some holes. The report tentatively acknowledges these by saying that it’s really a broad study,
it’s aiming to update older burden-of-disease
reports, and it should be used as a springboard
for more in-depth and concise research in specific
sub-populations.
The report shows that Australians are for the
most part moderate drinkers, and have been for
at least the last ten years. We are putting down
the spirits, and picking up the beer and cider. We
mostly drink wine and beer, of which most of us
consume modest amounts annually. In some cases,
our drinking habits are actually protecting us from
56
earlier death, and may be reducing our risks of some
chronic conditions.
And yet none of this made it into the media
reports. Instead, we had shrill calls for more
restrictions on drinking. How did this happen?
To answer this question, I need to turn the report
inside out, and describe it back to front. The report
begins with a portrait of how Australians drink, and
then moves on to show the connection between this
and various chronic illnesses and causes of death. I
will do the opposite and ask:
1. Does the report show a real relationship
between alcohol consumption and an increased risk
of developing various chronic illnesses?
2. If so, does the report show that Australians
have the type of drinking habits that lead to
increased risk? Are we on a dangerous trajectory,
or not?
T
he report has updated Australia’s existing burden-of-disease material by, for the first time,
factoring in alcohol’s relationship with the following
conditions: cancer, cardiovascular diseases, digestive
diseases, diabetes, infectious and parasitic diseases,
injuries, and neuropsychiatric diseases. So by linking alcohol to a far broader range of causes of death,
the report has naturally produced a far grimmer
portrait of its effect on Australians. The alcoholrelated death rate has “risen” by 60 per cent—but
only in the pages of the report, thanks to the data
modelling.
It’s also very hard to quantify “alcohol-related
harm”. Epidemiologist Dr Belinda Lloyd summ
arises it nicely for me:
Alcohol-attributable burden for many diseases
[is] still difficult to estimate because of technical,
methodological and co-morbidity issues.
Also for all conditions protected against by
alcohol, detrimental effects co-exist (low level
of drinking is protective, whereas high level of
drinking is harmful). The current methodology
New Myths About Australia’s Dangerous Drinking
happening, and to show this with data modelling,
which is what the authors have done. But data
modelling is just that—modelling. It doesn’t
necessarily represent reality. If you change one
Lloyd believes that the rate of harm is probably indicator, you change the whole model.
being under-estimated—but it could be just as easily
So what about cardiovascular disease? Similar
over-estimated, because that gives certain research amounts of alcohol were claimed to increase the
institutes a lot more traction in their drive for risk of developing hypertensive disease (50g to 100g
recurring funding.
daily, or five to ten standard drinks a day), ischemic
Can the report’s authors support a link to heart disease (“heavy alcohol consumption”), cardiac
increased deaths with their literature review? It’s arrhythmias (anywhere between 24g and 120g of
worth checking the literature cited by the report alcohol on average per day), and stroke (60g to a
against its own definitions of “light”, “moderate” whopping 150g daily). The report also noted that
and “heavy” drinking, and using its own model of low to moderate drinking is actually protective
grams of alcohol translated into standard drinks.
against ischemic heart disease and stroke, especially
Here’s how it works: the report translates 10 in older adults—but not in those who have been
grams of pure ethanol as one
binge-drinkers.
standard drink—a 30ml serve of
Diabetes is the same. The
spirits, a 100ml glass of white wine,
literature
cited by the report shows
he report noted
or 375ml of mid-strength beer. So
that a person needs to be drinking
when we go to the literature cited by that low to moderate around 48g or more daily—almost
the report on alcohol’s relationship
drinking is actually five standard drinks—to increase
to cancer or cardiovascular disease,
their risk of developing it. If they
protective against
we can see that much alcohol was
can keep it to 12g to 24g daily—
consumed by those studies’ subjects ischemic heart disease just a couple of standard drinks—
before a link was found to chronic and stroke, especially individuals may actually experience
disease.
a protective effect.
Here are the results for cancer. in older adults—but
The real surprises for me were in
One study found an increased risk not in those who have the literature on digestive diseases.
of developing colorectal cancer in
Apparently only 1 to 2 per cent a
people who consume on average 50g been binge-drinkers. year of heavy drinkers will develop
of alcohol per day. That’s around
cirrhosis of the liver; I would have
five standard drinks a day. Another
thought it was more than that.
study found an increased risk in those who consume Other conditions show nil risk increase at lower
more than 30g a day (three standard drinks or more) levels of alcohol consumption, but they rise once a
while another found a stronger “association”—not person goes past the 36g daily mark—three and a
the same as finding an increased risk—among those half standard drinks a day.
who drank as little as 2.5 standard drinks a week.
The real moment of glory appears in the section
For breast cancer, an increased risk was found in on infectious and parasitic diseases. I have saved
women consuming three or more standard drinks a this till last, because it’s a beautiful example of how
day, and another meta-analysis found that the risk prominent authorities can fail to understand the
increased among women who drank more than five human condition in all its alternations of confusion
standard drinks a day. Again, a “relationship”— and bliss. The report tells us:
not a firm link—was found with levels as low as
one standard drink a day. The risk of developing
In a review meeting hosted by the Medical
oesophagal, mouth, nasopharynx and oropharynx
Research Council and the WHO in 2008, 25
cancer increased two to three times when a person
international experts concluded that the causal
consumed 50g or more of alcohol daily—five
relationship between alcohol use and risky sex was
standard drinks a day.
still unclear.
In other words, the literature cited by the report
shows that if a person is a persistent and heavy
I will leave you to speculate about the social life
drinker, they will increase their risk of developing of those twenty-five international experts. And yet
some cancers. The literature cited by the report does we need only continue reading the report to find
not show that alcohol consumption leads directly the answer to this apparently baffling question.
to an increase in the death rate from these cancers. The section on injuries, for example, shows a clear
It’s perfectly reasonable to speculate that this is relationship between alcohol consumption and all
cannot capture these detrimental effects in
such conditions because they are masked at the
population level.
T
57
kinds of risky behaviour, through its impact on
visual functions, mental processing, vigilance and
reaction time, with disastrous consequences for
drivers.
The section on neuropsychiatric diseases also
offers food for thought. These include epilepsy
(where there may be an increased risk at four
or more standard drinks per day) and an ICD10 classification called “mental and behavioural
disturbances due to use of alcohol”, which is made up
of sub-categories including “alcohol intoxication”, or
in rough demotic, being drunk. Between 80 and 95
per cent of all hospitalisations for neuropsychiatric
conditions attributable to alcohol are caused by these
“mental and behavioural disturbances”. I can see our
twenty-five international experts being baffled by
this causal relationship as well, although I have it
on good authority that there’s a direct relationship
between alcohol consumption and being drunk.
So the real relationship between alcohol and
the burden of disease, according to the literature,
is largely restricted to an increased risk for heavy,
prolonged drinkers and binge-drinkers. But
are Australians heavy, prolonged drinkers and
binge-drinkers?
T
his is my second question, and to answer it,
we need to go back to the beginning of the
report. First, who are the “Australians” in question?
The report has used data from the National Drug
Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS) to work out
how much we are drinking. This has been compared
against actual alcohol sales figures, as the report’s
authors argue that the NDSHS may not provide the
full picture of alcohol consumption, instead underestimating it—a national telephone-based survey is
going to have trouble reaching some of our sturdiest
problem drinkers.
So allowing for this, how do Australians measure
up? Most of the Australian men who responded to
the NDSHS survey (just over 70 per cent) estimated
their consumption of alcohol at between 0g and 40g
of pure alcohol daily, while most women (around 66
per cent) are in the 0g to 20g bracket. So for men,
that’s anywhere from none to around four drinks a
day, which is a pretty broad spectrum, while women
are anywhere between no drinks and two standard
drinks a day.
Nationally on average, we are estimated to drink
around ten litres of pure alcohol per person per
year—litres, not grams, which makes conversions
to standard drinks a bit more challenging. These
are the figures from the NDSHS, but corrected by
factoring in alcohol sales figures from each state.
A litre of pure ethanol weighs 789 grams, so it still
works out at around two standard drinks a day.
58
Males may drink as much as fourteen litres
a year (around three standard drinks a day), and
females as little as 6.5 litres a year (around one and
a half standard drinks a day). These levels have
remained reasonably stable for the last ten years,
with “no significant increases in PCA” (per capita
consumption of alcohol). Australia is ranked as a 2
by the World Health Organisation, which puts it
on a par with New Zealand and Canada, neither
of which are proverbial for their raucous and
problematic drinking culture.
Nationally, we are drinking less beer and more
wine, and half of all men and a third of all women
have only ever had one binge (four or more drinks
in one session). Just over 9 per cent of all men and
13 per cent of all women are total abstainers, and a
further 7 per cent and 9 per cent respectively describe
themselves as “former drinkers”. We sit mostly
in the category of enjoying one to three standard
drinks per day (this particular table is confusing, as
it scores alcohol by grams for normal consumption,
and then by standard drinks for bingeing).
But it’s when we break it down at state and
territory level that some appalling anomalies
immediately appear. In the Northern Territory,
both men and women drink far more than anywhere
in the rest of the country, and especially towards
the heavier end of the scale—more than four to six
drinks daily. The Northern Territory has the highest
rate of binge-drinkers in the country (21 per cent of
males, and 7 per cent of females, compared to the
national average of 13 per cent of males and 3 per
cent of females). It has the highest overall rate of
alcohol-attributable deaths and hospitalisations in
the country—the national average is 3.9 per cent of
deaths and 1.8 per cent of hospitalisations, but in the
Northern Territory, the rate is 11.8 per cent of deaths
and 2.7 per cent of hospitalisations.
The Northern Territory suffers the most lost
years of life, working days and disability burden
from alcohol abuse for both men and women,
far above the national average. For almost every
identified disease and condition in the report, the
Northern Territory outstrips the rest of the country
in deaths and hospitalisations. Deaths from injuries
related to alcohol are more than three times the
national average for both men and women, and
hospitalisations for the same problem are double the
national average.
Chart after chart in the report shows an alarming
spike for the Northern Territory—sometimes
Western Australia and Queensland give it a run for its
money, but for the most part the Northern Territory
emerges head and shoulders above the rest of the
nation as a place where alcohol is doing damage,
proportionately speaking (and even allowing for its
relatively small population distorting these figures).
Yet the report only briefly mentions this outstanding
anomaly from time to time, and devotes a bare
paragraph to it in its final findings.
to show this relationship by using a column “summarising” each article’s findings, but these summaries are too blunt. Given that their chosen literature
showed that it took heavy and prolonged drinking
to increase the risk of developing various diseases,
he report was produced by three organisa- simply using the word “detrimental” as a summary
tions: Turning Point (affiliated with Monash is not accurate.
University), the Foundation for Alcohol Research
What else is missing? The report tells us that
and Education (FARE) and the Victorian Health fifteen Australians die each day from alcohol-related
Promotion Foundation (VicHealth). It’s question- conditions. This may not be entirely substantiated,
able whether any of these organisations is really but even if it’s true, the report doesn’t tell us who
impartial on this issue. Without impugning any they are. There is no data on age groups anywhere
individual, I’d suggest that for all three organisa- in the report, even though their data was collected
tions it’s in their interest to find the direst results from sources that used age groups.
possible.
Those fifteen people a day could all be over the
Turning Point’s mission is to promote “the health age of eighty, dying in bed of a collection of health
and wellbeing of individuals and communities living problems common to old age, but surrounded by
with, and affected by alcohol and other drug-related their progeny and having lived a long and happy and
harms”. It aims to do this in part by “applying research productive life, enjoying their one to three standard
to promote change and contribute
drinks a day. Or it could be fifteen
to policy making”. Fair enough. If
teenagers, snuffing out short and
they’re serious about this, then their
unhappy lives in road accidents and
ow did
own research shows that they need
suicides. We don’t know who and
a problem so
to move immediately from Victoria
where the fifteen people a day are,
to the Northern Territory.
so it’s a meaningless figure. But it’s
obviously specific
FARE describes itself as
very helpful if you want to sell a
to the Northern
an independent, not-for-prof it
scare story about the terrible impact
Territory turn into of alcohol on Australian society.
organisation “working to stop the
harm caused by alcohol”. They have
The other outstanding omission
a national problem throughout
been doing this for over ten years by
the report is the word
for all of us?
“supporting world-leading research,
Aboriginal. I can accept that a
raising public awareness, and
telephone-based survey may not
advocating for changes to alcohol
have collected data on a person’s
policy”. Their mission and staff will also find a ethnicity, but this information is readily available
natural home—and be exercised like a racehorse— from hospital and death statistics, both of which
once they decide to relocate to Darwin.
have been used to compile the report. We know
VicHealth—well, what is there to say, except from countless other data sources, including the
that they live and breathe to deliver “a healthier Australian Bureau of Statistics, that Aboriginal
Victoria” by “providing transformational expertise people die at greatly increased rates of precisely
and insights to government”. If by “healthier”, the conditions highlighted by the report, and at
they mean “non-alcoholic”, they have succeeded far younger ages than the rest of the population.
admirably. According to the report, Victorians We also know that Aboriginal people make up 30
have the lowest rates of alcohol-related problems per cent of the Northern Territory’s population,
in the country. (I can see the number-plates now: rather than the 4 per cent which is the average in
Victoria—The Wowser State.) I’d suggest again that most other states. The report’s authors feel free to
maybe their work is done and it’s time for them to speculate about other relationships not substantiated
relocate and change their name to NTHealth.
by their data, so why not this one?
T
H
I
am concerned that the “Findings” section of the
report is not entirely accurate. For example, it
launches out bravely and states, “Alcohol has detrimental health effects in a number of disease categories”, but avoids any qualifying statement about the
heavy and prolonged drinking needed to produce
even a slight increase in risk, not in actual disease.
There is a table in the appendices which purports
I
t’s the sale of this story that is the most concerning.
How did a problem so obviously specific to the
Northern Territory turn into a national problem
for all of us, including Victoria, the Wowser State?
The media flurry around the report’s release—with
its handy infographics—brought with it the nowinevitable calls for stricter government control of
alcohol use.
59
For example, Dr Stephen Parnis, emergency
physician and vice-president of the AMA, said:
The Australian medical profession is profoundly
concerned that the harms of alcohol are getting
worse—domestic violence, depression, deaths
from trauma, obesity—the list goes on. It is time
to deal with this epidemic, and denial will only
allow it to get worse. The evidence of harm is
absolutely conclusive.
And yet none of these issues was actually covered by the report. I don’t doubt that Dr Parnis sees
a lot of the ill-effects of drunkenness in his emergency department, but that’s not what the report
was describing.
Rob Moodie, Professor of Public Health at the
University of Melbourne, said the report showed the
nation’s alcohol problem was worse than previously
thought:
I would like to see sensible restrictions on alcohol
advertising, promotions and sponsorship ...
It’s not about trying to stop everyone enjoying
alcohol, instead it’s about reducing the impact
harmful forms of drinking have on everyone else.
But if the report is correct, we’re pretty much
staying within reasonable limits already, especially
in Victoria (where Professor Moodie lives), which
is one of the driest states in the country. Professor
Steve Allsop, Director of the National Drug
Research Institute at Curtin University, agreed
with Dr Moodie: “What stands out most in the
report is that the burden of alcohol is not just felt
by the individual alcohol consumer. There is significant burden on the whole of Australia.” But the
report actually shows that there’s a huge problem
in the Northern Territory, which may or may not
be affecting Aboriginal people disproportionately.
It’s very clear from the report—even with its
tendency to jump between drinks, grams of ethanol and litres of pure alcohol—that there is a problem in Australia with alcohol consumption, but it’s
not a national one. It’s a shame that this report
has been used to drive the usual agenda of more
government control of the sale and consumption
of alcohol. I can only hope that the report instead
ends up being used for its original purpose—to
stimulate further and more detailed research into
population sub-groups. These sub-groups continue
to suffer while privileged academics ask for “sensible” restrictions on people who don’t actually need
them.
Dr Philippa Martyr is a Perth-based historian
and writer. She blogs at Transverse City, http://
philippamartyr.blogspot.com.au.
If Life Were a Sonnet
If Life were a sonnet I’d be in the final couplet,
Or if it were a labour ward, I’d be the last octuplet.
If it were an eightsome reel I’d be the final figure
And if it is a rifle they’re about to pull the trigger.
If Life is a symphony I’m entering the coda
And if it is a drugstore I am finishing my soda.
If Life’s a highway then I’m on the exit ramp
And if it is an envelope they’re putting on the stamp.
If Life is a public bar, we’re on our final drinks
And if it’s just a sleep, the 35th of 40 winks.
If Life’s an octave, then I am singing ti
And if it is a lockup they are putting in the key.
But consider; any one of us could go at any minute,
So let’s carry on regardless and live the life infinite.
60
Peter Jeffrey
The Bad Banker’s Confessions to Good Granny Birdseed
From my eyrie in the City I spy schoolgirls playing games
And I lust through every lunchtime as they gambol.
The biplane of my enemy is going down in flames;
I rejoice without concealment or preamble.
My solicitors advise me to refuse outstanding claims.
I am busy annotating all the works of Henry James.
They have stolen all my Rembrandts; I have nothing but the frames.
It’s a mystery no headwork can unscramble.
Every Sunday in Saint Paul’s there sings a choirboy so sublime
He would tempt a very saint to acts of thuggery.
The Archdeacon and the Dean have both embraced a life of crime,
And their boats are well and truly burned to buggery.
They’re locked (God is not mocked) into a parlous paradigm,
For the serpent has arisen from the old primeval slime,
And it’s my belief it won’t be long before they’re doing time
For sexual malfeasance and skulduggery.
All the dead have quit the boneyards in their robes of dust and ashes
And they’re marching in a phalanx past my door.
I started robbing banks because the banks are where the cash is,
And I found I needed money more and more.
So I preen myself at functions where the heroin and hash is,
And I’m regularly off my face at whisky-swilling bashes,
And I wear dundreary whiskers and long mexican moustaches,
I’m a recreant and rotten to the core.
In our brazen towers we bankers dine on foie gras and champagne,
While you peasantry are huddled in your hovels.
Your singlets and your reach-me-downs are sodden with the rain
And you’re cooking rats and turnips on your shovels.
Yes, the filthy rich are targeting the filthy poor again;
As the taxes and the rents go up, hope slithers down the drain,
Like an electronic caterpillar boring through your brain,
Like a scorpion at a parliament of devils.
Bricks-and-mortar, Granny Birdseed, that’s the bank to keep your money.
Treat all other banks with caution and distrust.
They’re the dens of thieves and chancers, all emollience and honey,
Who will rob you blind and grind you in the dust.
We will swear upon our mother’s life the weather’s set to sunny.
“It’s as solid as a Rock!” It’s not—it’s viscous and it’s runny.
We will kiss you and caress you, whisper you’re our bestest bunny,
For we love you, Granny Birdseed, don’t we just?
John Whitworth
61
P eter G ilet
Hannah Arendt’s Impact
on Australia in the Sixties
H
annah Arendt was a pre-war Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who became an
academic in the USA. She had a certain
following among Australian students in the 1960s.
She was a philosopher who had studied under
Martin Heidegger in Germany, but her impact on
Australian students was due as much as anything to
the accident of her book on the trial of an important German war criminal being published in 1963.
This was Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi fugitive and the
former manager of the extermination camp program in Hitler’s Germany. Hannah Arendt had
been sent to Jerusalem in 1961 by the New Yorker
to cover the trial, and after her account appeared in
the New Yorker she published the material as a book,
Eichmann in Jerusalem. Recently the film Hannah
Arendt has been showing in Australia, documenting the genesis of the book, and recalling to all of
us of that generation just what had happened in the
1960s.
Had Arendt’s book been no more than a simple
piece of courtroom reporting it might have interested scholars of history and few others, but it was
more than that. It was focused on that topic which
was so central to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts, which
is the nature of totalitarian regimes so that, in a
curious way, the Eichmann trial became also a trial
of our own political structures, of the dangers to
Western society of its own totalitarian tendencies.
It was also a trial of some of those Jewish leaders
who, Hannah Arendt notes almost in passing, cooperated with the mass murder of the Jews under
the Nazis and helped bring about the Shoah.
But none of these observations could really be
said to be “in passing”, since Hannah Arendt’s basic
thesis is that evil is potentially present everywhere.
How comforting it was in suburban Australia in
the 1960s to locate that evil safely in a few years of
war and violence and in another and fundamentally
nasty nation; those years and that nation could now
become perpetual scapegoats allowing the rest of us
to enjoy the simple pleasures and securities of the
post-war consumer society. Germans, we opined,
62
were capable of evil because they were aggressive
people. The totalitarian structures of the USSR
and its satellites were also external to our own society, except for the threat of Soviet espionage and
subversion.
Therefore evil, when it was not genetic, could be
explained as an illness, curable by therapy, or else
it was an organisational one to be dealt with by the
right sort of bureaucratic or managerial processes.
Did we not after all have Psychology and Sociology?
The message of the war and of the camps was thus
in danger of becoming euphemised.
And so, at a point in the 1960s where a whole
brave new consumer world appeared to be getting
under way, Arendt’s book sounded a warning. Evil
exists, she said, and is potentially anywhere, and
can wear an educated, middle-class face (such as
Eichmann’s). Evil in the modern world, in fact, is
banal.
Her strong regard for the truth in this respect
caused a great deal of hostility towards her when the
New Yorker articles and the book appeared, a hostility which did not abate and did not have a happy
ending. The point of the book is not in fact a happy
(or a tragic) ending. It is the need we all have to face
the totalitarian option, a need to which Hannah
Arendt brought our attention in a way that had not
been done before.
B
ut Hannah Arendt’s book was important
to Australian students for another reason.
Eichmann in Jerusalem (and its ideas) appeared at
a time when there was already a kind of intellectual ferment, a consciousness of themselves, among
the Catholic students in the Newman Society at
Melbourne and Sydney Universities. I was a member of this group, and though I cannot speak personally of other campuses in Australia, something
similar was no doubt happening there too.
Arendt’s particular appeal to young Catholic
university students springs perhaps from the fact
that she speaks of evil in a world dominated by
Positivism and rapidly becoming agnostic to the
Hannah Arendt’s Impact on Australia in the Sixties
idea of good and evil as such, a world which refused book then has particular relevance to the present.
(foreshadowing modern political correctness) to
I postulate in short that Hannah Arendt spoke
speak of good or evil at all, but only of the accept- in the 1960s to those Catholic students and others
able pieties of the Left and of their violation by the who felt a sense of alienation from the joyous and
Right. Hannah Arendt challenges this complacency, consumerist celebration about them. She not only
and she puts her thesis in terms that engage with a articulated that malaise but pointed out the funmodern world in which the totalitarian propensities damental problem. It was that there is such a thing
of new technologies were starting to become vis- as evil, and that it is often banal. Ordinary, good
ible. In the Catholic past of the students concerned people commit atrocities and do so collectively.
here, there had been a discourse on good and evil, They had, as Hannah Arendt says at one stage in
but from an individual and private
the recent film, ceased to think
point of view. Evil was self-centred
and so ceased to be human and so
and egocentric. This had somebecame
monstrous. Eichmann, for
he speaks of evil in
thing of Jansenism about it, which
instance, was banal to an almost
was not surprising given the roots a world dominated by exemplary degree, and yet this
of Irish Catholicism. Evil was nei- Positivism and rapidly calm, decent chap sent millions to
ther more nor less than being self- becoming agnostic to horrible deaths. Nobody, not the
ish, was opposed to altruism and to
executioners, not even the victims,
the idea of good and was sufficiently aware of the consebeing a good Scout which was, de
facto, virtuous. Arendt’s take on the evil as such, a world quences of their actions.
matter was quite different.
Some of us took to this message
No doubt this malaise with the which refused to speak with great enthusiasm, but over the
modern world was wider than the of good or evil at all. years we have, it seems, forgotten
Catholic and student communities,
even to talk about totalitarianism,
and the 1950s were full of prophets,
about evil. The words themselves
such as the beatnik ones, who criticised the way we have fallen into abeyance and are an embarrassment.
were heading, though in less intellectually rigor- Our repertoire of concerns are now environmental
ous ways than Hannah Arendt. None the less, the or to do with issues of justice for indigenous people,
overall spirit of the age was generally not pessimis- for women, for gays. As for those Catholic students
tic or rebellious, was more Elvis Presley’s than Jack in the 1960s, they grew up and many fuelled the
Kerouac’s. It has alas become even less so, for one of reforms in the Church following Vatican II. Yet
the curious things of the last half-century has been a even here, I suggest, as in society at large, we have
steady dumbing down of the original protests of the lost our focus on something more central. As a result
1950s. The views of writers like Kerouac for instance we are now drifting steadily towards a society with
were replaced by a more acceptable style of revolt, a totalitarian potential. That is why Hannah Arendt
more cosmetic one, that of the hippies, and so on, was an important voice in our past, and why the film
down to the New Age and even further. Arendt’s Hannah Arendt is an important film for our time.
S
Coming to Grips
How can we handle what’s been happening?
By screaming? Drifting off to sleep?
Taking a walk or doing email helps
or letting landscapes happen by themselves
but every day anxiety, like dust,
suffuses what we breathe.
In recompense, the summer afternoon
calls us to prayer to celebrate itself
the way a child might, by saying, “Look!”
David Chandler
63
G a ry C l a rk
The Sacred and Profane
in Aboriginal Art
I
n January 2013 Fred Myers, Silver Professor
of Anthropology at New York University,
gave a paper at the International Symposium
on Australian Aboriginal Anthropology on the
Western Desert art movement. The symposium
was held in Paris—an appropriate time and place
for what he had to say, as an exhibition of Western
Desert art, Tjukurrtjanu: The Art of the Western
Desert, originally held at the National Gallery of
Victoria, had been at the Musée du Quai Branly
for the previous three months. In the paper, titled
“Paintings, Publics, and Protocols: The early paintings from Papunya”, Myers is concerned with the
problematic nature of exhibiting paintings containing images of sacred ritual practices and objects. For
traditional Aboriginal people, such images are only
allowed to be seen by initiated men, and the viewing
of them by women, children or the uninitiated can
lead to severe punitive repercussions.
Myers attempts to balance these traditional protocols surrounding the sacred with the imperatives
and values of Western gallery display. His resolution to this situation is a balanced and thoughtful
response to what is very sensitive cultural terrain. As
opposed to neglecting or overlooking the Aboriginal
perspective on such issues, Myers suggests incorporating it into the exhibitions themselves. This was
the approach adopted in Tjukurrtjanu—images
considered inappropriate for Aboriginal women
and children to view were shown in a separate area
from the other paintings, with signage indicating
in which section of the gallery the sacred images
were displayed. This was a sensitive accommodation between Aboriginal religious belief and the
Western culture of displaying art for public viewing. Exhibition organisers have not always been so
appreciative of Aboriginal religious sensibility.
In 1974 when a number of paintings were shown
at the Residency Art Gallery in Alice Springs, several traditional men were incensed by the open display of images of ceremonial objects and designs.
They threw rocks and spears at the building, and the
64
paintings were consequently removed and replaced
by some innocuous watercolours of landscapes of the
kind Albert Namatjira became famous for. A similar incident occurred at Yuendumu in 1972 during
the annual sports festival when a number of visiting
senior Pitjantjatjara men were deeply offended by
the open display of sacred images associated with
their own country. The paintings were promptly
removed from public display before they were seen
by women and children. Violent retribution was
avoided through a long process of discussion and
negotiation spanning the entire weekend in which
the men who painted and displayed the images
allayed the concerns of the Pitjantjatjara men.
These incidents indicate some of the tensions
and cultural complexities evident when negotiating the display of traditional designs. The process of
accommodation between the world of gallery display and that of the cultural contexts of the paintings achieved in the Tjukurrtjanu exhibition seems
the obvious path to take. However, it was not always
so and the path to such an approach was one fraught
with profound cultural misunderstandings.
Myers had undertaken field work in the Western
Desert in the 1970s, producing one of the most
frequently cited texts in Australian anthropology,
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and
Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (1986). This
seminal piece of ethnography analyses Pintupi social
organisation from the point of view of Aboriginal
people themselves, allowing the reader to more
intimately enter the experiential basis of the Pintupi
way of seeing things, and particularly the importance of sentiment in the structuring of society.
In Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal
High Art (2007) Myers reflects on his own involvement in the development of the Western Desert art
movement, from its humble beginnings at Papunya
in the early 1970s, evolving into the most internationally acclaimed art movement in Australia’s history. What unites this work, his earlier book and the
lecture in Paris, is his discussion of the cultural gulf
The Sacred and Profane in Aboriginal Art
that exists between Aboriginal religious sentiment secrecy. Anderson made a distinction between the
and the secular world of white Australians—what sacred dimensions of the paintings that must remain
he calls conflicting “regimes of value”.
secret and the “beautiful surface” that can be viewed
Myers highlights the lack of comprehension by the general public:
or awareness by art dealers and bureaucrats that
These were the men who decided to paint the
sacred images should not be shown to Aboriginal
emblems of their religion. They wanted to show
women, children or the uninitiated. When the men
something of themselves to the world. But
of Papunya began painting their ritual designs on
only something. The paintings were a portal,
canvas they had little idea of where their paintings
but they were also a veil, a screen. I know this,
would be taken and where they would end up once
because I was there, and I remember that time
they were sold. Paintings that were sold in the 1970s
very well. The men at Papunya wanted to show
which contained sacred images and which are now
their culture. They wanted to show they had
housed in galleries around the world will no longer
their culture, and it was hard, and strong, and
be unwittingly shown at a community sports event
beautiful. But they never wanted to show what
or in an Alice Springs gallery—but they may appear
on a Google search in the classroom of a remote
lay behind the paintings.
school.
Anderson asks of scholars and anthropologists
This situation has resulted in a change in how
the artists themselves approach painting traditional that they limit the degree to which they look behind
designs. Painters no longer include overt representa- the veil of secrecy, to the “hidden meanings behind
the surface stories”. She believes
tions of sacred imagery. However,
that when white people discover the
they have used various techniques
sacred meanings of the paintings it
to overcome these limitations. For
nlike many of
detracts from the cultural strength
example, very faint depictions of
the early painters, of Aboriginal people: “every single
sacred images may be used that only
contemporary
thing you discover, you weaken us,
the artist can see, while to others
and weaken our culture”. While
they are essentially invisible. There
artists tend not to
this may be valid to a point, I
has also been a tendency to depict
depict “ dangerous” would suggest that an appreciation
only those images that tell a verof the secret aspects of ceremonial
sion of the Dreaming story that can
images, and if
designs, or at least why the protobe told and shown to women and
they do they are so cols of secrecy exist, can deepen our
children.
Painters may describe an image cryptically embedded understanding of Aboriginal religious sentiment. It can also enable
of a sacred object as too “dangerous”
in the painting
us to see the affinities such protocols
for the uninitiated to view, but such
as to be virtually
have with other religious traditions,
images are also described as “dear”,
thereby deepening and enriching
the implication being that the most
unrecognisable.
our understanding of humankind
potent images are also those which
more generally.
evoke the deepest reverence and
Myers worked on the consultation report for the
affection. Unlike many of the early painters, contemporary artists tend not to depict such “danger- Northern Territory Museum which recommended
ous” images, and if they do they are so cryptically that sixty-six of the Papunya paintings were inapembedded in the painting as to be virtually unrec- propriate for the Unique Perspectives exhibition. The
ognisable. In this sense the practice of painting has report also asked that the reasons for the restriction
come to reflect and embody the ceremonial and reli- of these paintings not be made public. Myers is congious protocols of concealment and revelation out of cerned in his lecture with how visual representations
which they evolved, and with which they remained of ritual iconography, which have a certain meaning
or value in Aboriginal culture, are to be translated
for many years in a state of uneasy tension.
for Western gallery exhibitions and the art market.
t the launch of the exhibition Unique As he writes:
Perspectives: Papunya Tula Artists and the Alice
the dynamics of revelation and concealment
Springs Community, which opened at the Araluen
are intrinsic to the tradition from which
Arts Centre in Alice Springs in November 2012,
these paintings emerge. Painters played at the
Alison Anderson, former minister of the Northern
edge of these boundaries, as they no doubt
Territory Country Liberal Party, made some pertinent comments on the issue of sacredness and
did in deciding when and what to reveal in
U
A
65
ceremonies—sometimes with unfortunate
consequences. Art curators must be mindful,
indeed accountable to those who will bear the
responsibilities of revealing the work. For it to
be “art” … something has had to be stripped
away in translation.
To understand what is “stripped” away, it is
necessary to understand the nature of traditional
Aboriginal religious practice. Although Myers
does not discuss the painting movement in Pintupi
Country, Pintupi Self, he does offer an in-depth analysis of the intersection of cosmology, social organisation, ritual life and religious experience. The Pintupi,
like many other Western Desert peoples, believe the
landscape was created by ancestral beings during
the creative period, or what has become more commonly known as the Dreaming. After their creative
activities, such beings are believed to have re-entered
the earth from which they originally arose, often via
springs or caves. Deep below these recesses in the
earth’s surface such beings are believed to eternally
slumber—yet they may be woken if the appropriate songs or rituals are performed. Such springs and
caves where the spirit ancestors are believed to be
slumbering are often the sacred sites where ritual
activities may take place. Access to these sites is forbidden to the uninitiated.
We find here echoes of the religious significance
of caves evident in Greek and Roman antiquity.
It was the sacred cave of Cumae through which
Aeneas descended to the underworld and from
which the prophetic Sibyl issued her warnings in
Virgil’s Aeneid.
When a young man is initiated into manhood he
will be given the designs associated with his own
country and the actions of his totemic ancestor; for
example his body may be painted with the waterholes or rivers the ancestor created. During ritual
performances similar designs will be painted on the
sand. These sand mosaics are scaled-down depictions
of large tracts of country, and by learning the dances
and songs associated with that country young men
are memorising what are essentially visual and aural
maps of land—maps that will enable them to hunt
and survive in the harsh conditions of the desert and
consequently support a wife and family.
When different groups meet for ceremonial
activity—practices which have persisted into the
present in the Western Desert—a higher level of
social organisation is established. Different tribes
may exchange songs, dances and ritual designs, thus
cementing ties between neighbouring and potentially hostile groups. As a man grows and matures
and his ritual experience increases, he “owns” more
songs and broadens his social links with more dis66
tant communities. By such a process of sharing,
Myers suggests, the Pintupi become “one-country
man”—that is, different groups separated by vast
distances establish kinship relations through the
bestowal of gifts, which is what ritual designs and
the accompanying songs and dances essentially are.
Older men have very broad and far-ranging social
connections so that when disputes arise, senior men
from neighbouring tribes will be able to negotiate with one another and come to an outcome that
maintains harmonious relations across vast areas. As
Meyers writes:
Participation in ceremonies among those sharing
Dreaming tracks provides, for the Pintupi, the
widest range of relatedness among people. As
among “countrymen”, so also this relatedness
established in ceremony must be maintained by
exchange. Equality and shared identity among
men throughout a region is constituted and
coordinated through the exchange of ritual
knowledge and revelation … Wide ranging
relatedness does not exist as an automatic
entailment of Pintupi beliefs. It must be
produced in social action. Pintupi thus make
participation in the male cult—close relationship
with men from far away—a precondition of
sexual reproduction, creating a differential
between those with knowledge and those
without it.
Such a cultural context is important for understanding the art. The sharing of images depicting
country or its creation during the Dreaming is
deeply embedded in the social fabric. Without the
sharing of such songs and images, the socio-political integration of groups would break down. Such
integration is necessary for trade, wife exchange and
the mutual sharing of hunting grounds. This is a
dramatically different conception of art from the
one we are familiar with in the West. Aboriginal
people assumed, when they sold paintings to a white
buyer, that their art functioned as a gift, while the
white buyer assumed he was buying an aesthetically
pleasing painting. Neither party was aware that the
other was operating within completely different
regimes of value.
T
he sacred designs in Western Desert art, and
how and if they should be exhibited, are the
subject of Vivien Johnson’s Once Upon a Time in
Papunya (2010). Johnson has been researching the
Western Desert art movement for over twenty years.
This is the latest of her many books on the subject
and is particularly interesting for the discussion of
her involvement in the consultation process with
not with us. He asked Alison very pointedly:
Western Desert artists regarding the exhibition of
“Don’t you have any men in your department?”
secret material. Johnson had been for many years a
then lapsed into loaded silence.
strong advocate of increased consultation with artists. These efforts came to fruition in 2006 when
Even Johnson, with her years of experience, had
the Cultural Heritage Secretariat agreed to sponsor a trip to Central Australia in order to consult not anticipated the reaction such images would
the cultural custodians of the images and to estab- evoke in Bobby. After an uncomfortable dinner in
lish how to deal with culturally sensitive material which Johnson and Reid realised they would not
under the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage get the information they were seeking, Bobby stated
that he only wanted to speak about the paintings to
legislation.
Johnson’s description of what took place is a fas- older men—which meant, as Johnson writes, men
cinating account of the profoundly different worlds “with grey hair and beards … who knew something
inhabited by Aboriginal people and those who make about the culture—in short, men like Dick Kimber”.
One of the most intractable
decisions for them. It highlights
problems lay in the persistent attithe cultural gulf between those in
coastal cities who make laws and
ithout the sharing tude Johnson encountered amongst
white bureaucrats and art dealers—
formulate legislation for Aboriginal
of such songs and
they would repeat time and time
people, and the Aboriginal peoimages, the socioagain that surely contemporary
ple in the remote deserts and what
they think and feel about the same
political integration Aboriginal people no longer hold
such strict beliefs that prevent the
issues.
of groups would
depiction of sacred images. Such
Johnson was accompanied
by Alison Reid, an official from
break down. Such an attitude meant the painters and
their families were not consulted or
Canberra who had lobbied for the
integration is
asked about the relevant cultural
process of consultation to be undernecessary for trade, protocols. Consequently, the fact
taken. Reid and Johnson were to
that their views were not voiced or
meet historian Dick Kimber in Alice
wife exchange
heard reinforced the prejudice that
Springs and the three of them were
and the sharing of beliefs about the sacred nature of
to talk with Bobby West Tjupurla,
certain images were relics of the
one of the movement’s most promihunting grounds.
past that need not be considered
nent painters. Kimber has lived in
and around Alice Springs for over This is a dramatically in the context of contemporary art
thirty years, and in addition to his
different conception exhibitions.
Johnson’s tireless efforts, and
scholarly publications, has enduring
of art from the one those
of Myers and others, to overintimate relationships with many
we are familiar
come such bureaucratic ignorance
people in remote communities. His
are a triumph of sensitive and
cultural knowledge is impeccable.
with in the West.
thoughtful inter-cultural dialogue.
Bobby West agreed to the meeting
Without such efforts, exhibitions
with Reid and Johnson, as he had
been informed that Kimber would be accompanying like Tjukurrtjanu that now tour the world would not
them. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, have come to fruition. Such exhibitions have provided an avenue by which the riches of traditional
Kimber was unable to attend the meeting.
Johnson wanted to know what Bobby West religious sentiment can be expressed and communithought of a number of paintings so it could be cated to the global community, enriching our sense
established which ones would not cause offence if of human experience and also providing Aboriginal
exhibited. She opened her computer and the first people venues through which they can share their
painting to appear was Old Man’s Ceremony by culture with the rest of humankind.
One of the less noted features of this interacBobby’s father, Freddy West. Johnson’s description
tion with the broader world is the degree to which
of the incident is telling:
Aboriginal people invest such exchanges with the
traditional notion of gift-giving—by sharing depicIt was only a thumbnail—I had not even clicked
tions of their Dreamings on canvas they tend to
on it to bring up the large image, but Bobby saw
see such a process as cementing social ties between
it alright—and visibly flinched. He asked me not
themselves and those who view and appreciate the
just to move off that image but to close down the
paintings. This dimension of the social meaning of
computer. Then he explained to me and Alison
the art is not well known. Thankfully, in Painting
that he did want to talk about these issues, but
W
67
Culture Myers treats this as one of the primary
motivations underlying the painter’s art.
I
n 1988 Western Desert painting moved onto the
international art scene when the South Australian
Museum, in conjunction with the Asia Society in
New York, included many of the works in an exhibition titled Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia.
Two of the painters, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri and
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, were flown to New
York and as part of the exhibition over a two-day
period they created a large sand mosaic in the gallery. An entry fee was charged and visitors could
look down into the gallery and watch the men create
the ritual sand designs or maps of country that were
the basis of the acrylic works on canvas. Peter Sutton
edited a lavish and scholarly book to accompany the
exhibition, with a number of essays providing an
interpretative framework for the art.
The aim of the exhibition was to give exposure to
Aboriginal art and legitimate its status, as not mere
ethnographic curiosity, but art with its own aesthetic
value. However, the exhibition garnered a number
of negative reviews in academic art journals which
claimed such cultural displays represented a subtle
form of ethnocentrism that covertly denigrated
Aboriginal people. For example, Tony Fry and AnneMarie Willis in their review essay “Aboriginal Art:
Symptom or Success?” (Art in America, July 1989)
argued that the need to exhibit paintings was itself
a symptom of colonialism—the need for a colonised
people to earn money and gain acceptance in the
dominant white culture. In a similar vein, John
von Sturmer described the exhibition as a form of
cultural necrophilia, a “spectacle” and “tableaux” in
which a white populace fetishised a culture it had
already supposedly murdered through colonisation
(Art and Text, vol. 32, 1989).
Both of these reviews were highly theoretical
applications of postmodern theory in the context of
debates about the political empowerment of colonised peoples. During the 1970s and 1980s Jacques
Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) and Michel
Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) became highly
influential works that paid particular attention to
how Western civilisation deployed certain forms of
binary discourse in its representation of “self ” and
“other”. Derrida and Foucault demonstrated the
degree to which metaphysics, philosophy and the
writing of history were ideologically loaded. Edward
Said, in his equally influential Orientalism (1978),
applied Foucault’s critique of ideology, discourse and
power to European perceptions of the Arab world.
In the Australian context, the work of Said and
other post-colonial theorists was applied to how
white Australians constructed Aboriginal people in
68
ways that sanctioned or justified the annexation of
traditional lands. Two of the most ubiquitous were
the Social Darwinist notion that Aboriginal people
were intellectually inferior savages on a lower rung
of creation than Europeans, and Thomas Hobbes’s
belief that tribal life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Neither of these views, it turns out,
had any real empirical value—but they were ideologically appealing.
In Painting Culture Myers argues that such postmodern critiques do not do justice to the nature
of the process of cultural exchange involved in
Aboriginal people sharing their painting with the
broader community. Nor do such critiques take adequate account of the views of the artists themselves.
Discussing the influence of Derrida, Foucault and
Said on Australian anthropology and intellectual
life, Myers comments:
When the processes of circulation and exhibition
are considered up close, one wonders if this
dreary and monolithic critical view does justice
to the work of cultural exchange … In failing to
address any aspect of the agency of production
through which representations are actually
made, these frameworks betray a heritage in a
theory of signification that can hardly imagine
change … Exhibitions are not, after all, simply
the instantiation of pre-existing frameworks.
As participants tell us, exhibitions are real-life
organisations of resources, imagination and
power—in short social practices.
In Myers’s account of the exhibition and creation of the sand design, the views of Billy Stockman
Tjapaltjarri and Michael Nelson Tjakamarra about
what they were doing differed from the views of the
academic critics who presumed to speak on their
behalf. Michael Nelson Tjakamarra held the strong
belief that white Australians will “respond morally
to the demonstration of Aboriginal ownership of
land self-evidently embodied in ritual and painting”—that they might “recognise Aboriginal Law”.
Countering the notion that being the object of a
white colonial gaze is an implicit form of subjection,
of covert ethnocide, Myers writes:
Far from being the condition of their subjection,
the audience’s gaze is crucial to the Aboriginal
performers as an authentication of their
experience. To ignore this exchange analytically
is to exclude arbitrarily much of what is an
Aboriginal self-defined humanity, as one who
should be respected and heard, their own
powers and understandings; this would be a
double erasure.
The simplistic binaries of coloniser and colonised
have been long questioned by international post
colonial theorists, but this more nuanced approach
is yet to be taken up by Australian theorists. For
example, in In My Father’s House: Africa in the
Philosophy of Culture, the novelist and cultural theorist Anthony Appiah rejects the binaries of identity and difference and of coloniser and colonised.
In discussing the contemporary circulation of cultures in the postcolonial world, he avers that “we are
already contaminated by each other”.
I would not use the word contaminated to describe
the use of Western materials to depict ceremonial
designs, nor would I use the term to describe how
the paintings and the culture they give expression
to has affected and transformed the consciousness
of European Australians. While accepting Appiah’s
point, that the binaries evident in the resistance paradigms employed by postcolonial and radicalised
theorists have been made redundant by the hybrid
condition of our worlds, I would prefer the terms
transformed and enriched. Such words sit more comfortably with the processes of exchange evident in
the creation of the sand design in New York; the
men, like many of the painters who offer visual art
depictions of their cosmology to the broader community, believe they are communicating something
valuable that will be enriching if received with sensitivity and understanding.
W
ith these thoughts in mind I want to return
to Alison Anderson’s comments at the Unique
Perspectives exhibition opening. She makes an astute
comparison between the paintings and a temple that
holds within its walls secret and holy books:
The old painters only wanted to show you the
beauty of their culture: not its inner depths. It is
as if a western religion had a beautiful temple,
and you were free to go inside it, but not look
into the secret holy books. That’s what the old
artists wanted.
The notion of a secret domain of sacred space
and experience is not exclusive to Aboriginal culture—consequently I think Anderson’s comparison
is extremely pertinent. The demarcation of existence
into sacred and profane realms is a common human
impulse. For example, as Carl Kerenyi explains in
Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter
(1967), the Eleusinian initiation rituals in ancient
Greece took place in a temple whose centre was only
approached by the initiated in silence. As he writes:
certain rites in themselves imposed secrecy on
those who partook of them. But this direct effect
could have its source only in the ineffable centre
of the rites. Around the centre were grouped
elements less charged with emotion, concerning
which it was necessary to order silence.
These comments could equally well apply to the
sacred caves and springs central to Aboriginal religious belief—or to the sacred designs and objects
that are both “dear” and “dangerous”, and which are
only to be approached with extreme circumspection
and reverence.
Anderson also discussed the veil of secrecy, the
“hidden meanings behind the surface stories” the
paintings depict. What is significant is not so much
what is behind the “veil”, behind the “surface beauty”
of the paintings, but that the notions of surface and
hidden depth exist in the first place. Aboriginal
religious phenomenology has strict protocols that
demarcate the sacred and the profane in a manner
similar to that evident in ancient Eleusis. Therefore,
the notion of sacredness and secrecy which is evident in classical Aboriginal religious thought, and
which is central to the practice of contemporary
art, may be seen as the expression of an ancient and
ubiquitous human impulse. The absence of such a
distinction in Australian secular intellectual and
cultural life is expressive of, or may contribute to,
the spiritual malaise of our post-industrial condition, a sense of absence that it is more often silently
endured than adequately resolved.
In Wildbird Dreaming: Aboriginal Art from the
Central Deserts of Australia, Nadine Amadio writes
eloquently of the spiritual dimension of desert art,
making some astute observations regarding the
mythic and symbolic nature of the paintings. As
she avers, the Papunya paintings are “maps of life
meaning—charts of anti-futility—symbols that the
men and women of the desert have charged their life
and their land with ritual rich in meaning”. Given
such embodiment of religious sentiment in the
Papunya paintings, it is inappropriate to claim, as
Peter Howson has, that Aboriginal religion can no
longer mean “anything but nostalgia for a romanticised past”.
Rich and profound religious feeling is articulated in these contemporary works, sentiments that
led the art critic Robert Hughes in his review of
the Dreamings exhibition to write: “[Aboriginal art]
raises painful questions about the irreversible drainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe and
connection to nature.” It only requires contrasting
these paintings with the fragmented subjectivities
we find in the works of, for example, Francis Bacon
and Picasso, which are so expressive of spiritual desolation, to grasp the point Hughes is making.
In Painting Culture Myers quotes a passage from
69
his field notes about a trip out to Papunya in the
late 1970s. Myers wanted to buy a painting—but
unlike other buyers he wanted more than a mere
art object to hang on a wall. He told the men he
wanted to buy it so as to remember the country and
the people when he returned to America, to “look at
it and get homesick for them”. Instantly the attitude
towards the purchase changed and the men began
singing the songs that would accompany the designs
in a ritual context. He was told that what they were
doing for him was not a just a “brush”, that “sacred
words” are different. Given his attitude, some of the
men who had been very wary of whites, warmed to
Myers. As the men sang for him they looked forward to Myers reciprocating their gesture of warm
acceptance into their community. As he noted in
his field notes, using initials for some of the men:
“Pinny too seems genuinely interested in me for the
first time. CT and WW say they may try to come
and see me in my country, as painting men!”
Gary Clark lives in Adelaide. He discussed Stephanie
Jarrett’s book Liberating Aboriginal People from
Violence in the September issue.
Contemplation with Nuns and Ducks
Mighty floor length windows
are looking through me
there is nothing they cannot see—
my miscellaneous spread
creaking on the leather seat
endless sky going nowhere
Broome Moon
but back into me
my stomach growls
I eat my lunchtime sandwich
down at the abbey pond
do ducks know they are ducks?
my sultanas float past
in their brightly coloured packet detached from all reality
glassy water through my empty hands
at the edge of the abbey pond
sunlight strikes the water
a nun flies past me on the tractor
waving
I am in her blind spot but she waves
because she believes I am there.
Crazy moon red dirt distance on my shoes
the plane was leaving again
and my ears refused to work we bounced
along full of moonshine over the turquoise sea.
My sister used a megaphone to talk to me
in Broome I built a weird driftwood ladder
against a stack of massive clouds
and climbed over Cable Beach waving
to my sister I could vaguely hear her yelling
get down off that ladder.
A giant yellow moon called the huge sea higher.
Still I climbed rung after rung
above red rock dinosaurs hardened feet
above panting heat mad cattle dogs
and Crab Creek turtles glistening eggs
above swirling high tide muddy pools
above sharks and sea snakes casual drift
get down off that ladder—
the swelling surf reached up and helped me down
moonlight’s massive waves baptised
my salt stung crazy skin flung onto the beach
I was shining with new life—my sister said stay
off that ladder you are Australian now.
70
Christine Paice
Digbeth Bistro
(Stow-in-the-Wold)
I’m choosing chorizo salad
and the menu says cheerily,
“we’re in Digbeth Street—
so-called
because in the Civil War
blood here ran so deep
ducks swam in it—
hence duck-bath, dig-beth.”
Muntjac Deer at Freeland
And where the ducks swam, now
not a drop, or sign—except,
an olde-world menu-plaque
for top organic food.
I order my food,
pinch the skin on my arms,
wonder exactly how much blood—
but among chintz
and teapots, history’s
not in the mood.
Your Language
I turn into the morning’s
light-shafted hall, gold
beneath its clerestory—
and find my shoes, cleaned
with toes touching.
And they shine,
how they shine—each surface
and crack honed to a fine sheen—
red rims rejuvenated like roses
or kisses, blue sides glossy
as water under-spilling
the foam of lurching, tipped, waves.
And I know,
I’ll kill, to find and hoard
a whole universe of objects—
quarks, cosmic clouds, ploughshares,
all grubby and impatient,
to be polished like this.
The despairing voice cries
“kill the lot”, as we hush
to watch a Muntjac step lightly
onto the lawn, its curved back
a delicate question mark.
“They gorge
themselves,” the tart voice persists
as we’re held by the sight
of this miracle of calm,
so close, so close.
(Of evolutionary interest
for their chromosome count,
descendants of escapes
from Woburn Abbey circa 1925,
these ancient orientals
have joined our herd and increased—
two have actually been seen near Belfast,
obviously with human help.)
“But so many make road-kill,”
I demur, as the dainty deer
muzzles short clover and grass.
“Good,” comes the vengeful reply,
“they eat all my plants!”
“Where
do they belong, who cares,”
I wonder aloud, watching
tiny migrant hooves barely dent
the damp ground.
Olivia Byard
71
N ichol as H asluck
Geoffrey Lehmann’s Journey
From Robert Hughes to Ross and Others
Nicholas Hasluck delivered this speech at the launching
in Perth of Geoffrey Lehmann’s new book of verse,
Poems 1957–2013.
T
he dates mentioned in Geoffrey Lehmann’s
new book remind us that in the early postwar period Australian literature was enriched
by the work of widely respected poets such as
Judith Wright, A.D. Hope, James McAuley, David
Campbell, Rosemary Dobson and Gwen Harwood.
Then, towards the end of the 1950s, a younger and
equally talented generation began to make its presence felt.
For many readers the publication in 1965 of The
Ilex Tree, co-authored by Les Murray and Geoffrey
Lehmann, was a significant moment. These were
two new poets who would not only be with us for
many years to come but also, as editors and anthologists, were destined to play an influential role in
shaping our appreciation of contemporary verse.
And so, as an admirer of Lehmann’s work, I feel
immensely privileged to be involved in the launching of his latest book—another important moment,
fifty years further on.
The dates I mentioned earlier make it plain that
the author has gathered up the fruits of a lifetime’s
endeavour. It will therefore be useful, before turning
to the contents of his latest book, to look briefly at
certain facets of his life and times.
G
eoffrey Lehmann graduated with degrees in
arts and law from the University of Sydney
where he was associated with Les Murray in coediting the magazines Arna and Hermes. At that
time he was on the fringes of the bohemian coterie
known as the “Sydney Push”. It seems that these
connections led to a notorious stoush with the
young Robert Hughes, who was then winning some
faint applause as a would-be poet, not yet acclaimed
as the famous art critic he was destined to become.
The stoush erupted in this way. Having noticed
that Robert Hughes was borrowing too liberally
72
from other poets, Geoffrey’s legal training prompted
him to make the potentially actionable accusation
of plagiarism in an ingenious manner. He wrote a
piece for the student magazine Honi Soit in which,
by adopting a pseudo-scholarly tone, he purported to
explore the mysteries of “psychic transference”; that
is, the incredibly interesting phenomenon whereby
the words and thoughts of one person—an overseas
poet such as Dylan Thomas, for example—could, by
some amazing kink in the cosmic order, be transmitted to the mind of another person in another
country, before popping up in print as an original
composition by a local poet—as could be observed
in the Robert Hughes line: “I cannot rage against
the dying of the light.”
In this case, it seems, these scholarly observations gave rise to a good deal of rage, but not necessarily against the dying of the light. The ensuing
controversy led to a Mexican stand-off between the
two poets which lasted for some years. According
to Ann Coombs, author of Sex and Anarchy: The Life
and Death of the Sydney Push:
Lehmann says his expose was not meant to
be taken terribly seriously, but it was picked
up by the mainstream press … Hughes
called Lehmann “a malicious little [expletive
deleted]” … “I nearly died when I saw it,”
Lehmann says, but then I thought: “Now he
can’t sue me for defamation. I was delighted
when I realised that.”
This was not the poet’s only experience referable
to those years. Early on in the book one finds also
“Elegy for Jan”, a poignant recollection of a wellknown personality in the Sydney Push:
From the bloodhouses of my youth, vagrant hotels, I see your face
Dead girl (dear Jan!) in smoke-filled rooms glass-littered slimy floors.
Out of those brine-cold years, derelict houses Quadrant November 2014
with cracked lino
And crumbling ceilings, poems and obscenities scribbled on the walls,
A humid wind blows from that night we met and loved as strangers …
In later years Geoffrey went on to employ his
legal skills in other ways, as a practising solicitor,
and eventually as a specialist in taxation. But the
Robert Hughes incident and the passage I have just
quoted are reminders that Geoffrey was a contemporary of some of the larger-than-life personalities
on the Sydney campus in that era, including Bob
Ellis and Clive James. Perhaps this is why Geoffrey
has always been conversant with and fascinated by
the vagaries of the world at large, and the foibles of
those around him.
Something of this is reflected in that section of
the present volume containing the frequently satirical “Nero’s Poems” and a lengthy piece—in several parts—called “Meditations for Marcus Furius
Camillus, Governor of Africa”.
The meditations begin with the ageing governor describing his personal slave’s infatuation with a
school of dolphins in a tone that is world-weary but
far from disengaged, a narrator who is ever-curious
about the goings-on within his premises:
That night he seized my arm and talked
Of dolphins and their songs and odysseys,
And how their minds excelled our own
And they would contact us one day and bring
Peace to the world.
The palm leaves clashed,
As breezes fanned the peristyle.
Rubbing ash on his face he moaned
For the dead dolphin he had loved,
And spoke about the language they had shared,
The high-pitched music that its blow-hole uttered,
Inaudible to him, but causing dogs
To freeze and listen, muscles trembling …
Soon afterwards he vanished. Fishermen
Told stories of him swimming out to sea
One dusk, a strange light in his salt-wet hair.
G
eoffrey Lehmann’s capacity to be inspired
by and assume the stance of a personality
other than his own was borne out by a remarkable
sequence of poems he wrote in the 1970s. These are
presented to us in the voice of his then father-inlaw, Ross McInerney, a farmer who had married the
talented photographer Olive Cotton and brought
her to the property they named Spring Forest in
central-western New South Wales. In a lengthy
piece published in Australian Book Review in JulyAugust 2013, Helen Ennis described the straitened
circumstances of the married couple in the years
that followed, but that isn’t quite enough. For the
full story, in order to catch the laconic tone of Ross
McInerney’s voice, to grasp the nature of closeknit but impecunious family life in a small rural
community, the ways of the bush in that era, the
flow of time and chance, we must turn to Geoffrey
Lehmann’s evocation of Ross’s voice. As in “Getting
Started” where it is said:
When we first came our house
was two weatherboard rooms
in a bare paddock.
I was just back from a war.
There were no trees
and I chose the name Spring Forest.
It was dark when we drove up
and lit our pressure lamps and unpacked.
Our children found potatoes sprouting
on a wire mattress of a large iron bed.
What were they doing there my daughter kept asking.
We burned iron bark
in the old brick fireplace,
rubbing etherised hands into warmth.
At dawn Sally and Peter were out
calling in the frost, exploring.
A long icicle hung from the tank.
That day five cars passed on the road,
and the children ran out every time.
In “Driving at Night” we hear the distinctive voice again, but on this occasion in a mood of
rumination:
The earth loses its childhoods,
wood houses with their hearths and willows
flow away into the sky,
fathers and their horses,
mothers with iron pots
are going, and wives
who were warm
when dew formed on tin roofs
leave a crater of coldness in their beds.
We learn more about Ross’s neighbourhood
and his laconic outlook from a poem about a local
train called “The Daisy Picker”, well-known for its
eccentricities:
Send my corpse home on “the Daisy Picker”
and bury me in my pyjamas—
per “the Daisy Picker”
because it’s so hated and loved
73
for its procrastinations.
Passengers alight
and pick wildflowers by the railway line.
Then with a shuffling of buffers
and whingeing of couplings
with no logic it startles away.
The shadow of our “Daisy Picker”,
crossing a bridge
intersects the sun,
as I float on my back,
ears tingling with pressure in the Lachlan.
Cow’s toenails and bones would sink.
It’s a matter of displacement.
We’re judged by quantities.
But don’t give my measurements yet
to our local undertaker—
carpenter’s rule in his pocket,
as he sells me canaries.
I’m going more trips
on “the Daisy Picker”,
journeys with an end
but no destination,
as a red dragonfly paces the train.
You’ll see my face lean from a window,
shaded by a hat brim from the sun,
observing summer rocks and weeds
advance as they recede.
T
he final section of the book is called simply
“Later Poems”, and here the reader will discover
a fascinating array of poems about domestic life
(from the mundane to the marvellous), the enjoyment of travel (from Florence to Lima) and about
the indignities of ageing. In a poem called “SelfPortrait at 62”—which appeared first as a full-page
spread in the Weekend Australian—we are given
glimpses of the office-bound professional man. In
that poem, quite contrary to any credo propounded
by romantic poets, a stanza commences: “I answer
phone calls and emails”, as if, in the end, Coleridge’s
“Person from Porlock” had not only disturbed the
poet’s reverie by knocking loudly on his door but
shoved the poet aside in order to take over his intray and his desk.
A wry tone and understated humour are to be
found in many parts of this section. I responded particularly to the opening of the poem “Parenthood”
with its parodic echo of Allen Ginsberg, high-priest
of the Beat Generation:
I have held what I hoped would become the best minds of a generation
over the gutter outside an Italian coffee shop
watching the small warm urine splatter on the asphalt—impatient to rejoin
an almond torta and a cappuccino at a formica 74
table
… I have been pouring wine for women I was hoping to impress
when a daughter ran for help through guests urgently holding out
her gift, a potty, which I took with the same courtesy
as she gave it, grateful to dispose of its contents so simply
in a flurry of water released by the flushing of a button …
B
ut now, as I come to the end of these remarks, I
will return to the romantic poets for a moment,
and to something said by John Keats in particular.
Let me introduce it in this way.
I have endeavoured to provide an overview of
Geoffrey Lehmann’s life and times and a taste of
the poetry he has written over the past fifty years.
A bystander listening to this would probably be
intrigued to know how it comes about that a man
who has spent the greater part of his working life
practising law, adhering to the rigours of that discipline, the adherence to rules and precedents and
statutory provisions, was able, simultaneously, and
so successfully, to work as a poet, exploring the mysteries of imagination and the layers of self that such
a vocation requires.
It comes about, I surmise, because the author of
this book is a true poet, and very close to the paradigm of a poet praised by John Keats in a famous
letter:
As to the poetical character itself—it has no
self—it is everything and nothing. It has no
character—it enjoys light and shade. What
shocks the philosopher, delights the chameleon
poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark
side of things any more than its taste for the
bright one.
To paraphrase a leading poet of a later generation, T.S. Eliot, poetry is not the expression of personality, it is an escape from personality.
Indeed, in a memorable rejection of the French
critic Sainte-Beuve’s methodology, Contra SainteBeuve, Marcel Proust spoke of the duality of self in
creative artists. As he puts it: “A book is the product
of another self than that which we display in company, in our habits, or in our vices.” Patrick White
spoke of the words blowing through him, as if the
book was writing itself.
This is the facility that the finest poets possess:
they can, by intuition, or by uncanny insight, venture beyond the daily round, or enter the lives of
others, or chance upon the music of the spheres.
And so I come finally to what might be called
the transcendental quality in Geoffrey Lehmann’s
work, the way in which even apparently mundane
subjects are transformed by the poet’s other self. The
way in which apparently random events are infused
with a deeper meaning. In many cases we can sense
within the poet’s tone unsettling intimations of
what lies ahead in changing times, or the real value
of what we long for, or have left behind. These are
the insights that only a skilled poet can provide: the
feeling of authenticity, of unmistakable truth.
W
Drifting like dust, air bitter with roses …
The characters, their history, who remembers?
The plots and scripts are interchangeable,
Who knows who threw what spear or fired which rifle?
The earliest cottages are under clay.
What matters is a rose grew in wild places
And that all space is immanent with roses,
And strangers, who had little, cared to bring
The grafts and cuttings to a southern climate,
ith these thoughts in mind let me close by
taking you to the poem “Roses”, dedicated to
the artists Charles and Barbara Blackman, which is
but one example of the elusive quality I am speaking
of. A few excerpts from the poem will suffice.
Who suffered, cared for roses as a notion
Of excellence in rugged, lonely places.
Damask and hybrid tea, rambler and moss,
The precious amber hips wrapped in brown paper.
We left our bodies and we dreamed of roses,
But woke to shrapnel whining over the tundra,
Faces drained in the time of great bombardments,
Staggering through gas and mud, eating from tins.
There was no comfort in the heath and sandstone,
But still they built their huts and brought their plants,
To scatter fragrance by cold bays and mountains
Growing roots from the centre of the world …
Clutching a crumbling edge, our deafened minds
Reached for the tiny bursts and pops of space.
Then the guns fell silent, men climbed from their holes,
We laboured back along exhausted roads
The soldiers see their wives reflect the light
To find the house and village of our birth,
Veterans of all denominations, ranks
Erased, the convoys thundering back at sunset
To a place of weeds, cattle munching wild peaches …
A man is coming back along the roads
Of crumbling bitumen, thistles in potholes,
Wading a river where a bridge has fallen.
Dossing at night by trees in empty barns.
A man whose papers have been burned is coming,
Mud-stained, baked to the colour of the country,
Coming through passes, crossing plains and borders—
But all the guards are gone, the gates collapsed.
He briefly smiles at strangers as they pass.
Walking past blackened villages, his eyes
Look straight ahead, and still with bandaged feet
He seeks a hearth he knows, a weatherboard house
Amongst the medlar apples, airy verandas
With currants hanging from a trestle, insects
Of wheat-fields, faces given shape by hardship,
They find each other quickly in the dark.
The voices of the dead touch sleeping foreheads,
And when they wake they will not be consoled.
Old earth, moss-rose, rambler rose in space,
Pinching between your polar caps this garden,
These fleecy blues and greens, this fist of life,
This whorl of petals where we meet and part.
T
here is much else by way of poetic wisdom in
this book. Teachers and critics can say what
they wish, but for people who appreciate poetry
the crucial test is whether in a quiet moment one
is inclined to take a particular book off the shelves
because the poetry speaks to one’s inner self. For
me, the works of Geoffrey Lehmann have always
been of that order, and this book will assist us to
measure his achievement.
As the poet himself puts it, with characteristic
modesty, in an author’s note: “This contains all of
the poetry written by me that I think is worthwhile
including in a book.”
We are privileged to have among us one of the
finest Australian poets of his own or any generation.
Nicholas Hasluck’s latest novel, Rooms in the City
(Australian Scholarly), takes a fresh look at the
Gallipoli campaign.
75
J en n y S tewa rt
Revisiting
The Secret River
T
here are essentially two kinds of novel set
in the past. In the first, we follow the fortunes of a real person, such as Henry VIII’s
Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist
of Hilary Mantel’s celebrated trilogy. This is a flexible genre, in which the portrait does not have to
be accurate to be convincing: witness Peter Carey’s
brilliant impersonation of Ned Kelly in The True
History of the Kelly Gang. These works stand or fall
according to the psychological interest they create.
The second kind of novel set in the past uses
imagined characters, but places them in credible historical settings. Think of the Hornblower
books, or those by Patrick O’Brian, both set in
the Napoleonic Wars, or even (although they were
written for a younger audience) Rosemary Sutcliff’s
historical novels, such as her still-popular tale of
Roman Britain, The Eagle of the Ninth. The events
don’t have to be accurate, but these books stand or
fall on the strength of the realism they invoke, the
sense of being there.
Of course, historical fiction brings as much of
the present to the past as vice versa. The characters
must be remote enough to be intriguing, but not so
remote that they are inscrutable. There is a market
to reach, and this kind of literature must be readable
as well as credible.
Kate Grenville’s well-known novel of early
Sydney and its frontier, The Secret River (2005),
belongs to the second category—while the characters are imagined, the events around them, and
what happens to them, must seem credible for the
book to be effective. But while The Secret River is
definitely a good read, it is a much more ambitious
work than that. A little like Patrick White’s Voss, it
seeks to make a deeper point, about the relationship of Australians to the past—in this case to the
Aboriginal people who were here so long before us.
The climactic event of The Secret River, a massacre
of Aborigines on the Hawkesbury River that, in the
book’s chronology, is placed at some point around
1814, is intended to place readers in the reality of a
76
situation that we know happened in many places in
Australia’s early history.
While acknowledging that The Secret River was
fiction, its author claimed (in a post-publication
interview) that it actually represented a more satisfying way of looking at the past than was available to historians, whose arguments about the true
nature of the early frontier (she implied) had bogged
down in contentions about facts and counter-facts.
It was a claim that got its author into trouble not,
as she may have imagined, from those critical of
the so-called “black armband” view of Australian
history, but from historians Inga Clendinnen and
Mark McKenna, each of whom had written richly
interpretive accounts of encounters between whites
and blacks in the early years of white settlement.
Both historians pointed out that at least some
of the detail in The Secret River was anachronistic.
The incidents that the author had used had been
altered in ways that changed their meaning. For
example, detail of the massacre that is such a pivotal part of the story was taken from one known to
have occurred over twenty years later at Waterloo
Creek. It is not an easily resolvable debate—what,
after all, is truth?
B
ecause the issues go to the heart of what it
means to write fiction, and what the past means
to us now, they are worth revisiting. The Secret River
was the first in a trilogy: it was followed by The
Lieutenant (in 2008), and Sarah Thornhill (in 2011).
The theme of all three novels is guilt—the guilt of
white Australia at its treatment of Aboriginal people. Guilt poisons William Thornhill’s life, and that
of his daughter, Sarah Thornhill. In The Lieutenant,
Daniel Rooke, based on the historical William
Dawes, avoids guilt only by disavowing (to his face)
the governor’s orders to capture and kill six of the
local Cadigal people.
By general consent, The Secret River is considered
the best book of the three. It has a liveliness the other
two lack, largely because the characters are allowed,
Revisiting The Secret River
at least at the outset, to have lives of their own outside the relentless thematic trajectory of the later
two books. The Secret River starts with an account
of William Thornhill and his wife, Sal’s, battling
existence in late-eighteenth-century London. Their
vicissitudes are gripping—after his involvement in
stealing some timber, William is saved from the gallows only by Sal’s shrewdness. Through a chain of
contacts, she petitions the Home Secretary, begging
for William’s life to be spared. The appeal succeeds,
and both are transported to New South Wales,
William as an assigned servant to his wife.
Thornhill ultimately becomes rich, but is haunted
by the memory of the massacre which, although he
was only reluctantly and somewhat peripherally
involved in the actual killings, he had facilitated
by helping to transport the vengeful settlers to the
blacks’ campsite. He is also, or at least he becomes,
a pathetic figure. By the time Sarah, his youngest
child, is born, he does very little apart from being
a kind of poor man’s lord of the manor, isolated by
his big house, his riches and his memories. He dies,
unreconciled to his son Dick, who from the outset has been sympathetic to the local Dharug people, and having fled the family home, stays away,
revolted by his father’s brutality.
The story of Thornhill and his wife and family is
affecting, and many readers have been moved by it.
Grenville is an excellent story-teller, and a master of
the telling detail. In the end, whatever critics may
think or say, books must always live or die by the
vision of the artist who made them.
But in a strange sort of way, just as the places
and events of The Secret River are echoed by those of
early Sydney, so the fictional William Thornhill is
shadowed by the real person whose life gave rise to
him. We know the story behind the story because,
soon after The Secret River came out, Text published
The Search for the Secret River, Kate Grenville’s frank
account of her thoughts, motives and methods as
she put the book together.
T
he real person was Solomon Wiseman,
Grenville’s ancestor, and a character any novelist would kill for. In subordinating William
Thornhill to the leitmotif of guilt, Kate sacrificed
the chance to write about him, even though it was
Wiseman who inspired her to start her quest. Like
Thornhill, Wiseman started out as a Thames waterman, was convicted of theft and transported (with
his family) to New South Wales. Unlike Thornhill,
who for years carries other people’s goods up and
down Sydney Harbour and back and forth to the
Hawkesbury via Broken Bay, laboriously assembling
the capital to expand his business, Wiseman seems
to have been a natural entrepreneur. He quickly
made himself at home in the freewheeling dealmaking of early Sydney, and before settling on the
Hawkesbury in 1817 had made (and lost) a fortune
as a merchant and trader (he commissioned and
owned several vessels).
It was Wiseman who settled the (real) place
where the McDonald and the Hawkesbury Rivers
intersect, known as Thornhill’s Point in The Secret
River. He moved there in 1817 to take up a land grant
from Governor Macquarie, which he had obtained
(presumably by adroit representations) soon after he
lost his first business. Wiseman farmed the site, but
within a few years he made another fortune by supplying the chain gangs building the Great North
Road through to Newcastle, and (again through a
government contract) by ferrying passengers across
the river. His family’s motto, “Resurgam”, suggests
the general spirit. The eventual site of the ferry came
to be known (as it still is) as Wiseman’s Ferry.
Like William Thornhill, Wiseman owned a telescope (his portrait shows him looking out somewhat
furtively from the canvas, cradling the telescope
across his forearm). But unlike Thornhill, Wiseman
did not use his telescope to scan the horizon in
an anxious, perturbed way. Grenville is convinced
Wiseman was involved in killing Aborigines, but
even if he was, he was not the kind of man who
would be consumed by remorse. Contemporaries
recorded that he used the telescope to see who was
coming down the road to the ferry, a heads-up on
the possibility of forthcoming profit.
Wiseman was known as a hard man. He did all
he could to hang on to the convicts assigned to him,
rather than smoothing their path to emancipation.
After his first wife died, he built Cobham Hall, a
very grand house indeed, for his second. He must
have been literate to engage in his business affairs
(his portrait shows him holding what might be an
accounts book), and while he was not enamoured of
education, it seems most unlikely that his sons, at
any rate, would have been unable to read and write.
A book with a Wiseman-like figure as its central
character would not, of course, have been The Secret
River but rather, a chronicle of the emerging society
and economy of the period. Early Sydney was a fascinating place, unique in world history—intended
as a jail, but one whose inmates rapidly responded to
the opportunities of place, space and time to begin
the creation of a new society. People whose lives had
been hopeless responded readily to opportunity. It
was a tough place, but certainly not lawless. Indeed
in comparison to the American Wild West, early
Sydney was a well-regulated place.
We know, for example, that as early as 1804, the
then governor had placed one Andrew Thompson in
charge of registering the many boats that plied the
77
river near Green Hills (later to be known as Windsor).
Thompson had arrived as a convict, excelled in business (in the best traditions of early Sydney, he bought
and sold spirits) and became a respected citizen. The
shenanigans of the Rum Corps notwithstanding,
roads were built and schools were opened. With
Macquarie’s arrival in 1810, at the head of his own
regiment, there were fewer opportunities for lawless
behaviour. Macquarie’s diaries and journals recall
the care with which he organised the establishment
of the five Macquarie towns, Windsor, Richmond,
Ebenezer, Castlereagh and Pitt Town.
T
Jewish scriptural writers have a tradition called
midrash, which means writing about the present
through the lens of the past. Writers of history
run the risk of a sort of midrash in reverse—writing about the past through the lens of the present.
Historians try as far as possible to avoid doing
this—for novelists, the situation is not so clearcut. Characters in novels are always hybrids, partly
based on real people, but often stitched-together
attributes of a number of different originals. People
who claim to see themselves in novels written by
friends and acquaintances are probably flattering (or
at least deceiving) themselves.
he Secret River ignores this activity, which was
he preoccupations and the success of the
happening only a short distance from Thornhill’s
Grenville novels suggest that we are still worPoint, for these are melancholy books, whose pivotal
point is dispossession. The problem of representing rying whether or not we are legitimately in this
the perspective of the Aboriginal people who were country. Ironically, I am not sure that those alive
in the 1800s gave the matter a secdispossessed is resolved imaginaond thought. They may have done
tively, by bringing together a range
the nineteenth-century equivalent
of perceptions (some from the
any readers,
of travelling to the moon, but they
author’s encounters with Aboriginal
if the highlightings were practical people.
people in other parts of Australia),
As contemporary journals such
others from more-or-less contemin my Kindle copy
as that of Marine Captain Watkin
porary accounts. But there is more
are any guide, have Tench show, the need to find out
than a little of the noble savage in
Kate Grenville’s portrayal of the
received the message more about the capacities and character of the new land in which they
Dharug: they are victims, but they
loud and clear. They found
themselves, sharpened by the
are attuned to the land in a way
are only too willing exigencies of survival, was upperthat the settlers cannot be. They
are skilful, and move lightly on to take on the burden most in their minds. Macquarie’s
journals of his exploratory tours,
the land—all true, but as with any
human society, they had their share of guilt, secure I guess covering the period from 1810 until
of internal and internecine aggresfrom the need to do 1821, record almost non-stop effort,
establishing new towns, inspecting
sion and warfare.
anything about it. troops,
searching for fertile land,
Our putative ancestors in The
having regular breakfasts and namSecret River, on the other hand, the
ing everything in sight.
William Thornhills and their progThe presence of Aboriginal people was, in a
eny, have few inspiring qualities. Overall, they are
a poor lot. The Thornhills’ neighbours along the sense, unremarkable. Up to a point, they were
Hawkesbury, occupying land illegally downstream treated with forbearance and Macquarie, a typical
from Windsor, are mostly semi-feral. The Thornhills Scot, wanted to provide for their education. But his
themselves work hard, but gain little pleasure from duty was towards the settlement. As he showed in
their exertions, and do not bother much with schools 1816, if Aboriginal people killed settlers, they could
or education. Sarah Thornhill cannot read or write, expect to be the subject of punitive action in return.
and despite her obvious intelligence, she does not We might wish that these matter-of-fact people had
want to learn. Her husband, Irish-born John Daunt, thought and felt differently. But they did not doubt
must read the paper to her. When at the end of the that they had a right to be where they were.
For their part, the Australian-born sons and
eponymous novel, she travels to New Zealand to
explain the sad fate of her part-Maori niece, she has daughters of the first settlers, the currency lads and
no song that she knows, apart from “Oranges and lasses, revelled in their freedom. As far as we know,
Lemons”, to sing at the Maori greeting ceremony. unlike Sarah Thornhill, they were not bereft of
The Australian-born, even though free, lack even songs—they borrowed, stole or created their own.
the legitimacy of their own songs. The implication Their descendants have been doing the same ever
for the contemporary reader is clear: we are meant since.
Movements for a more independent Australia
to wonder, is this still the case today?
T
M
78
have come, and gone, in the two hundred years
since Solomon Wiseman. It is a sign of maturity
that we can now look back on our earliest years, and
see the grey and (literally) the black. Whether we
can, simultaneously, create and sustain an original
culture into the future, remains to be seen. Will our
time, never having fully come, simply disappear?
We cannot know. Nor can we know whether The
Secret River trilogy will stand for itself, or simply be
regarded as emblematic of the feelings of the current time for the past. Maybe future readers will
find these books as strange in their way as Eleanor
Dark’s The Timeless Land seems to us now. Whether
The Secret River is convincing or not, is, however,
beside the point. Many readers, if the highlightings
in my Kindle copy are any guide, have received the
message loud and clear. They are only too willing to
take on the burden of guilt, secure I guess from the
need to do anything about it. They are comfortable
with being uncomfortable.
The guilt may be a stage we need to go through.
But guilt is the least productive of the emotions—it
makes us sad, without making us more consistent or
effective. It is an emotion that is difficult to sustain,
nor, I suspect, is it even very widely shared. Almost
a quarter of Australia’s current population was born
overseas. Multicultural Australia knows little about
indigenous Australians.
For their part, indigenous Australians are fighting their own battles, day in and day out. We probably help them best by taking them seriously, doing
a few things sensibly, and sticking with what works.
Dr Jenny Stewart is Honorary Professor of Public
Policy in the University of New South Wales at the
Australian Defence Force Academy.
Old Postures
It was no surprise they were there
on the verandah.
At first they had kept themselves
on that stretch of weed-strewn sand
between the dock and the boathouse.
They came always at dusk,
and they stood there as if—as if—
they didn’t know I could see them.
Later, some days later,
they appeared at the end of the garden
between the empty fish pond
and the barrel where we once burned trash.
Staring hard, I could make them out
just beyond the apple tree,
assuming and losing shape
in the fading light.
And now here they are at the house,
on the other side of this locked window,
arranged in old postures,
begging, accusing.
They are standing there stock still
while I stand in the dark hall,
Bible in hand.
If I drew the blind, I could see them.
Ringing the Number
Ringing the number,
I let my finger hang in the air.
I think of the one at the other end
of the call I have not yet made.
She is stabbing a cigarette out
and pouring a second or a third cup of tea.
She is slipping out of her faded Chinese robe
and easing a thick leg into sudsy water.
She is painting her nails,
toe after toe in dark scarlet fury.
She is taking her pills, or else
she’s neglecting to take them.
And I? I am telling myself
to ring her number.
Knute Skinner
79
C hr istopher H e athcote
Triffids, Daleks and the
Fragility of Civilisation
F
ort Apache is set in the aftermath of the US
Civil War. The American west should be at
peace, but it is treacherously unstable because
the Indian nations are restless. John Ford’s 1948
film follows the friction between two men against
this background. There is the skilled and well-liked
Indian fighter, Captain Kirby York (John Wayne),
who has been passed over for command. His
rival, Lieutenant-Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry
Fonda), is a prickly West Point poodle assigned an
outpost he considers uncouth and beneath him. The
film culminates in Fonda ignoring Wayne’s expert
counsel and leading a large cavalry unit into what
will be a massacre by the Indians—afterwards, the
same bloody victors will merge with Crazy Horse’s
force and storm into battle at Little Bighorn. The
premise of Fort Apache seems pregnant with significance, because there are such intriguing parallels between Ford’s film and political tensions of its
day. War is over, but peace is tenuous; the fort is
isolated in an alien landscape, and surrounded by a
hostile force; the enemy is foreign, with a different
language, culture and religious outlook; a different
war for survival is imminent.
The story may be set in 1876, but European audiences were sitting up and paying attention when the
film was distributed there in early 1949, ten months
into the Berlin airlift. Some viewers felt the characteristics underpinning the story too evident for
coincidence. Was the fictional fort, boxed in by hostile forces, a metaphor for Berlin, currently sitting
behind the Iron Curtain? Was the Indian menace
intended to symbolise a Soviet threat? Might there
be a double meaning to that term, “the West”? The
German cultural historian Andreas Huyssen suggests that European audiences were attuned to perceive themes in popular culture that were missed
by Americans themselves. How significant is it that
Fort Apache concludes with a defeat? John Wayne’s
character may survive safely at the fort, but this popular film’s ending is hardly a stereotypical triumph.
The cavalry is annihilated. Seen in this perspective,
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the film seems to express a fear that civilisation is
facing a crisis.
The creative imagination is slippery. It behaves
in odd ways. This is especially so with strong artists,
because they will employ metaphor and subtle association. Much as a film like Fort Apache obliquely
refracts pressing issues from current affairs, so too
can certain novels be anchored in their political
moment. Some motifs will be reapplied with the
times. H.G. Wells crafted a disturbing fictional
story, The War of the Worlds, in 1896-97 in response
to fears of Prussian invasion. Decades later Orson
Welles recycled the tale as a radio drama, tapping
public anxieties over Nazi Germany. The War of the
Worlds was updated as a Hollywood movie in 1952,
this time encapsulating Cold War paranoia; and
there was a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg
in 2005 when the United States was in the grip of its
“war on terror” (one scene evokes the 9/11 attack by
having a jet airliner crash into the home where characters are sheltering). Symbolism is not far away.
This compulsion to respond to political tensions
is particularly evident in a surge in catastrophe fiction over the 1950s. The setting in these British and
American stories is not the historic Wild West. It is
an aspect of the everyday world, usually in the near
future. And civilisation is poised to fall.
E
xuding a charming folksiness, Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles (1950) is a meandering
saga of interplanetary settlement. The novel, which
begins in the year 1999, is customarily seen as connecting aspirations for space travel with pioneering
myths of the Old West. Put against the author’s
contemporaneous fiction, however, the book
seems more a lament on the waning of small-town
America with post-war progress; and, if the political
questions that troubled Bradbury are brought in, his
novel appears emphatically of its moment.
The Martian Chronicles was shaped as tempers
flared across Western Europe. A receptive public
was growing for noisy critics of the Marshall Plan
Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation
and economic relations with the United States.
European communities were alarmed by the spread
of American mass culture, the French media having coined the pejorative term “coca-colonisation” to
describe how American business seemingly imposed
US values upon other nations.
These tensions weave through Bradbury’s
Martian stories. Far from struggling with physical
danger, the difficulties faced by his colonists
are psychological. They are unable to rise above
ingrained patterns of thought and behaviour: Mars
is reshaped to resemble a nostalgic ideal. Shingled
ranches are built on alien plains. Redwood, aspen
and maple are planted along canals. A simulated
Mid-West town, replete with honky-tonk saloons,
is erected as planetary capital. Whether they are
farming people, engineers or technologists, the
colonists toil to implant a Norman Rockwell-like
rusticity upon this alien world.
Bradbury’s settlers repeat the worst aspects of
that post-war collision of expansionist America
with foreign societies (the indigenous inhabitants are closer to urbane Viennese than to native
Americans). Martian civilisation, so ancient and
rich, is smothered as the new arrivals impose their
own culture. “Anything that’s strange is no good
to the average American,” an anthropologist cries
when astronauts litter and vandalise. Nothing native
is studied, preserved or adapted. The alien is extinguished and swept away—an attitude conveyed in
“the silver locusts”, a native phrase for the Earth
spaceships which despoil their planet.
The few Martians who do survive mirror flawed
human desires. On the third expedition from Earth,
for example, the astronaut lands his rocket in a
Martian townscape that fulfils deep cravings. There
are tidy red-brick homes, leafy apple trees, a neat
church with pointy steeple, geraniums in flower,
even a brass band playing music. The townspeople
are all from the astronaut’s childhood, including
youthful versions of his “Mom” and “Dad”. Only
after a turkey dinner at the family table, when
the astronaut lies upstairs beside his slumbering
kid brother in their old brass bed, does his mind
challenge these experiences: “Suppose those two
people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother
and father at all,” he thinks, “but two Martians,
incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me
under this dreaming hypnosis all the time.” Next
morning the band leads a funeral service for the
deceased Earth crew.
Bradbury’s interplanetary settlers cannot adapt,
a point intensified as the threat of global war looms
on Earth. Most colonists flee to their home planet.
When Earth is annihilated in a nuclear cataclysm,
the exiles left on Mars symbolically burn tokens
of Earth culture—share certificates, government
paperwork—recognising they must adopt a different, more appropriate life. To survive in an alien
place, the Americans need to change.
T
hese subtleties seem a world away from Robert
Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, a runaway commercial success which set the template for
American catastrophe fiction. It speeds along like
an action comic without pictures. Set in 2007, several years after an atomic war, the gung-ho story
portrays an Earth invaded by slug-like aliens which
attach themselves to human hosts: the population
of the United States is being turned into slaves by a
hidden enemy. A greater contrast with the homely
moralising prose of The Martian Chronicles is hard
to envisage than this first-person narrative of a
beefy government agent fighting ghastly invaders:
“Puppet masters—the free men are coming to kill
you!” the final bellicose sentences run, “Death and
Destruction!”
Heinlein’s tale of aliens going undetected among
everyday Americans purposely tapped the paranoia
of the moment. The nation was reeling from spying allegations against the State Department official Alger Hiss, a media furore over the Hollywood
Ten, and the sensational trials of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg over stolen secrets. The author recast
Cold War patriotism as science fiction: “I wondered why the titans had not attacked Russia first,”
the hero reflects. “On second thought, I wondered
if they had. On third thought, I wondered what
difference it would make.” Tellingly, the enslaved
humans experience an artificial feeling of bliss when
their willpower is removed by the communist-like
parasites.
Heinlein was soon defensive about his novel’s
value. “It has a tired plot and was hastily written,”
he admitted at the University of Chicago in 1957.
“Its literary merit is negligible … If it has any
permanent merit it must lie in its theme, which
is a thinly-disguised allegory, a diatribe against
totalitarianism.” Heinlein felt so strongly about
communist expansion that he later sponsored
paid advertisements in science fiction magazines
supporting US action in South-East Asia. This
outlook seems consistent with Heinlein’s subsequent
production of military-style space adventures where
wholesome young astronaut-soldiers defend human
freedom.
J
ohn Wyndham wrote with a distinctly English
voice. It is recognisable in his diction, his choice of
phrasing, as well as the moral outlook his narrators
verbalise, their sense of what constitutes decency.
But the novelist’s Englishness is also implicit in his
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menacing imagery, the way he takes a romantic con- in the second; people have unseen telepathic powers
vention and endows it with a sinister edge. Nature in the third and the fourth. The Cold War overtones
does not reassure. It becomes progressively alarm- are heightened in The Kraken Wakes with its suging, monstrous, predatory. This is most pronounced gestion of unseen armies preparing beyond the Iron
in The Day of the Triffids, where England’s green and Curtain, and in The Chrysalids where a conformist
pleasant landscape conceals a malign threat.
community is ruled by a repressive autocrat.
Wyndham’s 1951 story of a modern cataclysm
All four Wyndham books are now categorised as
swivels on the consequences of three accidents science fiction, but this was not the case when The
involving advanced technology. New satellite Day of the Triffids appeared in 1951, the genre then
weapons orbiting the earth have exploded, blind- being identified with space adventures and highing the world’s population with their spectacular tech futuristic fantasies. Instead the novel’s roots in
atomic flashes. Then, within a fortnight, a virulent the surrealist and neo-romantic imagery of the war
plague developed for biological warfare gets loose years were apparent. Shaping visual metaphors to
and spreads through Britain. The third element is articulate a wartime anxiety, certain English artthe protein-rich triffids, walking plants genetically ists had portrayed wooded countryside as wildly
engineered by Russian scientists,
animated: dark trees rose up, leafy
and which are widely farmed as a
shrubs writhed, boughs sprouted
major crop. Following the other
thick
thorns, creepers grasped at
his quartet of
catastrophes, the carnivorous trifsolitary figures. Pastoral innocence
Wyndham novels uses was suspended. Affinities between
fids break free from their enclosures
landscape to suggest predatory triffids stalking across the
and prey upon the diminishing
human population.
land and the uneasy neo-romantic
a world out of kilter: vision
The Day of the Triffids was the first
of John Minton, Graham
gone were those past Sutherland, Paul Nash, Michael
in a quartet of novels Wyndham
wrote in quick succession. With
Ayrton and John Craxton were
conventions, the
The Kraken Wakes (1953) he has the
impossible to miss. Besides, this
earth’s oceans invaded by aquatic comforting countryside quartet of Wyndham novels likealiens who adapt the planet to their
wise uses landscape to suggest a
of Tory England.
environmental needs, raising sea
world out of kilter: gone were those
levels and dropping the planetary
past conventions, the comforting
temperature as they harvest humans like cattle. countryside of Tory England.
The Chrysalids (1955) is set in a Canadian farming
The Midwich Cuckoos starts by evoking a picturecommunity after an atomic war. The settlers there, postcard village, replete with a Domesday Book
who live in palpable fear of mutations in their crops, mention, the stabling one night of Cromwell’s horse,
livestock and, especially, children, are unaware that and a visit from Wordsworth to view the ruined
youngsters among them have telepathic abilities. abbey: “Midwich has lived and drowsed upon its
And The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) takes place in an good soil in Arcadian undistinction for a thouEnglish village where, due to alien intervention, all sand years,” the book explains. The rustic overtones
women of child-bearing age have been implanted are put to best effect when Wyndham describes
with modified embryos. Once the clone-like the village rendered unconscious by alien intrudchangelings are born and begin to mature it ers. Having dubbed it a day when “no birds sang”
emerges that, besides being physically superior to (a phrase redolent of Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame
normal infants, they share advanced intelligence, a Sans Merci”), the author eases into prose laden with
collective consciousness, and an ability to control pastoral associations:
people mentally. (The Midwich Cuckoos was later
While the rest of the world began to fill the day
filmed as Village of the Damned.)
with clamour, Midwich slept on. Its men and
These books tap a fear of unseen danger, much
women, its horses, cows and sheep; its pigs, its
like Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, which probably
poultry, its larks, moles and mice all lay still.
echoes Britain’s recent history of spy scandals. Even
There was a pocket of silence in Midwich, broken
before Fleet Street erupted with news of Donald
only by the frouing of the leaves, the chiming of
Maclean and Guy Burgess fleeing to Moscow, the
the church clock, and the gurgle of the Opple as
scientists Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May had
it slid over the weir beside the mill …
separately been caught passing vital atomic secrets
to the Soviets. The invisible danger was a public
An unseen force interrupts nature. Wyndham
fear. Hence humans are blind in Wyndham’s first
story; aliens are out of sight on the ocean’s bottom even has the children who will menace this
T
82
traditional “Winshire” village—and threaten the
pattern of agrarian life—born at the harvest.
The Chrysalids similarly begins with allusions
to a Golden Age, that mythical time when all was
harmonious as man lived in accord with nature.
However, the reader quickly learns of recurring
mutations caused by insidious radioactive fallout;
which the farmers interpret as heavenly retribution
for human sin. Still, none of Wyndham’s apocalyptic stories disturbs as much as The Day of the Triffids,
his tale of killer plants beleaguering idyllic England.
Much is due to a use of tangible detail. The narrator Bill Masen’s walk through paralysed London
starts at a version of the Chelsea Royal Hospital,
takes him to Hyde Park Corner, then along
Piccadilly and around into Regent Street, briefly
wending into Soho, then back to Regent Street
where he gets a car and drives along Portland Place
to Regent’s Park, heading for St John’s Wood. For
those familiar with the West End it is easy to visualise the mess described.
Likewise with the survivors’ exodus through
Sussex, Wiltshire and Dorset: fixing the counties
already sets readers’ imaginations supplying the
contours for typical villages. The first impression is
of a rural idyll, as in Wyndham’s description of one
hamlet:
we had a view of the whole of Steeple Honey as
we descended the hill. It clustered at the further
end of a stone bridge which arched across a
small, sparkling river. It was a quiet little place
centred round a sleepy-looking church, and
stippled off at its edges with white-washed
cottages. It did not look as if anything had
occurred in a century or more to disturb the
quiet life under its thatched roofs. But like other
villages it was now without stir or smoke. And
then, when we were half-way down the hill, a
movement caught my eye.
The place is infested with triffids ready to ambush
the unwary. Another striking passage occurs when,
several years after relocating to a Sussex farm, Bill
and Josella Masen visit a derelict seaside town:
Viewed impressionistically from a distance the
little town was still the same jumble of small
red-roofed houses and bungalows populated
mostly by a comfortably retired middle class—
but it was an impression that could not last
more than a few minutes. Though the tiles
still showed, the walls were barely visible. The
tidy gardens had vanished under an unchecked
growth of green, patched in colour here and
there by the descendants of carefully-cultivated
flowers. Even the roads looked like strips of
green carpet from this distance. When we
reached them we should find that the effect of
soft verdure was illusory; they would be matted
with coarse, tough weeds.
That image of weeds taking over is packed with
meaning. And there seems a symbolism to the
creeping behaviour of plants. In the middle parts
of the novel, the triffids consistently lurk in English
gardens, those man-made efforts to fashion a natural paradise. The first victim succumbs to a triffid
within a shrubbery, which then invades a home
through French windows opening on the lush garden. Later, the stress shifts to the Georgic. When
the triffids swarm around the few ongoing farms, it
emerges that they are attracted by the robust sounds
of agricultural labour.
They may not be as overtly political as George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or Eric
Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev (1952), yet the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham are sounding boxes
for Cold War unease. If the horrors threatening
civilisation appear far-fetched, themes recur that
are symptomatic of the mental climate: a concealed
menace, foreign invasion, scientific impotence, the
atomic peril, mutant life forms, social breakdown,
human extinction, and flight through a landscape
rendered hazardous. Humanity does survive—
Wyndham ends with a positive note—but there is
an appalling cost.
S
ober discussion of post-war catastrophe fiction
has been impeded by the neon aura of popular
culture. If the better imaginary novels are savoured
by a broad public, talk revels in a shallow mix of
prattle, fawning and incessant trivia. No popular
work has suffered more from this idolisation than
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), probably
the best Cold War invasion allegory to come from
the United States in mid-decade.
It is 1976, the American bicentenary, and the
nation is not celebrating. Catastrophe has occurred.
There was a war a few years earlier, Matheson
slowly reveals, although the reader is not told who
the enemy was, nor how the globe has been affected
geopolitically. All one learns is there was fighting in
Central America, and the arid zone from Mexico
up through Arizona and Nevada is now unsafe.
The grit carried by severe dust storms blowing from
those deserts (in reality, the site for nuclear tests) is
especially hazardous.
Robert Neville lives alone in an average home
in a deserted Los Angeles. Materially he has every
thing he needs. He has filled a spare room with
crates of tinned and processed food. He has installed
83
a generator and has well-stocked freezers. There are
supplies aplenty. Neville has books to read, a record
collection he enjoys, a new car. He has sufficient
fuel and batteries to keep going for years, and anything he lacks is acquired on foraging expeditions
to shopping malls or Santa Monica’s commercial
precinct. But Neville, who has converted his suburban home into a bunker-cum-fort, lives under
siege after sundown. America has been ravaged by
a post-war pandemic which killed nearly everyone,
and left the survivors—apart from Neville—repulsively changed.
Seven years earlier Albert Camus had used a virulent epidemic to symbolise the German Occupation
with his distinguished novel The Plague (1947). But I
Am Legend is a very different type of book, intended
for a popular readership: disease is a metaphor for
invasion. Matheson signifies people embracing a
corrosive political idea by having the fictional infection transform its victims. They become malevolent.
So those who do not succumb to the bacillus are
murdered by those who do, because the infected
take on vampire attributes.
I Am Legend is not a gothic novel. There are no
satanic monsters, no occult thrills, no dark uncanny
forces. The author avoids the formulas of the horror
genre. His vampire survivors do not frighten. They
are sickly, anaemic, pathetic, at moments ludicrous,
and they behave towards Neville more like ranting
demons that taunt and tempt a lonely St Jerome.
While Matheson refrains from horror, he does
blend motifs rich with significance. The character
Robert Neville calls to mind a 1950s wave of domestic
survivalists then preparing for war, men who
expected to emerge from home shelters and resettle
the land after an atomic war. And Matheson’s pen
sporadically alludes to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, having the protagonist muse on his plight
in a manner recalling the castaway. This is echoed
in the author’s engaging descriptive prose, with his
clean journalist-like sentences drawing the reader
along at steady pace. Behind these emphases is
an American folk archetype: the resourceful selfreliant frontiersman, a variant of historical figures
(such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett) central
to popular myths of how the heroic “American
spirit” was forged. And Neville is playing this role
by midway through the novel, struggling to clear
the land of diseased vermin.
This heroic persona comes unravelled in the final
section, which is set two years later. Following the
emergence of a new viral strain, the infected humans
have changed. They are re-establishing civic order.
They have a city council with elected officials, and
they have set up assorted basic services and restored
a legal system. After years of anarchy the mutated
84
humans are rebuilding the American nation. And
Neville’s violent conduct undermines law and order.
So a party is sent to arrest him. Later, in prison,
Neville looks through his cell window at the diseased crowd waiting outside the city court:
Then someone saw him. For a moment there was
an increased babbling of voices, a few startled
cries. Then sudden silence, as though a heavy
blanket had fallen over their heads. They all
stood looking up at him with their white faces.
He started back. And suddenly he thought,
I’m the abnormal one now … Abruptly that
realisation joined with what he saw on their
many faces—awe, fear, shrinking horror—and
he knew that they were afraid of him.
Reasoning that humanity has moved on, leaving him the sole survivor of a warring past, Neville
takes his own life.
B
y mid-decade a pattern was evident in British
and American catastrophe fiction. English writers followed the lead of John Wyndham in stressing
a world physically transformed. This was not surprising given their experience of saturation bombing
during the German Blitz, followed by the random
terror of V-2 flying bombs. War ruins were a feature of British cities, and English writers knew the
immediate human toll of war. No wonder there was
a stress in English fiction on changes to the land,
rendering it dangerous, as well as the effects on
traumatised survivors.
The American imagination had no domestic precedent for disaster. Notwithstanding the
Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, no city,
no town, no street in the continental United States
had been bombed to smithereens. So the visceral
reality of attack was unknown. This is surely mirrored in the casualness of Robert Heinlein’s narrator, who mentions that America has a couple of
radioactive craters where entire cities once had been.
Bombing is an abstraction. Likewise Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles has the nuclear apocalypse
happen off-world; and I Am Legend handles war in a
vague manner, with only hints about lingering dangers in the Nevada desert. Atomic attack is not an
issue in American catastrophe fiction.
However, the prospect of invasion plainly is
the urgent fear. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters is a
template for this outlook, indeed his storyline was
reworked in assorted novels, and B-grade films like
Invaders from Mars, where aliens conquer smalltown America by absorbing its citizens one by one.
The allusions to popular conceptions of communism
are direct. Converted earthlings are regimented,
have no emotions, and lack personal identities: “No
more love, no more beauty, no more pain,” an altered
human boasts in the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. This is more than the alarm call against
intellectual repression of Fahrenheit 451 (1951), Ray
Bradbury’s earnest response to the plight of East
Europeans under the new Soviet Cominform (hence
the Germanic name of his book’s protagonist,
“Montag”). Aliens symbolise a communist menace
invading by stealth.
I Am Legend marks a shift in position. Richard
Matheson was writing in those uncertain months
after Stalin’s death when liberal-minded Americans
hoped the Soviet leadership was about to relax. They
had reason to dream. Winston Churchill, who was
once again Britain’s Prime Minister, urged the US
President Dwight Eisenhower to negotiate a diplomatic compromise. This mood is mirrored in the
ending of I Am Legend, where the new viral strain
alters the vampiric humans and leads them to restore
civilised values.
Russia did not change. Having come down hard
on the East German uprising, repression continued
across the Soviet Union; hence the renewed paranoia in Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955). This
capable suspense thriller merged the alien and plant
metaphors for communist infiltration by having a
Californian town invaded by creatures that have
sprouted from extraterrestrial spores. Miles Bennell,
the local GP, and his girlfriend Becky helplessly
watch members of their community converted into
aliens, the pair lingering until they find themselves
trapped, afraid and hunted in their home town.
What most frightens Bennell about the changed
humans is their inability to write, indeed books and
literature gently add to the building tension. The
only other townspeople who doggedly resist the
extraterrestrials are, significantly, a novelist and his
wife. Hunting for a reference in old volumes, this
couple initially find the inanimate body of an alien
concealed in a closet at their home. It is lying on
cardboard boxes of books. Later, when Miles and
Becky use the public library, not only is it empty
of users, but they realise the librarian (a converted
alien) is censoring materials by cutting out passages
with a razor. In a crucial scene, Miles notices that
creative ambition and endeavour are beyond the
aliens, with both an academic and a professional
giving up personal writing projects after being
converted. They are incapable of pursuing their
former intellectual passions.
The aliens will be defeated by American resourcefulness in the last chapter: the positive resolution was
mandatory. However, English writers were sceptical about America. This was a low-key trend across
British popular fiction. In Ian Fleming’s spy novels,
for example, James Bond deals with threats in the
Bahamas and the Caribbean—that is, America’s
doorstep—which Washington has neither noticed
nor is capable of handling. In British catastrophe
fiction the Americans are unable to save themselves after global cataclysm, let alone anyone else.
Shocked survivors in The Day of the Triffids keep predicting that “the Americans” will arrive and fix the
mess. They never do. The Americans are powerless
to assist the world in The Death of Grass, closing their
borders and themselves struggling to survive. A US
Naval fleet is effortlessly wiped out by alien invaders
in The Kraken Wakes. And The Chrysalids is set in a
Canada ravaged by radioactive fallout following a
nuclear war that obliterated the United States. No
abiding faith is placed in Uncle Sam.
B
ritain is in crisis again in John Christopher’s The
Death of Grass (1956), the most plausible of postwar catastrophe fictions. A virus fatal to grasses
and cereal crops has broken out in China. Despite
quarantine measures and scientific efforts to control
it, the plant disease has mutated and is spreading
across the globe. Rice and wheat crops are blighted.
Pastures have died, leaving livestock with nowhere
to graze. Europe faces the prospect of being unable
either to produce or import meat, grain, poultry and
dairy products. Worldwide famine appears likely.
Already 200 million people have succumbed in the
Far East.
The novel swivels on John Custance, a structural engineer, and Roger Buckley, a high-placed
civil servant, both contented family men living in
middle-class London. With a story carried by dialogue, the deteriorating situation is explained in two
early conversations they have over meals: a hearty
lunch at the Custances’ Highgate home, and, a year
later, an unappetising dinner at a St James club. The
confidential whispers Buckley hears in Whitehall
are grim. When national food reserves run low, and
the army is about to lock down Britain’s cities, the
pair take their families on a hazardous journey to a
relative’s farm in the Lake District.
English life, so civil and secure, has come to an
abrupt end, leaving these level-headed professionals reduced to refugees fleeing through a ravaged
landscape. It looks as if another of those catastrophe
adventures à la Wyndham is in the offing; where, as
the British writer Brian Aldiss justifiably moaned,
“the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free
suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while
everyone else is dying off”. But John Christopher
has little time for such daydreams. Brutal reality
confronts his characters midway through their first
day on the road, when the group halts at a deserted
house:
85
It was easy enough to see, as [Custance] looked
in, where the noise had come from. A woman
lay in the middle of the floor. Her clothes were
torn and there was blood on her face; one leg
was doubled underneath her. About her, the
room was in confusion—drawers pulled out, a
wall clock splintered. It was the first time he had
seen it in England, but in Italy, during the war,
he had observed not dissimilar scenes. The trail
of the looter; but here, in rural England.
Christopher’s characters are conscious of their
ethical choices as they watch familiar constraints
cast aside: “Before all this is over,” Ann Custance
asks early on, “are we going to hate ourselves? Or are
we just going to get used to things, so that we don’t
realise what we’re turning into?” Not wanting to be
responsible for cold decisions, Roger gives up leadership to John; although both repeatedly defer to
the unnerving Pirrie, a ruthless operator they have
met in a gun shop. As the journey lengthens, and
more people join their party, the moral standards
the travellers wrestle with intensify. The author has
little faith in the innate goodness of the English,
that jolly decency Wyndham’s characters exuded in
a crisis.
Catastrophe leads people into barbarism—this
theme had loudly reverberated through literature
since French Existentialism provoked speculation
on links between warfare, social breakdown and
moral behaviour. The Day of the Triffids touched on
it (“In an environment reverting to savagery,” Bill
Masen muses, “it seemed that one must be prepared
to behave more or less as a savage”) although it was
William Golding who famously probed “savage”
and “civil” behaviour through his novels Lord of the
Flies, using modern children, then The Inheritors,
using Neanderthals. Sure enough, when published,
The Death of Grass was perceived by some as assembled from the materials of such books: Lord of the
Flies for a doomed circle of mismatched people, The
Day of the Triffids for a hostile disintegrating landscape, Camus’s The Plague for disease as an invasion
and alienation metaphor. But the author employed
more traditional means to portray moral decay.
Overarching John Christopher’s novel is the tale
of Cain and Abel. An alert reader may wonder early
whether the engineer protagonist will resort to fratricide. Sure enough, finding a barricade closing off
the family farm, Custance sneaks through at night
and shoots his brother: the Abel figure is murdered
by a modern Cain. In this moral schema there
are latent touches of a biblical quest for a promised land as the group treks across a world made
strange, stopping periodically to deal with dangers.
However, Christopher’s narrative takes the path of
86
those bleak modern quest novels, Mark Twain’s disturbing Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness, by having the travellers watch civilisation unravel and humanity sink into brutality.
The countryside itself has changed as the group
nears its goal, exposing the depravity that has been
unleashed:
The moors had been more or less deserted, but
when they descended to cross the lower land
north of Kendal, they witnessed the signs, by
now familiar, of the predatory animal that man
had become: houses burning, an occasional cry
in the distance that might be either distress
or savage exultance, the sights and sounds
of murder. And another of their senses were
touched—here and there their nostrils were
pricked by the sour-sweet smell of flesh in
corruption.
Instead of things improving when the destination is achieved, Custance looks into the heart of
darkness of Western man, wondering if it has any
redeeming qualities: “he felt a great weariness of
spirit, as though out of the past his old self, his civilised self, challenged him to an accounting”.
The Death of Grass marks the start of a shift in
British catastrophe fiction. In this novel the contagion that imperils a green, pleasant land is an evident symbol for colonial decline. Beginning in the
Far East, much of undeveloped Asia rapidly succumbs to the virus, followed progressively in that
region by the countries of the newly formed British
Commonwealth. The rest of the world follows. Hope
is placed in ongoing support from Australia, New
Zealand and Canada, which have resisted the disease and continue to stock British warehouses with
agricultural produce. But eventually their freight
ships halt. On his second night of travelling north,
Custance muses on the fall of empire:
There will be legends, he thought, of broad
avenues celestially lit, of the hurrying millions
who lived together without plotting each other’s
deaths, of railway trains and aeroplanes and
motor-cars, of food in all its diversity. Most of
all, perhaps, of policemen—custodians, without
anger or malice, of a law that stretched to the
ends of the earth.
John Christopher’s view of government is blunt:
pessimism. Whitehall is incapable of managing
the impending crisis. It takes for granted that the
virus will be speedily cured by local “boffins”. Their
efforts fail. So then it expects the USA to solve the
problem as well as sending endless food. Meanwhile
the cabinet bickers and there is an opportunistic is infertile, ashy and has been baked by immense
struggle for the prime ministership. With saving heat. Trees and shrubs are grey and crumble to dust
the nation the last thing on politicians’ minds, the when touched. The sky is clear, lacks moisture, and
army is mobilised to seal off cities and larger towns, the planetary atmosphere is contaminated with toxic
although this triggers civil disorder. Leading the radioactivity. The travellers reason the planet been
revolt is Leeds. H-bombs are used against the rebel rendered sterile by appalling weapons.
city.
Then the group discovers a gleaming futurisThe literary historian Roger Luckhurst connects tic city. Within it dwell the race of Daleks, creathis distrust of power to the Suez Crisis, which was tures responsible for the war that has killed their
played out in its entirety while Christopher wrote planet. These malign aliens, utterly convinced of
his manuscript. The silhouette of Anthony Eden is their own biological and intellectual superiority,
apparent in a scheming mediocre prime minister; have attempted to annihilate all other sentient life.
and the lacklustre performance of the Anglo-French However, the resulting high level of planetary radiopowers directly spills into a crucial paragraph where activity has caused them to mutate physically so that
the craven British and French cabinets together they must live inside armoured machines. Alarmed
flee to America. Power is abused,
by the arrival of the travellers, the
people are expendable, authority
Daleks plan another radioactive
disintegrates.
he inaugural Dalek device to render the surface eterBritain’s surprise invasion of
nally uninhabitable.
story was a Cold
Egypt late in 1956, which angered
The BBC’s inaugural Dalek story
the nation, also affected the book’s
was
a Cold War cautionary tale for
War cautionary tale
depiction of the military. Having
children. Penned shortly after the
for children. Penned Cuban Missile Crisis of October
served in the war, Custance and
shortly after the
Buckley implicitly trust the army.
1962, when the world stood at the
British servicemen encountered are Cuban Missile Crisis brink of nuclear conflict, the prolikeable, although the travellers do
gram used aspects of existing catasof October 1962, the trophe fiction to illustrate the peril
think them naive in obeying questionable orders. Then the RAF program used aspects of “Mutually Assured Destruction”.
obliterates Leeds. Soldiers are now
The confrontation between the
transformed into a threat. They raid of existing catastrophe Soviet Union and the United
fiction to illustrate States had galvanised British public
villages and prey upon refugees:
the resting travellers are attacked at the peril of “Mutually opinion, and the television show’s
night by a well-armed squad roamambitious young producer, Verity
Assured Destruction”. Lambert, tapped community feeling Westmorland.
English writers were electrified
ings on what was a pressing moral
when The Death of Grass appeared.
issue.
“With Christopher,” Brian Aldiss recalls, “catastroTerry Nation, the scriptwriter, used his childphe lost its cosiness and took on an edge of terror.” hood memories of the Second World War as he plotChristopher’s creative accomplishment was high- ted his storyline, giving the aliens many qualities of
lighted when John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos totalitarian societies. The creatures are militaristic,
hit bookshops twelve months later. Wyndham’s technocratic, hostile by disposition, and, convinced
schema was too familiar: small town is invaded; they are the supreme species, are relentlessly driven
friendly authorities are outclassed; emotionless aliens to destroy all others. They are also physically indisblend in, are identical, have a group mind, and con- tinguishable, lack individual identities, and each
trol villagers mentally. The former leader of English alien is armed with a lethal weapon it uses withcatastrophe fiction had adopted an American-style out compunction. These extraterrestrials lack love,
Cold War format.
empathy and positive human emotions: at one point
a Dalek tells the travellers that pity is a sentiment its
hildren’s television in Britain changed on race does not possess.
December 21, 1963. That evening the first
Recalling Hitler’s speeches heard over radio
instalment was broadcast of a seven-episode adven- broadcasts, Nation decided the aliens should have
ture in Doctor Who, a new weekly BBC children’s harsh metallic-sounding voices. He also insisted
drama: and the story employed many motifs already that, at moments, they would call in excited uniidentified. Using a vehicle that enables them to son, “Destroy!” or “Exterminate!”, much like Nazi
journey across time and space, the lead characters or Soviet zealots chanting slogans at party rallies.
land on an alien planet that seems dead. The soil Finally, the writer gave the ruthless creatures an
T
C
87
East European-sounding name, “Dalek”.
Due to an overwhelming positive response from
audiences, the BBC commissioned Terry Nation to
write another Dalek story for Doctor Who’s second
season. This time he employed further features of
Cold War catastrophe fiction, moving the story’s
focus now to domestic invasion by a frightening
enemy. Nation had the travellers go into a future
where the militaristic Daleks have conquered
Earth. London is in ruins, traumatised Britons are
enslaved, and the Daleks rule by using a uniformed
force of unfeeling “Robomen”. These are captured
members of a resistance movement who have been
brainwashed—the Daleks employ mind-control to
turn rebellious individuals into an army of compliant soldiers. Most humans are corralled into labour
camps, with the Daleks summarily killing those too
weak or ill to work.
E
ven as British television embraced catastrophe
fiction, popularising the Cold War form across
the broadest of audiences, a sea change was under
way. In recent years novelists including Brian Aldiss,
Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard and the American
Robert Bloch had voiced mounting annoyance with
the literary situation. Besides disputing the consignment of much speculative writing to the “science
fiction” label (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was
classified as SF), they loathed the formulaic, escapist conservatism of that genre. Especially targeted
were the mainstream novels of Robert Heinlein,
Isaac Asimov and others, which—having thinkers and scientists serve military interests—depicted
civilisation’s future as a benign, implicitly American
space empire. And certain writers would not stomach that.
J.G. Ballard’s speculative oeuvre commenced
with three novels. The Drowned World (1962) takes
place in a European metropolis half-submerged
under a tropical lagoon; The Burning World (1964)
begins and ends in a modern city laid waste by
encroaching desert; The Crystal World (1966) focuses
on a mining settlement in equatorial jungle which
is metamorphosing into iridescent crystals. These
catastrophe fictions are not at all, as is now customarily claimed, warnings-cum-predictions of climate
change. Ballard’s stated intentions were fixed on
what happens to mankind psychologically—to how
we think, our process of cognition—when our cultural environment, the lived-in world of civil society, is taken away.
It is seventy years into the future in The Drowned
World, and Europe has been abandoned. Puzzling
rises in solar activity have rendered much of the
overheated planet unfavourable to mammals. With
the oceans rising, the diminishing population of
88
the northern hemisphere has relocated decades ago
to Greenland and Siberia. Human extinction is a
possibility.
Robert Kerans is on a technical team visiting
an unidentified city to conduct a periodic survey.
Much of the metropolis has vanished. Residential
and industrial suburbs are lost under murky tides
of silt, while insects, reptiles and amphibians thrive
in the profuse jungle that has taken hold around
decaying buildings in the business districts. Sailback lizards bask in the sun atop mouldering concrete towers, mosquitoes the size of dragonflies flit
through the shade of giant ferns, crocodiles swim
along deep channels that once were bustling streets.
Catastrophe is not imminent: it happened two generations ago. This is a world without flags. Powerful
nations are barely a memory.
Kerans ponders whether to return to Greenland
or stay in the jungle as the survey nears completion. He stalls a decision by delay, then sabotage.
This is needless, because, watching those around
him—they regress into tribal violence and ritual—he comes to see a futility in human actions.
Kerans himself is listless. He is not melancholy or
depressed: instead his problem is existential, for
Kerans suffers ennui, as if life has worn out. He also
feels his mental architecture shifting, as if he is on
“a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic,
where old categories of thought would merely be an
encumbrance”. Kerans takes a boat and heads south
through sun-hammered swamps. As weeks pass he
seemingly reverts to a pre-hominid way of construing the jungle. The tale ends with Kerans choosing
to embrace, not defy, oncoming annihilation.
There is an absorbing complexity to Kerans.
Ballard crafted him using aspects of Albert Camus’s
fiction, the controversial psychiatric theories of
R.D. Laing, as well as Ballard’s own experiences
in Japanese internment during the war years (later
depicted in his roman à clef Empire of the Sun). His
internment especially affected his outlook, giving
insights into how modern people respond to the
removal of a supportive environment, of what the
human creature is capable of; and it left him with an
awareness of the fragility of society, how easily civilisation might fall. This was the viewpoint underpinning The Drowned World, The Burning World and
The Crystal World. Here was a vision of imagined
catastrophe, English critics agreed, that disturbingly
symbolised the industrial and imperial decline of
the West.
Dr Christopher Heathcote wrote on Jacques Tati’s Mon
Oncle in the June issue. A footnoted version of this
month’s article appears on Quadrant Online.
If Good News Sold Newspapers
The Red Napoleon
If good news sold newspapers
murder would make page 3
as headlines shouted VLAD PUTIN
HAD TWO BLINTZES TODAY WITH TEA
Bulletin Just In: THE SUN
IS PERFECTLY ROUND AGAIN
paparazzi would photograph lovers
holding hands along the Seine
Politics compressed as an insert
in the middle and never repeated
or recycled as wrapping for fish & chips
for any who much cared to read it
the serial killers and rapists
expensive bottles of Grange
would never even rate a banner
just a box on the crosswords page
pasty-faced brokers and businessmen
with ponzi schemes and lies
would go after the cartoon strips
or be buried in Classifieds
or his own preferred name for himself
General of Peace Võ Nguyên Giáp
the grand brother of Uncle Ho’s army
now imagine poetry as Breaking News!
led Viet Minh guerillas
on Page One: Chagall and Boyd
against Japanese invaders during WWII
if good news sold newspapers
against French against Americans
we’d all be less paranoid.
compared to Cyrus the Great
Chandragupta of India studied Mao
Joe Dolce
applied lessons to anti-colonialist struggle
communism grafted onto a national rootstock
educated in law taught history worked as a journalist
enjoyed Goethe Shakespeare Tolstoy
some popular quotes:
the enemy does not possess the psychological
and physical means to fight a long drawn out war
father arrested by French and died in prison
wife arrested by French and died in prison
re-married—five children
Americans think: pawns of government
Vietnamese think: united with government
General Giáp had a fiery temper a dandy
dressed in white suit vs Ho car-tire sandals & shorts
was criticized repeatedly for excessive verbosity of writing style
no formal military training he joked
I attended the academy of the bush
invented the Ho Chi Minh trail
died October 4th 2013
102 years of age.
89
M ich a el G iffin
The Next Creation
Story, Perhaps
I
discovered Margaret Atwood not long after
she’d won the Booker Prize for The Blind
Assassin (2000), got hooked, and began reading
her backwards: Alias Grace (1996), The Robber Bride
(1993), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985),
all the way back to The Edible Woman (1969). I sense
a shift with The Handmaid’s Tale, into what some
might call her literary maturity, coinciding with her
middle age. After the shift, she began pushing her
literary boundaries. Each subsequent novel is different. Each is engaged with a bigger picture: where we
came from, what we’re doing now, where we might
be heading, what might happen if we’re not careful,
and, with MaddAddam (2013), what might happen
after that. She keeps going. She’s unpredictable.
There are always surprises. In The Blind Assassin,
for example, the elder protagonist Iris—the muscle
controlling the eye; the messenger of the gods—
chose “between classicism and romanticism” in her
youth, preferring “to be upright and contained—an
urn in daylight”, while her younger sister Laura
becomes a romantic prototype and all that implies
canonically. The chronology is correct, as neoclassicism comes before romanticism, and both are “like
bookends” framing Alex Thomas, the revolutionary
face of modernity. But Atwood subverts the canonical roles of neoclassicism and romanticism, in ways
easily overlooked.
Iris turns out to be different from a neoclassical
prototype. She had the clandestine affair with the
revolutionary Alex, not her romantic sister. She wrote
the novel within the novel, famously attributed to
Laura. She chose anonymity and allowed history to
regard Laura as a tragic heroine. So her true identity
remains a mystery. Conversely, Laura’s true identity
also remains a mystery. She commits suicide because
of an excess of feeling—how romantic!—while Iris
lives on to narrate their story, which is also Canada’s
story, which only Iris has the strength to tell.
In Alias Grace there’s also this mystery of female
identity, based on a true story, brilliantly described
but never solved. Grace was one of the most notorious
90
Canadian women of the 1840s, convicted of murder
at the age of sixteen. As public opinion was divided
from the start, her death sentence was commuted to
life imprisonment, and during her long incarceration
she continued to polarise public opinion. Was she
“a female fiend and temptress, the instigator of the
crime” or “an unwilling victim, forced to keep silent”
by threats from her co-accused for fear of her own
life? As attitudes towards Grace reflected an ambiguity about women, Atwood had nothing to work
from, when attempting to reconstruct the historical
Grace, apart from contemporary constructions of her
identity.
Like all the novels of Atwood’s literary maturity,
Alias Grace functions on several levels, from seemingly simple ideas to deceptively complex art. Grace’s
aliases are traceable to the Hegelian master–servant
dialectic, grounded as it is in the Greek myths of
rationality and irrationality, which belong to Plato’s
model of mind in The Republic (c. 380 BC). One alias
allows Grace to be a servant embodying the heart’s
noble feeling. Another allows her to be a servant
embodying the lower abdomen’s base appetite. As
she’ll never be allowed that other Platonic–Hegelian
alias, a master with a rational mind, where’s the real
Grace on this Madonna–Whore spectrum?
A
round the time The Blind Assassin appeared,
Atwood gave the Empson Lectures at
Cambridge University, later published as Negotiating
with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002). This is
where we learn about her early influences, in the
1940s and 1950s, and how she’s evolved as a writer.
Comparisons between Canada and Australia can
be made, here, given their similar colonial relationships with Britain and their post-colonial trajectories. She studied literature as an undergraduate at
Toronto University and a postgraduate at Radcliffe
College. She’s deeply familiar with literary genres and has a broad and impressive knowledge of
the sacred canon, the classics, the humanities, the
sciences, and the history of ideas, all of which she
The Next Creation Story, Perhaps
wears lightly and gracefully.
Chapter 1 provides the most autobiography and
describes the range of Atwood’s references, both of
which are interconnected, as writers adopt the terms
of their discourse early in their lives. Chapter 2 deals
with the post-romantic writer’s double consciousness, as she assumes we’re still living in romanticism’s shadow. Chapter 3 discusses the struggle
between the gods of art and those of commerce,
which confronts every writer who considers herself
an artist. Chapter 4 considers the writer as illusionist, artificer, and participant in social and political power. Chapter 5 probes the eternal triangle of
writer, text and reader. Chapter 6 is about the dark
and winding ways of the narrative journey.
In her light-hearted way, Atwood keeps returning to the eternal triangle of writer, text and reader,
which could have been a treatise on its own, about
hermeneutical theory, specifically about the hermeneutical circle. She also keeps returning to the
shadow of romanticism, and could have written a
treatise about that, also, since the shadow has determined how many authors understand themselves
and how many readers understand them. She clearly
recognises the myriad of obvious and not-so-obvious
ways in which post-romantic literature (and postromantic criticism) has been critical of pre-romantic
mimesis and taken its cues from romanticism’s critique of neoclassicism. Negotiating the pitfalls of
that critique explains why she subverts the canonical roles of neoclassicism and romanticism, has Iris
telling Canada’s story, writing the story within the
story, and suggests Laura couldn’t have done either.
Atwood knows that, while her romantic predecessors were allowed to claim a special status, her
contemporaries are expected to behave differently,
which is why she’s wary of the “drastic mythologies” of the author as self-dedicated “priestess of
the imagination” devoted to creating a “perfect
work”. But even she admits: “In truth, if you do not
acknowledge at least some loyalty to this ideal you
are unlikely to achieve more than mediocrity, and
perhaps a glaring insignificance.” Clearly, then, she
believes in a special kind of story, an important story,
hidden, which the author struggles to bring into the
open. For example, she tells the story of Gilgamesh,
the first shaman and author:
He wants the secret of life and death, he goes
through hell, he comes back, but he hasn’t got
immortality, all he’s got is two stories—the
one about his trip, and the other about the
flood. So the only thing he really brings back
with him is a couple of stories. Then he’s really,
really tired, and then he writes the whole thing
down on a stone.
Who’s meant to read this important story?
Atwood tells us there’s an implied reader, an ideal
reader, for whom she’s writing, who exists on a continuum somewhere between a real person in her life
and God, who commands her to write but refuses
her the security of knowing the certainty of the
command.
t
he dawn of the new millennium found Atwood
entering her sixties; approaching an age where
many of us slow down, and rest on our laurels,
of which she’d already attained more than most
novelists. Instead, she kept pushing her literary
boundaries. She decided Homer’s Odyssey needed
to be rewritten from a different perspective, since
the canonical story doesn’t hold water, as there are
too many inconsistencies. Operating on the principle that mythic material was originally oral, local,
and would have been told one way in one place and
differently in another, she used other material—
non-canonical material—to re-tell the story from
Penelope’s perspective. In The Penelopiad (2005),
she used the details of Penelope’s parentage, her
early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumours
about her, to answer a question any close reading of
The Odyssey must pose: What was Penelope really
up to?
In Moral Disorder (2006) we find short stories,
breath-taking and diverse, some of which add up to
a novella about a couple, Nell and Tig, at different
stages of their lives, as they deal with the ironies
and ambiguities of their country life, city life, current families, ex-partners, ageing parents and ageing
selves. The dark but hilarious story of their attempt
to reproduce a bucolic life on a rented farm, “Moral
Disorder”, begins with an owl teaching her young to
hunt. They buy twelve ducklings for their pond, and
watch the owl carry off one duckling a day—to be
rent, shared and gobbled down—an ominous sign of
things to come. Then there’s “My Last Duchess”, a
brilliant and complex story about Browning’s poem,
about when and why it was taught, about the teacher
who taught it, and about two students who break up
after arguing over its meaning.
In The Door (2007) we find poetry, awe-inspiring and dissimilar, which reminds us of why Plato
banned the poets from his ideal republic; because
of the difference between poetry and philosophy,
between the head (neoclassical reason) and the heart
(romantic feeling). The rhetorical principle here,
essential to the Platonic model of mind, is that the
heart can easily be corrupted by base appetite (the
lower abdomen), so feeling is risky. In Negotiating
with the Dead, Atwood describes this risk, central
to the post-romantic writer’s double consciousness,
creating as they do within romanticism’s shadow. In
91
The Door we see, throughout her poetry, evidence of
this doublement or doubting self or doppelgänger, as
a Jekyll and Hyde persona, as a Through the Looking
Glass kind of world. Sometimes there are victims,
sometimes there are oppressors. Mostly these turn
out to be different aspects of the same characters.
Then there are Atwood’s excursions into prescient social commentary, such as her Massey Lectures,
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008),
clairvoyantly delivered as the global financial crisis
was unfolding. In “Ancient Balances”, she discusses
the history of our human sense of fair exchange
and what constitutes unfair exchange. In “Debt and
Sin”, she explores different translations of the Lord’s
Prayer and considers whether “forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors” is the same as “forgive
us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass
against us”. In “Debt as Plot”, she suggests there can
be no debt without narrative as a way of remembering it. In “The Shadow Side”, she addresses the
question: What happens when people don’t, can’t, or
won’t pay their debts? In “Payback”, she explores the
many kinds of debt that have to be paid back, moral
and ecological as well as financial.
Then there’s Atwood’s explanation of where
she’s heading—In Other Worlds: SF and the Human
Imagination (2011)—which no longer seems farfetched. The SF means “speculative fiction” not “science fiction”, as she confesses to no longer knowing
what the latter means. There’s a trajectory here, or
perhaps an entanglement, which originated in her
youth, continued in her unfinished PhD thesis, and
remained an undercurrent throughout her literary
career. The undercurrent has now become a current,
but not all readers want to ride the current with her.
She’s not the fulfiller of their desires. She must be
faithful to her vocation as an author. And for every
reader she’s lost to her speculative fiction she’s collected others.
So we come, finally, to the MaddAddam Trilogy.
A
s Oryx and Crake (2003) begins, SnowmanJimmy is living in a tree by the seashore.
He believes he’s the last human alive after a global pandemic. The Crakers live nearby, a gentle
humanoid species bioengineered by Glenn-Crake,
Snowman-Jimmy’s one-time best friend and rival
for his beloved, the beautiful and enigmatic Oryx.
In Atwood’s words:
The Crakers are free from sexual jealousy, greed,
clothing, and the need for insect repellent and
animal protein—all the factors Crake believed
had caused not only the misery of the human
race but also the degradation of the planet. The
Crakers mate seasonally, when parts of them
92
turn blue. Crake tried to rid them of symbolic
thinking and music, but they have an eerie
singing style all their own and have developed
a religion, with Crake as their creator, Oryx as
mistress of the animals, and Snowman as their
reluctant prophet. It is he who has led them out
of the high-tech Paradice dome where they were
made to their present home beside the ocean.
In his pre-pandemic life, Snowman-Jimmy’s
world was divided into the Compounds—fortified
Corporations through which a technocratic elite
control society—and the “pleeblands” outside the
Compounds, where non-elite society live, shop and
scam in their slums, suburbs and malls.
Snowman-Jimmy first met Glenn-Crake at high
school, where they bond over internet porn and complex online games. They lose touch when GlennCrake, who’s got neoclassical attributes (reason), is
accepted at the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute,
while the less intellectually endowed Jimmy, who’s
got romantic attributes (feeling), makes do at the
shabby Martha Graham Academy of Liberal Arts.
When they reconnect years later, Crake is in charge
of Paradice dome, where he’s gene-splicing the
Crakers. At the same time, he’s developing a pill,
BlyssPluss, which promises sexual ecstasy, birth
control and prolonged youth, but also contains a
hidden ingredient, which creates the pandemic
that erases humanity. In the resulting chaos, Oryx
and Glenn-Crake perish, leaving Snowman-Jimmy
alone with the Crakers.
What was Glenn-Crake’s motive for creating the
Crakers and developing the virus, which he puts
into a sex pill, which causes the pandemic? While
parental estrangement and a parallel misanthropy
may be important motives, so is his extreme rationalism. He believes anything spiritual is meaningless.
God is simply a brain mutation caused by the FoxP2
gene, which gave us language and allows birds to
sing, but this mutation hasn’t done us any good.
Also, while he created the virus and placed it in the
sex pill, he didn’t create the market for BlyssPluss,
and he didn’t force anyone to take it. His response
to Atwood’s dystopia, which he didn’t create, and
isn’t responsible for, is to “kill the king”, as in chess,
understood here as the “technological connections”
that gave him a god-like power.
One observation ought to be made, which I’ve
never heard discussed, or read in reviews. It’s to
do with Oryx’s relationship with her past and her
present. Atwood provides us with a detailed story of
her childhood, in a remote and impoverished part
of Asia, and the way her family sold her into sexual
slavery, and her life as a sex slave. That story would
once have been considered harrowing and not long
ago an edifice of victimhood would have been constructed around it. Clearly, Snowman-Jimmy and
Glenn-Crake have different kinds of relationships
with Oryx. They do different things to her and want
different things from her. She responds to each of
them differently. Her true identity, however—if
any fictional character can be said to have a true
identity—is autonomous. When Snowman-Jimmy
learns about her past, he wants to construct a myth
of victimhood around her, but she never buys into
that myth.
captured by a sadistic cannibal Painballer.
Several years before the pandemic, the Gardeners
had rescued Toby from the same Painballer, who’d
been using her as a sex slave and was about to kill
her and eat a few choice bits (apparently Painballers
are fond of their dead slaves’ kidneys). Over the
years, Toby gradually becomes indispensable to the
Gardeners, and is elevated to the status of elder,
although she accepts her elevation unwillingly, as she’s
unsure of her commitment to the sect’s beliefs. She’s
forced to leave the Gardeners, once the Painballer
discovers and pursues her. She’s given a new physical
n The Year of the Flood (2009), which takes place identity and finds work in a luxury spa for women,
during the same timeframe as Oryx and Crake, the eponymously named AnooYoo. She survives the panfocus is on the God’s Gardeners, a green sect which demic, quarantined in the spa. After several months
reconciles science and religion while prophesying of isolation, she discovers Ren on her doorstep, near
the man-made pandemic. Their dilemma is whether death, and nurses her back to health, but they’re also
to remain pacifists, who pray and forgive their ene- driven by necessity to leave the deserted spa, to seek
mies, or become militants who pray
others, and to try to save Amanda
and try to stop the pandemic. The
from the Painballer.
prevailing view, promoted by their
The different perspectives of Ren
he’s not the
charismatic celibate leader, Adam
and Toby are best read alongside the
fulfiller of her
One, is to remain pacifists, since
perspectives of other female promeeting threat with threat would
readers’ desires. She tagonists in Atwood’s earlier novviolate their integrity. Significant
els. They’re on a journey into their
must be faithful
opposition comes from one of the
freedom and their constraint. Who’s
to her vocation as
male elders, the charismatic nonout there? Can they save Amanda?
celibate Zeb, who favours strategic
Or
will they need to be saved theman author. And
militancy and becomes a kind of
selves? The omniscient narrator
for every reader
freedom fighter. When their intelmakes a poignant observation, near
ligence suggests the pandemic is
the end of the novel, just as Toby
she’s lost to her
approaching, sides are taken. What
feels certain she and Ren are about
speculative fiction
does Atwood favour: Adam One’s
to die: “The Human moral keyboard
she’s collected others. is limited, Adam One used to say:
pacifism or Zeb’s militancy? We
don’t know, as she’s even-handed,
there’s nothing you can play on it
and always pragmatic.
that hasn’t been played before. And,
The novel has two female protagonists, Ren my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its
and Toby, whose different perspectives dominate lower notes.” But they don’t die, at least not then;
the story, along with Adam One’s homilies, and although how long they can survive is another story,
the many magnificent hymns that narrate the which Atwood tells in the next and last volume.
Gardener’s theology. (There’s a CD you can buy,
n MaddAddam (2013), we have something
Hymns of the God’s Gardeners, which I play all the
different, not the end of the world but a new
time. My favourite hymn is “Let me not be proud”.)
Ren was brought to the Gardeners as a young girl. beginning. The novel’s economy is remarkable, as
She befriends an orphan, Amanda, and they grow Atwood leaves out anything non-essential. Her
up with each other, assimilating Gardener values, ideas are large but her scale is small, since she’s
but also discover a shared potential for treachery: dealing with remnants. The surviving bad guys
“How easy it is, treachery,” Ren reflects later, “You are represented by two Painballers, off-stage most
just slide into it.” She’s eventually forced to leave of the time. The surviving good guys are made
the sect, and, after graduating from a liberal arts up of a few former God’s Gardeners, a dozen or
college, she becomes a trapeze dancer in a high- so MaddAddamites, and the romantic Snowmanend sex club, Scales and Tails, where she survives Jimmy, who’s seriously ill and delirious for most of
the pandemic, while locked away in quarantine for the novel. Apart from these humans, there are the
several months. Amanda eventually rescues her from genetically-modified humanoids, the geneticallyquarantine, but they’re forced to leave the deserted modified flora and fauna, and the permanentlyclub, in search of other survivors, and they’re soon altered ecosystem quietly absorbing the ruins of
I
S
I
93
what passed for civilisation before the pandemic.
In case we hadn’t noticed, this is a redemption
story, subversive but salvific, in the tradition of
North American religious allegory. If it’s best not
to make too much of that observation, don’t dismiss it either. Atwood’s point is that salvation is a
chameleon. It changes colour to blend in with its
surroundings. So it’s harder to see and more difficult
to kill.
I love the way Atwood saves Toby, salvages the
religious vision of the God’s Gardeners, and gives
her the central role of narrating the next creation
story, which the romantic Snowman-Jimmy couldn’t
have narrated. That creation story is what philologists and anthropologists call Theogonic, since the
ages of the more recent creation stories—of the
Tragic Hero, of the Exiled Soul, of Adam—are well
and truly over; however, if she invents (or re-invents)
this Theogony, it’s composed of her human experience. She’s simply making sense of that experience,
putting it into an oral form, so it can be passed on.
I also love the way Atwood develops the Toby and
Zeb relationship, which is easier to understand if
you’ve been keeping up with relationships in her
earlier novels, with Iris and her men, with Grace
and her men, with all women and all men, each of
which has elements of pain about them.
Unpredictable things happen, when humans
attempt to usurp the gods, or God, or try to be anything more than human. One of the most powerful
and poignant moments in the novel, for me, was
when the malevolent, powerful pigoons, the genetically-modified pigs, went from being enemies to
allies, and spoke to the humans through a young
Craker named Blackbeard. They say they are concerned about their future. They want the killing of
their species to stop. We can no longer call this an
appeal to a common humanity, since it’s become
something else, something different. I also love the
way Atwood subverts Crake’s legacy. We know he
was a genius, in an über kind of way, but even über
genius has its limits. Did he think he could predict the form his legacy would take and control how
it would evolve? How much of this future did he
intend?
Did Crake intend to control his Crakers from
beyond the grave? Who they were? Who they could
become? Did he know they’d go on to develop their
language and evolve their religion through Toby and
Blackbeard? Did he know they’d eventually interbreed with the remnants of the God’s Gardeners and
the remaining MaddAddamites? The latter helped
to genetically-design the Crakers, in Paradice dome,
before Crake launched the pandemic. Did they have
any idea they’d eventually become the genetic experi94
ment, outside the dome, after the pandemic? While
we can only speculate about Atwood’s speculation,
one basic principle is certain, which isn’t speculative, since Atwood constantly reminds us of its reality. Her speculative future is our real past and our
real present, as she says in her acknowledgments:
“Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does
not include any technologies or biobeings that do
not already exist, are not under construction, or are
not possible in theory.”
W
here will Atwood take us next? Actually,
she’s in the middle of another project,
Positron, being published in instalments, a chapter at a time, like those nineteenth-century serialisations. It’s a clever idea—publishing e-book
instalments as a prelude to the final book—which
harnesses her interest in new technologies. Like her
LongPen, a remote signing device which allows her
to autograph books, anywhere in the world, during
an internet conversation with her fans. As with any
innovative technology, LongPen had its teething
problems, as has the innovative way of publishing
Positron. Those serialising Victorian authors lived
in a simpler world. They wrote for a single print
medium. They had regular deadlines which helped
them focus. There are many media now, and Positron
has obviously been competing with Atwood’s other
priorities. It’s frustrating waiting for instalments to
appear, irregularly, and I’ve already forgotten the
previous instalments.
I’ll wait, though, because I’m a loyal fan, regardless of whether I’m wearing my public hat, academic
hat, or priestly hat. This last hat, a biretta, is interesting, as far as Atwood’s speculative fiction is concerned, as many assume I should object to her in some
way, since isn’t she supposed to oppose everything
Christianity stands for? We don’t know whether she
does or doesn’t. As it happens, my parish includes
several Atwood fans, some of whom teach English
in Christian high schools, and we’re happy to
include her within the landscape of Christianity as
we understand it. It isn’t that we’re trying to claim
her extraordinary vision for ourselves. It’s more that
her extraordinary vision doesn’t necessarily exclude
Christianity, although many of her readers probably
wish it did. Sometimes, in fact, during Benediction,
while kneeling at the altar rails, I feel her presence,
and God’s presence, smiling at me.
Michael Giffin is a priest in the Anglican diocese
of Sydney. He also wrote on Margaret Atwood
in the April 2010 issue. Margaret Atwood’s latest
anthology of short stories, Stone Mattress, was
released in September.
My Country
Am I gay? said the Oz
or am I a lazy boy?
Do you believe, he was asked.
Do you really believe beyond
the evidence of your eyes
beyond your smell
beyond what you hear or read
beyond even your memory or through mind?
Do you believe in us, Oz?
she was asked again
(for he was also she)
if you cannot we
will not let you in.
A Bunch of Flowers for Saint Valentine’s Day
You must say yes to this
simple dictation test though
Sweet breath of Heaven.
we know this is not your first
You have written again in Italian
language—you must agree
the beloved has no gender role
to compassion and equity
nor race nor age nor woolly hole.
that we are all complete
it was a rider riding by
this tongue in which we speak
who sat with me one wet July
is absolutely quite unique.
and wept with me in the deepest dark
This black book contains
and lay with me through the florid night.
our history.
Though I will agree I saw your face
Read it carefully
last
night upon the curtain lace.
there are things to which
The billabong was dry as dust
you must agree.
the moon was swelled with fleshy lust.
We stole the children.
We put mates first ... and Oz,
Beloved begone, you murder me
we were dogs
but stay tonight a little while.
in this china shop.
Come to my bed you lusty girl
Yet we learned to burn in alcohol
let me whisper in your fur.
our discriminating minds.
We huddled in the outback towns
Patrick McCauley
drinking cheap red wine.
We cringed in our banishment
like strangers in another land.
Do you believe, Oz?
that we are very very
very bad.
For if you do we’ll let you in
but only if you agree to live in cities by the sea.
95
N eil M c D ona ld
A Dark
Operatic Triumph
A
film version of a great opera that realises
its creators’ intentions better than any staging has ever done, even in the composer’s
lifetime? Ridiculous! Inconceivable! Yes, Franco
Zeffirelli’s Otello is great film-making, but the
director left out Desdemona’s great aria before the
murder because it held up the action; that’s film for
you. These objections to the great Franco are worth
discussing in the light of the extensive film records
that now exist of his stage productions.
In this case the opera is Richard Strauss’s Salome,
and the film is the 1974 German television production directed by Götz Friedrich. What is more, the
opinion that Strauss’s vision had been realised was
that of Karl Böhm, who knew the composer well,
and was in the form of a compliment to Teresa
Stratas, who played Salome. The legend of this opera
film has been around since it was first made and
transmitted. It was highly praised by the German
critics and some American writers, but for years the
film was impossible to see in the medium for which
it was intended—television. Now at last Unitel and
Deutsche Grammophon have released Salome on
DVD with the sound enhanced beyond anything
that could be transmitted in the 1970s. This is an
extraordinary enrichment because the orchestra
used for the film was the Vienna Philharmonic at
the time Leonard Bernstein was cajoling them into
creating his great Mahler interpretations; and of
course the conductor was Karl Böhm.
Salome began life as an intense play in French
by Oscar Wilde. It was originally to be included in
Sarah Bernhardt’s 1892 season in London, but was
refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain because
at the time it was illegal to depict biblical characters
on stage. It was first produced in Paris by Bernhardt
in 1896 when Wilde was in jail. The play was translated into German by Hedwig Lachmann and produced by Max Reinhardt. Richard Strauss saw it in
1902 at Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin and
decided not to go back to the original French but
to use the Lachmann translation as the basis for
96
his libretto. Reading the play, it is easy to see why
Strauss believed it would make such good material.
As Wilde observed, the play’s structure is musical,
containing “refrains whose recurring motifs bind it
together like a ballad”.
From the outset there were performance problems. The first Salome, Marie Wittich, refused
to perform the “Dance of the Seven Veils” and a
dancer was substituted. Given the vocal demands
of the role and the statuesque physique of the singers of the era this was often the most tactful solution. Reportedly Dame Joan Hammond reduced an
audience in New Zealand to suppressed laughter
when she courageously tried to both sing the role
and perform the dance. Knowing Dame Joan—one
of the great singing actresses—there is little doubt
she would have been electrifying in the rest of the
performance. And then there were the censors. Not
even Gustav Mahler could get the Vienna censor to
allow the opera to be performed, and to Sir Thomas
Beecham’s annoyance the 1910 Covent Garden performance was “modified”.
Salome is of course intensely erotic—how could
it not be? A virgin, Salome, lusted after by her stepfather, Herod, who is incestuously married to her
mother, Herodias, desires John the Baptist (named
Jochanaan in the opera). Rejected by the prophet,
she dances before Herod so she can demand the
head of Jochanaan. Strauss’s music is some of the
most refinedly sexual ever written.
On stage the opera, lasting for little more than
ninety minutes, can have an overwhelming impact.
But its extraordinarily difficult demands on performers can result in ignominious failure. Clearly
the 1974 television production was intended to avoid
the staging problems and to be definitive. They had
Karl Böhm, but what about Salome? So often the
singers who could do justice to the score had to use
all their acting ability to create an illusion of youth
and beauty. Birgit Nilsson, Marjorie Lawrence and
Joan Hammond were handsome women who could
dominate a stage with ease, but physically they had
A Dark Operatic Triumph
difficulty impersonating a virginal seductress. In
1974 Teresa Stratas—the baby Callas (she is only five
feet tall)—was at the peak of her beauty, in good
voice and a superb actress. Her high lyric soprano
might not work on stage in Salome, but was very
effective in a recording studio supported by artists
such as Hans Beirer, a wonderfully effete Herod,
Astrid Varnay, splendidly decayed as Herodias, and
Bernd Weikl, an imposing Jochanaan.
Even though in 1974 Friedrich was a famous
opera director noted for his Marxist (but emphatically not communist) interpretations of Wagner,
there is not a trace of a stage grouping in sight.
Performers, especially Stratas, are isolated in the
frame. There are beautifully timed reaction shots;
the mobile camera follows Salome’s serpentine
movements as she crawls around the set. Two- and
three-shots are tightly framed; an over-shoulder
set-up lets us see the moon. The singing is not lipsynched but sung again to the playback, restoring
some of the immediacy of live performance. As
a result the viewer is virtually compelled to concentrate on the drama, the words and, above all,
the music. For those needing subtitles, as I did,
there is a bonus. Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred
Douglas translated the French of the original into
English and it is this version that seems to have
been employed for the titles.
The dance is easier to execute on film than in
the theatre, but Stratas had considerable grace and
in choreographer Robert Cohan’s hands all the sinister eroticism of the music is visualised. There is
a hint of a bare shoulder, then a face beneath the
veils, culminating in a close-up as Salome unpins
her hair. Up until then Stratas has worn a jewelled
cap, giving her a petulantly childlike appearance.
Now Salome has become a terrible woman. As the
film was made for television she does not lie naked
at Herod’s feet, but the implied sexuality is still
very disturbing. For the appalling final aria, only at
times it seems does Friedrich have Stratas sing to a
model of Jochanaan’s head; mostly on screen it is an
ambiguously photographed Bernd Weikl. Together
with Stratas’s superlative vocal acting, this brings
alive all the shifts in Wilde’s text and Strauss’s
score—the anger, the passion and the remorse.
The great strength of Friedrich’s film is that it is
supremely an interpretation—an achievement that
is even more important now, given the excesses of
so many modern directors.
Candyman
It was the cruel Candyman
Who came and took my child away.
He locked her in his transit van
And drove her from the joy of day
Into a sad and seeling night.
No moon or stars were in the sky,
He needed none, his eyes were bright,
They lent the light to steer him by.
His horrid hair was lank as rope,
And cold as fish his hangman’s hands.
He had no faith, he had no hope,
His life had run into the sand.
So scoured of humankindness, wild
With withering, he took my child.
Pitiless as a metronome,
He wrenched my darling from her home
To lie in some unfathomed combe.
But I will live, if God is good,
To flay his flesh and drink his blood
And grind his bones into the dust,
For that is right and that is just.
John Whitworth
97
Story
Archaeology
M or r is L ur ie
I
t’s of no consequence, says the stranger on the plane, but was your wife any
pleasure in bed?
We haven’t spoken before.
Needless.
His miniature is akvavit.
We did it in the bathroom. I won’t go into the whole history but I can tell you
that bathroom was small. One person in there was uncomfortable. Two was a risk.
It was an old house and of course they didn’t wash then the way we do now, enjoyed
a good build-up of honest sweat before they took to the bath. Coalminer’s pleasure.
Weekly scrub. And that was a proper bath too, not some steamy shower fogging up the
whole place, your exhaust fan be buggered, don’t think we didn’t try it, plumbers and
electricians every five minutes, nothing could cope. Which included as well, I should
mention, moved in by some previous owner from originally out the back, the house
jakes. Cheers.
On the aisle.
Full flight.
His lowered loaded tray.
In point of fact, actually, there was a second one as well, when we bought the place,
where the verandah’d been made into a sunroom, on the end of that, which wasn’t a
bad arrangement either until a neighbour’s kid paid the carpet in there a visit which
accelerated us in the direction we were thinking of anyhow, or she was, more plumbers,
more electricians, gave the son a bigger room. You got kids yourself?
Photographs now?
The flipped-open wallet?
Handed proudly across?
Well, I won’t go into the whole history but she was taking a shower. Dinnertime.
Kids starving. I was reading a book. John le Carre, as a matter of fact. Pure horseshit,
of course, but as my father used to say, no horseshit, no radishes, such is the garden of
life. Good man. Except I wasn’t really reading, as you’ve no doubt guessed. Otherwise,
what are we talking about here, eh, hombre? Just between you and me.
The knowing elbow?
The nudge?
A wink?
So let’s say that was the first time. Followed by a second time. In perpetration of
human act, as previously. Likewise each subsequent and successive visit or venture or
occasion or call it as you will. I should draw you the exact dimensions of that bathroom,
give you a better idea. With the kids, let me add in Dickensian detail, through the thin
door just outside.
98
Story
Dickens?
Le Carre?
Who next?
You get the picture? You starting to get the picture? You need the frame around
it as well? Because if it wasn’t there it wasn’t anywhere. And I’m not talking shyness,
coyness, strict religious upbringing, whatever the hell that is. Or that the pleasure was
all mine except it wasn’t any pleasure. Comprende? Mud in your eye.
His somewhat vexed.
Unanticipated honesty?
Shouldn’t have asked?
What detectives we have to be. Who wrote that? Something vaguely stirs. Whatever.
It’s of no consequence. The mad are always with us, like the rich. Akvavit. Like bad
armpit. This way and that way, how life forces us. Not to go into the whole history. The
deed was done.
Hergesheimer is writing a novel. His tools are archaeologist’s pick and shovel, dustpan,
tweezers, a camel-hair finest brush. His magnifier folds down to fit in a pocket, the
long-handled Sherlock Holmes number when he poses for photographs, promotion,
publicity, the back of the book. He has roped off his area, his territory, his site or dig.
Volunteers he doesn’t need. Flags and notices, in four diagrammatic languages, warn
the wary away. Carefully, carefully, a cake crumb, a shard of saucer, a fragment of
fossilized froth, a teased-out tassel of talk by other or self-spoken, an edge, an outline,
a further corner comes revealed.
Funny, but I keep thinking about those plumbers. Well, there were two. The first put
in that fan that was worse than useless. Complete waste of money. Didn’t do a thing.
It was supposed to work by the pressure of the steam turning the fan or some such
foolishness, no electricity required. Maybe in your bathroom, brother, not in mine.
Skip it and forget it. Napoleon’s army couldn’t have got the steam out of that configured
space. That said, I liked the chap. Straightforward. Didn’t over-charge. Tried his hand
at everything. Jack of all trades. Painted our house. Wired up the laundry. Told me
once he’d never read a book. That was when he saw I had lots. I suppose you need them
for your ideas, he said. Took a day off once to go to the dentist, had to have all his teeth
taken out. Told me it was only the second time he’d been to a dentist in his life. He
lived out in the country so his daughter could have a horse. Not his idea, his wife’s. I
met her once. She dropped in, needed some money. A mini skirt, long black lace-up
boots. Poor bastard. That was a hard ride.
I don’t know where I got the second one from, maybe out of the paper. This was
to remove that toilet I told you about, also some work under the house. Install a
handbasin, stuff like that. A week’s work all told. Maybe he was recommended, I don’t
recall. Curious fellow. Told me he’d spent every spare moment of the past three years
designing and outfitting a mobile home, beds, stove, washing facilities, you name it,
it had it. Set off then, the whole family, wife, four kids, holiday of a lifetime. First
place they stopped, some total stranger admired it, he sold it to him on the spot. What
happened to the holiday? How’d they get home? Don’t ask me. I told you, a curious
fellow. Worked for us for a week, never sent in a bill.
Morris Lurie (1938–2014), who had been suffering from cancer, died in his sleep in Melbourne in
the early morning of October 8. He was a prolific writer of many types of fiction and non-fiction, but
perhaps most notably of short stories, many of which appeared in Quadrant.
99
Story
Norseman
S e a n O’L e a ry
I
’m on a Qantas flight from Darwin to Perth, sitting comfortably in the aisle seat.
The middle seat is vacant and there is a copy of Bill Bryson’s latest travel book
about Australia sitting there. The owner is an English girl about twenty-eight or
thirty, a lawyer she tells me. She’s on holidays and meeting her brother, who is
backpacking around Australia. She wants to know what I’m doing in Perth.
“I have no idea,” I tell her. “I’m going to hole up in a motel for a day or two then catch
up with a friend, Tim. I know him from Sydney but he lives in Perth now.”
“Oh, you free spirit,” she exclaims, which is not what I expected and I’m not sure if
it’s sarcasm or not. We chat for a little while longer. She has come from New York but
lives in London. I tell her I just spent four months on Elcho Island (Galiwinku), an
Aboriginal community about six hundred kilometres east of Darwin in the Arafura Sea.
She doesn’t seem very impressed. I borrow the Bill book to read during the rest of the
flight and that’s the end of the conversation until she says, as we’re getting off,
“You should go to Kings Park. They’re having this big flower show on the weekend.”
And I never see her again.
Waiting for my bags to come out of the carousel drives me crazy. I pick my two small
backpacks off the conveyor belt and coins go everywhere, the small zips have come open.
Oh! Screw it. Too embarrassing to be crawling around on the floor of the terminal,
besides I’m cashed up, for me anyway. Working on Elcho, nothing to spend money on,
no gambling, no drinking and no drugs—just cigarettes. I’ve no idea where to stay so I
go over to this noticeboard on the wall of the terminal. It has all these accommodation
listings. I choose a motel in East Perth for sixty dollars a night and jump in a cab. It’s
a Maori guy at the wheel and we crap on about the All Blacks and he curses the TV
stations because all they show is the AFL.
“I understand your pain, brother,” I say. “I’m a rugby league fiend and I hear they
show the matches at midnight or later unless you have Foxtel.”
He drops me at the motel and says, “Kia ora, brother.”
I’m going to take a couple of days to look around Perth, have a few bets and take in
the sights, get on the train to Fremantle and then it will be Tim time. He’s a big bloke
and a big drinker. The last text I had from him he said he was living with a local girl,
Tracy. Maybe she has a friend?
In the morning I’m pointed in the direction of Murray Street by the beautiful young
receptionist. I head off on foot. Whenever I go to a new place I like to walk everywhere.
I just think it helps you get a better handle on the size and layout of the city or town. I
make it to Murray Street via a nice park and Wellington Street but I keep looking for a
recognisable CBD. I mean like Melbourne or Sydney, but there isn’t any. Hay Street isn’t
much different to Murray Street, but St Georges Terrace shows me a bigger, brighter,
100
Story
more business-like Perth.
I wander back to Murray Street and find a not too busy café opposite the
Commonwealth Bank, in the mall. I call Tim but get voicemail. I let him know where
I’m staying. My coffee arrives and the waiter looks like he must have had a tough night
or a bad morning. Next I go to an internet café, email some friends and check on the
employment site, Seek. I notice a job for a “retail assistant” in a place called Norseman.
What takes my interest is that Norseman is described as remote. I have a plan to go and
live and work in Asia, probably Bangkok or Saigon, but I know I’ll need big savings.
Norseman could be like Elcho, nothing to spend my money on but also a unique take on
WA. I call the number and I get a receptionist who puts me through to this English guy
and an interview is arranged for 12 o’clock at an office in Hay Street.
It’s a Monday in October 2003 and starting to get pretty hot. The air is dry, almost
arid. The football finals are over. Tim calls me as I’m walking back to the motel.
“Maaate, how are you?” he asks loudly. “Welcome to WA, the state of drinking.” I fill
him in on where I’m staying and he says, “I have an RDO. I’ll pick you up.”
“I have an interview at midday. How about 2 p.m.”
“Alright, listen mate, check out of the motel. Come and stay in Cottesloe, at my
place. Hey, guess what. Stuart is over here. He’s working in a hotel in Freo.”
“That’s great. I’ll see you at two. Let me think about the other thing. Gotta go. See
ya.” I don’t want to be tied into anything. If I stay at his place I have to obey the rules of
friendship. I can’t just take off when I like. If I’m over something or had enough to drink
I can’t just take off for home. Stuart’s a good bloke, so I’ll be glad to see him. All three of
us knocked around Bondi together.
The interview is more like booking a ticket in a travel agency than applying for a job.
The Englishman tells me about Norseman. It was a boom mining town that pretty much
went bust, although I did a Google search on it and the mine still operates.
“You can buy a house there now for $10,000. We’ll refund all travelling costs if you
stay more than three months. You catch a train from East Perth to Kalgoorlie and then
take a bus to Norseman. The train I believe is seven to eight hours and another three or
four on the bus.”
“You’re telling me I have the job.”
“If you want it, yes. I can see you’ve moved around a lot from your CV and you have
to do a bit of everything out there. They have a motel but the main employment is in the
roadhouse. Road trains and travellers coming through twenty-four hours a day.” I ask
for twenty-four hours to think about it and he agrees. Sounds like they’re desperate for
workers but that doesn’t put me off. It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere anyway. I have
a change of clothes in my backpack and I call Tim and let him know I’m taking the train
to Fremantle and he agrees and tells me he’ll contact Stuart and we agree to meet at the
Bar Orient on High Street.
The train out to Fremantle is a pretty good service. Around Cottesloe, some three or
four stops from Fremantle, you start getting glimpses of the ocean and then the white
sandy beaches. I like it a lot and wonder about Norseman. An old gold mining town
gone to seed. Or is it? I stroll around Fremantle and it reminds me of Bondi in size and
the village feel it has to it. It’s a modern place with almost the feel of a country town. I
eat at McDonald’s near the beach on an outside table. At a few minutes to 2 p.m. I walk
around past the old fort on the beach and across the railway tracks to High Street and
into the Bar Orient.
Much handshaking and backslapping takes place and we laugh and talk of Bondi.
Good times. Tim says,
“Mate, I love it over here, the beaches, the weather and the rent is cheaper. Me and
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Story
Tracy are talking about buying a place. I have money left over at the end of the week,
something I never had in Sydney.”
I think that might have more to do with the unseen Tracy but I don’t say it. Then
Stuart starts up the WA band and says,
“Nick, I’ve been here about six months, started out just doing some casual painting
when they were renovating and they offered me the night manager’s job. I love it over
here.”
“Get off those night shifts, Stuart,” I say, “they’ll kill you. Trust me, I know.” Then I
tell them, “I’ve been offered a job in Norseman. Know anything about it?” Blank stares.
Stuart says, “If I know you, I bet it’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“If you call 950 kilometres east of Perth nowhere then you’re spot on.”
Tim has a go, “Jesus, mate. You’re surrounded by paradise and you’re going out there.
The gold rush is over, mate. Even Alan Bond knows that.”
Much laughter and a few more beers and I tell them I’m shipping out tomorrow and
thank Tim for the offer of somewhere to stay but I’m closer to East Perth station than
he is and I walk to Fremantle railway station while calling the English bloke on my cell
phone and telling him I’ll be on the train and bus tomorrow. He says to me,
“Oh, the bus is only just over two hours. I’m told they show a movie.” I buy my
ticket to Norseman at Fremantle station and the man tells me they’re updating “The
Prospector” (the name of the train) in June 2004 and it will be much better with movies
and music like plane flights, which doesn’t do me any good. I have an early night back
at the motel. I’ll be seeing those Bondi boys again when I pass back through on my way
to south-east Asia.
In the morning at the station I almost don’t go but I think of Bangkok and Saigon and
parts unknown and I also think about Norseman, population hovering around 1000. I
think of it back when the mine was booming, and the mine still operates so someone
is making money. I’ve never worked in a roadhouse before either and I step on the
train and find a comfortable window seat. I try and sleep but can’t so I listen to this old
walkman I have and try and find interesting radio stations (an old habit of mine) but the
reception isn’t too good. I press the call button above me just to find out what happens
and this lovely girl in a nice uniform asks me what I’d like and I stare at her blankly and
she hands me a menu. It ain’t Qantas first-class but I order a sausage roll and a can of
Coke. The train stops after about three hours to pick up some passengers and for a break
and I sprint for the door with the other smokers and suck down as many of those babies
as possible in fifteen minutes and then it’s back on for the long haul into Kal.
When we arrive it’s nearly dark and I call ahead to the roadhouse and speak to the
manager. He knows who I am, which settles me down a bit and says he’ll meet the bus.
Cool. I wait fifteen minutes and the bus to Norseman pulls in and it is dark now.
The movie is Rio Bravo starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and the
beautiful Angie Dickinson. I love this film and the lights are off and there are only
three other passengers. It’s a brilliant finish to my long and sometimes painful journey.
The pain being the boredom. I step off the bus in Norseman, population now 800 (that’s
what the sign said), and take a good look around.
Service station with many, many pumps. A sign says “trucks only” for a number of
the pumps and no one comes up to me and shakes my hand. I sit on a log fence for a few
minutes. Nothing. I was the only one who got off. The bus continued to Esperance. I
walk into the service station. They have a hot buffet going with a bain-marie. I’m pretty
hungry. There are lots and lots of aisles filled with Twisties and chips and chocolates;
souvenir tea towels and beef jerky and a coin-operated internet machine. I take a seat in
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Story
the little diner eating area waiting for someone to appear so I can order some food. No
one does. I walk up to the cash register at the front and there’s an office close by and I
knock on the door. This big barrel-chested man in Yakka pants and an orange fluoro vest
(the kind road workers wear) says,
“What’s up, mate? Can I help you?”
“I’m Nick Garides.”
“And that means something because?”
“I have a job here. I’m looking for Mike Rogers.”
He stares at me for a few seconds, then says, “Right, sorry, so many people come and
go from this joint. I spoke to you on the phone.”
“Yeah. Two hours ago,” I say and he tells me that I start tomorrow on the cash register
at the front where people pay for fuel and souvenirs.
“7 a.m. My daughter, Missy, will be training you. We’re gonna put you up in the
motel for a couple of nights until someone moves out of one of the staff houses.” He gives
me a key and tells me I can eat what I want from the buffet. Just tell them I work here
now. I introduce myself at the buffet and eat up big on sweet-and-sour chicken and rice.
Afterwards I walk off in the direction of the motel and find my room and yeah, like any
other highway motel room. I shower and crash into sleep.
In the morning I walk across to the roadhouse and even at this early part of the day I’m
getting attacked by flies, sticky black flies that remind me of Yulara in the NT where
I worked for a short period of time, except these flies are bigger and more obnoxious.
The girl at the cash register is beautiful and around twenty-five. I introduce myself and
we shake hands and she says, “I’m Missy,” and she starts going through everything and
there are about a million keys on the cash register and she says, “I can’t really show you
until we get some customers. Don’t worry, it’ll get busy. We get to choose what CDs we
can play, just not too loud. Have a look and choose something.” I go for Powderfinger,
Odyssey Number Five. After a while I start to sing along, it’s a bad habit of mine and
I have a very bad singing voice, and Missy says, “You have a great voice,” while smiling
broadly.
I take it and say, “What do you do for entertainment around here?”
“There are dances at the RSL and the pub and other stuff.”
The roadhouse gets busy and Missy gets on well with all the truckies and I’m just
trying to do my work and not screw up and the day goes quickly.
She starts walking back to the motel with me and I ask, “Where do you live?”
“With Dad in a house on Roberts Street.”
“Have you always lived here?”
“Yes.”
“Never wanted to go to Perth or Kalgoorlie?”
“I’m not ... I’ve been of course but I’ve always lived here.”
“I don’t get it. Why are you here?”
“You’re here.”
“That’s a frustrating answer.”
“Want to make me a drink or coffee in your room?”
“Can we take a walk down the main drag first? Is that what Norseman locals say, the
main drag?”
“No, we say we don’t give the time of day to facetious bastards.”
“I’m sorry. I have this very dry, not very nice sense of humour.”
“Apology accepted. Come on, follow me.”
We cross the motel carpark and go right back almost to the roadhouse and then turn
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Story
onto Roberts Street (the main drag). There is no nature strip, the side of the road is dirt
and there are trees lining the road. The flies don’t seem too bad now. It’s a big wide street
and rather attractive in a kind of deserted country town way.
“That’s my house,” she says, pointing to a respectable looking, white weatherboard
home. There are brick homes too, well built and sturdy, but there’s still this deserted
atmosphere and I mention it to Missy and she says,
“I don’t get what you’re saying. People live in these houses and they are nice houses.”
“The guy who interviewed me for the job said that you could buy a house here for
$10,000. Is that true?”
“Oh yeah, you probably could, but not my house. I mean Dad’s house.” We pass
McIvor Street on the right and a big house with a long driveway and steel garage and
further on where there are no empty blocks and the public swimming pool is on the
left but it’s not open. Missy’s starting to look pissed off and there’s a statue of a horse or
donkey on the left before the roundabout and she says, “Let’s go back. You can see the
town centre and the pub tomorrow or later on.”
“What’s up? Are you alright?”
“I don’t know how to put this. Um, I get a lot of shit from the locals for always
hanging out with the staff but we get all kinds of people through here and I know all
the locals back to front. Right now we have an English couple and this guy from New
Zealand, and others from all over have been here.”
“Is the grief from the guys or girls?”
“Both. C’mon, let’s go back. Do you have music?”
“Just a small CD player and a walkman.”
Back at my room she says, “Don’t move out of the room. Just tell Dad you like it. We
never get full and you won’t have to share.”
“Have you ever thought of moving to Perth?” I ask her.
“Not that again,” she says. “Oh, you have Pete Murray, Sheryl Crowe and Luka
Bloom.”
“You know, yesterday I was in Fremantle and Pete Murray was playing at a pub there
tonight. Wouldn’t you like to be there?”
“Oh shut up! Shut up about how great it is everywhere but here! I like you, Nick,
but just shut up about that stuff. I’m not stupid. I probably know more about music and
books and films than you ever dreamed of. This is a new age. I have the internet. I get
whatever is current the minute, the second I want it. I can download anything. New
music or films and book reviews and house prices in Perth. You’re thirty years old and
you don’t have two cents to your name but I don’t keep reminding you of it.”
“How do you know what ...”
“Oh, come on. Would you be here if you didn’t?”
“I came here to save money. I have close to $4000 and I want another $4000 because
I want to go and live in Bangkok or Saigon. I came here because I have a goal I want to
get to.”
“Oh wow! $4000. Big deal. Why don’t you buy a house here? That’s what you meant
isn’t it. This place is so crap you can buy a house for $10,000.”
“I don’t want to argue with you. Pete Murray or Luka Bloom?”
And she sings, “My name is Luka; I live on the second floor.”
“Oh, very cute,” I say, but I have the biggest smile on my face.
The next morning I wake at 6 a.m. and the room is stuffy so I pull on a pair of jeans and
open the door, which has a terrific view of the carpark and the other motel units. Missy
and I played music for a couple of hours and she talked a lot about life in Norseman
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Story
and how this guy, Lincoln, broke her heart. He was from Adelaide and had hitch-hiked
across the Nullarbor Plain and walked into the roadhouse looking for work. Promised
her the earth and then left at midnight one night with a waitress from the motel. When
I opened the door for her to leave she kissed me softly on the lips and said,
“See you, tomorrow, Nick. Thanks for listening.”
She left at nine so I got to bed early and I promised myself one of my mantras was
going to be Early to bed early to rise. Save money. I shower and make instant coffee,
smoke a few cigarettes. Go to the diner for breakfast and have three bowls of Rice
Bubbles and about six pieces of toast and more coffee and a final cigarette as Missy
walks towards me.
“All ready for training?” she asks and I mumble a yes.
We take over the cash register from Neal, an English guy who has been here for four
weeks. “I’m leaving in two weeks,” he says. And I quickly count the till so he can go.
It gets busy straight away. I get some grief from a truckie when I stuff up his bill from
the diner and he says, “Get with it, mate. I need you to be fast. Time is money in this
game. C’mon.” He makes me nervous and Missy steps in and fixes it up and gives him
some cheek and he loves it and says,
“Sorry mate, but I need you to be fast.” And I feel like saying, stop talking to me and
you’d be a lot faster.
Ten minutes later I answer the phone and this voice says, “Ronny here, order me two
serves of chips, burn the bastards and I’ll be there in five.”
I tell Missy and she says, “Simmo. Mad bastard. Those stories of truck drivers on
speed. That’s Ronny Simpson.”
Everything is going pretty well. I have the cash register with its millions of buttons
and keys pretty much down and there’s a “best songs of 2002” CD in the drive and I’m
humming not singing and this guy with long hair and baggy harem pants walks in. His
girlfriend is in a tie-dye T-shirt and cargo shorts and I give them a big smile and say,
“How’re you doing? Where have you come from?”
And this guy looks at his girlfriend and rolls his eyes and says, “Where have you
come from? The most asked question at the Norseman Roadhouse,” and he says it with
heavy sarcasm and I’m about to give him a blast when Missy just pats my bum and
smiles at me and I let it go.
He pays for his petrol and buys cigarettes and I ask him, “Where are you headed?”
He starts the roll of the eyes again but sees me smiling and walks out.
“Kill ’em with kindness,” Missy says.
I wanted to say to him, you don’t know me; you don’t know anything about me. Not
why I’m here or where I’m from. His sarcasm hit a nerve and I put it together with what
Missy said about me being thirty and only having two cents to my name and I want to
head overseas and then what. I think about it for the whole shift. I can’t shake it.
“Feel like a beer?” Missy asks at the end of the shift.
“At the pub?”
“No, your room. Tomorrow night we’ll go to the pub. You have the Saturday off to
sleep in.”
“You’re planning my life are you?”
“I don’t want the local girls seeing you.”
“Oh right,” I say and I can’t quite tell if she’s stirring me or not.
“I have a six pack at home. I’ll bring it over,” she says and I meet Gloria as she arrives
to take over the shift. She’s from Stirling, a suburb in Perth, and she says,
“I’m leaving in two weeks.” And, “Are you in the staff house or the motel?”
“Motel.”
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Story
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not so bad here, just don’t stay too long.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two months.”
“Oh, OK, taking your own advice. I have to go, so, see ya.”
On the way back to my room I stop in at the motel reception to ask about using the
phone in my room and how much the calls cost. I introduce to myself to Warren at the
front desk, and Monica the motel manager comes out and shakes my hand and we all
have a little chat. Monica goes back into the office and Warren says,
“I’m leaving in two weeks.”
“Oh, um, great,” I say and walk out and see Missy walking ahead of me to the room.
Missy is short and compact with shiny black hair that she wears (so far) in a thick
ponytail. I watch her bum sway from side to side as she walks, and smile. Her eyes are
black too and she has thick eyelashes and eyebrows. I see her knocking on my door and
still can’t shake that bad feeling I got from that smartarse in the roadhouse.
I rest my hand on her waist as we walk inside. She turns and holds up the six pack.
“Oh, Swan Lager,” I say.
“You should be thankful. This is my treat.”
“You always speak your mind, don’t you?” She pulls two cans off the plastic ring one
at a time and places them on the small round wooden table and we sit like we’re about
to have dinner together on the two metal chairs with their orange plastic cushions.
“To Norseman!” I say.
“Cheers,” she says softly, thinking I’m being sarcastic and then asks me to put on
some music. I put on Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and she says as he sings, Love is
all you need, “Who is this?”
“Lloyd Cole. Like it?”
“Yeah, what’s the name of the album?”
“Rattlesnakes.”
“Cool.”
We drink and talk and laugh for a couple of hours and she says, “I better get back.
Dad’s going to Perth tomorrow and I promised I’d have dinner with him.”
I nod. I don’t want her to leave. I think she knows it and says, “Do you like me?”
“You mean do I like you in that way?”
She doesn’t answer the question but says, “You know, a lot of the locals make out I’m
some kind of tramp because I always hang out with the new male workers who come
here but I was only ever with the one guy and he left me. I liked you the minute you
walked into the roadhouse. That’s never happened to me before.”
I don’t know what to say and she says, “It’s OK. I’ll see you tomorrow.” And she
throws an empty can into the small waste basket on the other side of the room.
“Good shot,” I say, but it sounds really hollow and she closes the motel room door
softly behind her when she leaves.
I bring Rattlesnakes to work the next morning and I say to Neal, the English guy, “Only
thirteen days left, Neal.” He shrugs and walks out. I thought I was being friendly.
Missy walks in and she sees the CD and says straight away, “You can play that
as long as you don’t sing along.” I smile and nod. She adds, “I’m going to let you do
everything today, training is over. Dad’s gone to Perth already so believe it or not I’m
running the place. I’ll be in the office if you get stuck.”
I simply nod again and three trucks are filling up and three people just walked in
and the rest of the day is flat out until 3 p.m. I have my lunch standing up at the cash
register and have to beg Missy to get a smoke break. I’m walking out and she grabs me
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Story
by the arm and says, “Come to the house for dinner. I’m cooking. I have some wine
too.” A few of the motel workers and a group of people from the staff house had invited
me to the pub. There are about fifteen to twenty people working here. Housemaids,
short order cooks, receptionists and barmen and the maintenance guy and I’ve barely
spoken to anyone and I say, “I was asked to the pub.”
She looks away from me and I think about it. Who gives a stuff about the pub. “I’ll
come over for dinner but we should go to the pub after that.”
“OK. Be at my place at seven.” And I walk out.
I get to her house right on seven and it’s still pretty hot. The house is hot too because
she’s cooking and I say, “Any air-conditioning?”
“I’ll put the ceiling fan on and it’s nice to see you too.”
“What’re you cooking?”
“This Malaysian chicken curry. I got the curry paste at this supermarket in Kal about
two weeks ago. Want a beer?”
“Yeah.” She goes to the fridge and brings over a VB and I smile and take it and crack
the ice-cold can. She sits next to me on the sofa and puts her hand on my thigh and I
turn to face her and she kisses me on the mouth and I kiss her back and she says,
“I just wanted to get that out of the way.”
The Malaysian curry is great and she plays a lot of her dad’s old soft-rock CDs. Stuff
like Foreigner, Status Quo and Toto and I don’t mind. I even dance badly with her and
we kiss a lot and don’t go to the pub and she asks me to stay the night.
The next morning she has to go to work and I have the day off. I sneak back to my motel
room but along the way meet the housemaids and some other staff and they all give me
a hard time about not turning up to the pub and staying the night at “the manager’s
house”. There are no secrets in Norseman.
Her dad went to Perth for three weeks and I stayed at the house the whole time. I’ve
been here three months now, living in the motel room on my own but with Missy
coming over almost every night.
One morning I go to work and get there ten minutes early because I’m training a
new staff member on the cash register. The wheel has turned the full circle. All those
who said they were leaving have left and others have come and gone in that time too.
Sheila, the new staff member, is about forty and a big woman, more big-boned than
overweight, and she asks me,
“How long have you been here?” I tell her and she seems to be waiting for me to tell
her how much longer but I don’t.
Two weeks later it is 3 p.m. and I’m sitting on the front lawn of the house that Missy
and I have rented and Missy opens the front gate and comes and sits next to me and
asks,
“How long have you been here?”
“Over three months,” I say, and she asks,
“When are you leaving?”
“Never.”
Sean O’Leary lives in Melbourne. More of his stories will be appearing in Quadrant next year.
107
Books
A l a n G ould
Their Place in the Country
Tree Palace
by Craig Sherborne
Text Publishing, 2014, 327 pages, $29.99
“T
rants” are itinerant people, and Craig
Sherborne’s Tree Palace describes the lives of
a family of them from their outset in nomadism and
its dislocations to a resolution where some settle
ment of spirit and material circumstance are in
prospect. Here is a novel of resourceful, well-paced
comedy and I found myself engaged by it as I had
been by a previous Craig Sherborne story of people
at the exposed margin of a society, the vibrant
memoir of his parents, Hoi Polloi.
This trant family owns as many surnames
as it does members. But Shane, Moira, Midge,
Zara, Rory and baby Mathew (who never quite
accomplishes a surname) form a domestic entity
nonetheless, and one turbulent with what happens
in families and to them. They take possession of
a vacant farm among the long, straight roads of
Victoria’s Mallee-Wimmera region and this they
adapt to their particular needs with additions of
caravan, tent and a chandelier that they hang from a
tree, so dubbing their home “Tree Palace”. For they
are home-makers, and the novel, as unashamedly
and as warmly as Steele Rudd’s accounts of Dad,
Dave and family in On Our Selection, is about how
homes are made and, more searchingly, the sense of
resolute identity that accompanies this.
Morals are looser than among Steele Rudd’s
hayseeds. The surnames indicate how fornication
has been casual, thieving is encouraged as opportunity, though fire-raising is wrongful and Moira’s
disapproval of bad language, piquantly, is the one
bourgeois aspiration of the book. Shane and Midge
pursue a clandestine business stripping the valuable
furnishings from abandoned properties. Teenage
Rory, rejecting school, wanting adult acceptance,
plays with fire and attracts adult vehemence instead.
Fifteen-year-old Zara rebuffs her newborn child in
an interval of surly downcast and wild living before
taking up a supermarket job found for her by the
resourceful Moira and, from this, moves towards
maturity and some prospect of becoming an effective mother.
But it is Moira we come to know best of the group,
108
who is the bravest and canniest in dealing with the
impedimenta faced by rootless people. Deftly, intelligently Sherborne takes us into the workings of
her mind. She is rehearsed in lies and excuses, now
fawning, now fierce in her defence of those close
to her. She can “perform” her emotions to dramatic
effect, but she is also the character whose feelings
make her most vulnerable, most morally astute.
Critically, Moira is illiterate, and ranged against
her is literate Australia, the police, the Indian supermarket proprietor, and later the prison wardens. So
we witness her deviousness, her moments of desperation, of hurt, as she improvises the needs of
day-to-day. And these are needs often focused upon
issues of identity. To appease bureaucracy she must
accrue “points” by presenting birth certificate and
driving licence, precisely those tokens of legitimacy
that rootless people might be deemed too feckless
to provide. But then, amazing her own sense of herself and emergent from her panic at watching her
daughter carelessly abandon her infant, Moira experiences late in life “the bloom”, those bodily changes
and well-being that come as a result of her taking up
the care of this infant. This is but half her story, for
Moira must in time then find the moral reconciliation to foil this physiological well-being and return
the babe to Zara, allowing the natural processes of
life to resume when they are ready to do so. Craig
Sherborne illumines here a fine if unsensational
human progress, a woman of instinctive humanity, unassisted to that compassion by the prompts to
sensibility of books and letters.
And to this end, here is narrative attentive to the
minutiae of human reactions and exchanges. There
are, maybe, occasional longueurs in the placing of
effects, but Tree Palace is wide-awake, intelligent
writing. More than anything, Sherborne shows a
journalist’s verve for the intrigue of the everyday
together with a patience for that naturalism. His
story takes its significance from within the ordinary; it works with the necessities and expectations
of life’s unexceptional fabric, but vitally so.
T
he allusiveness of this “ordinary” can easily be
overlooked. Here is a “family” where huntergathering is the livelihood, where the ingenuity,
improvising and opportunism of hunter-gathering
are shown to provide the vital ethos for these folk at
the margins of an economy, and naturally one brings
Australia’s first itinerant people to mind. Certainly
there is no actual discussion of race in this book;
there does not need to be. Sherborne’s six people
move in a milieu where miscegenation is likely, but
not an issue as they connect with their “selection”
and discover their land rights. The wellsprings of
identity arise from loyalties and reactions that are
Books
sui generis within the group. Shane is protective of
his asthmatic, semi-crippled son, Midge. Moira
mothers her daughter’s child, makes of the “family”
a unitary enterprise and so demonstrates its actuality and her own largeness of spirit.
There is no lack of immediate drama and exchange
in Tree Palace. Indeed the novel is a page-turner at
that level of suspense where the reader engages sufficiently with its characters to hope for their good.
If there is one difference between Sherborne’s characters and Rudd’s Dad and Dave it may be that the
latter inhabited a place and time where they could
be trusted to recognise The Good for themselves,
while those of Tree Palace, encountering modernity’s
waste and confusions, cannot be so trusted in the
first instance. One process of this most accessible
novel is that we are shown how the characters, each
in their way, grow towards their self-possession,
their place.
For if this is a novel of action, it is also one of
meditation, and behind its concern with identity is
this moral consideration, “How locate that ground
where people may be valued without being compared.” It is chimaeric ground, but sustains a resilient presence in this novel. For instance, we watch
Zara’s self-destructive behaviour. Refusing the
wherewithal of life to her infant, she sequesters herself, puts herself in moral hazard at the rough end
of town, predictably suffers the consequent humiliations. Why should anyone bother with her? Yet we
watch how she is bothered with, tolerated through
her phase of repudiations. Similarly we watch as
the “family” censure Rory for his fire-raising, then
applaud him on an occasion when he behaves with
much more direct danger to life. We are endeared
to Midge in his basic decency for all that Darwinian
competition would make short work of an asthmatic
ex-jockey whose mobility has been forever damaged
by accident. Value establishes itself between people
in the very impulses of the everyday, the humanity
of this given vibrancy by how close to feral conditions their lives come.
Here is the novel doing its job. As with works
by, say, Austen, Waugh or Garner, Sherborne finds
story in his close scrutiny of manners. His particular
folk live at the friable edge of a society; nonetheless
he unfolds how individual lives are felt and lived in
relation to a social whole. Tree Palace is thorough
going in its imagining of this “trant” culture, sure
in the physical and moral setting it integrates. May
the book flourish.
Alan Gould’s most recent novel, The Seaglass Spiral, is
published by Finlay Lloyd.
Ton y T hom as
The Renewable Energy Myth
Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How
Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists
Wrong
by Robert Bryce
PublicAffairs, 2014, 400 pages, US$27.99
G
reen-minded people hate coal, because of all its
carbon pollution, as they call it. They also hate
natural gas, especially the fracked variety, partly
because it poisons water supplies and all that, but
mainly because it’s so cheap and plentiful. Nuclear
power? It’s straight from the devil. Ditto hydro
power. So of course we must switch to “renewable”
energy, that is, wind farms and solar panels.
Global energy analyst and journalist Robert
Bryce demolishes such fatuous thinking. He is the
author of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, an
intriguingly cumbersome title for his fifth book on
energy.
Bryce was a guest of the Institute of Public
Affairs in Melbourne in September. As a cogent and
entertaining speaker he is also a class act.
Read his book and marvel that the developed
world is now spending countless billions on renewables for no rational reason. Gaining significant (as
distinct from token) power from renewables is a
pipe-dream. Bryce does the maths, and renewables
add up like 2 + 2 = 3. Renewables are not a good basis
for policy, as the Germans—the foremost proponents, with a third of the world’s nameplate (peak)
solar capacity—are discovering. The German power
grid totters towards crisis. Would you believe, 38
per cent of German “renewable energy” now comes
from chopping down forests for firewood to burn in
otherwise coal-fired power plants, medieval-style.
Bryce says he is agnostic about the global warming debate, and makes his case purely as an energy
analyst. He foresees the cost-per-watt of solar panels
falling steeply as global production ramps up, but
notes that in 2012 solar was meeting only 1/625 of
global energy needs. Solar and wind combined produced only 1 per cent of global energy.
The fundamental problem with wind and solar
is their low energy “density”, meaning output per
unit of area or weight. The newest GE jet engine
produces 15,000 watts per kilogram and fits on the
wing of a B-787. In contrast, a typical wind farm
produces a puny one watt per square metre, meaning that enormous land areas must be set aside for
the whirling blades. To hammer the point home,
Bryce remarks that Siemens’s biggest wind turbine
109
Books
has 154-metre diameter blades that sweep an area
equal to three times a soccer pitch.
Green enthusiasts are avid users of computer
communications, which are surprisingly powerhungry. Planet-friendly Apple announced in 2012
that it would use solar to help power its cloudcomputing centre in North Carolina. Sadly, to power
it all with solar would have to involve seventeen
square kilometres of panels, and this area would
have to be completely bare of shadow-casting trees
and structures, Bryce says.
Facebook is the Green youngsters’ tool of trade.
Using wind-power, just to service the twentyeight megawatts needed by Facebook’s Prineville,
Oregon, data centre, Mark Zuckerberg would need
to install twenty-eight square kilometres of wind
farms—half the size of Manhattan Island.
US data centres alone consume 2 per cent of total
US electricity, equal to the total electricity of the
Czech Republic, or forty-seven times the total US
solar power output. It’s not easy for smart-phone
users to be Green.
B
ryce really gets into his stride calculating what
the vaunted (by warmists) low-emission world
will require. For the US alone to switch out of coalfired power and substitute wind power, it would
need to set aside an exclusive area of the US equal
to the area of Italy. Moreover, no one could live in
that area because of the blade noise.
Switching from coal towards biofuels is even
more absurd. Highly-placed and awarded US guru
Amory Lovins has called for biofuels to meet 23 per
cent of total US energy needs by 2050. Bryce does
the maths and finds that would require as much US
land as Texas, New York and Ohio combined, or
three times the area of Italy.
Bryce’s narrative covers not merely energy but also
the mainsprings of American innovation—about
which he remains enthusiastic. This innovation is
exemplified in the natural gas industry. Thanks to
a myriad of factors including land-owners’ ownership of sub-surface resources, the American drilling industry enjoys economies of scale which lead to
ceaseless innovation and progress, especially now in
gas fracking. I had not known that the US invention of the roller-cone drilling bit (by the father of
Howard Hughes Jr) made possible cheap gasoline
and the auto industry.
Nowadays the drilling industry in the US spends
as much per year putting down oil and gas wells
as the entire rest of the world spends on so-called
“clean energy”. Far from dwindling, US oil output
in 2013 was up by a million barrels a day, its biggest rise since its 1859 inception. Bryce mocks claims
about “peak oil”, which I have been sceptical of ever
since I heard Labor’s Rex Connor forecasting in 1973
that Australia would see the last of its oil production
in 1984. Bryce predicts that US oil production will
soon match that of Saudi Arabia. Right now the
USA is producing as much gas as the whole of the
Middle East and Africa combined.
It is beyond bizarre that US activists prattle about
freeing America from the “tyranny of oil”, the most
cost-efficient and convenient of all energy sources.
The phrase makes as much sense as the “tyranny” of
physics or density.
As Bryce told his Melbourne audience, and
spells out rigorously in this book, cheap electricity
liberates humankind not just from poverty but—
when morphed into information technology—from
oppression. Would that his book could be put in
front of intelligent secondary school students.
Tony Thomas, a retired financial journalist, wrote on
his visit to Palermo in the October issue.
Photograph of Albert
Like a mug shot without a profile,
taken the day he enlisted,
a boy unable to wait
another month to re-enact
games he’d played
with brothers, bang bang.
Seventeen
barely working full time
at the wood yard
three blocks from home,
even the training
ground was further
than he’d been before.
110
Tiggy Johnson
P eter R ya n
Dogs, Balloons
and Their Humans
I
hope, in my piece last month, I didn’t gush
insufferably about the almost magically melded
utility and amenity of my upstairs combined
sleeping and “writing-study” apartment. Few nonagenarians can be so handsomely set up, and all that
is only what’s inside, what’s behind the glass, so to
speak. Outside lies a vaster infinitude of miracles
which, with rough descriptive economy, we may call
“The View”.
Through a wide eastern window (unless it’s
cloudy) the sun rises over an immense acreage of
open unfenced parkland, with waterholes and
billabongs as they drain their way irregularly down
to join the Yarra River in the vicinity of Marcellin
College. Directly across the road from my front gate
passes an unpaved, rough dirt footpath, on which
cycling is forbidden and skateboarding impossible;
but where a broadminded municipality expressly
permits dogs to run off the leash.
I am thus afforded daily a procession demon
strating, not merely aspects of canine nature, but
of human; don’t think that any species remains
unaffected by the restraint imposed by attachment
to a leash, whichever end of it they may adorn.
To report first on the dogs, they most certainly
score high marks: over years, never a fight; little
even in the way of serious disobedience. A more
heterogeneous assemblage of breeds and varieties
cannot be imagined: an immense and stately great
dane, tall enough to put a saddle on, standing
gravely close to his owner, imperturbable, as a tiny
excited silky terrier repeatedly hurls himself bodily
aloft in unsuccessful leaps to lick the big fellow’s
nose.
Ecstatic tides of throbbing canine energies flood
across the parkland where it adjoins the “leashfree” path. Young dogs bursting out of their hides
with steam built up overnight from confinement
in backyard or house, race around at speeds
enviable even on a greyhound coursing track; old
acquaintances are renewed with friendly yelps and
a crazy gallop together; new friendships are formed
with just a little more formality—tentative nose
contacts, developing, if all the vibes are right, into
tail-wagging so frenzied as to threaten severance of
the stern from amidships.
I suppose that, without the intervention of
human-ordered selective breeding, nearly all dogs
would look something like dingoes or wolves. But
the indubitable canine quadrupeds who thrive in
our park vary enormously from each other in form.
For the most part, these alterations have not been
imposed on the animals for the animals’ own benefit,
but for trivial reasons like exhibiting or showing.
The stern Winston Churchill countenance of the
bulldog does nothing for its ease of breathing or
span of life. How do a dalmatian, a dachshund and
a dandie dinmont all recognise each other as dogs?
But they do, and not only at breeding time, either.
It is pleasing to report that (according to such
wholly casual and unprofessional observations as
I can offer) the human duties of the loop end of
the leash are being honourably discharged. Very
likely a vet would find matters for attention, but I
see no signs of gross ill-treatment or neglect. I am
sometimes irritated by the silliness of the training
methods, and the fatuous baby-talk of what should
be the clear language of command. But I suppose
we must face it—we’re always going to have some
dogs with more brains than their owners.
A significant few owners cheat on their obligation
to remove their dog’s droppings immediately from
the place of deposit. It isn’t exactly a delicate job,
but it isn’t half as horrible as the task of the innocent
“treader-by”, who must scrape it from his own shoe
and (in a worst-case scenario) from his hall carpet.
It seems almost to have been a social rule for
centuries that “who walks a dog carries a stick”.
On “my” dog track, the rule has in a few cases
been honoured with great-grandpa’s carved cedar
walking stick, or with his Malacca cane, but,
overwhelmingly, with any old bit of twig or light
branch picked up in bushland or off the woodheap.
Here I can report a very marked and daily-
111
Dogs, Balloons and Their Humans
continuing change. Dog walkers are adopting the them all”, and he may stay aloft no more than a
conventional English riding crop with the leather matter of minutes, and come to land in the next
flap at the lower end, and more are doing so daily; suburb; or the trip may finish much later in the day,
the dog track is indeed a whole new niche market in a different region of the state.
for the saddlers, and for the new-style outfitters
Often I have stood by my west window,
who followed the great R.M. Williams to trade in neglected coffee turning cold, mesmerised by the
such wares.
tension of that rise-and-sink, rise-and-sink as the
In my earliest days here, two young men drove lumbering creatures find—or do not find—a steady
up and parked, one producing a handsome domestic atmospheric updraft to get substantially free of the
cat, and the other a sleek ferret. Both animals already cramping clutch of earth.
wore a neat and secure little harness, to which
Though I have never so much as stepped into
leashes instantly were clipped. The “walk” that then one of those stout baskets slung beneath a balloon,
began would have been the most unremarkable it is to a balloon I owe one of the most exciting
thing in the world, had the animals been dogs; but moments of my life. Let me tell you.
dogs they were not, and showed
In the early mid-morning of one
no sign whatever of performing
fine day, and greatly to my irritation,
a sudden species change just to
my reading was repeatedly being
nless the
oblige. The couple of hundred yards
distracted by an intermittent
performance had
they were, in their recalcitrance,
roaring sound from outside. What
been watched and could it be? It seemed to be getting
dragged, pushed, coaxed or carried
was a farcical failure; and unless afterwards discussed louder. I went to the window—the
the performance had been watched
west window, as it happened—and
with a couple of
and afterwards discussed with a
saw the cause: a cheerfully coloured
couple of neighbours, I should neighbours, I should hot-air balloon was bearing directly
not have been game to mention
upon me. No, I am not joking.
not have been game Idown
it here, lest you should think I’d
cannot pretend to have preserved
gone bonkers. A few days later, one
to mention it here, even a shred of that “icy calm” or
of the neighbours returned to it:
other form of sang froid we used to
lest you should think favour
“Got a theory! They were students
in our pulpwood heroes. The
I’d gone bonkers.
working up an act for one of those
“situation report” which follows is
not-too-prudish college charades;
truly the very best I can do for you
the lewd associations of ‘pussy’ are
out of a mind briefly unhinged by
legion; ‘giving the ferret a run’ will get a wink and a what was for me the novelty of the situation, and
leer and a snigger in any saloon bar in town. What also “highly fluid”:
do think of that?”
Distance when first sighted: 750 yards
What do you think, gentle reader? Height: 50 feet above my window
My broad west window offers a view wholly
Direction of travel: right at me
different from the east, though equally remarkable.
Speed: awesome
On a rising plane, one’s vision soaring over the
The pandemonium was completed by the
heights of Kew, one can follow the vapour trails of monstrous roar as the captain burnt off fuel in a vain
incoming aircraft as they begin their descents into effort to gain altitude. He actually passed between
Melbourne’s airports. Alternatively (provided you my house and next door, a trailing rope slapping
are an early riser) you can watch the rise of the squads my roof with a bang, just cleared a fringe of trees to
of the gaily coloured and striped hot-air balloons, as enter the parkland opposite, and sat down heavily
they begin their eerie and periodically silent journey on the grass.
for that day. True, they enjoy the help of modern
Well, what’s so remarkable about all that? No
radio communication, navigation and meteorologic one was killed, were they? Nobody injured? No
aids. In other respects, every balloonist remains as significant damage? And don’t I say that one of the
wholly at the mercy of nature and the elements as main reasons I regard my whole life as a blessed one
Captain Cook; “time and chance happeneth unto is that it’s seldom been dull for long?
U
112
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