--L/ f -~ ...... I \ I ( I !' I

' \ I .I Denis Freney Memorial Scholarships Up to $10,000 AUSTRALIAN Applicatio ns are in vited from people currentl y engaged BOOK REVIEW in (or about to commence) a research, writing or cultural project whi ch is judged to make a contributio n to the labour and progressive moveme nts in Australi a. MAY: The SEARC H Foundation wi ll award scho larships to assist wi th the costs o f such a project. Priority will be An essay by Terry Collits g iven to pro jects which have good prospects of pu blicati on or othe r public use of th e results, but A double review of Germaine Greer's whi ch do not have access to other funding. The Whole Woman by S EA RC H is an inde pendent, non-pro fit fo undati on Jenna Mead and Peter Craven established to assist acti vities whi ch pro mote social j usti ce and the development of a more democrati c and Dorothy Hewett on Jm·die Albiston's egalitari an society. Deta il s of its aim s and objecti ves are avail able on request. The Hanging ofJean Lee

Suitabl y qualified applicants should contact SEA RCH Susan Lever on David Foster's essays for deta il ed applicati o n g uidelines. Applications must be received by July 20, 1999 and his new novel, Social Education and Research In the New Country Concerning Humanity (SEARCH) Foundation Rm 610,3 Smail Street, BROADWAY NSW 2007 Andrew Riemer on Ph : (02) 921 I 4164; Fax: (02) 921 I 1407 James Bradley's The Deep Field SEARCH FOUNDATION New Subscribers $55 for ten issues plus a free book ACN 050 096 976 Ph (03) 9429 6700 or Fax (03) 9429 2288

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Michael Mann 6/15 The Avenue Heathcote NSW 2233 'MOVING REFLECTIONS' (Seventy-five hymn-tune arrangements) is available from the publishers , Music Sales (Australia) Pty Ltd , 120-126 Rothschild Avenue, Rosebery NSW 2018. Volume 9 Number 4 EU May 1999 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology

22 CoNTENTS THE PHOSPHOR OF A CITY: PETER PORTER'S 4 IMAGINATION Cover: Beach Road Beaumaris, COMMENT by Clarice Beckett, c1919, With Morag Fraser, Andrew Hamilton Peter Steele inhales the smoke of cities oil on board, 35.5 x 25.4cm, and Toby O'Connor. with one of Australia's finest poets. collection: Alan and Lesl y Martin. He also reviews Porter's new volumes All reproductions of Beckett 7 of Collected Poems, 1961-1999 (p25) . paintings courtesy The Ian CAPITAL LETTER Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. Paintings are from the 8 Paintings by Australian artist exhibition 'Clarice Beckett: THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC Clarice Beckett (1887-1935). Politi cally Incorrect', curated With Becci Fleischer, Jim Davidson, by Rosalind Hollinrake. Design by Siobhan Jackson. Lee Cataldi, Kate Manton and James Griffin. Photograph of Peter Porter p3 by Greg Scullin. 11 32 Photograph of C larice Beckett p3 co urtesy Ian Potter Museum. SUMMA THEOLOGIAE BOOKS Graphi cs pp8- 9, 17- 18, 41 Rob Darby reviews Frances de Groen's by Siobhan Ja ckson. 12 biography of Xavier Herbert; Peter Pierce BUSH LAWYER reviews Keith Beattie's The Scar that The exhibition of Clarice Beckett's work, 'Clarice Beckett: Binds: American Culture and the Politically Incorrect', is 15 Vietnam War (p36); Jon Greenaway currently touring Australia, ARCHIMEDES surveys the life of Burma's having completed its opening season at the Ian Potter Museum Aung San Suu Kyi (p38); of Art, University of Melbourne. 16 Ian Dunn reviews Michael Cannon's Sydney: 24 April-13 June 1999, RUNNING ERRANDS FOR THE That Disreputable Firm ... The Inside S. H. Ervin Gallery (National Trust of Australia NSW); GOVERNMENT Story of Slater etJ Gordon (p41 ). Orange, NSW: 19 June- 18 July Moira Rayner looks with alarm at 1999, Orange Regional Gallery; government accountability. Adelaide: 6 August- 42 19 September 1999, Art Gallery PLAYTIME of South Australia; 18 Geoffrey Milne on the Come Out Youth Bendigo, VIC: 30 September- INTEGRITY: THE LONG WALK Arts Festival in Adelaide. 31 October 1999, Bendigo Art Gallery; Ballarat, VIC: Antony Campbell on the challenge of 5 November 1999- 16 January unconditional love. 44 2000, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery; FLASH IN THE PAN Hobart: 3 February- 26 March 2000, Tasmanian Museum and 20 Reviews of the films Divorcing Ja ck; Art Gallery; Burnie, TAS: IN MEMORIAM Lolita; The Craie; Happiness; Praise and 7 April-22 May 2000, Michael McGirr on Indonesian social Hilary and Ja ckie. Burnie Regional Art Ga llery. reformer and priest, Y.B. Mangunwijaya. Eureka Street magazine 46 Jesuit Publications 3 1 WATCHING BRIEF PO Box 553 POETRY Richmond VIC 3 121 Tel (03)9427 73 11 'Snail Bait', a suite of poems 47 Fax (03)9428 4450 by Jack Hibberd. SPECIFIC LEVITY

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 3 C OMMENT M ORAG FRASER A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology Publisher Daniel Madigan SJ Cities in Editor Morag Fraser Assistant editor Kate Manton O NCR S A c~~~Nc~~~o~T who ha< m•d' Consulting editor so many of us think afresh about the way our minds work, Michael McGirr SJ was talking recently about walking in the botanical gardens. I caught the conversation-it was with the ABC's Louise Graphic designer Adler-while I was stuck in city traffic. Siobhan Jackson Sacks goes to the gardens every lunch time, after seeing Production and business m anager his patients. During the w alk he forgets completely the details Sylvana Scannapiego Editorial and production assistants Juliette Hughes, Paul Fyfe sr, Geraldine Battersby, Chris Jenkins SJ Contributing editors Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ, Perth: Dean Moore Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor Queensland: Peter Pierce United Kingdom correspondent Denis Minns OP South East Asia correspondent Jon Greenaway Jesuit Editorial Board Peter L'Estrange SJ, Andrew Bullen SJ, Andrew Hamilton SJ of his morning consultations. He just takes the time and lets Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ the backroom of his min d do the work of salting down. Come Marketing manager: Rosanne Turner the afternoon, he has the shape, the narrative he needs to Advertising representative: Ken Head make sense of the morning's experience. Subscription manager: Wendy Marlowe To make his point even more dramatically, Sacks told Administration and distribution the story of the playwright, Harold Pinter, who once read Kate Matherson, Lisa Crow, the neurologist 's book, Awakenings, and promptly forgot Mrs Irene Hunter about it completely for ten years. But then, out of the blue, Patrons he had a detailed dream about what he had read, and had to Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the make something out of it, urgently. support of C. and A. Carter; the It is probably lucky for Sacks' patients that his trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; transformation process is speedier than Pinter's, but the W.P. & M.W. Gurry point-about fallow time and the creative, transforming Eureka Street magazine, TSSN 1036- 1758, mind-is well m ade. Australia Post Print Post approved pp349181/00314, Art comes out of transformative processes like these. is published ten times a year Art can also be the botanical garden for those of us who take by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd, the time to read or look or hear with our defences put behind 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3 121 Tel: 03 942 7 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450 us for a while. email: [email protected] So in this month of May, which will be a jangle of war, http:/ jwww .openplanet.com.a ujeureka/ dispossession, political stridency and opportunism, our cover Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by records one still moment. The car, moving toward you like Daniel Madigan, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. the onset of winter, was painted by Clarice Beckett, who died Printed by Doran Printing, 46 Industrial Drive, Braeside VIC 3 195. when she was only 47. Her Melbourne contemporaries were © Jesuit Publications 1999 concerned with more heroic subjects; Beckett recorded the Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and fragile moment. On this page you can catch a different fiction, will be returned only if accompanied by seasonal moment, a turn of a shoulder into the bleaching a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Requests for summer sun, in The Red Sunshade (1932). Many of Beckett's permission to reprint materi al fro m the magazine should be addressed in writing to: paintings were dest royed after h er death-fashion and The editor, Eu reka Street magazi ne, carelessness contributing to a loss that is ours now. But PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121 enough remain to show what power a focu sed imagination

4 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 can have and how it can transform mundane seconds of life into a pattern of light and tone and shapes to Peter Porter w ill rea d briefly from hi s poems at a public lecture in Melbourne on Tuesday 25 May. Th e lec ture, keep you m arvelling for days. 'A Letter to the World: Love and Peter Porter' wi II be given We have paired Clarice Beckett's paintings of her by Peter Steele SJ, at 6.30pm, in th e Su nderland Theatre Australian city and its streets and beaches and corners, in the M edica l Centre, University of Melbourne. All are with an essay, by Peter Steele, on the poetry of Peter welcome. Th e lecture is being sponsored jointly by the Porter, one of Australia's great city explorers. Porter, University of Melbourne and the Europe-Asia Centre at who turned 70 earlier this year, returns to Australia th e Victorian University of Tech nology. for a time in May to celebrate the launching of his An exh ibition of Clarice Bec kett's work, 'Clari ce Beckett: Politica ll y Inco rrect', is currently touring Collected Poems, 1961-1999. • Australia. For details of ex hibition locations, see p3. -Morag Fraser

C OMMENT: 2

ANDREW H AMILTON Reading the signs

T,'"" ecuRRY of govemment octivity obout What was disappointing, however, about the Kosovo refugees has subsided. It looks unlikely that government response was something more subtle and Australia will receive Albanian refugees, at least in pervasive-a culture of government with a network the immediate future. of assumptions about priorities, about who is to be As with everything that has happened in Kosovo, valued in a society and who is not deserving, about the it is easy to find fault with the response of proper scope of administration, and about the ways governments, but hard to devise anything better. Past in which economic rationality fits human values. reluctance to get involved, the reliance on a long The initial Australian response to the Serbian bombing campaign that privileges Allied lives over crisis was to support the Allied bombing, to encourage Serbian and Albanian ones, the faithlessness evident allies rather than to show solidarity with the in similar humanitarian interventions in Somalia and Albanians of Kosovo. There was no attempt to prepare elsewhere, all argue that the final result will be much Australians for the length and difficulty of this human suffering for little gain. But would the campaign. Nor was there any pledge of humanitarian Albanians have suffered less without intervention? If support for the refugees who would inevitably flow the Western governments have got it all wrong, it is from the conflict. While Australian officials may have hard to imagine oneself doing better. been involved in such discussions, there was no The response of the Australian Government to indication that the government leaders believed the Albanian refugees has been scratchy and disjointed. tragedy salient to Australians. One day Mr Ruddock declined to offer shelter to This silence en sured that the Aus tralian Albanian refugees on the grounds that it would be reluctance to accept Albanian refugees in Australia better to support them closer to their homes. The next seem ed m erely self-serving. The Prime Minister day, the Prime Minister was moved by popular outrage strengthened the impression that the human face of to accept a few thousand refugees for a few months. the crisis was neglected, when he emphasised the Initial reports suggested they would be housed in temporary and remote nature of the refugees' stay. It remote army installations. appeared that the government was apologising for After a few days, it appeared likely that they yielding to the generosity of spirit of its citizens. would be sheltered reasonably close to centres of Thus, good actions were betrayed by a persistent population, with access to their communities and m eanness of spirit which appears to believe that with some provisions for pastoral care. But then the narrow self-interest is the only legitimate motivation United Nations decided that there was no immediate of individuals and nations. need to send refugees to Australia. Narrow symbols, like removing legal access to It would be easy to criticise the Government for asylum seekers and eff ectively excluding community a belated, unco-ordinated and grudging response. groups from the resettlement of refugees, come easily I would rather praise it for readiness to develop new to this government. When creating broader symbols policy with bipartisan support, and to put it into that express and encourage national generosity of practice at short notice. The need for further change­ spirit, it suffers from spiritual illiteracy. • for example, to offer permanent residence- is less a m ark of incoherence than of fl exibility in an Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United Faculty of unpredictable situation. Theology, Melbourne.

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 5 COMMENT: 3

T OBY O'CONNOR Third time lucky for GST? T,P"M' M'"""' mu

6 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 Of no utility

I,TH< nm GO>NG om on plost some of its Bill-rejected last year by the Senate- to change the Public the sharp market-oriented zeal of 1996-97, partly as a result of the Service Act. One Nation backlash, and is now frankly doing a bit of pump­ In more ordinary times, something like the preamble debate priming and manipulation of particular markets. Add the fact that might be playing a quietly important role-as citizens and their the Asia crisis and-if to a lesser extent-the focus in international representatives, by arguing backwards and forwards about different diplomacy away from trade and back to war, has put many of the formulations of words, and about God, and Aborigines, and migrants, shifts towards liberalisation of world markets into hibernation. and mateship, sought to find some unifying ideas of citizenship and The downturn in world commodity prices, and the sluggishness of national purposes. In the background, however, the underlying the Japanese economy, have in any event taken some of the impetus ethos is less about citizenship than about consumers, stakeholders, away from claims that mere economic soundness creates the inputs, outputs and the corporate style. • buoyancy needed to bobble in the international sea. In the meantime, politicians who have always tended to dismiss Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times.

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 7 the only ones in the district. Small groups in his letter rem ained true: There is no After the deluge of people wandered slowly through the heat, economic development in the village, or in and sat dejectedly under rain trees, not the area for that matter, since independ­ talking much, staring into the distance and ence in 1975. Consequently the economic I N MY JOB I GET PLENTY of letters from far­ chewing betel-nut, spitting the blood-red base is nil ... There is no road to the village flung corners of the Pacific. Last July juices on to the road. This was a far cry from ... To go to Aitape station one either walks I received one from West Sepik province in other towns I'd visited in PNG, where life east along the beach for nearly three hours Papua New Guinea: 'I am Mr John Sana we on the streets is anim ated and noisy. The /to catch a bus] or travels by casual boat OBE of Arop Village. I am 55 years old, people in Aitape sat well away from the trip ... once every two days. This isolation married with five children.' Sanawe, a beach. m eans that the people have virtually no retired colonel from the PNG Defence Force, I spent my first afternoon swimming access to basic services like health care, wrote of the village's need for development with a group of young people who had lost schools, or even a trade store. Worse still, and his fear that, as the population grew, many in their families during the tsunami. with their houses and gardens now gone, the village's already neglected condition They had also lost limbs to infection after people are living under makeshift shelters would deteriorate further. the disaster (m edi cal tea ms had carried out and surviving on the dwindling relief Before reading Colonel Sanawe's letter many amputations, to prevent the spread of supplies and whatever they can forage from I'd never heard of Arop Village. A week later gangrene from untreated wounds). To get to the bush. the whole world knew about it. On 17 July the river, we travelled kilometres over a One of the older women, Margaret Otto, 1998, a tsunami swept across the north­ gutted dirt road in the back of a t.lte, each invited me into her home to sit and talk. west coast of PNG; television screen s bump jerking these bedraggled kids with The house was a hastily constructed wooden everywhere were filled with images of their bandaged stumps. frame, with a large blue tarpaulin thrown flattened trees and uprooted villages. There over as a roof. The rain dripped steadily on were front-page pictures of the dead floating to the fl oor. Her few remaining possessions among debris, and reports of horrific injuries. were crowded into the centre to stop them Television graphics tracked the path of the getting wet-a single m attress with a 15- m etre wave that swept thousands of mosquito net, a pot, a spool of green string, men, women and children from the villages a few tins of fish and a bag of rice. We sat of Sissano, Warapu, Arop and Malol, high quietly for a while before she began to tell above the coconut trees, and smashed them me her story. into the lagoon behind their hom es. Otto had lost three of her children in the Watching the reports, I remembered the wave. Her remaining family moved inland letter. Rifling through m y desk I found it on to land belonging to another clan, but and turned to the last page. John Sanawe When we arrived, the boys started a after three months fighting began. The had drawn a sketch of the area around his rowdy game of soccer on the river stones. landowners becom e jealous of the aid village. It was virtually identical to the The young women, however, sat quietly in received by the tidal wave victims, and maps now on television. There in the centre waist-deep water covering their injuries forced the family to m ove. So they packed was Sissano Lagoon. He'd marked all the with their clothes. They talked, only a their belongings and started again, this time neighbouring villages-now flattened. He'd little, of the difficulties they expect to face on land belonging to their own clan. Otto drawn in the sam e mangrove swamps that in the future. Several felt they had almost spoke slowly and with difficulty about her were now filled with rotting corpses. It no chance of getting married and having missing children, and her attempts to dawned on me that the person who'd sat families of their own. Given that women in rebuild her life; as she talked she made a down to write this call for help could now Papua N ew Guinea do almost all the work bilum, a string bag u sed for carrying be dead. of survival-carrying water, growing food, everything from food to babies. Recently I pulled out the letter again, bearing and raising children, cooking, fish ­ This is a community in shock. People this time on a flight bound for Aitape, the ing, house building and so on, what man are slowly starting to recover, but the trauma town nearest the tsunami-devastated area. would take them on? And without family, of this event will remain for life, and the Tropical paradise stretched below- long it is difficult to find a sense of belonging in loss is extensive. At a memorial service white beaches and tiny reef islands, the villages of Papua N ew Guinea. marking All Souls Day in Aitape, families turquoise water and lines of glimmering The next clay I took another bumpy held poles with paper hearts stuck to them palm trees. It was hard to match this scene truck ride to the new Arop village, relocated for each person they had lost. One woman with the images of disaster in the news in the swampland several kilometres from sat alone in the crowded service, with a pole reports, and with the picture of neglected, the sea. John Sanawe, I was told, had carrying more than 20 hearts. In contrast to poverty-stricken villages painted in survived, and had been taken to Port the excited rush of international attention Sanawe's letter. Moresby hospital with multiple injuries. after a major disaster, the process of real My image of paradise didn't last long I was unable to find him there. recovery is slow and difficult. on ce I landed. Aitape is a small, dusty town But a quick look around Arop village There are a few aiel agencies still working with a bank, a shop and a health centre- showed m e that much of what he'd written in the area, but many left in the weeks

8 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 following the disaster, with a number of her turbanesque h at, modelled on the serious problems unresolved. Jealousy over traditional doek, while the black core of the aid distribution is rife. Some members of Drag race dress is almost invaded by a slit at the side. communities that were unaffected by the Thus far it could be an afro-chic outfit, of wave express their anger through fighting I MAGlNE Dame Edna Everage touring the the kind seen at the opening of the South and theft. Local committees have been · whole of Australia, complete with an African parliament. (Evita says it was actually organised to distribute assistance, but the Aboriginal off-sider, as she sets about run up for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, but difficulties of transport and communication convincing people to vote for the republic. she defaulted on the bill.) But wig, lipstick make it hard to ensure that representation In recent weeks a very similar spectacle has and m assive earrings complete her montagei is fair. Women, particularly, do not have a been available in South Africa. the marriage of absurdity and apparent strong voice-they find it difficult to express For 20 years or more Pieter-Dirk Uys respectability is consummated by an their needs and the needs of their families. has been satirising politics in the country­ adjacent phallic cactus. These issues compound the difficulties 'Politicians, bless them, will always write It is the absurdities of contemporary caused by severe trauma, and the loss of so my scripts'-but the one character that has South Africa which are highlighted in the many capable people and leaders. lodged in the public mind, and on whom initial warm-up. Eleven official languages! Aitape still needs help. The survivors of h e now centres his work, is Evita By the time the Pedi burglar has found the the tidal wave are traditionally seafaring Bezuidenhou t, Afrikaner matron and former line in a notice intended for him, the watch people, and they are not yet well adapted to ambassador to the (mythical) homeland of dog has already bitten him on the bum. And living inland. They may eventually return Bapetikosweti. Evita resembles Edna-Uys all those black homelands the late govern­ to the sea, but the terror could keep them is every bit as quick as Humphries-but ment devised. 'Nowadays/ says Evita, away for a long time. instead of being a conservative dandy, he is 'there's just one big black homeland: it's This means developing new ways of totally committed politically called South Africa.' For the living-collecting water, growing food, to a democratic South Africa. basically student audience, organising san.i ta tion, and building different Uys therefore conceived Evita includes a few more kinds of houses. In the new Arop village for the idea of hiring a train to references to the past than she example, where Margaret Otto and her convey Evita around the often does. Then comes her family are settling, the nearest river for country to encourage people punch line: 'We're very sorry washing and drinking water is now a to register to vote. For a about apartheid. We're very 20-minute walk away through a swamp. number of reasons-not the sorry it didn't work.' When The women are just starting to build gardens least of them the elimination the laughter subsides she adds, for their new villages, and these gardens of multiple voting-the 'And we Afrikaners promise need to be more varied and productive than government had decided to that we'll never never do it before, when the sea provided plenty of insist on registration involv­ again.' Just like a child. It's nutritious food. ing new identity papers as a refreshing to see the current As my short time in Aitape came to a necessary preliminary to wave of apologeering getting close, more and more people began to tell voting in the general election one in the eye. me their stories. Many spoke of fear, tragedy on 2 June. Registration was Unlike Humphries, Uys and loss. But there were also tales of slowi it was only after a blitz has not developed a fruity miraculous survival. One mother told how of television advertising and falsettoi his natural voice is Elijah, her three-week-old baby, had been extended deadlines that 77 per unusually flutey, and with flung from her arms by the force of the cent of the population were - "'---very little adjustment serves wave. His head had wedged in the 'v' of a eventually induced to ,__,.....,~ Evita and Pieter-Dirk equally large stick and he was found floating the participate. Uys' helping hand well. The Afrikaner-matron­ next day, fast asleep and unharmed, his was therefore well-judged. But instead of who-isn't, standing up there turning a lot of head still stuck in the 'v'. A young man the train, which would have cost him cherished assumptions on their head, has spoke of his blind friend, who had been $500,000, he decided to hire a bus, which been quite subversive enough. 'The Great washed from a chair on his verandah. was a great deal cheaper and gave him Trek!', she exclaims. 'Which one? The one Holding his hands outstretched before him, greater mobility. While the Independent to Australia?' There are some who argue h e had found the branch of a tree and clung Election Commission was prepared to that Uys was, in the apartheid era, a kind of to it for over 24 hours, relying only on authorise him, it gave him no moneyi the court jester. Indeed in our later m eeting, sound and touch to tell him what was venture was financed from the takings Uys clobber discarded, he reveals the sharply happening. I also met a small baby called had recently collected on a European tour, etched features of a m edieval fool. The 'Tsunami', born only hours after the wave. plus sponsorships. 'Evita's People's Party', criticism is put to him: 'Not a court of Debra, a nine-year -old from Arop village, he told the newspapers, 'is not a political power/ he retorts, 'a court of law. Bad described clinging to a floating coconut tree partyi it is a party for all South Africans who politicians deserve to be laughed off the for a night and a day after the wave, until have forgotten what fun an election can be.' stage.' she heard her uncle calling the names of After a warm-up with recorded songs­ Uys is optimistic about the new order in family members across the swamp. Hers in which she is described as 'born in South Africa, seeing it as 'a culture of life' was the only voice that responded. 'Mi stap, Bethlehem (it exists) to be a star'-on comes rather than 'a culture of death'. Evita will mi stap!' ('I'm here, I'm here!'}. Evita, dressed in an outfit marked by joke that 'we knew the value of the vote­ - Becci Fleischer lashings of batik. This theme continues in that's why we kept it away from so many of

VoLUME 9 NuMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 9 you for so long', but often her tone is It's just the past that is fu ll of surprises', said 'Bhopa bhopi'. I was most impressed buoyant, encouraging, allu ding to th e which is one way of referring to the work of with their music, and asked them if I could serious work of building a democracy, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, videotape them performing. We agreed to then concluding the act with her indaba 'We are,' she adds, 'a very, very successful meet at the sam e spot the next day. (formal meeting), in which one by one democracy, because we are all equally I came to realise that they were not representatives of the different parties put unhappy.' untrained buskers or beggars, since they did their cases. This part is deadly serious, -Jim Davidson not busk and did not beg. A man I asked though Evita hovers with her cactus to prod about them accused them of being thieves the prolix. In Grahamstown, a traditional Singing and fakes. In the course of the day, I worked English-speaking area among the whites, out that the musicians are a caste (these, there are no Nationalists or Afrikaner in to silence from central and w est Rajasthan, are Freedom Fronters; but they have appeared I SA WN ARURAM and his wife Shupiyara as Nayaks) and the music is handed down on stage with her elsewhere. 'Evita'sindaba they sat quietly with a small baby outside a from parents to children. They do not come is good news,' says Uys. 'There are no bad school just above the main gate to the fort from Jaisalmer, live in a special part of town guys.' And so a spokesman for God's People's at Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan, India. ... and are very, very poor. Party, looking like a pony-tailed Jimmy N aruram wore a torn but spotless! y ;:;· The Bhopa are the singer- Carter, is indulged as his thick Afrikaans clean white shirt and dhoti, and a priests who perform the accent pronounces the need for parliament red turban. He had a bag and his liturgical narrative which goes to enact God's laws. Equally, there is no own instrument, a ravenhatta, and with the painted scrolls of the Humphries-sty le victimisa tion; audience another smaller one. Shupiyara lives of popular deities like Dev participation consists of asking serious held the baby, which was naked " Narayan and Pabuji, like the questions of the spokespeople, albeit under except for a thread tied around its one I saw painted on the wall at the eagle eye of Chairma'am Evita. waist. The baby was healthy but the Sanskriti Kendra, New Uys says he has found this tour 'the I thought the parents Delhi, where I was staying as most exhilarating experience of my life'. were looking rather an Asialink writer-in-residence. Instead of being the 'minstrel' playing to thin. I went on past This leads to two questions: the gallery, there he was hot gospelling to them up to the fort. how have they come to be the country. It brought home to him-with It was Sunday, and singing for tourists, and why, a forcefulness a foreigner finds surprising in very quiet. It was when they are m entioned to any of its previous absence-a sense that South September and still the inhabitants of Jaisalmer, do Africa is truly a black country. Eighty or 90 very hot. There were people pull the sort of faces Europe­ per cent of his audiences for the show have relatively few tour­ ans do at the mention of gypsies? been black, he says. Sometimes there has ists about and those The n ext day I went to videotape been suspicion, a want of belief, because it who were, one saw them. Unfortunately their pitch is has been provided free (a suspicion shared repeatedly in the right outside a school, so during the by whites); but nonetheless they have com e. different res ta uran ts week they cannot sing while the Moreover, Uys' off-sider Basil, a young and temples. children are in school, and they Coloured comic, has been seen by talented On my way back Bhopa musicians lnzpiyara cannot sing after school as the black youths as a role model. down the hill I (top, with baby) and Nawram children hassle them, as we found (p laying the ravenhaua). The tour was undertaken because, says stopped and asked out. Uys, 'I want to grow old in this country. Naruram to play som ething. He did, most Naruram and his wife speak admirably I want there to be a healthy dem ocracy. ' He brilliantly. He sh owed me the smaller effective English. He told me that they are delights in the way audiences share the instrument which was for sale. I declined, religious singers and have come from experience together. At Fort Beaufort the but asked him if he also sang. Shupiyara Pushkar to stay in Jaisalmer while the previous night, most white people there cam e and sat down and Naruram played tourists are there. In November they will had probably never sat in an audience with while they both sang-a rhythmical chant, return to Pushkar. We went to a tea shop, black people. 'By the end of the evening,' he canonical in type, with him leading, the where I videotaped Naruram playing. He notes approvingly, 'people were talking to next bit in parts and with her repeating the suggested we go to his tent, and agreed to each other.' last phrase. I thought this was pretty meet th e next day. There is an awfully long way to go. At marvellous. His tent was a frail piece of black plastic the end of Evita's indaba in Grahamstown, Then he produced from his bag a cassette on a neat clean little terrace on a hill with one co uld not but feel how remote most of tape, with RAVENHATTA, the name of a wonderful view of the fort, the town and the issues raised by the Green spokesperson the instrument on it in hand lettering. the desert. It's a bit like Rio-the poor get seemed, despite their global significance. I bought it willingly for what he asked, the view, to console them for their rattling Similarly, when the ANC candidate went since he was the artist, and also paid them stomachs. Naruram and Shupiyara have into orbit with the lita n y of the for the music. Shupiyara was rather moved four children-a boy who also sin gs government's achievem ents when it came and, naming me as h er sister, put a little beautifully, a younger boy, a delicious little to building houses and providing utilities, pewter chain on my ankle. I think what fat girl and the baby. the predictability of the expected vote made I gave them were their m eals for the next N aruram showed me his scroll, battered him unassailable, even indifferent. 'The week. She said they had had no business for and water-damaged. He offered to sell it to future of South Africa,' says Evita, 'is certain. a month. I asked who they were and she m e, but I refused, saying he needs it. I failed

10 EUREKA STREET • MAv 1999 • 1 to realise that if I had bought it, he could a e have used the proceeds to commission a new one. But that was three libraries and three towns later. I videotaped Naruram and Shupiyara singing part of the Pabuji God in politics liturgy and paid them for their efforts. I asked them if their children go to E LITICAL THEOLOGY IN THE CHURCHES of the developed world needs renewal. Our recent and school. Naruram replies, 'School is for rich impoverished discussion of wh ether God has a place in the preamble makes this all too people and I am a poor man.' Seeing her clear. One recent book (Studies in Christian Ethics, 11/2, 1998) devotes an entire issue to major source of income about to depart, it) underscores the point. It is Oliver O'Donovan's Desire of the Nations (Cambridge Shupiyara hit me with the facts of her life, University Press, 1996)-a spring tide of political theology. no money, four children, no house back in But what of liberation theologies of the developing world? Acknowledging that they are a village. She is quite right but I depart more adequate political theologies than most, O'Donovan nevertheless finds them nevertheless. inarticulate before the political questions of the developed world. The problem is that, in Then next day I went back to take some struggling against government, 'the Southern school has lacked a concept of authority' still photographs. Shupiyara got me a tape (p16). Yet, while all must struggle against poverty, the political questions for the North are of part one of the full Bhopa performance, ones of government: 'can democracy avoid corruption by mass communications? ... Can which I was happy to buy. When later civil rights be safeguarded without surrendering democratic control to arbitrarily appointed someone tells me I should have only paid 30 courts? ... Can etlmic, cultural and linguistic communities assert their identities without rupees for it (A$1.50), I ask how much a oppressing individual freedoms?' (p18). What is more, because the concept of authority blank tape is. He says 20 rupees. I point out underpins the priority of theology over politics, without a positive account of authority we that 10 for the artist (45 cents) is hardly fair. are always at risk, in the political realm, of hearing 'nothing from ... [God] but the echo of To my question as to why they are so our own practical energies' (p14). despised I received these answers: they are Central to O'Donovan's analysis is a rich account of the Kingdom of God. Having traced like beggars and prey on tourists (although the revelation of God's kingship through the Old Testament, he turns to develop an they do neither), they are not proper account of Jesus as the representative of the Kingdom of God who both embodies the rule musicians because proper musicians (native of God and mediates its presence. As the embodying representative of this Kingdom, four to Jaisalmer) play the tabla and the 'moments' of Jesus' life-Advent, Passion, Restoration and Exaltation-tell its story. The harmonium and understand music; and (the final sequence beginning with the passion is decisive for the future of politics, constituting main and operative reason) they are itinerant the final judgment upon the secular politics that seeks to derive its authority from human and do not come from Jaisalmer, which is a will and the restoration of the kingly rule of God. Although the rule of God is restored, the city in the desert built entirely and fulfilment of the Kingdom lies beyond time in the eschaton. It is this temporal gap, which, exquisitely of golden sandstone and as as O'Donovan observes, has always been the core of the complexities of political theology, parochial as Cornwall. that shapes the political nature of the Church and its relations with government. After consulting scholars and various The community that lives and witnesses to the rule of God is the Church. This makes texts, I get my hands on a book by John the Church the political society-not one that simply fulfils a particular function but one Smith which transcribes and explains the whose members live a distinct life answerable to no another authority. This makes the entire Pabuji story. He writes that the text catholicity of the Church central for O'Donovan-only what orders and reveals the is fixed, although transmitted orally, and presence of the Church is not the order of ministry but the order of the sacraments. relatively free of ornament-the Bhopa can, When this reconciling community of radical equality whose relationships are ordered however, decide which sections of the epic without coercion relates to government, the contrast to the 'secular' government of this to perform and which to leave, depending passing age is not the 'sacred' or the 'spiritual' but the 'eternal' (p211 ). For O'Donovan, the on time, audience and circumstance, and relationship of the Church to government is mission-a relationship which has led some his own know ledge. Where the artist- priest to the mistaken conclusion that he is advocating a new form of a tradition, which he is free to make his own decisions is first in understands and explains with unique clarity, namely, Christendom. There are three the music, as there are a variety of forms for movements to this mission. The first is to press government to create the space for this new different set pieces, and second in the dance. political society to grow. The second is to encourage government to exercise its function John Smith, and O.P. Joshi, an earlier of judgment according to the stable rule of God in creation (sometimes known as natural writer on scroll performances, agree that it law) rather than as a projection of the human will. Finally, to promote acts of government is in the amazingly virtuoso performance, that reflect the political life of the Kingdom-an example of which would be a government playing and orchestrating the music as he apology for the Stolen Generation. goes, singing and narrating, pointing to the A few line sketches do this book little justice because so much of its insight lies in relevant parts of the painted scroll, and O'Donovan's finely crafted detail. The positive engagement with this book by a range of dancing, that the art of the Bhopa resides. eminen t scholars, including Christopher Rowland, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard John His wife, who also sings, dances, and holds Neuhaus and David Novak in Studies in Christian Ethics, suggests it is detail worth a lamp to display the painting, shares this exploring. It is a book that, in the best tradition of Anglican theology, speaks provocatively virtuosity. across the Catholic/ Protestant divide by drawing upon both traditions in the attempt to Now I am in a position to return to my set a benchmark for an adequate political theology. • questions about the lowered social position of the Bhopa. Dr Jyotindra Jain, author of Rufus Black is Chaplain of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne and a lecturer Picture Showmen: Insights into the in the United Faculty of Theology.

VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 11 BU SH

BusH LAWYER Narrative Tradition in Indian Art, thinks S EAMUS O'SHAUGHNESSY that changes in the social structure of Rajasthan (the end of the feudal system), while not displacing the Bhopa directly, have affected them , causing them to seek Guilty secrets an audience in tourists as well as villagers. He believes that the general di sa pproval in which they are held is because they are, and have always been, itinerants. Like gypsies, I CAN'T SPEAK FOR ALL magistrates but the world, but they found that they were not they are convenient scapegoats, not trusted. cases I find most difficult and disturbing alone with their guilt. It seems to m e that one can see in are child sex matters. They present a What were they like? They varied in Naruram and Shupiya ra's journeys an number of problems, som e of which I will personality and intelligence, but all lacked adaptation of a traditional practice to a new deal with in another column. I want to self-esteem. Almost all had themselves been audience, the tourists. Once they would have suggest h ere that the moral and psycho­ the victims of sexual or psychological abuse followed a known route through a number logical issues are more murky than is as children. Many were lonely people who of villages for whom the ph ad (the painting) sometimes acknowledged. felt inadequate and uncomfortable with would be read each year. Now this seems to When I was a student, I shared a house adults. Some were inarticulate and appeared be required by fewer and fewer villages. with a young couple who had a little daughter. to be psychologically damaged. Others were Apart from the fact that singing for One evening, 'Jim ' and I were sitting on his talkative and quite immature, glad of an tourists is over-subscribed not only by the verandah sh ooting the breeze over a couple audience. To a greater or lesser extent, Bhopa but their half-trained imitators, the of beers. He said that he would like 'child­ however, all of them seemed to have danger with the tourist audience is that its molesters' to suffer the death penalty. I was developed the insights that they had harmed completely secular context will separate shocked. The taboo against sexual abuse of children and might do so again if they did the performance from its serious ritual children is very powerful, but this was a bit not address their own psychological purpose, and thew hole tradition will rapidly steep I thought, and said so. problems. It takes considerable courage to decay. Now that I have two small children do that and I came to respect those men. If the Bhopa only sing for tourists this whom I adore, I understand more fully the Just as we need to take special care of will happen. If, however, they continue to passion which underlay Jim's outburst. child victims, and rehabilitate suitable minister to communities of believers as I don 't mean to make a claim of moral offenders, I think we also need to take pains priests, then these almost miraculous superiority, however, when I say that I have to avoid witch-hunts. narrative performances of the exploits of a different perspective on 'child-molesters' Recently, I acquitted a man whom I am Pabuji and Dev Narayan will continue with or 'paedophiles'. They have been so convinced was falsely accused by an the same seriousness and intensity they routinely and extravagantly demonised in 11 -year-old girl of having indecently have today. the media that it is difficult to view them assaulted her. He had been investigated and -Lee Cataldi with any obj ectivity, l e t alone any was charged with having had digital inter­ compassion or understanding. course with her younger sister. He had Count nothing Some years ago, I spent some time pleaded guilty. Some time after he was visiting the Cooma Gaol in southern NSW charged with that very serious offence, the human foreign for the Ombudsman. It was then a prison older girl came forward with her accusation. IFI SAID I 'o JUST BEEN to see a film that left for sex offenders. A large number of m en He was charged again. He denied the less me heavy with fear, grieving for slaughtered denied their guilt and wanted to complain serious allegation. fa mily never m et, fee ling desperately about being convicted. In most cases, they Hesatincourt, head in hands, the picture human, would you guess I was talking about did not dispute that something had hap­ of a broken man. The girl was bright and the recent Italian comic sensation, Life is pened, but claimed that their actions had effervescent, apparently truthfuL But Beautiful? been 'misunderstood' or, even worse, they between the time she was initially inter­ Commentary has focused on how funny blamed the victims, claiming that they had viewed by the police and the hearing, her this two-part film is. Its first half is high been 'led on' by the children in question. story changed in a number of significant slapstick: Guido and Dora fall in slapstick There was nothing to be done for them and respects. It slowly emerged in cross­ love, have a slapstick son, and career down I got away as quickly as I reasonably could. examination that her younger sister had Italian cobbled streets on a slapstick bicycle. There was a more interesting group of been the focus of an enormous amount of The second half is set in a concentration inmates. A counsellor, an ex-Army warrant attention, and she had felt left out. camp, where the family is taken, and where officer, ran a voluntary program based on The man had done something very G uido, to protect his son from the horror of AA principles for child-sex offenders. As a wrong, but had admitted his guilt, and their situation, spins him an elaborate and precondition the members of the group had shown obvious contrition, saving the real often amusing tale about its all being a big to admit to themselves and the group that victim the trauma of giving evidence. He game. they were guilty of their offences. They felt did not deserved to be victimised by a false It seems that opinion, like the film, is liberated when they could say to one witness. • split in two. One view is that the Holocaust's another, 'This is what I have done. I am unprecedented h orror is off-limits to sorry.' Not only was it cathartic to come Seamu s O'Sh aughnessy is a country humour. Th e other rejoices in the film's out into the open from their secret, guilty magistrate. 'redemptive' properties- life is indeed

12 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 beautiful, there is laughter amid horror, criticism. But that's n ot all there is here. sunshine in the end. Both read the film as The humour in Life is Beauti{lll creates a Danny comedy, and find that, respectively, common thread of humanity in the film. offensive or redemptive. It's an aspect any viewer would readily boys Both views are reductive . Life is accept. The first half makes us feel so Beautiful is not funnyi it has humorous jubilantly human. We've all fallen in love, I NTHE END Daniel O'Connell (d. 1847) has aspects, for good reasons, but that's not the found joy in a child, had the sun shine on us come off better, even if his statue has been same thing. and laughed at the simplest of idiocies. The banished to the north yard of St Patrick's Ultimately, it's a black tale, an inspired humour is beguiling-this is truly the Cathedral, Melbourne. There was once talk dark fable. The voice-over at the beginning human spirit. But then, by a plait of humour that the Great Liberator would be removed informs the viewer straight up that it's a and horror, the film leads us to the dreadful not just from the western cortile, where he fablei throughout the film the magical sets, humanity of the second half. How can we had stood since 1891, but to other precincts, lighting and thematic sounds spin a surreal then deny it ? If we are humans capable of to make way for Archbishop Daniel Mannix mood. Things happen in this film that could laughter, we are also humans capable of the (d. 1963). It was rumoured that this would never have happened in realityi no child ate Holocaust, as victims and perpetrators both. be in the nature of a political statem ent: a strudel in a concentration camp. But anyone, The Holocau st was a human creationi reaction against the liberalisations of particularly a Jew, has the right to obj ect, to allowing it to be spun through a fable is one Vatican Council II and an icon for the stand back, not to step into the fable. way of bringing that hom e. If we all belong National Civic Council. I'd like to take that step, becau se if you in the first tale, we all are responsible for The s tatue (and statement) were think this film mocks the Holocaust then the second. It is a realisation that does n ot unveiled on the Sunday before St Patrick's you're just not getting it, not getting the necessarily come from a stark documentary Day. fact that the child's prize for winning the or an unmitiga ted drama. However, perhaps it was understood that 'game' is a full-size military tank. N ot To make the Holocau st off-limits to Mannix(b. 1864), may well have been proud, getting that Dora sorts the clothes of gassed humour or fable is to sever it from our even as Daniel the Less, to share the prisoners, son Giosue goes hungry and understanding. It is natural to look at history forecourt with the man after whom he was narrowly escapes having his clothes added and experience through different lenses probably named. He had himself fostered to the pile, and Guido, the life of the film, is variously tilted. Which is not to say that lay initiatives during his long regime. So shot to death while trying to rescue his the Holocaust could ever be viewed as just r-- wife. another historical episode. We circle it I - - - I If you think it's redemptive, you're not carefully. In Reading the Holocaust, Inga Aboriginal Cultural seeing every dark, shadowed, portentous, Clendinnen writes: I I apocalyptic shot in the film and that the Gala Dinner Dance My own conviction is that our sense of I ending is anything but sunny, that the child Holocaust uniqueness (a nd we do have l celebrating National Reconciliation Week I and the woman lose father and husband. that sense) resides in the fact that these The final scenes with sunlight and Yanks ferocious, largely secret killings were in tanks are not some sort of Christian perpetrated within ' twentieth -century redemptive take-over of a gruesome Jewish Wes tern society ', and that both our sense Welcoming tale. This man doesn 't die for a greater of portent, and of the peculiar intransigence purpose. No victim of the Holocaust died ceremonY. cultural of these actions before puny human inter­ for a greater purpose. They died because pretation, finds its ground in the knowledge Performances. they were gassed, shot and burned, because that they were conceived, executed and humans are capable of killing each other endured by people very like ourselves. Aboriginal tribally, because they can kill each other without guilt, with bloodlust, with God It bothered m e that people in the cinema musicians. auction. on their side, with might and right, laughed at spots I thought impossible and raffle and school technological s marts and political left immediately the credits started rolling, know-how. Children kill children, adults chatting happily. Others' reactions, Performance kill adults, armies slaughter, and we're none particularly only perceived reactions, are of us better off. not an argument against any work of arti So this film is not funny. And yet it but it is worrying to think that, at only 50 contains abundant humour. Hardest of all, years on, the 'Final Solution' may be fading $55 per ticket includes a Guido's manic story in the camp, though from memory enough for them to have three-course meal and beverages. mostly impossible to laugh at, is indisput­ viewed Life is Beauti{lll as simple humour Tables ava ilable in groups of ten or ably funny. There's Guido providing a mock that could just as easily have been set single tickets ca n be purchased. translation of the fierce German guard elsewhere. But that is all the more reason to For tickets, phone: 03 9480 3849 or email: [email protected] straight out of Hogan's Heroes, there's keep telling the story. When I left the film, Guido pretending that he spent the day the Holocau st was h eavy on m ei the Friday 28th May, 7pm playing hopscotch. humour had evaporated, like the alcohol Fogolar Furl an Clu b, Comedy and tragedy often go hand in in a tincture, leaving only the active 1 Matsi Street, Th ornbury hand, as director and lead actor Roberto ingredient behind. Proceeds of the even ing go to the Aborigina l Catholi c Ministry. Benigni has pointed out in response to -Kate Manton ~------.1

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 13 O'Connell was moved. An The portals rang with the eel at of earthy non-celibate-in the Palestrina's motet, Tu Es Petrus. More so posture of a ruggedly clad that morning in 1951 when his guest, the Apollo Belvedere-he now Scottish tenor, Father Sydney McEwen, strides away from the city he celebrated a dulcet High Mass. Believe once confronted as he did the m e, I heard nothing so elevating in the Protestant establishment in year I spent in Rome under Pius XII. But Great Britain. There is esteem in St Patrick's week 1999 the choir in the gilded cursive identifi­ numbed the nave with 'Faith of Our cation, 'O'Connell', on his Fathers'-which has its place, but surely pedestal and pathos in the not there or then. plaque, 'Presented intrust for Somehow the anthem fitted the the citizen s of Melbourne by Boonham statue. One hardly expected a gmup of Irishmen'. Foolish the spirituality of late Michelangelo (n el fellows, they could not have modo bozzato) or the spectral egoism of envisaged that O'Connell's Rodin's Balzac. Yet hardly this position would one day be representation of a chaplain-general usurped, especially by a addressing the national constabulary bishop who, for all his virtues, either. Boonham' s prelate is didactic, with did more to provoke contin­ puckered commanding brow under an ued discrimination against authoritatively set biretta, complacent Catholics than any of his smile, left hand clasped over the right peers. There was, after all, space for both. The Cathedral took pains to devise a fitting tribute to Mannix, although how prescriptive it was about iconography is unknown. It consulted the forthright art critic of The Australian, Giles Auty, an Englishman, whose 'leadership and advice ... was cru cial in our choice of sculptor', said Archbishop George Pell. 'We looked at Two studies in ca pes. photos of the works of many Above: Archbishop Daniel Mannix, as interpreted sculptors and eventually by N ige l Boonham. Right: Th omas Brock's chose Mr Nigel Boonham Daniel O 'Co nnel l, w ith his fac e towards Fitzroy. from England, among whose commissions was one of Diana, Princess of confessed, by whom I was confirmed, Wales.' He charged $100,000. and in whom my mentors (mostly) Boonham came to M elbourne and had inviolate trust, derives from consulted a number of persons-one witnessing, often enough, his entry hesitates to say 'authorities'-not excluding, to Sunday High Mass at St Patrick's, at the tolerant suggestion of the Cathedral, preceded by his full-throated the author of the entry on Mannix in the juvenile choristers marshalled and Australian Dictionary of Biography, val. (as occasion demanded) cuffed into 10, which Archbishop Pell had described line by the ebullient Dr Percy Jones (in Quadrant, 1991) as 'snide' and who shunned the edifying hoot in 'unworthy'. It was said to have made B.A. the voice production of their English Santamaria apoplectic. counterparts. Boonham's 'English background', Near 90but steady, not shuffling acknowl edged the Archbishop, 'was (under spires with which in 1939 he som ething of a disadvantage ... but we had capped his cathedral), eyes wanted the best available'. hooded, hands steepled, ascetic but Whe ther Boonham h as 'succeeded not cadaverous, ins tine ti vel y brilliantly' as claimed will be disputed. My dutiful though no pedant in rubrics, enduring image of Mannix to whom, like Mannix em blemisecl the gothic many ageing Melburnians, I had once traditions of the Universal Church.

14 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 wrist at navel height suggesting a satisfying communion breakfast, and gathered, massive wintery (in fact, hyperborean) garm ents swirled by a following breeze. Only the rough foliaged Maynooth cloak with its slightly theatrical chain delivers 'ImANDMD GR«Nffi~~;:~ , ~:~;:m~:n~;;,~e:,~~~~Hi"to me. On the the whole from banality. (What ambience, one hand, corporate executives typically fail to understand that making a product which hemisphere is Mannix in?) environmentally friendly is almost bound to make it more efficient and profitable. And on Thomas Brock's neo-classical O'Connell, the other hand, the average environm entalist seems incapable of understanding and coping buffeted by the wind, was more expressive with industry on its own pragmatic terms. and-incorrect though it may be to say it­ There is no reason why being green should necessarily hurt company profits. 'That's probably the more recognisable. And old-fashioned thinking,' says John Gertsakis, acting director of the National Centre for although the Cathedral did not promise Design at RMIT University. He should know. For the past nine years, the Centre has been the Great Liberator a rose garden, he demonstrating how little substance there is to many of the debates between environment nevertheless now stands in a decorative and industry. The Centre has been collaborating with innovative companies on clever one-with a neat herbaceous border, albeit redesigns of consumer products for better environmental performance-using lighter, in a declivity looking towards yuppy Fitzroy. more appropriate materials, microprocessors which demand less energy, and simpler The Great Perturbator, on the other hand, layouts which can be easily disassembled for maintenance or recycling. is on bare tarmac and dull, mundane. The approach has met with great success, as the Centre's director, Professor Chris Ryan, But who are we to complain when Giles told an OECD workshop onEco-Efficiency in Sydney recently. For instance, one of the Auty, a resident of Australia these last four Centre's products, developed with Zoom Systems and known as Swap Shop, is now being years, can suggest that Boonham has manufactured in the US. 'It's a hi-tech Coke machine,' says Gertsakis, 'which vends office captured Mannix's 'psychological essence', supplies-paper, toner, ink-jet cartridges.' Computer giant Hewlett-Packard has just bought and can enjoin his readers: 'Go see the 200 and is busy installing them in American businesses, supermarkets, office blocks and bronze when you are next in that area of universities. Not only is the machine energy efficient, it also comes equipped with a return Melbourne. (Th e Weekend Australian, slot to allow used cartridges to be collected for recycling. And the computer system used 27-28 March 1999). to manage the machine also collects marketing information on who is buying what. But Thirty years ago, St Patrick's College, perhaps the most important innovation, says Gertsakis, is its convenience. It saves energy with its blues tone tradition, was demolished by stopping people from constantly having to drive to a retail outlet to buy supplies. in defiance of the National Trust, to make Another product, the Global Dishlex Dishwasher, is the first Australian appliance to be way for underground diocesan bureaux in awarded a full 6-star rating for energy efficiency together with a AAA rating for water the Cathedral grounds. Today we have a conservation. And Schiavello Commercial Interiors now manufactures better-performing comparable diminishment. There were office furnishings, workstations and partitions out of recyclable materials. The new inspiring aspects of Daniel Mannix which products, designed with help from the Centre, use less hazardous material, less material in transcended politics. It is unfortunate that total, and have won the company international accreditation for environmental management. an image has not been created that will This has allowed it to sell into new markets. speak to future generations, appositely and Good design is a matter of creative thought and an awareness of materials. The staff at aesthetically, as Brock's O'Connell will the Centre have clearly learned a great deal about both over the past nine years. To increase continue to do, though facing in an corporate awareness of design, the Centre has developed the Eco-redesign Manual. It is a inappropriate direction. step-by -step guide of about 100 pages with accompanying video. The Centre is also working - James Griffin on the Eco-specifier, which will be a searchable database of commercially available, Afterword: Since the statue was erected environmentally sensitive materials for builders, designers, architects and engineers. there has been news (Melbourne Herald Overseas, where environmental efficiency has become corporate policy at enterprises Sun, 4 April 1999) that an Archbishop such as Bosch, Philips and Miele, the latest trend is towards taking responsibility for Mannix Foundation has been set up, with products over their entire life cycle. So, products are being designed to be disassembled and the approval of Archbishop Pell, to advance recycled when they have outlived their usefulness. In line with this, the Centre recently the cause of Mannix's canonisation. published Return to Sender, a booklet detailing 10 case studies of how extended product responsibility works. This month's contributors: Becci Fleischer The National Centre for Design was originally established using federal government is the program co-ordinator for Community funding as a kind of industry assistance package. It advertises nationally, inviting expressions Aid Abroad's Pacific Program. CAA is of interest from companies who wish to avail themselves of its services. Nowadays, says currently helping communi tie set up water Gertsakis, most of the money comes from progressive state government agencies such as and sanitation systems in the Aitape district, the NSW Environment Protection Authority and Eco-Recycle Victoria. and welcomes donations; Jim Davidson is But although public money is often used to kick-start the design process, it is the currently spending 12 months in South companies themselves who pick up the sizeable tab to develop the products that emerge. Africa; Lee Cataldi is an Asialink Literature As Gertsakis says, 'Companies, big companies, are becoming aware that environmentally Resident in New Delhi, India; Kate Manton efficient design is not just about being green and doing the righ t thing, it is an important is Eureka Street's assistant editor; James part of the serious pursuit of making money.' • Griffin is an historian and author of the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer. For further information, visit the website of the on Daniel Mannix. National Centre for Design at: http://daedalus.edc.rmit.edu.au/

VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 15 research and resources to help them adapt. Of course, when courts do act to protect citizens against government authority, Running errands governments react. One way they do this is by closing up 'loopholes' or passing new laws. One example was the Native Title for the government Act, in response to the Mabo decision. A second form of response is to exclude 'The aim of all government is the well-being of the society the courts entirely. All governments govemed. In order to prevent anarchy, to enforce the laws, to routinely restrict access to the courts, in protect the citizens, to support the weak against the ambitions of favour of 'informal' or adminis tra ti ve the strong, it was necessary that each society establish authorities remedies, or unreviewable ministerial with sufficient power to fulfil these aims.' - Diderot determinations that override the remedies. A more subtle exclusion is- where WKNow, from experience, that no We started with good intentions. Our possible- to remove the 'government' human being with power can long resist odd, three-personed government had flavour from its public business, by turning the belief that the people's interests are worked over the centuries to control it over to private enterprise, or corporatised identical with his. As Lord Acton famously governm ent hubris- rather better than one entities, whose commercial activities are observed, 'Power tends to corrupt, and might have expected. It works less well in not subject to administrative review at all. absolute power corrupts absolutely.' It is a the new environment. The third response is to create rare person who, having gained power, Parliaments had checked, and finally alternative 'accountability' m echanisms. willingly fetters it or gives it away. Thus destroyed, in the Glorious Revolution of These include statutory regimes, such as our Westminster system, cautioned by 1688, the absolute, discretionary authority Freedom of Information, guardianship, history, divides political power three ways: of the sovereign, subjecting even the King protection against discrimination and unfair among our lawmakers, administrators, and to the rule of his own law. Executive treatment at work, and requirements that the judiciary. authority fell into the hands of his bureaucrats give written reasons for their Now that modern government h as 'servants'-bureaucrats and officeholders, administrative decisions. Some of these reinvented itself as a market for goods and who accounted to parliament. The courts regimes have tribunals that look and behave services, re-badged its citizens as helped to contain their 18th-century very like courts, and most are headed (at least consumers, and blurred the divide between excesses when parliaments sought to silence initially) by lawyers who behave like judges. public and private business, those old criticsascriminalsuttering'seditiouslibel'. When I did a quick review for this piece 'authorities'-the three anns of govern- Courts went on to protect and preserve I found scores of these tribunals: the ment-have been largely overtaken. Prime citizens' rights by developing the 'Common Commonwealth's Administrative Appeals ministers and premiers have the greatest Law' and, by the late 19th century, the Tribunal, Industrial Relations Commission concentration of power. fundamental principles of good, executive and tribunals dealing with Competition, The second part of Lord Acton's decision-making-good faith, proper Copyright, Human Rights and Equal observation is not quoted as often as it intentions, compliance with legal Opportunity, Immigration Review, should be: 'Grea t m en are almost always limitations, natural justice- by developing National Native Title, Social Security bad men ... There is no worse heresy than ancient prerogative writs. In this century Appeals and Refugee Review. The states that the office sanctifies the holder of it.' Australian courts have developed constraints have their own-NSW's AAT, Community Prime ministers, premiers and their on executive power by interpreting laws in Services Appeals Tribunal, Compensation ministers, claim the legitimacy of the will context, particularly our international Court, Dust Diseases Tribunal, Land and of the people and, as High Court Chief political obligations, and through the Environment Court, Residential Tenancies Justice Gleeson recently remarked, they do natural justice requirements arising from Tribunal and Strata Schemes Board-to not like being 'checked and balanced'. the 'legitimate expectation' that the govern- name but a few . Victoria has rationalised T he institutional checks and balances ment meant to put them into practice. most of its tribunals under the umbrella of on executive power have increasingly been Then we began to abandon the courts, a Victorian Civil and Administrative rendered in effective. We have created starting more than 30 years ago. The law's Appeals Tribunal, with specialist 'divisions'. instead anew, statute-based, administrative development was too slow, haphazard, and Governments have set up a plethora of law regime which recognises or limits expensive, we said. Our new administrative other, statutory bodies to 'keep them particular interest claims, and commissions law was to be premised on the democratic honest'-Auditors-General, Ombudsm en, statutory officers, ombudsmen and com- v irtue, and n ecessity, of openness, bodies s uch as NSW's Independe nt missionersto'watchdog'thepublicinterest. participation, and accountability in Commission Against Corruption and Those who accept such government government. Queensland's Criminal Justice Commis­ commissions have a high and lonely destiny, We paid a price. sion. And then there are commissioners of and a risky one. Part of that price has been the lessening every hu e: privacy, human rights, industrial The new administrative law regime has of the status of our judges. Yes, the courts relations, even healthy rivers. These office­ not worked. Worse, it may have weakened were a clumsy tool for protecting citizen holders usually have a wide range of the rule of law. I say this with some regret, and consumer rights, but this could have responsibilities, including educating the having been an early enthusiast for the new been remedied by better access to legal public; receiving, investigating and publicly regime. representation, m ore and better judges, reporting on complaints and government

16 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 failings. They are not supposed to be 'public After the Victorian Auditor-General, disadvantage of the former. Politicians have servants', but are suppose l to be independ­ Ches Baragwanath, released a damning come to believe that, since they can freely ent of government. report on the child protection system , the create tribunals and appoint their m embers, Recently, governments have begun to Kennett Government brought forward, by who seem like ' judges', and equally freely delegate watchdog roles to non-government two years, a planned review of his office. At dismiss or abolish them , then perhaps 'real' bodies, som etimes set up and funded by the review's end, and despite its widespread judges should be equally subservient to the industry (the Electricity Ombudsman in condemnation, Baragwanath was stripped 'will of the people', rather than the rul e of Victoria is one example). of many of his responsibilities, most of his law. The argument that the dismissed So the patterns are clear enough: packs staff, and his ability to perform, rather than tribunal members were 'not real judges' is of watchdogs to protect the public interest. oversee, government audits-disingenu­ applicable to all Australian courts: they are The intentions are laudable. But just see ously justified in the name of 'national all legislatively based, even the High Court what has happened to them. competition policy'. (i ts judges are, fortunately, protected by the Statutory tribunals may be restructured The h ead of W es tern Australia's Constitution, which can't be conveniently easily, and their members may be contrac­ 'independent' Legal Aid Commission changed by a simple majority vote of both tually obliged and accountable to the very resigned after the Attorney-General, Peter houses of parliament, as in Victoria). government from whose acts a citizen seeks Foss, told her Board he wanted her out, 'Independen ce' becomes stripped of relief. If they have been difficult, 'judges' of immediately, in the middle of her term . meaning. To review government decisions statutory tribunals have simply lost their Foss recently stated that he would not requires freedom from threats or induce­ jobs, without redress, once the government approve of a n y appointment by the m ents. A commissioner, these days, may has decided to abolish the bodies. Take the Commission's Board with which h e was be appointed by the Queen's representative examples of Commonwealth industrial personally unhappy. in council, but she must also contract and relations commissioner Jim Staples, or of co-operate with Her public servants for the 11 judges of Victoria's Accident services, remuneration, superannuation Compensation Court and, later, all members and resources (withholding them is a classic of its Employee Relations Commission. way of taming the beast). Governm ents Their removal fundamentally undermined control the legislature, by and large. Most the convention that judges who may be ..,.'-'-""~­ 'commissioners' are de facto public called on to review government decisions, servants. They know that they are must be free fr om the threa t of retribution. accountable. They have heard the screams Protests were unavailing: they were 'not of their predecessors. real judges'. But who is? Roger West , NSW's Community The power of the executive grows daily. The ease with which politicians may Services Commissioner, could not obtain Creatures of statute can be as easily unmade, appoint and remove tribunal m embers, adequate resources for his work: in his h owever great the outcry. Restructures are dislodging inconvenient obstructions to the brilliant five-year term he investigated and always plausible, and need not accommo­ achievem ent of their will, has led to the critically reported upon the quality and date the contracts of the incumbents-the perception that 'real' judges can be criticised delivery of services to our most vulnerable Commonwealth will clearly not, for and dismissed too. In an editorial on 5 April citizens-children, old people and people instance, preserve Chris Sidoti, a critic of this year the Sydn ey Morning Herald with disabilities. His appointment was its immigration policies, as Human Rights remarked that judges will evoke displeasure simply not renewed. Commissioner, when that Commission's when they insist that forms of the law, such The lessons are clear enough . Statutory 'restructure' is complete. Its Administrative as those protecting human rights, are watchdogs, commissions and tribunals are Appeals Tribunal is to becom e a body headed recognised, 'because it is their job to eph em eral, their essential dem ocratic by a non-judge, its presidential m embers administer ju stice according to law, rather function n eithe r cons ti tu tionall y gone, and its new members on short-term, than submitting it to government policy as recognised nor politically respected. performance-based contracts. The Prime public servants would'. Without structural protection they become Minister personally vetoes appointments This is the heart of the matter. The new vulnerable on a number of fronts. to the bench, boards and honours lists. 'checks and balances' on the executive are Government thinks it owns them . In How much do we value our watchdogs servants to its will in ways that judges and m y own case, ministers and senior public on government? Max Moore-Wilton, our the Common Law have n ot b een for servants were genuinely astonished that most senior Commonwealth public servant, centuries. I continued to exercise my statutory duty is paid three times more than the High What happens to other statutory office­ to receive and try to resolve complaints, Court's Chief Justice. Whose authority does holders when they act 'independently' and even against the discriminatory effects of this government respect the more? irritate their masters? They quickly come government policy. They really believed Which leaves the last word to Chuang­ under attack. that a Commissioner for Equal Opportunity T zu, 369-286 BCE: 'People who make In 1993 my own office of Equal should subject her statutory responsibilities themselves useful for government service Opportunity Commissioner, in Victoria, to the policy direction of the government of risk the dangers of intrigue and unjust was statutorily abolished after a series of the day, whatever the Equal Opportunity punishment: better to be useless to others, tribunal decisions concerning citizens' Act, and instrument of m y appointment, useful to oneself, and thus to survive.' challenges to the discriminatory effects of said to the contrary. new government policies against school­ The distinction between courts, and Moira Rayner is a lawyer and freelance children, women prisoners, and Aborigines. tribunals, has been blurred, to the gross journalist.

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 17 T HEOLOGY

Ko~ovo, no 1 ~wd much ·· -= ....J •• - ~· · •

Ualk:an power. ~ T Integrity: the long walk

out Antony Campbell continues his series on an unconditionally loving Go d. This month: unconditional love-the challenge.

v Because you are precious in my sigh t, and h on oured, an d I love you. An unease has (Isaiah 43:4) prevailed in faith's I BEGAN THIS SERIES WITH AN ADMISS ION: 'I am not su re people are taking on board the full reality of the loving attitude to human life, God they're talking about.' As I see it, there are some major aspects of the standard presentation of Christian faith that get in the way of the idea of a loving God. I believe Christian faith can be presented imaged as 'mourning in ways that encourage acceptance of a loving God. Often, however, a standard presentation of fa ith can and weeping in this inhibit acceptance of a God who loves deeply and unconditionally. Re-visioning is a challenge. valley of tears'. • This unease can be Our sinful world Our human world can be wonderful. Our world can also be miserable, wretched, and thoroughly sinful. honest witness to the But even at its worst, it may not be unlovable. This insight demands a place in Christian fa ith. Some intolerable aspects residual aspects of doctrine work against it. Open conviction of the innate goodness of human beings is a relative latecomer to the Christian scene. of injustice and An unease has prevailed in faith's attitude to human life, imaged as 'm ourning and weeping in this valley of tears'- This unease can be honest witness to the intolerable aspects of injustice and oppression, ranging oppression, ranging fro m the domestic tyrant's raised eyebrow or raised fi st to the secret police, torturers, an d arm ed fo rces from the domestic of global dictators. Som ething is right in faith's conviction that the sinful m ess we are in is not the place where we ought to be. It does not m ean that we are unloved; but it can inhibit our acceptance of a God tyrant's raised eyebrow who loves deeply and unconditionally. or raised fist to the T heology's attention whether to the origins of life or to its end entails a risk. Both the image of a beginning where humankind was radically better than it is now and the image of an end where secret pollee, torturers, humankind will be radically better and enj oy perfect peace and justice-' the wolf shall live with the lamb' and armed forces of (Isaiah 11:6)-a re im ages that risk cheapening our view of the present tim e and devaluing us who live in it. Behind these tra ditional positions seems to lie the belief that God could not possibly have wanted and global dictators. created a world like ours. In our world, there is too mu ch sin and suffering. God could not possibly want Something is right in it or find anything lava ble in it. It has to be the result of original sin; it will becom e lovable in the kingdom. So the theology of a loving God goes out the window. We're second-best. faith's conviction that We can never settle for a compromise with injustice and oppression. God's passionate love for the poor and the oppressed has to energise our struggle against the structures of poverty and oppression. Precisely the sinful mess we are in the quest for fai th and in the fight against injustice we can be deeply and passionately loved by God. in is not the place God's love fo r us n eed not wait un til our world is just. Unutterable human anguish may want the pain of separation from God fo r its oppressors-but what we might want we may not get. Justice may be where we ought to be. satisfied by the awareness revealed to oppressors of God's love fo r the oppressed and God's anger at the It does not mean that oppression as well as by their eternal sharing in God's regret and grief. Sin in our world is obvious; beyond God's anger and grief, it can be met by God's forgiveness and God's love. A vision of fa ith is possible in we are unloved; but it which God loves us and sees into us deeply enough to perceive the lovable in us even in our worst sin or can inhibit our our worst suffering. Any hint that humankind might have been intended to be radically better than it is or will end up in acceptance of a God a fu ture situation that will be radically better is open to the suggestion that we now are secon d-best and who loves deeply and that God could not have wanted this world. We are cast in the role of playing Leah to Jacob's Rachel. Says Jacob: I didn't want this one; I wanted her sister (cf. Genesis 29:25 ). Love relates to us as we are, not as w1ccmditionally. we were or as we might becom e.

18 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 Our salvation Redemption language has a lot loaded against it. Salvation-if we free it from the 'Jesus saves' glibness­ has richer associations by far. Radically, salvation for us is our being loved by God. We need it. We've got it. It is about putting a troubled situation right.lt is about being in a right relationship with God. The idea of redemption is burdened with the overtones of buying back and repaym ent. Lo ve does not demand redemption; love forgives. A loving God does not need to redeem us; a loving God forgives us. A couple of biblical passages keep coming back to m e. Job to God: 'If I sin, ... why do you not pardon my transgression and take away m y iniquity?' (7:20-21). Isaiah quoting God: 'I, I am the One who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins' (43:25). Only justice insists on redemption, on repaying what is owed, paying for the fa ult. Love, like the father Theology's attention of the prodigal, m oves to forgiveness. both to the origins A vision claiming that God loves us, that God's compassion is deep enough to perceive the lovable in us even in the most sordid of our suffering, and that God forgives us our transgressions is a vision that of life and to its end calls for a theology of salvation rather than redemption. It dawns on u s, whether slowly or in a flash, that entails a risk. we are loved by God, that in our mess God forgives us, that despite our fragility our relationship with God is right- from God's side always, even if from our side sometimes only maybe. That is salvation-and it Both the image of a is gift, God's gift to us. Such a vision needs the incarnation and needs it badly. In such a vision the incarnation is not a means beginning where of divine redemption but an expression of divine love. God so loved the world that God entered the world humankind was and took human fl esh, becoming one of us. The incarnation is, in this vision, an act of unitive love, of unitive passion. Those who love want union with those they love. God wants union with us. God became radically better than it on e of us. The incarnation is the unique and unsurpassable expression of God's love for us. is now and the image A belief in God's utter love is wonderfully expressed in the apocryphal Jewish book of 2 Esdras, a writing roughly contemporary with the gospel of Matthew-available in the deuterocanonical section of of an end where the NRsv. The book's thinker, a prophet Ezra, is arguing with God about human destiny: 'Spare your people humankind will be and have m ercy on your inheritance' (8:45). God replies: 'You come far short of being able to love m y creation more than I love it' (8:47). We need to take this on board. Our thinking and our theology and our radically better language must m ake room for such love. Even if we draw a different conclusion from it. and enjoy perfect peace The God of 2 Esdras shares Jesus' view in Matthew that 'the ga te is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it' (Matt 7: 14 ). Ezra is told that ' the Most High made this world and justice-'the wolf fo r the sake of many, but the world to come for the sake of only a few ... Many have been crea ted, but only o;halllive with the a few shall be saved' (8: 1,3). Ezra resists various appeals to mystery and, echoing Job, protests: 'But what are mortals, that you are angry with them ; or what is a corruptible race, that you are so bitter against it? lamb' (Io;aiah 11 :6}­ For in truth there is no one am ong those who have been born who has not acted wickedly; among those who have existed there is no one who has not done wrong. For in this, 0 Lord, your righteousness and are images that rislz goodness will be declared, when you are m erciful to those who have no store of good works' (8:34-36). cheapening our view At the beginning of the Bible, Ezra's hope is anticipated by the God who brought on the flood becau se of human wickedness (Genesis 6:5) and who declares at the end of the fl ood, accepting the inevitability of the present time of human wickedness: 'nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done' (Genesis 8:21 ). and devaluing us who Love is shown to those who have no store of good works. That such texts exist invites u s to choose between such images of God-the God of the narrow ga te or the God who will never again destroy. live in it. .. Behind these Seriousness of our life traditional positions God, in dialogue with Ezra: 'You come far short of being able to love m y creation more than I love it.' In seems to lie the belief 2 Esdras, such love did not m ean the salvation of all; for us though, it may. Then the question might surface whether, if all are to be saved, we are wasting our time being good. Selective salvation offers a that God could not guarantee for the seriousness of life. Paul writes that 'the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us' (Romans 8: 18). For m any, this life is too serious and possibly have wanted its sufferings and miseries too appalling for eternal salvation not to be somehow at stake. and created For many, too, fear of the apparently easy is a powerful argument against belief in a loving God, a God whose love affair with humankind will not allow for lossi Deeply rooted, it is one of those things that a world lilze ours. m ake m e say: 'I am not sure people are taking on board the full reality of the loving God they're talking about.' At least one reflection, too often neglected, safeguards for me the seriousness of life and the vision of a loving God. Memory is essential to our human sense of identity. When we lose our memory, we lose our sense of who we are. I do not see h ow memory can be overlooked in our life with God. The comforting Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory has overtones for m e of a car wash or a finishing school. The car goes in dirty and comes out clean. The person goes in a rough diamond and comes out a polished gem. But what about m emory? Is it likely that with death our m emories would be erased and our identities retained? Certainly, it is Christian belief that those with God will be beatifically fulfilled. Is there any

V o LUME 9 N uMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 19 incompatibility with the retaining of mem ory ? We would know ourselves to be deeply and unconditionally loved by God and we would be aware of all that we have been- including every moment of meanness and jealousy and evil. We would rem ember every significant moment of our lives, for better and for worse, and at the same time we would know ourselves to be beloved of God, deeply and unconditionally loved by God. There are human analogies enough to suggest that this is possible-and possibly true. If so, this life is utterly serious. What I do now, I will rem ember for all eternity. I will know myself to be loved by God and I will rem ember every moment of m y life-what I have been and what I have done, the rough and the sm ooth, the good and the bad. It is a vision that includes both a loving God and a view of human life that could not Memory is be more serious. essential to our • human sense Our prayer of identity. Intercessory prayer, what's been called 'selfish prayer', troubles m e as an obstacle to faith in a loving God. Prayer for help is natural and spontaneous. People pray to God for help for themselves or others. They pray to God for the church When we lose our and the world. But I don 't hear a strong sense in this prayer that God loves them-or the others, or the church and the world- more than they them selves do. The tone of such prayer can often work against belief in a God who loves memory, we lose us passionately and unconditionally. our sense of In my vision of a loving God, prayer is primarily relational. It functions in much the same way that com munication does in my human relationships. To be fully myself in relationship, I need to be still enough at times to know myself. who we are. So too with God. At times in a deeply loving relationship I need to say what I know or what I feel, so that I hea r myself I do not c;ee how say it. So too with God. At tim es in such a relationship I fi nd myself silent in the other's presence. So too with God; I call it contemplation . At times in a deeply loving relationship, I need to share what is going on for me. So too with memory can be God. At times I m ay need to ask the other to share with m e. So too with God- but trickier. Above all, those who love overlooh.ed in our me support m e, encourage me, challenge m e, hang in with m e, and are present to m e in so many ways. So too with God. As a rule, I don't ask God to do anything that I would not ask of a good friend. life with God. The demands of faith do not stand in the way of belief in a loving God. What belief in an unconditionally loving God may demand of us is a vision of Christian faith where the reality of sin does not exclude being loved, where God's fo rgiveness replaces redemption, where the reality of m emory gives seriousness to every moment of human life, and where our prayer is prim arily relational, trusting in a God who loves. Faith in a loving God may not be easy but it may be unbelievably rich. •

Antony Campbell SJ is professor of Old Testam ent at the Jesu it Theological College within the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. Next month : Unconditional love: a different view. J. T heoretically at least it is possible that God's gamble could som etimes be lost and a human being emerge who becomes wholly unlovable. Judgi ng, we might assassin ate the liv ing; lovi ng, God m ight an nihilate the dead.

IN M EM ORIAM

MlcHAEL M c G IRR The shadow- puppeteer

l,,"M"'""' '"" think of>n individual cultu ml impcdali". He w, a Catholic who has filled the role in Australian priest in a predom inately Islam ic society that Y.B. Mangunwijaya played country, an architect in a country with in Suharto's Indonesia. Mangunwijaya basic housing problems. was affectionately known throughout Mangunwijaya's life was one of deft the country by the Javanese title, Romo adaptation. At on e stage, he was close to Mangun. It's a sad irony that Romo a group of urban squatters in Yogjakarta Mangun survived by less than 12 months who had constantly to contend with the regim e h e did m uch to subtly Y.B. Mangunwijaya being moved on by the authorities and discredit. 1929-1999 having their shanties demolished. Romo Rom o Mangun was an enigm atic figure. He was a Mangun noticed that the squatters buried anything they prolific novelist in a language with a limited market for had which was of value so that, after their places had literary fi ction. He lived with squatters whose poverty been razed and they had been locked up for a time, they and illiteracy precluded them from reading the endless could return and recover watches, wedding rings, photos stream of lectures and columns which came from his and the like. When the time came to design a church fo r pen. He was a Javanese cultural insider without being a the community, Romo Mangun simply marked off a

20 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 vacant area with wire fencing. In the middle of the area, was alert to the way blindness can becom e deeply he buried the blessed sacram ent. The gesture indicated ingrained. He was disturbed, for example, by the rigid som ething precious. division between good and evil in his culture and saw Rom o Mangun cast himself as both a m arginal and a this as the foundation on which tyranny could be built. central character in Indonesian society. He compared his 'In traditional contexts, su ch as Wayang puppetry, role to that of the panakawan or com edians in Wayang good and evil always exist together. In other words, shadow puppetry. These figures appear during breaks in people think that evil is not something you have to figh t the action to offer a commentary on what's been going and eliminate but that evil is simply part of life. It has an on. The commentary, known as goro-goro, is witty, existential necessity. You don 't dare resist it.' entertaining and often improvised. But it tends to reveal Rom o Mangun u sed traditional stories and form s. His deep undercurrents in the dram a as well its relevance to novels were shaped like Wayang performances. But he a contemporary situation . The panalintellectuals, including writers such as Param oedya furiou s b ecau se the Ananta T oer, had been imprisoned. He sided with those producers reverted to the writers deprived of their liberty. But he was still the only tradition al ending. person on Bum who chose to be there. Others di d not It's not easy to under­ have the luxury of choice. stand how a fi gure such as Mangunwijaya u sed his position with skill. After the Mangunwijaya takes to him self the authority to alter Above: A squatter Dili massacre in 1991, he becam e vocal in support of a tradition al tales. You could not imagine Peter Garrett, community w here changed disposition towards East Timor. He wrote simply whatever his moral authority, changing the ending of Romo Mangun li ved, by the River Code in that Javanese can tend to look at a situation exclusively 'Waltzing Matilda' so the swagm an does not take his Yogjakarta. from their side and that they needed to look at the own life. The mystique that surrounded Rom o Mangun situation in East Timor 'with human eyes'. He said that does not translate easily across cultures. the East Timorese had their own history, their own Mangunwijaya's explanation for his action was simply aspirations and had to be accepted for who they were. For that Roro Mendut's suicide made sense within the Hindu Australian readers, these points sound bland and obvious. fram ework which first generated the story. But within 'I could h av e written more explicitly,' said the contemporary Islamic framework, suicide is sinful. Mangunwijaya in 1992, 'but if I did no newspaper or He had the choice of letting the story grow or allowing it m agazine could publish me. I had to be very moderate. to be preserved as a museum piece, no longer a vital part But the government knew what I was saying.' of a culture. Romo Mangun made an anti-fundamentalist Sometimes, Mangunwijaya did transgress the gesture in support of Islam and in so doing weakened the boundaries established even for him. His best known arguments of Islamic fundamentalism . n ovel is Burung-Burung Man yar (1979) which was He was passionate about education. He also believed published in English as W eaverbirds. As in much of his that the future peace of Indonesia lay to som e extent in fi ction, Mangunwijaya chose an historical context in the appreciation of a Javanese style of Islam, different which to deal with contemporary issues. Burung-Burung from the hard-edged Islam encountered in Aceh or Man yar is set in the years after the revolution of 1949. It Minangkabau. He described Javanese Islam as m ore is told from the point of view of som eone who fought on ' tolerant, human and eclectic'. the side of the Dutch and who, in spite of this, is neither It was ironic, then, that when he died suddenly on lO more nor less virtuous than his opponents. Once again, February, Mangunwijaya had just delivered a paper on the point seems obvious. But it did not suit the require­ science and technology in education . He had a h eart m ents of Indonesia's governing ideology. When the book attack and collapsed into the arms of an Islamic was nominated for a prestigiou s literary award, the intellectual, Mohamad Sobary. Minister for Education stepped in to prohibit the 'You are m y kiyai,' said Rom o Mangun, using a term nomination. of Islamic respect. They were his last words. It was a 'I was actually glad. It showed that the officials scene that could have been scripted fo r a Wayang understood the real m eaning of my story.' performance, and it showed the profound reverence of Mangunwijaya was later the first to propose a federal this profoundly irreverent m an . • system of government for Indonesia, as opposed to a centralist system . Ami en Rais has since adopted his model. Michael McGirr SJ is the consulting editor of Eureka He was con cerned by the erosion of traditional Street. He wrote his BA honours thesis on the work of Javanese culture, but did not canonise that culture. He Mangunwijaya.

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 21 Ess AY

P ET ER STEELE The Phosphor of a City Peter Porter's Imagination

L ' OEMS m PmR PomR new h,ve cit;es out This is the Deben, not the Mekong, but a sail of mind for long. On the face of it, these may be curves round a copse; masts for Woodbridge various indeed, ranging all the way from a palpable crowd three degrees of the horizon, edging London to a resplendent New Jerusalem or a ruinous a painterly Dutch sky. Clouds are curdling. Babel, with any number of European or Antipodean massifs thrown in. But because Porter's imagination A golden rain of ladybirds falls in the lap is so given to intervention and transformation, his of Suffolk. Drought has driven the wasps mad, envisaged cities come to seem analogous one with they butt the kitchen glass. A cucumber, another. This is not to say that they are cut, inter­ like Masolino's Satan, rears under grass. changeably, from whole cloth: but they do have something of the same hang. I want to reflect here To townsmen everything is like something upon some of their typical features. from a book- most noticeably in this It is convenient to begin with a poem in which made landscape. The swan on the canal, Porter is out of his habitual city, London, but in which with nine cygnets, is the Horne Fleet, 1936. attention constellates in a way naturally thought of as urban. It is 'At Ramsholt'. Ezekiel in church: shall these bones live? The pheasants live another month and then The harvest is in early. Across the paddock, go plumply down. A nightingale sings where we raise the bull's head with mimic politely through the dangerous summer. bellows, through the salt-dead trees and thatcher's (Th e Cost of Seriousness, Oxford: Oxford rushes, yachts navigate on seeming land. U ni versi ty Press, 1978)

The Phosphor of a City: Peter Porter's Imagination Thinking of parks and gardens as a kind of rus in denied, a M ekon g brought t o West ern attention urbe, and then taking a line through proper names in entirely because of Western military involvement in this poem, one can see that it is a kind of urbs in rure. the countries through which it fl ows: the painterly Pastoral poetry is always that to som e degree, of Dutch sky is dislodged fro m its natural milieu to do course, but not often to the terse, concentrated extent duty in an English shire: the mythical rain of gold of 'At Ramsholt'. The name designates a locale as fa lls upon a Suffolk made Danaean. firmly of the country as, say, 'Oxford', and harvest, All this is m agical, and som e such word has to paddock, bull and rush es fortify that sense: but be invoked whenever Porter's poetry is at its most harvesting and the m aking of paddocks are examples characteristic. And if, nodding over the summery page, of human designing, mimicry is a ubiquitously though one were missing this, a single unmistakable touch not exclusively human affair, the rush es are for would prompt attention-' A cu cumber,/like thatching, and yachts and their navigation print Masolino's Satan, rears under grass.' The reference is calculation on the scen e. to Masolino da Panicale's 'The Fall', a fresco in the And 'scene' it is, with the word's overtones of Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine, in Left: Res ting Place, theatre and of the painter's art. One rarely goes far in Florence. In it, the serpent twined about the Tree of Clari ce Beckett cl 927, Porter's poetry without at least one of those form s of the Knowledge of Good and Evil rears above Eve, the oil on board, 22 x 30cm, conduct appearing, often (as at the end of this poem) t empted and the temptress. The serpent's face is collection: Paton Forster. Above: Bay Road, in association with music. Mahl-s tick, m easuring-rod, notably like Eve's own, and the roughened green body Bea umaris, Clari ce conductor's baton- they flourish in his lines. Each of is indeed much like a cucumber. Beckett cl 927, those emblematic instruments evokes change, an What does one make of this cross-reference? T wo oil on boa rd , 34 x 44cm, othering. The Mekong is evoked even while being things, I should say. The first is suggested by a remark priva te collection.

V O LUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 23 of Paul Joannides in his book on Masaccio and or mode of the spirit, he can play supply and variously Masolino, who says of 'The Fall' that 'Masolino has across a register of attendings. attempted ... to combine the narrative and the iconic' The last two stanzas of 'At Ramsholt' are a case (London: Phaidon Press, 1993) . I think tha t this in point. 'To townsmen everything is like something/ describes very well one of Porter's major imaginative from a book-most n oticeably in this/made attributes. He wants to name processes, landscape.' That some are more bookish than others sequences, the shape of stories-he is, goes without saying, but the multi-leaved experience deeply, a narrator-and he reaches con- of town or city tends to fortify the ancient trope of stantly for the emblematic, for the figure­ world as a legendum, there for the scanning or the We no longer cutting entity. A citified imagination has decoding: far from telling against the significance of to hand a reality which encompasses both countryside, it can enhance expectation, as is indeed engage1n of these, insofar as the outline of every city the point of seeing land as landscape. It may, declares a set of agendas or records a set momentarily, be a merely startling thing that swan foundation- of events, while being a thing which is and cygnets should be seen as the Home Fleet of 1936, solidly there. It is like a book, occasioned but the ethos of 'England, Home and Beauty' was not sacrifice when by a tale but having its own being in the then a dead thing in the comm on consciousness, and instituting new world. A poem of Porter's is likely to have the rural, the domestic and the patriotic could be many signs of dynamic run to it, and as apprehended coherently. Porter's binding glance here, cities, but many of pause and gaze-as in, for as very often, spans time as well as space. instance, 'Clouds are curdling', and in The poem's last stanza plays ominously against sacrifices aplenty 'Ezekiel in church: shall these bones live?' what has just preceded it. Ezekiel's name, splendid The second, connected point is that, and funebrous, resonates with reminders of how there are in cities just as civic reality has a variety of pitches thoroughly doom has been breathed into the 16 new and old or levels, Porter's imagining of experience previous lines-in the salt-dead trees, the Mekong, is variously keyed. He has often written the Dutch sky d'antan, the maddening drought, the alike. Porter's of Renaissance and Baroque churches and death-bearing Satan, the obsolete fleet from the their paintings and statuary, and I would trembling Thirties. But Ezekiel is not plucked as from business is often, guess that, while disavowing the whole nowhere by a mordant imagination. Like several other kit and caboodle of their theologies, he of the 'major prophets', he writes of the siege and in his poetry, to finds something highly congenial in their retrieval of a civilisation, its barrenness and fertility; smell the smoke mingling of different ontologies, mythol­ and some of his complexity comes through in the ogies and psychologies. To swag together famous passage to which the poem refers. In it, God from these. beings from Graeco-Roman myth, Jewish tells the prophet that 'these bones are the whole House aetiology, Gospel narration, Medieval of Israel. They keep saying, "Our bones are dried up, legend, Counter-Reformation celebration, our hope is gone; we are as good as dead'", and retorts and to do it with an ensemble of manners, that he will in fact revitalise them. and with a view to framing sacred theatre There is no sign in the poem that so consoling a with or without music- this might well claim is to be vindicated; the later 'House' of Christians engross a hospitable if sceptical mind. In a similar hearing it proclaimed has the prospect of itself being fashion, Porter's books have a long tally of titles which among the slayers, if only of pheasants. Ezekiel, in point to specific ways of attending, to evoked tilts of short, is ironised, in a fashion typical of Porter: and the mind: 'Reading MND in Form 4B', 'Two Merits this skewing of the conventional is rounded off with of Sunshine', 'Preaching to the Converted', 'On First the two unexpected adjectives 'politely' and Looking into Chapman's Hesiod', 'A Study of a Bird', 'dangerous'-we had not thought to find a nightingale 'Sonata Form: The Australian Magpie', 'Landscape invested with civic decorum, nor benign, with Orpheus', 'A Chagall Postcard', 'Night Watch', harvest-bearing summer turn menacing. 'Sacred and Profane'-the list could be extended. It does not need much stressing that this I N ALL, THEN, Porter's attention to what abundance of 'ways' is one of the main things found, surrounds him registers spectacle but declines variously, repellent or attractive about the city. To predictable interpretation. The Two Noble Kinsmen, an appetite still fresh, such a menu or repertoire of a play which interests him, says at one point that 'This experiences, processes and roles m ay be highly world's a city full of straying streets' (William attractive: to a heart wearied or, in the title of Porter's Shakespeare and John Fletcher) and that state of affairs early book, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten', it may have is one which Porter addresses with instinctively more the air of a labyrinthine nightmare. Porter, who ramifying imagination. I have suggested elsewhere the is exceptionally fluent and copious for so intelligent importance of Browning as an early sponsoring a poet, has no constant gambit in the midst of the presence in Peter Porter's work, the Browning of citified experience. As music itself may shift with intricacies named with dram atic attentiveness; and astonishing rapidity, and authenticity, from one mood although Porter's voice could rarely be mistaken for

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PETER STEELE that tartly fluent poet offers his benediction to an Australian in London acutely conscious of life's many incivilities; and The sound and the silence there is not, I think, a single page in the two volumes which does not in one way or 'T Collected Poems 1961-1999 (2 Vols), Peter Porter, Oxford University Press, another allude to a procedure from which Melbourne, 1999. ISBN 0 19 28809 7 7/28 8098 5, RR P $69.95 Porter is deviating. ELL ALL THE TRUTH, but tell it slant'. might shift a claw an inch or two./ /It can Sometimes this is astringent, as when Emily Dickinson's injunction might have tell when an overlord is unhappy./ When he writes, 'My friends find new forms which been made for Peter Porter, at least in his one sweeps out in tears to clatter/ the petrol make kites/ Of confessions', or, in a vein poetry. One of the m ost striking feature of mower, magpie flies oH./ /But never flies far. which has had its own temptations for him, the almost 600poems in these twin volumes Big feet/are moving to their place in dreams- ' ... you know the kind of thing/ The water is their blend of the emphatic and the / a little delay in the sun won't count.' The I boiled the lobster in/ is cool enough to oblique. This is a rarity at almost any time, narrative looks plain, but the overtones are top/up the chrysanthemums'. Often, as the and certainly at present, when the fi eld complex. To 'upbraid' a magpie is both titles suggest, an existing work or habit of seems often to be divided between comic and faintly esoteric; to drop Kant mind prompts dialogue or dialectic. 'Doll's descendants of Uriah Heep on the one hand into a milieu of petrol mowers widens the House' has an intricate modulation of grief and Ancient Pistol on the other. Porter's gap between them; to endow an overlord beyond Ibsen's framing: 'Talking to the idiom- intellectual, emotional, and with unhappiness is to undo him even while Lizards' offers that m aestro of unease, social- is all his own. it enrages him; to rem odel the intransigent Cicero, becom e fo r a while its victim: From the first, he has been one for claws as feet in dreams is to recast the 'Listening to Shakespeare' matches the remarkable dicta, which (as withDickinson) narrative after all. At the end of a poem by garrulity of one of the playwright's seem to defy the misgiving they provoke. Porter the question is not only, 'where have contemporaries with Shakespeare's fo re­ From 'The Conservation of Energy', you been ?', but 'how have you been there?' shadowed silence. 'Despair/ Is energy too. For fire you rub The preface to these Collected Poems As well it might, since one of the things together two dead sticks'; from 'My Late tells us that they include 'the work of about m ost constantly dram atised in Porter's T 'ang Phase', 'Ambition fights talent m ore forty years', a work which reflects the life- poetry is the challenging, and som etim es than sloth does'; from 'The Shining God experience of a man between about 30 and m addening, relationship between language and the God of Correction', 'I am haunted, 70. Porter changes all he touches, whether in its vaunting and the silence fro m which how can I doubt it?/ My taxi driver had the it be what he calls 'music's huge light it em erges and to which it returns. Hundreds face of Anubis'; from 'Three Poems fo r irresponsibility' or the death of a wife. But of times, he has designated or implied the Music', 'Yet beauty who indulged the swan/ to 'tell it slant' i not to fa lsify-after all, to frail durability of music, of painting, of At death completes her with a song'; from get things in on the slant may be, as with a architecture, of the scenic itself; in poems 'Thom as Hardy at Westbourne Park Villas', needle, to get them in m ost decisively. So, early and late, h e lights the riot of ' .. . each house knows/ As m any stories as for instance, when he writes 'An Exequy', degradations to which our species is pron e. in the iron sublime we call/Victorian'; from this is m odelled after a celebrated poem of His real point of central com mand, though, 'The Delegate', 'The truth/ is a story forcing the 17th century, also about a wife who is in enacting the precarious, fes tal nature m e to tell it. It is not/ my story or m y truth.' died too young, and the cerem on y of of the only intellectual thing we all have in This taste for the vatic or the sapiential emulation helps to keep grief tolerable: common, nam ely language. goes in Porter with two other enthusiasm s: but Porter's own urgently disbelieving Here, too, the effect can be illustrated to forthe musical andforthe dramatic.He has spirit dem ands expression even while he a degree with succinct quotation, but at its earned much of his livelihood by writing invoke the presence of the one who is lost, most striking it depends upon m odulation about music and dram a; in his poetry both and the last thing his poem looks like is and cassation within poems, and som e­ modalities m ake their claim in the shifts the replica tion of an earlier times from one poem to another: I would and sway of language. To read even very H accomplishment. commend, as cases in poin t, 'Clutching at short poems by Porter is to feel that one has Culture', 'And N o Help Came', 'Pigeons, gone a considerable distance, partly because OPKJNS SAID THAT, faced with fine Gulls and Starlings', 'A Honeymoon in 1922'. the pitch of imagination keeps changing accomplishment, h e was prompted to Reading these, I am rem inded of two and partly because the range of sound is admire and do otherwise. Such a disposition reflections of Elias Canetti's, which might visited in unpredictable ways. Schooled as has often been understood as a fear of seem to be at odds but which complem ent h e is by, am on g others, Shakespeare, engulfment by one's betters, but it can in each other: 'He will never be a thinker: he Browning, Au den and Rochester, he knows fact be a re oluteness in keeping fa ith with doesn't repeat him elf enough', and 'Whoever that intense feeling and its lamented absence that wish fo r originality which brought the wishes to think has to give up promoting his can both be succoured by the ingenious m entoring poem into being. Porter's work own thoughts.' With extraordinary tenacity, dispo ition of words. For him, 'phrase' is as seems to m e to fl ow from the second hope. Porter has been re-addressing an agenda put much a musical condition as a linguistic Of course, we get our schooling wherever to him by life itself- has been a poet because one, and 'line' as much actorly instruction we can find it, and in poetry as in every he could not help it- but has been, in the as part of a logic. other area of life to play the sedulous ape is process, the least proprietorial of poets. In 'Sonata Form: The Australian Magpie', the inevitable prerequisite to finding our I hope that he and Emily Dickinson will Porterwrites, 'Youcanupbraidthemagpie,/ own w ay. Among the poem s in this have further dealings. • saying "What do you know of Kant?"/ It Collected are those A fter Martial, where - Peter Steele

V OLU ME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 25 Hawthorne said that a city was a 'paved solitude', which puts vividly a predicam ent explored by many before and after him. The Potsdam of Frederick the Great might have seem ed such to him, for all that one of its palaces is called 'Sans Souci'. Historically, he had as a young man been thrashed in public and forced to kiss his father's boots, been court-martialled and made to watch the beheading of a confrere: later, in battle, he was hungry for death and blamed the bullets for not hitting him. He was avid for fame, which he achieved at great cost to his own army and to those of other nations; and in the end, he died of a chill caught while reviewing his army in the rain. None of this was calculated to abate solitude. Sorrows may come in battalions, but the sorrowing go alone. Frederick would probably have agreed with Belloc's 'Most of us live alone. We all die alone.' Browning's, they are alike in a Thesean confidence in Soliloquy as such does not presume the full force the world's labyrinth. of this, but does lend itself to it: Porter's Frederick in Browning too is a great donor, celebrator and his court is som e kind of kin to Hamlet in his. This, scrutiniser of cities, particularly as named in colloquy though, does not do away with the fact that Frederick's or soliloquy. Porter knows that way, as can be seen Potsdam has an array of roles, of realities. It is palatial: in, for example, Soliloquy at Potsdam : it is a military headquarters: it is the centre of civic administration. This having a number of facets is one There are always the poor- of the most typical features of Porter's cities-his Getting themselves born in crowded hou es, Rome or London is likely to glint as it is turned in Feeding on the parish, losing their teeth early the light-and he gives himself with intensity to And learning to dodge blows, ge tting imagining Frederick in situ. Strong bodies-cases for the warped nut of the mind. The poem has m any striking expressions, from The masterful cat-o'-nine-tails, the m erciful which I single out two. One is the repeated word Discipline of the hours of drill- better 'discipline', and the other 'the warped nut of the mind'. Than being poor in crowded Europe, the swan-swept The first can m ean either a learned teaching Waters where the faces dredge fo r bread (as in Captain Fluellen's 'the discipline of the , .,. And the soggy dead are robbed on their way to the grave. wars') or the imposition of such teaching (as I can hear it from this window, the musket-drill in the use of a whip called 'a discipline'). On the barrack square. Later today I'll visit Frederick is for both of these, not, at least in The punishment block. Who else in Europe his own eyes, because he is a m onster, but Could take these verminous, clutching creatures because they avert what he sees as chaos­ And break them into men ? What of the shredded back 'the merciful/Discipline of the hours of drill And the broken pelvis, when the side-drum sounds, ... There has to be misery so there can be When the uniformed wave tilts and overwhelms discipline.' Historically, Frederick held the The cheese-trading burghers' world, the alderm anic intelligible but paradoxical position that the Principalities. The reformers sit at my table, monarch was the suprem e servant of an They talk well but they've never seen a battle absolute state, a position which he embraced Or watched the formed brain in the fl ogged body with the soul of a conquistador. H ence Marching to death on a bellyful of soup and orders. conscription, press-gangs, abduction: hence There has to be misery so there can be discipline. too his introduction into the Prussian army People will have to die because I cannot bear of the cadenced march of imperial Rome, so Their clinging to life. Why are the best trumpeters that 'A hundred regiments have marched ... Always French ? Watch the west, the watershed and not once/ Has a man broken step.' T o Of revolution. Now back to Quantz. I like to think 'break them into m en ' was no doubt a real Above: Walking Home, That in an afternoon of three sonatas ambition of Frederick's, even if what was in Clari ce Beckett c193 1, oil A hundred regiments have m arched more miles mind was not individuals as such but a on board, 49.2 x 59.5cm, Than lie between here and Vienna and not once 'broken-in' citizenry, even humanity. The private collection. Has a man broken step. Who would be loved nightmare is seductive, as the history of 200 Centre: The Red Car, Clari ce Beckett c1928, oi l If he could be feared and hated, yet still years and more since his death displays. on board, 16.5 x 21 .S cm, Enjoy his lust, eat well and play the flute? As for 'the warped nut of the mind', this in its co llection : M r Al lan Cullen (A Porter Selected, Oxford: Oxford 'case' is like 'the fo rmed brain in the flogged body', and daughters. University Press, 1989) one insufficiency compounding another, but both

26 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 brought under control. That this should be brought militancy entirely appropriate to the figure from whom off is a tricky business. The proneness to 'warping' is everything is flowing. a commonplace of moral commentary, whether in the And then there is the matter of the music. 'N ow biblical allusions to the heart's being of all things most back to Quantz. I like to think/ That in an afternoon deceitful and desperately wicked, or in Kant's notion of three sonatas/ A hundred regiments have marched that out of 'the crossgrained timber of humanity' m ore miles/ Than lie between here and Vienna and nothing straight can be m ade. Frederick's wish to not once/ Has a m an broken step .. . ' Johann Joachim make the crooked places straight is neither arcane nor Quantz, master of this king's music, wrote more than sheerly archaic: it is what a reformer of any stripe 500 pieces for his own master, w h om h e both aspires to have happen. That all of this, every last time, taught and, by excep­ com es from a convoluted brain is not som ething tional licence, criticised. which seem s to give the reformers pause. Porter, immensely if Porter's soliloquist, then, for all his peculiarities, informally knowledgea­ is fellowed widely. This is no great surprise, since ble about music, declines although Porter is as ready as the next writer to be to sentimentalise either intrigued by esoterica and by curious performances­ it or its makers, and he by what might be called the English Eccentric gone is certainly not one to Continental- his real subject is always one of the muddle dicta about common human experiences or forms of behaviour. music with others Probably one reason for his attachment to the about poetry: but he is portrayal of life in the city is that it is there that they singularly alert t o its can best be s tudied in their complexities and power, and to its rooted­ contrarieties-in their intensity, in fact. In ne s in and its branching 'Soliloquy at Potsdam', while much of the rhetorical away from the deeds and high ground is taken by the repeated 'I', two other prioritie of the worldi elem ents help to keep the rhetorical field lively. The and like Au den he keeps first of these is the array of parities and paradoxes, as a wary eye on the traffic in 'masterful/m erciful' and 'formed brain/ fl ogged between the realm of body', in 'There has to be misery so there can be music and whatever other realms we inhabit. Above: Beach Road, discipline', and in 'the aldermanic/Principalities', Nobody is more likely to notice the incongruity Clari ce Beckett c1933 , w here 'alder-manic' catches perfectly a mixture of of Frederick's being lessoned by Quantz and oil on canvas on performing so zestfully on the flute until the los of boa rd , 44 x 49cm, his teeth stopped him, at the sam e time as side-drum, collection: Mr and Mrs R. john so n. trumpet and no doubt that pragmatic flute, the fife, dictated the movem ents of those stepping to a marche militaire. In another early poem, 'Walking Home on St Cecilia's Day', Porter concludes by naming 'a practice of music which befriends/ The ear-usele s, impartial as rain on desert- // And conjures the listener for a time to be happy) Making from this love of limits what he can) Saddled with Eden's gift, living in the reins/ Of music's huge light irresponsibility', and much of his poetry, like much of his prose, testifies to an indebtedness of this kind. One can also, though, as in 'The Orchard in E-Flat', find plenty of occasions in which music is invoked to more elaborate, and som ewhat bitter, ends. Either way, to write poetry about music shows one of Porter's constant fascinations, that of the relationship between liberty and command: 'the disciplines of the war' have m ore analogies than it is pleasant to contemplate with sundry musics, military or other. Frederick plays the flute, but to the tune of Quantz's Versuch einer Anweisung die Floete traversiere zu spielen, and there are no two ways about the conventional and the obsessional, which in that: the gift of huge light irresponsibility comes only turn redounds upon Frederick himself. The second is if the king keeps taking orders. the rhetorical interplay between exposition and Only Potsdam was Potsdam, only Frederick the question in the poem , which gives a matrix of prototypical Prussian, though his father tried hard

VOLUME 9 N UMB ER 4 • EUREKA STREET 27 enough. But every social condition which is to have Inside his head than discs record, any chance of lasting has to go on testing the relation­ Herbert alone can say, My Lord. ship between the absolute and the gratuitous; and if (as Auden, once again, insisted) every utopia is What is the reason for our death? cancerous with dystopia, the character of civic To find the only rhyme for breath, compromise has to be pressed again and again to find To bottom-out both Blake and Dante, how tolerable it is at a given moment. We no longer The genius proved, the Profit sca nty. engage in foundation-sacrifice when instituting new (Th e Chair of Babel, Oxford: Oxford cities, but sacrifices aplenty there are in cities new University Press, 1992) and old alike. Porter's business is often, in his poetry, to smell the smoke from these. 'Death is not an event of life', said Wittgenstein: N ot that he is likely to concede that, an 'Death is not lived through'; and Heidegger, 'Death is acceptably liberal verdict given, there is no more to a strange and unhomely thing that banishes us once be said. The passion moving many thinkers about the and for all from everything in which we are at home.' condition of the city, from at least the time of From the first, Porter has written as if under this Augustine's The City of God, has been one of cosmic double legend: he is like someone who, in the midst dismay: the concern, that is to say, is less for pragmatic of a ga thering of whatever sort, is prone to ask outcome than named enigma. Augustine had his unbidden, 'But what about death?' All sorts of societal hopes, but h e no more expected a short-term retorts are possible in the customary elision of death­ vindication of them than Job expected to talk, but Porter is quite undeterred by them. At the make money for The Dunghill Press. end of Yeats' poem about Plato's interrogating ghost, when all that is most encouraging is named, 'But E RTER TOO rs GIVEN TO the asking of primal questions. louder sang that ghost, "What then I'" This is Porter's Such answers as h e gives emerge not from a question, too, and it is a question not only about philosopher's study or a mystic's retreat, but from the death's timing but also about its being the horizon of thick of crowds, or from the cross-currents of thought everything in life. and feeling. The rhetorical form may be as simple as The point to be made just now is that, in his that of, say, 'A Consumer's Report' or 'Essay on poetry, death's ubiquity colours Porter's sense of Clouds', but the discerned pressures of experience are public reality as well as his sense of the private. This not simple. When Porter asks questions, things can is not inevitable in poets of mortality. For some, the turn out as they do in 'A Clumsy Catechism'. demeanour is largely confined to their private psychic realm, and the worried man singing his worried song What is the purpose of our life? prescinds for the most part from what is going on 'out Question the butter why the knife there'. But for Porter this is impossible: the world's Goes through it, clear the pond of weed arcades run all the way into his mind. And one of the And watch rapscallion beetles breed. ways of seeing the city available to him is in effect to see it as a necropolis. What power put us on the earth ? 'Within the mortal temples of a king/ Keeps death The lack of rhyme, the pious dearth his court, and there the antic sits,/ Scoffing his state Of consequence, the one-way flow and grinning at his pomp', Shakespeare's Richard the Of dripping curds through calico. Second says. The king is the realm's embodiment, not simply an individual; and for Porter, 'there the antic What is the challenge of the New1 sits', at the heart of any polity, or of any polis. A freshness of the morning dew Accordingly, when in 'A Clumsy Catechism' he asks Turned automatic hosing-down those questions which (by common consent, as we Of thoroughfares throughout the town. say) are taken for the big ones, his answers convene evidence or illustration from all sorts of areas in shared What do we mean by tragedy? civic life, from the most to the least domestic. If, as A rather bigger you and me usual, death has the last word-'What is the reason Than any that our neighbours know­ for our death?/ To find the only rhyme for breath,'­ Fire in Heaven but lights below. this is partly because death always has the last word, is always asking 'what about me? ' What, after all this time, is truth? 'A Clumsy Catechism' has for context not only Research reveals that Pilate's tooth many earlier poems by Porter, but poems of Was troubling him, he couldn't stay reductivity or scepticism by, for example, Housman Debating with the Bench all day. or Hardy, or the Clough of 'The Latest Decalogue'­ 'Bear not false witness; let the lie/ Have time on its Where may an hone t man be found? own wings to fly:/ Thou shalt not covet; but tradition/ The singer hears a different sound Approves all forms of competition ... ' The line goes

28 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 back a long way, to at least the Martial who modelled Our poets are not fit to be provincial early poems by Porter. The present poem is seen in Governors, nor will they fruit like olives. profile against these its cultural companions, just as, more sardonically, it presumes the existence of more The town has made a sculpture of the sky. conventional catechisms. Historically, these last were Pale prudes of their own blood approach often polemical documents, as with Martin Luther's This vine-upholding vale looking for Shorter Catechism or the Council of Trent's Simplicities of everything too difficult. Catechism: but the genre is also capacious enough to Why, when the grandest of us little men include, for example, Caleb Bingham's Astronomical Is whisked away to Heaven, should survivors and Geographical Catechism for the Use of Children, Flounce to the parapet explaining things? or Lieut-Col. Arthur Wagner's Catechism of Outpost Sausages and wine are placed before us, Duty: including Advance, Rear Guards and The wheel of work rolls past the perfect town. Reconnaissance. There is, or there has been, a lot of (English Subtitles, Oxford : Oxford catechising about. University Press, 1981) In Porter's, cell after cell of the human hive is opened. The knife going through butter, the curds in At one point in his poem 'The Rest on the Flight', calico, the hosed-down thoroughfares, the singer at after naming some of the cus tomary horrors or his discs-all are civilisation in action, and each consolations of a long journey by air, Porter says that carries the trace of mortality. In more complex fashion 'the nose will dip/ Towards the phosphor Pilate, caught between toothache, elemental question, of a city', an image all the more engaging and a tried Christ who is also the tryer, betokens a if one remembers both that phosphors are 'kingdom of this world' under formidable stress; and extremely numerous and that Phosphor Porter's much-admired Herbert and those perpetually is the morning star, the planet Venus wild cards Blake and Dante have their own minglings before sunrise-also known as Lucifer. He wants to name of singularity and exposedness. Pienza is a distinctive 'phosphor', or has The line quoted earlier from The Two Noble one, but Porter is poetically incapable of processes, Kin sm en, 'This world's a city full of straying streets', being, simply, a gazer; interlocution is his is paired in a couplet w ith, 'And death's the constant way, whether it is landscape or sequences, the m ark etplace where each one m eets.' Porter, cityscape that is in question. shape of stories­ catechising his reader, does so partly as a campaigner In Pienza, the two are closely related. against the God of Death, but partly too in the spirit Between 1459 and 1464 a m edieval he is, deeply, a of Caleb Bingham or Arthur Wagner, letting us know hamlet was transformed into what was just how things are in Porter's agora. There in effect a showcase Renaissance city­ narrator-and he the antic sits, old scoff er and old grinner. state, at the direction of a 'local boy/ Made good', Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, reaches constantly E.HAPS THEY O RDER these things better in Italy Or in alias Pope Pius II. Pius had plans to alter for the Greece I By instinct, Porter would answer, in the words the surroundings with, for instance, the of Evelyn Waugh's sycophantic Mr Salter, 'Up to a introduction of a lake. These did not emblematic, for point, Lord Copper', but his poems are often meditated succeed, but the n ew cathedral and qualifications of that reply. From many possible palaces and almost 40 other n ew or the figure-cutting examples, I think of 'Pienza Seen by Prudes'. refurbished buildings were conceived of entity. A citified both in relation to one another and, as There is so much which poetry turns its back on, an ensemble, with regard to the setting. imagination has The Rout of the Past, the you and you and you If it is not 'the perfect town', it is not for For whom I don't exist, the crossing want of trying. It is clear from Pius' own to hand a Of these hills in our over-powerful car, Commentarii that the whole thing was Up and down the fawn of Tuscany devised as a work of art, 'urban and reality which To the Pope's town: clouds sail to worlds urbane', as one writer puts it, 'a concrete encompasses both Beyond us as we m otor into visions illustration of the humanist principles of Harder than paint. Scattered by tyres, rational thought and reasoned living, of these. Angels disperse to fresco-bearing trees. designed both for individual reflection and group discourse' (Charles R. Mack, The mind is m ade of G uide Books, factitious Pienza: The Creation of a Renaissance Chapters of a biased history. Where local boy City, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Made good, things stay looking good, dust sheets 1987, pp162-3). Over faction, and deracinated ankles Such a place, honouring the architect's perpetual Swell on the way to Calvary. A little aspiration to make things both coherent and dynamic, Renaissance is put in the palm of hand is bound to stimulate an imagination like Porter's, To keep the wonder venial. Today since he is as sympathetic to such achievements as

VOLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 29 he is eager to scrutinise them . 'Pienza Seen by Prudes', Porta Humana', 'Cities of Light', 'Cyprus, Aeschylus, like a number of his poems, shows him brought to a Inanition', 'To Venetia's Shores Have Come', 'The stand less by the particularities of a place than by its Tomb of Scarlatti', 'Le Jardin Suspendu'-there are ethos, and then prompted to devise a coherence of his dozens of poems which, as certainly as these, own amidst what Yvor Winters once called 'the rain re-confect the territories they off er to describe. It is of matter upon sense'- true that som e of the earlier accounts of Pienza's Cities and poems are monumental in both senses building are questionable, but it would not have of that word-they mark death and they aspire to needed this to prompt a claim with the scope of endurance. The American architect Philip Johnson's Porter's. He is one of the imaginatively restless ones 'All architects want to live beyond their deaths' speaks in the historical city. to more than psychology, and tells us Another way of putting this is to say that, lodged som ething crucial about an art form there, Porter usually declines the lyrical. It is not a Porter is given to which seems at first glance to be all matter of incapacity, for even at improbable moments about space but is as certainly all about his poetry can be suffused with lyricism-as it is, for the asking of time. Poetry is prone to repeat Horace's instance, in 'The King of the Cats is Dead', or in primal questions. 'exegi m onumentum', but is always 'Talking to You Afterwards', or in 'Die-Back' or 'Little subject to the humbling truth of Buddha'. But wariness is the way to go in most of his Such answers as Porter's first line-'There is so much cities, most of the time, as for instance in this passage which poetry turns its back on'. from 'Delphi': he gives emerge Wallace Stevens said that poetry not from a 'makes silk dresses out of worms', but You can have when this is true it leaves the worms A bathing hut and a packed lunch and if you speak philosopher's study out of account-who will, as it Quietl y and take the occasional hand of cards happens, have the last word. With the doyen of landladies she may utter through or a mystic's I take it that, as very often happens Her muslin one of the aboriginal truths. with Porter, his concession of human Our gardens are planted too late again retreat, but from frailty tries obliquely to make amends. And the jittery clock at the Town Hall has forgotten the thick of 'The Rout of the Past' encompasses If Sa lamis or Mafeking was the time of its life. both the past's fashionable convenings The oldest resident, summing up sanctity and crowds, or from the (which we call history) and its being The bracing air, says we have the seediest of m ade mere 'alms for oblivion'; and it Perihelions, our tone of prophecy is due to cross-currents of also sounds like the title for som e grand The prevalence of sunburn and the number of scenic Victorian painting where Vegetarian restaurants ... thought and disaster stamps itself after all on the (Preaching to the Converted, Oxford: Oxford feeling. m emory. 'The you and you and you/ University Press, 1972) For whom I don't exist' might be a salute to Auden's Old Man without Delphic or sibylline locales have fascinated poets concrete or grapefruit, or to his acknowledging that and other makers of narrative, from Virgil to William 'to m ost people/I'm the wrong color'. It certainly Golding, and from the end of the Commedia to the acknowledges that the imagination in its poem, like beginning of The Wa ste Land. They hold writers and the selves in a car, is carried along with extrem e readers alike for a variety of reasons: because of our selectiveness through a world whose 'everything that pricked curiosity in the face of the unknown; because is the case' m ostly goes on beyond earshot or eyeshot. of a mixture of timidity and resolve in the shadow of Chesterton claimed that tradition is democratic menace; because of a hankering for more- than-human in that it gives the dead a vote; Porter is constantly voices; and because others seem to be interested. T his alert to the presence of the past, a presence which m elee of emotions finds its equivalent in people's som etimes asserts itself whether or not we want it, reactions to the preternatural or the supernatural: the or even notice it. A Pienza seen by the temporally or hustle without dramatises the hustle within. It is not even ontologically prudish-'clouds sail to worlds/ surprising that Porter sh ould find his attention Beyond us ... '-is dormant, not dom esticated: those solicited, since what we find here is, in effect, the references to Calvary, Renaissance and even Heaven, staging of the soul, or the soullessness, of the city. It ironising though they may be, still open vistas well is, then, all the more striking that, in 'Pienza Seen by beyond the 'Sausages and wine'. Prudes', acknowledging that 'the grandest of us little 'The mind is made of Guide Books, factitious/ men' is an absentee, he should concede, as if with Chapters of a biased history'-'experto crede', Porter one foot still in Eden, that 'The wheel of work rolls might add, since a staple of his poetry has always been past the perfect town'. • the making of quasi-Guide Books, ostensibly to this or that physical or psychological locale, but really to Peter Steele SJ has a Personal Chair at the University what might be called The State of Ultimacy. 'At the of Melbourne.

30 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 P OETRY

JACK H IBBERD

Snail Bait In Mem ory of Barney Vacuum our dog It's a strange thing, absence, that lack of substance, something, anything, positive because it is negative in the end, Hope because absence, I'm still alive true absence, and at large, bespeaks though m y soul (unspeakable word) resembles a half-dried chive signifies on a large barge, (insignificant word) or an owl requires trapped in vicious sunlight: (at last) two shrivelled eyes presence. waiting for moisture, dew, rodents around a yew: Now, the revelations of night. after all of this philosophy and doggerel, I would like to absent myself from the present.

Cats and Dogs Odysseus' dog, deserted, died of gloom on a dunghill: poor Argos. Grief The gaze of Baudelaire's voluptuous cat is 'ocean-deep and aloof'. As slow as a snail, Dogs are as different from cats and as ponderous, as a koala bear is from a rat. it expands, contracts, Hounds habitually love their m aster or mistress, an inch becom es a mile. while cats are insouciant, could not care less­ The eyes protrude, until m eal time, or when they crave warmth seem disembodied, and leap on to a cat-detester's groin. rem ote on stalks, Mutts, like Cerberus, keep watch at the door, as they roll and swivel while toms circumnavigate the parish, whores. in search of green Dogs w olf down their fo od with epicurean lust among the grey while cats eat neurosurgically: delicate thrusts. concrete and dust. Moggies torture their prey: consum mate sadists. The hard shell protects, For fleabags a hunt is sport: foxes, criminals, rabbits. entrails and lymph, Dogs can be comic, even grin, in their love attacks. the heart's pump, Cats are sarcastic, m elancholy, humourless, unabashed. enabling locomotion, Indeed they pad and silkily strut the rims of evil, the next distant m eal, while dogs bound, loll, lick, in a good commonweal. and lubrication, These days, it seem s, there is much m ore cat in humankind, a slow glissando and much less dog: at least to my torm ented mind. that leaves in its wake a faint silvery trail.

V O LUM E 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 31 BOOKS: 2

R OBERT DARBY Wrestling with Old Horrible

X.ader Herbert: A Biogrilphy, Franc~s de l.roen Unl\-nstt\' of ()ueen,land Press llJlJ,'\, 1'>1\"-i 0 7 022 i021 'J, IZR I' S,N_l)-,

siege of Troy, Menelaus learns that the only way he can return home is by wrestling Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, to a stand­ still and forcing him to reveal the secret_ Proteus resists by assuming one bodily form after another, and a titanic struggle ensues: First he shifted into a great bea rded lion and then a serpent- a panther- a ramping wild boar- a torrent of water __ _ -Odyssey, Book 4, Robert Fagles' translation. But Menelaus and his men hang on to their quarry and eventually force him to disgorge the vital details. In writing his biography, Frances de Groen has had a similar experience with Xavier H erbert, w h ose protean self­ transformations were the material of both his life and his fiction. She reports ruefully that, while many writers jealously guard Xav ier Herbert quarrelling with hi s 'beloved patroness', Beatri ce Davis, Adelaide Arts Festi val, 1962. their privacy and destroy the records of their life, H erbert eagerly welcomed vast hoard of papers consists of lengthy the decision of white parents to withdraw biographical inquiry, encouraged a number autobiographical fictions from which it is their children from a school in the Northern of scholars and eventually gave som e 500 difficult to disentangle fact from fancy. De Territory when five Aborigines were boxes of uncensored papers to the University Groen n egotiates her way through this enrolled, described the race of the latter as of Queensland. With many subjects the labyrinth with great assurance and provides 'degenerate' and concluded that they could main problem for a biographer is lack of a judicious and reliable guide to the most never become civilised (p 195) . He was not information; with Herbert the problem is likely scenarios; the result is a thoroughly above calling Aborigines 'black bastards' too much. demythologised, warts-and-all version of the when an individual offended hin1 or he was Well, one of the problems. The big great myth-maker. It is not a pretty picture. treated in a way that miffed him (p242) . difference between the Old Man of the Sea De Groen convicts H erbert of nearly all His atrociou s beh aviour at public and Herbert is that while the former could the seven deadly sins, barring sloth and occasions in the later years of his life becam e not lie, the latter could not tell the truth. gluttony, and describes in often painful detail legendary: when Poor Fellow M y Country Throughout his long life he fa bricated how he displayed aggression, anger, won the Miles Franklin Prize h e turned up various accounts of his experience and left ingratitude, manipulativeness, egocentrism, to the award ceremony in a bad mood, numerous conflicting versions of events. homophobia, racism and, above all, misogyny. mocked th e guests as 'bunyip knights' and Every detail of Herbert's life- from his For all the passion with which his novels 'snobs', called the chairman a silly old fool parentage and date of birth to the editing of demand justice for Aborigi n es, Herbert and pretended to refuse the cheque (p249). Capricornia and the circumstances of his himself was not always free from the racist At an informal m eeting of the Australian army service-is shrouded in controversy attitudes his fiction condemned. In a notorious Society of Authors to honour the memory and obfu scation. A large proportion of his article for the Bulletin in 1962, he defended of his wife Sadie, he fl ew into a rage when

32 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 some m embers tried to leave as he told the resulting anxiety that he would never be Poor Fellow My Co untry, is already well story of her death at length, and he began to able to publish again produced som e of the developed. throw punches (p259). H e h eld an stress which made neurotic behaviour m ore On the personal side, Herbert had a exaggerated estimate of his own importance likely. De Groen does not raise this rough life and many psychological problems. in Australian literature and was bitterly possibility, but the furious aggression he Christen ed Alfred Jackson , h e always jealous when other writers received praise. displayed so often in the last 30 years of his thought he was illegitimate and could never H e poured scorn on intellectuals and life sounds very similar to the 'roid rage' be quite confident that Ben Herbert, whom academics, yet cadged shamelessly experienced by bodybuilders who take heavy he called 'Dad' but who treated him as one for an honorary doctorate. doses of steroids; it might well have been might a suspected cuckoo in the nest, was the result of the regular injections of his real father. He has consistently asserted H ERBERT1 S HATRED and fear of wom en testosterone that he was apparently giving that he never felt loved as a child and was expressed more in words than in action, himself as part of his program to maintain always carried the bitter taste of this but it is clear that he was a chauvinist even a vigorous masculinity into old age. rejection in his m outh. A few m onths before by the standards of the 1930s. He developed C h e mis try may be part of the h e died he told an interviewer, 'I was never strange theories about male and female explanation, but much of the anger was a wanted child ... nobody ever wanted m e. sexuality and the proper relations between always there, fuelled by both personal and They didn't want me as a bloody pet even.' m en and wom en which received expression political factors. On the political side, some ('Last words', p20 ). De Groen softens the in his novel Soldiers' Women and a number of Herbert's rage arose fro m knowing that picture of childhood m isery given in of (mercifully) unpublished m anuscripts. most Australians did not share his sense of Disturbing Element and numerous inter­ H e h ad numerou s aff airs outside his n a tion al destiny an d his h a tred of views, but there is a depth of alienation m arriage, but always broke them off to colonialism. This obsession is clear in many here that seems strong enough to resist all return to his wife and heap curses on his places, including the letter to the Fellowship appeals to reason. It led directly to Herbert's e rs t w hile paramours. D e G roen is of Australian Writers in which he explains profoundly uncertain sense of self, the unde rs ta ndably exer cised b y su ch w hy h e will not contribute to the collection numerous masks he continually assumed, behaviour, but in her zeal to show what a of anti-fascist essays (' Australian Writers 'his n eed to define himself through the pig he was she raises the converse problem : in Defence of Freedom ') planned for release presumed enmity and ill-will of others' (as how to explain why Sadie stuck by him so in 1939. De Groen describes this letter as de Groen put it in a selection of Herbert's loyally and why, throughout his life, women 'monomaniacal', and, insofar as it makes writing she edited with Peter Pierce) and apparently kept throwing them selves at the claim that he is the only man in the his inability to feel com fortable with him and usually refused to say a word against world fi ghting fo r Aboriginal rights, it is anybody, least of all those who 'ough t' to him even after they had been callously both arrogant and conceited. h ave been his natural colleagu es. P.R. dumped (as in the case of Beatrice Davis) . But som e of the other poin ts in the letter Stephensen characterised Herbert's 'self­ Such a response seem s to suggest either the cannot be dismissed so quickly. Herbert sought isolation' as 'the produ ct of a hermit's truth of the old adage about treating 'em was correct to say that the FA W did not dodging away fro m his equals and superiors'. m ean or that his bark was a lot worse than have much awareness of Aboriginal rights As de Groen observes, this is acute (p94), his bite. as an issue in the defence of dem ocracy; and but it seem s to m e that part of the reason Herbert does seem to have had an almost he also had a case when he asserted that the w hy he shied fro m judgment by his peers Wagn erian power to compel loyalty and practice of most Australians (despite the was that he did not know who his peers assistance from m en and wom en, senior stand of a few rebels determined to oppose were. How could he, when he did academics not excluded, who often went the tide) did suggest that the real national rr not know who he was himself? miles out of their way to h elp him, so there e thos w as based on sycophan cy an d must have been some magnetic force in his compli ance, n o t the liberty- lovin g .l.HE OTHER BIG PROBLEM Herbert faced was personality that was hard to resist. The insubordination dear to the myth the FAW the battle to establish his masculinity, as biography covers Herbert's marriage in some was trying to foster. This letter contains he put it shortly before he died ('Last words', detail, but I feel that de Groen is too passages of striking political rhetoric in p1 9). Throughout his life he was beset by disapproving of Herbert's infidelities and support of Aboriginal rights and against anxiety as to his m asculine identity, his general mistreatment of Sadie to come to tyranny, but it also betrays a jaundiced sexual potency, his physical fitness and his grips with the dynamics of such an enduring attitude towards the Australian people in h eterosexuality, and de Groen gives plenty relationship. What I would also like to have general: of evidence to suggest that he was embattled learnt is why they h ad no children, a on all these fr onts. In his defen ce he resorted I maintain that the Australian people­ question that is not raised. to all m anner of desperate stratagem s: these people who will starve and exploit a It must be said that the worst of Herbert's strenuous manual jobs like wood- cutting poor black savage, or allow it to be done ... vices, particularly the aggression, appeared and mining, heavy drinking, punishing who will sneer at a poor, down-trodden only after the success of Capricornia and, work-out schedules, learning to fl y planes, immigrant and call him a Pammy but lick more precisely, in the 1950s, when nothing riding a m otorbike, retrea ts into the desert, a rich Pammy's boots and call him Sir­ seem ed to be going right for him. He was injection s of testosterone and vicious are, considering their chances to be struggling with the manuscript of a novel diatribes against wom en and hom osexuals. otherwise, the most slave-minded people about life in Sydney during the war that was The fact that he was m ainly a w riter made on the earth. m eant to have been finished in time to be the situation worse: 'I grew up with a lot of bought by US service personnel in Australia. The vision of the rabble fl eeing the test of tough people', h e said in 1984, 'and they He did not complete it until 1961, and the nationhood, so powerfully dram atised in despised anybody who wrote'. He often

V OLUME 9 N UMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 33 recalled the incident when he won a prize in terms of Australia's national destiny'. It such a fusion of personal anguish and in an essay contest while at school: 'I was was, in other words, related to both his political disappointment was the novelist ashamed of that. It was a boys' school and uncertain sense of self and his tendency to forged . that was a sissy thing to do ... the teacher identify his illegitimate status with the From the reader's point of view at least, said nothing and the kids said nothing, but bastard Australian nation. When Herbert it was probably worth it. Capricornia, with I said to myself, "He writes stories and he was not writing 'he was literally talking its drama, tragedy, comedy and rollicking sits down to pee".' De Groen throws doubt himself into existence' (pxv-xvi). He once cast of Dickensian characters, took the on Herbert's claim to have won such a remarked that he was not really happy 1930s by storm and made nearly every other prize, but even if the incident is an invention unless he was writing (pl98) and seems to novel of the decade seem bloodless by his shame at engaging in such an effeminate have felt that he would cease to exist if he comparison; only the work of the young activity as writing is apparent. Such chronic ever stopped. Marjorie Barnard commented Christina Stead and perhaps Brian Penton's obsession with the appearances of ambiguously that he ' talked himself out of Landtakers equals or surpasses it. It is one masculinity suggests comparisons with his best books'. Did she mean that in his of the tragedies of Australian literature that Ernest Hemingway; at least Herbert best books he was able to erase the signs of Herbert destroyed the manuscript of his did not take up elephant shooting. his own presence, or that his inability to next novel, Yeller Feller, while preserving shut up marred even his best world Both his tedious and self-serving autobiography, H ERBERT' S GARRULITY, both in speech positions have been argued. and on paper, wa of epic proportions. And so a definite psycho­ Marjorie Barnard recalled that when she logical profile of the artist and Flora Eldershaw stayed with the Herberts e merges: a child whose at Collaroy over Easter in 1938 or 1939, uncertainty of parentage and insecure sense of self allowed Xavier met us at the bus stop. He had a him to make two identifica­ loaf of bread, half a pound of butter and a tions vital for his later fiction. toilet roll. He slammed them down on the The first was with Aboriginal table and said, 'Now you won't have to go half-castes, people caught shopping, you'll have to listen to me.' So between two cultures and we had to listen to him for the whole of accepted by neither. The Easter, a most exhausting experience. second was with the 'bastard Paradoxically, this endless loquacity was a nation ' Australia, as Herbert form of writer's block. After Capricornia, often referred to it, a country Herbert found it increasingly difficult to be which never developed its an author; he wrote non-stop but could not own sense of independent organise the flow of words into a finished identity and whose people composition. Soldiers' Women was meant retreated at every challenge to be a pot-boiling quickie along the lines of of nationhood. Herbert was the stories he had written for the popular very conscious of the parallels fi ction magazine, the Australian Journal, between his own life and the in the 1920s; it took 15 years. The bizarre history of Australia: born rituals he instituted when writing Poor 1900, tooyoungforWorldWar Xavier Herbert, aged 64 in Mackay, 1966. Fellow My Country-trips to the desert, I, the larrikin streak, not marathon writing sessions, living in a tin clever enough to take advantage of the Me and My Shadow. Still, Poor Fellow My shed, avoidance of sex-all testify to the opportunities offered by the European crisis Country (PFMC) is probably a greater work extreme difficulty he faced when trying to of the late 1930s. Some of the bitterness in than the one that was lost and achieves a finish anything. Not for him Anthony his work and his self-destructive personal union of historical, political, psychological Trollope's 3000 words of final text before behaviour have a common source in his and mythological themes that makes breakfast and a day spent running the Post despair at the refusal of his fellow citizens reading it a unique experience for the scholar Office. to run the risks of going it alone; even in his and general reader alike. It was published at And what of the garrulity itself? final years he was waiting for the revolution a propitious time, exactly when a certain J.J. Healy makes the perceptive remark that that would provide him with a stable sense colonial relic, presumed moribund, stretched Herbert used words to assault reality-'a of self and his country with an independent out its dead hand to extinguish the govern­ continuous verbal assault on experience' identity. De Groen does not draw the ment of Mr Whitlam, provoking the (Literature and the Aborigines, p167), and a connection explicitly, but her biography strongest upsurge of republican sentiment number of de Groen's comments are even suggests strong! y that H erbert's resentment since the 1880s; but its appeal to the short­ more suggestive. As she and Peter Pierce of his anglophile, respectability-plagued lived new nationalism of the period accounts put it in the selection of Herbert's writing mother had its analogue in his hatred for neither for the immediate impact of the they prepared, his enormous written output Mother England: the one oppressed and novel, nor for its enduring readership. One 'testifies to Herbert's dependence on the ridiculed her son, the other bullied the must look deep into the Australian psyche act of writing as a m eans of apprehending infant nation, sought to use it for her own for an explanation of that. the reality of [his] existence and of forging purposes and demanded an unending If the politics of class were the dominant for himself an identity which he signified sacrifice of blood in the Great War. From style of cultural commentary in the 1930s

34 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 and '40s, race the 1970s and gender the held. As Jeremy Delacy tells the Bloke (a thing, and most of Capricornia is exuberant 1980s, it seems that the 1990s give cruel caricature of Steph ensen): story-telling. What matters is the imagina­ primacy to personal identity. Herbert's star tive transformation of the raw material and You're as mad as the bloody lunatics waned after the success of PFMC, but the the role it plays in the finished work. De overseas you worship' Can't you see it's intensity of his yearning for landscape, place Groen suggests that the bastard half-caste because of your silly aping of fascist and and roots suggests that he might be due for Nawnim is a projection of Herbert's uncertain Nazi systems that the whole idea of Free a revival. De Groen writes mainly from the self, but, while his own family circum­ Australia now stinks . ... You've fouled up perspectives of 1980s feminism, but she is stances might have enabled him to empathise for ever any hope we had of true national­ sensitive to the politics of belonging which with bastards and half-castes, it does not ity. (PFMC p. 1079) colour the mood of the late 1990s. As you follow that any bastard or half-caste in the might expect, she is most fascinated by Unfortunately, and probably as a long-term novel is a projection of the author. Herbert's misogyny and focuses closely effect of this, de Groen makes little attempt Even in the case of PFMC one can take on his personal psychopathology; she to recreate the atmosphere of the Yabber the autobiographical slant too far. A novel tends to downplay the class and national Club, where a bevy of opinionated intellec­ has many layers, and to suggest that this politics of his writing, to dismiss his political tuals must have made for a number of very one is primarily a working-out of Herbert's aspirations as 'utopian nationalism' and to lively evenings. The cut and thrust of psychological demons is to fall, perhaps, for give us a rather summary discussion that goes on at this sort of his own egocentrism. Much of PFMC is treatment of his involve­ gathering is notoriously difficult to recover, based on Herbert's observations and responses ment with the various but an agent of the secret police was present to the course of Australian history in the political causes he at many of the Australia First conversaziones, 1930s and '40s, and to this extent it can be espoused at different and their reports are preserved in the files of read as history; Humphrey McQueen went times. These included the Investigation Branch, so more could as far as to describe the novel as the best Aboriginal citizen rights, have been done. This is one of a number of general history of the period ever written, a half-caste association, instances where the biography misses the anticipating the perspectives of David Day the environment, the opportunity to bring Herbert to life while it by many years. This is not autobiography, Communist Party, repub­ catalogu es how various details of his however, but Herbert's vision of and licanism and a brief experience became the basis for a commentary on the events of his times. It is enthusiasm for Judaism passage or character in a later novel. a political history written from the stand­ and Israel in the 1970s, point of a nationalist in angry despair at the but his most important I T WOULD BE UNFAIR to say that de Groen failure of the Australian people to develop affair was with the does not take Herbert's politics seriously, national consciousness. Not only this: PFMC Australia First Movement. but they are of less interest to her than the projects an imaginary history in which all All these flirtations murky depths of his personality. Such a the forces for good-those who are broadly had a somewhat faddish priority normally runs the risk that an on the side of the Land, the Aborigines and air to them as Herbert author's work (the reason he/she is of the patriots and against the foreign beef strove to find a cause biographical interest) is overshadowed by barons, bureaucrats, generals and so on­ worthy of his loyalty, but the colourful details of his/her life, but de are annihilated. It is a vision of history as in Aust ralia First he Groen's book is saved from this fate by its Herbert did not want it to happen. All these though t h e had come strategy of approaching the life through the manoeuvres take a great deal more imagina­ hom e. De Groen is too re- art: it is as m u ch a stu dy of the biographical tion and inventiveness than de Groen seems pelled by the movement's sources of Herbert's fiction as a conventional to give Herbert credit for; they also refer to anti- semitism , Hitler-worship and general life and work. real social forces and historical possibili ties, crankiness to be able to show why it held Su ch an approach does have its and they represent more than an attempt to su ch strong appeal for nationalists like irritations, as when we are repeatedly told resolve psychological obsessions. Herbert and even liberal pacifists like Miles that one or oth er person or experience Herbert explained in an ABC radio Franklin. She contrasts it with the left wing becam e character X or Chapter Y of one of broadcast in 1975 that PFMC was a lament FAW, wh en in fact the two organisations his novels, claims which are usually either for 'the tragedy of our nation .. . [which] shared a ferven t cultural nationalism, and dubious or trite, but this strategy does work lived thirteen years and died' in the trenches likens it to th e conservatism of R.G. better for Herbert than it would for an of World War I, and then missed its second Menzies and theNewGuard(p113). Nothing author whose work is less autobiographical, chance to be a nation when it failed to take could be more misleading: Menzies, as we and up to a point it works well: clearly there an independent stand against the German all know, was British to his bootstraps, is much in PFMC, for example, that is based and Japanese threats in 1939-42. He while the New Guard was established directly on the author's experience with considered that he sorrowed for his 'lost precisely to fight disloyalists like Jack Lang; the Australia First Movement. In relation country' in the same way as Aborigines Australia First was so anti-Empire it was to Capricornia, however, in which no prevented from returning to their tribal willing to do a deal with Japan. Herbert character is remotely based on the author, lands would mourn and cry 'poor fellow my became bitterly disillusioned with the it does not work so effectively. Certainly country'. Herbert was clearly among those movem ent's increasin g adu lati on of Herbert drew on his experience of life and who believed that Australia did become, in German and Japanese fascism, and the anger the people he met in the N orthern Territory Bernard O'Dowd's words, a place where he allowed to break out in PFMC is propor­ to help create the characters an d inciden ts 'the West/In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal tional to the hopes he must originally have of the novel, but all authors do that sort of nest' and 'a new demesne for Mamm on to

V oLUME 9 N uMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 35 infest' rather than the 'millennia! Eden' caste in Australian literature to be presented movem ent of the 1970s and helped to create which m ight on ce have lurked as a as a suffering human being with whom the a climate of opinion in which the Mabo and possibility before the King and Empire mob reader is expected to feel sympathy. With Wik judgm ents were possible. stuffed things up. In both Capricornia and his creation (following Prichard 's Xavier Herbert does not emerge from PFMC Herbert symbolises the process Coonardoo) 'Australian culture begins a this book as an attractive or sympathetic whereby their cohorts violated Eden and process of atonement, t h e con cerned character, yet even on the evidence presented ruined millennia! hopes with conscience is pointed a way by which it it seem s that he endured more suffering amazing dramatic force. might be quietened, and Truganini laid to than he inflicted. For all the liifficulties of rest behind h er mountains' (The Spectre of his personality he gave us two great works H IS TRAGIC VISION of Australian history Truganini, p31). of art that have enriched our politics and will not endear Herbert to those who It is difficult to estimate the impact of culture and which will stand as signposts to complain that the 'black armband' view PFMC on modern Australian sensibility, their times in years to come. History has has becom e too popular among intellectuals. but a book that sold 69,000 copies in four shown that his politics were utopian, but it There is more than an echo of PFMC at the years (p260) must have left some trace in is not the function of creative writers to end of the fifth volume of Manning Clark's the public mind. The novel gave many formulate practical political blueprints; it History of Australia, where the Gallipoli readers t h eir firs t positive and non­ is enough that they provide us with material landing is seen as a tragedy which tied the patronising exposure to Aboriginal culture, to nourish our dreams of a better world. new nation to the old world: 'Australia's and it left many of them with a sympathetic This is the first complete biography of Xavier day of glory had made her a prisoner of h er interest in both the Aborigines' traditional Herbert, but it will certainly not be the last, past, rather than the architect of a new way of life and their modern plight. It would, and it will be interesting to see what other future for humanity .. . The ideals of in fact, be impossible to read the novel and writers m ake of him. Dr de Groen has given Australia had been "cast to the winds"' not come away with at least some respect us a very full and mostly convincing picture, (The people make laws, p426). And of course for tribal culture, particularly its attachment but there can be little doubt that Proteus his undying anger at the dispossession and to the land, and at least som e concern that has a few masks and tricks that have not yet mistreatment of the Aboriginal people is the plans of the developers will destroy been revealed: we are likely to be wrestling another reason why Herbert will not be an these relationships. We cheer every time with Old Horrible for many years to come. • Approved Author am ong those who want Prindy evades the troopers and shudder at us to forget the past. Our great fear as the threats to Lily Lagoons. In this way the Robert Darby is an independent scholar and (British ) white Australians has historically work of Herbert did much to develop public editor; correspondence is welcome: been that somebody else (French, Russians, support for the Aboriginal land rights [email protected]. C hinese, u nspecified Asian hordes, Germans, Japanese, Russians again, Chinese again ... ) will come and take the country from us in the same way as we took it from BooKs: 3 the Aboriginal people. Formerly the fear P ETER PIERCE was of armed invasion; today the concern is Asian immigration. Herbert has no such anxieties and takes great delight in probing this sore point. As Billy Brew, the donkey driver, puts it to Jeremy: Mentioning the war Hain't I told you a 'undred times there hain't no 'ope fo r that Au stralia Felix Th~ Scar that Binds: American C ultur~ and th~ Virtnam W<~r , lunacy I We're an Asiatic country. It fallers h~ Keith Beattie, New York U niversity Press, 19

36 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 The first presupposes the need for a healing in the American way) within the legend of more symbolic than it can be literal. The Anzac, and healing was facilely proclaimed. second examines a sinister paradox. While The second and third sections of The AUSTRAilAN at first veterans were often portrayed as Scar that Binds, 'The Vietnam Veteran as inarticulate, psychopathic, functionally Ventriloquist' and 'Bringing the War silent, when given a talking part ' the "Home'" extend Beattie's analysis of the e-thic~l Agribusiness or veteran's heavily m ediated speaking voice spurious image of national unity that was was heard to speak only of unity'. Finally forged after 19 75 and the American reafforestation. TRUSTS Beattie traces the processes, abetted by abandonment of Vietnam . The foot-soldier Mining or recycling . Investors popular culture, in which in the 1980s 'the was known as the 'grunt', hence reduced to Exploitation or can choose notion of a consensual, convivial "home" language's lowest common denominator. sustainability. Through the AE Tru sts you was reinforced in the nostalgic agenda of The silenced veteran naturally inclined to Greenhouse gases con invest your savings the Reagan administration'. physical violence and, by a cyclical process, or solar energy. and superannuation in The first of these three sections of the 'Depicted as mentally deranged, violently Armaments or over 70 different book is the most complex, and also the emotional, or hysterical, the veteran is community enterprises, each expertly most persuasive. Writing of 'The Healed forced into silence, the mark of hysteria.' enterprise . selected for its unique Wound', Beattie contends that: Yet when the veteran found a voice, or had combinati on of earnings, on e found for him, 'h e was virtually Contrary to common assumptions, the environmental condemned to speak of unity'- Coming war in Vietnam did not cause the 'wound'. sustainability and social hom e, veterans found that their war had Rather, the war exposed the existence of responsibility, and earn a already, if vicariously, been fought in the 'wounds' already present within American competitive financial nation's living rooms, on nightly television. culture. return . For full details The idea that Vietnam had been repatriated make a free call to Returned hom e, the suffering veterans with the veteran was the pernicious but were afflicted by emblematic maladies 'the standard device employed to evoke the 1800 021 227 which illuminated those cultural divisions: ruinous impact of the war'. Yet gradually lw'estmellls in tbe Australian Etb ical Trusts can American popular culture began to attest onh· be made througb the current prospectus paraplegia, madness, impotence. The long registered tflitb tbe Australian Securities line of paraplegic veterans, who feature in (on the evidence of its own desires) that the Commission a nd at•ai/able from: such films as Coming Home (19 78) and family had been healed. Top-rating programs Australiatr Etbicalltwestment Ltd Born on the Fourth of Jul y (1989) begins of the 1980s included Family Ties and The l 'nil 66. Ca nberra Business Centre Bradfield St. Dott'lter ACT ! 60.! with the plaintive twang of country-and­ Cosby Show. Even ET was able to go home. western: 'Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Beattie concludes persuasively that the Town' (1969). Beattie has bravely confronted constant assertion of home in political The Centre for Christian the sentimental, the shocking and the rhetoric and popular culture collusively Spirituality schlock-ridden in his research: pop songs evokes a condition that bears the traces of and so-called Vietnam westerns, Ma gnum a sedimented comm on sense that has Principal: Bishop David Walker and The A-Team (war experience uniting invested the word 'home' with a number of Associate Member Institute of the Sydney otherwise marginalised characters), the sub­ m eanings: security, succour, conviviality College of Divinity genre of missing-in-action m ovies and and unity. Distance Education Programs in depictions of the veteran literally as a fiend But the judgment that h e reaches is (see Blood of Ghastly Horror, 1971 ). more ambitious, and in line with the sub­ Theology and Spirituality 'The Healing Wound' also interrogates title of The Scar that Binds. These are his including: 'stab wounds', that is the theory so final words: Certificate in Theology (SCD) memorably mumbled (in different words) This is what it has come to: the reworking Bachelor of Theology (SCD) by John Rambo, that American soldiers in of the American identity within the history Graduate Diploma in Christian Vietnam, like their German counterparts of the operation of ideological strategies of Spirituality (SCD) in the Great War, had been stabbed in the unity is the devastating outco me of Master of Arts in Theological Studies back. Beattie also highlights the American involvement in the Vietnam War. pathological condition which h e calls (SCD) 'Vietnamesia': Noun-heavy and verb-poor, this prose The Centre also offers casual Bed/ eerily echoes official pronouncem ents of Breakfast accommodation and conference the various nostrums to forget signal the those who prosecuted and sought to justify facilities in the heart of Randwick. end of the war on two counts: the wilful the war in Vietnam. Appropriating their effacement of memory erodes the effect of language may be Beattie's parodic strategy the war, and it translates into a form of death Further Information: in this summary of a stark indictment. In for all those who participated in the war. The Administrator any event, the full ironic implications of PO Box 201 , Australia, too, favoured that amnesia his title, The Scar that Binds, are at last Randwick, 203 1 about its experiences in the war, until the exposed. • Ph: (02)939822 1 l, Ame rican Welcome Hom e marches prompted a sentimental enfolding of our Peter Pierce is Professor of Australian Fax: (02)93995228 Vietnam veterans (as we cam e to call them, Literature at James Cook University. Email: centre@ internet-australi a.com

V o LUME 9 NuMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 37 BOOKS: 4

JoN GREENAWAY Burmese days

The Voice ol' Hope, Alan Clements and Aung San <>uu Ky 1, Pcngum, l'J'J7, J<;!IN 0140266 15 I Freedom from Fear, Aung San 5uu Kyi, PengUin, 19'):) (rev 1sed edition), J<;!I\J 01402531 73 Lett~rs from Burma, Aung San Suu Kyt, Pengum, 19')7, J<;H"- 0140264035

H OW CAN>aumcmc betwoenvi'Hmg 'Would yo u mind very much ' hould H e< h onkne" ' ' pointed to by he< your dying husband fo r the last time and such a situation ever arise? How probable it colleagues, such as NLD Deputy Chairman leading your countrymen 's fi ght against is I do not know, but the possibility is U Kyi Maung, as one of the reasons for the t yranny? Can su ch a stark ch oice be there.' popularity of the weekend talks she gave carried out while m aintaining a senses of The respect and admiration the Oxford ou tside her residence after she was released equilibrium? academic had fo r his wife's convictions is fro m six years of house arrest in 1995. She T his almost surreal scenario presented apparent in the fe w pages he contributed to is also admired for her ability to empathise itself to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at the end of the edition of h er writings he himself with any and all. In Letter from Burma, a March as the culmination of two all-too-real revised. His application for a visa to visit collection of articles she wrote for a Japanese them es that have dominated Burmese his wife in Burma before he died (from daily over the course of the year, sh e politics in the last decade: the desire of the prostate cancer) was the fulfilment of Suu introduces the reader to Burmese culture ruling military junta to harry its mostfamous Kyi's request. Machiavelli might rem ark and philosophy as much, if not more than citizen into exile and her determination that it was a political act calculated to she does to the platform of her party. not to be cowed by the tactics they employ. invoke the internation al community's loud In one piece she refers to the Japanese It's hard to avoid the impression that the condemnation of the junta's refusal. Suu occupation of Burma during World Wa r II. 1991 Nobel Laureate knew what personal Kyi once observed, after one of the countless Japan was originally invited by her father's sacrifices where to com e when she helped occasions on which the military blocked Burma Independence Army as a means of launch the National League of Democracy off access to her house in University Avenue, evicting British administration . But the (NLD ) in 1988. Herfather Aung San, revered that she tried to maintain as normal a Burmese quickly realised that what they in Burm a fo r his role in ending British rule, lifes tyle as possible but that circumstances had done was replace an old colonial yoke was assassinated by a rival politician in often m ade that impossible. with a new one fashioned by war. Aung 1947 when Suu Kyi was two. Most of her 'My colleagues and I agree that were we San's troops switched allegiances and fo ught colleagu es in setting up the NLD were to write about our experiences in the with the allies to push the Japanese out. fo rmermilitary m en disaffectedby N e Win's form of a novel it would be criticised as Suu Kyi quoted lines from songs that the 1962 coup. They had served in the army, and too far-fetched a story, a botched Japanese troops sang while in Burma. She had also been imprisoned by it, so were all A Orwellian tale.' asks whether words such as 'Old horse are too fa miliar with its paranoia and singular you feeling sleepy? The reins I hold are as a brutality. The NLD was created the m onth UNG SAN Suu KYJ's observations of vein that links your blood to mine', are after unarmed civilians were gunned down Burm ese politics, history and society, particularly militaristic. fo r daring to go out on strike, and a week spread across interview s, n ewspaper She concludes that extremism can turn and a half after the State Law and Order articles, and her academ ic work, di splay even a pretty song into a war chant. Restoration Council (SLORC) announced an unruffled intelligence. She employs a The kind of dem ocracy Aung Sa n Suu itself the legitimate government of Burma. plainness of expression that accords with Kyi would like to bring to Burma appears to It coul d even be suggested that Suu Kyi the core dem ocratic principles to which be less a client of free markets, as it is in the had long anticipated that she might be sh e has devoted h erself. It cuts against OECD, than a system of government based where she is today. In his introduction to the more fl orid language that fa wning an d on civic respon sibility a nd Bu ddh ist Freedom from Fear, h er late husband, l ess de termined per son alities u se to m orality. This is understandable, given she Dr Michael Aris, quoted fr om one of the describe h er. is in opposition to a m ilitary junta that has letters she wrote him prior to their marriage Someone said once that a strong will is no respect for such values. But one might in 1972. She was worried that her m arrying dependent upon a formidable intellect but wonder whether there is a kind of enforced a foreigner-in thiscaseasubject ofBurma's in the case of the leader of Burma's dem o- naivety here. Because Suu Kyi and her former colonial ruler- might be misinter- cratic opposition it seem s the other way colleagu es must constantly m ake stands on preted by the people who loved her fa ther as around. Her erudition is not wasted on principle, they delay the em ergen ce of more a lessening of her affection for them . clever rhetoric or distracting the reader sophistica ted m odels. In The Voice of Hope, 'I ask one thing,' she wrote, 'that should with witty asides but put towards one goal: a series of interviews with Burm a scholar my people need me, you would h elp m e to an end to military rule and the creation of a Alan C l e m ents, Suu Kyi declares a do my du ty by them . multi-party dem ocratic state. preference for m anaging foreign influence.

38 EUREKA STREET • M AY 1999 Rangoon 1998. The Burmese people to whom Suu Kyi returned . The photograph they are carrying is of her father, Aung San . Inset: Aung San Suu Kyi .

Main photograph by Greg Scullin. 'If it comes in too quickly in this way, army: Khin Nyunt, h ead of military We were publicly denounced, along with we may end up with a very superficial kind intelligence, and Than Shwe, General-in­ the George Soros-funded Open Society of non-culture. I am very much for Chief. As yet there have been no purges, or Institute, for trying to foment revolution in openness-people studying other cultures. cracks in the SPDC's stony face. Burma. The accusation led to the delicious But this kind of quick invasion can be The wars with e thnic minorities suggestion of a massive Jewish-Catholic unhealthy.' continue but are less intense than in years conspiracy, captured in the headline Could a democratic Burmese govern­ gone by. The ceasefires with the Kachin, 'Vatican and Soros combine to undermine ment manage to limit the spread of MTV, Wa and Mon people are still holding, though government: junta'publishedinindia's The Coke and McDonalds if it also wished to shaky, and while the Shan are fighting again Asian Age. bring prosperity to its people? now that the resistance has picked itself up, It would be wrong to think Aung Sa n But that is not the question of the they constitute no more than nuisance Suu Kyi believes in non-violence and moment. The pressing issue is when the value. The Karen are h olding out, though appealing to the military's better nature junta will sit down and negotiate a peaceful at the end of each dry season they seem to because she hasn't the courage to engage in transition to democracy with the ethnic lose a little more ground to the junta's armed struggle. A story of her walking minorities and the NLD-which nine years forces. Nobody has the ability to bargain through a line of armed soldiers while ago this month won over 80 per cent of the with Rangoon, least of all the many drumming up support for the NLD, which vote in an election result never honoured thousands of Karen, Shan and Mon refugees she recounts in The Voice of Hope, has by the military. in Thailand. become legend. She was leading a march in There are few signs that the State Peace But despite few prospects for change rural Burma when they came across a line and Development Council (as SLORC and the death of her husband on the other of soldiers with guns drawn. They were renamed itself in 1997) is loosening its grip side of the world, it is hard to imagine Aung given an order to stay off the road, which on power. Nor is there any indication of a San Suu Kyi abandoning her peaceful, she asked her fo llowers to comply with, but willingness to bring Suu Kyi and others Ghandiesque approach to forcing change. she continued to walk towards them while into the picture. She has always made a point of meeting a major who was accompanying her rally The possibility that Burma is on the extremism with moderation. In Voice of argued with the officer in charge. brink of insolvency and that the edifice will Hope she answered a question about 'We just walked through the soldiers crumble for lack of funds has been over­ whether the junta had ever captured her who were kneeling there and I noticed that estimated. Through much of 1997 and last 'inside'. some of them were actually shaking and year, its official reserve of foreign capital 'Have you ever read a book called muttering to themselves but I don't know was put as low as US$50 million, but this Middlemarch by George Eliot? There was a whether it was out of hatred or nervousness. includes no reference to the black economy character called Dr Lydgate whose marriage 'Apparently the captain [in charge of the which is where most economic activity turned out to be a disappointment. soldiers] tore the insignia off his shoulder. takes place. When a top civil administrator I remember a remark about him, that what He threw it down and said, "what are all earns a wage barely the equivalent ofUS$20 he was afraid of was that he might no longer these for if I'm not allowed to shoot," or a month, survival for most is dependent on be able to love his wife who had been a words to that effect.' abusing your position to extract gifts and disappointment to him. Perhaps greater international pressure bribes. To pass examinations, students must 'I've always felt that if I had really for change in Burma will be the catalyst. have extra-curricular tuition by teachers. started hating my captors, hating the There are signs that A SEAN, which accepted Hospital workers charge for everything from SLORC and the army, I would Burma as a member in 1997, is starting to syringes to comfortable rides in wheelchairs. r"J1 have defeated myself.' take a more aggressive approach on human Without gratuities, bureaucrats perform at rights abuses in Burma, led by the more glacial pace. .l.HERE ARE SOME democracy activists, dynamic foreign ministers of Thailand and The black economy is made liquid particularly students, who would haveAung the Philippines. largely through drug profits. Burma still San Suu Kyi take a more forceful approach. This is something Aung SanS u u K yi has produces more than half of the world's Last year when elected representatives were always aimed for. Prior to the beginning of opium in Northern Shan state and drug being locked away to prevent the NLD this year's general session of the office of lords are now opening up the amphetamine carrying out its plan to convene the the United Nations Commissioner for market as well. The government regularly parliament elected in 1990, there were Human Rights she asked that they not allows amnesties on declaring money, and muted calls for a tougher stand. However, forget what is happening in her country, as the Wa and particularly the Kachin to oppose SPDC directly m eans facing up to she has done every year over the last decade. syndicates have been able to launder their an army of 500,000 and an intelligence Maybe this will be the year. Indeed she profits through legitimate businesses in operation with staggering reach. offers this conclusion towards the end of Rangoon. As an example of this last point, the The Voice of Hope: Nor does the State Peace and Develop­ Jesuit Refugee Service in Bangkok-for 'Something that moves people to ment Council look likely to split apart or be which I work-was infiltrated by an SPDC identify themselves with what is happening riven by internal fighting. When the junta informer posing as a client last year. in Burma will raise the level of their rejected the awkwardly appropriate Extreme! y accurate information about what consciousness. And you can never tell what acronym SLORC for SPDC in 1997, help we offer to Burmese seeking refugee thatis.' • questions were asked about whether this status from the Thailand office of the United meant there was movement around the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Jon Greenaway is Eureka Street's South two m ost powerful figures in N e Win's was published in an intelligence journal. East Asia correspondent.

40 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 BooKs: 5

I AN D UNN to Foreign Aff airs in 1945, h e m ade inform ation available to the Russians that was usually intercepted- by a technical unit based n ear Darwin-wh ile being On the case tran sm itted to Moscow. The only problem was that once our technicians had inter­ That Disreputable Firm ... The Inside Story o( Slater & Gordon, cepted the material, the problem of decoding by Michael C,tnnon, Melbourne Umversay Press, 1998 . it was left to the British or the Americans. ISBN 0 522 84787 0, RRI' S:W. 95 Once th ey saw what they were dealing with L IKE MANY wHo HAVE read That seem to have been fighting cases forever, and Jim 's role in it, they froze Australia ou t Disreputable Firm I expected an account of this book provides confirmation. That is- of secret communication without telling the great battles fo ught by Slater & Gordon. if 70 years can be regarded as 'forever', the hapless Dr Evatt why. The Departmen t Almost all within the legal profession which in a history as short as Australia's, it of Foreign Affairs was astute enough to admired the persisten ce with which this pretty well can be. Another extraordinary transfer Jim to a variety of less sensitive fir m fou ght for asbes t os suffere rs, fa ct also em erges. At least in the last 30 positions. Those who have been critical of particularly fr om the Wittenoom mines in years the turf wars fo ught between the that Departm ent in relation to the Petrov Wes te rn Aus tralia. Som ewh a t m ore 'labour fi rm s' have been as robust as those affair m ay need to reconsider their position controversially, their recent work for the against their conservative opposition . How once they have read this book. N ew Guinea landowners affected by the ironical, therefore, that wh en Bill Slater In recent years, Slaters, previously very Ok T edi mine attracted much interest, with n eeded legal work at Hamilton it was reliant upon trade union referrals for their the su ccessful outcom e of that bitterly provided by Maurice Blackburn and that fo r work, have pioneered the advertising of 'no fought case appearing to speak for itself. a time the two practised as Blackburn & win- no fee' as a means of attracting clients Less successful, but equally well fought, Slater-a combina tion which had n ot from fa r and wide. As Cannon points out, was a battle fo r the victims of abuse by the surfaced again until Slater & Gordon and for decades, solicitors, and indeed som e Christian Brothers in Western Australia. M aurice Bl ackburn & Co recently barristers, practised on this basis, well And underpinning all of this has been the announced that they are sterling work carried out by the fi rm for pooling their resources hundreds of thousands of vi ctims of to represent the victims accidents at work or in motor vehicles. It has of the Lon gford gas been this work through which m embers of explosion. the Australian and, particularly, Victorian But it is the book's community have had contact with Slater & description of the firm's Gordon and fo r which many are grateful. relationship with com ­ The accounts of these battles are munism that I am sure grippingly told, the chapters dealing with will attract m ost interest. There is first the k n owing tha t if t h eir client was Wittenoom and Ok Tedi being particularly detailed and sympathetic portrayal of the unsuccessful in a court action, the lawyers m oving. But, to this reviewer, the book's la te T ed Hill. Wha t an extraordinary would not be paid. When the Law Institute attraction lies fi rst in its account of Labor character! Born of parents who were by no freed up the advertising restrictions in the history from World War I onwards. m eans impoverished, T ed's uncompromis­ early 1980s, Slater & Gordon saw the How, one might ask, could Bill Slater ing support of his political belief attracted potential. In turn, this has led to the recent possibly h ave gained election to the interest as early as 1936. When Hugh handling of massive class actions which, Victorian Parliament in 1917 as a Labor Gordon, Bill Slater's partner, departed for again, are regarded with suspicion in certain candida t e, representing Dundas, the service in the RAAF, Ted more than filled quarters. Bu t the truth is that they have prin cipal towns in which were Hamilton, his shoes. He fought every battle there was opened the doors of the justice system to Coleraine and Casterton ? Perhaps the answer to be fought for workers in Victoria. He also m any victim s of injury or other di saster, is that he was elected withou t campaigning represented the Communist Party in its and for this the firm deserves great credit. fo r the very good reason that at that tim e he battles against the Menzies legislation While the book is laudatory, the writer was immersed in the mud and blood of designed to get rid of it. In his support for has n ot ign ored the recent disastrou s France while serving in the ambulan ce Stalinist communism , T ed attracted many handling of the litigation brought by Cheryl corps. Indeed, his sole contribution to the unions to the clientele of Slater & Gordon Harris against Ian Smith MLA. And a election was to sign a blank nomination and his subsequent declaration of support number of other m atters in which the firm fo rm before departing for Europe. for the Chinese variety led to the loss of was unsuccessful do receive the author's Readers throughout the legal profession m any friends, and a great m any clients. attention. N evertheless, he reach es th e will be fascinated to learn that in 1924, Bill And then there is T ed's younger brother, conclusion that there are fa r m ore pluses Slater succeeded Sir Arthur Robinson as Jim. He did not join Slater & Gordon until than minuses, a conclusion that might not Attorney-Gen eral and that thereafter, Sir 1953 (and served as a much-loved partner necessarily be shared by our Victorian Arthur gave young Bill a fearful bucketing fo r 20 years) but what an extraordinary Premier, whose contribution to the book from his elevated position in the Upper eight years h ad preceded his arrival. was its nam e. • House. Both founded great, though entirely Intelligence files first released in 1996 appear different, law firms. For those who have to make it certain that Jim was a Russian Ian Dunn is chief executive officer of the observed that 'Arthur Robs and Slaters' spy. Recruited by the infamous Ian Milner Law Institute of Victoria.

VoLUME 9 N uMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 41 L Mmou'"' Age of 1 Apdl "" ' " young writers' program; a massive street a judicious blend of local and interstate obituary of Joan Rayner who died in March, parade and m an y o ther participatory companies targeting audiences across the just a few m onths short of her 1OOth activities which involved thou sands of school-age spectrum from Kindergarten to birthday. The N ew Zealand-born Ra yner South Australian school-children, plus Year 12. And while audiences for som e sisters (Betty died in 1981) were am ong the professional and school-based music, dance evening performances were disappointing, pioneers of theatre fo r young people in and visual arts events. the fes tival board's decision to revert to the Australia; they not only toured their own Interstate and overseas performing arts old Com e Out fo rmu l a was clearly children's theatre shows throughout the companies joined the many Adelaide-based vindicated by the fact that the daytime country from 1948 to 1965, under the nam e companies to present specially commis­ shows for schools (w hich constitute the of Australian Children 's Theatre, but they sioned or invited Com e Out shows. By bulk of the program me) were 92 per cent also brou ght overseas attrac tion s to 1983, Come Out was regularly hosting (in sold out. Australia and gave countless local artists a association with Carclew and ASSITEJ­ One show for littlies was Playpen, by start in the trade once they gave away the international association for children's the composer and performer Linsey Pollack. performing themselves. Master puppeteer and youth theatre) a m ajor conference of all Commissioned for last year's Ou t Of The Richard Bradshaw was one artist who was of Australia's young people's theatre Box Fe tival of Early Childhood in Brisbane, nurtured by the Rayners; in fact, puppetry companies, plus m any from abroad, along­ Playpen is a cl eft little piece about a baby generally received great support from the side the festival itself. These were the salad (artfully played in a giant nappy by Pollack) sisters' entrepreneurial phase. days of Australian young people's theatre. who discovers and explores the m usical An event that must have given the Not surprisingly, generational changes potential of his oversized playpen and the Rayners considerable satisfaction (though occurred and a new broom swept through obj ects within it. The pen's rungs, fo r they had no direct hand in it them selves) the organisation in 1997-renaming the example, are tuned like a giant upright was th e inauguration of the biennial Come festival Take Over: Australian Festival for marimba; they also light up spectacularly Out You th Arts Festival in Adelaide in Young People. It focu sed on the work of when played. His teddy bear is eq uipped 1975. Australia's first, and still m ost promi­ local em erging artists aged 18-26, multi­ with a microphone and a sampler, w hich nent, young people's arts fe stival, Com e m edia and t echnologi cally driven provides the 'rhythm beds' for the percussive Out em erged from a youth arts program of performance and visual arts, cyber arts, m elodies on the 'marimba'-as well as a the Adelaide Festival, which ran a small fashion and dance parties plus a substantial very loud fart or two! Likewise, a feeding young people's component for som e years overseas performance component. Its centre bottle becomes a flute and balloons become prior to 1974. The Festival Board decided was located in a specially built site (named bagpipes. It's a terrific idea bu t, fo r all its that a ma jor metropolitan and regional Capital City) in Elder Park and the idea was digital and luminescent technology, the festival of professional performances, work­ for the whole thing to be staffed by young show runs out of steam a bit before the end. shops and school-based activity would take people who would thus ' take over' the Another show for primary -aged kids was place in every 'odd' year (the Adelaide festival city. In some ways, this makeover an adaptation of one of the ubiquitous Tim Festival itself occurring in the 'even ' years) was designed to capitalise on the success of Winton's stories, The Bugalugs Bum Thief, fro m 1975. the 1996 Adelaide Festival's Red Square fr om Fremantle's Spare Parts Puppet From 1975 to 1983, Com e Out gained performance venue, and Take Over did make Theatre. I fo und this extremely popular show such strength and popularity that it outgrew som e appeal to the young adult age group limited in its means; it is essentially a three­ its Adelaide Festival base and, in 1984, but failed to capture the imagination of the handed spoken-word narrative illustra ted by becam e an entirely separate body, with its younger age groups for whom the festival some attractive dance, slide projections, a own legal identity and an administrative had traditionally catered. Even a planned couple of rod puppets and an effective bit of centre based in the Carclew Youth Arts N ational Youth Arts Forum was cancelled. shadow puppetry. Bu t th e kids loved the Centre in N orth Adelaide. In the m ean time, This rather ambitious experiment only obvious bum jokes, the simple detective many of the standard features of the Festival lasted for one festival (if it wasn 't broken, story and the visual gags of the characters had becom e established. These included a why try to fi x it?) and this year Come Out trying to go about their lives m inus their substantial m enu of professional theatre has com e back with m ost of its traditional bottoms, not to m ention the antics of a produ ctions (many of which toured regional elem ents intact, although with no inter­ giant crayfish. Bugalugs will be back fo r a centres and schools in addition to their in­ national component. My sampling of the return season at Spare Parts' excellen t house metropolitan th ea tre season s); a 1999 professional theatre program revealed Frem antle theatre from 7 June to 10 July.

42 EUREKA STREET • MAv 1999 One of the most impressive shows for effects to support their superlative acting secondary students was an original work skills. The Stones is based on an incident in entitled Visible Darkness from Patch Melbourne when two teenagers throwing Theatre Company, which is now the only stones off a pedestrian bridge over a freeway professional young people's theatre killed a motorist passing below. company in Adelaide, following a Zeal's show begins by engaging our restructure occasioned by the recent drastic interest in two lads aged 13 and 15 whose reduction in Australia Council funding to relatively harmless pranks include a botched theatre in that city. This very high-tech warehouse break-in via a sewerage drain, show is a complex amalgam of dance, trying to pinch the badge off a BMW and puppetry, film, 'smart lighting', a driving trying to set fire to a cat: all this in evocative rock soundscape and a brilliant set mime and streetwise dialect. The boys' whose mobile components are endlessly behaviour is intercut by scenes involving a reconfigured to make prison walls, a pair of shambling cops trying to catch the skateboard ramp or a playshelf for expertly miscreants. So far the play is light-hearted operated long-rod puppets. The whole thing and at times wickedly funny. But when the is put together by Patch's new Artistic main incident occurs, the tone changes Director Ken Evans (late of Handspan Visual markedly. You could hear a pin drop as the Theatre) and Jonathan Taylor (founder of play goes on to portray the inevitable after­ Australian Dance Theatre in Adelaide math, including the trial and community many years ago) together with lighting attitudes towards the incident. Zeal don't designer Philip Lethlean, puppet maker merely present the case; without a hint of Colleen Crapper and costumier Anne didacticism, they reveal the complex issues Rabone. It's one of those pieces whose of juvenile justice, youth alienation, collaborative whole is greater than the sum parental responsibility and police of its parts. sensibilities. The show focuses first on two alienated This is a stunningly good piece of theatre, individual teenagers (a latter-day Juliet and brilliantly conceived and superbly Romeo?) and their relationship to a darkly performed. Theatre in education is clearly surreal urban world which confines and not dead yet; it is certainly practised by threatens them in different ways. This is all fewer companies but I have never seen it portrayed in contemporary dance; not a done better than this in 25 years. word is spoken. Both are reinforced in their As if to underline the power of a theatre attitudes by the demon of peer-group that depends on the imagination rather pressure, represented by a' chon1s' of dancers than technology, and on genuine emotion from the Out-Rageous Youth Dance and real issues rather than the trendy Company. But he finds an outlet for his pent­ fashions of the cyber age, Come Out also up energies when he rediscovers his prison brought in the Riverina Theatre Company's walls-now tilted at impossible angles-as production (from Wagga Wagga) of Tony a surface for some dazzling skateboarding. Strachan's 1984 play State of Shock. This She has an inkling of better things in the portrays, infictionalisedfashion, the events form of a film showing a future self projected leading up to and following the murder of on to her blouse. Both receive visits from Deirdre Gilbert on a Queensland Aboriginal illuminated little guiding-light spirit reserve in 1979 by her de facto husband puppets and soon enough the two meet in a Alwyn Peter and-like The Stones-it does joyous pas-de-deux of lyrical grace alternat­ so with a minimum of props and staging ingwithgawkyteenageenergy. VisibleDark­ and an emphasis on the character-acting ness might suffer a bit from repetitiousness skills of two young Aboriginal actors (Trisha and an over-abundance of special effects Morton-Thomas and Lee Willis) and one but it speaks powerful! y to its whitefella (Jim Holt) who play the five teenage audience. characters in this moving drama with a simple and unaffected truth. A T THE OTHER END of the technological So welcome back, Come Out; I'll be spectrum is The Stones from the Melbourne­ there again in 2001. Meanwhile, fans of based Zeal Theatre. This is a two-hander young people's theatre can look forward to written and performed by Stefo Nantsou Perth's Awesome International Children's and Tom Lycos, who play several different Festival in November and Brisbane's Out characters each with no more than a couple Of The Box Festival next June. • of carpenter's saw-horses, an aluminium ladder, the most minimal of costume Geoffrey Milne is head of theatre and drama alterations and their own vocalised sound at LaTrobe University.

V OLUME 9 NUMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 43 In the screamingly to convey both the banality and the tragedy funny Loci<, S tocl< of a life lived out of sequence and corrupted and Two Smoking from without and within. Frank Langella, Barrels, murder and as the blithe professional paedophile, Clare Break up mayhem are a self-contained joke, but Quilty, is the actor who best catches Divorcing Tach never banishes a sense of Nabokov's basilisk apprehension of evil. laughing reality to make way for the humour. Quilty knows what he does and glories in it. I haven't read Colin Bateman's book 'Granddaughters?' h e offers. The final Divorcing Ja ck, dir. David Caffrey. Black upon which the film is based and it may be scenes, where Humbert seeks his perverse comedy is an elusive concept. It's all in the hilarious. Words often soften violence while salvation in Quilty's slaying, are a Jacobean recipe, the delicate balance between the camera simply records it. slaughterhouse, ludicrous and terrifying­ frequently offensive reality and visual and -Gordon Lewis and as close as Adrian Lyne comes to the oral humour which is part of the main darkness of Vladimir Nabokov's conjurings, theme. When it goes wrong, often it is Ironing out to his 'nightmare of wonder'. because the horrific events dominate and -Morag Fraser the humour is crushed. Humbert This time the humour is intermingled Lolita, dir. Adrian Lyne. Now the censorship Four X or a with a story about the lunacy which is the squall is over (what a misdirected effort it Troubles in Belfast. wasL Adrian Lyne's sober cinematic raid on Guinness? Set in 1999, the election of the first the capricious genius of Vladimir Nabokov The Craie, dir. Ted Emery. The three Prime Minister of an independent Northern may turn some film -goers into new readers greatest Irish cultural exports, as everybody Ireland is just days away. David Thew lis is of the book which started all the fuss. Lolita knows, have been Jim Stynes, Jim Joyce and Starkey, a satirical columnist for the Belfast was a shock to the imagination in 1955, and Jimeoin. Stynes and Joyce have both retired Evening News. He is an identity in his own the intervening 45 years have only or, as Joyce might have said, go t out of their right both for this and his public boozing. sharpened its edge. I wonder sometimes if boots and given them the hang-ups. That Distrustful of all politicians, he is no less the US Customs had any idea what they leaves Jimeoin as the sole active custodian cynical about the candidate most likely to were doing when they stamped the visa of of thousands of years of wit and wisdom. be elected the new Prime Minister. the urbane butterfly collector from Russia. It's a mighty responsibility that he brings to Kicked out of his home by his wife Not all anarchy comes with plastic his film, The Craie, and he handles it with because of a flirtation with a young woman explosives in its briefcase. all the subtlety of a man who gets a laugh he has met, he spends the night with her. Lyne's film is a serious work, almost out of sticking his proboscis in the foam on Returning to her flat, h e finds the girl too scrupulous-it has a wash of com­ the top of a Guinness. Jimeoin has tried to bloodily murdered and not only does he memoration over it. Howard Atherton's protect his rich heritage by hiding it within become a prime suspect but inextricably cinematography is exquisite, but it is the a funny bit of a film. He has put serious involved in kidnapping, blackmail and beauty of nostalgia. In the 1950s Nabokov culture hounds off the scent by distracting political intrigue. was discovering America, not burying it. them with a few harmless belly laughs at As Starkey tries to sort out who is killing But it is hard to recreate cinematically the the expense of a host of stock characters. whom and why, the violence is overlaid by brash verve of a confident post-war America But the discemingviewer will not be deceived. some good one-liners and sight gags, the that has been refiguring itself in endless Fergus (Jimeoin) and Wesley (Alan best of which is our hero Starkey's prized stereotype ever since. Lyne has great McKee) have overstayed their tourist visas limited-edition Clash single being cooked technical skill but a rehearsed imagination. in Australia and are now dodging the in a sandwich-maker by his very angry wife. And then there is Jeremy Irons. His immigration police. This is a coded account However, the laughs come slowly, Humbert Humbert is a great performance, of the Irish exodus from the famine last simply because it is difficult to come to just not the right one. Nabokov's Humbert century. The many occasions on which grips with humour in the context of violence spoke in tongues, all the rich, dire experience Fergus and Wesley are seen stuffing their which is realistic, bloody and repulsive. of 20th-century Europe in his range. Irons' faces make clear the fact that they are Against this background, the comic voice-and we hear it right from the opening dealing with a backlog of cultural angst. characters are sprinkled like salt and pepper. scene, narrating faithfully in his lapidary They are pursued by an IRA chap whom The best of these is Rachel Griffiths as Lee fashion- has a simpler cadence of elegy they have disobliged back home. His name the NHS nurse who moonlights as a nun-o­ which sets the mood for the entire film. is Colin. Colin has no pretty face, an obvious gram (see right, in more sober garb in Hilary Irony in aspic. allusion to the terrible beauty of the Easter and Ja ckie). Nonetheless, there are some great Uprising in 1916. Fergus goes on to a TV The title of the film itself is a great joke sequences. Melanie Griffith as Lolita's game show called 'The Meet Market' to and Thewlis' performance as Starkey mother, Charlotte Haze, is almost find a date. This is a clumsy attempt to deal gradually transforms a 'loud mouth, fond of unwatchably good-so vulnerable in her with the divorce debate and the role of women, drinking and shit-stirring', into venial pretensions that you want to Catholicism in contemporary Ireland. someone to care about. intervene-maybe wipe the smudge from Fergus and Wesley get in a kombi van and As a political thriller the film has her lipstick. Dominique Swain is surprising go to central Australia, a thinly disguised disturbing impact. As 'a riotous comedy and complex as Lolita, sustaining the role attempt to discredit the urban preoccupa­ thriller' (that's how it's toutedL it left me through to her last scene where, pregnant tions of Roddy Doyle's The Van. They end feeling uncomfortable and unsatisfied. and detached, she is able-as Irons is not- up watching TV in a pub. This demonstrates

44 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 the marginalisation of poets such as Seamus Morning, noon and night. Again. And again. all very bleak, but the film is also very Heaney. And so it goes on. You see, if you And again ... Gordon, who freely admits to funny, and in its own weird way, joyous and look long enough at it through the bottom having a sm all dick and a libido m atched uplifting, in the way only a really good film of a beer glass, The Craie is a masterpiece. only by his ambition, is in trouble right can be; the performance are great, the -Michael McGirr from the start, and boy does he know it (in soundtrack (by Australian band The Dirty a lot of ways Cynthia is the embodiment of Three) exactly right, and the casting is som e Ingrown and a peculiarly Australian misogynist night­ of the best I've seen in an Australian film. mare/fantasy about wom en in general). John C urran ' s direction of An drew overblown Gordon and Cynthia are matched only McGahan's script for Praise (a dapted from Happiness, dir. Todd Solondz. Happiness in their capacity for self-destruction; asked McGahan's Vogel prize-winning novel of reminded m e a little of the films of Peter why he smoke de pite his asthma, Gordon the same nam e) captures the feel of the Greenaway, but without the baroque excess. says that sm oking actually helps his asthma, book almost more successfully than the Here is dull hell, it seem s to be saying. This makes him feel better. This tension between book itself. In case you can't tell, I really is how grimily and obsessively and m eanly utterly self-destructive behaviour and the like this film; go see it. evil or selfish we can be. Here is the evidence physical and em otional anaesthetic it offers -Allan James Thomas of it all laid out on the table where it can go while pulling you apart, is a current that rancid and rot while your eyes linger. fl ow s throu gh Gordon and Cynthia's Mine didn'tlingermuch. Maybe I missed relationship; fo r all that the relationship is Double stopping the black com edy that so excited Cannes a solace for them both, it's also a violence that they gave it the 1998 International they each choose to inflict, not on each Hilary and Ja ckie, dir. Anand Tucker. Tracing Critics Prize. Maybe it was the visual other so much as upon themselves. This is the movem ents of a life is a complicated claustrophobia of the film that m ade it hard business. Tracing the m ovem ents of art is to bear. Happin ess is shot in a succession of no pushover either. Hilary and Jackie stifling interiors: over-furnished restaurants, attempts to do both. Exa mining the fra ught upholstered dom es tic interiors, grimy apart­ relationship between the two precociously ments, corridors, concretestreetscapes, seedy talented du Pre sisters, Hilary and Jackie taxis. The lives of the characters also grow attempts to strike a balance between 'genius inward, like toenails. Solipsism rules. In bio- pic' and fam ily dram a. this world fathers rape small boys, pathetic On the whole this film is enorm ously mad wom en dism ember doormen, lonely m oving and pitch-perfect. Rachel Griffith m en fantasise violently while they mastur­ (left ) and Emily Watson are wonderful in bate, sex is exploitation and no wind blows. the title role . Both the writing and the But I didn't com e away convinced I'd performan ces show a deep under tanding seen caustic satire, dark com edy or even of the profound and fragile relationship that brutal realism . Frankly, I just felt manipu­ so dominated their lives. Ferocious loyalty lated. And distracted by a mash of genre. and an unnerving capacity for love mark Almodovar one mom ent (well, not quite­ out their relationship like an insistent that was the trouble) and N ew Jersey sitcom m etronom e. The two central performances the next. There were m om ents, and som e are supported by a host of handsom ely performances, that in a less unrelieved realised bit parts. Charles Dance and Celia context might have been m emorable. But Imrie are perfect as proud but frightened in a stew that blends guts, shin, sirloin, parents, and David Morri sey pu ts in an testicles and packet gravy, you are unlikely appropriately charming perform ance as to rem ember the spiced chicken drumstick. Hilary's husband, Kiffer. -Morag Fraser But while beautifully scripted and performed, the film is strangely clunky in structure. Awkward and unnecessary use Praiseworthy of titles labours otherwise subtle transitions, and the spot inclusions of fam ous fi gures Praise, dir. John Curran. Gordon (played by such as Margot Fonteyn only highlights muso Peter Fenton in hi first screen role) is narrative indecision about the film's an apathetic, underachieving, alcohol­ purpose. (The actor playing Fonteyn looked abusing, chain-smoking asthmatic, who's m ore like a blow-up doll than one of the opted so far out of society, connection, the most graceful women ever to walk the earth.) world, that he barely exists in it at all. But the heart and lungs, in fact all the Som ehow, through absolutely no effort of vital organs of this film, are in fine fettle. his own, he drifts into a relationship with Hil ary and Jackie is m oving in the extrem e Cynthia (Sacha Horler, in an absolute and, if it's possible, has added even m ore ripsnorter of a performance). Cynthia is em otional fire to Jacqueline du Pre's subtle as a sledgehammer, has chronic interpretation of Elgar's cello concerto. eczem a and likes sex A LOT. All the time. -Siobhan Jackson

V o LUME 9 N uMBER 4 • EUREKA STREET 45 Lust in action

B~CY CoNNom ;, 'me being . all the comedy in the White House, US television is getting filthier who can give welcome surprises but not funnier. about ourselves: the utterly comic In Nine's Friends, watched hugely around the country, and figures humans cut as brains in screened at prime time, there is a spot of envelope-pushing (Rachel charge of genitals, or vice versa. and Monica's casual affairs, Phoebe's surrogate motherhood, Ross' How much more convenient, he lesbian ex-wife, et al) but an episode last year went too far for the said once, if, like dogs, our urges timeslot, and tainted the show's charm. The boys, Chandler and were seasonal. (Much hilarious Joey, win the girls' apartment (much nicer than theirs) on a bet, and dumbshow accompanied this, but the episode is concerned with the girls' efforts to persuade the boys to try to describe it would be the written equivalent of people who to give it back. Finally, the girls offer to kiss each other in front of the tell you his anecdotes in a Finnish accent, made more opaque by boys for half a minute. Cut to the boys leaving the girls' place looking their own snorts of laughter and the arguments of bystanders, who hot and bothered, and going to their own rooms and shutting the insist 'No, it was like this-'.) doors, presumably to masturbate. This screened at 7.30pm. Humans, poor things, perpetually on heat, lusting after shadows American comedies are absolutely obsessed with masturbation, in the mind and on the page and on the screen. When we can laugh but whereas the Seinfeld episode 'The Contest' that began the trend at ourselves it is an antidote to tragedy; the sententiousness of was actually funny, because it had something to do with the S&M forbids mirth. No-one dressing up in those black leather repellent nature of George, things like the Drew Carey effort at thingies can have anything approaching what the desperately­ cybersex between the main guy and Mimi, a hated co-worker, are seeking columns call a GSOH. loathly. Most kids are still watching at its 8pm timeslot, and the So why am I worried about the way sex is being handled, for world is a sad, ugly enough place without young minds being want of a better word, in the comedies that churn through the ~ given images of losers wanking at computer terminals. television? Soaps have always dealt with sex, and still do, but always in the context of some tragic dilemma. In fact most soaps l.HE NADIR 1s RuoEAWAKENING . Ten screens it lateish on Thursday take this responsibility seriously, 'dealing' with various issues as nights, but the expletives fly, there is contrived and deliberately the storyline develops. In some ways it has been good-it's no sleazy nudity, and of course, a sanctimonious subtext. On one longer acceptable to judge single parents, or indeed anyone's adult, level, no prude should fear: it makes one seriously consider the consenting personal choices. Television, ever available, never advantages of celibacy. It's about an alcoholic TV actress: we get all sleeping, spreads a new generation's desires around fast as thought, the stuff about 12 Steps so the producers can argue the series has for it must hold the attention to survive. A program that does not worthiness while the script has the actors boasting about butt deliver buyers does not last long, and the programmers know that plugs. Watching it, I caught myself yearning for Gone with the if they can just package and focus it at the right demographic, sex Wind, or Anne of Green Gables or Romeo and Juliet. will pull in the punters. Shakespeare got it about right when dealing with sex. He Tolerance and free choice are fine by me. But sometimes the showed us to ourselves as sexual beings, funny, ribald, enraptured, shallowness and the fripperiness of American comedies get me dangerous when crossed and more vulnerable if female. It was even worrying. I laugh heartily at Billy Connolly, recently on Seven, and more dangerous to be a woman in the 17th century, when memories Absolutely Fabulous, Father Ted, The Young Ones, Bottom, Red of a flagrantly adulterous father who could order the deaths of her Dwarf, The Vicar of Dibley, Good News Week . But it's rare for mother and stepmother-for adultery-made Elizabeth I avoid American sex comedy to be at all funny (early Nanny and Third marriage like the pox which had eventually killed the incontinent Rock from the Sun episodes were exceptions) and this deserves Henry VIII. Shakespeare knew disgust as well as bawdry and high­ comment, particularly since they spend so much damn money on toned tragedy; when we can't joke or rhapsodise about sex, we sex. According to Germaine Greer, in The Whole Woman, Americans should be afraid, and are, like Lear on the heath. spend $8 billion a year on pornography in some form or other­ Blake saw this too; fused it awesomely with beauty: more than on Hollywood movies. That brilliant series, Big Girls' Blouse, had a skit which for me summed up the whole dilemma. It 0 Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm was an oblique comment on the fact that Roseanne had bought the Has found out thy bed rights to Absolutely Fabulous and was planning to cast Elizabeth That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Of crimson joy: Taylor and Carrie Fisher, God preserve us, as Edina and Patsy. And his dark secret love (Interesting that other countries rarely if ever buy the ideas behind Does thy life destroy. American sitcoms.) The BGB skit had Marg Downey and Magda Szubanski being Liza Minnelli and Katherine Hepburn doing the Our sexual life is a mighty complex of impulse and feeling and Parrot sketch from Monty Python. It was all there, the 'love me, reflection; the chase for satiety complicated infinitely by the will love m e, I'm a legend' attitude, the total incomprehension of what for intimacy and the probability of procreation. Sex is something the sketch was about, the dialogue slashed to inanities, all with a intensely private, which we continually force out to contemplate, final ecstatic bow to rapturously block-headed studio applause. because of its ramifications. There, narcissism and the grey urge to Downey and Szubanski were yet another indication that the colonial dominate fuse with love and life and death. And we can still laugh.• heritage of this country, however flawed, has its upside: no-one needs to translate anarchic humour for Australians. But even after Juliette Hughes is a freelance reviewer.

46 EUREKA STREET • MAY 1999 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 73, May 1999

Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1. Enid sits about in disorder? Quite the reverse! (8) 5. Exclamation of surprise may trouble each excited runner at the start. (6) 10. I stand before the portal in singlet only? Enquire about this situation. (11) 11. I will, in short, in such circumstances feel nauseated. (3) 12. Everyone, for instance, newsman declared suspect. (7) 13. Lass with the takings is a silly fool. (7) 14. Phone is engaged? Person talking is such a meddler' (8) 17. Only pressure could affect this support structure. (5) 19. Such a drink could get you tied up with the police for being over .05. (5) 21. The answer would be clear-cut if sceptic could possibly ignore time. (8) 24. The islands in the Pacific where girl is not available. (7) 25 . Commercial poetry would be contrary to our interests. (7) 27. Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey Dost sometimes counsel take- and sometimes ... (Pope: The Rape of the Lock) . (3) 28. Calmly contemplate, without Ecstasy, the pure lucid elements of beauty! (11) 29. Pattern could be houndstooth or one of mine. (6) 30. To find the solution, come in here with books-it's essential. (8) Solution to Crossword no. 72, April 1999 DOWN 1. Perhaps a win at Lotto would get me a trip to the country. (6) 2. Nick would, in the end, sin. (5) 3. Bill happy to present a posy. (7) 4. I raced around and kept watch. (5) 6. Partly cover the bowl or the cat may drink too much. (7) 7. The poll takes place mid vulgar shouts for attention-such common people! (3,6) 8. Call about story going up in the telling! (8) 9. Fish and gentile (so called) the French carved in a spout at Chartres, possibly. (8) 15 . Measure with curtain swirling about? It's doubtful. (9) 16. Let us, perhaps, bolt case to floor. (8) 18. In Peru, fantastic Lima ticker-tape parade depends on the weather. (8) 20. Late camera movement-showing little emotion. (7) 22. Bill is singing well. (7) 23. Be sorry salesman meets specialist medico. (6) 25. Drained of colour when layer appears. (5) 26. Get up and growl. (5)

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IN THE MAY ISSUE

Cuh i-.l'lllll'

Sean 1-.dh :,:ol's to I he most rL'l'l'lll, non-:,:alkn nhihition silL' - thl' li:,:hthouse on Bnm1 Island, connl'ctnl to satellites, thL· \\orld-\\idc-11eh and the ll.lllhaus in (inman~

l'etn Ifill looks at some national and imern;llional nampks of !,(

Out now

S.J. 11.1, jio111 good f,ooks!to{>s aud 1/t'II'Stlg('II/S. The !an Potter Museum of Art, The University Or pit'""' lil r,}-/'1 .)%'(, ji11· your subsalf>li'"' of Melbourne April-9 May 1999

04