Allen & Unwin Tim Costello Special Book Offer TIPS FROM A TRAVELLING SOUL-SEARCHER by Tim Costello In times when materialism and competition threaten to overwhelm all that we used to hold dear, Reverend Tim Costello senses a common cry: What can we dol H e believes there are some things we can do, like reasserting the humane values n ecessary for genuine progress. His inspiration is his Christian tradition and the aspirations of people he encounters on his travels. In candidly exploring experiences of friendship, ambition, risk, public-versus-private identity, home, ritual and grace, he shares the insights, m om ents of confusion and new m eaning which lead to growth. Tim Costello offers these reflections as tips to fellow soul-searchers. His stimulating mix of personal wisdom and street-wise humour leads us to reflect on what will be precious to us in the long run, not only as individuals f!JJ from a traYcLLi;g but also as families, workmates and fellow citizens. JtJUL-Jearclter Thanks to Allen & Unwin, Eureka Street has 15 copies of Tips from a Travelling Soul-Searcher to give away, each worth $19.95. Just put your name and address on the back of an envelope and send it to: Eureka Street December Book Offer, PO Box 553, RICHMOND VIC 3121.

C£"Relax with God and Minister to Yourself!

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OPTIONS: SCIIOOL OF APPLIED TIIEOLOCY Nine Months, Fall ur Spring Graduate Theological Union Audit, C•·cdilnr M.A. noom/lwanl availai.Jic on site 2400 Ridge Road, Berkeley CA 94709 Partial Scholarships E-mail: [email protected] For a Free Hrochu•·c, call : Website: http://www.satgtu.org/ HOU/lBI -0555, or 510/652-165 I Serving religious, clergy awl laity since I 960. Fax: 5111/-Uil-0542 Volume 9 Number 10 December 1999 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology

24 SALT OF THE EARTH CONTENTS Margaret Simons investigates salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin. 4 27 Eureka Street COMMENT PERFECT ONE DAY? With Peter Steele and Geoffrey King. Jon Greenaway reports on the challenges wishes all our of building a nation in East Timor. 7 readers the CAPITAL LETTER 3 1 peace and FROM STRUGGLE TO 8 RECONSTRUCTION blessings of LETTERS Dewi Anggraeni talks to Xanana Gusmao. 10 32 the 1999 THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC THE MANY-FACETED McAULEY With Paul Collins, Frank O'Shea and Martin Krygier on James McAuley, Christmas Maggie Helass. communism, passion and Cassandra Pybus' new biography. season. 11 BUSH LAWYER 38 BOOKS 12 Paul Collins reviews David Man's The High Price of Heaven; Hugh Dillon Cover: Two millennia of images SUMMA THEOLOGIAE of Jesus Christ, from East and passes judgment on David Solomon's West, from ancient wall fr escoes 14 The Political High Court (p40). to modern African painting. THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE Design by Siobhan Jackson. Moira Rayner speaks up for advocacy. 42 Mosaic p4, Nativity with a disconsolate Joseph, from the THEATRE Baptistery of S. Giovanni, 15 Geoffrey Milne on Australian plays Florence. ARCHIMEDES in print. Graphics pp6, 15, 19, 20,23 by Siobhan Ja ckson. 16 44 Cartoon pl3 by Dea n Moore. Map and photographs pp24- 25 WEARING HANDCUFFS FLASH IN THE PAN courtesy the Murray-Darling AS JEWELLERY Reviews of the films eXistenZ; Th e Sixth Basin Commission . Anthony Ham in Beirut with Robert Fisk. Sense; Black Cat, White Cat; An Ideal Ph otographs pp27-29, 3 1 Husband and Summer of Sam. courtesy Jon Greenaway. 19 Eureka Street magazine SOUTH AFRICA: 46 Jesuit Publications TIME FOR THE GRIQUA PRAYER WATCHING BRIEF PO Box 553 The euphoria is long gone: now South Richmond VIC 3 121 Tel (03) 9427 7311 Africa, under Thabo Mbeki, must build a 47 Fax (03) 9428 4450 safe, civil society. Jim Davidson reports. SPECIFIC LEVITY

V OLUME 9 N uMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 3 CoMMENT: 1

EUREKA SJREET P ETER STEELE A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology General manager Joseph Hoo Vinegar Editor Morag Fraser Assistant editor and song Kate Manton Graphic designer Siobhan Jackson Publisher Michael McGirr SJ Production manager: Sylvana Scannapiego Administration manager: Mark Dowell Editorial and production assistants Juliette Hughes, Paul Fyfe SJ, Geraldine Battersby, Ben Hider Contributing editors Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ, Perth: Dea n Moore Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor Queensland: Peter Pierce United Kingdom correspondent T MBCW o•FTo RoM' " cwm, again" expectation, l was Denis Minns OP abnormally alert to trifling detail. The police blew their South East Asia correspondent whistles as though each hankered to be, for the day, Jam es Jon Greenaway Galway or Childe Roland; the astrologers and the pliers of Jesuit Editorial Board Tarot cards itched to get back to their cellular phones; the Peter L'Estrange SJ, Andrew Bullen SJ , window of the immensely expensive m enswear shop next to Andrew Hamilton SJ the rooms where Keats died was packed with shirts named Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ after Byron, who despised Kea ts deeply and outlived him Marketing manager: Rosanne Turner briefly. So it goes, when you leave your standard locale. Advertising representative: Ken Head And they are, yet again, recycling the stones. Romans Subscription manager: Wendy Marlowe have been about this for well over a thousand years, switching odd bits of the Colosseum into a palace on the make, Administration and distribution harrowing expendable m emoranda of this or that god towards Lisa Crow, Mrs Irene Hunter, Kristen Harrison a later florid shrine, and in general obeying the sacred dictum Patrons of m y wise father who commended 'what you do with what Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the you've got'. At present, the Romans are plucking up some of support of C. and A. Carter; the the paving stones, giving them a brisk brush, and relodging trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; them sleekly for the expected feet of the devout and the W.P. & M.W. Gurry curious next year. EurelAustralia Post Print Post approved pp349181 /00314, not confined to the ston es. A few minutes' walk from the is published ten times a year Colosseum there is a statue of Julius Caesar, kitted out for by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3 12 1 war- well warranted in his case, since on the evidence he seems Tel: 03 9427 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450 to have fought virtually in his sleep. This time, his plinth email: eu reka@jespu b. jesuit.org.a u has an inscription which reminds us that he was 'Dictator http:/ fwww .open planet .com.a ufeu reka/ for Life', and annmmces that the statue was erected 'in the tenth Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by year since the Restoration of the Fasces'. It is as neat an Michael McGirr SJ, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. Printed by Doran Printing, instance as one is likely to see of ancient grandeurs' being 46 Industri al Drive, Braeside VIC 3195. invoked to warrant and adorn later aspirations. I did not notice © Jesuit Publications 1999 any salute, nearby, to Mussolini, but perhaps that was the jetlag. Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and The empires rise, fall, or modulate, but the dream fiction, will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Requests for perdures. Waiting in Zurich airport for the long ride home, permission to reprint material from the magazine I watched a sizeable blood-red aircraft take its way upwards, should be addressed in writing to: an d wondered idly who would own such a thing: until The editor, Eurel

4 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 driving south from Sydney, I heard on local radio a farmer the occasion, which has to do with imperial edicts, with the reporting that he was exporting, by air to England, planeloads compulsory shifting of the poor and the vulnerable, with the of lettuce, to be enclosed with other commodities within the burgeoning of unkillable new life against all the human odds, celebrated buns. Perhaps, a couple of thousand years hence, some and with the heartening of those perilously close to being group will be making a fuss about the Restoration of the Arches. broken-hearted. Not with rage, but with a new-found realism, If they do, I hope that someone will point out that the the story has to do with the trashing of the triumphalistic. And catenary arch is so named because of its allusion to the hang of that warrants applau e, even from the weary. chain -which might stimulate reflection on power's proneness As a poet, and thus at war with the glib, I am reminded of to be its own enchainment. One of the things that comedy and one of Thomas Hardy's best poems, 'The Darkling Thrush', tragedy, as artistic forms, have in common i their declining to which is dated 'December 31, 1900'-a sufficiently evocative be bluffed by the narcissistic enthralment of the powerful­ moment. There, Hardy acknowledges the great force, authority which, accurately, the most penetrating imaginations of the even, of a sense of waning all about him. His attention is caught Western tradition have always presented as derangement. The by what he calls 'An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,/ In grotesque trick can be brought off for a while by seductive blast-beruffled plume' which goes on singing, against the political monsters, and sometim es for m uch longer by domestic odds. Hardy is wary in the face of the moment, but is prepared tyrants, of either gender. Whatever the milieu, though, we are to record in the battered creature 'Some blessed Hope, whereof looking at beings who are off the wall, and out of the world. he knew/ And I was unaware.' The thrush was not a caged What kind of talk is this, you may wonder, at so grave and bird but, God knows, our own hopes are all too frequently cerem onious a moment as the last Christmas of a flagging caged. millennium? I suppose that it is brooding talk, and I wish that Still alive, though, and open to attestation. I am indebted, there were more of it. I wish that, partly because when one and perhaps you may be, to the spirit of the American poet considers the vivid insignia of so many enterprises-the crooked Gerald Stern who, in 'Personal', from his book This Time, crosses, those fasces, the stars and hamm ers and sickles and concludes by speculating on 'who/would wash w hose feet and sundry eagles-it is understandable that our century could be whether his name is Jesus/ or Joshua and if his hair was red and seen as a saturnalia of serial killers: to ignore that would be who/ gave whom the vinegar and what did I sing.' One hell of a like an islander's ignoring the ocean. But m ere brooding, lot at Christmas, and for some of us this time especially, comes terminal brooding, is simply another form of narcissism i down to who would wash whose feet, who gave whom the buckling in the face of the odious is not much more useful than vinegar, and what did I sing. • truckling to it. As a Christian, I turn back at this time not to the Dicken­ Peter Steele SJ has a Personal Chair at the University of sian fantasia of snow, holly and glut, but to the original story of Melbourne.

C OMMENT: 2 G EOFFREY KING Room for debate on drugs

T .RECENT INTERVENT ION by the Congregation for the technical sense of leading another into morally wrong Doctrine of the Faith in the Australian drug debate came as a behaviour) can be avoided. surprise to m e. The Congregation interven ed to forbid Formal co-operation m eans that the person co-operating participation in a safe injecting room program in Sydney by the intends, desires, or approves the wrongdoer's conduct. It seems Sisters of Charity. I was surprised because the Sisters had obvious that the Sisters of Charity do not intend, desire or researched the matter thoroughly and had prepared a rationale approve the continued abuse of drugs. They are trying to do for their participation which seem ed completely in line with what is best in a situation which everyone admits is disastrous very traditional principles of Catholic moral theology. but which we seem powerless to prevent. Their co-operation is Central among the principles that they cited was that of material, not formal. co-operation. Some of the terminology that is used can be a bit Is it m ediate, not immediate, material co-operation? daunting, but it actually articulates a good deal of common­ Co-operation is considered mediate if we can distinguish our sense wisdom. The tradition distinguishes between formal and activity from that of the wrongdoer. The tradition requires material co-operation, and further distinguishes between that we can distinguish two 'objects' (ours and the wrong­ immediate and mediate m aterial co-operation . Formal doer's) of the activity. The safe injecting room program has co-operation in evil is always immoral. Immediate material two such 'obj ects': the taking of drugs on the part of the user, co-operation is immoral, except in situations of duress. Mediate the protection of health and life on the part of the Sisters. m aterial co-operation can be moral when undertaken for a The proportionate reason requirement is also observed: the proportionately serious reason and when scandal (in the whole purpose of the program is the preservation of life,

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 5 which is about as proportionately serious as you can get. impression of condoning drug abuse. They may diminish harm, The archaic terminology that I have been using is a clear even save som e lives, in the short term, but in the long term indication that the Sisters were looking to put their rationale they will make the drug problem worse. This is an argument within a venerable tradition (the formal/material distinction that needs to be taken seriously, but ultimately I find it comes fro m a m edieval adaptation of Aristotelian philosoph y unconvincing. The Sisters of Charity have gone to considerable which was fu rther developed by the moral theologians of the lengths to avoid scandal, by carefully explaining the nature of 17th century). It would be diffi cult for anyone claiming to be in their proposed program and the rationale behind it. Even more the Catholic tradition to obj ect to the principles on which the telling for me is the thought, 'How could any person of good Sisters were working. At the sam e time, it has to be admitted will even remotely imagine that the Sisters might be in favour that the application of the principles of co-operation to particular of drug abuse?' cases has long been recognised as something of a minefield for It would, moreover, be an ungenerous and poorly informed moral theologians. reading of the Sisters' proposal that would interpret them as It is not surprising then that a very small (I'm tempted to signalling that drug-taking, while it is wrong, is something that say 'eccentric') minority of theologians would argue that can be easily or complacently tolerated. N or is it fair to see participation in the safe injecting room program involves them proposing safe injecting rooms as a 'quick fix': the rooms formal, or, more likely, immediate material co-operation. arc proposed explicitly as one part of a more comprehensive strategy. A T THIS POINT we can introduce a further elem ent of the A final thought on scandal: it seem s strange that a tradition, that of 'probabilism'. It is generally held that in Congregation housed in Rome hould think itself better placed disputed moral matters one may legitimately follow a 'probable than people 'on the ground' in Sydney to make a pragmatic opinion', that is, a view which is soundly based and/or soundly judgment about the way in which safe inj ecting rooms will be supported, even if there are strong arguments for perceived. The Congregation in fact seemed to recognise this the opposite view. In the present case, I think in its reference to international perceptions. But the bare the Sisters' reasoning very sound, and in the possibility that som e people in other countries might closely parallel case of needle exchange for drug misinterpret the situation seem s to me a very thin argument users it is supported by many respected for putting a stop to a program which does not contravene any theologians and by several Eu ropean bishops. teaching on faith or m orals and which is widely Thus the Sisters are following a probable opinion, accepted as having the potential to save lives. in fact the fa r more probable opinion. The theory of probable opinions was devel­ W ILE llE!NG INTERVIEWED on radio recently I was interested oped in the 17th century when morality was to encounter another argument, one not advanced by the conceived in unduly legalistic terms- there arc Congregation. It was said that safe injecting rooms might be clear parallels between probable opi nions and acceptable if conducted by a government agency, but that it being deemed ' innocent until proved guilty was not appropriate for a Ca tholic order, especially(?) an order beyond reasonable doubt'. Despite its legal of sisters to be conducting such room s. This argument of course trappings, however, probabilism was based on an enduringly flies in the face of such orders' history of pioneering work in health sound instinct, namely that the Catholic moral tradition can care, in particular health care for the destitute. But perhaps combine consensus on basic m oral principles with sharp something deeper is at work here. In pointing to it I am entering differences on the practical implications of those principles. into the hazardous business of asCiibing motives, even unconscious To take but one example: Catholic moralists have always been motives. Hence, what follows is said with some hesitation. united in insisting on respect both for human life and for justice, In the early 1990s, I was in Switzerland, and a friend insisted but the tradition has come to sec both pacifism and 'just war on showing me what he called 'the other side of Swiss life' by theory' as legitimate options for Catholics as they seek to respect taking me through the' cecile Park', in effect a safe injecting both life and justice. When we are dealing with complex moral area staffed by the Red Cross, near the Zurich railway station . issues, it can sometimes be an impoverishment of our tradition, It was all very clean and efficient, and I walked out of the park and perhaps a laying of undue burdens on people's shoulders, chilled to the bone. I think many people would share my to rush to the judgment that there is only one appropriate instinctive revulsion at the sight of others' inj ecting drugs, but Catholic response. I realise that such an instinct cannot determine my judgment. But what about the final condition for moral co-operation, Revulsion, and the attendant fear of contamination, can easily namely the avoidance of 'scandal'? It seem s that this was the isolate us from reality. I have to wonder then whether some nub of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's objection who oppose the involvem ent of the Sisters of Charity in Kings to the safe injecting room, and in the form of 'sending the wrong Cross feel that the Church, and especially an order of sisters, signal' or 'giving a green light to drug abuse' it has appeared in would somehow be contaminated by such an involvement. But subsequent comments on the Congregation's decision. surely it has often been the case that the Church and its religious First, we need to be clear on what we are talking about. We orders have been at their best precisely in those situations where are not talking about scandal in the sense of som ething that they have had to risk getting their hands dirty. • merely causes shock or offence, but scandal in the technical sense of an action that leads others into immoral behaviour. Geoffrey King SJ is Professor of Canon Law and Principal of The argument then is that safe injecting rooms give the Jesuit Theological College.

6 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMilER 1999 Mid-term report

'IARST 'ix month' of next yea< States, for example-have simply developed from events. Some is shaping up as a pretty horrible others-a complete reform of defence service culture-flow time for John Howard and his government. The introduction of from some of the horrible shocks of recent months when the goods and services tax is bound to cause Howard serious prob­ government was forced to contemplate what time, and rotation lems, particularly with small business and particularly in regional policies, had wrought. Still others involve little more than areas. Interest rates may well be on the way up, not only slowing indulging some of the nutty ideas of personal friends of the any further improvement in the jobs market but damping some Prime Minister or setting them loose on constituencies which of the increase in disposable income which, more than tax cuts, he hates, particularly in the arts. Imagine, for example, the fun has made most Australians feel better off in recent times. He is that his biographer, David Barnett, and his old speechwriter, under pressure from hostile state governments, particularly on Christopher Pearson-neither famous, to put it mildly, for their the health front. Even as things settle in East Timor, it is hard affinities with or sympathies for Aboriginal aspirations-are to see many triumphs on the international front, either close having with the Museum of Australia. at home or abroad. His Cabinet is restless, and his deputy fairly Peter Costello has his hands full with changes to the tax openly mutinous. His Coalition partner rightly perceives system. Peter Reith has slipped in estimation since the continuing post-Hanson discontents out in the backblocks and referendum campaign, though he may find himself propped up wants interventionist government and spending plans. as a counter-candidate to Costello. Michael Wooldridge, whose A bit hard, too, to grasp the leadership reins, or do the vision faction will probably choose which of these is to be next Liberal things, after the republic referendum. His stalling and spoiling leader, is in some serious strife because of the rortings of tactics won all the engagements, as they have since 1996, but radiologists, and John Fahey, who thinks the baton might be in whether his strategy will win any wars is still far from clear. his pocket, is most focused on still having a seat in The initiative has now passed from him; his very success with NSW when the redistribution music stops. the referendum has now probably made the republic an issue which matters. The impression of stolidness and mean­ 'IE MOST INTERESTING politician to watch at the moment is mindedness is accentuated, even as he has demonstrated a Warren Truss, National Party chieftain of agriculture. He does capacity to trounce his own young turks. If John Howard looks not project well, and it is hard to see him taking the leadership backwards, it is not for fear of those who want his job. from John Anderson, but some of his admirers see him as If he can muddle on, however, it might all turn out well. It potentially in the Black Jack McEwan mould. The National is only mid-term and there is no deep crisis. The government Party commands key portfolios in agriculture, transport, thinks it can stagger through the agonies of the new tax system regional development and trade. Truss is the man, some think, to a point where tax cuts soften the pain. There's a war chest with the administrative and the political skills to get them available for pork-barrelling. A turn of the century tends to operating in tandem and to do some repair work with rural create its own optimism. John Howard will not open the constituencies and regional economies. Olympic Games, but, if he is still there, he is best poised to Is there room for Aborigines in any of the grand planning? benefit from any euphoria it creates. The centenary of federation Oddly there could be. John Howard is still not much in in 2.001 presents opportunities too. syn1.pathy with Aboriginal aspirations; he has marginalised Some scope too for some focused social spending to rebuild them more and more in government priorities since his Wik some constituencies. John Howard has appropriated most of legislation was bedded down. But he is getting more and more the third way rhetoric of Blair and still has a better ear for anxious to scratch them off the list of things to do. The failure battler views on welfare than does the Labor party. More of the preamble has undercut one of the few gestures he has confidence too, these days, in moving in quickly to throttle made; I should not be in the least surprised if he gets personally foolish proposals being floated by those of his ministers who involved in deliberations on a reconciliation document. With still hold radical ideas. The engine room of government is no his track record, of course, that could be disastrous, both for longer the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet. It is the success of the project, or for its adoption by either Aboriginal Prime Minister's office. or non-Aboriginal Australians. Yet unless he gets involved, The big trouble is that neither the leader, nor the office, things seem likely to go nowhere. I cannot think of a year since has much in the way of an agenda, apart from soldiering on and 1966 in which Aboriginal issues have commanded less attention getting re-elected. It can recognise bad ideas which stand in the than they have done in 1999-and that is taking the preamble way of that-almost anything which David Kemp comes up into account. It would be a sorry end of a century if the best with, for example, or some of the rattier ideas of a Philip prospect were some triumph inside and some embarrassment Ruddock, who has now almost entirely lost the plot on outside the Olympic stadiums. • thwarting invasions from the east, the west and the north. Some projects-repairing relations with Indonesia and the United Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times.

V OLUME 9 NUMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 7 LETTERS

EurelMonash University by bouts of Palestinian terrorism. allege wilful and gratuitous Israeli The recent ca ll by the Taxation But it is Ham's observations on the destruction of the city, a claim neither Commissioner, Michael Carmody, for Syrian- Israeli aspect to peace-making backed by evidence nor in accord with a parliamentary inquiry into the ethics that are fundamentally misconceived. the circumstances of the fighting. of pa yi ng tax is to be welcomed. First, Israeli withdrawal to the pre-S Third, considering the attention In recent years, there has been a June 1967 borders (meaning a Ham devotes to the Golan Heights, he significant erosion of public support complete Is raeli evacuation of the has not a syllable to say about the very fo r o ur taxation system due to a Golan height ) i not enshrined in UN pertinent fact that the Golan plateau, perception that the wealthy are not Security Council Resolution 242 or during the period 1948 to 1967, was contributing t heir fair share. This anywhere el e. Acquaintance with the routinely used by the Syrians to shell perception has been actively fuelled contents of that resolution, concluded Israeli farms and urban centres in by current governmen t policies such in the wake of the 1967 war, would Israel's Galilee. This occurred despite as the introduction of a CST and reveal that it calls for Arab- Israeli the fact that the relevant sectors of proposed cuts to capital gains tax negotiations leading to Isra eli with­ Galilee were demilitarised by Israel in which appear to undermine th e drawal 'from territories occupied in accordance with the 1949 armistice progressive n ature of our system . the recent conflict' but deliberately agreement. Syria nonetheless insisted Overall, tax revenue as a percentage refrains from requiring total Israeli on disrupting all peaceful activity, in of GDP has declined from 27 per withdrawal. As the US representative violation of the cease-fire, under the cent to 25 per cent over the las t at the UN, who was principally cover of Soviet vetoes in the Security decade-a loss of eight to ten billion involved in the drafting and passage Council. dollars. of the resolution, stated then and later, For this reason, an Isra eli return to We urgently need a statement from 242 neither requires nor prohibits the situation as it existed before 1967 our leading politicians (o n both sides complete Israeli withdrawal, but is unlikely. Furthermore, the pre- 1967 of the spectrum ) which reinforces the rather remits the timing and extent of lines do not conform with the accepted moral purpose of taxation: that is to s uch withdrawal to n egotiations international border but in fact involve fund universalist community services between the parties. Syrian occupation of Israeli territory such as health, housing, education and Accordingly, Ham is mista ken in seized in the 1948 war, a further reason social security whi ch are fundamental asserting that Bara k's declared for Israel having never accepted Syria's to the social cohesion of any demo­ intention not to return to the 1967 claim for an exact restoration of the cratic society; to promote greater bord ers is in contravention of 242 and tatu quo ante bellum. eq uality of opportunity; and to an impediment to peace. It is certainly Lastly, a word of caution in assess­ redistribute incom e from those who not the former and unlikely to be the ing the bona fides as peace-maker of have too much to those who have too latter. Hafez al-Assad. First and forem ost, as little.

8 EUREKA STREET • D ECEM BER 1999 It may be true that there is a a mea ns such as heroin are constructed technical legal difference between tax and thereby regarded as deviant, are avoidance and what Michael Carmody judged as criminal, and from within euphemisticall y calls 'tax minimisa­ this situation of exclusion face the AUSTRALIAN tion', but there is certainly no mo ral very rea l possibility of death fr om or ethical difference. We urgentl y overdose. Such peopl e are the victim s e-thical need a government campaign that of the respectability of the 'culture of Agribu siness or promotes the civic duty of paying a dea th'. reafforestation . TRUSTS fair share of tax. Ye t it seem s now that all is Mining or recycling . Investors The campa ign should emphasise forgiven on the part of the Chair of Exploitation or can choose that individual citizens have Peter towards this errant 'culture of sustainability. Through the AE Tru sts you obligation to others a well as rights. death', for now the Chair of Peter is Greenhou se gases can invest your savings The principle should be espoused that (too) much concerned with respect­ or solor energy. and superannuation in governments have a right to intervene ability, with the appearance of right. Armaments or over 70 different to limit the rights of powe rful However, by the Vatican's directive, community enterprises, each expertly individuals (or groups of individuals) the good has been sacrificed, and the enterprise. selected for its unique when this is deemed necessary to ersatz morality of a culture formally combination of earnings, protect the ri ghts of other less castigated for its disregard for human powerful individuals or groups. life ha becom e newly imbued with environmental Let's have an end to prominent moral force. sustoi nability and social corporate leaders boasting of their self­ How painfully ironic it is that as responsibility, and earn o ishness and greed in regards to their the Western world approaches the competitive financial fellow citizens. beginning of the Third Millennium, return . For full details Philip Mendes e nters upon what has been for make o free coli to Clayton, VIC C hristians declared as a year of Jubilee, 1800 021 227 the Vatican has chosen to reveal itself fm 'estm eflls in tbe Au:.;tralian F:tbica/ Trusts can at one with the 'culture of death', has onlr be made througb tbe current prospectus Scandal? revealed itself as, in truth, respectable, registered 1/litb tbe Australian Securities Commission and at•ailablefrom: but stripped of m oral authority. Australia11 Ethical In vestment Ltd From Mark Johnson Mark Johnson l 'nil 66, Ca nberra Busm ess Centre There ca n be no grea ter scandal to the Katoomba, NSW Bradfield St. IJOII 'II er ACT 2601 faith of the Church than its rea lisation that the Vatican directive w hich prohibits the Sisters of Charity from working with the NSW Government in providing safe injecting rooms for heroin users has much to do with maintaining the appearance of respect­ ability, and little to do with the exercise of moral authority. How strange it is that over the past 21 long years we, the Church, have had to endure the reactionary anti- Western ramblings of a Vatican [and its covert s upporters[ s upposedly much con­ cerned with the in trinsic worth of human life, yet seemingl y little concerned with the quality of human Getting two of something? life as actua ll y lived. The current figure positioned upon the Chair of Peter has in the past infamou sly Or getting none of anything? labell ed the West as a 'culture of dea th' . By thi damning description can be inferred a perspective which has cast judgment on the callous disregard V If you hate doubling up on gifts, imagine being a by which human life has been, and refugee getting nothing and having nothing. No home. remains, little more than a resource to No food. No future. When you donate to the 1999 be exploited, its intrinsic dignity Christmas Bowl Appeal, it goes to those who need it diminished. In s uch a culture, as most. It's not a hand out, it's a helping hand. So please perhaps correctl y assessed by the help us give the best gift - the gift of hope. present Pope, it can be of little surprise t hat some of us fall fo ul of this culture's sense of respectability, and turn to addictive m eans by which to ~~!~c~!~~I~~a~~~~!!~ ~ endure it. Those among us addicted to

V oLUME 9 N uMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 9 ~ The Month's Tra-ffic a 'JJj

Sunday there would be general absolution at the Synod. He is a moderate and would be Curial in all our parishes.' a strong contrast to John Paul II. Pierre Eyt, O'Brien said that the response from Archbishop of Bordeaux, 66, is a moderate manoeuvres Rome was negative and that 'Medina would conservative possibility. Another Belgian, not budge'. The 'Medina' in question is the Jan Pieter Schotte, 72, General Secretary of S uoOENLY,last December, after a dressing­ Chilean Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez of the Synod, has been mentioned, as has Jean­ down from Rome, Australian Ca tholics the Congregation for Divine Worship and Marie Lustiger, 73, Archbishop of Paris, became aware of synods of bishops. The Discipline of the Sacraments. This was the although I think both must be considered synod season continued in October with a same gentleman who, with the Secretary of long shots. three-week Synod for Europe. The next pope State, Angelo Sodano, petitioned the British Given the antagonism to the Curia, was probably in attendance. governmen t to release the former dictator Vatican cardinals, such as Angelo Sodano, It go t off to a pessimistic start with the Augusto Pinochet. O'Brien's comm ents 72, and Cam ill o Ruini, 69, have fallen from Synod Relator (Chairman), the John Paul­ caused a considerable flurry in the curial favour, although the Colombian Prefect of appointed Spanish Cardinal Maria Rouco dovecote. the Congregation of the Clergy, Dario Varela, denouncing Europe's loss of faith At the end of the Synod there were few Castrillon Hoyos, 71, is mentioned by many. and 'immanent humanism '-the notion practical suggestions but a lot of hype about One thing is certain : it is still a wide that we are saved by intra-worldly forces. 'h ope'. There h ad been debate about open race. -Paul Collins This, he said, had infiltrated the Church as ordaining married men to solve the priest 'secular humanism', stripping it of its faith shortage (by next year 30 to SO per cent of in the resurrection and transcendent values. European parishes will have no resident In M em oriam It was a bleak picture. priest), the re-admission to communion of It was not until Cardinal Godfried remarried Catholic divorcees, a call for the JaclzLynch Danneels of Belgium spoke about the new appointment of women to h ead curial challenges and questions raised by contem­ agencies, and a more generous approach to 1917-99 porary Western society that things began to the use of general absolution. Hardly any of (Taoiseach 1966-73, brighten up. He said that religious plural­ this got into the final synod document ism had led the Church to dialogue with which was strong on theology, European ~ 1977-79) other faiths and that God was trying to unity, the growth of democracy and human .l.o THE IRISH PEOPLE he was Honest Jack. teach the Church humility. This theme rights and praise for the so-called 'new There was a famous occasion wh n he was was taken up by the Englishman, Father religious movements'. All fairly predictable. fo und out in a lie and he apologised to the Tim othy Radcliffe, Mas t e r of the However, the most interesting aspect of country with the words 'I forgot'. The people Dominican order, who went on to say that the Synod was the performance of the believed him and the incident became ' just asserting the authority of the Church papabile, the cardinals on the papal known more as a gentle joke than as a ever more strongly is not the answer. People shortlist. The odds on an older and transi­ vindictive reminder of miscreance. The will either resist or take no notice'. tional Italian or Western Europea n strength­ comedian Niall Toibin, a fellow Corkman­ The Roman Curia came in fo r a lot of ened. The cardinals will not be looking for he plays the role of the parish priest in criticism even from very conservative a long papacy, but they will be seeking Ballyl

10 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1999 BusH LAWYER BUSH 5;:

S EAMUS O'SHAUGHNESSY the 'reluctant Taoiseach' (Prime Minister), a title he was quite happy to live with. Softly spoken, modest, courteous, a man of simplicity and unassailable integrity, Fear the people loved him. The country was so innocent in those days that they could whisper what a pity Jack and Mairin had no children, and a trimming might be added to and loathing the family rosary that, like the biblical Anna, some miracle would happen. When he was finally and humiliatingly pushed I ASKED ANEW District Court Judge recently they report decisions inaccurately or out in 1979, the leader of the Opposition, how he was finding his job. He said, 'I'm simplistically. While I wouldn't claim to the dour and solemn Liam Cosgrave, not just taking it quietly, trying to keep off the have mastered the art of making judicial given to exaggeration or hyperbole, front page of the Telegraph .' (The Sydney decision-making media-friendly, a case I described him as ' the most popular Daily Telegraph , for those who don't know, handled about a year ago showed me what politician in Ireland since O'Connell'. It is a crusading tabloid with the largest can be achieved if you take account of how was an assertion which was not challenged circulation of daily newspapers in NSW.) the media works. then and has not been challenged since. In my experience, the general reaction A woman school principal had been But behind the soft voice and the pipe of judges and magistrates to the media is charged with defrauding her employer of smoke, there was no shortage of steel. This one of fear and loathing. There are few $10,000. Her QC asked me to deal with her was the man who as a centre halfback things that tabloid journalists, TV crime as a mentally ill person , rather than repelled Kilkenny hurlers and Kerry foot­ reporters and redneck radio jocks like more applyingthecriminallaw. She knew what ballers with equal success. Surrounded in than a juicy legal controversy, and judges she had done was wrong. The argument his political life by fiercely ambitious and and magistrates have no immunity from was that she was a person of impeccable ruthless men, he held on to the leadership their blitzes. Many have suffered silently character whose conduct was an aberration of Fianna Fail for 13 years and served as but bitterly. resulting from extraordinary s tress. Taoiseach for nine of those years. One magistrate, whom I admire, was Psychiatric evidence that she was In 1969, he took on the nationalist hawks criticised by talkback radio kings to such profotmdly depressed was incontestable, within Fianna Fail by sacking the strongest an extent that he angrily rang up the station and, significantly, she had repaid most of ministers of his cabinet, Charles Haughey and sought to put his point of view. I think the money. As a matter of law, I had to and N eil Blaney, and persuading two others he now regrets having done so for two balance both the private, subjective to resign. He had Haughey brought before reasons. First, the rationale for his decision concerns of this woman and the public the courts on a charge of importing arms for had been given in court on thepublicrecord, interest. Mercy or deterrence. the IRA and when that case failed, Haughey and that should have been left at that. But, At the hearing, to my horror, the court's put down a firm marker that he would not in any event, the shock jocks will always press box was chock-a-block. Having been forget. That part is sour and still festering have the last word- they, not their victims, badly burned twice before, I decided this history; the years of the late '70s were the control the medium. time to spoon-feed the journalis t s, bitterest since the Civil War as people like Before I went to the country I had two emphasising and repeating what Sile de Valera, the late Dr Bill Loughnane unwanted appearances in the tabloids. In I particularly wanted them to understand. and Haughey publicly questioned Lynch's the first case, I cautioned an 18-year-old I had accepted the woman's application. credentials to lead a party which had been kid, a first offender who, drunk, had foolishly Rather than leave them to attempt to cast set up to achieve the unification of the grabbed a bike from outside a bike shop and the decision in their own words, I tried to country. It was a chorus which was taken ridden it for about 200 metres before seize the agenda, to give them words and up by Sinn Fein who called him 'Union Jack abandoning it. In the second case, the phrases they could quote. They accepted Lynch'. brother of a famous murderer was hounded the offering and the reports of the case were He finally succumbed to the constant by reporters relentlessly prior to and during astonishingly accurate-! could have sniping and resigned. In the ensuing contest his brother's trial. Infuriated, he lashed out, written them myself. for leadership, Haugh ey's backbench punched a photojournalist and smashed a It is easy to dismiss journalists as light­ dragoons won him the leadership of the camera. He hadn't been in trouble for 30 weights or rednecks and to sneer or complain Party. For his remaining years in the Dail, years. I made him pay for the camera but from the ivory tower, but they are the vox Lynch was always referred to as ' the real otherwise let him off. I was excoriated in populi. Law is for the people, so the law Taoiseach'. He was rarely heard from in each ease-l had 'condoned' bicycle theft must talk to the media. Given accurate, retirement-there is no tradition of former and given an imprimatur to violence. digestible information on complex issues, Irish leaders making nuisances of them­ I had expected everyone to see how journalists are capable of serious thinking selves like they do in this country-and we obvious were the arguments for leniency and good reporting, even in stories of 600 only knew that he was a director of Irish and to report them. I didn't spell these things words and audio-visual grabs of one minute. Distillers and we did not begrudge him the out; I assumed that all decent people who Some might be beyond redemption, but the occasional free whiskey of which he was heard what I heard in court would react as honest hack is worth her salt. • said to have a connoisseur's fondness. I did. I was shocked and hurt by the reaction. There was no dinner in his honour after The most usual complaint by judges Seamus O'Shaughnessy is a NSW he left politics; the party which he had led and magistrates about the media is that magistrate.

VOLUME 9 NUMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 11 1 a e fo r 13 years effectively wrote hi m out of its history. There was no golden handshake, not even th e alarm clock which one of the humblest of his followers could expect; his picture does not appear in the Hall of Fame at party h eadqu a rte rs; m ember s of Have some respect parli ament were left in no doubt that public friendship with him was not a way to A sucKER FOR E u nEKA STREET in any of its manifestations, I decided to watch the telly promotion. version of it (reviewed in Eureka Street, November 1999). In the first episode, one of the It was a small revenge, but a pointed characters who started a political argument in a pub got a beating to teach him 'respect'. one, when the funeral oration was not given An odd form of teaching, I thought but, as I worked through this month's journals, it did by a present or former Fia nna Fai l notable, set me thinking about respect. not even by a member of the party, bu t by Introducing a lively conversation in the Feminist Studies in Religion (Spring 1999), Des O'Malley, a renegade who had been Emily Neill touches on issues of respect. She argues that feminist scholars of religion kicked out of Fianna Fail and fo unded his have often presented the history of their discipline as a story of progress from theoreti­ own political movement. cally incoherent beginnings to theoretical sophistication. N eill argues that from this Jack Lynch will be remembered as the perspective early feminists can easily be seen as primitive, with the result that the agenda leader who, in 1972, brought Ireland into of equality and freedom from discrimination which they pursued with passion can Europe. His gentle persuasion on peopl e implicitly be dismissed. Her interlocutors take up this point, acknowledging that desire like Ted Heath and Marga ret Thatcher for acceptance by a substantially male academy can distract scholars from the feminist would res ult in later initiatives like concerns that first led them to scholarship. The conversation illuminates what is at stake Sunningdale, the Anglo-Irish Agreement in respect. If those who have gone before us are not respected, the project which defined and the hope of Good Friday. He was the their lives will be trivialised and lost. That insight, however obscurely sensed, lay behind first leader to go to America to persuade th e the beating administered by the thugs of the Belfast pub. people ther e not to send h elp t o paramilitaries in the North. The pragmatic One of the historian's gifts is to offer respect to forgotten people and projects. In this and active co-operation with all sides which spirit, Graham Neville writes on Dorothy Sayers (Theology, October 1999). As a child is the core of today's Irish policy on Ulster I listened each Lent to her radio series, Tl1e Man Born to Be King; as a teenager I graduated owes its genesis to Jack Lynch. to (and soon moved on from) her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Sayers was also a theolo­ Although poor economic results may gian in an Anglican tradition which has valued the lay contribution. She was concerned adversely affect how history judges his terms that in the post-war search for relevance, the depth of Christian theology not be lost. Her as Taoiseach, the Iri sh people will always contribution encourages renewed respect for the place of lay theology in the churches. remember him as a politician who was Many Christian theologians professionally pay respect to earlier texts and projects. genuinely loved, the kind of person for In this spirit, Tina Beattie writes about the Magnificat (New Blackfriars, October 1999). whom politics was public service in the More recently, Mary's song of exultation has been studied for its revolutionary implica­ ense that Plato wrote of it, his integrity tions: kings are to be put down, and the poor to be raised. Beattie explores the place in a and simple lifestyle cast into greater reli ef comprehensive account of salvation which the Early Church gave to Mary. She then by what has happened since. turns to the thoroughly modern question, 'Can women be saved by a male Saviour?' She -Frank O'Shea argues that for the early Church, the answer would be, 'Not by a male saviour in isolation' On these grounds, she would endorse the description of Mary as co-redemptrix, normally Public seen as an index of conservative, not to say reactionary views. But in her account, the phrase seems to have radical implications. It suggests that gender-based exclusion from power and office belongs to the fallen world and has no place in the Church. reproof

Finally, a proper respect restores lost complexity. Nowhere is this more needed than SuNDAY 24 SEPTEMBER, Anglican in discussion of religion and science. Michael Roberts (Expository Times, October 1999) Primate Dr Keith Rayner ca ll ed a media looks at the attitudes of 19th-century Anglican clergy to the literal interpretation of conference at Bishopscourt in Melbourne scripture, and in particular at their response to Darwin. He argues that before Darwin to m ak e public Church disciplin ary few clergy interpreted the priestly creation story literally. Indeed they were responsible measures aga inst the Bishop of Canberra for much of the geological research that demanded long processes of development. and Goulburn, George Browning, who had Equally, most had little difficulty with the general theory of evolution proposed by confessed to adultery with a former Darwin. They disagreed, however, with Darwin's philosophical judgment that evolution parishioner 15 years before. Not much of a could be based only on chance, and that it excluded any belief in God's providence. They story in media terms, but Sunday is a slow also insisted that human beings had a special status within the created world. The view news day and it got national coverage that that Christian thinkers generally saw the conflict between science and religion as night on the airwaves and fo r several days irresoluble is fictitious. It is embodied in Huxley's highly coloured account of his debate afterwards in the pri nt media. with Bishop Wilberforce. It has led scientific theorists to accept too easily the assumption What made the story news at all was that science demands a materialist philosophy based on chance, and some Christians to that the bishop had tendered his resignation believe that creationism is not a novelty, but can appeal to a broad Christian tradition.• over the affair. In the cl ays that fo llowed, an air of puzzlem ent penn ea ted reports, Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. edi torials, letters to the editor- general

12 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1999 opinion mooted that the punishment rather that sectarian enmities had conspired to public gaze. The sexual mores of the Church outweighed the crime. There were calls to unseat the bishop of Canberra and Goulburn. appeared rather silly when revealed in the reinstate the bishop. The bishop himself 'I have no doubt that the Church will review marketplace. wrote emotively to his flock that, under the its legislation in the light of this experience,' Before his resignation became public circumstances, he had chosen to go to the the Primate wrote. It seems however that the bishop had confessed to veteran cross rather than continue as their shepherd. much of the Sturm und Drang evolved from Canberra Times journalist Graham Downie Outrage at the tragic ending of a brilliant the tribunal's interpretation of 'public' that he should have taken legal m easures to career was n1ore-or-less universal. Decent, reproof and its decision to use the public protect himself. The bishop expressed God-fearing people, committed to forgive­ media as a channel for applying the penalty. disappointment that the Church as an ness and reconciliation, were appalled at News editors are often tolerant towards the hierarchical institution had been unable to such rough justice. Church, but a routine response to organisa­ respond with the creative, redemptive love But the Anglican Church had not tions seeking free publicity is more likely of God. 'In this due process, appropriate intended to crucify the bishop. The option to be 'Why don't they pay for an ad?' Th e care of myself and my family hasn't been as of removing him from office had been open Australian's Monday headline, 'Bishop obvious as I would like,' the bishop told to the Special Tribunal. It chose instead the Quits in Sex Scandal' was fo llowed up with Downie in an exclusive interview. T-shirts lesser sentence of 'monition', or reproof. an editorial a few days later censuring the appeared in Goulburn Cathedral Explaining the decision, Dr Rayner wrote bizarre spectacle of a church failing to emblazoned with the words 'Bring back in The Age that the tribunal had judged practise what it preached. +George'. Positions were taken, polemic private reproof to be too slight a penalty. 'In For in spite of the promising headlines, raged, hands were wrung, the media effect it would have been no more than a the Fourth Estate had been sold a pup. shrugged. No doubt the Anglican Church slap on the wrist for what had been, at the There was simply no way to translate into will blame the Fourth Estate for much of time, a serious breach of priestly responsi­ the public domain the notion that a 15- the damage to its reputation and its flock: bility.' The tribunal opted therefore to reveal year-old single act of 'adultery' was either the media (C hurch leadership will decide) the matter in the mass media. 'The rest is newsworthy or worthy of' monition '-even simply cannot get the story right. now public knowledge,' according to Dr if a bishop did it. For the tribunal the whole But the problem is that Church culture Rayner. exercise backfired. There was predictably a is no longer formative in mainstream public As so often occurs when people are at certain am ount of satisfaction that Church culture. Codes, concepts, language used in cross-purposes, public knowledge soon leadership shared the foibles of 'ordinary' the life of the Church are often incompre­ exceeded the facts. Conspiracy theories grew people. Anglicans watching the news break hensible in the public domain. To translate like mushrooms, forcing the Primate to that Sunday night were shocked to see one its message these days for mass media write another open letter to quash rumours of their bishops so brutally exposed to the consumption the Church needs a particular ministry of proclamation that uses radically different m ethods from those taught in theological college. ltHi~ RESPEC.\ ID '(OlJR PKOCUV-4\~\\0N In the past, 'public' in Church teach­ Of PE.C&Me>E.R 25, Wf 11'\StST T~C. P~~ASC. ingmeant 'from thepulpit'-within \' P€ PiC. E. ON e~~1"tt'' ee AI"\E ~DE. D \.0 READ the fe llowship of the Church . In the ''PE.AC~ IN CE.Ri',._l~ DE.5\vN~>-.ifD .WN~S Wlil-1 days when cathedrals were hubs of NO lMI't\~DIAIE. MtUT~R'{ S\6~\FlCA"'lU •; communication, no doubt a reproof AND we R.EJ~£.1 ouTR\&HT f\s toMPLETe.L.Y from the pulpit would find its way into society's h eadlines as a matter UNACL~Fff\St.E T~ UN(ONPlflON~L- of course. But it is highly question­ ~NP Ul'ltt.Alf.RAl ~1\~TI~& Of able whether it is appropriate for ''&OOPWlLt..'' To AU.. ~N! the Church today to co-opt the mass media to administer the penalty of public reproof on one of its members. If the Church wants a mandate to address society at large through the public media, it needs to learn the appropriate language. -Maggie Helass

This month's contributors: Paul Collins MSC is a priest, writer and broadcaster; Frank O'Shea teaches ma ths at Marist College, Canberra; Maggie Helass is a journalist who has worked on assignments for the Anglican Church in the UK, South Africa and Australia.

VOLUME 9 NUMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 13 Republic of Conscience', in which At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law The and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office- This kind of modesty is a fl eeting republic of phenomenon. Advocacy and activism are just some • of the voluntary activities that keep us involved with our community, and this conscience feeling of connection is crucial to good government. There are no long-term gains to be had in 'special relationships' B EWRE THE V.cTO" AN dectome government dismissive of the very and a real danger in coming to rely on voted out the Kennett Government-or, concept of consultation, a government governments to speak out. Advocates of more accurately, let the Bracks Labor which dismantled the most fundamental social change need, as Virginia Woolf team , giggling with delight and policy feedback mechanisms, deliberately said, both a room and a sufficiency of surprise, in- I was trying to keep the froze out advocacy groups, tied non­ their own. fa ith alive. government sector funding to contracts The RMIT Winter School on Social In July, RMIT University gave me an which committed the recipients to Action and Advocacy was a good honorary appointment and invited me to service standards and confidentiality and example. Perhap there wasn't a great help set up and to ch air a three-day threatened or exacted revenge on those deal that was novel in the presentations. Winter School on Advocacy and Social who spoke out publicly. The Victorian We put Australian social activism in its Action. T h e University, the Stegley governm ent h ad made an art-form of global context-economically and geo­ Foundation (a philanthropic trust based marginalising its critics as ' disloyal', graphically, becau se we know that in Melbourne) and the Victorian Trades 'partisan' or self-interested lobbyists. activism knows no boundaries. Lawyers Hall Council co-operated in designing, It did not seem possible, in July, that talked about how to structure advocacy funding and delivering it. It was meant there would be any change in the way groups and avoid liability for defamation to give grass-roots advocates survival Victorian government wa conducted. and other intimidatory litigation. This skills. They needed them . Since the election, there ha been a was just before Tim Costello, anti­ For people who have not lived in curious phenomenon. The heat seems to gambling advocate, was threatened with Victoria, it is difficult to understand have gone out of the advocacy move­ defamation action by a government how disheartened community groups ment. Community groups are hoping for agency that he accu sed of supinely h ave becom e, after seven years of a more funding, greater access to ministers, complying with the desires of the (then) and a sea change in the quality of Premier. their community lives. But it is now We had practical demonstrations of difficult to get a meeting together, how to manage conflict within advocacy to plan a telephone tree. The groups; workshops on how to plan and Federation of Community Legal monitor campaigns; how to use the Centres, long a hotbed of activism, internet, film, comedy and the media. was even said to be considering This was just before it was revealed how The Churchill Trust invites applications from Australians, pulling their representatives from entirely the m edia had misread t he of 18 years and over from all walks of life who wish to the government review of their electorate and the outcome of the recent be considered for a Churchill Fellowship to undertake, during 200 I. an overseas study project that will centres 'beca use they had state election. enhance their usefulness to the Australian community. a Labor government now'. We shared inform ation on how to No prescribed qualifications are required. merit being fundraise and why and how we should the primary test, whether based on past achievements or demonstrated ability for future achievement. NEED for independent measure social capital. This was just Fellowships are awarded annually to those who have advocacy has never been greater. A three months before the Federal Govern ­ already established themselves in their calling. They are not awarded for the purpose of obtaining higher Labor government is still a govern­ ment's full range of attacks on voluntary academic or formal qualifications. ment, not a protest movement, and community agencies, particularly women's Details may be obtained by sending a self addressed the Victorian one is especially hog­ groups, becam e evident, and we were stan1ped envelope (12x24cms) to: tied, with a hostile upper house and reminded yet again how dangerous it is The \V'mston Churchill Memorial Trust 218 Northbourne Avenue, Braddon. ACT 2612 an Opposition convinced that it was to rely on the government shilling. And or from: http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/ churchill_fellowships cheated of office. Surprised by joy we shared success stories of activist and Completed application forms and reports the ALP ministers might be, but advocacy campaigns, and there were from three referees must be submitted by they are far from what Seamus many of them- albeit 'successful' in a Tuesday 29 February, 2000. H eaney foresaw in his 'From the range of ways. Activists w ith very

14 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1999 different views-Gary Foley and Frank Brennan, for example-spoke, differed, but did not attack one another. The Winter school was an effective use of public physical space-the Trades Hall Council chamber. It was an effective use of metaphysical public space, with Engineering results film, electronic and interactive presen­ tations as well as printed papers and LESNOWY MoUNTAINS ScHEME and the Sydney Harbour Bridge aside, when we think resources. It was an extraordinary about Australia, we don't normally think about engineering. Perhaps it's time to take example of collaboration, without another look. competition, for the public good. T h e Hong Kong's new air terminal at Chek Lap Kok-at 1.3 kilometres long, the world's degree of trust, co-operation and involve­ largest airport building-has been built on a land reclamation site in a demanding tropical ment of individual activists, and climate. It handles 35 million passengers a year. And it was a Melbourne company, Connell Wagn er, that oversaw all the structural, mechanical, electrical, fire protection, institutions such as RMIT University, communications, hydraulics and transportation engineering. the philanthropic com m unity and the Earlier this year, another Australian company, Air International, won a $500-million Union movement who jointly funded and contract from General Motors (GM) in the US to supply the air conditioning system in a mg•ni,cd it, w"' unp,ccc ~

VoLUME 9 NuMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 15 fOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE Wearing handcuffs as jewellery l •

While Australia was musing over the antics of its commentator-entertainers, Laws and Jon es, Anthony Ham recalled a visit to Robert Fisk a journalist from another school altogether.

L ARST "M' I spoke to Roben Fisk, I was in out as a truly independent voice, enabling him to Damascus and he was at his Beirut home, a short circumvent the Allied war machine's propaganda and distance away across the mountains. After weeks of image manipulation. And while those of his friends trying to pin him down, there he was, finally, on the and colleagues who had not been taken hostage in other end of the phone, and I wasn't letting go. When Beirut were moving on to report from safer capitals, would it be possible to meet ? I asked. Robert Fisk stayed because he believed the world should 'Next Tuesday will be fine.' He paused. 'Of course, know what was happening to the people of Beirut. next Tuesday I could be anywhere from Algeria to Such credentials are rare in modern journalism. If Afghanistan. If I'm not here, ring my editor at The there was any possibility of meeting him, I knew Independent; she'll know where to find m e.' I must take it. As much as I admired his work, For years I had been an admirer of this respected however, I drew the line at the prospect of following Middle East correspondent. As an undergraduate him to Kabul. I took my chance, and headed across struggling with the minefi eld of vested interests and the border in a battered Valiant Charger bound for fiercely defended subjectivities that is Middle Eastern Beirut. politics, I admired his ruthlessly fair-minded approach, For the uninitiated like myself, Lebanon is a m eticulou s attention to detail, and placem ent of bewildering array of images and associations. ordinary people with names at the centre of every The Beka'a Valley, a wide smooth fla tland story. His refusal to operate within the Allied 'pool' separating the mountains of Lebanon from the hills system of journalism during the Gulf War singled him of Syria, saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war

16 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1999 in Lebanon, and continues to see sporadic outbreaks By the time I met Robert Fisk, Beirut had unsettled of violence. It is also where many Western hostages me profoundly. Fisk strode into the hotel foyer in were held. It flashed past my window at dizzying speed. which we had arranged to meet. He was smoking his Further in towards Beirut, along the steeply pipe, and, as he greeted me warmly, I began to feel winding roads of central Lebanon, there was barely a more ecure. After all, this m an is a survivor, structure not showing signs of war. Many existed only I thought. It couldn't hurt to be seen with him. as battered walls with the tell-tale signs of bullet and As we walked along to his apartment, the man who shell-holes framed charcoal black. Graceful and no has survived the bombs, sieges, and hostage-taking of doubt once very exclusive hillside villas were now as Beirut said, with no apparent sense of irony, that he uninhabitable as the humble stone bungalows which feared one day soon he'd be finished off by one of the stood close by. large earth-movers digging up the street in In Bhamdoun, I was reminded of Robert Fisk's front of his building. report during the Israeli siege of Beirut in June-July 1982. He described how 'Syrian transport lorries had SAFELY IN HIS APARTMENT overlooking the Corniche, been crushed on the pavements, some gutted, others Fisk proved to be a highly accessible, not to mention abandoned even as their occupants were loading blankets generous and urbane host. In the short time we spent and supplies in a vain attempt to retreat in good order'. together, he fielded a radio interview from Europe and In September 1983, he returned with the soon-to-be­ spoke about the prospects for peace in Northern kidnapped T erry Anderson, and reported that: Ireland with a UN commander based in southern Lebanon. H e had just Much of it was in ruins and at least six fires were flown in from Belfast and burning out of control. It was filled with gaunt young was jetting off to sunny men, Palestinian guerrillas from a PLO faction opposing Kosovo the following day, •• • Arafat, Shi'a militiamen with green headbands, Lebanese but had still made time to Communist party gunmen. They were dirty, exultant, see me. He told me that high on danger, laughing when artillery rounds crashed when he was starting out into the roofs of houses. With militia banners above as a journalist some of the them, the gunmen had set up checkpoints on the broken big names at the time streets. They lounged on the smashed pavements, many were too arrogant to talk of them smoking large Cuban cigars. 'This was a great with him. He promised victory,' one of them said, leaping to his feet and pointing himself that h e would excitedly through the heat haze to the distant outline of always make time where Beirut below us. 'We shall be in Beirut in two days.' possible. When I passed through, an advertising billboard On one occasion, Fisk on the outskirts of town for a mobile phone company agreed to meet a young read 'The United Callers of Lebanon'. Australian Lebanese man In nearby Aley and further afield, thousands of who had written asking civilian lives were lost as armies of Israelis, Druze, to speak with him. When Palestinians, Syrians, Christian Phalangists, and they met, Fisk asked the Lebanese Shi'a, all fought to the death with 'liberation' young man what it was on their lips. In the words of Fisk, '[ i]f ever ignorant that he wished to speak armies clashed by night, they did so on this mountain about. Was it the current ridge'. state of Middle East Beirut itself was no less confronting, its contra­ peace? Or the process of dictions no less breathtaking. Whole avenues of once­ reconstructing Lebanon? elegant buildings remained only as facades riddled N either. The young man with bullet holes. Entire suburbs had been shattered had read Fisk's seminal and the wind blew diesel fumes through the caverns account of the Lebanese left behind. Above them towered gleaming, newly War, Pity the Nation, and built skyscrapers. On the waterfront Corniche simply wanted to sit on promenade, women in miniskirts and on roller blades the balcony overlooking the Corniche, the same Photographs taken flirted with men in convertible black BMWs, all in balcony where Fisk had sheltered as the shells rained in Beirut by full view of both the Hard Rock Cafe and a multitude down upon the city. Fisk was happy to oblige and Anthony Ham. of typically stern posters of the late Ayatollah went about his work while the man soaked up his Khomeini. And, in the neglected southern suburbs of surroundings. the city, the squalor of the Sabra and Chatila In between telling me the restaurants where Palestinian refugee camps stood in sharp and shameful I absolutely must eat, trying to arrange for me to contrast to the shiny new sports stadium on the attend a UN wreath-laying ceremony in southern camps' perimeter. Lebanon the next day, and expressing heartfelt

V O LUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 17 concern for the fragility of Lebanon's reconstruction, people seeking protection from persecution. He has he spoke engagingly of his years as a journalist. also instigated campaigns to raise money for the His recounting was as entertaining as it was children of Iraq who suffer from malnutrition, disease, sobering. From his early years writing a gossip column and skyrocketing mortality rates. for a northern English newspaper in which he spent Where other corresponden ts describe events and his time 'chasing vicars around the countryside', he trends, in the process merging individual people into moved to reporting from the streets an undifferentiated mass, articles by Fisk tell the story of Belfast, before Beirut beckoned in of the great events by identifying their effects upon 1975. He has been there ever since. ordinary, named individuals. It is easier to turn away He spoke of his job as a passion, a and do nothing when hundreds of anonymous people calling, one which required a are being killed than it is when confronted particular mind-set to live with the n with a name, with an individual face. danger 24 hours a day. His excite­ ment, the adrenalin rush he gets from L RHAPS MOST REMARKABLE of all in this era of reporting in war zones, was obvious. globalisation and instantaneous international commu­ On the waterfront He learned his Arabic by spending nications, Fisk, wherever possible, has his stories three months in a burnt-out building translated and sent to the people described. Where Corniche promenade, in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah they are illiterate, the story is often read to them. Too fighters returning each evening from often, reporters, however well-meaning, move on to women in miniskirts raids against Israeli and other enemy the next story without ever allowing the subj ects of positions. Beirut may be quieter their stories to comment on the way they have been and on roller blades now, the dangers of earth -movers represented, to own their stories. When I expressed notwithstanding, but parts of Lebanon surprise at Fisk's practice, he shrugged it off. Clearly flirted with men in remain highly volatile, as do many of he thought it an integral part of his job. the other places from where Fisk files This is responsible journalism. Alongside it, much convertible black his reports. that currently masquerades as journalism is exposed Fisk has been the unwelcome as little m ore than crude populism which mistakes BMWs, all in full witness to some of this century's most on-the-spot reporting for informed analysis. disturbing crim es, and countless Journalists like Fisk shame sensationalist and view of both the individual human tragedies that have celebrity journalism- Richard Carleton's escapades resulted. In the midst of the massacres in East Timor during the referendum process and Ellen Hard Rock Cafe and in Sabra and Chatila, he wrote: Fanning's misguided interventions on behalf of a Chinese asylum seeker recently removed from They were everywhere, in the road, in a multitude of Australia being two examples among many. laneways, in back yards and broken We could do with m ore journalists like Fisk. rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and typically stern Journalists who are committed not just to the story, across the garbage tips. The murderers­ but to the people behind the story. Who provide posters of the late the Christian militiamen whom Israel informed counterpoint to prevailing wisdom, who are had let into the camps to 'flush out aware of the power of words and images. And who Ayatollah Khomeini. terrorists'-had only just left. In some can see their profession's propensity for what Fisk cases, the blood was still wet on the describes as the 'careless depreciation of meaning'- ground. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped From Robert Fisk's balcony overlooking the counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses­ Mediterranean, I watched the Shi'a families drawn on women, young men, babies and grandparents- lying to the Corniche by the late afternoon breeze. With together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had the palm trees swaying, it was easy to be deceived been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor into seeing the scene as idyllic. through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients Fisk, h owever, was ever-vigilant. He spoke at a Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen critically about much of Western public opinion, its ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs easy acceptance of black-and-whites, its child-like of hastily dug mass graves. Perhaps a thousand people attention span, and its support for n1. ilitary were butchered; probably half that number again. intervention based on ignorance. H e has suffered And yet, within this context of danger and the vilification for reporting the crimes of all sides in worst humanity has to offer, the Robert Fisk I found Lebanon, and in conflicts from Algeria to Afghanistan. was not the cynical, world-weary correspondent, the 'Clearly som e people don't want to know the truth, 'danger junkie' that I expected. Instead, he astounded and instead want to wear handcuffs as jewellery.' • m e with his affability, his relentless pursuit of justice, his humanity. Anthony Ham is a M elbourne-based writer H e spoke of asylum cases around the world with specialising in the culture and politics of the Middle which he assists, using h is skills in the service of Ea st.

18 EU REKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 THE W ORLD

Ji M DAVIDSON South Africa: time for the Griqua prayer

WNTH' SouTH Ahic• n p•di•• made evident, a signalling by whites that the Afrikaans they are once again prepared ment begins a new session in Cape Town, the new dispensation is accepted. The to speak in public is reliant on them for there is considerable pomp and changes have nonetheless been seismic, its undoubted strength in the region. ceremony. After the arrival by motor­ and the harmonisation propounded in Yet Cape Town is not a happy place. cade, the president advances from his state symbolism- or the constitution­ The old boast that it is safer than brash, limousine to the podium saluted by a can sometimes seem but an aspiration. exciting Johannesburg is no longer true: cannon fired on Signal Hill; then , This has becom e uncomfortably clear the Western Cape rates for murder and s tanding between the lordly pair of in Cape Town . Traditionally the city­ housebreaking exceed those for Gauteng columns where P.W. Botha once reviewed having relatively few blacks, though (the Johannesburg-Pretoria region), while the sam e regiments, he raises his hand many Coloureds- could pride itself on its the violence associated with taxi wars to his heart as the band strikes up the liberalism, and on the fact that in the old and with PAGAD (the Muslim organisa­ national anthem. Sweet and heavy it Cape Colony people from these groups tion which began as People Against rolls, the Nkosi Sikelele that has come might qualify for the vote: apartheid Gangsters and Drugs) still persists. to signify the aspirations of a third of could be represented as an imposition Coloured distrus t of blacks remains Africa; but that is only half of it. For then from the north, by backveld Nationalist trong, though m ore are now prepared to the new anthem modulates into Die MPs who returned each year to the vote for the ANC; at the sam e time, Stem, the old Afrikaner hymn, its up-beat Mother City to pass further repugnant although Cape Town now has an end providing a perfect symmetry. laws. But history is full of ironies, and articulate, magisterial black woman as South Africa is full of such hard-won the one Cape Town has collected is that mayor, the old divisions remain. White compromises. This can be seen in the the Western Cape, rather than being the people come down from Johannesburg flag, in the existence of ll official most advanced province, is now the only and ask, where are the black brothers in languages, and no doubt will again be one to be ruled by a (New) Nationalist­ the restaurants? The recent festival, 'One evident in the new coat of anns now in dominated government. Even more C ity, Many Cultures', unwittingly preparation. It is a country where surprisingly, it is kept in place by the vote demon trated its second proposition tolerance has not come easy, and where of the Coloureds-those same people more convincingly than the first. Whites formality is functional, an agreed way of whom the old Nats did all they could to largely stayed away from the carnival on negotiating public space. M en are still jettison, despite ties of blood and the Parade, while few blacks (and few often addressed as 'Mr', African women language. Now their vote keeps in place people, period) came to the discussions referred to as 'ladies'. Respect has to be the only rump of the old regime, while of contemporary issues. For those who

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 19 did, there was quite a lot of self­ expecting you to pull over to the is raped every 83 seconds. The problem congratulation to be heard along the lines emergency lane-which has a nasty habit is that the crime feeds off traditional male that at last people were talking to each of withering away from time to time or attitudes: a recent survey of boys in other across traditional barriers. else being already occupied by blacks or Gauteng found that only one in ten Coloureds and blacks are still often joggers. Small wonder then that 9000 die opposed sexual violence. In that province simply not seen by hegemonic whites. In every year on the roads, particularly as alone, once every six days a woman is the countryside, the lot of the Coloured traffic police are few and far between. murdered by her male partner. And most peasantry has not improved; wine Kombie vans serving as (black) taxis rapists are either married or farmers can prevent them from attending figure prominently in accidents, as do­ have a steady girlfriend. election meetings. Meanwhile the resort famously, now-buses. At the time of the suburb of Hout Bay, just over the disaster which killed 2 7 British tourists, C RIME HA S CONTINUED to rise, most mountain, still playfully calls itself a there was a 12-day stretch in September notably robberies and burglaries. This led republic (detached from all the country's which saw 76 people killed and a further the leader of the Pan African Congress to problems) and carries on as if the 234 injured in bus accidents. Mechanical suggest that judicial mutilation, Islamic Coloured fishermen and the relatively failure (i.e. poor maintenance) has style, should be imposed as a deterrent. new black squatters did not comprise half been given as the main cause. But the legal system itself is under strain: of its population. Last New Year's Eve, even when offences are successfully when millionaire Sol Kerzner put on a I T WAS ASHOCK to see an ad on television followed up with prosecutions, criminals fireworks display, the blacks responded enjoining the public to report copper-wire can go free bcca usc inexperienced by firing AK47s into the air. theft direct to Telkom rather than to the prosecutors arc out of their depth. Other Many of those blacks would be police, but corporations as well as prisoners, no doubt emboldened by truly Christian: although you and I might everybody else in South Africa have to appalling jail conditions, simply escape­ scarcely recognise some of the varieties take crime into their calculations. often by squaring off police. Meanwhile of the faith, fully 77 per cent of South (I speak as somebody who has been the South African Police Services have Africa's population claims allegiance. It mugged, burgled, had washing taken from been leached and demoralised by massive is one of the things that persistently gives the line, glasses stolen in a library, and retirements, the morale of new recruits­ let alone the old guard-further battered If the country's religion-complete with by police mortality rates. This year, lOS police were murdered in the six months the rise of charismatics-carries shades to June 30. Equipment, including vans, of the Deep South, then the roads are the is often scarce; at least one police station in Cape Town is now protected by a province of cowboys. For South African private security firm. Small wonder then drivers, double lines are a waste of paint, that justice is also being privatised. Recently a man on a murder charge had speed limits an interesting suggestion. his bail paid, only to find that h is liberators were members of the enraged the country its old-fashioned feel. When encountered an intruder in the house.) community, who promptly convened a the town of Mooi River lost its only Today we hear more about crime because people's court, 'tried' him, then killed textile factory recently, anxious towns­ in the old days, 80 per cent of the police him by necklacing. Vigilante groups have folk held prayer meetings to call for used to be stationed in white areas; increased by leaps and bounds. divine intervention to secure employ­ suppression of violence was so built into Then there is corruption. Army ment. Conversely, when the historical official reckoning that the current ID officers have supplied classified informa­ museum in Grahamstown discovered booklet still contains provision for the tion to crime syndicates; not long ago the with relief that it was not to be closed holder to own five firearms. But now, anti-corruption unit was investigating after all, the whole staff processed from with police reallocation, crime appears 3000 cases in the police force. In govern­ room to room behind nine clergymen. everywhere and can affect anyone. ment departments, lack of paper work But then there was also the thief who, Foreign diplomats have been shot dead; has often been deliberate, shielding when asked by his tied-up victims whether the Canadian High Commissioner, in misappropriation of funds; in addition, he went to church, told them, 'Yes. But I Cape Town for the opening of parliament, there have been a large number of 'ghost' don't want to talk about that now.' was assaulted in his hotel. One ANC MP employees drawing salaries. Recently the If the country's religion-complete recently sustained six bullet wounds in Eastern Cape education department with the rise of charismatics-carries a battle with car hijackers; muggings have insisted that all people on its books come shades of the Deep South, then the roads occurred even at police headquarters in and collect their salaries personally-'We are the province of cowboys. For South Pretoria. No-one is safe. Murders run to just want to see you.' African drivers, double lines are a waste 25,000 a year. Rape has become so And while the government has been of paint, speed limits an interesting endemic in Cape Town that its justly proud of its drive to build basic suggestion. Nothing will m ake them Archbishop calls it 'Rape Town'; housing for the poor, much of the slow down; rather, they tailgate, nationally, on current figures a woman effectiveness of the scheme has been

20 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 Nelson Mandela sings and claps with Thabo Mbeki following Mbeki' s acceptance speech in parliament, ·14 june 1999, after being elected as Mandela's successor. (Ph oto: Assoc iated Press AP) eroded by shonky deals and shortchang­ non-payment of council rates, sometimes Existing services elsewhere, now open to ing by contractors. In March, more than rising to as high as one-half of moneys all, were often originally designed only half of the 600,000 dwellings then built due. What began as a form of resistance for the white sliver of the population. But were declared by the housing minister to has now become habitual. since wage bills consume just over half be 'substandard'. Moreover, fraud-that This, combined with a tardiness of of the national budget (after interest is, understating income or assets-was provincial governments to pay their bills, payments), there is not enough money to suspected in as many as 90 per cent of has meant that about a third of the run them properly as well, and precious the applications. country's municipalities are in serious little to maintain infrastructure in With some justice, Thabo Mbeki financial trouble. At a time when they general. In the Eastern Cape, Public blames this alarming erosion of public can scarcely afford to pay their town Works receives only 4.5 per cent of the morality on apartheid: when the prevail­ clerks or staff, further responsibilities are budget, and that includes salaries. ing system was 'morally and politically being imposed upon them-water The results can be seen everywhere. illegitimate', people decided to set their supplies, sanitation systems, housing That people now have to take their own 'own norms of social behaviour'. So 30 schemes and electrical installations, linen to public hospitals is the least of it. per cent of all companies-thanks to which they cannot afford to maintain. At The Chris Hani Baragwanath in Gauteng white buccaneering-are still unregis­ the same time, the government has­ had, at mid-year, a shortage of 100 doctors tered for tax purposes. The legacy can also understandably- decided to prioritise the and over 2000 other staff, since budgetary be seen in the persistence of black provision of basic services in poorer areas. constraints had imposed a freeze; 24-hour

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 21 service was removed, and there was talk more pronounced. Mbeki now appoints regarded by some whites as 'apartheid in of closing the ante-natal clinic, which the directors-general, the key public reverse', is partly responsible for the would mean hundreds of infant deaths. servantsi the role of parliament, where impressive growth rate of black In February, the ANC in the Free State the ANC stands just a little short of a companies listed on the Johannesburg formally apologised to the nation for two-thirds majority, has also been Stock Exchange. But elsewhere transform­ deaths which might have occurred as a eclipsed, if not diminished. The truculent ation proceeds bumpily-even allowing for result of the collapse of the provincial Tony Leon and the Democratic Party, the some necessary gradualism. In the health system, a move prompted by official opposition, soon found that the country as a whole, 89 per cent of senior children dying in a country town from government would prefer to grant the management remains white and m ale. lack of medicine. Elsewhere there are chairmanship of a key parliamentary The ratio among top civil servants is horror stories of bodies in mortuaries that committee to the conservative loose much better, as would be expected, but have lain there for as long as four years. cannon Louis Luyt. Meanwhile, for the in the police, despite the retirements, Schools present a comparable picture. first three months of the new session, middle and top ranks still have seven There are frequent reports of their being parliament all but atrophied, passing only whites to every three blacks. In the army closed because water or electricity is no two new billsi Mbeki-who longer being supplied by municipalities, attends few debates-prefers annoyed with education departments for less legislation and more Meanwhile the South African Police not paying their bills. (Half of the action by the executive, with Services have been leached and country's schools don't have electricity, the responsible minister anyway.) Desk and textbook shortages empowered to issue proclama­ demoralised by massive retirements, are common, and absenteeism among tions. There has been some the morale of new recruits-let alone teachers rife. Recently the Education concern expressed about these Minister, Kader Asmal, said there was a developments, particularly as the old guard-further battered by public perception that teachers-one­ Mbeki has defended his men in police mortality rates. This year, 105 third of whom are not properly dubious circumstances, sought qualified-are not worth their money. to sani tise the image of the police were murdered in the six The kids have quite often drawn the same ANC as presented in the final months to June 30. Equipment, conclusion: at least a couple of school report of the Truth and Recon­ principals have been badly beaten up by ciliation Commission, and including vans, is often scarce; at least their pupils this year. In a climate of been complicit in cooping up one police station in Cape Town is now despair, schools are trashed. Often: one the highly effective Heath anti­ in East London was attacked nearly 30 corruption unit in its base of protected by a private security firm . times in just over a year. But then operations, the remote city of another, in Port Elizabeth, simply East London. The relative ineffectiveness the racial divide is still often replicated disappeared: neighbouring squatters of the provincial governments, shortly to by that between officers and other ranks: literally took it apart one night be weakened further by the creation of at Tempe army base in the traditionally . and spirited the materials away. megacity units, means there is now no conservative Free State, the only blacks counterweight to this surge of centralised seen in the officers' mess are waiters. The BY MID-SEPTEMBER Thabo Mbeki had authority. Mbeki, declared one commen­ belts of their superiors are still been president for 100 days. Already, tator, 'sits at the centre of a web of power emblazoned in the old South African instead of Mandela's benign avuncularity, not experienced in this country since the colours. a more managerial style had become paranoid heyday of apartheid'. Tempe was the place where a evident. A foretaste of what lay in store The challenges ahead will tax his disturbed black soldier pushed other occurred in April, when Mbeki considerable skills to the utmost. Mbeki Africans out of the way as he took aim announced he was sacking two ANC has been able to tame Buthelezi, so there and killed seven whites. For there is still provincial premiers. Since then, he has is now no talk of Zulu secessionismi and a good deal of anger beneath the surface: built up the Office of the Presidency to he has also won over most Afrikaners, to on a lesser scale it erupted again at the the point where its staff now numbers the degree that he drew the sneer from soldier's funeral. This may partly explain more than 300. The declared aim has the right-wing leader Constand Viljoen the brutal nature of much South African been to co-ordinate policy across the that he has 'a charming bedside manner'. crime, where, in the words of the new ministries, given the need to do some­ But the central task of government seems police commissioner, 'People no longer thing about the country's long collapse terribly like trying to square the circle. steal. They steal and kill.' And it is into crisis. Indeed a new sense of purpose First there is the crying need for certainly evident in farm attacks­ is already apparent, particularly in the transformation, delivery and empower­ usually on elderly whites. These seem to fight against crime. But with both a ment. The buppies (the emerging black come in waves, and may be in part fuelled deputy president and a cabinet minister professional class) are doing well-very by the persistent mistreatment and even with no other duties than to do his well sometimes, to judge by the reports assault of black workers that still occurs. bidding, the president's personal control of rorts that periodically hit the press. Slowness in implementing land reform of the government has become markedly Affirmative action in its various forms, is probably also a factor.

22 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 Mbeki often speaks with a note of But downsizing continues-with fresh said to be HIV positive, as are an urgency, as though there is not much announcemen ts in the mining industry increasing number of the 180,000 new time to put things right. This may be even after the recovery of the gold price­ cases of TB in South Africa each year. The correct, for wh ile accelerated transfor­ and the expectation is that, in addition two conditions are rapidly becoming mation may satisfy the buppies, they at to the half million jobs that have inseparable. But government attempts to most comprise only 10 per cent of the vanished since 1994, even more will have cope with the crisis have so far been population; the major problem remains gone by 2005. On the other hand, the rand lamentable. The Department of Health delivery to the masses. Poverty remains is relatively stable, inflation the lowest began distributing condoms, stapled to endemic. After Brazil and Guatemala, it has been for 31 years, and South Africa their packets; and, because of the cost, South Africa has the world's most has finally signed a free trade agreement has generally refused to distribute AZT. unequal distribution of income: almost with the European Union. Growth next Already the country faces a situation half of South Africans (95 per cent of year is expected to be 3. 7 per cent. where 20 per cent of the workforce may them blacks) live in poverty. As a Moreover, great hopes are pinned on the be HIV positive by 2005, while the consequence, one quarter of all South rapidly expanding tourist industry-but number of orphans will also rise dramat­ for all the hyperventilation, most ically, many of them in desperation museums remain closed on Sundays. probably turning to crime. 'Get out of There are those who say that redistri­ Africa'' urges a prominent AIDS activist bution should fi gure higher in the at dinner parties. For a variety of government's priorities, not come last as reasons, many whites already have. it seems to do in GEAR. Recently there have been serious public service strikes, B RAVELY, IN HIS FIRST address to parlia­ and elements in the trade union ment after becoming president, Mbeki organisation COSA TU and the South made no explicit reference to apartheid; African Communist party-partners in for as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has the government with the ANC-have put it, 'The time for blaming our past is been unhappy about the general direction over.' As the earlier prime minister Jan of policy. A projected summit to discuss Smuts would have sighed-when also these matters keeps getting postponed, confronting intractable problems-'It's while some SACP members who are time for the Griqua prayer.' He was cabinet ministers are involved in selling referring to an old chief who got down off state assets. Such privatisation may on his knees and said, 'Lord, save thy be an effective form of black empower­ people ... But this is no work for children. ment, but the result might be, as one It is not enough this time to send Thy African children between six months and observer put it, 'a capitalism that will Son ... Lord, Thou must come Thyself.' six years of age suffer from some form of kick the SACP out of business'. Indeed. malnutrition. Spending by blacks may be The most unpredictable element, and But the country's material difficulties, increasing, but it still stands at only 14 one which could yet skew South African the legacies of apartheid, together with per cent of that of white households, and politics, is the alarming growth of AIDS its basic multicultural complexities, can in some rural areas has dropped back in the country. More than 17 per cent of also be taken by Desmond Tutu to mean sharply. In the Eastern Cape, the squeeze the population are said to be HIV positive, that South Africa's peaceful transition has been put on disability grants, since as are one-third of the pregnant women might become a force for hope in a money is short. Meanwhile child main­ turning up at ante-natal clinics in divided world: 'God does have a sense of tenance grants have been reduced, as a KwaZulu-Natal. humour. Who in their right mind could preliminary to their being eliminated. Although both Mandela, and even ever have imagined South Africa to be an Little is heard now from the govern­ more Mbeki, have spoken up about the example of anything but awfulness; of ment of the Reconstruction and Develop­ seriousness of the epidemic, traditional how not to order a nation's race relations ment Plan, except when Mbeki, taking attitudes and practices remain and its governance? We South Africans up Mandela's catch-cry, calls for 'an RDP entrenched. One reason the disease has were the unlikeliest lot, and that is of the soul'. Instead, the strategy now is spread so fast is the penchant for dry sex, precisely why God has chosen us.' Yet GEAR-growth, employment and redis­ sometimes using ash, which causes something else remains to be said. It is tribution. Although Mbeki attacks the abrasions; another is the great shame this. If South Africa does not succeed, Democratic Party for being proponents associated with it, so that those who then the whole human experiment might of a 'soulless secular theology'-as indeed announce their condition to increase have to be considered a failure. • they are- the government itself has public awareness run the risk of being adopted much of the mantra of economic killed for their pains. Meanwhile the Jim Davidson, who teaches a course at rationalism. Some of this was essential: epidemic fuels the rape of young girls, Victoria University of Technology on the as a result of its isolation and paying since there is a pathetic belief in the Rise and Fall of Apartheid, has just blacks poor wages, the South African 'virgin cure'. Already half of the patients returned from a year spent in South economy was distinctly uncompetitive. in Durban's King Edward VII hospital are Africa.

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 23 THE CouNTRY

• • • and it is rising fast. Margaret Simons investigates the environmental fragility of Australia's breadbasket, the Murray-Darling Basin.

I NJoNe NeXT YeAR ucpon wi II [,nd on the cb b of the extent of the salinity problem in the basin, and Australia's state and federal agriculture ministers. The the effectiveness of strategies presently in place. As thud it makes will likely rock us all. well, the Commission launched a document The report will be written by some of the best co-authored with the CSIRO examining the effective­ scientists in the country, employed by that unique ness-or rather, the lack of effectiveness-of current instrument of pragmatic environmentalism, the farming systems in controlling salinity. Murray- Darling Basin Commission. It will present Like all such documents, these had been through our farmers with what will be, ironically, the biggest the spin-doctors, and the negative messages were challenge since the pioneers crossed the Great carefully interwoven with upbeat statements about Dividing Range and were faced with a landscape full our ability to handle the problem. But once past the of stubborn, thirsty trees and shrubs that had to be executive summary and the press release, the message cleared to allow crops and communities to grow. was surely one of the hardest ever delivered by a The report will likely recommend a comprehen­ statutory body in the history of Australia. sive change to the way we use the land, particularly The documents said that in spite of intense effort in those areas previously most profitable. and investment over the last ten years, all that had Put bluntly, the Commission's draft salinity been bought was a 20-year reprieve for the Murray management strategy is likely to recommend River. Salinity in many of the river valleys of the measures designed to encourage-and perhaps even system was at disastrous levels and likely to get worse force-much of the central west of New South Wales quickly. Water in many rivers was expected to be and northern Victoria, presently big earners in sheep, undrinkable within 20 years. The cotton industry wheat and dairying, to be up to 80 per cent planted faced ruin by 2020. Likewise, cash crops like citrus with trees and woody shrubs. and grapes in many areas. Even with drastic change The recommendation will come with some force to land use, the problem could be expected to get behind it. Its claim, quite simply, is that any less worse for some centuries because of the cumulative drastic action will see much of the breadbasket area effect of 200 years of land clearing. of Australia become poisonous to humans and crops. This is a problem not only for farmers and their And yet nobody really knows w hether it will be communities. The Murray- Darling Basin produces 41 possible to bring about the huge changes to land use per cent of the nation's agricultural wealth. As a required. Even if it is possible, how is it to be done nation still dependent on agriculture [and much of without sending thousands of communities-and the rest of agricultural Australia is also facing salinity possibly the country with them- broke? problems) we are talking about the economic future The Murray- Darling Basin Commission started of the nation. the softening-up process for next year's hard task in One of the tragedies of the ongoing battle for October when it released a Salinity Audit reassessing salinity control is that the story of the fight so far,

24 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 One of the biggest examples was the Woolpunda Groundwat er Interception sch em e, a m assive engineering works near Waikerie in the Riverland of South Australia, fi nanced by three state governments, in which the landscape was literally plumbed. Bores were dug and pumps fi tted along the riverbank to intercept ancient deep flows of saline groundwater to the River Murray. This water was then pumped to a big evaporation basin kilom etres away on the plain. The interception of this natural saline flow offsets the flows of saline drainage fr om irriga tion further upstream . There have been many other smaller schemes. All these initiatives have worked, to different extents in different areas, but the hard m essage is that they are nowhere near enough. Buried towards the end of the recently released Commission documents com es the bald statement: 'Despite m ajor investment in the development of improved farming system s and in catchment management programs, for som e rainfall zones there are currently no farming system s capable of controlling salinity. The scale of land use change needed .. . is beyond current resources.' In other words, what is needed is a complete recasting of the relationship between money, land and water. largely unreported by city-based m edia, is one of the SAL IN ITY IS C AUSED by rising groundwater. The centre most impressive examples of community-based action of Australia is naturally salty, but before settlem ent and government co-operation in Australia's history. most of the salt was locked away underground. Native And yet it clearly hasn't been enough . vegetation used almost all the rainfa ll, meaning that The Murray-Darling Basin Commission is itself very little water seeped through. With clearing, an an immen se achievem ent, being fi nan ced and imbalance was created. More rainfall seeped through supported by state and federal government, and largely successful in constructively juggling the competing interests of politically opposed governments. But that is just the macro level. At catchments and farm level, individual landholders, local govern­ m ents and communities have been involved in an extraordinarily co-ordinat ed process of changing cropping and tilling m ethods, tree-planting and fa rm and catchment m anagem ent-all in an attempt to control salinity. It is estimated that almost 70 per cent of farmers are in volved in som e way w ith Landcare groups, m aking farm ers Australia's m ost environmen tally active group. This has been done at a time when the agricultural sector is struggling. There is plenty that is inspiring about the fight against salinity. For the last ten years the Commission h as administered a Salinity and Drainage strategy with the aim of improving water quality in the River Murray against a background trend of increased salinity, while allowing irrigators up river to continue to the groundwater, which began to rise; bringing with putting salty water into the river. All this has been it dissolved salts. In many areas, groundwater is as balanced by a system of 'salinity credits'-or licences salty or saltier than the sea. When it com es within to pollute-in which irrigators buy the right to dispose two m etres of the soil surface, crops and vegetation Th e ev idence is increas ingly hard to ignore: of saline drainage by paying for salinity mitiga tion begin to suffer. This is long before the dramatic 'salt photos of country and town works further downstream . These initiatives have scalding' so visible in areas of the Australian bush sa linity provided by th e been required to reduce salinity by at least twice as and so dramatically represented in photographs. There Murray-Darling Bas in much as the disposal 'rights' increases it. are m any towns in inland Australia where pub cellars Commiss ion.

V o LUME 9 N uMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 25 One of the are flooded with groundwater, where mechanics have Tim Fi sher, of the Australian Conservation to pump out the pits they use to work underneath Foundation, says that other options include tree and tragedies of cars, and where even the diggin g of a grave is shrub crops, such as flowers, olives, nuts, and even accompanied by pumping to remove groundwater. honey production. But he also says that large areas of the ongoing Irrigation intensifies the effect. Most irrigation land may simply have to be retired from agricultural areas have underneath them groundwater 'mounds' production. battle for created by run off. These mounds not only threaten Asked whether he thinks the political will is the crops with waterlogging but also displace deeper, there, Fisher replies, 'We don't know. Truss [Federal salinity far more saline water to the rivers. Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry] is Engineering can provide solutions for high-value saying that do nothing is not an option, but we haven't control is that crops. Water can be pumped out of the landscape under seen the colour of their money, and we are talking irrigation areas. This is now being done in many tens of billions of dollars ... personally I don't think the story of irrigation areas in the Murray-Darling basin. It is we'll see the comfort zone change too much.' expensive, and creates a disposal problem- where to On the other hand, the ageing of the farming the fight so far, put the pumped water? The salinity credit system population does create opportunities for changes in allows much of it to be discharged to rivers. land use-as well as risks that fewer, bigger largely But engineering solutions are not usually viable landholders will have less time for environmental for non-irrigated, dryland crops. Here different crops management. Fisher also points out that the recent unreported by and cropping methods, laser ploughing-trying to demonstrations that the bush cannot be relied on ensure a level surface without potholes and dips which to go on voting conservative means that rural city-based collect water and allow it to seep through-and communities now have real power to push for planting trees particularly over the 'recharge' areas incentive and compensation packages to help with media, is one where most groundwater seeps though, have been land use change. tried, with varying success. It will take a lot of money-far more than the of the most The recently released Commission reports shift the present Federal Government has committed from the emphasis away from irrigation to dryland salinity as sale of Telstra, and as Fisher says, 'There are no more . . ImpreSSIVe the biggest and least controllable problem. Dryland Telstras.' salinity processes are much slower than those under The Minister for Agriculture, Mr Warren Truss, examples of irrigated land, and much bigger areas are involved. launched the Salinity Audit report with a speech in The really hard message is that even best-practice which he said that 'do nothing' was not an option, community­ farming using conventional crops and methods is not and that Australia would have to become a clever enough. To have any hope of long-term sustainability, farming nation to tackle environmental problems. But based 'leakage' of rainfall to groundwater must be reduced his speech was short on specifics, and later, in an so that it is close to the same as it would have been interview with Eureka Street, he would not be drawn action and before clearing of the native vegetation. And even the on how and whether change would be achieved. best of our present fanning methods are very leaky. He said to Eureka Street that he did not think government In the most productive grazing regions of the legislation and regulation were the answer. Farmers basin-those with rainfalls of more than 600ml a year, should not, and could not, be forced. He was also keen co-operation the Salinity Audit states: 'A high proportion of trees to emphasise that constitutionally, land use issues is the only option for salinity control.' This has were the preserve of state governments, rather than in Australia's massive implications for the dairying, lamb and beef the Commonwealth. industries over huge areas of our most productive Management plans were the answer, he said: history. farming land. As well, if trees are planted, run-off to 'There is a place for incentives, and also for compen­ rivers will be greatly reduced, which will have sation in those cases where one landholder might be And yet it implications both for the amount of water available forced to bear a disproportionate share of the burden. ' to towns, cities and irrigators, and for the environment. According to Tim Fisher, there is a debate within clearly hasn't In lower rainfall grazing and cropping zones, the salinity bureaucracy about how to communicate perennial pastures like lucerne can reduce or even the problem. 'Do you give people the hard message, been enough. nearly eliminate leakage. In irrigation zones the or soften it a bit? The feeling is that the hard message engineering solutions, together with an increasingly is too scary, and people won't take it in. Personally refined salinity credit system, can achieve I think we have to tell people the situation as it is. a measure of control. The thing is, we almost have to start planting trees and worry about how to make money from it later.' B uT How 1s THIS MASSIVE change in land use to be But that, he agrees, is an impossible message to achieved? There are income opportunities from sell politically, or to farmers. And, he agrees, the 'hard timber production, but any yield would be years or message', the 'telling it like it is' adds up to an even decades into the future. To support farming apocalyptic vision. • communities in the meantime would take billions of dollars of taxpayers' money Margaret Simons is a fr eelance journalist.

26 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1999 M ,om M A KA N BATU ;, a ' logan 200-250,000 people who fled or were to leave behind a power vacuum and an in Indonesian that adorns the charred deported to West Timor in September, addiction to hard currency. remnants of Dili's homes and shops. only 50,000 had returned six weeks after Elements in Gusmao's National Roughly translated, it suggests to the Interfet arrived. Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) reader that voting for independence There is help now. The UN and major have already made it known that they are means eating stones. Another piece of NCO agencies have, in the weeks since unhappy with the unwillingness of key graffiti even more common-it seems to September 20, managed to distribute UN agencies and instruments to regard be the militias' preferred signature-is food, basic items and medical care to Dili, them as a government-in-waiting. At a Akibat Salah Pilih: 'This is the conse­ Bacau and the outlying regions. But this meeting in late October, Joao Carascalao, quence of making the wrong choice.' is emergency aid given to satisfy a prominent CNRT leader, lectured In a poetic touch-which as a jailed immediate needs. Much more difficult, representatives from aid groups about not guerrilla-leader now become statesman and sensitive, is the process of laying the listening to CNRT advice. He singled out he has the liberty to employ-Xanana foundations of a modern democratic the World Food Program for being too Gusmao has said in reply that the stones nation-state. It needs to be done in such slow in the distribution of food aid. (He shall become flowers. a way that the East Timorese themselves also loudly declared that Portuguese Metaphors resonate in East Timor can and will build on the foundation would be the official language and the now-something has to. There is no civil when the United Nations Transitional escudo would be the operating currency administration or infrastructure; people Authority in East Timor (UNTAET) within a week.) need materials to build more permanent hands over control in January 2001. Many When Gusmao returned to the shelter from the wet; few villagers were of the internationals who have landed territory in October, he decided to base home during the all-too-short planting here have referred to the Cambodian himself, with seven close advisers, in the time before the rains and those who experience: they hope that the lessons mountain town of Aileu, one hour's were did not have seed, tools or animals from that will have been learned and that drive south from Dili. The main reason to work the soil. Of the estimated billions of dollars will not be spent only for this decision, according to an

VOLUME 9 NUMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 27

Australian-based representative of CNRT, than the mandatory four days. Currently, widely understood, particularly in the was to place the group close to their if people are accu ed of anything- from under-25 age group, but it is the heartland and away from the co-opting stealing a bicycle to committing occupier's tongue. Portuguese is the influence of the international 'circus' in atrocities-they can be held for this sentimental favourite, but children Dili and Bacau. He was urging the length of time. If they are held longer, it hardly speak a word of it; English is wisdom of this to me when we met by is under an interpretation of the practical, but again few people speak it. chance at Dili's port, both of us there to Indonesian criminal code which gives In November, schooling started up meet the HMAS Jervis Bay, the enormous consideration to the seriousness of the again in some places through initiatives sea-going catamaran that dwarfs the pier alleged offence. But there is no court taken mostly by Church educators. But and its low-slung warehouse. Al o there system operating to try them and no the efforts are spasmodic: some was CARE's goodwill ambassador, certainty about when one will be Portugue e literacy classes conducted by Jacqueline Gillespie, who unwittingly established. teachers from pre-Indonesian times; corroborated his 'circus' claim by some English-language curricula charming a small, hand-wringing man taught with the appropriate transla­ from a Portuguese NGO into videoing tion. UNTAET, in conjunction with her as she welcomed disembarking Church, CNRT and local community colleagues with theatrical groups, will decide on curricula and hugs and kisses. the language of instruction in order to form the basis of a nation-wide U TAET ts AN adolescent, though education system. quickly maturing, creature, faced with The push to adopt Portuguese and the problem of how to deal with dump Indonesian as quickly as CNRT, an organisation whose net­ possible is very strong from CNRT works it needs for the success of its and its backers. At a meeting in Dili, mission but to which it cannot get too a representative of UNICEF (the UN close because it can't risk embroiling agency supporting education) itself in nationalist politics. Some described how schools in Bacau were parts of UNTAET -the civil affairs teaching t he pre-poll Indonesian section for example-are happy to curricula. Through oversight, she include CNRT. Others are wary. failed to mention Portuguese as a The commissioner of the Civpol possible language of instruction. section is Alan Mills, a slow-talking Afterwards, delegates from the mountain of a man from the Portuguese Mission harangued Australian Federal Police. Charged her for half an hour. with creating a police force, he wants to select people who are neutral R ESERVATIONS ABOUT working rather than offering a sinecure to alongside CNRT stem from recogni­ former Falintil guerrillas. As it tion that the grouping will split up in happens, Falintil already has custody the coming year and that there are of at least 23 suspected militia many small political organisations members. that are not under its umbrella. The The police force and the judiciary fear is that these groups will act to are both sites for potential disagree­ undermine UNTAET if it is seen to ment between UNTAET and CNRT. be legitimising CNRT at their expense. The UN Secretary-General, Kofi The problem here, as a Timorese Annan, gave particular priority to the colleague pointed out, is that trying speedy establishment of a police force to avoid political association is next and a judiciary when he set the terms to impossible, as every East Timorese for UNTAET. Questions of what legal Above: East Timorese church, damaged but sti ll with the skills to work with UNTAET system will be used, who will enforce standing. Left: Vi ew from wrecked Governor's house has some affiliation. on th e road to Dare. it and who will preside over it, are Page 27: View towards th e harbour in Di li with A real danger is that CNRT, out already creating friction. CNRT was Christ the King monument to the right. of h ubris, could set up a parallel pushing for the adoption of the administration to UNT AET. Its top Portuguese system, but all Timorese Education policy is also highly echelon, drawn from Fretilin and the lawyers available had been trained under political. The key point in contention at conservative UDT party, is sprinkled the Indonesian system . the moment is what lan guage of through with the expatriate Portu-elite, In the m eantime, Interfet has instruction should be used. Tetun is the who are m ore than happy to take advan­ established a body to determine whether lingua franca, but is almost exclusively tage of the generous off ers of assistance people should be held in custody longer a spoken language. Indonesian is most coming from Lisbon . If pro-autonom y

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 29 political and militia activity returns to P ROFILE East Timor itself the reaction might not be that of an organisation as ured of the JoN GREENAWAY direction in which the country is headed but one that must continue to fight as it has for the preceding 24 years. Natalia's story In the meantime, the manoeuvring in East Timor has drawn the attention of the territory's political leaders away from 'WHAVE ALREADY shed so much blood for independence, why should the pressing concern of returning depor­ we leave now?' tees from militia -con trolled camps in This is the way Natalia explains her family's decision to remain in West Timor. The slow pace of repatria­ East Timor when most were packing the few belongings they could take tions organised by UNHCR, and the on the trucks and boats bound for West Timor. A kind matriarch of a human rights abuses which led to the typically extended Timorese family, Natalia shares the experience of many exodus, are the concern of a handfu l of other East Timorese whose lives have been lived on the fringes of politics. poorly resourced local NGOs and And there are so many like her in this emerging nation with its labyrinthine committed international organisations politics and extended family networks. such as Human Rights Watch A local human rights NGO salvaged a document from the Dili military and Amnesty International. command that included Natalia's name under the heading of government employees suspected of being CNRT. For many years she worked in the T ERE IS ENOUGH evidence emerging to Governor's office in Dili. She is a nationalist, she says, so she ignored the fuel the UN commission of inquiry due directive of the last Governor, Abilio Soares, that all Government to begin deliberating at the end of employees vote for the autonomy package. November. People returning from camps 'This was a God-given opportunity,' she says with a sudden lift of the in the Atambua and North Central Timor head, 'and live or die, we were going to take this opportunity.' areas refer continually to the organised She saw and named the seven militia groups she believes were most way they w ere taken to military responsible for the violence. She witnessed the anger of some militias when command posts before being escorted they found out that the money given them by TNI was counterfeit. She across the border. heard of collusion between the Indonesian military and the militias from Added to these testimonies are a friend who was taking notes in the relevant meetings. documents recovered from the Dili Natalia has had close experience of Indonesian occupation for many military command, including notes and years. Her brother-in-law is Fernando Arujao, a former political prisoner memos that show the link between in Jakarta's Cipinang jail. Released last year, he had been imprisoned for military and militia. One proposal, dated his involvement in East Timorese student politics. Natalia visited him in 5 May, the day UNAMET was formed, 1992. When she returned she did not receive her salary for 10 months. outlined the response that should be When she tried to get some of her savings out of the bank she was told taken if East Timor voted to reject the that she couldn't have the money because she would give it to Fernando. offer of autonomy. It suggested the In 1994, Fernando won the Reebok award for human rights. Several implementation of a terror campaign to times Natalia and her husband were visited by TNI, asking where the force people into West Timor. The proposal money was. She said she was angry with Fernando then, because her family was circulated to five top military officials, was suffering while he was getting recognition. including the second in command to then 'We scraped and saved so we could send him to college. I even pawned TNI chief, General Wiranto. my jewellery. It's not that I don't agree with it, but it is hard because we There is a story being told and retold were tainted.' in East Timor about a fisherman in When Fernando suddenly returned to East Timor in July, she and all Liquica, the site of some of the militias' her family were terrified of what would happen. Yet she hid his mobile worst violence. As he gutted the fish from phone and laptop in her house. On 4 September, the day the poll result his haul netted along the shoreline, a was announced, Fernando was advised by a colleague to get out of the wedding ring fell on to the stones at his country. Four days later, militias burnt Natalia's house and they told her, feet. H e picked it up and cleaned it, as she watched, that it was because of Fernando's activity. slipped it on his finger and went on with She is back in her home now and looking forward to what she says his work. will be a huge Christmas celebration leading up to the first New Year of The legacy of Indonesia's departure independence. She is also looking forward to Fernando's returning to East from East Timor will be a part of East Timor for good. Timor life-as much a part as coffee and Another who knows him well was not sure when this would be: Sunday mass-for quite some time. • Fernando's partner has been appointed to a teaching position at a university in Melbourne. -Jon Greenaway Jon Greenaway is Eureka Street's South East Asia correspondent.

30 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1999 INTERVlEW

dem ocratic and transparent government, then there will be no problems. Hopefully, with Amien Rais as the speaker of the From struggle to reconstruction Consultative Council, the government will abide by democratic principles and be Jo se Alexandre (Xanana' Gusmao visited Melbourne in October, mindful of human rights and justice. They will prevent further disregard of human just prior to his triumphant return to East Timor. At Melbourne Park lives, such as happened in East Timor. the East Timorese resistance leader addressed a crowd of 3000, We hope that when Indonesia has a and afterwards he recorded this exclusive interview democratic governm ent, we will have good with Dewi Anggraeni. and co-operative relationships. Do you think the next president of Dewi Anggraeni: Are there any plans in What if the East Timorese people elect you Indonesia will co-operate with Ea st Timor! place for an independent East Timor! as president! I believe so. Indonesia's economic situation Xanana Gusmao: We don't have any ready­ I have been leader for 25 years. We need to will encourage this. They cannot afford to to-use plans at the moment. Remember, educate our people that there is a need to alienate the international community. And East Timor has just em erged from a draw a dividing screen between the past and the international community continues to devastating time in which all infra­ the present. Struggle is one thing and monitor Indonesia in relation to East structure we had ever had was eliminated. reconstruction is another. At the end of the Timor, just as they watch how Indonesia We did have a strategic development struggle we cannot look back. We have seen handles corruption and human rights. plan, a precursor to a general consultation. in several countries where the so-called They will also continue to monitor But that was before the last bash of heroes of the struggle became over­ what is happening in Wes t Timor. destruction. confident and transcended the dividing line. Obviously they don't want anything to Now we are planning to go to East They didn't see their own limitations and destabilise the region. I believe the next Timor to see and assess what the most wanted to lead the reconstruction. It president of Indonesia will see that it would usually ended up in a mess. be advantageous to stop the violence that is still occurring across the border. Lack of So you are going to refuse even if security and stability would not h elp the people elect you! economic regrowth. During the two to three years of transition, we will keep our eyes What do you think of the factions in the out for the most capable and body of CNRT! Do they bother you! suitable person to be our president. They don't unduly bother m e. We have to see it this way: every faction is a potential Why is the transition period so political party. In an independent East important! Timor, we have to welcome the em ergence It is important because it is the of new parties, to complement the existing continuation of struggle, moni­ ones. We want a wide democracy. So if one tored by the UN. The end of this party forms a government, there should be period is the day before we are another who will be the opposition. officially independent. Do you agree with Mary Robinson 's idea What is now the role of Indonesia of setting up a war crimes tribunal on East in an independent East Timor! Timor! Dili woman rolling up her sleeves I don't think we have any quarrel I do, but not for our own sake alone. I believe for reconstructi on. with the people of Indonesia. They that, with the UN's help, we will soon be are in fact our brothers and sisters. free from residual repression from the Kop­ pressing needs are, to sort out the highest Sometimes we see that the government and assus [Indonesian elite command force] . priorities from the short-term to long-term their generals also hurt them, as much as But I see that the Indonesian people plans. they've hurt the East Timorese. themselves are still vulnerable to the Though we have been oppressed by the influence of Kopassus. So if we support the Will you be the first president of East Indonesian Government and their generals, idea of the tribunal, it is not for revenge. Timor! with the people we remain friends. The peo­ The Kopassus have committed a lot of No. It will be up to the people to elect a ple-to-people relationsh ips are on a atrocities in various places in Indonesia. president. We are going to experience the different plane. [Gusmao, during his seven They shouldn't go unpunished. transition process. Our struggle is not over. years of imprisonment in Jakarta, forged So, if I may say this, I support the idea We have to work on it until we are fri endships with a number of Indonesian of the tribunal as an expression of solidarity completely independent. Until then I am political prison ers.] As for the relations be­ for our brothers and sisters in Indonesia. • willing to lead. But after that I prefer to see tween In donesia and an independent East someone more capable to lead the country's Timor, it will very m uch depend on D ewi Anggraeni is the Australia reconstruction. the Indonesian Government. If it is a correspondent for Tempo news magazine.

V oLUME 9 NuMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 31 R EVIEW E SSAY

M ARTIN KRYGIER The many-faceted McAuley

The Devil and James McAuley, Cassandra Pybu s, University of Queensland Press, 1999. ISBN 0 7022 3 1 I I 8, RR P $34.95

T MCS McAucov w" ' multi-t.lented poet, writer and public figure. He was also a complex man, a compelling presence, not a bad pianist and a remarkable drinker. Through his life, and at any one time, he played many public roles: member, with a team of unusually but disparately tal en ted and later prominent Sydney University mates, of Alf Conlon's bizarre wartime Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (in connection with which he went to New Guinea, source of several encounters which changed his life); co-progenitor of Ern Malley; influential m ember of the Australian School of Pacific Administration which sought to develop policy and train officials for post­ war Papua New Guinea; Roman Catholic convert and political activist; founding editor of Quadrant; Professor of English, poet and writer; political organiser; uneasy participant in modernity. He was notable and controversial in many of these roles. Cassandra Pybus didn't know McAuley, and acknowledges that there were many aspects to his protean person­ ality, attested to by those who did, which she 'cannot find ... on the printed page'. N evertheless her book, The Devil and fames McAuley, is the most detailed chronicle of the life so far. It is also an attempt to explain the course it took. As chronicle, it has several virtues. It contains a lot of information, usually delivered lightly, brightly and at times engagingly and wittily. Even cheekily.

32 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 The book is rarely dull. The man is more whole book is a struggle to resolve. How The second step owes more to the than commonly interesting and so his did the awesomely gifted, irreverent Zeitgeist of the analyst than to the story is interesting to tell. Pybus is a pre-War poet and piano player, of aesthet­ evidence at her disposal: the source of the gifted story-teller and chronicles it well. icising and anarchist leanings, whom she torment, in case you need it spelt out, is Since she seems tantalised by the describes with some affection, change so? sex. What else could screw you up so, so young McAuley, he emerges from her How did h e come to em erge from N ew to speak? telling as a person one would very much Guinea and the War so plus catholique The third emerges from a welter of want to meet. As her distaste grows, que ... , so combatively (a.k.a. 'stridently', speculation, several strategically placed which it does pretty soon-towards the 'rabidly', etc.) anti-communist and at the 'coulds' and 'may have beens', acknowl­ end of the War and increasingly after­ end so passionately, if ambivalently, anti­ edgment of the central importance of wards-she can't resist a derisive, counter-cultural/ Prince to frog. women-particularly his wife-in his life condescending tone when he offends her and the candid confession that 'I simply sensibilities, which he often does. Here I have praised the book as an don't know, n·or will I ever know'. one feels (more precisely, I feel, for Undaunted by these rather heavy-duty reasons that will em erge below) that one interesting chronicle of an qualifiers, Pybus builds to her climax: is learning more about the author than interesting life. But as a 'my supposition that McAuley's terrors her subject. The story comes to be driven are related to guilt about homosexual more and more obviously by h er source of understanding and desire is not wildly speculative'. Given prej udices (in the classical and not explanation, the work is the flimsiness of h er evidence on this necessarily pejorative sense of unthought point, that is a matter on which prejudgments) and less and less by what merit-free. This is not judgment and perhaps taste drives him. And the prose flags, too. It because Pybus entertains the might differ. leans increasingly and repetitively on stock epithets: 'intemperate', 'strident', hypotheses she does about B uT PYBUS' RELUCTANCE to give up on 'dogm atic', 'crude', 'rabid', 'virulent'; so McAuley's psyche ... The her speculations is understandable, since much so that they become su perfluous. so much of the explanatory offering of the We know that the next anti-communist problem is, rather, that she book depends upon them. For they are, we meet m ust be one or the other, or one seems to have no idea how to we learn, the key to McAuley's Catholi­ and the other, without being told. But we cism, anti-communism, editorship of are always t old. Still, even h ere h er establish the significance of Quadrant, support for the Vietnam War, difficulties w ith McAuley and his ilk the psychological factors opposition to student sit-ins, ability to (among them m y father, I should h ere drink anyone else under the table, and declare) do not always, though they do upon which she lights, in much else. Everything really. commonly, swamp her capacity to record what she wants so Let m e m ention three exam ples: some things that speak w ell of him, religion , drink and anti-commu nism , particularly the calm and courageous way desperately to explain: the w ithout w hich, it is pretty clear, the he faced death. public life, in a particular m a ture M cAuley would h ave been Pybus is n ot infrequently careless som eone else. First is religion, a central with facts and h er interpretation s are epoch, of a complex and elem ent in his post-War life and in Pybus' often tendentious. But if you are curious strenuously thoughtful man. account: '[i]n m y reading McAuley's way abo ut details of M cAuley's life and of dealing with w hat h e hated and feared interested in a som etim es shrewd in himself- the suppurating wound that dissection of a complex and not easily H er answer, hinted at throughout the would never heal-was to externalise his penetra ted personality, you will find the text, but only fully revealed in the book's guilt on to the malevolent, preternatural book informative. Particularly if you last chapter, h as the following three force [the D evil]'. And so his Catholicism aren' t interested in poetry. But if you are steps. They appear consecutively in the and its stringently-ast ringently­ after a perceptive and nuanced report of w ork, each less weigh ed down by orthodox character: ' this faith enabled the cau ses w hich animat ed h im , the evidence, more buoyed up by what m ight him to externalise his fear and give it a reasons he might have had fo r adopting gently be called imagination, than the na1ne'. them or the character of the period in preceding on e. And as the evidence dims, Second, though there is no suggestion which he lived, Cassandra Pybus' book a som ewhat desperate assertiveness glows. that h e was an alcoholic, M cAuley was a will disappoint. It might even annoy, as The first st ep, for w h ich Pybus serious drin ker. According to Pybus, his it has m e. adduces ample evidence, is that McAuley 'fren etic alcoh ol con su mption would Pybus clearly is intrigu ed by was, or often was, deeply tormented by seem to m e to be an indication of the McAuley, and, as fa r as I can tell, she tries what we might m etaphorically call inner chaos and terror that lingered at the edges within her lights to be fair. Sh e doesn 't dem on s, and h e might h ave n on ­ of his rigid self-con trol' . But only at the always find it easy though, as her ,taste m etaphorically called the sam e. In edges, because he almost never appears fo r him dwindles noticeably and fast. For particular he suffered, sh e surmises, from to get drunk, though all around him drop he confronts h er with a problem that her deep inner conflicts, self-disgust and guilt. about. T h a t too is grist for Pybus'

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 33 accommodating mill: McAuley always That is of no importance to anyone but Automatically to see through them is not needed to be so in control of his me. Anyway, Pybus, expert in psycholog­ always the best way of seeing what these rampaging netherworld that '[t]he mask ical cliche, would expect it. The problem are, where they might lead and where they rarely slipped'. It's this terror-concealing is, rather, that she seem s to have no idea might have led him. These reasons might masl< a nd not his be good or bad, we might accept apparently heroic liver them or not, but it is arrogant that is the key. Oh for A great deal of discussion of to assume they count for such a mask. Oh for communism in this country never had nothing and philistine to imag­ such a liver. ine that it is enough simply to Pivotal to the anything to do with communism at tune in to the 'bottom line'. story, however, is all, but only with one's attitude to the Apart from this political McAuley's anti-com­ intellectual's ideas, what of his m Lmism, and it is in social and political order here ... What politics? If a thinker is anti­ rcla tion to this that mattered was where you lined up in communist, for example, how Pybus delivers her much should his biographer psycho biographical the Australian debate, and who your understand communism? Or, piece de resistance: friends would turn out to be, as a more precisely, how much should she enter into how Having sa id tha t result of what you were prepared to communism, and what he McAuley was a knew and understood of it, contradictory and say about this strange phenomenon of affected his thinking about it? complex man, it is which you knew nothing. You can't write about not my intention to everything, of course. In one of try to render him how to establish the significance of the several increasingly shrill sallies (strident imple and transparent. My thesis is only psychological factors upon which she even) against reviewers who displeased that McAuley was trou bled by­ lights, in what she wants so desperately her, Pybus reminds us t hat it matters terrified by- his sexual urges, especially to explain : the public life, in a particular what the book was intended to do. Robert the homoerotic, which he displaced epoch, of a com plex and strenuously Manne had suggested that her work was onto the Devil and h is com munist thoughtful man. 'both a political-spiritual biography of agents. He was not alone in this. The Am ong McAuley's many parts and [McAuley's] m ovement towards anti­ Cold War provides some outstanding roles, Pybus explicitly chooses to focus comm unism and a cultural interpretation examples of the mechanism: J. Edgar on him as 'political intellectual'. He of the Australian Cold War'. He goes on: Hoover, long-time Bureau chief of the certainly was one, and the ph rase '[ b]ecause Pybus is such an intelligent and FBI, was one; Roy Cohn, the over­ deserves to be taken seriously. Let us attractive writer her portrait of McAuley zealous counsel for t he Ho use of treat it so, starting with the noun. is likely to prove persuasive. Because she Un-A merican Activities, was another. McAuley was a m an of ideas, an erudite appears to know so little about the nature Had Hoover and Cohn also written and driven thinker; not only but also. of communism her portrait of the poetry and fath ered six ch ildren, the Pybus recognises that he has conclusions, Australian Cold War is likely to case would have been clinched. As things for it is those that she wants to explain perpetuate our current misunderstanding stand it is not completely clear from and debunk. But she shows no acknowl­ as to what was most seriously at stake' Pybus' account w hether suppressed edgment that this deeply intellectual (Australian Book Review, August 1999). hom oerot ic urges are s uff icient or man might also have had reasons-that In her angry response, Pybus claims that m erely n ecessary conditions for anti- is, thoughts, arguments, considerations­ her book was no more than a 'study of com m unism. Perhaps that will be that on refl ection he took to point one the preoccupations of a very singular man sorted out in a second edition. way and not another. H er M cAuley and more than half of the book is in no comes to conclusions simply as a result way concerned with the Cold War'. She I HAVE PRA ISED the book as an interesting of drives, just like Bill Clinton I guess, or 'resent[s] being called to account fo r chronicle of an interesting life. But as a rather as an attempt to stop up drives, defi ciencies in a book I did not write' source of understanding and explanation, unlike Bill. It is a bit like those fa miliar (Australian Book Review, September 1999). the work is merit-free. This is not and crude understandings of judicial Yet it is pretty obvious that she has because Pybus entertains the hypotheses decisions, that they are just 'the result both less and m ore than this singular she doe abou t McAuley's psyche. For all of' the judges' personalities, socio­ individual in m ind. I have already I know, all three of them migh t be true, economic status, religions, etc. All of mentioned her lack of discussion of his though on the evidence provided I would these things are potentially relevant, as ideas. Moreover, though he was above all only consider betting on the fi rst. N or is is McAuley's psychic playground, bu t else a poet, she is not concerned with his it simply because I-who didn't know judges also deliver reasons and m any of poetry. It appears only as a psycho­ McAuley well (though my fa ther, who them, the best of them , take seriously the diagnostic aid. Rather, as she explains in founded Quadrant, knew him very reason s they give. M cAuley also her introduction, on the one occasion well)-find the analysis unpersuasive. published many of his reason ings. that she saw McAuley, when he came to

34 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 speak at a political function at Sydney knew it would. It bore on hopes and on 65 million in Communist China, several University, '[i]t was not the poet I went dreams, since it claimed to incarnate and millions more in Cambodia, North to hear all those years ago. Then, as now, fulfil the most influential secular Korea, Vietnam and Eastern Europe. it was the political ideologist and cold prophecy of modern times. It bore on our These estimates are controversial, of war warrior who compelled my understandings and evaluations of the course, but whatever the figures, as attention.' Her book is an attempt to societies in which w e lived and on what Martin Malia puts it in his foreword, 'the 'make sense of [McAuley's] ideology and we imagined alternatives to them Communist record offers the most its political impulse, rather than a might be, since globally communism colossal case of political carnage in conventional biography'. But if she is represented just such alternatives: alter­ history'. interested in less than the whole native ideals and alternative forms and And that is perhaps not the most McAuley, she is at the same time models of social, economic and political important part of this tragic tale. confident that he stands for something organisation, all available, as it were, in Hundreds of millions of people were larger. Her aim is ' to foreground the 'real time'. And it bore on foreign policy condemned to live stunted, thwarted political intellectual whose spirited everywhere, since communism was an lives, by regimes which sought to engagement with public affairs in the export industry of vast scale. infiltrate every aspect of their subjects' three decades between the Second World For almost the whole of the epoch, beings and managed to crush, diminish War and the Vietnam War provides some communism was never what it has and demean them, even as they slid from insight into that unique time of turmoil become now, in those few places where ruthless repression to slovenly despotism and change'. So Manne might be forgiven aged Communist Parties still maintain to collapse. A collapse, by the way, for thinking that it was not just their dictatorships, such as China, North which, unlike that of the Roman Empire McAuley' s singularity which so Korea, Vietnam and Cuba: local and or the Austro-Hungarian, or the British concerned Pybus. absurd anachronisms, no longer Raj, left nothing good in its wake. By the And in any event, the point surely is demoniacal (with the possible exception end, most of these regimes were shabbily not whether she should have written a of North Korea), just horrible, rather than history of the period as well as a bio­ malign; and aban­ energetically and rep­ graphy of the man. Rather it is that one doned by those Though he ressively horrifying as can't understand a man so immersed in whose enthusiasm was above all they were to begin the period unless one understands some was at its peak with; but by then they aspects of it, important in themselves and precisely when they else a poet, had far fewer Western important to him. One such were demoniacal. she is not supporters. aspect is communism. James McAuley The comprehen­ (and my father) were concerned siveness, many of the A :T THE BEG INNING of the 19th century, born in the year the with his details and the figures Joseph de Maistre made a profound epoch began; they of the Black Book observation about the French Revolution: both died before it poetry. It are new and some 'we must have the courage to acknowl­ ended, McAuley 13 appears only of them inevitably edge .. . that for a long time we completely years before. as a psycho­ controversial. The misunderstood the revolution, of which In the month I contours are not new we were witnesses; we took it to be an write (October), the diagnostic at all, h owever, to event. We were mistaken: it is an epoch.' English translation aid. anyone who cared to (Chou en Lai might have had a som ewhat of a monumental look for them. But similar point in mind when, in response and very important many people never to a reques t for assessment of the book has just been published by Harvard. did, and Pybus doesn't even now. Not consequences of the French Revolution, It appeared originally in French two years because she would likely be interested to he is said to have remarked, 'It's too soon ago, as Le Livre Nair du Communisme, deny any of this, but because she seems to tell.') The communist revolution and was quickly translated into many to think it is irrelevant to her subject. But inaugurated an even more far-reaching central and eastern European languages. what if her subject thought differently? epoch and much of the world is only I first saw it in Polish . It is over 800 pages, The first issue of Quadrant appeared beginning-with great difficulty and no and based in part on new archival findings in December 1956. In his first editorial, assurance of success-to recover from it. and hitherto unrevealed documents from McAuley wrote: Whether one dates the end of what former Communist archives. The state Hobsbawm calls 'the short 20th century' crimes of every country that has endured Suddenly this one huge glaring visage, at the collapse of European communism communism are documented by some of this enormous mask made of blood and in 1989, or as he does at the collapse of the leading scholars of these matters in lies, starts up above the horizon and the Soviet Union in 1991, communism the world. Their editor estimates that dominates the landscape, a figure of was- in Hegel's phrase- a world­ between 85 and 100 million people died judgment speaking to each person in a historical phenomenon pivotal to the as the result of deliberate official action different tone or tongue, but with the development of that century. Its in these countries in this period. About sam e question: And what do you think significance spanned the world, as Marx 20 million in the Soviet Union, about m e?

V OLUME 9 NUMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 35 Pybus writes of the 'extraordinary A great deal of discussion of communism influence Vaclav Havel). As he explained performance' that this editorial repre­ in this country never had anything to do in the lecture, he resolved to escape again sents. What is more extraordinary, as with communism at all, but only with in 1948, when it became obvious the noted by Andrew Riem er (Sydney one's attitude to the social and political Communists would take over. He tried Morning Herald, 24 July 1999), is that she order here. And so it didn't depend, for to warn a friend, but his friend said he doesn 't 'acknowledge the conjunction many people it has n ever depended, on would stay because, as he was apolitical between McAuley's editorial and that knowing anything about w hat was he'd be okay. Knopfelmacher commented, defining moment in modern political happening in communist countries, even without any emphasis, as though it went history' which had begun the m onth when precisely that was the subject of without saying, 'he didn't understand before: the Soviet invasion of Hungary. bitter debate. What one thought about that this was a regime in which what you This was not an event noticed only by communism couldn't be refuted, even did or didn't do protected you from anti-communists, of course. It had a dented, by evidence of those things. This nothing'. I was stunned by this remark, profound resonance for millions, then was true of many who had no wish (as realising at the ripe age of 19, and at a and since. But like so much that many others, however, did) to believe highly political time, th at I had no happened in the world during the life anything particularly wonderful was understanding of such a regime either. of her subject, and notwithstanding her happening under communism. They just That led to an obsessive attempt to gain professed interest in the 'political had no imagination of catastrophe and such an understanding, which has yet to impulse' of his views, Pybus were happy to misunderstand commu­ stop. I still am not confident I understand r-'J' passes it by in silence. nism by accommodating their picture of much, but there are som e things that it to the slack and easy standards of I have learnt . .!.HERE ARE MANY ways of accounting for everyday Australian life. What mattered And it was not so hard to learn. the differences between Pybus and was where you lined up in the Certainly, no-one was starved of infor­ McAuley on these matters, but one is Australian debate, and who your friends mation, neither then nor even much overarching. She has no understanding would turn out to be, as a result of what earlier. There were scarifying works by of something fundamental which you were prepared to say about this ex-communist writers such as Silone, weighed with him: the radical evil of s trange phenomenon of which you Koestler, Milosz, and later by former communism. Without wishing to be knew nothing. victims, such as Ginzburg, Nadezhda cruel, I believe the reason is expressed in Some people couldn' t think of Mandelstam and Solzh enitsyn, which the subtle but important distinction communism in this way, because they profoundly influenced people such as Henry James makes, when he observes had experienced it 'on their skins', in the McAuley, and which, needless to say, that Thoreau was 'worse than Polish phrase. As it happens, my father Pybus never m entions. There was plenty provincial- he was parochial'. was one such, and so was Frank Knopfel­ of material available to convince anyone Provinciality is a geographical matter; macher. They didn't just pop up in this who cared that communism was a no-one to blame. Parochialism is a matter country, as they do in the book, without human calamity in every country on of will and imagination . One, of course, a past, ready to be walk-on extras­ which it had been visited. People with can foster the other; but it needn't and in eccentric, devious, altogether excessive­ an ability to imagine catastrophe-such McAuley it didn't; on the contrary, what­ in Pybus' psychodrama. as George Orwell who saw only a bit of ever else one thinks of his Quadrant, it They w ere driv en to m ak e some what he so profoundly understood, or was the least parochial of Australian things that seemed desperately important more recently Simon Leys of whom the m agazines; indeed it was a self­ to them apparent to others, in this same can be said- understood this consciously de-parochialising influence in implausibly peaceable and complacent material. They were not thanked for it at this country. Of this significance, there island on the other end of the world. They the time. is not a word from Pybus. spoke of things beyond local experience. Certainly, for a very long time not Parochialism comes in many variants. Some people believed them and were everyone was convinced; indeed many Peasants are often parochial, w hich is influenced by them, though it did not reserved their hatred not for a system of why Marx despaired of the 'idiocy of rural always come easily. rule responsible for so much unmitigated life'; they show no interest in things that Even though I grew up in an anti­ tragedy, but for those who sought to do or have gone on, or might, in a wider communist home, for example, it was in expose that system, and thought it world. Less obviously, and more Bondi not Warsaw, and I had no privileged important to do so. I have often commonly among parochial intellectuals, understanding of these things. I still wondered why. even clever ones, a real in tercst in larger recall a lecture on Czechoslovakia given things is combined with lack of aware­ by Knopfelmacher in 1968, shortly before I HAVE NO PYBUS IAN explanation for why ness or ability to imagine that they might the Soviet invasion. Knopfelmacher was a what was obvious to any ordinary Polish be qualitatively different from what one Czech Jew w h o, unlike most of his peasant was calumny to so many finds at home. Everything is measured on family, had escaped the other world­ eminent Western thinkers. Instead the local scale. historical scourge of the century, Nazism. I would venture a charitable explanation, This is not merely Pybus' problem. It After fighting in the War, he returned to which is, I confess, 'wildly speculative' is a common feature in Australian Prague and resumed philosophical and even if true could only be partial: in responses to communism, and much else. studies (under Jan Patocka, later to Australia, at least, radical and systematic

36 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 evil, conducted on a mass scale, is hard N othing to choose. If it had been my fate for whom modernity is a problematic to imagine. It might have been that to have to listen to much prating of this achievement at best, now respond in very McAuley, perhaps even for the reasons sort, I think I would have become pretty different ways to the challenges of post­ or some of them that Pybus gives, was uncompromising too! I might have even communist modernity, than do, say, more than usually receptive to under­ been moved to religion; certainly to Polish liberals, among them Catholics standing it, and to recognising its most drink. Religion clearly informs and others, for whom modernity and a powerful political site and source in the McAuley's understanding of evil as it tolerant civil society are ideals for world at the time he lived. That would cannot mine, and perhaps he was better Poland's future and grounds for conflict have been an interesting marriage of for it. It does appear to have helped him with friends of the past. psychological predisposition and aware­ understand something Pybus can't. Among those who agreed on the evil ness of empirical reality. But it is not a N one of this is to say that McAuley of communism, after all, are many who hypothesis that Pybus ever entertains, was necessarily right or admirable in all see it as but a development and height­ since she appears to know nothing and his particular views, h ostilities, ening of modernity, and they dislike many features of the latter, even without the former. So did McAuley. Others, once In the polarisation of the epoch, Manichaeanism equally opposed to communism, see it as came easily to people who found themselves a perversion of modernity. Much that was most objectionable about communism continually derided for saying something important died with it, and grounds of political and true. It might well be that it came too easily alliance and antagonism are no longer the at times, and hardened into a reflex rather than a same. Recent splits in what was once called the 'Quadrant group' attest to considered response. But these are discriminations some divisions and re-divisions of these sorts. What they had in common was and criticisms which can only have purchase if fundamental, but new questions arise to in making them, you understand the context which they now h ave conflicting answers. in which they occurred. But this is idle, if not completely wild, speculation. My point is m erely that care less about the realities that McAuley obsessions, that he wasn't tormented, unless one penetrates the actors' own did know and did care about. Nor does that it was always the better course to be views of the world in which they lived she seem to think it important to know. contrarian (to use a new and ugly coinage) and tries to see what in the world (both And so, since nothing else, least of all in his manner. In the polarisation of the of action and of thought) might have led communism, for example, is thought to epoch, Manichaeanism came easily to them to these views, psychological reduc­ have anything to do with McAuley's anti- people who found themselves continu­ tionism of Pybus' sort is not really a communism, the answer must ally derided for sayin g som ething conclusion of one's research but its pre­ lie deep in his groin. important and true. It might well be that supposition. When everything else of it cam e too easily at times, and hardened potential importance is filtered out, INTHE MOST remarkable passage in the into a reflex rather than a considered whatever is left wins by default. book, Pybus explains in a crisp school­ response. But these are discriminations To conclude, in anticipation of mistressly way: and criticism s which can only have correspondence, I have not asked that purchase if, in making them, you under­ Pybus answer a question she now McAuley's insistence that commu­ stand the context in which they occurred. repeatedly declares is 'of no concern to nism was an aggressive force of evil, Pybus doesn't even see a need to. m e ... who was right or who was wrong rather than a political and social system It might also be that, if McAuley had about communism' (The Australian, 13 created by human intelligence and lived past 1989, his view of the world and October 1999). That is not a bad question, practised by mortal men, made him those of some others who had been in or by the way, and not one, as we have seen, uncompromisi ng toward those who around Quadrant would have diverged, on which she avoids expressing did not regard communism as an on the grounds less of the state of their uninformed yet censorious opinions. But abomination. libido than of their beliefs. there is a different point, which has to Here we have it: either evil or human. It is, for example, very plain in post­ do with the obligations of a biographer. Try substituting 'nazism' or 'Pol Pot's communist Poland, with which I am One of these is t o understand your regime' for communism in that sentence. familiar and which has local resonance subject. Ignoring the significance of ideas How irresistible is the choice that poor for me, that people who were once closely to an intellectual and communism to an Devil-obsessed McAuley is supposed to united against a common foe may come anti-communist and poetry to a poet is have overlooked? The plain truth is that to discover they have less or nothing in not the best way to meet it. • communism wa an aggressive force of common when that foe disappears. Polish evil and it was a political system [and the Catholics of a traditionalist anti-modern Martin Krygier is Professor of Law at the rest] ... and it was an abomination. bent, conservatives, nationalists, many University of New South Wales.

VOLUME 9 NUMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 37 BooKs: l

P AUL C OLLINS All this and heaven too

The High Price of Heave n, Davtd Marr, Al len and Unwm, 1999. ISB 1 86505 201 5, RRI' $24.95

THI S BOO K IS BOTH fascinating and more provocative statem ents. One of the infuriating. David Marris a fine writer, and most useful things he docs is to discuss The High Price of Heaven is full of pleasure and to remind us of one of interesting and penetrating sketches of some Christianity's most long-lasting contra­ of Australia's most important people and dictions: its deeply ambivalent and negative religious institutions. But sometim es it left attitude to the human body and more m e impatient and occasionally annoyed. broadly to the material world. I suspect my feelings will be mild compared This, of course, is strange, given that with those of some readers; I have no doubt the fundam ental Christian doctrine of the a number of Catholics-and others-will incarnation highlights the fact that God be positively fuming. enters the world in the fl esh of a human Fundam entally, the boo k is a series of body, that in Christ God experiences the essays about the deep-seated, pervasive human condition in its totality, and that influence of the mainstream churches, 'God sent his own son in a body as phy ical especially the Catholic Church, on Australian as any sinful body' (Romans 8:3). That sam e politics, social mores and culture. Marr main­ doctrine of the sacredness of matter is fmther tains they still have an ability to put real emphasised in the doctrines of pressure on governments and he assumes bodily resurrection and eucharist. that the churches still have a constituency really only on those who want to play that is relatively coherent. He points to the politics. The book almost totally neglects H owEVER, Marr's trea tment of the important influence of the church on the vast majority of Catholics who have history of repressive Christian attitudes is questions like drug law reform, censorship already been through a process of renewal sketchy and incomplete. This is unfortunate and even equity in industrial relations. and are struggling to find out what it migh t since it is a key element running through Anyone who has been around the m ea n to be a Catholic in the contemporary his whole argument about the Australian religious ridges would have known this. world. church's stance. For instance, he tells us Sociologists are beginning to gra nt that The book also highlights the difference that 'Christianity came out of Judea with even nominal religious affiliation has an between perception and reality when the terrible idea that the body was the influence on the way people see politics. considering the role of the Catholic Church enem y of the soul'. Not so: the Jews never Political scientist Graham Little illustrated in Australia. Catholicism is often perceived drove a wedge between body and soul. T he this vividly in his fascinating articles, before by observers as morally oppressive, narrowly split finds its origin in Greek Platonic the 1993 election, about the religious focused and obsessed with controlling thought and only influenced a small part of backgrounds of Paul Keating and John sexual expression. Given the Church's the Wisdom tradition very late in the period Hewson. Man's purpose is to examine how public record, this is a perfectly under­ just before Christ. the churches use this influence. While his standable perception. The body-soul dualism largely entered barbs are not confined to the Catholic But th e reality of the Ca tholic C hristianity in the third and fourt h Church, it is his major target. community is much more complex and centuries AD as the church struggled to Marr has the good journalist's ability to multifaceted. Out in the real world there is express itself within the cultural context of sum up an individual accurately in another Catholic Church. I kept thinking late Roman times. As a result it became penetrating and som etim es cruel pen that for every censorious and wowser immersed in a socia I con tcx t that, sketches, and he does not hesitate to do Catholi c that Marr nominates, I could name increasingly, was deeply ambivalent about this, especially when it comes to Catholic a dozen sensible, intelligent, progressive matter, the body, and the primal expression clerics. But the problem here is that those and committed Catholic , very much in of corporeal existence, sexuality. As a result, he chooses are not really typical. They touch with modern life. It is so much easier the Western church's predominant spiritual often represent their own particular agenda , to reject a parody of Catholicism than deal tradition became increasingly suspicious and their constituency in the wider Catholic with the m ore complex, intelligent and of matter, the body and pleasure, and high­ Church is often small. As he admits himself, integrated faith of say, a Max Charlesworth, lighted an asceticism which brought to the 'sometimes it's as if two churches were or a Veronica Brady. Christian a spiritual clarity that was op rating under the same Catholic banner'. Having said that, it would be unfortunate preparatory to the final vision of God. The High Price of Heaven focuses almost if one of Marr's fundamental points were to In this context Marr mentions Peter exclusively on the official church, and then be lost in arguments about some of his Brown's splendid book, The Body and

38 EUREKA STREET • D EC EMBER 1999 Society (1988). But he misses the complex Archbishop as saying that 'Catholic teachers picture that Brown develops. For Man should stop talking about the primacy of SPIRITUAL everything is summed up under the rubric conscience. This has never been Catholic COMPANIONING of repression, what he calls 'the moral teaching', and, according to Arch bishop Pell, h roism of saying no to sex'. He argues that 'rests squarely on the fallacy of overwhelm­ formation this creates a deep Christian fear of ing natural virtue. All you have to do to sensuality and pleasure of any sort. This, he fulfil yourself is to follow your natural A course for those exploring says, has led Christianity to be particularly instincts.' spiritual companioning/direction hard on homosexuality as well as all sexual As it stands, Pell's view is hard to square and the skills required. expression outside marriage. with the Catechism of the Catholic Church While there is considerable truth in this, (Paragraph 1778) which says: 'In all that he Brown suggests a lot more nuance: says and does, man is obliged to follow This is the sixth year this faithfully what he knows to be just and ecumenical course is being It is not sufficient to talk of the rise of right. It is by the judgment of his conscience offered. Christianity in the Roman world in terms that man perceives and recognises the of a shift from a less repressive to a more prescriptions of the divine law-' The It is part of the ongoing program repressive society. What was at stake was Catechism then goes on to quote John Henry of the Australian Network for a subtle change in the perception of the Newman, saying in part that 'Conscience is Spiritual Direction. body itself. The men and women of later the aboriginal Vicar of Christ'. This merely centuries were not only hedged around re-states a long Catholic tradition of freedom The course comprises a guided with a different and more exacting set of of conscience. The Catholic tradition says reading program and a residential prohibitions. They had also come to see that a person is bound to follow even an school at the Melbourne Anglican their bodies in a different light. (Brown, erroneous conscience. Again, as Newman pp29-30) Retreat House Cheltenham says in the Apologia, in the context of his 28 May to 2 June 2000 For the early Christians, cha tity conversion: 'I have always contended that symbolised an experience of tran cendent obedience ever to an erring conscience was Full details are available from freedom from earthly ties. It was a way of the way to gain light.' emulating the angels, of recovering to the In contrast, Pell's emphasis is almost The Registrar (Mr John Stuart) pristine state of purity before Adam's fall. exclusively on authority, especially papal 398 Nepean Highway They were sure that the end of the world authority. He equates any assertion of PARKDALE VIC 3 195 was nigh and the kingdom of God was just freedom of conscience with a kind of radical around the corner, from whence a 'new liberty to form moral opinions without any creation' would arise and the human body reference to an outside authority. However, Social Justice would be possessed by the Spirit. his position is not typical of the mainstream While I would be the first to agree with Catholic moral tradition. That is why Diploma Man that the results of these attitudes have I warned earlier that Marr needs to be careful at Yarra Theological Union, been parlous for m any, they do need to be when he takes Archbishop Pell as Melbourne seen within their cultural and historical typical of mainstream Catholicism. context. The High Price of Heaven would Eight semester units can be chosen: have been much stronger if it had acknowl­ A NOTHER OF MARR'S Catholic 'charac­ * History of Catholic social edged that context and argued that it was ters' is Senator Brian Harradine. He details movements precisely these past conceptions that the Harradine's role in censorship and * Justice and social teaching repressive Catholic authoritarians of today opposition to pornography in Australia and * Church and politics were trying to maintain. comments that if 'we are to make sense of * Christianity and economics Marr argu es that the churches, as what's going on in Australia regarding these * Can war be just? inheritors of a compromised tradition, act issues we have to learn to listen to the old * Human rights as the primary agents of repression in Puritan arguments that linger ... behind the * Educating for justice, etc. Australian society. He examines this claim secular language'. In other words, the whole in relationship to issues such as censorship, Harradine argume nt i s essentially Enro lments close 17 February 2000 euthanasia, homosexuality and drug law theological. It is really about preventing YTU does not offer reform. The recent Vatican intervention to the experience of what Catholic moral correspondence courses . force the closure of a safe injecting room at theology used to call 'venereal pleasure' For further information, contact: The Academic Dean , the Sisters of Charity's St Vincent's Hospital anywhere outside the context of marriage. Yarra Theological Union in Sydney gives some weight to his Marr argues that Harradine has devoted PO Box 79 argument. his long political career to furthering what Box Hill VIC 3128 I said that Marr created brilliant he variously calls 'the minority positions of Fax: (03) 98901160, character sketches. It is to some of these his faith' and 'the demands' of his 'Catholic ph: (03) 9890 3771 'characters' that I will now turn. God'. It is not about 'freedom of choice but Email: The first is Dr George Pell, Archbishop freedom from sin'. This is probably true, Admin [email protected] of Melbourne. Marr says that Archbishop but the difficulty again is that Harradine Website: http:/ /www.rc.net.ytu Pell 'is hard on freedom'. He quotes the himself is in many ways a minority Catholic

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 39 in a m uch bigger Catholic C hurch . only because it highlights the influence of still at work, inflicting misery'. While he Oftentimes he represents the emphases of a small group of unrepresentative individu­ might fi nd that m ost Ca tholics these days the theology of a past age. als on the social agenda of Australia. have changed radically, the book is a tim ely One of the m ost interesting issues Marr Marr speaks honestly of his desire to reminder to those of us who are comforta ble raises is the question of the church and belong to a church community and of his with fa ith that the very institution we value industrial relations. This is an important own period of Christian commitment. But can for som e people be very destructive. • and practical issue because the Catholic in the end he was repulsed by the emphasis Church, with its n etwork of sch ools, on guilt and sham e and says 'it's left me Paul Collins MSC i a priest, writer and hospitals and other institutions, is now the unable to forgive those Christians who are broadcaster. largest employer in Australia after the federal governm ent. This raises the question: is everyone employed by the church 'engaged in propaga ting religion' as Marr puts itl If they are, then what if they BooKs: 2 are in de facto rela tion ships, or are H UGH DILLON h om osexu al or lesbian, or unmarried mothers, or remarried divorcees? 'If they are [propagating religion J, religious rules apply to their employ ment. If they're not, then they may have secular protection of Politics out of court the law against church bigo try.' It is clear to m e that people merely working for church ins ti tu tions as cleaners, The Political High Court, David So lomon, Allen & Unwin, 1999. cooks, receptionists or accountants are ISBN 1 86448 716 X, 1\RP $29.95 simply em ployees doing a job. Certainly, a Christian approach might be asked of them through some fo rm of 'mission statem ent', D ,.Nc T H ' em '80' •nd '90,, the change which the Court brought about in but nothing m ore. The church has no right majority on the High Court adopted a recent tim es. After all, Solom on has spent to interfere in their private lives nor demand 'dynamic' approach to the development of many years as a journalist watching the that they li ve according to rules demanded the common law a nd interpretation of High Court and studying its members, so of those who work in ministry. Ministry consti tu tiona! questions. Simultaneous! y I had hoped for insights into the internal does not flow fro m mere employm ent by they adopted of policy of transparency in dynamics of the Court. On both counts the church, rather fro m spiritual gifts and relation to judicial creativity. As Chief I was disappointed. ecclesial call. One is gifted by God to carry Justice Sir Anthony Mason put it: Helen Garner has rem arked that a writer out the work and called and authorised by should be granted the righ t to his or her own Beca use policy-oriented interpretation the church community to do the ministry. m aterial. There is an element of unfairness exposes underl ying va lues for debate it As John Collins has sh own so well in his in criticising authors because they have not would enhance the open character of the Are All Christians Minister ! (to which written the books which the critic would judicial decision-ma king process and question he answers 'no'), ministry involves write or wish to read. Nevertheless, if a promote legal reasoning that is more t raining, leadership a nd an intim ate book on the High Court's political impact comprehensible and persuas ive to society identification with the a n c tifyin g fails adequately to address a critical political as a whole. personhood of Christ. and ju risprudential issue concerning the The issue becomes more difficult in the Prior to this, a doctrine of 'strict legalism ' Court's methodology, one w hich directly case of teachers in Catholic schools, where (or legal literalism ) h ad m asked the under­ affects the very subject matter of his study, a demand could be made that all teachers lying assumptions and values affecting the then the author cannot shield himself from accept the essentially Catholic ethos of the Court's decisions. criticism behind his subjective agenda. school. It is hard to spell thi out in practice T he Mason Court's concern to uncloak So what does Solomon give us? The but when you experience it you know it is the decision-m aking process was designed book divides into three parts: an intro­ there. I have always held that the key to enhance the public's understanding of its duction; a consideration of 'problem areas' teachers in the school need to be practising work and confidence in its processes. Mason (native title, tax, environment, federalism, Christians or even, specifically, Catholics, and others recognised that such trans­ interstate trade, etc.), and 'institutions' (or especially in the key roles of Principal and parency also exposed it to fair and unfair the relationship between the Court, the Religious Education Co-ordinator. Marr sees criticism. They got plenty of both sorts, but parliament and the political mainstream) . this as unjust because it m eans that other particularly the latter, especially during In these he gives us a history of the teachers in the system cannot aspire to the Mabo and Wik debates. significant cases dealing with these various these jobs. Given the dynamism of the Court's work issues. Solomon knows his constitutional The High Price of Heaven is a very during the Mason-Brennan period, the case law and is able to explain the decisions personal book, and also a very 'Sydney' significance of the debate concerning the in terms which an intelligent layperson book. Because it is written with passion it limits of judicial activism, and the seductive would understand readily. sometimes outstrips its evidence and gets title of David Solomon ' stu dy, I had Where I think the book fails is in the carried away. But it is well worth reading, if anticipated a critical analysis of the sea analysis of how and why the Court ca me to

40 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 its critical decisions. In his concluding darts for those he regards as belonging to chapter, Solomon confesses: 'This book has the 'radical' wing of the High Court. The not attempted to explore the political obvious riposte that he is entirely selective CONFERENCE proclivities of the judges ... ' One asks, why in his criticisms is never made by Solomon. Journal of the not? If, as Mason admits, values and value­ Yet some conservative judges espoused the Catholic Education Conference judgments are an integral part of judicial very sorts of judicial methodology Craven Thro ugh articles contributed by local and decision-making, the factors taken into purports to find so repugnant in the Mason­ internatio nal writers, the account, and the weight given to those Brennan Court. CONFERENCE j o urnal seeks to info rm factors by the judges are crucial to a full Chief Justice Barwick, for example, not and inspire by being at the cutting edge of understanding of their decisions. only refused to be bound by precedent, but som e of the m ost impo rtant contemporary Solomon seems to have accepted former thought that if the composition of the Court iss ues f.1c ing Catholic Educa ti o n today. Chief Justice Sir Harry Gibbs' tendentious changed, that was sufficient justification claim that differences of opinion on the for a previous decision to be overmled. Sir In 1999 the m aj o r iss ues addressed the year High Court are explicable m erely in terms Harry Gibbs pronounced 'it is for this Court ofjubilee. T he them e was: R elease, Rejoice of ' differences regarding legal principle, not to assess the needs of Australian society a11d Reco ll ciliatio ll a ca ll to Jubilee. M ajor political policy'. In his concluding chapter, and to expound and develop the law for presenters were Shawn Copeland (USA), he quotes Gibbs at length expounding the Australia in the light of that assessment'. Elaine Wainwright (Brisbane) and Eric theory that, because the judgments of High Even Sir Owen Dixon, the great exponent H odgens (Vi cto ri a). Court judges reveal no political bias (as if of the ultra-conservative doctrine of 'strict The j o urnal is iss ued in April and they would leave their fingerprints in uch and complete legalism', felt constrained to October. a way), there is no reason to doubt that all throw off the shackles of the House of Lords High Court decisions by all judges are made when he felt that th ir decisions were so Cost: $29.00 p.a . purely on legal principle. fundamentally wrong ' that I could To subsc ribe fo r th e yea r 2000 iss ues send No doubt all High Court judges do decide never bring myself to accept them '. your postal details and c/i eq11 e to: on the basis of 'legal principle' but which Catholic Education Conference Jou rnal legal principles they select in a given case I F SOLOMON FALLS SHORT regarding judicial 59 omcrs t turn on a number of things, including prec­ activism, and the nagging issue of the BUR WOOD VI C 3 125 edent, consequences (or policy outcomes) Court's internal politics, he succeeds in New subscribers for the year 2000 issues and their philosophies of th role of the showing the complexity of the work of the will receive a free copy of the October judge. High Court judges are never entirely High Court, the integrity of the judges and 1999 issue. predictable, but some are more predictable the intensity of the pressure on than others because they have explicit judi­ them. Sir Gerard Brennan once told cial philosophies. me that he started work in the car Not everyone accepted the Mason being driven to work at about lam AUSTRALIAN Court's approach. Dr Greg Craven, Dean of and h e worked well into the Law at the University of Notre Dame, WA, evening, every day. While the BOOK REVIEW accuses the judges of a systematic abuse of prestige associated with member- power, undemocratic politics, absolutism, ship of th e High Court is faulty jurisprudence and placing their undoubtedly trem endous and a DEC/jAN personal values above legal principle. He reward in itself, there is also, for the argues: judges, an element of self-sacrifice Elizabeth Jolley in the nation's service which is not The question is not whether judges make on The Nature of Gardens often acknowledged. If Solomon's law-everyone cheerfully accepts that they intention was an apologia for the do-but rather in what contexts they make An Essay by Subhash Jaireth judges whom he obviously respects law, and to what extent. The fact that it enormously, he prevails. may be appropriate for the judges carefully Susan Kurosawa on Robin Gerster's I think the book can be read and incrementally to develop the law in a Legless in Ginza with advantage by anyone wanting particular context may no more be regarded an intelligent, well-written intro­ as conferring upon them a ge neral Jenna Mead on Marilyn Lake's history duction to the work of the High competence to mould the law in their own of Australian feminism Court. It was a useful historical image than that the cautious acceptance of refresher course for me, but it will the concept of self-defence constitutes a John Docker on Robert Manne's disappoint those hoping for more The Australian Century general tolerance of homicide. than a general narrative of the Solomon's sympathies, as far as I can Court's progress. Those who wish Ivor Indyk on tell, are with the judges, but his commen­ to understand the debate concern- Brian Castro's essays tary on the debate is unfortunately limp ing the Court's activities during and fails to traverse Craven's arguments. the last decade need to look further Craven is a right-wing dogmatist with a afield. • New Subscribers $55 for ten issues plus a free book value-system of which he is unashamed. It Ph (03) 9429 6700 or Fax (03) 9429 2288 is unsurprising that he reserves his sharpest Hugh Dillon is a NSW magistrate.

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 41 THEATRE

GEOFFR EY MrLNE Dramatic writ

Plays of the 60s, Katharine Bris bane (cd.), Curre ncy Pre s, 1999 Pla ys of the 70s, Kathannc Bnsbanc (e d.), Currency Press, 1999

C URREN CY PRESS, Australi a's lea dmg which to re-examine these works fr om (and, I'm afraid, still forge ttable) The Lucky perfo rming arts publisher since 1971 , is the past. Streak, in which nothing happens to jolt never short of a major project. Its major Looking at the Plays of the 60s, for the yo ung Ken and Colin ou t of th eir achie ve m ent to da te has been th e example, one is forcibly struck by several depressinglyconformisttorpor,conditioned Companion to Thea tre in A ustralia in 1995; persistent elements of content, form and as it is by the stultifying influence of their the long-awaited Companion to Music and language. One is the seemingly constant battle-axe of a boa rding- house landlady, Dance in Australia is clu e out this yea r and pressure on (mostly youthful) individuals Mrs Bailey. a thi rei in the series, a Companion to Film, to conform to established codes of behaviour El sewhere in the 60 collection, dashed RadioandTelevision, isschedulcd fo r 2000. while they are simultaneously trying to ideals surface in Bill Reed's Burke' But in the meantime, another major esta blish a sense of their own self- Company of 1968 (Vol. 3) and Dorothy project has begun to materialise, in the determined icl en ti ty. So fo rm of collections of plays and perform- m a n y of th ese plays a nee texts from two points in the co ntinuum chronicle dashed hopes and of contemporary Australian elrama and the crushing of idealism, theatre. From the recent past, two volumes none more pungently than have appeared from each of two three- AlanHopgood's previously volume collections of Plays of the 60s and unpublished Pri vate Yul< Plays of the 70s, part of an ongoing new Obiects, written and first project called the Modern Dram a Series, performed in 1966 at the while a collection of much more recent height of the anti-Vietnam con temporary performance and physical War protests but just before theatre texts appeared early this year under Harold H olt's pro-w a r the title Performing the Unnameable. conservative government Currency is thus simultaneously tunnelling wa paradoxically returned forwards and backward to mine the rich with a huge majority. Tony, lode of ore that constitutes our recent the educated, draft-dodging performance literature. son of conservative MLA To bridge the gap, the Modern Drama Henry McKa y, is subjected seri es w ill later address the '80s and then to all kinds of pressure to push back to the '30s, '40s anci 'S Os. This is come to hi s senses and toe a ve ry big and very welcome project indeed. the family line-not least T he series is edited by Katharine Brisbane, because his elder brother w ho contributes her usual perceptive intra- Peter is fi ghting the good ductions to each vo lume, pa ying particul ar fi ght in Vietnam. Given a attention to the social and political context week to drop his 'commo' of the short span of years in which each sympathies, T ony finally group of plays appeared. A production tears up his 'Hey Hey LBf! Jude Kuring as Cora lie in the 1974 N imrod Theatre production photograph of each play and a short word How Many Kids Did You of Coralie Lansdowne Says No. about its au thor are accompanied by detail s Kill Today ?' placard, saying of the plays' first productions and th e 'I suppose you'll say, rather glibly, that I' m Hewett's 1967 play This Old Man Comes presentation makes it as useful to the starting to grow up. But perhaps the truth is Rolling Hom e (Vol. 2) . general reader as to the scholar, as well as ... I'm fac ing the utter pointles ness of The politically stable landscape that for the classroom or the rehearsal room . being an id ealist' (Vol. 2, p 52 ). fo rmed the backdrop to the plays of the Many of the plays ga thered into the four To some extent, this cla h of idealism earl y 1960s, to which Brisbane refer in her volumes seen so far have already been and co nformity da tes back to Ala n Introduction to 60s Volume 2, has given publ ished by C urrency, while a couple are Seymour's 1961 play, The One Day of the way to turmoil, doubt and a crisis of m a king their third appearan ce ; om e Ye ar, which is one of the few notable confidence by the tim e we get to the plays oth ers have never been in print before. In omissions from the 1960s collections. On of the late '60s. Still, numbing confo rmity either case, ga thering them together into the other hand, a surprising inclusion in and sanctioned suppression of outsiders are coll ections like these provides a context in Volume 2 is )am es Sea rle's long-forgo tten the main concerns of Alex Buzo's Norm

42 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 and Ahmed (1968, the last play in Vol. 2) Donny (Milgate's latter-day Pentheus and kills two husbands with rat poison) and and The Front Room Boys (1969, Vol. 3). Dionysus) in A Refined Look. One is left then Jack Hibberd's quintessential and But the most interesting of these plays with a powerful sense of the word as deed. much-revived 1972 monodrama, A Stretch to re-read today are Rodney Milgate's As Belly Caclmus h says early in of the Imagination. The other play in A Refined Look at Existence (1966) and A Refined Look, 'Langu age is not commu­ Volume 1 is David Williamson's The John Romeril's Chicago, Chicago (1969), nication' (Vol. 3, p12); but this is countered Removalists, first produced in Melbourne both of which appear in Volume 3. They soon after by the Greek Zeus figure, Jovey in 1971 but frequently revived since. This were way ahead of their time in form and Smith's 'I'm telling you all this because is the only naturalistic play in a volume style and outward-looking in their aspect, I need desperately to be understood' (p19). otherwise devoted to experiments in epic although only the latter has had a recent So the talk goes on and on ... and, so often, and presentational form. revival of sufficient potency and insight little happens and no-one is understood. Plays of the 70s, Volume 2, offers the (David Pledger's 1998 adaptation for Not But, beside the language of disillusion most interesting selection of all, revealing Yet It's Difficult) to realise its late 1960s and non-communication, there are also the increasingly divergent interests of our potential. The extent to which American­ poetry and heightened imagistic speech. playwrights-and the increasing cliversi ty style political machinations and election Some of Hewett's characters quote from of the playwrights themselve . First up is propaganda have superseded, in recent years, 'The Lady of Shalott' and 'Bannerman of Peter Kenna's A Hard God; dating from the idealised 'Australian style' of politics, the Dandenong', but others forge poetry 1973, this is more like a play ofthe 1960s (it has made Chicago, Chicago's prescient from the banal utterances of everyday is set in 1946) in its critique of the stultifying warnings more resonant today than they speech. Bill Reed's defeated explorers in effects of the past (here, the Catholic might have been in 1969, when we still Burke's Company can find heightened Church) but in its lightly encoded explora­ believed the dream of Dan's Party would expression in their mouths when they can tion of homosexuality (the 'furtive love' of come true at the next election. scarcely summon action from their a later Kenna play) it is also tip-toeing into While Romeril looked to America for exhausted bodies, the young idealist John the territory of new-wave values. The his source, Milga te looked to classical Greek King especially, as when he responds to ubiquitous Buzo's Coralie Lansdowne Says tragedy for his in the bizarre marriage of Wills' urgent plea to get a rake to uncover No (when she really meant yes, after all ) is Euripides, Pinter and Ionesco, rock 'n' roll, the buried box of provisions and letters at unambiguously into new-wave life-values. commercial hype and religious revivalism Cooper's Creek: 'Yes, yes, the rake. I'll get If both of these take up residence in that was A Refined Look at Existence. the rake, Mr Wills, sir. I'll .. . I'll get the what Brisbane calls the domestic sphere, so Interestingly, it was this part-time rake 1 I'll get the rake! You'll find it here too does Jim McNeil's surprisingly gentle playwright (Milgate was also a painter and within my hands.' (Vol. 3, p85). This play How Does Your Garden Grow, premiered poet) who had as much influence as any of remains as moving to read today as it was to in 1974. While! am not as strongly persuaded the Sydney writers represented here upon see in 1968, precisely because of as Brisbane that prison elrama is such a the iconoclastic style and content of the so­ the power of its words. prominent Australian sub-genre, this play called New Wave of Australian drama that does fit neatly into the collection in the was to follow in the last years of the '60s A CTION CAME TO EQUATE tO deed more way that inmates Mick, Sam and the and the early '70s. vigorously in the New Wave plays of the transvestite Brenda are, in a sense, practising But before launching into the New Wave, 1970s, especially those in Volume 1 (all a kind of new wave, unsanctioned, furtive a third preoccupation of the '60s' play­ drawn from the briefperiocl1970-72). While love in itself (like Kenna's Joe and Jack) and wrights needs to be mentioned-their love the volume opener's The Legend of King at the same time practising for real life (like of language. O'Malley (by Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis, Coralie). The revelation that Mick's future In many of these plays, words are the 1970) might still be rooted in the verbal­ 'outside' lies in the arms of the 'mannishly' predominant tool of the dramaturgy. debate structure of some of its predecessors, dressed but clearly lib era ted I though Speechless, inactive characters (like Hoth notably Milgate, this widely toured and unnamed) 'Woman' is a fascinating twist. Yuk in Private Yuk or Jacko in The Front much-revived harbinger of the Sydney New The final play is Robert Merritt's The Room Boys) suddenly wax lyrical and Wave is still action- and character-driven Cake Man, rightly included as the first play become active-once they have articulated and even its debate is couched in the forms by an indigenous playwright to make it into their inner feelings-only to be plunged of vaudeville, song and dance and the ribald the mainstream professional theatre. This into war or ostracism. Tommy Docherty is satire that characterised at least one strain play about life on the Aboriginal mission at at pains to ensure his daughter Jaycee can of the enduring appeal for a decade and a Nowra in the 1950s is yet another chronicle spell the name of the communist candidate half of the Nimrod Theatre, whose life was of dashed ideals, but its national and inter­ Sharkey properly (in This Old Man), but arguably spawned by this landmark show. national tours after its Sydney premiere in when the police arrive they fl ee, leaving the T hi volume would suggest that the 1975 got issues of Aboriginal health, welfare pathetic 'Shakey' scrawled in chalk on the New Wave's gestati on in Melbourne and rights on to the national theatre agenda Redfern streetscape. Likewise, Laurie's occurred in m ore modest circumstances, in a way that no oth er play had done rambling odes to a forgotten pa t in the especially given the absence of the APG's previously. sam e play and Ahmed's unnaturally formal equally vigorous Marvellous Melboume. Currency is doing us all a grea tfavour in peech (in Norm and Ahmed) signal their The plays that follow King O'Malley are reviving (a t least in print) the repertoire of outsider status and lead to their doom. short pieces by Alma De Groen (The foss our past. • Verbal deba tes also proliferate, most Adams Show, about a post-natally depressed pro min en tly those between Henry and Tony mother who kills her baby) and John Romeril Geoffrey Milne is head of theatre and drama McKay in Private Yuk or Penthouse and (Mrs Thally F, w hose abused wife Vonnie at LaTrobe University.

V oLUME 9 N uMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 43 immediately-you are at a double disadvantage for not having seen it and because there are lost souls around who will try to tell you the ending. If someone starts to do this, put your fingers in your ears and sing 'Eskimo Nell' loudly. It may be difficult to do this in, say, a posh restaurant or David Jones, but you might improvise with an elbow to the solar plexus. Shyamalan wrote the script, and it is extraordinarily well-crafted: on a second viewing I noticed things that were integral to the plot that lay hidden the first time. The performances are uniformly compelling. Toni Collette, as Lynn Sear, the harried single mother of a very troubled ten-year-old, shows her best work to date. Bruce Willis is excellent as Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who must deal with his own pain as well as that of the boy he i trying to help. But Haley Joel Osment as Cole Sear, the tortured child visionary, is amazing, a powerful natural talent. The difference between The Sixth Sense and other horror or ghost m ovies is fundamental, because here there is no gratuitous wallowing in evil and grue. The plot deals with courage, love, pity and terror, Cronenberg misses no opportunity to play and do not underestimate the terror. Both on the sexual ambivalence of the new bodily times I went I was glad of company. But Unreal orifice created by the bioport (when Geller I was also moved. -Juliette Hughes finally convinces Pikul to have a bioport eXistenZ, dir. David Cronenberg. Anyone installed, she spouts lines about it 'just familiar with the films of Canadian director waiting to be filled'-you get the picture). Shaggy dog David Cronenberg will recognise the pet There's also plenty of fun to be had in obsessions in his latest, eXistenZ; the Cronenberg's self-knowing play on the Blacl< Cat, White Cat, dir. Emir Kusturica. blurring of boundaries between flesh and parallels between gam e and film (when This n ew film by respected director technology, paranoid anxieties about the Geller and Pikul have sex in the game world Kusturica I Underground and Time of the crossing of psychic and physical borders, she has created, she berates herself for having Gypsies) has a plot to rival the most the fetishisation and sexualisation of the scripted such a 'transparently obvious attempt convoluted of operas. The film is like an line between the human and inhuman. The to heighten the emotional stakes in later over-exuberant pup jumping into your lap. film plays these obsessions out in the scenes of the gam e'), and the ambivalence It's fun at first, but then you wish it would multiple worlds of virtual reality; 'eXistenZ' about what's real and what's virtual back off. is in fact the title of the latest fully amplifies as the layers of games within Set on the banks of the Danube, the immersive VR game fro m designer Allegra games multiply throughout the film. Gross, comedy revolves around the interaction Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh, above with grotesque, queasily erotic and parodic by between two rival gypsy families controlled Jude Law). It's played through a game turns, eXistenZ offers a great introduction by two wealthy octogenarian patriarchs, console of pulsating, living flesh, grown to one of the most consistently interesting Grga Pi tic and Zarije. Zarije's crooked son, from mutated amphibian DNA, and jacks directors of the past two decades for anyone Matko, devises a black-market 'get ri ch into a surgically implanted bioport at the fool enough to have avoided him till now. quick' scheme involving a train-load of base of the player's spine via an eight-foot -Allan James Thomas petrol, but makes the mistake of letting umbilical cord. Dadan, a drug-crazed gypsy gangster, in on eXistenZ begins with Geller on the run the scheme. Dadan double-crosses Matko, fro m the 'Realists', an anti-VR terrorist Seventh heaven resulting in Matko's owing Dadan a heap of group who've put a $5-million bounty on money, a debt that can only be satisfied by her head for 'crimes against reality'. Her The Sixth Sense, dir. M. Night Shyamalan. marriage between Matko's son and Dadan's only companion is Ted Pikul (Jude Law), an It's possible that you've already seen this unmarriageable sister. Compared with this, amateur security guard and games virgin, film, since it opened just after Eurel

44 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 However, despite the vibrant colour and the youthful Lord Goring (34, but he only m ovem ent, the fi lm consistently fa ils to admits to 32) is so polished and infectious deliver as a com edy . The actin g is that he carries this otherwise pedestrian Spiked again overwhelming and fra ntically unfunny, dram a before him. with real laughs few and far between . A Goring/Everett is the narcissist with a Summer of Sam, dir. Spike Lee. I always repeated sight gag of a large sow devouring m oralist's heart, a peacem aker's urge and a com e out of a Spike Lee film feeling a car was the biggest hit at the session wittily incontinent tongue-the quintes­ hectored. Oliver Stone has a sim ilar effect I a ttended, closely fo llow ed by a sentially Wildean figure. He is the pivot of on m e. Their fi lms crash over you in great Keatonesque scene in which the betrayed Oscar's play and Oliver Parker's film. Lu cky, waves of face-pulling political rhetoric and Matko tries to recover his m oney from a because none of the rest of Parker's cast is em otional bullying. corpse hanging from a railway boom ga te. much m ore than competent (except in the Summer of Sam is a confused but insist­ It requires inspired com edy to overcome vignette roles-Peter Vaughan as Phipps, ent film set during the N ew York summer a foreign langu age and th e resultant Lord Goring's gentlem an's gentleman, and of 1977-a summer of baseball, black-outs, subtitles. Subtitles distract from the visual John Wood as his cholericfather, the Earl of looting, searing heat and random killings. impact of a film and of course deprive the Caversham ). Minnie Driver plays a pert and As Stone often does, Lee attempts to audience of the subtle nuan ces and colour marriageable Mabel Chiltern with a bit too talk about 'big stuff' by looking at 'little of idiom atic speech, but here everyone tries much jaw action. Jerem y N orth, as her stuff'. As nea t an artistic idea as this may be, just too hard to please, virtually begging for compromised brother Sir Robert Chiltern, Lee just can't m ake it work. The Son of Sam laughs. There is a running Cas a blanca joke, is afflicted with a m oustache. Julianne killings become m etaphors for the end of anal jokes, the bodies-kept-on-ice joke, and Moore warms to her role as the scheming neighbourhood trust and sexual freedom; Fellini-like use of animals as the fi lm Mrs Cheveley with the aid of som e script the punk kid becom es a m etaphor for searches for zany impact. additions (Parker gives her m ore complex bucking the system; the policem en (one In the event, two hours seem ed to take m otivation than did Wilde), but she has Afro-American, one !tala-Am erican ) become four and towards the end, when the film rather too m any teeth in her lower jaw. symbols of race relations; and so it goes on. simply refused to lie down, my buttocks They distract one both from her conniving Lee's characters are so overburdened with were telling m e it was time to go hom e. and fr om her vulnerable face. the responsibility of educating us that they -Gordon Lewis Cate Blanchett drew the short straw become essays rather than real human beings. when she was cast as the unengagingly With Mira Sorvino and John Leguizamo impeccable Lady Gertrude Chiltern-the in the lead roles you can fo rgive a good deal. The beau ideal namegives her character well enough. Wilde But John Turturro is wasted as the 'Voice of did wicked wom en well and eccentric Harvey the Black Dog', barking commands An Ideal Husband, dir. Oliver Parker. women wonderfully. He was not strong on at David Berkowitz to go out and kill. While Adapting Oscar Wilde to the screen is like the relentlessly virtuous, m ale or fem ale. undeniably (but I assume unintentionally) trying to put nail polish on skin: the surface Blanchett's response is to hunch her humorou s, the nattering K9 certainly keeps sloughing off. In Oliver Parker's shoulders in hapless self-defence and in a represented the film's low point. attempt at this stagey 1895 comedy of series of costum es that do not quite fi t. The artful design of blood-splattered car m anners and misdem eanours, the intimate But Everett/Goring is immaculate. Cary interiors and the film-clip style of the cam era seems to extract fro m his players a Grant reincarnate-a teasing pleaser with Berkowitz sequences m akes m e wonder patchy naturalism rather than Wilde's flickers of depth. You grow so fond of his and worry about Lee's artistic priorities. enam elled style. Characters chat where he supercilious, self-deprecating humanity The virtuosity of his design is costly, and it would have them declaim. They deliver that by the film's end you are reconciled to com es at the expense of a humble engage­ their bans mot with m ethod intensity. All the play, the film and his friends. Well, m ent with the real world, both big and except for Rupert Everett that is. Everett, as almost. - Morag Fraser little. -Siobhan Jackson

V oLUME 9 N uMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 45 What really happens

/OH MY OARUNG, keep of the outrageousness of the way humans intrude upon others. your hands free from your But in the midst of outrage is still this tinge of optimism. fellow creature's blood .. . ' Clendinnen seems to be arguing, cautiously, throughout this In the fifth of her Boyer Boyer series that if we cease to feed the heart on fantasies (or lectures (ABC Radio National; 'bad history'), but give instead truth (or 'good history') then Sundays at Spm) Inga Clendin­ hearts will grow, not brutal from the fare, but perhaps tender at nen quotes a letter from Lillie last. She draws on the experience of the South African Truth Matthews, a young woman Vic­ and Reconciliation Commission, and notes that 'Some will still torian in place and time (the 1880s), writing to her fiance in cry out for justice, but the worst of the agony has been assuaged Western Australia which was then still in what Clendinnen and rendered unavailable for disreputable use by that identifies as 'the violent stage of the contact process'. The young extraordinary collective enterprise in good history.' man 'has confided that he himself has been "on nigger hunts"'. Inga Clendinnen's vision of the past is clarified by her Clendinnen notes that Lillie may be less motivated by com­ attachment to values we need more of: a certain steady wisdom passion for Indigenous people than by a desire to save her be­ that has seen plenty but is still properly shockable, not loved's soul. Soul-saving was to be as much of a scourge for the desensitised-like that of an old, experienced teacher Indigenous as any other oppressor, and its pain was to pene­ ferreting out the truth about an incident of bullying. trate far into this century. The Melbourne Presbyterian hierar­ chy who ignored anthropologist Donald Thomson's pleas for B uT THE BULLIES are still a problem. It may be that I'm going the Aurukun community under the heel of its evil Supervisor from the heights of tragedy to the rolling suburbia of easy MacKenzie; the well-intentioned Jesuits who gave physical pro­ buffoonery, but I think anyone who watched Ramsay's Boiling tection to the people of the Daly in 1887, but left feral pigs and Point (on Channel Nine recently) might see the connection. ill-digested biblical stories to devastate the fragile riverside Gordon Ramsay is a man you wouldn't want your son to work environment and the culture of the people who had lived there for. He is a chef, we are told, of great talent, and wants more so long. than anything in life to get a third star in the upcoming Micl1e­ Clendinnen shows us another woman of those times, Emily lin Guide. To that end he abuses his kitchen staff. He allows Creaghe who, in her travels around Cape York with her husband, the documentary team into the kitchen because he is after some blandly documents the treatment of an Aboriginal girl who has 'favourable' publicity after being nominated as one of Britain's been hunted down and brought in with a rope around her neck, worst bosses. Like all bullies, he doesn't see his own behaviour dragged behind a horse and then tied to a tree. This is to tame as anything but reasonable. He might have reduced a young the 'new wild gin' before introducing her to a life of slavery at a man to tears and then sneered at him for 'blubbering like a white, presumably Christian, homestead. Clendinnen tells us fucking baby' for the heinous crime of overcooking some arti­ that this one managed to escape. I have a wild hope it was chokes, but he would say the young sous-chef made him do it. because Emily, knowing what awaited that girl, crept out in Ramsay is also a liar and a cheat. Given £5000 to create a the dark, hot Cape night, impelled by anger, pity and solidarity dish to promote Bramley apples, he uses Granny Smiths. When as woman and human being, and untied her. I can muse in this the Michelin judges arrive (unannounced, but he has his spies) way because I am not an historian, and my imagination is under he gives them appetisers that ordinary customers don't get, and less discipline than Clendinnen's. This is not to accuse makes sure the surrounding tables get them too in order to make Clendinnen of lack of imagination, far from it. She is one of it look good. You wouldn't want to eat there, because he spits Australia's best historians precisely because of her fusion of on a teatowel to tidy up a plate that's just going out to an sensibility and rigour. unsuspecting diner. Fake apples, fake generosity, spit and polish. She is strangely optimistic about human nature, given the All creating a veneer of reasonableness, care, skill, pleasure, horrors she has documented as the author of Reading the kindness. The reality it covers, imperfectly thanks to the Holocaust, as well as in her acclaimed work on Mayan and camera, is foul-mouthed, dishonest, egomaniacal. Aztec culture and now in her investigations into the And don't miss As It Happened: Holy Hijacker: Seeking treatment of Australia's Indigenous people. Her first Boyer the Third Secret of Fatima (SBS, Saturday 18 December, lecture opens with an account given in 1801 by Nicolas Baudin, 7.30pm). The way the Fatima loonies see the state of the world, a French naturalist, of an encounter with an Indigenous couple Our Lady's relation to Jesus is like some battered matriarch on the south-west coast of Western Australia. After shaking from the western suburbs, holding back Wayne who's about to his fish spear at the Frenchmen (Baudin was part of a scientific go ballistic because someone dissed his tattoos. It seems the expedition backed by Napoleon Bonaparte) the man flees, only way to save the world from cataclysmic flood and war is leaving the woman, who falls on her face, terrified. The two to grovel a few rituals, not to be kind, honest or farsighted. And scientists lift her and examine her. All very benign, considering Satan is stalking the corridors of power, even in the church. what could have happened and often did. But when Clendinnen, Well DER. • after quoting Baudin's viewpoint, takes us through the incident from the woman's perspective, we start to perceive something Juliette Hughes is a freelance reviewer.

46 EUREKA STREET • DECEMBER 1999 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 79, December 1999

D evised by Joan Nowot ny IBVM

ACROSS 1 & 19-down. Young maiden, perhaps, is about to alight on the South runway for a stay in the West Indies. (6,7) 4. What's the score? It's around two thousand and nine, maybe. Result coming soon. (8) 10. Mother and you, in Paris, take Latin translation in the morning. (9) 11 . Unusual choir sings rapturously, having drunk the divine fluid, perhaps. (5) 12. Conclude with a 'No' vote? That could cause hell! (7) 13. Former healthy Head Director breathed his last? (7) 14. Fill some prelate with optimism. (5) 15. Through thirteen moons-a span of time to yearn for. (8) 18. Such people often engage in polite, rational discourse. (8) 20. Protective equipment for sixes or over! (5) 23. Bring to an end the arrangement of local leading fire fighters. (4,3) 25. 9-down could bring on such frenetic activity-it's neverending! (7) 26. The extent of the Alps, for instance. (5) 27. Showing foresight or impractical? How does one characterise a follower of 5-down? (9) 28. A craft that provides receptacles for what's too hard for now. (8) Solution to Crossword no. 78, November 1999 29. Stiffening needed for such floppy charts! (6) DOWN 1. Blackmailers, for example, could drive one bats' (8) 2. Liqueur I sipped at RAAF broadcast airshow. (7) 3. In any event, rein in your emotions lest embarrassment should ensue. (9) 5. 19th century philosopher took directions from 4th century heresy to create belief in an era of universal harmony. (14) 6. European whiskey, perhaps! (5) 8. I joined in the deal, not expecting such a dressing down. (6) 9. The temperature one can have at the thought of Christmas shopping, perhaps, or final term exams, maybe. (3-2-4, 5) 16. For a nurse, perhaps, residence off the job is not allowed. (6, 3) 17. Excursion taken yearly, initially, to church featuring painted panels as an altarpiece. (8) 19. See 1-across 21. After bush fires at random intervals, settled weather is now likely. (3, 4) 22. Beetle along in AB's new car with fellow cricketers, perhaps. (6) 24. Stout old boy takes directions to improve his condition. (5)

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