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Policy for only $104 for one year! 2012 arch M The Threat to Democracy auley Patrick McC fromJohn O’Sullivan, Global Governance The Fictive World of Rajendra Pachauri Tony Thomas Pax Americana and the Prospect of US Decline Keith Windschuttle Why Africa Still Has a Slave Trade Roger Sandall Quadrant is one of Australia’s leading intellectual magazines, Freedom of Expression in a World of Vanishing Boundariesasluck Nicholas H Meyrick Zerilli, John de and is published ten times a year. ConservativesGiffin, and John Same-Sex Marriage Michael Joe Dolce John Stone On Bob Dylan and Christopher Ricks Stephen Buckle On myths about floating the dollarRoss Barham, On David Hume and Mreligionichael Connor Policy is the only Australian quarterly magazine that explores On the art of acting , I Morris Lurie fiction I Les Murray, Russell Erwin, Janine Fraser, Vivian Smith the world of ideas and policy from a classical liberal perspective. Poetry Ron Pretty, Duncan McIntyre, Leon Trainor I I history Patrick Morgan, Victor Stepien, JanI Owen, Trevor Sykes Reviews freedom ofI speechI first person I environment I film I politics I music Society I chronicle I economics LettersI media philosophy & ideas To take advantage of this offer you can: • subscribe online at www.policymagazine.com • use the subscription card in the middle of this magazine • contact The Centre for Independent Studies: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW 1590 p: 02 9438 4377 f: 02 9439 7310 e: [email protected]

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AustrAliA’s secret WAr HoW unionists sAbotAged Ten our troops in World WAr ii HAL COLEBATCH’s new book, Australia’s Secret War, tells the Years shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions 33011 — against their own society and against the men and women of their of The r own country’s fighting forces during the perils of World War II. Every major Australian warship was targeted by strikes, go-slows and besT renodesign.com.au sabotage at home. Australian soldiers fighting in New Guinea and the Pacific went without food, radio equipment and ammunition because 487 pOems by 169 auThOrs of union strikes. “It has been known for decades”, Les Murray writes in his introduction to this Photographs © australian War memorial verse collection, “that poets who might fear relegation or professional sabotage from the Waterside workers disrupted loading of supplies to the troops and It seems to me the best such occasional critical consensus of our culture have a welcome and a refuge in Quadrant—but only pilfered from ships’ cargoes and soldiers’ personal effects. Other strikes collection I have ever read; better, for if they write well.” by rail workers, iron workers, coal miners, and even munitions workers instance, than ‘The Faber Book of Modern From the second decade of his 20 years as literary editor of Quadrant, Les Murray and life-raft builders, badly impeded Australia’s war effort. Verse’; which is saying quite a bit. here presents a selection of the best verse he published between 2001 and 2010. — BOB ELLIS, Table Talk For you, or As A giFt $44.95 Order This Landmark bOOk $44.95 ONLINE ONLINE www.quadrant.org.au/store www.quadrant.org.au/store POST POST Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia PhONE FAX PhONE (03) 8317 8147 FAX (03) 9320 9065 (03) 8317 8147 (03) 9320 9065

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Letters 2 Frank Pulsford, Greg McCarry, Chris Rule, John de Meyrick, Hal Colebatch Chronicle 5 John O’Sullivan ASTRINGENCIES 7 Anthony Daniels australia 10 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future James C. Bennett correspondent 20 Letter from London Christie Davies politics 23 The Economic Case for the Abbott Government Tony Abbott 28 Who Runs the Liberal Party? Rebecca Weisser immigration 31 Christian Faith, Reason and Open Borders John Zmirak 34 Christian Faith, Luck and Offshore Detention Peter C. Grundy history 36 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On Michael Connor 46 James Campbell, Photographer of Australia John Hirst philosophy & ideas 48 Who Am I to Judge?: The Humean Answer James Allan religion 52 Religious Doubt in Adversity Peter Smith tributes 56 Peter Ryan Robert Murray, Geoffrey Blainey, John Poynter, B.J. Coman, George Thomas books 63 The Novel Response to Jihad David Martin Jones 68 Ever William John Whitworth 71 Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton Steven Kates 74 Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane Craig Sherborne art 77 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide? Christopher Heathcote newspapers 87 A Dying Art Mark McGinness travel 92 Letting Go Jenny Stewart literature 96 A Half-Open Door Iain Bamforth 100 Gossamer Shakespeare Alan Gould film 103 Two French Masters Neil McDonald story 107 Sasha Sean O’Leary Poetry 9: Boarding in Town for School; Two Last Stanzas Les Murray; 18: Old Guys Max Ryan; 19: Robert Pershing Wadlow Daniel Tammet; Bali & Other Haiku Jade Pisani; 30: The Centre Pompidou Saxby Pridmore; 35: Natte Yallock Jump Rope Joe Dolce; 45: Saving Jesus Paul Lake; 51: Window Hal G.P. Colebatch; 62: “My dear man” Russell Erwin; Phasmida the Stick Insect Woman Suzanne Edgar; 76: The Interment of the Ashes Elisabeth Wentworth; A Charming Bath Joe Dolce; 91: The Last Day Ross Donlon; Memento Mori at Seventy-Eight; Saint Teresa of Avila Graeme Hetherington; 95: For your daughter and her granddaughter Russell Erwin; A Taoist on Montserrat Saxby Pridmore; 99: In a dream a face Russell Erwin; 106: Bonyi Joe Dolce; 112: Jean la Pucelle Joe Dolce Letters Perhaps these don’t satisfy the rigorous standards one would expect to find in a religion designed by a polymath, so Unger has had Editor to write a theology of his own but John O’Sullivan has hidden its truths from all and [email protected] The Faith of a Polymath sundry, from Mr Monk right down Liter ary Editor to me. Les Murray Sir: s Just a Paul Monk read I fell at the first hurdle when I Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Deput y Editor could not find why Unger thought George Thomas Religion of the Future word for word, we needed a new religion. It seems so did I read Mr Monk’s analysis that the only thing wrong with Contributing Editors of the book (December 2015) word the “old” religions is that they are, Books: Peter Coleman for word—twice; and, at the end of well, old. Unger’s treatment of the Film: Neil McDonald even the second reading, I was no “Semitic religions”, whatever it Theatre: Michael Connor wiser and no better informed. might say about his understanding Columnist Mr Monk tells us that Unger is a of Judaism and Islam, betrays a lack Anthony Daniels polymath, which means, I suppose, of understanding of Christianity that he is terribly clever; so clever, Editor, Qua dr ant Online which he sees as “struggling with Roger Franklin in fact, that his book is, surely, one the world” and, according to Mr [email protected] exclusively for the new Gnostics. If Monk’s analysis, “seeking to con- one so versed as Mr Monk in criti- sole humanity for the flaws in its Editor-in-Chief cal thinking skills struggled with condition and redeem it in the Keith Windschuttle the opacity of the gospel according name of a higher order of things”. to Unger, what hope have the rest Well, I have been a Christian for a Subscriptions of us? great many years, and that’s news Phone: (03) 8317 8147 The only comfort we can derive to me. I recommend Mr Unger Fax: (03) 9320 9065 from the intellectual disparity is to have a look at Aquinas. He might Post: Quadrant Magazine, be found in Matthew 11:25, where be surprised—that is, if a poly- Locked Bag 1235, Jesus praised the Father for reveal- math is capable of being surprised North Melbourne VIC 3051 ing things to “little ones” and by anything. E-mail: quadrantmagazine@ hiding them from the “wise and I leave Mr Unger with a par- data.com.au prudent”. Perhaps it takes a poly- able relating to Louis Pasteur, who math to come up with the idea of declared that he had the Faith of a Publisher a religion in which there is no god Breton peasant and that his prayer and no life beyond the grave, but was to advance to the Faith of the Quadrant (ISSN 0033-5002) is for us “little ones” religion is only a Breton peasant’s wife. published ten times a year by means to an end. If there is no pre- Quadrant Magazine Limited, Frank Pulsford scribed destination, why make the Suite 2/5 Rosebery Place, Aspley, Qld Balmain NSW 2041, Australia journey? I have trouble picturing a ACN 133 708 424 triangle bounded by no intersect- ing lines, but I accept that a poly- Economics and Production math might take it in his stride. Morality Polymaths, by definition, Design Consultant: Reno Design occupy Olympian intellectual Sir: nI discussing the Pope’s “more Art Director: Graham Rendoth peaks and it may be that Unger’s spiritual approach to econom- Printer: Ligare Pty Ltd view from this lofty eminence was ics”, Peter Smith (December 2015) 138–152 Bonds Road, obscured by cloud and he failed to observes that the “free market is Riverwood NSW 2210 notice that the Western world is not of human ingenuity and design. awash with new religions. We have It simply evolved.” Perhaps so, but Cover: Colours of Australia Consumerism, Hedonism, Secular “Hamersley” it has embedded in it a set of values, Humanism and the one presently which manifest themselves in the www.quadrant.org.au enjoying an enlightenment which market’s operations. Many of them has its roots in a schism in the sci- are deleterious, as shown, for exam- entific disciplines, Climate Science. ple, by the actions of the agents who I am sure there are others. supplied and provisioned many of

2 Quadrant March 2016 Letters the ships involved in convict trans- Pope t has a least furthered that whatever the art world decides. portation to Australia. Moreover, process. One need not warm to Robin Norling defines art as there has emerged an impressive the Pope’s suggestion of a supra- a “contract” between artist and body of economic theory which national authority, any more than viewer that exists when “any object explains the free market, justifies to the notion of highly centralised made to be viewed aesthetically, and in many instances advocates planning, to acknowledge the need [is] viewed aesthetically”. it as a desideratum, to be inter- for his investigative surgery on Mr Etheridge has provided a fered with as little as possible. But the bowels of the free market and wider definition of his own, enu- there are values embedded in and its justifications, for in its present merating a range of human factors assumptions underlying that theory condition it is surely not in good and aesthetic responses that may too. Even where there is an aware- health. Unlike Smith, a number of be involved in the process of art ness of these assumptions they are the Pope’s critics seem unwilling appreciation. His definition, with often ignored in policies intended to engage the real issue; they recite respect, is not prescriptive of what to foster the market, to increase the usual shibboleths and carry on art is, but of what effect art may competition and so on. That is as before. evoke in a viewer’s response to it. a main reason why examples of But it is futile, I suggest, to even Greg McCarry market failure and its adverse con- ask “What is art?” or to attempt to Epping, NSW sequences abound. This is notwith- provide a general definition, even standing the fact that empirical though every dictionary does so studies by behavioural economists So Much for in terms of art’s creative inten- and others are increasingly expos- Black Lives tion rather than of its appreciative ing these assumptions and values response; for each of us perceives and demonstrating just how far Sir: oI refer t your Chronicle objets d’art in a different and per- they are removed from reality and in the November 2015 edition in sonal way. One may just as easily from the way people and institu- which you refer to an article by find artistic merit in something tions actually behave. Jim Geraghty in National Review which was not produced as art as The Pope might have made his Online. In a quote from that arti- one may regard the Mona Lisa as points better by more clearly iden- cle appears the line, “all lives don’t a dreary old picture. Art is simply tifying these underlying values and matter: black lives do”. It would what you make of it, rather than assumptions, rather than multiply- appear from the abortion rates what it is or intended to be. ing instances of their malevolent amongst black women which, One person likes a painting operation, because many of them according to Susan Cohen of the because it’s the right size with a are at odds with Christian values Guttmacher Institute, are higher nice frame to hang over the man- and spirituality, and for that matter than those of all other racial/eth- telpiece. Another likes the top of with other value systems. The Pope nic groups in America, and five a cigar box because it has been clearly names two: materialism and times higher than those of white painted on by Arthur Streeton. But consumerism. Economics tries to women, that black lives don’t really what determines art to be art has excuse itself by claiming, as Smith matter. The irony of this is that the more to do with the judgment of notes, that it is “not a spiritual first black president of the United those who are in a position to influ- discipline”. But it is. When those States is an enthusiastic supporter/ ence others, which then leads to the values and others are embedded promoter of abortion. work’s popularity, monetary worth in it and when in many instances and ultimate acceptance as art, Chris Rule they are advanced as desirable it is notwithstanding that many trend- Gilmore, ACT necessarily a spiritual system, and setters in art have been exposed its spiritual values are legitimate by their own vulnerable judgments objects of analysis and criticism. What is Art? (for example, the hoax paintings of An “economic” choice between Pierre Brassau, a chimpanzee so more of this (armaments, say) and SRI : oI refer t a letter from William named, whose work was exhibited less of that (health care) is also a Etheridge (January-February 2016) in Sweden in 1964 and won almost moral choice, in addition to what- in which he contends that the unanimous praise from the critics). ever else it may be. answer which Robin Norling gives Why then should we rely upon Frank recognition of the under- to the question “What is art?” in anyone else’s judgment when Van lying values and assumptions and his article “The Life of an Artist” Gogh sold only one painting of the an examination of their conse- (November 2015) is too narrow. 900 or so he painted; when Manet’s quences is an essential first step He also disagrees with Arthur famous Olympia met with derision to deciding what to do next. The C. Danto’s definition of art being by art critics; when his Dejeuner sur

Quadrant March 2016 3 Letters l’Herbe caused a riot in the streets the complete and unalterable word 15) In your address to the Royal of Paris; and when Maurice Utrillo of Allah as revealed to his messen- United Services Institute of New tried to sell his paintings outside ger Mohammad? South Wales on March 31, 2015, the Galerie Druet after it had 2) Do you believe in sharia law, you stated inter alia: “Another rejected them, at just the moment including punishments such as example of double standards is the when another art critic was pass- amputation for theft? world’s reluctance or inability to ing, saw them, liked them, and the 3) Do you believe women taken enforce the 1948 United Nations rest, as they say, is art history? prisoners of war by Muslims may be resolution regarding the Israeli- There is much pretentious rub- used as sex-slaves, or other slaves? occupied territories of Palestine, bish being portrayed as art nowa- 4) Do you believe a woman’s but its willingness to take prompt days. But who am I to judge for evidence in court is worth half as and decisive action against other others? Let me illustrate my point: much as a man’s? nations such as Iraq, even in the I am presently wearing a necktie. It 5) Do you believe apostates absence of a United Nations man- is plain blue. It is artistic in design from Islam should be put to death? date.” What exactly do you mean but I would not call it art. Yet if 6) Do you believe homosexuals by this and which 1948 resolution I were to attach it upside down should be put to death? do you refer to? to a piece of board, call it Tie Up 7) Do you believe it is per- 15a) Is this statement consistent Blue and exhibit it, someone would missible for a Muslim to lie to with the rule that serving officers surely regard it as legitimate and unbelievers? should not comment on political saleable art. And it might well be. 8) Do you believe a Muslim subjects? That’s what makes art art. man can validly divorce his wife by 16) Do you agree that Israel was saying “I divorce thee” three times? the victim of aggressive war by John de Meyrick 9) Do you believe Jews and Arab states in 1948, 1967 and 1973? St Ives, NSW Christians should pay the dhimmi 17) Do you agree that Israel has tax and other disabilities? been the victim of innumerable An Open Letter 10) Do you agree with those rocket attacks and other acts of to Mona Shindy Muslim states which make it a terrorism? capital offence to sell land to a Jew? 18) Is your paramount loyalty to SRI : snThis i a open letter to 11) Do you support Israel’s right Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Captain Mona Shindy, a Muslim to exist behind secure boundaries? Queen of Australia, and her lawful lady who has been promoted to 12) Do you believe it should be representatives? the rank of captain in the Royal permissible for Jews and Christians I await your reply with interest. Australian Navy, and who is appar- to build places of worship in Hal G.P. Colebatch ently adviser to the Chief of the Muslim countries including Saudi Nedlands, WA Navy on Muslim affairs. Arabia? 13) Do you believe Jews should Dear Captain Shindy, be allowed to pray on the Temple I would, as a taxpayer and citi- Mount in Jerusalem? Quadrant welcomes letters zen, be much obliged if you would 14) Do you believe the location to the editor. Letters are subject answer the following questions. All of the Australian embassy to Israel to editing unless writers except Questions 14a and 15 may be should be moved from Tel Aviv to answered by a simple “Yes” or “No”. Jerusalem? stipulate otherwise. 1) Do you believe the Koran is 14a) If not, why not?

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

4 Quadrant March 2016 C h r o n i c l e

John O’Sullivan

ustralians and New Zealanders, like most most. Clinton is embarrassed by her ties to Wall people outside the United States, have been Street and high lecture fees. And the moderate gazing with a kind of bafflement, amused or GOP candidates who stuck with liberal immigration Ahorrified according to taste, at the early results in reform in obedience to “the donor class” (another America’s season of primaries and caucuses. Donald variant of establishment) watched helplessly as Trump’s dominance in the Republican early prima- Trump soared past them by responding to long- ries, though shaky, seemed to be spreading to more ignored voter concerns on the scale and illegality of and more groups in the broad Republican coalition; immigration. Money has insulated the political class and Senator Bernie Sanders won the first primary from the voters. and tied in the first caucus against the well-funded • Are women destined by gender and demography but scandal-haunted favourite, Hillary Clinton, by to vote for “the first woman presidential candidate”? drawing high levels of support from white progres- Apparently not. Hillary Clinton lost the women’s sives and young voters with a campaign rooted in vote to Sanders in New Hampshire by 11 per cent— undiluted socialism. and by a landslide among women under thirty. She Both party leaderships (or “establishments”, as won only among wealthy women over sixty-five (or it has become fashionable to call them) have been to people so like herself as to constitute a club rather rattled and undermined by these results. Mrs than a demographic). Clinton enjoyed the barely concealed backing of the • Is youth the key? Hardly. Sanders at seventy- Democratic machine, but it was unable to deliver four is far and away the candidate most popular the votes it once did. It modestly compensated for with young voters on the Left. And Senator Marco this failure by giving her most of New Hampshire’s Rubio, the latest young Kennedy-style wonder, Democrat office-holders as “super-delegates” to the promoted by the pundits as the most “electable” Convention. Having been beaten better than sixty- Republican, has yet to do better than third place. to-forty by Sanders, Clinton left New Hampshire Voters are less impressed by his eloquence and with more delegates. energy than suspicious of his co-operation with the Carnage was far greater on the Republican side. Democrats over liberal immigration reform in 2013. Most of the establishment’s starting candidates— The voters are rejecting conventional politics. governors, senators, CEOs—did so badly that They have concerns that the parties ignore or gloss they pulled out of the race before and after New over or refuse to discuss. The parties stress issues Hampshire. The most establishment candidate, Jeb the voters think secondary, in language that seems Bush, who is also the best-funded one, has struggled either simplistic or academic. And the voters end to remain fourth or fifth in the polls. And the two up feeling that politics is an insider game for a self-proclaimed anti-establishment candidates, self-interested political class from which they are Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, between excluded. them have about the same support as all the other Charles Murray, in a powerful essay on the candidates put together. Trump phenomenon for the American Enterprise All this could change, of course, as different Institute, argues that the voters are fully justified states hold primaries. But the big picture remains in these views. For the last few decades, ordinary a kind of stable instability. Sanders is pulling even Americans have seen their living standards stagnate, with Clinton nationally, buoyed by polls that show their habits of neighbourhood co-operation his supporters and half the Democrats believing in undermined, their job opportunities reduced, their socialism. Trump seems to be consolidating his lead sense of moral equality with the new American (and Cruz his second place) in a field divided among educated class decline, and their feeling of a special too many moderate opponents for any single one American identity mocked and abandoned. They feel to challenge the leaders effectively. And political that they have lost out and that no one gives a damn certainties are crashing with every poll release: for them. The Democrats are the patriots of a new • Does money dominate US politics? Candidates post-American multicultural America with fewer in both parties who spend the least are winning the places for them; and the Republicans have replaced

Quadrant March 2016 5 chronicle the flag with the balance sheet. The political parties of Hungary’s borders, have had three revealing no longer reflect the real social divisions between effects. They have strengthened and stabilised the the new ruling classes and the old working ones. government internally as defenders of social order and These feelings, subterranean until released (almost the national interest. They have made it unpopular by accident) by two political entrepreneurs, Trump in Brussels as hostile to “European values”. And they and Sanders, have produced rebellions against the have made it the leader of the Central European two mainstream parties that nonetheless draw on the countries in arguing for a different approach to the two parties’ traditions. Sanders’s rebellion stresses migrant crisis that stresses giving generous help to economic equality, Trump’s patriotic solidarity. But refugees in countries next door to their own rather both are pouring new wine, called populism, into than welcoming them to Europe. the old bottles, called Republican and Democrat. Different though they are, these crises and the If this strikes us as odd and even outrageous, that populist responses to them are united by a single is probably because it is occurring in the relatively theme: opposition to an undemocratic technocracy familiar context of American politics where we can in Brussels. This reality became clearer after the 2014 see that something new and novel is on the table. In European elections when, in response to the advance fact similar developments are occurring elsewhere. of Eurosceptic parties, the two main centre-Left and centre-Right groups forged a de facto alliance in the reece, Italy, Spain and Portugal have all seen European Parliament to continue pushing through massive political upheaval since 2009. Moderate integrationist policies. It looks like an immovable Ggovernments of Left and Right have been defeated; object. social democratic parties have been weakened and But Euro-austerity is still keeping Mediterranean even destroyed; extreme Marxist or idiosyncratic Europe in stagnation and crisis, and it seems unlikely Left parties have risen to power; riots have become that Brussels will be able to force Central Europe to frequent. These upheavals arise directly because accept migrants it doesn’t want (especially since the these countries joined the euro at an overvalued EU’s own rules allow them to hop on the next train exchange rate and the “austerity” policies needed to to Berlin). So European populism will continue to sustain it have given them six years of low growth, advance as long as Brussels exercises unaccountable high unemployment and political instability. All power not very intelligently. And Brussels will defend these things generated hostility to the “troika”—the itself by saying that populism is a bigger danger to European Union, IMF and ECB officials—which democracy than itself, which seems exaggerated as enforces compliance with “austerity” on behalf of well as self-serving. A Europe without populism (mainly official) creditors. That in turn toppled suc- would be an even more undemocratic place. cessive governments in these countries and fostered What of the Anglosphere, where populism a politics of Left populism that (not unreasonably, has usually been a regional phenomenon? Fraser given this history) wants Germany and Brussels to Nelson in the Spectator warned a year ago that an finance their borrowing. angry Left populism was advancing in Britain as in Populist rebellions in the rest of Europe, Mediterranean Europe. David Cameron’s election especially Central Europe, tend to lean Right rather victory restored a dubious complacency—too soon. than Left. They arise from several sources. In the That victory was the result of good organisation last year they have been driven by opposition to the rather than a swing of opinion; angry Left populists policy of welcoming mass migration into Europe are gradually capturing the UK’s second nation as launched (seemingly thoughtlessly) by Germany’s well as its second political party; and even though Chancellor Angela Merkel and then enforced Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party would probably lose by the European Commission with compulsory a UK election even after a crash, it will inevitably refugee quotas. Anti-immigration parties have risen drag politics to the Left, making some left-wing across Scandinavia and Western Europe in protest. issues respectable, some right-wing ones taboo. If in Denmark, Sweden, France and Germany itself have addition Cameron should fight a Euro-referendum imposed “temporary” border controls. campaign that keeps the UK in the EU by a narrow Even before the migration crisis, Central Europe margin, he will divide the Right further and likely was rebelling both against specific European midwife an indignant Right populism less restrained policies and against the general drift of powers and by the fading liberal tradition of a Britain subject to sovereignty from national capitals to the European Europe’s statism. Union. These rebellions came not from small For all its flaws the populism of Trump and insurgent populist parties but from the mainstream Sanders is being expressed through America’s two conservative governments—notably Fidesz in great parties. It and they will change each other for Hungary. Its policy stances, notably the closing the better, but maybe not right away.

6 Quadrant March 2016 a s t r i n g e n c i e s

Anthony Daniels

would rather talk to a taxi-driver than to most would (like most doctors) skim papers and read intellectuals: usually a taxi-driver has more their conclusions on the assumption that they fol- interesting things to say. Indeed, in my brief lowed from data presented; I have since realised aInd undistinguished career as a civil-war corre- that this is far from always the case. But medical spondent, I realised that most of what appears in practice is highly influence by conclusions that do our newspapers about such conflicts is garnered not necessarily follow from the evidence, and so I from taxi-drivers on the way from the airport to have become much less willing to be screened by the warring country’s only five-star hotel: and this any doctor than I would once have been. is as it should be, for taxi-drivers are much less One of the problems is the nature of so much parti pris than Ministries of Information, the other of the research that is published in the general possible source of information for most journal- medical journals. It is not like the heroic days ists—apart, of course, from other journalists in the of medicine, when any fool could see that ether hotel bar, that great echo-chamber of rumour and anaesthetised a patient undergoing an operation. misinformation. Nowadays, research is conducted on hundreds of I therefore took seriously the opinion of the thousands of people, or even millions, and the taxi-driver from the airport in Paris—not, I hasten conclusions rely on complex statistical manipula- to add, to a five-star hotel—that, six weeks after tions of data that not one in a thousand doctors the terrorist attacks, many people were still afraid understands and which, in any case, almost always to go out or to frequent crowded places. This was yield completely different conclusions when a dif- confirmed for me in the Métro, which seemed unu- ferent statistical method, equally incomprehensible sually quiet: though whether my observation was to doctors, is applied. a true one, or was unduly influenced by my con- The old rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri versation with the driver, I cannot tell. No doubt and suggestio falsi are employed, or at least are there are trustworthy statistics on the subject, but present in medical journals surprisingly often. in any case I would prefer to believe and trust to my Epidemiological evidence is particularly susceptible own impressions. The Webbs’ book on the Soviet to misinterpretation. When factor a is correlated Union was full of statistics that they thought were with disease b, for example, the relative risk is often trustworthy. given but not the absolute risk (people with, or who Rather grandly, I told the taxi-driver that I was do, or who live in, a are 1.37 times more likely to not going to be cowed into altering my frequenta- suffer disease b than those without, or who do not tions by mere terrorists: I would rather be killed, do, or who do not live in, a). Statistical significance besides which it was statistically very unlikely that I is confused with clinical significance: the poor doc- would be killed even in the event of another attack. tor is often left to work out for himself whether After all, I refuse the constant computerised invita- the absolute risk to his patients is worth worrying tions from my doctor for screening procedures to about. Usually it isn’t. detect the diseases from one of which I am quite The requirement that patients nowadays be told likely eventually to die: so why should I avoid so the truth and make choices for themselves leaves tiny a risk? them with insoluble dilemmas. Many patients want Actually, the comparison is a good deal less stark to be told what to do, not to solve riddles with no than at first might appear. Since my retirement I indubitably correct answers. Is it worth taking a have paid closer attention to medical journals than tablet every day for five years in order to avoid a I ever paid before, and I have been surprised by how one per cent risk of something nasty happening, much that is published in them is deeply flawed especially as most people give up taking the tab- where it is not outright dishonest. Previously, I let before the end of the first year and there is the

Quadrant March 2016 7 astringencies riskf o side-effects? The last time I tried this frank of self-mutilation—the fall of the Roman empire, approach on a patient, a man of limited intelli- perhaps?—but I can’t quite put my finger on it. gence, he replied, “I don’t know, you’re the doctor”: There is one important correlation that has which struck me as a perfectly reasonable thing for been insufficiently noticed, namely that between him to say. European jihadism and rap music. Practically all the jihadis (for whom religion is the continuation of o matter how statistically sophisticated a crime by other means) were, until their conversion, paper in a medical journal, when a correla- fond of rap music, if not actual practitioners of that tionN is found (and if you search hard enough, you dark art. Probably failure to become rap stars was can always find a correlation between something to them what failure to obtain entry to art school and something else), it is almost invariably consid- was to Hitler. ered causative, and speculation offered as to how The question is whether rap makes people stu- factor a causes disease b. This is an pid and aggressive, or whether only elementary howler but it is made stupid and aggressive people listen time and again. When a medical he requirement that to rap music. journal published a paper showing T It is, incidentally, more difficult that heart attacks were correlated patients nowadays to criticise modern popular music with low levels of selenium, brazil be told the truth in print than to criticise Islam. nuts promptly disappeared from When I wrote in an article for a the supermarket because they are and make choices for French publication that rock con- high in selenium. (A paper in the themselves leaves certs are like fascist rallies of licen- New England Journal of Medicine tiousness, the editor had to remove not long ago suggested that nut them with insoluble it because his staff threatened to consumption, including of peanuts dilemmas. Many resign if he printed it. When I which are not really nuts at all, was patients want to wrote in a Belgian newspaper that positively correlated with longev- modern pop music was responsi- ity. The elixir of life seems to be be told what to do, ble for deafness, car accidents and boiled oily fish in satay sauce with not to solve riddles crime, there were innumerable calls broccoli.) for me to be silenced. You can have great fun with with no indubitably But to return to the Parisian correlations. I once wrote that correct answers. taxi-driver. Having solved the criminality among white men was problem of terrorism, we went on caused by a long-acting neurotropic to the interesting question of why virus introduced by the tattooing needle, since Parisian taxi-drivers are not obliged, like every practically all white men in prison are tattooed. other driver, to wear seat-belts. Was what another Indeed, the association of criminality with tattoos driver (whom I once would have called a lady driver) was far closer than that between criminality and told me true, that it was so that taxi-drivers could any other factor, including what used to be called get away more quickly from aggressive or violent broken homes. customers? She had only once had to take advan- To my amazement, some people took me seri- tage of this wise provision, most passengers offer- ously and argued in refutation of my hypothesis. ing her sex instead of a fare not having to be taken Actually, in my heart of hearts I do believe that au sérieux. there is a connection between tattooing and crim- No, said, the taxi-driver, this was not true. It inality, though not a directly causative one. This was because it was uncomfortable to sit all day does not mean, of course, that the current vogue with a seat-belt across your front: a less interesting among the middle classes for tattooing indicates an explanation. Poor fellow, he had had to wait three increase in criminality, only in criminally bad taste. hours for a fare at the airport in a queue of taxis. It As Aldous Huxley once said, most people will be had turned him talkative instead of sullen. Apart vulgar if given the opportunity. I think, however, from anything else, one can learn humility from a that there is more than this to the recent epidemic taxi-driver.

8 Quadrant March 2016 Boarding in Town for School

The trick was to be asleep before the rail signalman whispered in with his latest girl off the midnight train otherwise the murmurings would go on and on whatever the pair did— At waking they’d be gone. Those days when boys called you names that rarely impressed the girls, who danced, calling you like Hinder and Posterio; those days could be got through, spit on prefects, eat downtown, talk cadet rifles, admire one or two.

Staying with your best friend Two Last Stanzas at his place. And his sister coming in in worn bathers, 1981 knocking bedframe with her broom, You rose dressing up a year older than you, and you praised putting down quiet touch in her face, especially the cultures city ahead, and your lies of TV and bush town, to dismiss her so undue. the white-booted chucker and the wet-lipped seersucker and the flowers were flung gladioli

2001 Fashion ruled, while the old Queen still reigned. Some flickers of nonsense remained, one last war, and none of ours killed— Cuisine grew less shamed and more skilled, Entertainment grew more forms of media, some dearer, some seedier yet the flowers were Olympic gold roses.

Les Murray

Quadrant March 2016 9 James C. Bennett

Ten Questions for Australia’s Future And Some Possible Answers

1. Overthrowing the tyranny of distance: even if some of its advantages are hiding in plain A resource colony forever? sight. Australia is very close to the Asian marketplace compared to other OECD nations save Japan hile the rest of the world was being battered and South Korea. Unlike them, it has a Western by the global financial crisis, China was busy culture, and a robust and respected common-law sWpending wildly on domestic infrastructure and legal and judicial system. Unlike Hong Kong, its housing, and Australia was enjoying a commodi- legal and political system is secured for the future. ties boom supplying it. Australia’s future prosper- Unlike Singapore, its military security is robust. It ity seemed to be guaranteed indefinitely. In a larger has enormous amounts of space and can accommo- sense, of course it is true that Australia has far date effectively infinite numbers of newcomers, if more actual and potential resources than are being certain measures are taken. Australia is in a position exploited at present, and the region almost imme- to be the English-speaking world’s closest window diately adjacent to it, including not only China but on, and platform for dealing with, the Asia-Pacific South-East Asia and South Asia as well, all of it century. Without abandoning its resource and agri- rising in income and ambition. This would seem to cultural potential, it should begin to move to exploit be common sense. that potential. However, China’s path upward, although The tyranny of distance is now being dissolved likely in the long run, is fraught with uncertainty at an unprecedented rate. The federationist writers in the next two or three decades. If Australia, in of a hundred years ago used to speak of the “anni- Geoffrey Blainey’s famous formulation, is shaped hilation of distance” brought by the steam engine by the tyranny of distance, so China is shaped and the telegraph. No doubt some subaltern reading by the tyranny of history. The centralism, the such books on an un-air-conditioned liner making authoritarianism, the familism, the corruption, its way through the Red Sea in summer had his own are so interwoven into the core of Chinese culture opinions as to how effectively distance had been that the ghost cities and hollow bans are not annihilated. mere epiphenomena of China’s rapid change, but Today cheap jet travel, the internet and Skype something that can be escaped, if ever, only slowly have annihilated distance much more radically. Yet and in fits and starts. Australia must prepare to even more is in the works. After a hiatus of some take advantage of the rise of Asia, but also take decades, the supersonic flight world is once again measures so as to not be hostage to the development active with new ideas, including the promise of of China, or any other Asian nation. supersonic flight that is cheap, without sonic booms, However, Australia cannot easily follow the and less polluting than subsonic craft. Immersive alternative path that other non-commodity-export- virtual reality promises to make telepresence far ing developed nations have taken in the past, either. more effective. In this coming world, these advan- Even at the height of the traditional industrial era, tages of Australia will grow greater than ever. Australia’s economy was too small to maintain much of a self-sufficient industrial system. It now struggles to manufacture cars or its own submarines. It 2. Australia’s arc of instability: How to cannot augment its domestic market by exporting manage it? manufactures, as its wages are too high by global he source of Australia’s current prosperity is standards to compete. also its fundamental existential problem. It is At the same time, Australia is well-positioned Ta resource treasure house in close proximity to a to compete in other aspects of the global economy, large, growing, rapidly modernising population that

10 Quadrant March 2016 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future greatly desires those resources and will have them by of a rising Asian power led to a war that could be one means or another. Australia has dealt with this finished only by the use of nuclear weapons. problem to date by a mix of strategies that have been reasonably effective. It has made the resources available to the world marketplace at a reasonable price. 3. Nuclear proliferation: Under whose To date, it has been cheaper and easier for anybody umbrella will Australia shelter? desiring those resources simply to buy them than to nother irony is that the very political classes try to take them from Australia by force. For much who have been calling for a greater orientation of Australia’s history it had its security guaranteed oAf Australia as an “Asian” nation have been the ones by the British Empire, and for most of that period most guilty of keeping their heads in Europe while that was a very effective strategy. When it failed, at Australia’s security depends on a clear-eyed and Singapore in 1942, Australia shifted to a security realistic assessment of the reality of Asia. By Europe guarantee from the US. That has been the under- I specifically refer to the “End of History” illusion pinning of its defence ever since. that gripped European intellectuals with the col- It has supplemented this with a pro-active lapse of the Cold War—the idea that international military program, capitalising on its status as a relations were on the verge of evolving into a peace- better-educated, more high-technology country ful transnational governance under positive inter- surrounded by less capable neighbours. It has been national norms and regulations. The pilot program capable of small-scale interventions for this was to be the European (unilaterally, when necessary) in Union, which would leap ahead of the Arc of Instability that stretches he greatest threat the US and other less enlightened from Aceh in Sumatra in the north- T powers, until it was globally emu- west to the Solomon Islands and Fiji to Australian lated. In this rule-based world, to the north-east. However, most security in the military forces would be an expen- of the fundamental assumptions sive anachronism, which would of this strategy are coming under coming era may be gradually wither away into a global pressure. The Obama administra- the determination of peacekeeping force. And the most tion has demonstrated that the US the Green movement terrible of weapons, nuclear arms, guarantee may be subject to peri- would be confined to the existing ods of foreign-policy fatigue in the that, for essentially nuclear powers, who would gradu- American body politic, and its his- quasi-religious ally reduce their forces until they torical bond with Australia may be vanished for good. weakened by administrations that reasons, Australian This vision has been thoroughly increasingly have to counterbal- resources must stay undermined by developments. The ance that bond with the demands in the ground. benign Hegelian world proved to be of trade and security with Asian an illusion born of the optimism of powers. North Korea has demon- the Cold War’s peaceful end. The strated that even a small determined power can European Union has failed precisely where it has develop the ability to threaten Australia directly been most ambitious in assuming the attributes of a with long-range nuclear systems, while driven by state: maintaining a currency, securing its borders, non-economic motivations that cannot be placated and developing a common foreign policy. merely by the availability of resources at a fair price. Ukraine embodied all of the failures of postmod- The greatest threat to Australian security in ern statecraft rolled into a single package: Ukrainians the coming era may be the determination of the traded their nuclear weapons, inherited from the hard-core element of the Green movement that, for USSR, for international treaty guarantees of secu- essentially mystical quasi-religious reasons, the next rity and territorial integrity. Today these guarantees generation’s store of Australian resources must stay are in tatters, as Sebastopol, under international law in the ground. This amounts to a de facto embargo a Ukrainian city, passed into Russia’s possession as of Asia’s rising economic and military powers. It readily as Bismarck swallowed Schleswig-Holstein, would be well to remember the consequence of the and with little more effective protest from today’s last successful embargo of a rising Asian economic “international community” than was heard in 1864. power, America’s 1941 strategic materials embargo of North Korea torpedoes a South Korean warship Japan. Ironically, the hard-core Green lobby wish- with fewer repercussions than Japan’s sinking of ing to limit Asia’s ability to access these resources the USS Panay in 1937. Nuclear proliferation pro- at a reasonable price also lobbies against Australia’s ceeds apace as India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals acquisition of nuclear weapons. The last embargo are normalised for all intents and purposes, North

Quadrant March 2016 11 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future

Korea’s nuclear warhead program is limited only by by the principle of the handover agreement in terms its competence, and Iran’s program is all but legal- of continuing to let its vigorous market economy ised in return for their accepting little more than a flourish. Hong Kong residents have been less happy speed bump along the highway to full capability. over the gradual encroachment of mainland author- Several major Asian powers are generally consid- ities over Hong Kong’s political self-government. ered to be a “screwdriver’s turn” from nuclear weap- China has generally refrained from overt violation ons capability, possessing the science, technologies, of the handover agreement, but has exercised grad- fissionable materials and delivery capabilities for ually increasing pressure over the political system. nuclear weapons, requiring only the directive from This has brought adherents of a vigorous democracy on high to proceed and some small period of time. movement, a great many of whom are young peo- Nations with less capability, of course, can always ple, into the streets. The symbols of their movement just buy them from one of the less scrupulous unof- have included the Guy Fawkes masks beloved of the ficial nuclear powers, as Saudi Arabia has reportedly Occupy and Anonymous movements, and, some- arranged with Pakistan. what ironically, the old Blue Ensign of colonial-era In this environment, Australia must carefully Hong Kong. Just as progressives and republicans consider its realities and options. The first option is in Australia and New Zealand have wanted to get to believe in the Hegelian vision and rely on inter- rid of the Blue Ensign on their national flags, the national treaties and the declaration of the South democracy protesters of Hong Kong have adopted it Pacific Nuclear Free Zone to prevent any use or as a symbol of constitutional government and civil threat of nuclear attack on Australia. Some advice liberties. might be sought from the Ukrainians as to this Over the next twenty years, which is to say option. The second option is the status quo, reli- within the timeline of this look forward, the peo- ance solely on the US nuclear umbrella. This has ple and businesses of Hong Kong will be watch- worked well for Australia to date, at least so far ing the intent of the mainland government very as anybody can prove. The question is, would it carefully, as the 2047 deadline for expiration of work into the indefinite future, especially given the the fifty-year guarantees of free markets and increasing uncertainty of American politics? Would democracy approaches. Long-term planning for a President Trump or Sanders retaliate for a nuclear infrastructure and property development in Hong strike on Australia if the aggressor threatened to Kong will be well under way during that period. attack a US city as a consequence? It is quite likely that as the deadline draws closer, The third option is the acquisition of a nuclear a great many Hong Kong people will be quietly deterrent by Australia. This is a perfectly feasi- seeking a second home or passport, in case they ble option both technologically and financially. need it as their primary one. Australia is an advanced technological nation with This deadline and uncertainty offer an opportu- sufficient capability to build atomic weapons, and is nity for Australia. If this century is destined to be actually an exporter of ores for fissionable material. an Indo-Pacific century, as many indicators suggest, But would an Australian government have, and be then Australia’s possession of seacoast and modern willing to expend, the political capital needed to fol- infrastructure on both oceans gives it, in effect, a low through on a nuclear commitment? (It would, front-row seat in this arena. There has always been among other things, require Australia to withdraw a place for a city where the businesses and financiers from the Treaty of Rarotonga.) And would it be of the English-speaking world can readily access worth the expense and effort to acquire the weapons the Asian business arena, yet enjoy the familiarity when its delivery methods would likely be more vul- and security of Anglo-American common law and nerable and therefore have less deterrent effect than the Anglo-American business environment. Asian the gold-standard umbrella it now enjoys, namely entrepreneurs and English-speaking courts have high-quality nuclear-powered ballistic-missile sub- always been a highly productive mix. Hong Kong marines with continuous at-sea deterrence? has provided this environment for nearly two cen- There is a fourth option, which will be discussed turies now, to the benefit of all. Yet how long can later in this article. businesses, financiers and the ordinary people of Hong Kong count on Beijing to successfully repli- 4 cate the magic? . Wistful for the Blue Ensign: Is Hong The opportunity for Australia is to offer a home Kong’s deadline Australia’s opportunity? on its soil or under its umbrella to much of the nother trend currently under the radar for most energy that now resides in Hong Kong and make Australians is the future of Hong Kong. Since every attempt to attract it to that new home. This tAhe handover in 1997, China has in general abided is happening already in a piecemeal fashion, as

12 Quadrant March 2016 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future

Chinese and particularly Hong Kong people have benefit” in this context means that citizens of the been taking advantage of Australia’s rational immi- countries involved have not only the theoretical gration policies and migrating to its major cities. right to jobs or other opportunities, but that there However, it would be possible to go further, and actually be jobs realistically available on both ends.) take advantage of one of Australia’s underutilised Australia’s population growth could be acceler- assets —its north and north-west coast, with its ated, if desired, by broadening the applicability of closer proximity to Asia’s existing business centres. any or all of these three systems. Most discussion If Australia began a development plan to exploit to date has revolved around broadening or narrow- this opportunity, it would be turning into an ing the criteria in the first two categories. There is available reality in ten to twenty years, exactly the an interesting option for accomplishing the accel- time frame needed to attract what is likely to be a eration through broadening the third, as will be growing crowd of opportunity-seekers anxious to discussed later in this article. develop a nearby Plan B. Western Australia is even (There is now a third question, which is whether on the same time zone as Hong Kong, a feature current population growth, by whatever means, is that the émigrés now shuttling regularly between adequate to sustain the social benefits system that Hong Kong and Vancouver would undoubtedly depends on a large rate of increase for its actuarial welcome. viability. Although this has been debated, it is likely Britain in the nineteenth century took four that any adaptation to a smaller growth rate, not to fishing villages on the fringe of the Asian main- mention a flat or negative one, probably requires a land—Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore and Hong more wrenching restructuring of institutions, and Kong—and by offering a trustworthy legal and thus a greater expenditure of political capital, than administrative framework, turned them into four the adaptations that could increase the population of Asia’s main business centres. Australia could rate.) provide a fifth. This would, of course, require an improvement in a number of areas, including transport speed, availability of cheap fresh water, 6. Beyond old Australia: Where will the and resolution of Aboriginal land title claims. new jobs and homes be? However, these issues may be addressable by new n contemplating an accelerated population developments, as we will discuss later. growth, a question arises. Other things remain- Iing equal, many incomers will likely be seeking jobs and housing in the major metropolitan areas. 5. Australia’s next generation: Where These areas are becoming increasingly dense, and will they come from? home prices have risen substantially and are con- ince its founding, Australia has had two prin- tinuing to rise. This has been to some extent a result cipal concerns regarding its population. The of deliberate policy choices, based on Green ideol- fiSrst was a fact considered readily evident: that ogy, but also propped up by the desire of the home- Australia had more opportunities, in terms of owners who have bought at high prices to maintain land, resources and global location, than it had the asset value thus achieved. This is hardly an qualified Australians able to take full advantage Australian problem alone; it has been encountered of them, and, when needed, to defend them. The across the English-speaking world, all of whose cit- second arises from the observation that it would ies have been a result of similar deep-seated pref- be easy enough to increase the number of people erences for nuclear families owning (not renting) in Australia above that of natural reproduction by stand-alone single-family houses, and a willingness immigration. The question then is, you may have to commute whatever distance is needed to afford 30 million people in Australia, but will they be such housing. Australians? This question was answered variously Affordability plagues London, San Francisco and in the past, with national and racial preferences and Vancouver just as much as Sydney and Melbourne, bans. Those approaches are beyond the pale today. and for similar reasons. Yet the US, and to a lesser Currently, Australia has three systems for extent Canada and Australia, are demonstrating admitting non-Australians: a general points-based a coping strategy that, applied more consistently immigration system based on national needs and and deliberately, could be a winning strategy for candidate qualifications; a refugee category based a new, growing, better-connected and more eco- on genuine evidence of persecution and need for nomically robust Australia. This is the creation and asylum; and a treaty system based on reciprocal encouragement of what the urbanist Joel Kotkin meaningful benefit, which is currently extended has dubbed “aspirational cities”. These are the new only to New Zealand. (“Reciprocal meaningful cities, suburbs and exurbs of the American South-

Quadrant March 2016 13 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future

West and West. They were born in the post-war usual, such places attract newcomers. A dispropor- era, when the interstate highway system, afford- tionate number of the 600,000 New Zealanders able jet air travel, telecommunications and airline living in Australia, for example, have gravitated to deregulation, and nationwide simultaneous tel- these areas. evision broadcasting knit America together into a As with the question of reforming social ben- genuine nationwide market and nationwide mental efit institutions, it does not seem realistic to tackle space. Suddenly, it became possible to start or grow head-on the understandable reluctance of current a business anywhere and sell nationwide, and many suburban home-owners to reduce the value of veterans and their families took their veteran’s their homes by changing urban policy in the exist- financing and bought affordable (and now toler- ing major urban centres. Rather, an agenda for able due to air-conditioning) housing in places like Australian growth, prosperity and security would Orlando, Houston and Phoenix. Many people and identify barriers to the growth of new aspirational businesses abandoned congested and high-priced cities, particularly on the Asia-facing northern and city centres for increasingly distant affordable sub- north-western coast, and remove or alleviate them. urbs and exurbs. In effect, it would be a strategy to create a New Although these areas were sometimes accused of Australia for the existing Australian population, racism, in fact such exurbs and new and newcomers, to the prosperity cities are heavily favoured by immi- of both Old and New Australia. grants, who like the affordability n agenda for and find suburban strip malls con- A Australian growth, 7. The water question: Is a venient places for establishing the breakthrough imminent? restaurants, retail businesses and prosperity and religious meeting places that pro- hen Australians first started vide the economic base and com- security would to generate a coherent vision munity centres of their diaspora identify barriers to oWf the continent’s future, its inte- communities. rior had not been explored and its Some Green advocates critique the growth of new hydrography was not understood at these aspirational communities for aspirational cities, all. In America, President Jefferson sprawl and energy inefficiency. Yet particularly on the sent Lewis and Clark across his these concerns are largely misplaced. continent in 1804 and found 3500 As economic activity continues to Asian-facing northern kilometres of well-watered land transition to self-employment and and north-western with perhaps 1000 kilometres of entrepreneurialism, as manufactur- desert between the Rockies and the ing transitions to small-scale local coast, and remove Sierra Nevada. When Burke and 3-D manufacturing, and as self- or alleviate them. Wills crossed Australia from south driving cars promise more efficient to north in 1860-61, they crossed ground transport, the paradigm of 1350 kilometres, and found that the daily commutes from the periphery to city centres is proportions of desert to watered land were effec- likely to decline. Off-the-grid technologies hold out tively reversed. Hopes of an Australian population the promise of exurbs that do not require the less- to equal America’s were replaced with a much more efficient low-density grid connections. (Ironically, modest vision of a land that would be forever dry while hard-core Green elements oppose almost and carry only a sparse population around its coasts. all forms of progress, many individual alternative However, this picture may soon be challenged energy technologies could be quite useful in mak- by another trend every Australian should follow. ing exurbia both affordable and low-impact.) With Water desalinisation has in the past always been such developments, exurbs hold out a renewed ver- a species of fool’s gold. It was by nature a highly sion of the original promise of the suburb, the gar- energy-intensive process that might be the least- den city combining the more attractive features of worst solution on a nuclear-powered aircraft car- urban and country living. rier, or, in a pinch, in a rich energy-abundant place Canada and Australia already have their own like the Emirates. versions of aspirational cities. Calgary became not However, new technology promises a funda- only a centre of employment due to the years of the mental change. Nanotechnology, the technology of oil boom, but also gradually became a headquarters handling materials at the nanometre scale, has been town, attracting first energy companies, and then a rapidly developing field for many decades, and a other corporations. Brisbane and the Gold Coast technology buzzword for the past two. But beyond also became centres of aspirational opportunity. As the hype, steady progress has been made on the use

14 Quadrant March 2016 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future of a nanotechnology-derived solution, molecular resources, including both mineral and agricultural filters, for water purification and desalinisation. potential. Barriers in the past have included lack of Energy-intensive distillation methods are, essen- infrastructure, a lack of water in some places, and tially, a brute-force tactic. Molecular filtering is a more water than can be used locally in others. Its smart-technology alternative, accomplishing supe- tropical climate was another barrier. Now, with the rior quality results for a fraction of the energy cost, development of affordable air-conditioning, both and therefore of the dollar cost. hot dry areas (such Phoenix, Arizona) and hot wet When considering where to build the new aspi- places (Orlando, Florida) have become aspirational rational cities for Australia’s coming generations, cities attracting millions of transmigrants from the north and north-west have been discounted for temperate climates. Most of northern Australia’s many reasons, but primarily for the lack of water. locations have annual climate ranges comparable to Molecular filtering technologies have already been one of these areas. demonstrated to the point where an aspirational In addition to the geographical and environ- city project for a dry area could reasonably begin mental challenges, northern development has been development depending solely on such technology held back by bureaucratic and political barriers, for residential water needs, at a price competitive to including an inability to resolve Aboriginal title residential water elsewhere in Australia. in a way that is timely, effective and fair. Narrow These technologies will soon be ready to sup- interests have been able to block development by ply substantial amounts of water for industrial or putting local advantage or other particular con- water-intensive agricultural uses in Australia at cerns against the general welfare of the Australian competitive prices. However, a trading city oriented nation. These barriers have artificially made it primarily to being a business, financial and high- harder to finance needed infrastructure and have technology centre on the model of Dubai would not raised uncertainty about the long-term political need that scale of water. Thus such a trading city is and regulatory environment. In an era when an well-suited to be a pilot application for the large- outgoing British Treasury secretary can leave his scale use of such technology. successor a note saying, “Sorry, but there is no One generation’s rare commodity can easily money” (a phenomenon happening throughout the become the next generation’s cheap commodity, developed world), such investment will necessar- given the right technology. Aluminium, shortly ily be primarily private. Guaranteeing a policy and after its discovery, was so rare that Queen Victoria regulatory continuity favouring the long-term gen- was presented with a dinner service made from it eral interest would be the best enabling solution to as a novelty; nobody else could afford one. Shortly this dilemma. afterwards, the Hall process made it a commonplace material. Desalinated water promises to be on 9 the verge of a similar transition. No nation is better . After Brexit: Will an outward-looking poised to benefit from this change than Australia. Britain give Australia new options? nef o Australia’s formative experiences was 8 Britain’s applications for membership in what . Australia’s north and north-west: iOs today the European Union, first the unsuccessful How to realise the new opportunities? one of 1960-61 rejected by Charles de Gaulle, and hatever initiatives may be taken to diversify then the one pursued to conclusion under Edward Australia’s economy in future, resources will Heath in 1973. Australians, like New Zealanders rWemain a substantial part of it. The rising economic and Canadians, were blindsided by this move. powers and consumer classes of Asia remain too Canadian writer Jack Granatstein quoted Virgil’s much of a pull. They will likely push as well if pull line “tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore” to is not sufficient to ensure these resources are devel- evoke the image of Britannia’s daughters stretching oped. However, Australia has the ability to control their hands out with longing to their mother on how its resources will be developed, and it will be the farther shore. The shock of Britain’s turn away able to ensure that environmental damage is mini- from its long-standing Commonwealth partners to mised and remediation, where needed, is carried embrace its former German and Italian foes, and out and paid for as part of the price for the resource. the consequent exclusion of Australian producers This is particularly true of Australia’s north. from their historical British markets, led to a major This area, roughly the area north of the Tropic of change in Australia’s perception of itself and its Capricorn, constitutes 40 per cent of Australia’s place in the world. land mass but has only 5 per cent of its population. Now, four decades later, Britannia’s long- It has substantial undeveloped or underdeveloped simmering doubts and discomfort about her

Quadrant March 2016 15 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future abandonment have come to the surface, and a or tighter as circumstances dictated) could, from Referendum Act now requires that a referendum an Australian point of view, be understood as an be held before the end of 2017 on the question expansion of the Trans-Tasman arrangements for of Britain’s exit (“Brexit”) from the European trade, finance, defence and free movement of peo- Union. Opinion polls vary but suggest a close ple to include Canada and the UK. As individual vote. However, even if the referendum fails, it is agenda items, such types of co-operation are already not unlikely that Britain will leave within a few under way or in discussion in various areas. The years anyway. The current problems of the single AUKMIN series of defence ministerial meetings currency, and the internal no-passport Schengen has become regular and useful. Royal Navy per- area, suggest that the EU will need to move to a sonnel made redundant by budget cuts were taken closer, more centralised federal form in the near wholesale into the RAN—there are not many other future, a change which would by law trigger a new services from which Australia would contemplate referendum that would almost certainly lead to such a move. London’s Mayor Boris Johnson has Britain’s voters rejecting the EU. proposed a Labour Mobility Zone Current discussion in Britain between the CANZUK nations among advocates of Brexit turns giving Trans-Tasman-like free frequently to the question, “To A CANZUK movement. A Facebook petition for whom shall we turn for closer association could, from such free movement, backed by no trade and co-operation if our an Australian point of money, publicity, organisation or ties with Europe are loosened?” famous name received over 90,000 And the answer that comes up view, be understood signatures in a few months. with increasing frequency is “the as an expansion of Such a CANZUK alignment Commonwealth”, which in seri- would not seek to replace the US ous discourse really means two the Trans-Tasman connection for any of its mem- options, one being India, and the arrangements for ber nations, but to supplement it, other Canada, Australia and New and to allow future co-operation Zealand, collectively. The formal trade, finance, defence to be negotiated on a more even Commonwealth Secretariat would and free movement basis. Once the US foreign policy not play a serious role; neither of people to include establishment finished mourning India nor Canada is about to com- the death of its dream of the UK ply with a decision with real costs Canada and the UK. as the State Department’s mole in or consequences passed by a major- Brussels, it would quickly see the ity counting Tuvalu and Lesotho value of a stronger and more capa- equally with themselves. Nor does it make sense ble partner. The American defence establishment, to deal with a rising, developing power like India which has grown more and more sceptical of the with the same mechanisms needed to deal with a prospects for a genuine European contribution, and mature developed power like Canada. What will is eager for a reliable, proven partner with genuine emerge as a topic of discussion is a close associa- capability, would probably welcome it more quickly. tion of what is sometimes called the “CANZUK” The four nations and their forces together group: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the could more readily afford the advanced capabilities UK. Some discussion along these lines is beginning needed to inter-operate with the US, and to take to emerge among commentators such as the econ- care of itself in situations where the consistent par- omist Andrew Lilico and groups like the United ticipation of the US could not be guaranteed. And Commonwealth Society. significantly for a century that is seeing a prolifera- For many Australians, the first response might tion of nuclear powers, not all of which are respon- be to say, “Sorry, mate, way too late.” For those old sible, the prospect of coming formally under the enough to remember the shock of the first applica- UK’s gold-standard strategic deterrent provides an tion to Brussels, there may be a temptation to take alternative to complete reliance on US constancy. an almost Sicilian delight at the prospect of a cold (In fact, it also holds out the possibility of a stra- and tasty dish of revenge for that betrayal. But the tegic deterrent that does not require Australia to fictional yet plausible Don Vito Corleone would renounce the Non-Proliferation Treaty, or even the more likely to respond, “Interesting. What would Treaty of Rarotonga.) be in it for us?” In regard to the domestic investment needs of And once examined in the light of realism, it an aspirational cities strategy, London is one of the does become interesting. A CANZUK associa- two greatest financial centres on the planet. The tion (which could take many possible forms, looser prospect of its investment in the infrastructure and

16 Quadrant March 2016 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future development in northern Australia and Canada grateful to Australia for its virtues. As Hong Kong being given the same assurances of continuity of approaches the planning horizon for the expiration policy as a domestic investment has the potential of its guarantees, it would be a particularly likely to fully unlock a needed source of support. This source of such newcomers. could be guaranteed by an ANZCERTA-plus style Australia needs reliable friends in the world. agreement including the UK. The US has been a reasonably reliable friend, but it has many friends and many interests, and at a ratio of 25 million Australians (generously) to 330 mil- 10. How can a new framework address lion Americans (conservatively) there will always all these issues comprehensively? be a certain asymmetry to the relationship. Britain s the previous discussion demonstrates, by itself has useful capabilities, but at 65 million to Australia faces a complex set of challenges and 25 million, would provide still a rather asymmetri- oApportunities over the next several decades. Most cal partnership, and additionally carries historical Australians have a healthy scepticism of utopian connotations in the Australian psyche that are not solutions, a liking for many features of Australian uniformly positive. An Australia in a CANZUK life as it is, and a desire to keep them if possible. entity, on the other hand, would see 65 million This is a humane and sane desire. But in times Brits balanced by 64 million Aussies, Canadians of rapid and universal change, we might heed and New Zealanders, which would mean British the words of the Sicilian aristocrat Don Fabrizio interests, even if they ever could agree on anything, Corbera in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “everything could not prevail against the rest. (There is always needs to change, so everything can stay the same”. the prospect that Scotland, Quebec or other areas In order for Australia to maintain control over might chose to become members of such an align- its resources, it must develop them on its own ment in their own right, providing a compromise terms. In order for Australia to maintain the secu- between independence and union. Special areas rity to ensure it can dictate its own terms, it needs such as large “aspirational city” projects in free to expand its population and range of development. zones might also choose to affiliate independently, But in order to ensure its ability to assimilate the so that newcomers would not disrupt existing local newcomers from different linguistic, cultural and political balances.) In reality, political alignments political backgrounds, it needs also to have a sub- are so similar throughout the four nations that the stantial stream of newcomers from similar back- Right, Left and Centre would quickly form all- grounds to existing Australian populations. In CANZUK alliances and align mostly by affiliation order to maintain its cutting-edge resource indus- rather than by nation. This is not empire redux, but try, it would help to have economic diversification rather a family that long ago went their own indi- to insulate it from the inevitable boom-and-bust vidual ways and decided that they got along rather cycles of the world commodity markets. Free move- well, after all, and might as well start a new venture ment with other advanced economies helps obtain together. the talent to drive such diversification. The Victorian era was marked by the emer- As these newcomers come into Australia, they gence of audaciously ambitious visionary figures will want jobs and houses. Current urban planning such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Charles doctrines make houses scarce and expensive, and Babbage. Brunel envisioned high-speed trains and have driven up the price of housing, raising wages enormous trans-Atlantic steamers, but was frus- and therefore the cost of operations for small and trated by having to work with iron rather than steel new companies, the most likely source of new jobs. and low-pressure steam engines that strained to Changing these laws would drive down the existing power the fast trains and massive ships he built. equity of current home-owners, however, making a His visions began to come true only a half-century vote for such measures political suicide. Therefore, later as trans-Atlantic steamers finally caught up the growth of aspirational cities, especially in the to the standards set by his Great Eastern. Charles north and north-west, would provide the space for Babbage correctly understood the implications of new housing and employment without disrupting machine intelligence, and envisioned an “Analytical existing arrangements in the old cities of the east Engine” a century or more ahead of its time, but and south. The new cities would also provide trad- was frustrated by the limits of the technology of ing centres substantially closer to Asia. Thus, the his day, and the lack of visionary support to afford high demand for secure venues for Asian trading the persistence that probably would have given him and secure refuges against the political uncertainty success. in Asia would ensure another stream of qualified Their equivalents in the political sphere were newcomers who would add productivity and be the imperial federationists, men like the English

Quadrant March 2016 17 Ten Questions for Australia’s Future historian and writer J.R. Seeley and New Zealand could not. Just as modern liners or modern super- Prime Minister Sir Julius Vogel. These men computers do not much resemble their Victorian theorised that the “annihilation of distance” created precursors in the details, so a CANZUK alignment by railways, steamships and telegraphs permitted would not much resemble the imperial pomp the an unprecedented possibility: turning the British federationists envisioned. It would most likely be Isles and its colonies of settlement into a new little more than a bundle of trade, defence and free form of state, a globe-spanning federation of equal movement agreements along the lines of Nato and members governed by an imperial parliament. ANZCERTA. Yet such things have been the stuff Although this vision excited a great many of the of modern security and prosperity, and still they intelligent political thinkers of the day, it never would deliver much of the functionality the impe- came to pass, largely because the annihilation of rial federationists desired. Within such a frame- distance the technology of the day offered was still work, Australia’s chances of realising the rest of too incomplete to make such a scheme practical. the confident, growing and prospering future envi- Like Brunel’s ships and Babbage’s computers, their sioned here could be greatly enhanced. That too vision exceeded the available means. would likely be just one more step in “changing The possibility of some form of post-Brexit everything, so that everything stays the same”. CANZUK alignment might just be the political equivalent of the modern liner or computer, with James C. Bennett is the author of The Anglosphere the internet and jet aircraft providing the annihi- Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will lation of distance that steamships and telegraphs Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century.

Old Guys

geto t the club every evening early with wives called Betty, Flo or Shirley order the mixed roast with chips and a pavlova take it back to the table like they’re in clover always wear their trousers way too high still like to say I’ve got to fly sometimes have a piece of one ear missing play with the past and call it reminiscing always miss a loop on their belt band like their sandwiches closed and their spaghetti canned always look sad when they’re on their own get there too late to catch the phone read the death notices, every letter see they’re not there and somehow feel better old guys are everywhere, everywhere I see old guys are starting to look like me

Max Ryan

18 Quadrant March 2016 Robert Pershing Wadlow (1918–1940)

He looked like a stilt-walker, or a suited sunflower, parading his head along the tidy streets of Alton. His aerial ears stopped cars. Illinois’s tallest boy—his height: eight feet and eleven inches. He occupied a sweeter air, above the strangers’ cologne and second-lung smoke, the cheesy pong of spongy sandwiches. Wherever he’d go, an impromptu camp would form: upturned faces lengthening with surprise. The suck and pop of gasps as he waded through the paddling pool of people. Handshakes were ribbon-cutting protocol; his foot-long hands englobed other folks’. Bali & Other Haiku They were useless with scissors. arthritis Reporters’ pencils, between his fingers, grateful to write were the size of drawing pins. just three lines Tired blood, huffing and puffing from head to toe, laid him low. Bed sheets twitched with cold stethoscopes; a sheaf of corn sour thermometers neighboured his pillow. The phone’s on the old man’s back gargle interrupted by his dad saying “normal”, then “no”. Mount Agung

Unhindered by blisters or walking sticks— my driver a body’s paraphernalia—radio voices too shy to accept a Bintang met his mind. The accents of America lifting clouds live from London, Toronto, Yokkaichi. a stone bridge Bob, feeling dinky, on the other side of love beneath the sky. frangapanni Daniel Tammet an ATM swallows my card the skinniest cat

foggy moon a smashed wine glass on the lawn

half a moon a puddle walked through in slippers

Jade Pisani

Quadrant March 2016 19 Christie Davies

Letter from London

s I write, Britain is seeing the collapse of see why anyone ever took her seriously. In 2013 the a long and nasty witch hunt against lead- Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there ing Conservative politicians and establish- was no evidence to justify charging Leon Brittan, Ament figures, all of whom had been falsely accused but a powerful Labour MP, quite unconstitution- of sexually abusing children and been ferociously ally, put strong pressure on them and this led to investigated by the police. When I say “witch hunt” Lord Brittan being interviewed under caution at a I do not mean that there has been a conspiracy. time when he was terminally ill. It meant that his Nothing was planned or co-ordinated against the last years of pain and suffering from cancer were individuals who were placed under suspicion, and further blighted by having this false accusation some of those who put these absurd allegations hanging over him right up until the time he died into circulation believed them in good faith. Rather in 2015. what we have seen is a curious mixture of inane In addition, Leon Brittan, along with Field credulity and heavy-handedness on the part of the Marshal Bramall, the former Conservative Prime police, encouraged by hysterical publicity provided Minister Edward Heath (who died in 2005) and by bigoted and opportunistic left-wing pressure Harvey Proctor, together with many other sen- groups, politicians and publications. ior figures, were accused of being part of a gang The crumbling of the witch craze began when that had not only raped and tortured young boys the police admitted after a long, intrusive and but had also murdered three of them. The police expensive investigation that there was no credible were stupid enough to believe these absurd accu- evidence to indicate that Leon Brittan, a former sations mainly made by the anonymous “Nick”, a Conservative Home Secretary, and Field Marshal former National Health Service manager now in Bramall, a former Chief of Defence Staff, had been his late forties. Nick even alleged that at one paedo- involved in any kind of criminal sexual activity. phile party for Conservatives, Harvey Proctor had It was not that there was insufficient evidence to threatened to castrate him with a pen-knife, but charge them, but quite simply that there was no was stopped from doing so by Edward Heath. Why decent evidence at all. Effectively both men have Heath and Proctor, political enemies who loathed been completely exonerated and the leaders of the each other and were not on speaking terms, should Metropolitan Police are currently under pressure have gone partying together has not been explained. to make a full, abject and grovelling public apol- However, honest Nick has even produced the pen- ogy to Field Marshal Bramall and to Leon Brittan’s knife in question and given it to the police. The widow. world waits eagerly to hear whether Proctor’s or What is now clear is that the small number of Heath’s prints or DNA have been found on it. anonymous witnesses on whom the police had relied The investigating detective said publicly at an were unreliable fantasists. One of them, “Darren”, early stage that he found Nick’s allegations “cred- has already retracted his allegations, saying he had ible and true”, thus treating them as established fact been under pressure from left-wing groups to pro- before they had been properly investigated, which ceed with them. But the man he falsely accused, is quite contrary to the basic rules of British justice. ex-Conservative MP Harvey Proctor, has in conse- Was it credible and true that three boys were mur- quence been harassed by the police and lost his job dered? Where are the corpses, Mr Plod? Where and his home. In Leon Brittan’s case an anonymous are the reports of suitable boys gone missing? The woman described in the press as a “Labour activist police have subsequently admitted that there never with severe mental health problems” had claimed were any murders, but if this part of Nick’s testi- that he raped her in 1967. Given that she is clearly mony was a lie, then why should anybody believe both crazy and ideologically driven, it is difficult to the rest?

20 Quadrant March 2016 Letter from London

Its i quite clear that Nick has invented the entire It is interesting to contrast the eagerness to story. He may have been sexually abused by an pounce in all these cases with the total reluctance unknown group of men at some time in his youth, of the politically correct authorities to take swift which is how he knows the kind of thing that hap- action against Britain’s numerous violent Muslim pens, but his stories about generals and politicians sex gangs who prey on under-age girls. As I write and castration and murder are delusions. As I write, twelve Muslims have just been convicted and given Nick’s step-brother has just told the press that as a total of 143 years in jail for gang-raping a thirteen- a child Nick was a spiteful, serial liar and that he year-old non-Muslim girl in Keighley in Yorkshire. does not seem to have changed. Many of the local Muslims are blaming the victim but the leftists and feminists are unusually silent. ore charitably, I am inclined to see the adult Similarly, an eccentric retired Anglican prel- Nick as a compulsive fantasist. He is in the ate has just repeated a bizarre story that Enoch Msame category as the numerous people who claim Powell was involved in satanic ritual child abuse, with complete sincerity to have been kidnapped that invented phenomenon which never happened. by aliens from outer space and to have been the Powell is of course a key hate figure for the Left victims of sexual experiments in even today due to his robust nation- flying saucers, or those who can alism and his strong opposition to recall in vivid and seemingly accu- ther parties imbued immigration from the Third World. rate detail a previous life that hap- O We may contrast this with the pened hundreds of years ago. False with the ideology of determined and corrupt left-wing memories are very common, and as victimisation—the cover-up of the crimes against boys Dutch experimental psychologists committed by Trevor Huddleston have repeatedly shown, they are police, left-wing whom they regard as almost a saint extremely easy to induce. campaign groups, because of his battle against apart- The usual inducers in moral compensation- heid in South Africa. Let us now panics about sex abuse are thera- look at his story in detail; it is quite pists and analysts and social work- hungry lawyers the opposite of today’s mad perse- ers who hold progressive views. and scandal-seeking cution of conservatives. They sympathetically listen to a story of abuse and eagerly press for journalists looking for n April 1974 the police ques- more detail. The youthful teller of copy—get involved tioned Huddleston, then Bishop a dubious tale of abuse, grateful oIf Stepney, in the presence of for their support and to have been in magnifying, his solicitor, after a mother had made important and the centre of amplifying and doing complained that he had behaved attention, now responds with ever well out of the story. improperly with her two schoolboy more lurid and dramatic “memo- sons, boys who played regularly ries”. Other parties imbued with at his house in Stepney. A report the ideology of victimisation—the police, left-wing was sent by the police to the Director of Public campaign groups, compensation-hungry lawyers Prosecutions (DPP) giving details of offences and scandal-seeking journalists looking for copy— against a total of four boys. The report proposed that now get involved in magnifying, amplifying and Huddleston should be charged with four counts of doing well out of the story. gross indecency for illicitly fondling the young boys That is how a moral panic is born. How do we while they sat on his lap. But Huddleston was never know his? We know it from the detailed study of prosecuted and the Scotland Yard investigation was previous, now utterly discredited, panics in which kept secret. abuse by parents and even satanic child abuse was A reporter contacted the mother, and the editor alleged to have taken place in Middlesbrough in of the Sunday Express, John Junor, told Prebendary 1987, in Rochdale in 1990 and in Orkney in 1991. Dewi Morgan, the Anglican Rector who acted as Hundreds of children were forcibly removed from a link between the Church of England and the their homes by police and social workers. Closer press, that he was sure Huddleston was guilty. investigation by sceptics revealed that the parents The Sunday Express was prepared to publish the were innocent and that satanic abuse was a myth story and its legal adviser read it out to Prebendary and the panics collapsed. But by then the damage Morgan. Due to strong external pressure it was to the families had been done, just as it has been never published, though a reference to the incident done to Brittan, Bramall, Proctor and other con- did appear two years later in Private Eye. servative figures today. Meanwhile the head prosecutor had referred

Quadrant March 2016 21 Letter from London the o case t the new Labour Attorney-General, have worked as a defence if it were unscrupulously Sam Silkin, to decide whether Huddleston should exploited by an experienced left-wing attorney. be prosecuted. He quashed it. Five years later the It is curious that no one has looked with any wretched Silkin said about the case on the radio: degree of thoroughness into whether there were complaints about Huddleston’s conduct when he I found that I was in difficulty as the man was was Bishop of Masasi in Tanzania in the 1960s and very well known. If he had been prosecuted in charge of mission schools. The boss of Tanzania, at all it would have ruined his career. Within Julius Nyerere, was his friend and protector and the DPP’s department everyone thought he might well have been willing to provide silence would be acquitted though there was clearly and complicity. If Huddleston had chosen to be evidence. the chicken-hawk of Masasi, he could have done so with impunity. Relatives of the former Tanzanian Sam Silkin, the man who dishonestly covered up opposition leader Oscar Kambona have told me that for Huddleston, was later to become a close associ- they are convinced that this was the case. It would ate of the crooked Robert Maxwell and to cover up also be interesting to investigate what Huddleston for him too. In this case it was Huddleston’s posi- got up to as Archbishop in Mauritius (from 1976 to tion as a left-wing political icon that determined 1981) after he was hurriedly translated there to hush his decision. Silkin must have felt uneasy about up the Stepney affair. what he had done or he would not have blurted out The very absence of a public scandal in the case of about it on the radio five years later. John Junor Huddleston is a matter of importance. Huddleston saw the point and wrote in the Sunday Express of was protected by the power of the Left. He enjoyed Silkin’s admission: a high level of protection because he lived in a society where Left-liberal values, priorities and heroes For that could be another way of saying that the cannot be challenged—a true hegemony. In the prominent man was not necessarily innocent face of this the newspapers did not dare openly and but that in any court proceedings it would have directly to print what many journalists would have been his word against the word of the little known or thought about his sexuality. What is par- children and that a jury would almost certainly ticularly curious is that the Sunday Express did not have accepted his word. in the end publish a story about him in 1974 despite having one prepared and checked by their lawyers The denials by Huddleston’s supporters that and despite the editor’s dislike of Huddleston and their hero was an abuser are ridiculous. One of their his politics. What kind of pressure was put on them defences has been to suggest (without any evidence to spike the story? Who was leaning on them? whatsoever) that the Stepney incident was set up by Surely these historic allegations should be thor- his political enemies, notably the Afrikaner South oughly investigated in the paramount interests of African government’s Bureau of State Security. The victims in general who need to feel they will always Bureau was a great bogeyman but it never had the be believed? resources or the manpower to mount massive cov- No doubt Huddleston’s admirers will strongly ert operations in Britain either against Huddleston object to seeing him accused of sexual abuse after or against their other sexually deviant and possibly his death when much of the evidence is just rumour murderous enemy, the much covered-up-for Jeremy or speculation. But why should there be one law for Thorpe. the Left? How can the Huddleston-loving leftists Like many paedophiles Huddleston probably see it as entirely acceptable to smear Edward Heath convinced himself that his sexual activities could or the “racist” Enoch Powell, both deceased, on the never have harmed children because he loved them basis of rumour alone? Now you can see why I have so much. This would account for his complete men- stressed that the present witch hunt is one specifi- tal breakdown after the accusations of 1974 when cally directed against conservatives. for months he was hardly able to feed or dress himself. It also helps to explain why there were some in Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of the DPP’s office who thought they might be unable Moral Britain. His previous London Letter appeared to obtain a conviction. Love of children might well in the October 2015 issue.

22 Quadrant March 2016 Tony Abbott

The Economic Case for the Abbott Government

he first law of governing is that you can’t As a citizen paying a mortgage, let alone as a spend what you can’t raise through taxes senior minister working to a budget, I had always and borrowings; and the second law is understood very well that everything has to be paid Tthat today’s borrowings have to be paid for—with for. Every single thing government does—main- interest—by tomorrow’s taxes. Governments, like taining the police and armed forces, administering households and businesses, have to live within their justice, paying for social security and facilitating means. Although governments have some unique schools and hospitals—all has to be funded by capabilities, in the end, they can’t spend any more taxpayers. So ensuring that government spends no than taxpayers are prepared to pay for. more than it really must is not just an economic With more than $250 billion of cumulative defi- imperative; it’s also a moral one. It’s the respect that cits under the former Labor government, the need government owes to taxpayers, for whom every dol- for budget repair was the constant refrain of the lar is hard-earned. Abbott opposition and the task of budget repair The stronger the economy, the easier it is to fund was the most important work of the Abbott govern- and execute all the work of government and the eas- ment. We were far from fully successful but made a ier it is for people to have good and fulfilling lives. determined effort. Certainly, no fair-minded judge The economy certainly isn’t a government’s only could accuse us of shirking the challenge. concern or, always, even its prime one; but because In 2014, launching Paul Kelly’s book on the the strength of the economy impacts on everything, Rudd–Gillard era, I said that the mission of the the capacity to be a strong and prudent economic Abbott government was to prove that the age of manager is the most important qualification to be reform had been interrupted, not ended; and that in office. the Rudd–Gillard years were an aberration, not the new normal. To then lose the prime ministership in uring the 2013 campaign, I was very clear that a party room coup was to repeat recent history, not the objective of a new Liberal-National gov- to change it. Still, for two years, the Abbott govern- ernmentD would be to build a “strong and prosperous ment squarely faced up to our nation’s challenges economy for a safe and secure Australia”. A strong and did much that will stand the test of time. and prosperous economy was needed to deliver the We stopped the boats—which none of our critics “hope, reward and opportunity” that people invari- thought could be done. We repealed the carbon tax ably want for themselves and their families. Far and the mining tax—which, like all new taxes, were from being a political cliché, this was the shorthand supposed to be forever. In short order, we finalised summary of a detailed plan developed in opposition. the Korea, Japan and China free-trade agree- The key to a strong and prosperous economy was ments—which had gone nowhere for the preceding getting government spending down so that tax cuts ten years. We met new national security challenges could responsibly be delivered. This, in fact, is the at home and abroad with a strength and sureness constant challenge of government: keeping its own that was noticed internationally. And we began spending under control so that tax can be low and the critical task of budget repair. This was achieved private-sector confidence can be high. despite a hysterical opposition, a populist Senate Early on, the Abbott government showed its cross bench, a poisonous media—and, as shown by economic mettle. Refusing to offer further subsidies the very well-organised September 2015 spill, some to chronically unprofitable car makers when Holden senior members who didn’t want the Abbott gov- and Toyota announced, around Christmas 2013, the ernment to succeed. end of production in Australia; declining to extend a

Quadrant March 2016 23 The Economic Case for the Abbott Government loan guarantee to Qantas when it claimed its future best deal reasonably available, rather than wait for was in jeopardy; and telling SPC Ardmona to look the perfect one, enabled our own bids for free-trade to its parent company, rather than to government, agreements to be concluded; and there’s no doubt for a bailout when its closure was a risk to regional that Australia will be a more prosperous economy Victoria, meant that “the age of entitlement was as a result. over”, at least for business welfare. These were not easy decisions. They were very ikewise,n i workplace relations, the Abbott vigorously debated inside the cabinet. Well before government swiftly moved to reform the union the 2014 budget, they demonstrated the govern- mLovement in a pragmatic, two-step process that ment’s conviction that our job was not to pick win- would lead to reform of workplaces. ners or to prop up losers; it was to put the best system Of course, it would be better if penalty rates in place and then allow businesses to stand or fall on didn’t force businesses to close on Sundays and their own merits. public holidays. Of course, if businesses had more The Abbott government’s car industry decision power to fire, they’d also have more power to hire. will ultimately save taxpayers upwards of half a But the case for change needed to be made: espe- billion dollars a year. As its latest cially to low-paid workers whose results show, our Qantas decision penalty rates allowed ends to meet; forced the unions to accept that mployment growth and to vulnerable people with their members’ jobs required their E insecure jobs; so we established a employer’s profitability. And our is on track to meet Productivity Commission inquiry SPC decision forced the company our election pledge of to build the case for further reform. to innovate rather than to con- At the 2013 election, we’d sought tinue products that had gone out a million new jobs a mandate for a registered organisa- of fashion. within five years. tions commission to subject union Demands for job protection had officials to the same standards of not only led previous governments Just 23,000 more governance as company directors; into wasteful subsidy; they’d also jobs were created in and for a re-established Australian complicated successive govern- 2013 but this rose to Building and Construction ments’ attempts to make trade Commission to be a tough cop on easier. There is, after all, much 175,000 in 2014 and the beat for large projects regularly greater public support for more 300,000 in 2015. subject to union blackmail. We’d exports than for more imports— also promised a judicial inquiry into yet we can’t expect other countries union corruption. to reduce their barriers to our goods and services if Now that the Heydon Royal Commission has we don’t likewise relax ours against theirs. provided an abundance of evidence to justify these Very soon after the election, I announced the policies, it’s hard to see the legislation once more government’s intention to finalise free-trade agree- being blocked in the Senate. The cross benchers have ments with Korea, Japan and China within a year. the justification they need; and even a CFMEU- As all these negotiations had been becalmed for influenced opposition is unlikely to risk a double- the best part of a decade, this was a risky pledge to dissolution election defending union thugs. make; but thanks to Trade Minister Andrew Robb’s These aren’t the workplace changes that the most relentlessness, we got there in fourteen months with committed reformers typically seek—but they were the most comprehensive free-trade agreements that the ones most likely to pass this Senate. Higher- any of these countries had yet made. calibre union officials would be more likely to enter Freer trade means more trade; and more trade, into constructive negotiations with vulnerable ultimately, means more jobs. Freer trade boosts pro- employers. Further, an intimidation-free building ductivity by enhancing competition and that ulti- industry, on past evidence, would likely be at least 10 mately means higher wages. This is a hard message per cent more efficient, saving consumers upwards for local employers and for workers facing stronger of $5 billion a year. overseas competition, but the alternative is less efficient local business, higher costs, worse products for herever the Abbott government had com- consumers and, in the long term, a weaker economy. parative freedom of action—for instance in After concluding its own free-trade agreement Wnational security or foreign policy—it was largely with China, for instance, New Zealand’s dairy successful. Even in economic policy—which often exports had quadrupled while Australia’s had stag- required the passage of legislation through a diffi- nated. The Abbott government’s readiness to do the cult Senate—much was achieved. Indeed, one of the

24 Quadrant March 2016 The Economic Case for the Abbott Government strongest endorsements of the Abbott government’s It was our attempt to repair the structural budget economic policy has been Malcolm Turnbull’s challenge Australia faces, which sky-high commod- pledge to maintain it. ity prices had partly papered over under Labor. The The abolition of the carbon tax removed a $9 bil- poll-measured unpopularity of the Abbott govern- lion a year economic handbrake. The abolition of ment, in other words, was not due to any shirking the confidence-killing mining tax was the clearest of responsibility but to our determination to do our possible indicator that, under the Abbott govern- duty as a government by getting our own spend- ment, Australia really was “open for business”. With ing under control. We were prepared to risk deep the scrapping of its predecessor’s tax hits on edu- unpopularity in order to do what was necessary in cational expenses, on vehicle leasing, and on bank the long-term national interest. account deposits; and with its reductions in tax for Judging things by polls, many commentators have small business and the small business tax write-off identified the 2014 budget as the Abbott govern- for assets under $20,000, the Abbott government ment’s biggest mistake. I regard it more as a badge demonstrated its tax cutting credentials. of honour because it showed that we were serious Resolving the decades-old argument about about long-term budget repair and could therefore Badgery’s Creek as Sydney’s second (and Western be trusted with the long-term economic manage- Sydney’s first) airport was another sign of the gov- ment of the country. I can remember saying, late in ernment’s determination to get things done. Just 2013, at the beginning of our first budget process, two years earlier, the former government had spent that we should savour good polls because the job millions re-investigating alternative sites to delay a before us meant that we’d be deep in poll deficit the decision past yet another election. following Christmas. The Abbott government’s pre-election pledge It was also claimed on September 14 last year to reduce the public service headcount by 12,000 that the government lacked an economic narrative. in three years was attacked as unachievable but In fact, the government’s economic narrative had Minister Eric Abetz managed to cut numbers by been clear from the beginning: lower taxes, less 14,000, or almost 10 per cent, in just two years regulation and higher productivity; but that neces- without any disruption or diminution of services. sarily meant getting debt and deficit under control As well, almost 300 unnecessary government agen- by responsibly restraining government spending: cies, boards or advisory groups were abolished or by cutting it where necessary, by refraining from merged (a 25 per cent cut); and there was a reduc- increasing it where possible, and by striving in all tion of almost $3 billion a year in red-tape costs, as areas to reduce its rate of growth. assessed by the Office of Best Practice Regulation. In its May 2013 budget, the Labor government Despite the Senate’s ongoing failure to pass some had claimed that the 2013-14 budget deficit would be important measures from the 2014 budget, much did just $18 billion. By the pre-election economic state- pass, invariably after protracted negotiation, so that ment, this had become $30 billion; and, by the mid- more than $50 billion of savings over the forward year statement in December, with various hidden estimates were achieved. costs brought to book, the expected deficit stood at Employment growth—the best sign of eco- $47 billion. nomic optimism—is on track to meet our election On Labor’s budget trajectory, even with no pledge of a million new jobs within five years. Just new spending decisions, with no unexpected fur- 23,000 more jobs were created in 2013 but this rose ther deterioration in the terms of trade and with no to 175,000 in 2014 and 300,000 in 2015, according to return of “bracket creep” to taxpayers, there would the latest ABS data. The Abbott government’s eco- be $123 billion in deficits over the forward estimates, nomic measures were succeeding, despite difficulties with debt peaking at $667 billion early the follow- in the Senate and despite the sharpest collapse in ing decade. The essential problem was that previous our terms of trade in living memory. governments, especially between 2007 and 2013, had locked in permanent spending on the basis of what eople knew we were serious about economic turned out to be temporary revenue. reform because we were prepared to be unpop- Plainly, this was unsustainable. Before the elec- Pular if the national interest demanded it. As was tion, I’d said there was a “budget emergency”. If pointed out on the afternoon of September 14, 2015, anything, the budgetary situation was even worse the Abbott government had been behind in thirty than we’d feared. Steadily worsening terms of Newspolls in a row: we’d been behind, in fact, since trade—and the risk of more to come—had made the 2014 budget. Yet the 2014 budget had been our budget repair even more urgent, post-election, if bid to ensure that long-term spending was at least “debt-and-deficit as far as the eye could see” were matched by long-term revenue. not to sap the capacity of government and erode

Quadrant March 2016 25 The Economic Case for the Abbott Government

Australia’s economic vitality. this budget will do for you; ask what it will do for Hence, the objective of the Abbott government’s our country. The temporary budget repair levy on 2014 budget was to produce a surplus of 1 per cent people earning over $180,000 a year—who were of GDP within a decade but to do so in ways which less impacted by the savings—was to ensure that structurally reformed the economy, kept faith with everyone carried some of the burden. our pre-election commitments and gave people a At every point in the Expenditure Review sense of confidence in Australia’s long-term eco- Committee process, Joe Hockey and I had been nomic future by demonstrating a capacity to live careful to avoid breaking promises. For instance, within our means. we’d promised “no changes to pensions”; that’s why The key measures of the 2014 budget meant lower indexation was not to begin until after the that the workforce would grow, productivity would next election so voters could deliver their verdict increase, the economy would strengthen and, on on it. Treasury’s then-best forecasts, the budget would be In speeches in opposition, echoing former Labor back to broad balance in four years with peak debt national president Warren Mundine, I had said that halved. Each big measure was an important struc- young people should not be able to leave school and tural economic reform, as well as a saving designed go straight on the dole. And we had specifically to build over time with only a promised during the campaign (and relatively modest initial impact on been much condemned for it) not to households. continue Labor’s massive beyond- The point of indexing pen- Even if the fate of the the-forward-estimates funding sions to CPI was to slow down the Abbott government increases to schools and hospitals. growth of social security as a per- owed much to the A more difficult issue was my centage of GDP despite an ageing “no surprises” commitment. There population. Reducing government particular personalities had been no election commitment support for two-parent-one-income that comprised it, not to introduce a Medicare co- families once the youngest child payment but there had been no pre- was at school would increase its vulnerability-in- election debate about it. Likewise, female participation in the work- spite-of-its-record we hadn’t made specific commit- force. Deregulating universities lends weight to Paul ments not to deregulate universities would increase their efficiency and but it certainly hadn’t been flagged their international competitiveness. Kelly’s thesis that pre-election either. Introducing more price signals good government Another difficulty was the into Medicare would help restrain reduction in family tax payments over-servicing. Reducing the rate of is becoming more for stay-at-home mums coming on growth in Commonwealth fund- difficult than ever. top of my commitment—through ing for state government-run public the 2010 and 2013 elections—to a schools and public hospitals would paid parental leave scheme giving force the states to seek efficiencies in organisations women their real pay for six months rather than which account for nearly 10 per cent of GDP. And the minimum wage. There had been no commit- expecting school leavers to be learning or earn- ment not to change family payments but, coming ing—and not on the dole—was a further measure on top of the “pro-working mums” PPL policy, this to boost participation and productivity. struck too many of my colleagues as too hard on Over time, the Abbott government was deter- traditional families. mined to spend less on short-term consumption It’s become accepted wisdom that no one had and more on long-term investment: hence the very expected a tough budget in 2014. We considered large long-term boost to medical research as well a tough end-of-year “mini-budget” in 2013 but as unprecedented Commonwealth spending on decided against it to avoid a pre-Christmas hit on infrastructure. business confidence. We could, perhaps, have made better use of the Commission of Audit report had verall,t i was a fundamentally fair budget it been released earlier and more widely debated. because it sought to end the intergenerational Perhaps because we were “hastening slowly”, the Otheft involved in piling up debts for our children pre-budget fear expressed in Liberal Party focus and grandchildren to meet. It asked this generation groups was actually that we’d “squib” the challenge to tighten their belts a little so that future genera- of budget repair rather than tackle it too vigorously. tions wouldn’t need to tighten theirs a lot more. As Given its importance, it might have been tacti- the Treasurer said on budget night, don’t ask what cally wiser to have been talking about budget repair

26 Quadrant March 2016 The Economic Case for the Abbott Government as strongly post-election as we had pre-election and tion with a program of budget savings and lower before we’d finalised the further structural meas- tax. ures needed. Still, my strong instinct was that peo- A credible savings strategy is essential for a cred- ple would accept tough changes, including changes ible tax strategy. Shifting the burden of tax from that hadn’t explicitly been flagged, because getting earning to spending makes sense but it’s hardly the budget under control had been such a big part reform if it ends up increasing the overall burden of our pre-election pitch. of tax. No country, after all, has ever taxed its way Especially after we had rejected the business to prosperity. subsidy requests of the type that previous gov- Changes to the GST and to the responsibili- ernments had regularly approved, a tough budget ties of different levels of government so that peo- should have been predicted. The problem was ple know who to blame when things go wrong is less that the budget was tough but that some of well worth considering. The Abbott government its tough measures failed to pass the parliament. was canvassing this through the tax and federation Announcing tough measures is the mark of a strong reform white papers. But the only way to provide government but struggling to implement them can a tax cut rather than a tax shift is to get spending make it seem weak. down; hence the need to implement reforms that On many occasions, senior members of the gov- generate savings. ernment discussed the best ways of dealing with the In September last year, the Abbott government cross bench. As it happened, cross bench senators was just beginning the election policy process. The were offered weekly meetings with Senate Leader likelihood is that we would have gone to the elec- Eric Abetz. They had an abundance of ministerial tion seeking a mandate to reduce or eliminate some briefings (ministers Hunt, Cormann and Morrison of the one-off payments that seemed defensible were especially assiduous). Joe Hockey visited most with surpluses of $20 billion but not with deficits of them in their electorate offices. There were din- of $40 billion; and further to tighten eligibility for ners, including with me—but to little avail. Indeed, ongoing payments. After all, it’s hardly fair to ask it was Clive Palmer’s subsequent boast that he’d taxpayers on modest incomes to subsidise people destroyed the Abbott government! who could readily do more for themselves. With To be fair to the cross bench, most measures for further budget savings in place, I was confident that which we had a specific mandate (such as the repeal there could be income tax cuts during the next term of the carbon and mining taxes and the end of the of parliament. schoolkids bonus—although not, so far, workplace Even if the fate of the Abbott government owed changes) eventually passed the Senate. The prob- much to the particular personalities that comprised lem was individually unpopular measures for which it, its vulnerability-in-spite-of-its-record lends there was no specific mandate other than an overall weight to Paul Kelly’s thesis that good government pledge to bring the budget back into surplus. is becoming more difficult than ever. As the head of the European Commission recently observed, “We early two years on from the 2014 budget, get- all know what to do; we just don’t know how to get ting spending down remains the critical issue. re-elected after we’ve done it.” CNontrary to Keynesian orthodoxy, as recent UK If governments and leaders are required always experience suggests, reducing deficits is the key to to be ahead in the polls—as well as to win elec- increasing private-sector confidence and unlock- tions—tough-but-necessary decisions will rarely be ing more prosperity. It’s also the key to tax reform taken. Apart from being strong on national secu- because, without lower spending, any tax changes rity, in Australia’s current circumstances, the one must either increase the overall tax burden or fur- absolute requirement of good government is the ther increase the budget deficit. readiness to reduce its own spending. Yet cutting The Coalition won the 2013 election despite benefits that people merely anticipate, let alone ben- promising tough measures: to abolish the school- efits they already have, is never popular. At most, kids bonus and the low-income supplement, to it might grudgingly be respected on election day. delay employer-provided superannuation benefits and to reduce Labor’s promised funding boost to The Hon. Tony Abbott, the federal Member for schools and hospitals beyond the next few years. Warringah, was Prime Minister of Australia from I’m confident that we could have won the 2016 elec- September 2013 to September 2015.

Quadrant March 2016 27 Rebecca Weisser

Who Runs the Liberal Party?

liss tn was i i that dawn to be alive. Or, as most significant victory was fought, not in a theatre the Prime Minister might put it, there had of war but in a battle with sexists, was provocative never been a more exciting time to be an enough. But using his inaugural address to campaign BAustralian. for a republic and accusing fellow Australians of On Australia Day 2016 love was in the air. The discriminating against minorities ignited unprece honourable members of the bunyip meritocracy, dented anger. Around 7000 people signed a peti- the self-appointed guardians of our nation’s moral tion calling on Morrison to resign, furious that he fibre, were best pleased with themselves. A prime had used his soapbox to preach gender equity while minister whom they loathed, a champion of bat- ignoring the high rates of suicide among returned tlers and tradies who went to war with Q&A and service personnel. the Human Rights Commission, a global warming His appointment gave oxygen to scandals over sceptic, friend of coal mines and scourge of wind his sacking of allegedly innocent soldiers accused farms, a constitutional monarchist, God-fearing of “misogyny”, his $15,000 public speaking fees, and Catholic and defender of traditional marriage, had his reported acceptance of $200,000 for twenty-five been banished. days work as a “diversity adviser” from a company In his stead—or so they thought—was one that had just won a multi-million-dollar defence of their own, a green-and-pink-tinged Eastern contract while he was Army chief. Suburbs-dweller, who happily chatted on the ABC about renewable energy, gay marriage and a repub- usts a the ire at Morrison began to subside, the lic, and sent out selfies catching public transport resumption of parliament caught the Prime rather than donning a hi-vis vest and hard hat to JMinister with one foot out of the bed as his hon- publicise building roads. eymoon with the media began to sour. Effusing that excitement, on the eve of the 228th “Change the prime minister and you change the anniversary of the nation’s foundation day, all the country,” Paul Keating warned voters before the state premiers, the opposition leader and the leader federal election in 1996. They took him at his word of the Australian Republican Movement—replete and dumped him in a landslide for John Howard. with jejune arguments and matching red necker- Never had Keating’s aphorism seemed more chief atop his glossy pate—were noisily clamouring apposite than in the removal of Abbott and his for a republic. replacement by Turnbull. But when a prime minis- A transgendered speech-writer and her former ter is changed without an election, only the media boss, the erstwhile chief of the army, were battling it and the parliamentary party have a say. out in the political correctness contest for the crown Yet having installed their man, the commen- of Australian of the Year, a job that latterly involves tators are starting to have their doubts. As Mark haranguing ordinary Australians into minding their Kenny, chief political correspondent for Fairfax, Ps and Qs, not to mention their LGBTIs. put it: “Turnbull’s retreat on the GST expansion at Just as Australia Day 2015 will remembered for the first whiff of grapeshot has punctured the over- the knighting of Prince Philip, an affront to all bun- blown expectation created around his ascension, yips of merit who redoubled their efforts to under- of new and purposeful economic leadership based mine the then prime minister, Australia Day 2016 on explanations rather than slogans.” For Kenny, detonated its own time bomb. The appointment and many others in the press gallery, “One obvious of former Army chief, Lieutenant-General David conclusion to draw from all of this is that like the Morrison, as Australian of the Year, a soldier whose refusal to put same-sex marriage equality to a free

28 Quadrant March 2016 Who Runs the Liberal Party? parliamentary vote, or even to lend qualified support with the promise that policies would not change, to a new republican push, the government’s politi- merely the way they were sold. But pronounce- cal interests come before the oft-invoked national ments which they see as calling for the appeasement interest.” of radical Islam, the embrace of Human Rights Laurie Oakes chronicles the disenchantment Commissioner Gillian Triggs, the softening of rhet- in a collection of headlines: “Malcolm in muddle”, oric on asylum seekers, the possibility of new tax “Turnbull fails to take risk on growth”, “Turnbull slugs on superannuation (a policy first advocated by thinks small after large ambitions go bust” and the ACTU and the Greens) and new restrictions on decries the caution and drift. “Consultation and pro- negative gearing (a policy touted by Labor) suggest cess get such priority that he fails to convey strength to them that the government will move a long way or a sense of direction,” laments Oakes. Niki Savva, to the Left, if not before the election, then certainly who played a key role in Turnbull’s ascent, tells him afterwards. bluntly to “extract the digit”. Slowly, as if awakening from a drug-induced phantasmagoria, some of those erstwhile Abbott- s for the parliamentary party, the jockeying backers are asking themselves what they have done. for promotion and Machiavellian skulduggery Their deepest fear is that by changing leaders they Athat played an important part in Turnbull’s rise have not just changed the country but the party. continue. Many of those who switched their vote Meanwhile, the Conservatives Lefties, who pre- to Turnbull in exchange for promises of advance- fer to describe themselves as moderates, feel embold- ment were rewarded in the post- ened as never before. They see the coup reshuffle. The swift fall from installation of Turnbull as a historic grace of some who had done little t its heart it is not and permanent shift to what they wrong in terms of parliamentary A regard as the centre and are seizing procedure and the dogged defence just about candidates the opportunity to install their can- of others whose transgressions were and factions but the didates wherever they can. more clear-cut in terms of parliamentary protocol suggest that the very structure of owheres i the battle more latter were rewarded for their sup- the party Menzies ferocious than in New South port while the former, who voted created seventy-two NWales, the most dysfunctional state against Turnbull, could be cast branch of the Liberal Party, where asunder with no compunction. years ago, who gets an electoral redistribution has made A number of long-standing MPs to represent that safe Liberal seats notionally mar- have also announced their retire- ginal and has unleashed a fight to ment. There is nothing unusual party, and what the the death for pre-selection in the about this in an election year. party stands for. federal seat of Hume. Indeed, others are also expected to Seldom has a pre-selection announce their retirement. That the battle seemed so consequential for Opposition have leapt on this as a sign of turmoil the direction of a mainstream political party. At is predictable. That the media have swallowed that its heart it is not just about candidates and factions line is par for the course. It is a beat-up—this mix but the very structure of the party Menzies created of generational renewal and neophytes blotting their seventy-two years ago, who gets to represent that copybook or being brought down by conveniently party, and what the party stands for. exposed skeletons is the quotidian fodder of politics. The member for Hume, based in rural Goulburn, The back-story, unsurprisingly, has been largely is Angus Taylor. It’s hard to imagine an MP bet- missed or misunderstood by the mainstream media. ter suited to this constituency. Taylor was brought That story is the way in which the ascent of Turnbull up on a farm near Nimmitabel and went to the has played into the factional battles within the local school, before going on to win the University Liberal Party broadly between Liberal luvvies, or as Medal in economics at Sydney University and a Savva calls them “Conservative Lefties”, on the one Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. His father was Vice hand, and the broad Right of the party, encompass- President of the National Farmers Federation. His ing fiscal dries and social conservatives, on the other. mother’s father ran the Snowy Mountains Scheme The two camps roughly coalesced into Abbott back- from 1949 to 1967. ers and Turnbullites, with a number of key Abbott As if all this wasn’t enough, he brims with the supporters switching sides to deliver Turnbull the decency, honesty and the straight talk of country prize he set his sights on in childhood. people, is tall, dark and handsome and has a charm- The Abbott-backers who switched were won over ing wife and children. Many see in him a future

Quadrant March 2016 29 Who Runs the Liberal Party? treasurer, even prime minister. He has the backing both times. Abbott also commissioned an expert of Howard, Abbott and Turnbull. panel, chaired by Howard, which has called for a And yet, over the last two months, Taylor has been radical overhaul of how federal and state candidates in the fight of his political life. The challenge comes are pre-selected. from Russell Matheson, member for Macarthur, a Turnbull’s cabinet reshuffle six days before the seat centred on Campbelltown in western Sydney. pre-selection vote raised hopes that common sense Matheson, a sergeant with the New South would prevail. Taylor’s appointment as Assistant Wales police for twenty-three years, is serving his Minister to the Prime Minister for Cities and second parliamentary term. A redistribution made Digital Transformation may not be the most spec- his seat notionally Labor when he first ran in 2010 tacular promotion, but in the long run it may be the but he won it with a swing. Another redistribution most important. has made it marginal again and rather than fight As the government struggles to craft its eco- to retain it, Matheson wants to displace Taylor in nomic policy, the critical issue is whether factional Hume. forces can be forced to accept the pre-selection of By the time this article is published, the pre the man the Prime Minister wants to drive the digi- selection will have been held. Only a few dozen pre- tal transformation of the economy and the govern- selectors, some Taylor was prevented from meeting ment, a man latterly called in by some of the biggest until the eleventh hour, will have been able to vote. companies in the country to solve the problems they Amazingly, Taylor has even been actively prevented couldn’t solve themselves. from opening branches in his own electorate. It raises the stakes considerably for Taylor’s pre- Turnbull says he backs Taylor, yet the uncertainty selection. If the Matheson challenge goes ahead it continues. There is no mechanism, as in the Labor puts into the starkest relief the dangerous dysfunc- Party, for federal intervention. tion of the government and prompts a question that When he was prime minister, Abbott appointed has been ignored for far too long: Who really runs Arthur Sinodinos to reform the New South Wales the Liberal Party and what do they actually stand Liberal Party, without success. As a result, in one for? instance, a virtually unelectable candidate was pre- selected, twice, for a critical winnable seat and lost Rebecca Weisser is a journalist and editor.

The Centre Pompidou

looks like Disneyland dropped an oil refinery in the middle of Paris. It has coloured tubes and passages all over the outside (you can’t see out the windows). Blue for air-conditioning, yellow for electricity green for water and red for people. It houses the Bibliothèque publique d’information, but they refuse to host wood chopping championships. It has the Institute de Recherche et Co-ordination Acoustic/ Musique, but they say non to roof-top clay pigeon shoots. It has the Musée National d’Art Moderne, but won’t permit sheep-dog trials on the piazza outside. The Centre Pompidou is a partial success; showing colour coding works, but at the cost of multi-functioning.

Saxby Pridmore

30 Quadrant March 2016 John Zmir ak

Christian Faith, Reason and Open Borders

s people who are blessed to be citizens trade. All these political events were the fruit of of highly developed countries—such as certain stubborn beliefs, which we can boil down to Australia or the United States, my own one: that the dignity of each human being affirmed hAomeland—we have a long list of privileges we did by Christian theology has political implications, little or nothing to earn. Some of them, such as which philosophers such as John Locke presented natural resources, are the gifts only of God. But in secular form as “life, liberty and property”. most of the others came from our fellow man. They As we study less history with each generation, are less like a landscape than a legacy, a trust passed it is all too easy for us to take these privileges for down from father to son, mother to daughter, across granted, to assume that because (as our theology the centuries. These gifts came from our ancestors, teaches us) every person deserves them, that it is either personal or political, who painstakingly built only natural that they enjoy them. But in fact, as we up the peaceful and orderly, free and dynamic coun- read the chronicles of the centuries, and survey not tries in which we live. just non-Western civilisations, but most Western We are moved by a sense of compassion, and nations for most of their history, we will learn even of justice, to wish that we could share these something quite different: that it is highly unusual blessings with people in other countries—if only by for human life to be treated with unconditional letting them come and live in ours. That’s a laud- respect; for citizens to be protected from arbitrary able sentiment, but it must be counter-balanced by arrest and to be free to speak their minds; for the a realistic understanding of where these privileges work of our hands and our brains to belong to us come from, how they are maintained from one gen- and our families, exempt from unfair confiscation. eration to the next, and how fragile they really are. If life, liberty and property rights are what God In fact we can overstrain our societies and destroy intends for us—as we Westerners grow up believ- the very institutions that we so treasure, if we are ing—in cold fact, murder, bullying and theft are too reckless and overconfident in our acceptance of large frequently the norm. numbers of new citizens from societies with hostile The political tradition which affirms basic or alien values and incompatible civic habits. We human rights, which is traditionally called “liberal- can choke the goose that lays all these golden eggs. ism”, is a fragile golden thread extending through If we follow the carefully documented arguments centuries, which has on many occasions come close of Daniel Hannan in Inventing Freedom (2014), we to snapping—for instance in 1940, when a seem- will see that some of the greatest blessings which ingly unstoppable Nazi Germany was dividing the we residents of the “Anglosphere” (from Canada to world with its allies in Japan and the Soviet Union. India, from Australia to the Falkland Islands) enjoy As the historian John Lukacs documented, it was are the fruit of the political principles, personal sac- a near-run thing: Winston Churchill and his cir- rifices and prudent decisions of particular people— cle were under enormous pressure to negotiate a the rebels and preachers, barons and burghers, who peace that would have handed the British Navy to resisted the arbitrary power of kings, and fought Hitler and world dominance to totalitarian powers, for religious, political and economic freedom. These putting freedom and human rights into an eclipse distinct people, at distinct times and places, under- that might have lasted for centuries. took political actions with enormous moral conse- Our ancestors knew that societies hoping to put quences, which generations of schoolchildren used their fragile, precious tradition into action would to be dutifully drilled to remember: Runnymede, face many challenges. They had seen that Locke’s the Glorious Revolution, the abolition of the slave political trinity was not a package deal: societies

Quadrant March 2016 31 Christian Faith, Reason and Open Borders that valued human life didn’t always treasure liberty, had reached, which was Nato member Turkey—a and those that accepted liberty might not account comparatively prosperous Sunni Muslim country for property. The Peruvian economist Hernando de where they could have been easily integrated, and Soto has documented the fact that most of the pov- one which bore some responsibility for the war in erty in the developing and post-communist world is their native land—Germany followed the dictates the fruit not of colonialism or even of wilful exploi- of post-Christian, post-Western multiculturalism. tation, but of the failure of such societies to formally With high-minded abandon it accepted more than recognise and legally protect the property rights of a million Syrian migrants, in effect forcing much of the poor—leaving them subject to the vagaries of Europe to follow suit. corruption and confiscation. The answer de Soto The results have been an unmitigated catas- offers is not one that appeals to revolutionaries, trophe, as hundreds of thousands of military-age but it would have resonated with our liberal ances- Muslim males, unaccompanied by the “women and tors: citizens of such countries must make a careful, children” which leftist media and church bulletins determined effort to fundamentally reform their love to highlight, have flocked to West European laws and policies to recognise the property rights of countries. ISIS recruits have already been found the poor, and allow them full access to the national among the migrants, one of whom was involved and global economy. That doesn’t sound exciting, in the most recent Paris attack. There have been and you won’t see college students grotesque incidents on a large scale, sporting T-shirts with icons of Dr such as the “rape mobs” in Cologne de Soto. But it’s the only approach undreds of which subjected Western women that will work. H to sexual assault; there are count- More radical efforts that offer thousands of military- less reports of lesser crimes leak- greater ethical “uplift” have been age Muslim males, ing through the mesh of a partly tried many times and failed, from censored press, which is cowed as Peron’s Argentina to Castro’s Cuba unaccompanied by the Western governments are by the and Chavez’s Venezuela. Rather “women and children” fear of offending multiculturalist than doggedly working to extend which leftist media pieties. the blessings of private prop- Already hard-pressed public erty rights to the poorest people and church bulletins welfare systems are cracking under in such nations, impatient left- love to highlight, the strain of hundreds of thou- ists and romantic Christians with sands of foreigners whose ances- a distorted conception of “social have flocked to West tors never paid into them; countries justice” have attacked private prop- European countries. such as Spain and Germany and erty itself, agglomerating more Italy where youth unemployment is wealth and power in the hands of staggering are being flooded with the few—those backed by the guns and jails of the low-skilled workers who don’t speak the native state. Instead of extending protection to the work language. Governments are responding not by and wealth of the many, as de Soto advised, these reconsidering the wisdom of their refugee policy, regimes have wrecked the middle classes and crip- but by cracking down on the right to free speech of pled private enterprise, sharing not wealth but mis- Europeans who question it. Water cannons in the ery more even-handedly. streets of Cologne were turned on the demonstra- tors who responded to the “rape mob”. Christmas oo many today, even well-meaning religious trees and carnivals, crucifixes and classical statues people, take the same reckless approach to are disappearing from public spaces, lest they offend iTmmigration. We have seen in the past year the the puritanical sensibilities of the intolerant new- effects of romanticism in action. Pope Francis went comers. The president of a German university in to the Italian island of Lampedusa and called on Hamburg has proposed that every young German citizens of the West to welcome migrants from the be required to learn Arabic, to prepare for the “mul- Muslim world as brothers, to see each would-be ticultural” society which that country’s government immigrant as the Good Samaritan saw the rob- has imposed on them. bery victim on the road. His statements have been Some will read these arguments and see the echoed by many clergy throughout most major sense in them, but fear that in using their reason Christian denominations. they are not being “really Christian”. Certainly, And Angela Merkel listened. Instead of insist- they will feel this way if they subject themselves ing that under international law the Syrian refugees to the non-stop flow of sentimental rhetoric that be accepted by the “first safe country” which they is pouring out of the churches. Here are just a few

32 Quadrant March 2016 Christian Faith, Reason and Open Borders examplesf o the statements coming from religious ble”, and insofar as migrants obey their laws, honour leaders in Australia. their heritage, and bear civic burdens equally. From Gosford Anglican Church: If Christianity really were the antinomian, irra- tionalist cult that today’s liberal Christians pretend [The] Kingdom of God manifests itself in it is when it suits them, it would never have spread compassion and justice and true humility and beyond a tiny circle of believers, and would have there are lots of things going on in our society died out long ago. Every nation that has accepted at the moment that aren’t about those things, Christianity has in fact policed its borders, limited like the way we treat gay people by not allowing the franchise to citizens, and directed public wel- them to be married, the way we treat our planet fare first to those who had contributed something and the way we treat asylum seekers. These are to their societies. the things Christians should be seeking—justice When large numbers of Sunni Muslims and compassion. attempted to colonise much of Europe in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, Christians ener- From Pope Francis, during his talk on World getically organised to prevent them from doing Migrants and Refugees Day: so—as students of history will remember from the Battle of Lepanto and the sieges of Vienna. Now A f change o attitude towards migrants and the Islamic world is employing a different tac- refugees is needed on the part of everyone, tic for expansion. Instead of sending armies wav- moving away from attitudes of defensiveness and ing banners, it sends armies of “refugees” waving fear, indifference and marginalisation towards asylum claims—marching them straight through attitudes based on a culture of encounter, the Turkey, into the heart of once-Christian Europe. only culture capable of building a better, more If accepted, these migrants will someday gain the just and fraternal world. rights of citizens—the power to vote in laws that fit their values instead of ours. We have seen those From Melbourne Catholic Archbishop Denis values in action, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. Hart: Their fruit is honour-killings of women, execution of homosexuals, the death penalty for “apostasy” The Bishops’ Social Justice Statement addresses from or “blasphemy” against Islam. There are plenty the divisive national debate over asylum seekers of countries where people can live if they wish to and reminds all Australians of the need to be ruled by sharia law. Why should we inflict that welcome and comfort those who have fled here illiberal creed on our children? Is that what Christ from terror and danger, and to live out the called us to do? example of Jesus, who never turned his back on When we inflict such radical changes on our those who were lost or suffering. society, we should ask ourselves whether we are being faithful stewards of the prosperous, free soci- Such statements exert a powerful emotional eties for which our ancestors struggled, fought and appeal. They tempt us with the chance to join the sometimes died. Perhaps instead we are squandering elect of enlightened and compassionate “genuine” our inheritance, for the sake of that happy frisson Christians—who just happen on this issue to agree we experience when we do or say something sup- with the dominant forces in the media, interna- porting “openness”, “tolerance”, and “social justice”. tional elites at the United Nations and European We are purchasing approval from our fellow upper- Union, and the faculty of prestigious universities. middle-class citizens, with social capital stolen from These statements threaten us that if we employ our our children and grandchildren. We are feathering reason in discerning the wisest policies for our fel- our own cosy nests, while making life even more low citizens, we might be punished eternally in wretched for our own nations’ native poor—whose hell—along with the scribes and Pharisees, who ancestors did fight and die, alongside ours, for their also calculated and counted, rather than engaging descendants’ stakes in the nation. We are stealing in reckless generosity. the precious gifts of freedom and order from our In fact, there is nothing genuinely Christian in least-advantaged fellow citizens—the blue-collar refusing to use our reason, to account for the pre- workers, the unemployed, the troubled war veter- dictable effects of our actions, or to plan wisely for ans—in order to salve our confused consciences, and the future for our families and our communities. The feed our self-esteem. current Catechism of the Catholic Church does not demand open borders, but asks wealthy countries John Zmirak is a Senior Editor of the Stream (stream.org) to accept newcomers insofar as they find it “possi- and co-author of TheR ace to Save Our Century (2014).

Quadrant March 2016 33 Peter C. Grundy

Christian Faith, Luck and Offshore Detention

eflectingn o the notions of destiny and prov- out that had the (unaccompanied) Good Samaritan idence, and as a Christian believer, the great come across the robbers when fully in action as they Latin scholar Boethius (480–524 AD) was beat and robbed the innocent Traveller, then the Rdrawn to consider what philosophers now might Good Samaritan could have had to decide whether call “moral luck”. This significant notion (concern- to attempt physical intervention, risking mortal ing ethically-relevant factors beyond our control) injury to one or other of the robbers in the fray. He applies to the experience of the wicked, the just and was, of course, spared that daunting dilemma. To the innocent alike. We can look at moral luck from that extent, he was lucky: by virtue of the events the perspective of Jesus’s parable (an extended meta- forming the essence of the parable, he could not phor) of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–36). inadvertently have harmed or killed any of the ban- The wicked in the parable, of course, were the dits because they had already fled. But the Good robbers who beset the innocent Traveller on his Samaritan also had moral luck in chancing upon journey from Jerusalem to Jericho. But while enjoy- the beaten Traveller. The Good Samaritan enjoyed ing sheer good luck (simpliciter) in their escapade, moral good luck in being present at just the right the robbers suffered from moral bad luck. Let me time, enabling him initially to pursue virtuous explain. action by way of taking pity, cleaning and bandag- In regard to sheer good luck, if there had been ing the wounds of the innocent, placing him on his numerous others accompanying that Traveller, the donkey and transporting him to the inn. robbers, if not physically deterred from their profit- However, in this regard, perhaps the Good able mischief, could have been caught. The point is Samaritan did not enjoy moral good luck over the that they were free to beat up and rob the Traveller longer term because the presence of the inn, and its because their good luck centred on the fact that the co-operative innkeeper, meant that the Samaritan Traveller was vulnerable. But, turning to the ethi- could ultimately absolve himself of the opportu- cal dimension, their moral luck was bad because, in nity to continue his virtuous ministrations to the permitting their intended action against an inno- Traveller. The Samaritan seized the opportunity cent, their guilt was facilitated in the evil of beating to pay another to do what was merciful by way of and stealing. continuing care and healing. And the innkeeper Now, what of the Good Samaritan? He was was in a position to do good while being paid for quite simply lucky in not being vulnerable to a beat- his trouble; so the innkeeper enjoyed both moral ing himself. In addition, it was convenient that he good luck and good luck simpliciter by virtue of that did not need to take extensive continuing action to opportunity. By contrast, the Samaritan was mor- relieve the suffering of the Traveller. That is, the ally unlucky enough to be able to rely on paying for Good Samaritan’s good luck extended to the pres- the intervention of another, rather than needing to ence nearby of an inn; the innkeeper was paid by continue to exercise compassion and care himself. the Samaritan for his trouble in taking care of the That is, the opportunity to avoid a virtuous act was beaten Traveller. Notably, in about 1630 Rembrandt just too clear (and tempting); ultimately, moral bad painted the scene (with some licence) depicting luck for the Good Samaritan in the presence of the the abused Traveller, the Good Samaritan, and inn and innkeeper! the innkeeper. (It hangs in the Wallace Collection, Now, this is much more than an observation London.) about the twists and turns of the sheer luck (and The Good Samaritan also had his fair share of moral luck) experienced by the characters in Jesus’s moral luck. It is a commonplace reflection to point famous parable. That is, we can cash out any extended

34 Quadrant March 2016 Christian Faith, Luck and Offshore Detention metaphor, including this parable. For example, from innkeeper. Nevertheless, and sadly, that means that time to time various innocents embark on irregu- the moral luck of the border protection force, just lar unauthorised journeys to Australia. And they like that of the Good Samaritan, includes moral chance their luck on the open seas. Regrettably, they bad luck. By virtue of the government’s policy, the are exploited by people-smugglers who, whether or border protection service loses the virtuous oppor- not they abuse and beat the travellers, neverthe- tunity to continue to do good to certain distressed less take their money and leave them to their fate. travellers. But, then, we all only experience so much The people-smugglers’ moral bad luck extends to moral good luck in the course of our life journeys. the opportunity to exploit those travellers, with the (How many beaten victims of robbers, or people- consequence of succumbing to that evil. smugglers, does the average Australian ever have the Thankfully, Good Samaritans appear on the opportunity to assist?) So the chances of doing good open seas from time to time; they include border of this kind are limited. Nevertheless, the nation security personnel. It is their moral good luck to of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island discover migratory vessels because those particu- might embrace their moral opportunities (courtesy lar Australian authorities are then in the morally of Australia) as metaphorical Good Samaritan inn- desirable position of being able to do good to such keepers themselves because, just like the Samaritan, travellers. Lives may even be saved. And in attend- Australia delivers the afflicted from the high seas to ing to such travellers at sea, the Good Samaritans them. And, mutatis mutandis, in its decision handed of the border protection service also have the same down on February 3, the High Court of Australia kind of good luck as the original Samaritan. That has now preserved that prospective moral good luck good luck, of course, is courtesy of the policies of for our Pacific innkeeper neighbours. At the least, the Commonwealth government and the soundness we should acknowledge the role of the ministering of its border protection service. innkeeper in any contemporary consideration and Further, the offshore assessment and resettle- application of the parable of the Good Samaritan. ment program provides the means by which the distressed unauthorised travellers can receive attention Dr Peter C. Grundy has taught Philosophy at by virtue of the charity of Australia in payments Sydney and Macquarie universities, and Theology to Nauru and Papua New Guinea. That is clearly at Charles Sturt University. He is undertaking similar to the Good Samaritan’s employment of the research at the ANU.

Natte Yallock Jump Rope

Milkbar’s gone, pub is shut, older kids now catch the bus, half an hour away they go, the bigger school in Maryborough. Budget cut, teachers go, three small children in a row, Ring-a-round the rosie, the last ones in the dying town, the local school is closing, no new families coming now. Natte Yallock, what a shame— Big Water Little Plain. School, school, Golden Rule, spell your name and go to school, Sing a song in gibberish rhyme, mister minister, please tell me, turn the rope in perfect time, what our future’s going to be? one each end, one jumps between, children growing in their green. Ring-a-round the rosie, the local school is closing, Natte Yallock, what a shame— Big Water Little Plain.

Joe Dolce

Quadrant March 2016 35 Michael Connor

,The Iraqi Money Scandal Forty Years On

even days before Gough Whitlam’s dis- director of the non-profit Scarf Foundation, had missal, the US Ambassador in Canberra told proven Middle East contacts and would be a suitable Whitlam that neither the CIA nor any other go-between to act for the ALP. Late that afternoon, ASmerican government agencies secretly funded any before returning to Melbourne, Hartley contacted political group or candidate in Australia, and the Henry Fischer, a co-director of the Foundation, assurance was put into writing for the Department and discussed the scheme with him. Fischer was of Foreign Affairs. In Washington, the Assistant interested and Hartley phoned the news to Combe. Secretary of State called on the Australian Deputy That night Whitlam and Combe visited Fischer Head of Mission and repeated the claim. Five days at home. There were nuts and a bottle of German after the Dismissal, Whitlam authorised an attempt wine. Whitlam had a glass, Combe and Fischer to obtain and launder secret election funding from finished the bottle—never mind that Fischer was Iraq’s ruling Ba’ath Party for the ALP. a teetotaller. No money was talked about, yet sev- Recent evidence in declassified ASIO and eral days later Fischer flew to Baghdad to arrange Commonwealth Police files, and other accounts the generous gift for the ALP. Two good-fairy Iraqi which have emerged since 1975, offer fresh per- emissaries, secret police chief and torturer Farouk spectives on the excuses, cover-ups and agreed- Abdulla Yehya and Saddam’s relative Ghafil Jassim upon fictions of the “Iraqi money affair”. Accounts Al-Tikriti, arrived and met Whitlam for breakfast, of Whitlam’s breakfast meeting with the head of and half a million dollars US was (Fischer in 1976) the Iraqi Intelligence Service and his compan- or was not (Jenny Hocking in 2012) handed over, ion, a relation of Saddam Hussein representing and anyway Fischer stole the money (Fairfax Media the Ba’ath Party, generally run on conventional in 2015). lines with Whitlam being criticised for his behav- Two months later the money (or the promised iour then generously excused, as the event is made second instalment) had failed to arrive and the ALP to appear a rather unimportant sideshow. At the and its advertising agency, unable to pay the bills same time, Rupert Murdoch, writing the biggest for money spent on the election campaign, faced a story in Australia’s political history, is pilloried for financial crisis. Unable to raise bridging finance by having unfairly used the event to attack Whitlam. themselves, the conspirators were forced to share This modern fairy tale has two parts—the lead-up their secret with senior Party colleagues. Naturally to Whitlam’s encounter with the Iraqi thugs, and it leaked. the events around the scandal becoming public About the same time Henry Fischer initiated knowledge. a meeting with Rupert Murdoch in London and revealed the details of the incredible story. Learning nce upon a time, the Sunday after the that good Laurie Oakes was about to break the story Dismissal, an ALP executive meeting was in the Melbourne Sun, based on revelations from hOeld in Sydney to discuss the unplanned-for elec- Labor insiders, evil Murdoch seized the chance to tion. Pro-Arab left-winger and Victorian Senate embarrass Whitlam and wrote an astonishing front- candidate Bill Hartley suggested to ALP National page story, based on Fischer’s disclosures, for the Secretary David Combe that campaign funds could Australian. be raised in the Middle East. Combe carried the Then, travelling back to Australia, Fischer dis- proposal to Whitlam, who in the stress of the polit- appeared from a hotel in Singapore and, from an ical disaster, approved the idea and suggested that unknown location, issued a denial through his well-known menswear retailer Reuben Scarf, the Sydney solicitors, putting forward an implausible

36 Quadrant March 2016 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On and innocuous counter-tale which contradicted Party participants but there are other accounts and what he had told Murdoch but also what the ALP new elements of evidence which deserve to be con- leaders had themselves already revealed. The poli- sidered. She ignores the other contemporary and ticians told variations on one story, Henry Fischer essential book on the politics of the period, Alan had told Murdoch another. Reid’s The Whitlam Venture, which was published in Murdoch, in March 1976, asserted that the reports November 1976. in his papers, based on the Fischer account and his ASIO files exist for Henry Fischer, Reuben own investigations, were “completely substantiated”. Scarf and Bill Hartley. The file on David Combe Whitlam sued for “defamation and injurious false- was destroyed in September 1975, before the scan- hood” in his original article, and the complaint was dal, on the orders of ASIO Director-General Peter settled with a substantial payment by Murdoch. Barbour. The declassified files for the three men, The Attorney-General, Bob Ellicott, suggested in with the usual annoying redactions, are deposited Parliament that what Whitlam objected to was “the in the National Archives of Australia. They indicate suggestion that he would vary Labor policy in the that the head of Iraq’s secret police and Saddam’s light of election donation”. In 2007, two journalists relation had flown into Australia, both under their from the Wall Street Journal asked Murdoch about own names, and until the first newspaper articles the truth of what he had written: “Yeah. Absolutely were published in late February, our internal secu- true word for word … My source [Henry Fischer] rity force had neither noticed nor been warned of disappeared when it came to court. But my second- their presence by allied intelligence services. ary source [Bob Hawke] lied and The old story, a face-saving exer- later became prime minister, I won’t cise, can be re-examined in the light name any names. (Laughter).” of newer information. Doing so also Hawke suggested brings forward a bizarre assertion of his broadly conventional and the means by which a possible Whitlam scandal which, untrustworthy telling of the the funds raised were though hidden in plain sight in sTtory, sometimes with light varia- the documentation, has never been tions, is obviously incomplete. Even to be laundered: publicly explored. Whitlam was simple accepted facts are wrong. “the money could clearly compromised by his con- For instance, Fischer is criticised tact with the Ba’ath Party and the for running to Murdoch with the come to the ALP, Iraqi Intelligence Service, which at story. In fact it was his employer, Whitlam was told, the time worked closely with the Reuben Scarf, who first attempted via the Reuben Russian Intelligence Service, and at to make contact with Murdoch. least one of the other players in the Basic questions about the arrange- Scarf Foundation”. affair was a KGB agent. If Gough ment between the ALP and Fischer Whitlam had not told the truth in are not raised. A fee must have been 1975 then, when he arrived in Paris negotiated for acting for the ALP and certainly a in 1983 as our Ambassador to Unesco, he was a com- commission would have been paid if the project was promised figure susceptible to manipulation, or even successful. Neither is mention ever made of who blackmail, by Soviet Intelligence. Historians who paid Fischer’s travel and accommodation expenses. are rather pleased by the anti-Americanism he dis- Likewise, essential plans for how the money, if played at the time may not be noticing something raised, was to be secretly deposited into Labor rather unpleasant hiding in the great man’s Parisian accounts are seldom fully explored. There is never shadow. any consideration of how quickly these details, if the story is accurate, must have been discussed and heLP A National President, Bob Hawke, approved by all parties in order for Fischer to drop became involved when the conspirators were his other responsibilities and fly to Baghdad four Tforced to involve other senior Party officials. In days later or why he immediately left Australia with Blanche d’Alpuget’s 1982 biography he revealed that the Iraqis after they met Whitlam. the money-raising plan was in place even before the In the most recent retelling, the 2012 biography dismissal: of Whitlam by Professor Jenny Hocking, the base story draws on accounts given in Laurie Oakes’s some weeks before the Government had been Crash Through or Crash: The Unmaking of a Prime sacked Bill Hartley, who was a Senate candidate, Minister and Paul Kelly’s The Unmaking of Gough. had the idea that the ALP’s slender campaign Both books were published in May 1976. Both books funds could be pumped up with money from the hold material drawn from interviews with the Labor Government of Iraq, for which he worked as a

Quadrant March 2016 37 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On

Press correspondent. He had a friend, Henry asserted that cash was received and that a second Fischer, who offered to go to Baghdad and instalment had been promised. In conversation raise the money—between a quarter and half with Murdoch he also asserted that only part of a million dollars … in the confusion and fury the second Iraqi payment was for the ALP: “That that followed the sacking, Whitlam and Combe ½ million. Supposed to be a part payment for the agreed with Hartley’s suggestion that he could Cabinet [ALP] but mostly to go to the unions.” The tap funds from a special source. involvement of other seemingly minor characters in the affair who were associated with Hartley, and are With this knowledge, disparate elements of evi- present in the ASIO reports, changes quite mark- dence can be linked within a larger narrative. Diane edly if it is possible they represent union and activist Fischer, in her 1980 divorce agreement with Henry interests expecting money from Iraq. Fischer, was bound not to discuss her former husband’s involvement in the Iraqi affair “or of any lthough the “Iraqi money affair” is seen as a events in which her husband was involved since the post-Dismissal sideshow it may be part of month of September, 1975, or concerning the receipt aA much larger endeavour: the story of the flow of of her husband of any monies of whatsoever nature Middle Eastern money to unions and pro-Arab, from the Iraqi Government or the Australian Labor anti-Israel activists in Australia. The bungling ALP Party”. This makes no sense if the search for money politicians may have temporarily turned off the flow only began after the dismissal, but makes perfect of money into Australia and perhaps caused the sense if the project was being planned at an earlier closing down of a planned or operating mechanism date—probably from the time Hartley was planning constructed by Fischer and his associates to facili- his future election campaign. Fischer had returned tate political corruption. to Australia from overseas on September 21. This Reuben Scarf’s ASIO file begins in December suggestion of a payment from the ALP could also 1973, when a security intercept revealed that he and refer to the never discussed topics of his expenses two partners were involved in a merchant bank and commission. based in the New Hebrides. After Scarf’s employee Hawke suggested the means by which the funds Henry Fischer, already under observation, was raised were to be laundered: “the money could come seen visiting the Egyptian embassy in Canberra, to the ALP, Whitlam was told, via the Reuben Scarf ASIO copied a letter he wrote to the ambassador. Foundation”. Thus Scarf and Fischer were used not Ostensibly an order to supply Egyptian cotton, only for their Middle East contacts but also for an the letter was from Scarf-Miller-Fischer Finance alleged ability to launder the money for the ALP. Holdings Ltd, merchant bankers. The bank had When Henry Fischer talked to Murdoch he also a post office box number in the New Hebrides, a suggested that this was the way the money was to Sydney CBD address, and a North Shore post be treated, but he made it seem that this not very office box and telephone number. The three men original idea for deceit had come from the ex-Prime involved were Scarf, George F. Miller (the owner Minister: of the Music Hall in Neutral Bay) and Fischer, who described himself as a director. Several weeks later Mr Fischer says that Mr Whitlam suggested Fischer again used SMF notepaper when he wrote Reuben Scarf and/or the Scarf family pay to the same ambassador for his assistance in organ- large sums into the ALP in Australia, taking ising a visit by Scarf and himself to the Middle East. equivalent amounts from Arab sources into When they returned, Scarf accompanied Whitlam their overseas accounts, thereby overcoming the on a flight from Perth to Canberra and briefed the ALP problem with foreign exchange controls Prime Minister on the success of their commercial as well as helping the Scarfs to have money mission which he claimed as a Scarf Foundation ini- beyond the eyes of the Australian Reserve tiative. The three directors of SMF (Scarf, Miller Bank. Fischer says that when Scarf dodged any and Fischer) were also directors of the tax-exempt direct involvement Mr Whitlam said: “Use the Scarf Foundation. diplomatic bags.” Over the next several years ASIO files hold other brief clues as to the continuing existence of SMF, Fischer himself never explained exactly how the but there is nothing in the documents, unless hidden money was, or was to be processed—probably the under redacted elements of text, which indicate former. ASIO investigated this strange merchant bank or The major difference between the accounts given its possible connection with the Scarf Foundation. by the Labor participants and Fischer is that they Whether the Australian Secret Intelligence Service maintained no money had been given, while he (ASIS), our overseas security service, took an

38 Quadrant March 2016 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On interests i unknowable. the possibility of a donation. However the person Fischer and Scarf had been dealing profitably approached on that occasion was warned about the with Iraqi trading concerns since the beginning past political record of Fischer and the contact was of 1974. At the beginning of 1975 the Iraqis made broken.” Before and after that period Scarf and an attempt, through their Tokyo embassy, to gain Fischer had high-level ALP contacts that they care- information on Scarf and Fischer. They used an fully cultivated. Australian citizen who they appeared to be cultivat- In June 1973 Bill Hartley and Senator Lionel ing for an intelligence role and who had no contact Murphy had been present at a lunch at Reuben with their normal agents in this country. When he Scarf ’s house and then moved on to dinner at suspected what was happening he contacted ASIO. Fischer’s apartment with New South Wales ALP Later in the year Hartley, who had seemingly ignored state parliamentarian George Petersen and Justice his friend Fischer’s active and well publicised politi- Jim Staples. In the lead-up to the 1974 election cal activity in the 1960s, wrote a letter to the PLO Scarf, with Henry Fischer present, had opened his warning them of Fischer’s right-wing past. About Vaucluse home to entertain Bill Hartley and other the same time, he was asked by the Iraqi govern- ALP political figures including senators Murphy ment to report on the activities of Scarf, Miller and and Jim McClelland. The senators were surely Fischer. This linking of the three present to obtain a donation, and no men suggests SMF was of inter- doubt they received a generous one. est to the Iraqi government though hile it is About the same time the Egyptian that name was not mentioned. W ambassador in Canberra entertained Hartley sent his associate Gail conventional to ALP representatives planning to Cotton from Melbourne to Sydney wonder why Gough visit Egypt and the Middle East. to investigate. She went to at least Hartley was present, as was Reuben one campus and checked with her Whitlam had entrusted Scarf, who made a speech calling Arab acquaintances. An ASIO his reputation to for “more co-operation between informer reported on her findings: a notorious right Australia and the Arab countries”. “Cotton said this trio is not fully Scarf later claimed the post-election sincere and that they are using the winger the opposite visit by “a Labor delegation” had Palestinian cause for their own per- was actually true. been organised by Fischer. Before sonal benefit. She believes they are the 1975 election, Fischer said that better than other supporters who He had put his trust Scarf had been contacted for a say much but do not do anything.” in a Soviet spy. donation: “Jim McClelland called The assurance that they were smart me the other day and put the hard businessmen rather than woolly word on me for some money. I have idealists may have increased their standing in the agreed to give.” While it is conventional to wonder practical eyes of the Arab revolutionaries. Later, why Gough Whitlam had entrusted his reputation despite his quite damning warnings against Fischer, to a notorious right winger the opposite was actually Hartley provided his friend, before he journeyed true. He had put his trust in a Soviet spy. to Baghdad for the ALP, with letters to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi Youth Minister Naeem Haddad. SIO became interested in Henry, or Henri, In case he needed to look elsewhere for cash Hartley Fischer in the early 1960s when he received also gave him a personal letter for Yasser Arafat. The Amail from British Nazi sources. He was known as ALP member had an interesting address book. The an anti-Semite with strong right-wing views. As a letters stated, according to Fischer, that he was on a young man from an educated middle-class French “very delicate and important mission” for Whitlam. family he had moved to Switzerland to study cook- Looking at the affair through the perspective of ery: this was probably to avoid being called up by the ALP leaders, commentators find it incredible the army to perform national service during the that Whitlam, Combe and Hartley could deal with Algerian War. With family connections in the coun- Henry Fischer, the holder of anti-Semitic right- try he travelled to Australia and took up Australian wing views. Laurie Oakes is typical: “The involve- nationality when he was twenty-one. For working as ment of Fischer with the Labor Party was to stagger a cook on an Australian Antarctic expedition he was people who were aware of his background.” Richard awarded a Polar Medal by the Queen. From 1965 Hall, in The Secret State, claims that before the 1974 until it closed in 1967 Fischer was involved with a election Fisher and Scarf had “made contact with right-wing magazine, Australian International News the ALP at a fairly high level to make suggestions Review, to which Liberal backbencher Malcolm about Middle East policy and vaguely intimate Fraser contributed an article, “Why We’re Fighting

Quadrant March 2016 39 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On in Asia”. Gough Whitlam, then deputy leader of the vately with the Iraqis on Tuesday. He said he made ALP, unwittingly contributed the “Oddest politi- two phone calls to Whitlam late Tuesday after- cal speech of last month” in September 1965: “By noon—making final arrangements for where and derivation civilised men are those who live in cities. when the meeting would take place. The discussion Pagans are those who live in the country.” of this, he said, did not come from his own con- Despite his public reputation and their own tacts with the Iraqis but through telephone calls he observation ASIO had come to suspect that Fischer received from Fischer. was a Soviet agent. A lapse of tradecraft by Fischer As for the money, Fischer, before he changed his and his Soviet contact, a KGB agent operating out story, said that US$500,000 was passed over at the of the Canberra embassy, had been observed. Their meeting and that a second payment was promised suspicions were correct. In 2014 files copied from but not given after Whitlam lost the election. David KGB archives by defector Vasili Mitrokhin were Combe told Paul Kelly that he believed the money, made available to the public by Churchill College in which he says was never received, was to have been the United Kingdom. After consulting them Fairfax handed over in Tokyo. Diane Fischer claimed her Media revealed that Fischer had contacted the husband had told her that he was given the money Soviet embassy in Canberra in 1970, made a secret in Tokyo and banked it in Hong Kong. At the time visit to Moscow, was given the codename “Kirk”, it was generally believed, at least in public, that the and made a second visit in 1974. The actual docu- ALP received no money from Iraq. Modern views ments are not available for consultation in Australia are divided: either no money changed hands, or it and there are incidents in the ASIO files which was given and then stolen by Fischer. If it was stolen suggest other contacts made with the Soviets. To then it belonged to the ALP, who had a responsibil- add to the confusion there are also unsubstantiated ity to report the theft to the police. claims that Fischer had reported to ASIS after over- As everyone has an opinion on this, mine is that seas trips. Before he left Australia for Baghdad, on the money was given to the ALP. And that, after behalf of the ALP, Fischer visited Canberra—pos- all these years, is also the belief of Rupert Murdoch: sibly to arrange a visa for Iraq through the Egyptian “there was a crisis, he’d [Whitlam] been promised, embassy, surely to report to his Soviet contact. In he was given cash, which they’d spent, and was 1994 Gough Whitlam suggested that Fischer had promised that they’d get another quarter of a mil- security links: “he would have been in touch with lion and they spent that too”. I t find i completely the CIA”. unbelievable that Iraq would send the head of the The heart of this affair is not Whitlam’s famous Intelligence Service to deal with the matter without encounter with the Ba’ath Party emissaries. That, clinching the deal, the buying of a Western politi- and surely recognised on both sides as such, was a cian, seen at the time as a once and probably future formality. The real focus of interest is what happened prime minister. on the two days before they met Whitlam. What Iraqi and Soviet intelligence services were closely did the Iraqi representatives ask for, and what were linked and they were being offered a bargain they they promised, in return for the proposed donation? surely could not refuse. Even the seemingly simple- Or was it true, as Labor politicians said, and their minded questions which Whitlam appears to have claim was clearly stated in the first ground-breaking been asked at the meeting seem like basic steps in and writ-avoiding report by Laurie Oakes, that the the recruitment of an agent of influence. The path to money was to come “without strings”? On Monday, full-scale traitorhood begins with innocuous ques- the day they arrived, David Combe increased his tions and payment, but leads into much more com- advertising spending for the election campaign. promising territory. Whitlam’s defeat in the 1975 Fischer told Murdoch that cash was not mentioned election delayed more serious consequences. at the Wednesday breakfast meeting and nothing Whether money was handed over or not at the was negotiated: “Fischer said that that had all been meeting is probably unknowable. In an affidavit pre- done by Combe, who saw the Iraqis several times sented to an American court during her divorce in on the 8th, 9th and 10th of December.” Murdoch 1980 Diane Fischer revealed that the meeting had carried out his own checks and was confident that been secretly taped by her husband and George F. Combe had “certainly been seen a number of times” Miller: “He was in the flat in December when he at the motel where the Iraqis were staying. Were installed a tape recorder behind a bookcase to tape there negotiations on Tuesday and if so was Gough a conversation between Iraqi officials, my husband, Whitlam, who was in Sydney that afternoon and and Mr Whitlam, the then [sic] Prime Minister.” evening, kept informed? Apart from Fischer and When asked about the claim Miller, who was not Murdoch’s claims, never publicised, there appear to under oath, replied, “It’s nonsense.” Even with the be no other allegations that David Combe met pri- tape recording, which might now be in any of the

40 Quadrant March 2016 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On archivesf o several security agencies, the question in power, and he remained on good terms with his might not be resolved. Everyone present was aware Iraqi contacts after the scandal. of the probability that what they said was being When the secret was spreading, as senior officials recorded, and Whitlam was far too cautious a law- in the ALP were learning of the promised money and yer to make any obviously damning statements, or the financial problems of their party, Reuben Scarf, count the money in public—if it was handed over. in Paris, made the first attempt to talk to Rupert Murdoch. When he failed to make contact, and was fter the breakfast meeting Fischer left Australia flying back to Australia, Fischer took over and even- with the Iraqis. The three men flew first to tually met the newspaper proprietor. Fischer is the AHong Kong on Wednesday and continued to Tokyo only person connected with the scheme who alleged on Saturday. With two full days in the British col- that money had been given to the ALP. Writers ony the Iraqis spent more time there than in Sydney. wishing to excuse Whitlam downplay the ethi- Whether the money came to Sydney cal questions involved by asserting in the diplomatic baggage of Yehya that no money was received so little and went out the same way it seems damage was really done to his repu- clearer that it was with Fischer in Writers wishing tation. It is also a ploy that would Hong Kong. He was seen by his to excuse Whitlam have covered Fischer. Scarf pleaded wife’s step-sister and her husband. downplay the ethical complete ignorance and escaped He showed money he was holding, entirely. If he had claimed that no asked their advice about finding a questions involved money was received Fischer would local bank and introduced his Iraqi by asserting that no have appeared as a political inno- companions. This unusual behav- cent who had attempted to assist iour by the very private Fischer may money was received the ALP at a time of crisis. More have been an act of personal insur- so little damage likely the intense pressure that ance, for he surely had no illusions was really done to pushed Scarf and Fischer to contact about the dangerous men he was Murdoch came from their certain travelling with. It does not seem his reputation. knowledge that money had been an unreasonable supposition that involved and they were expecting to Iraqi cash, whether handed over be exposed and made scapegoats by in Sydney or Hong Kong, now went into a bank their untrustworthy political accomplices. Also, if account, possibly SMF Finance Holdings. From the money had been stolen there was no reason at then on it would have been untraceable. all for Fischer to speak to Murdoch. A week later Fischer’s brother-in-law, an archi- tect and director with a well-known Hong Kong he first time Murdoch and Fischer were in company, sent him a formal agreement letter for a direct contact was by telephone: Murdoch in commission-based agency for “architectural, electri- TLondon, Fischer in New York. In a later statement cal and industrial planning” projects in Iraq. The Murdoch recalled the main points of what he had agency was to run, in the first instance, for a period been told: “He [Fischer] said that Mr Whitlam of three years. The formal proposal to Fischer was had agreed to accept substantial sums of money for dated December 19 and signed and accepted by him the election and that some [emphasis in original] of on December 21. This is not the action of a man this money had not come through, thereby caus- who has just stolen half a million dollars from the ing the present crisis.” Also, that “the Chief of Iraqi picturesquely brutal Iraqi government. Intelligence together with a personal emissary of the David Combe was in touch with Fischer until dictator” had come to Australia and met Whitlam at February 17, 1976. If a payment was made to Fischer Fischer’s home in Blues Point Tower “and that the in mid-December the Iraqis would have quickly Arabs had asked for top secret information on the known that it had not been received by the ALP. Kissinger–Rubin and Kissinger–Assad talks, that Bill Hartley had an Iraqi-paid-for telex machine Whitlam had arranged for them to receive this from and was in close contact with his employers. Fischer a third party, a US citizen”. was in Iraq in late December 1975 and January 1976. What Murdoch was told in that fifteen-minute This would have been suicide if he had just stolen phone call was so bizarre and specific that, while half a million dollars from them. Likewise, Reuben making his own efforts to confirm what he was Scarf travelled to Iraq in a fruitless attempt, accord- being told, he contacted the Prime Minister, ing to Fischer, to obtain the second payment for the Malcolm Fraser. The astonishing claims prompted ALP. He would certainly not have visited the coun- Fraser to issue instructions resulting in a query try if his employee had just robbed the brutal regime to ASIO: “Prime Minister has requested [Alan]

Quadrant March 2016 41 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On

Renouf [Department of Foreign Affairs] to report duced him to Iraqi officials: “Mr Howard is a United on allegations that copies of cables from Kissinger States citizen aged approximately thirty-seven who to Israeli Government have been sold in Australia lives in Damascus and Beirut but travels extensively to persons with Arab interests. Name of Reuben and continuously throughout the world. Though he Scarf was mentioned.” It was also queried whether is officially known as a film producer making pro- ASIO was aware of Iraqis or Iranians “with intel- Arab films”—more information is illegible because ligence background” who had been in Australia in of the poor quality of the photocopied document. November or December 1975. Whitlam’s name was The text notes that because of his political films not mentioned. he has had contact with “Australian left wing lead- The follow-up discussions between Murdoch and ers and the Australian Union of Students”. The Fischer were spread across seven days in London. mention of students was followed by this observa- Murdoch was wary as he dealt with his informant tion: “Incidentally, Mr Jawad [a visiting Iraqi gov- and he sought to verify what he could: “I was never ernment official] who had that earlier experience convinced that Mr Fischer was telling me any more in Australia, told me that he had personally given of the truth than I was able to check out.” At the money to student leaders for their pro-left and pro- end Murdoch and his office staff summarised the Arab activities.” conversations in a text set out like a “Statement” by He then asserts that Howard offered the Iraqis Fischer. It exists as a rough draft with corrections “useful intelligence information which he had in in Fischer’s handwriting. Presumably meant to be his possession”. Specifically, Fischer claims that retyped and signed, it was incomplete when Fischer Howard offered documents to the Iraqis: left England for Australia and then disappeared from his hotel room in Singapore. It was never retyped He t said i would cost them plenty of money. or signed by Fischer and after it became public he A figure of one million dollars was mentioned issued a single-page version of events, through his and that he had with him secret documents Sydney solicitors, which contradicted everything he proving the gist of all the Kissinger Arab talks had told Rupert Murdoch, and also the accounts about the Lebanese crisis and the Syria/Israeli given by Hartley, Combe and Whitlam. settlement talks. The Iraqis’ own people had not The “Statement” circulated as a poor-quality pho- been able to get this information fully but they tocopy throughout Parliament House in Canberra were able to check out these documents to their and was tabled in the Senate. The pages are numbered satisfaction before paying over any money. 1 to 42, but pages 36 and 37 are missing. However, the files of the Commonwealth Police investigation, Fischer claims that Howard is presently plan- now in the Australian Archives, hold a complete ning to return to Baghdad: “he also claims they have text. In an interview at the time Murdoch cryptically not paid him all the money they owed him. I was referred to “allegations which were infinitely more present at the first meetings between Howard and far-ranging than those published”. Presumably this Haddad and other members of the leadership.” is part of what he was referring to. Whitlam is not On Monday February 23 Murdoch taped his mentioned in these pages. The censored text expands conversation with Fischer; the two men spoke of on an incident briefly touched on in the earlier part Tito Howard and his contacts with the Iraqis and of the narration where Fischer claimed that at the Whitlam: breakfast meeting, after a bulky envelope had been passed over, the Iraqis questioned Whitlam about Murdoch: “The thing about Tito Howard to me his knowledge of a “plot” linking Henry Kissinger is the most serious thing you have said yet. In and “reactionary cliques of the Arab world” against essence Whitlam took part in selling American the Palestinians and socialist regimes in the Middle secrets … He was a party to it. He said I cannot East. Whitlam’s reply was non-committal: “He then give you the secret but go and see so and so and turned to Mr Combe and said: ‘Maybe you can put he might be able to.” them in touch with our friend if it can be of any Fischer: “That’s right. He is not giving them help to them.’” Fischer identifies “our friend” as Tito secrets but Tito Howard is. He has done a Howard, and claims that after separating from the reference job.” Iraqi agents in Bangkok he had gone on to Kuwait to meet Howard. It is at this point that the pages In the “Statement” Fischer has Whitlam telling are missing. Combe to “put them [the Iraqis] in touch with our On those pages the narrative continues with friend [Tito Howard]”. In this conversation Fischer Fischer telling how he met Howard in Kuwait and expanded on the events of the breakfast meeting then went with him to Baghdad where he intro- by alleging that following this instruction David

42 Quadrant March 2016 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On

Combe had contacted Howard and told him to fly to attended an official ALP function at which he Kuwait to meet Fischer. At this time Fischer him- introduced Whitlam to a visiting Iraqi official. If self was travelling to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok Howard was also present this may be the basis for and Kuwait with the Iraqi emissaries. While the his claim to have film of Whitlam accepting money Iraqis flew home from Kuwait, Fischer stopped from an Arab in public. The talk of raising money there to meet Howard before they went on together for Whitlam and being promised a commission to Baghdad for meetings with government officials may be based on his own knowledge of Fischer’s at which Howard attempted to sell his secrets. activities. The next afternoon Fischer brought Howard to The next day Fischer and Murdoch met again. meet Murdoch. As they waited for their appoint- Part of this conversation is referred to in the Fischer ment Fischer was worried that he was catching a “Statement”. Fischer did not bring up the garbled cold, and Howard complained of not sleeping well. plots Howard had introduced but cut to the prob- Unknown to Murdoch at the time, Fischer was able centre of the confusing remarks: wearing a hidden tape recorder supplied by a News of the World employee. The taping was not good quality Its i interesting to note that at the meeting and there are a number of breaks in the transcript yesterday in London with Mr Murdoch and I, made by Murdoch’s office. After the introductions he claimed that the non payment of the second and opening remarks Fischer appears to be prompt- 500,000 dollars was due to his influence because ing his friend to talk about the Kissinger documents, he also felt cheated on some other arrangement but Howard strikes out in other directions: with Mr Whitlam.

Fischer: “You mentioned to me that you actually This odd reference does not make sense without gave him [Whitlam] some pretty interesting knowledge of the censored pages in the document. information that he needed.” In Fischer’s ASIO file is a photocopied filing card Howard: “Not only information, some other for Tito DeNagy Howard, date-stamped March 17, things as well.” 1976, which simply notes: “Reputed to deal in the sale of U.S. official cables concerning Israel.” This Its i possible that Howard is present to see how aspect of Howard’s involvement in the scandal has much his “friend” has revealed to the newspaper been ignored by later writers. Given that Whitlam proprietor about his illegal activities, and also to had been engaging in a public debate involving the make an effort to sell film of a quite separate affair CIA around the time of the Dismissal he may well concerning a supposed attack by the Israelis on a US have been interested in a secret US document if it naval vessel. Regarding Australia, Howard claims had been offered to him for verification and pur- that he “raised a considerable sum of money for chase—just as Fischer alleged Howard had done him and the Labour [sic] Party and 15% of what I with his Iraqi contacts. raised was to be mine as well”. As well as this Tito Howard is quite clear that he has film of Whitlam trangely,s a close or far from the truth as this “accepting money”. The film is temporarily unavail- speculation may be there is one other element able, he says, but he attempts to negotiate a sale of tShat may belong in this tale, a forgotten piece of film that is never delivered. Murdoch does not men- political history preserved in Clyde Cameron’s tion the supposed trade in US documents and gives political diaries. the impression of encouraging Howard to talk by On January 15, 1976, Cameron noticed newspa- agreeing to consider high-figure payments for sup- per reports of a break-in at John Curtin House, the posed film of Whitlam accepting money. national headquarters of the ALP, and the theft of “Party political” papers belonging to Whitlam. Murdoch: “It’s a brief case. No question that it’s Further reports appeared, with David Combe claim- money?” ing the break-in had happened between December Howard: “No question.” 23 and January 5. The police, it was claimed, were only notified after staff established what had been It all seems a fantasy mixed with elements of taken. reality. Howard claimed to have spent four days in It all seemed very mysterious to Cameron. One Australia and specifically refers to being here on report had a staff member finding “the doors of Sunday, December 1 and Monday, December 2, 1975. the Party’s offices unlocked, although the entrance Whitlam attended public campaign functions in to the building was locked”. The first account, he Sydney (on the Sunday) and Melbourne (Monday). noted, had claimed “the doors had been forced”. He On the Monday Fischer was in Melbourne and was intrigued by the vagueness, as if Whitlam’s staff

Quadrant March 2016 43 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On would not have known exactly what was missing. gave a bizarre account of what had happened. Also, The files had been moved to this secure location while admitting that he had been in Baghdad with from Whitlam’s Parliament House office after the Fischer, he stated that the reason for their visit was election, “And yet, after more than a fortnight, we to sell “35,000 tons of frozen chickens to the Iraqis”. are asked to believe that no one is able to tell the Newspaper interest in him and his fabulous career police the nature of the allegedly stolen documents.” appears to have died in late March when he was Perhaps the stolen Whitlam documents were reported occupying a cell in Tuscaloosa County Jail. stolen Kissinger documents, which had been recov- He had been arrested on nine forgery charges— ered by their owners who had ensured that by mak- matters to do with an allegedly stolen MasterCard. ing sure their presence in John Curtin House was After the scandal Whitlam kept his job as noticed they were leaving an obscure but quite clear leader of the opposition though he and Combe message for Whitlam. The logic in this fantasy con- and Hartley were severely reprimanded. The ALP struction is that if Whitlam was in possession of National Executive made a face-saving claim that documents given him by Howard, and these were no money had been received, none of the three had retrieved by their owners, his probable refusal to personally profited, and “none of the three persons continue his “other arrangement” with Howard directly talked on this matter [the money] with the would account for the hostility Fischer had sug- two Iraqis”. gested, and which Howard displayed in Murdoch’s Intending to make a profit from the affair, Bill office. Hartley revealed plans in June 1976 to apply for a A further odd element in this already strange grant to write a book about the scandal “using the story occurred sixteen months later. The seemingly tools of social science”. Asked how Whitlam would forgotten incident dramatically resurfaced when appear in the Labor family saga Hartley said he Bob Hawke accused ASIO of the break-in and the “would come out quite well”. A few weeks later an theft of documents, and the Canberra police of imperious summons came from the Iraqi embassy in taking part in a “cover-up”. ASIO was silent. The Japan ordering him to report for a high-level meet- police responded that although a break-in had been ing in Tokyo. It would have made a fine chapter in reported “nothing had been reported stolen”. The his book. Although the gathering clashed with an Deputy Commissioner of Police released a state- ALP Executive meeting in Canberra the calls were ment saying that “police found no evidence of forced insistent and he flew to Tokyo, his expenses paid entry into the premises and to this date nothing has by the Iraqi government. A representative of the been reported stolen”. Australian saw him arriving at Tokyo airport and The ever-mystified Clyde Cameron talked it over noted that he “was met by a car carrying diplomatic with a fellow Labor politician after an ALP execu- number plates”. At the end of the month, the finan- tive meeting: cial report of the New South Wales branch of the ALP showed a surplus of $247,770, at a time when Mick Young told me he had asked Hawke why the federal party was $350,000 in debt after the elec- he held his press conference alleging that the tion. The National Times commented: “The irony of CIA [sic] had broken into the ALP headquarters the situation is that while the Federal party was in Canberra following the 1975 election. Hawke engaging Mr Henry Fischer to secure funds from told Young that David Combe had asked him to the Arabs there was a spare quarter of a million hold the conference and make the allegations. dollars sitting in the NSW coffers but never used.” Or had someone made helpful political donations To accuse ASIO of stealing documents that were but not realised that the federal and New South never reported stolen does seem unusual, even by Wales branches operated separate accounts? the standards of a political party who perhaps had David Combe had some ASIO difficulties in the half a million dollars stolen from them, and never early 1980s. reported the theft. If this quite elegant little ver- Whitlam, after the election and in the years sion was academic Aboriginal history, or the history that followed, may have been of little interest to of colonial Tasmania, the points between the dots Iraqi Intelligence or the KGB. Fischer was a Soviet would be inked into our history books, but since it agent, and Bill Hartley was in the pay of the concerns a Labor idol, normal scepticism is advised. Iraqi government. Whitlam seemed a spent force. Whatever really happened in the Iraqi money affair t the time the scandal became public Tito was known to the KGB, and possibly one or two Howard’s name came into the story when other security forces. When he stepped onto the hAe was connected with Fischer’s disappearance in international stage at Unesco it was time, if they Singapore. When tracked down by journalists he did hold secrets from 1975, for their investment to

44 Quadrant March 2016 The Iraqi Money Scandal, Forty Years On pay off. With a man like Whitlam it would have His present location is unknown. The registration been crude to attempt overt blackmail, although for SMF Finance Holdings Ltd ended in 1981 when he simply could not have survived another public it was struck off by the Vanuatu Financial Services loss of face with fresh revelations from the revived Commission. money scandal. Perhaps also by then Henry Fischer Perhaps there are further chapters in this his- had had some interesting talks with American tory—not only the real story of the ALP’s Iraqi intelligence, or Israeli, or French, or British, or money scandal, but also the scope of financial Australian. support from Iraq to its Australian friends over Of the three men involved in SMF, Reuben the years. Much of the story may be in the Ba’ath Scarf, who always denied involvement and dis- Party archives taken after the fall of Baghdad, or in owned Fischer, was made a Member of the Order the memories of Farouk Abdulla Yehya, captured of Australia for community service and philan- on September 25, 2003—present location or fate thropy by the Hawke government in 1985. He died unknown. in 1993. George F. Miller, never seriously mentioned in relation to the affair, died in 1989. Henry Michael Connor’s theatre column will resume in Fischer reappeared in America and was involved in April. A footnoted version of this article appears on more, and equally complicated, personal scandals. Quadrant Online.

Saving Jesus “BrickHouse Security saves Jesus for 8th year in a row, offers free GPS tracking of nativity scenes and holiday displays.”

Somehow escaping The sharp eye Of angels, shepherds, And magi, Thieves snatch the infant From the crèche Unless the abject To spirit God off And forlorn In the flesh. Hijack the babe Clearly, it’s To feel newborn The thieves’ intent Themselves, and think To massacre By robbing churches The innocent They gain a love Like Herod They cannot purchase. In the dark of night, Unlike the soulless Forcing parents Figurine To take flight. With planted chip, To empty Christmas The Nazarene Of the Christ Restores the lost Would seem the purpose Sans GPS, Of the heist— And covers crime With holiness.

Paul Lake

Quadrant March 2016 45 John Hirst

,James Campbell Photographer of Australia

The historian John Hirst died in Melbourne on illustrated papers in Melbourne. February 3 at the age of seventy-three. He gave In the peace he became official photographer for this speech in Carlton on February 1 to launch the State Electricity Commission in the Latrobe Alan Harding’s book JP Campbell: Pictorialist Valley. This was Victoria’s Snowy Mountains Photographer (Connor Court). project, a massive undertaking, and like the Snowy John Hirst’s books include Sense and Nonsense designed to make electricity without relying on the in Australian History (2006), The Shortest History strike-prone black-coal fields of New South Wales. of Europe (2009) and Australian History in 7 Monash, Australia’s most famous soldier, was in Questions (2014). charge. Beyond all this Campbell was a witness to an hen I leafed through Alan’s book (and I episode deep in our national consciousness: a child hasten to say that I have read the book; lost in the bush. The event was celebrated in art doesn’t always happen) I saw immediately and literature, and we now also have photos from tWhat it has similarities to the life of Albert Facey, Campbell of the search for little Adam, lost in the who told his own story under the title A Fortunate bush near Mansfield in 1909—and found safe after Life. Like Facey, James Campbell steered a path that three days. made his life emblematic of the nation. And he was Unlike Facey, Campbell did not land at Gallipoli taking photos as he went. on April 25; he went with the Light Horse without Campbell was a country boy; he grew up in their horses to Gallipoli in May. But he was a wit- Gippsland; in the 1880s like so many young men he ness to the most disastrous battle of the campaign, was attracted to the big city; in Melbourne he was the slaughter at the Nek, featured in Peter Weir’s a government clerk who took up cycling and pho- film Gallipoli. This was fought by the Light Horse, tography and so was a very modern man. He then or rather they ran or stumbled into the fire of the became a salesman, travelling with his bike and his Turkish machine guns. Campbell was not among camera over much of country Victoria. them; he had now been appointed to signals, still After Federation he applied to be a part of the with the Light Horse, and he had recently been nation-building project; he went as official pho- injured. tographer to the Northern Territory, which the The most poignant photograph in the book is Commonwealth took over from South Australia in the one he took of the two officers, the only two, 1911. Developing the territory sat with the railway who survived the slaughter, Lieutenant Higgins over the Nullarbor and the building of Canberra as and Major Deeble, half-lying in a rough dugout; things that had to be done to complete the nation. not a photograph for the illustrated papers. Another When war broke out Campbell put his age down unheroic scene captured by Campbell is three sol- and joined up. Among all these young men in their diers sheltering from a shell in a dugout, crouching, teens and early twenties at Gallipoli, he was a mar- huddled close together, like one animal cowering in ried man of fifty with grown-up children and a a hole. I had seen nothing like it before. grandchild. Monash turned fifty at Gallipoli, but he After Gallipoli the infantry went to France; the was a senior officer. Campbell was an ordinary sol- Light Horse to the Middle East. Here Campbell dier, albeit in the Light Horse. The war for him was became official photographer at first as assistant a photographic opportunity. Like many others he to the more famous Frank Hurley. On one occa- took a camera with him but he was a professional; sion they travelled together from Jerusalem down some of the photos he took were reproduced in the to Jericho like the man who fell among thieves in

46 Quadrant March 2016 James Campbell, Photographer of Australia the parable of the Good Samaritan. That most sur- to bankroll the photography. And then James con- prising conjunction: the Australian Light Horse trived to spend very little of his life with his wife. in the Holy Land, the liberators of Jerusalem and Alan has examined the long and very close relation- Damascus; for this we have Campbell’s photo- ship he had with a single woman, Lilian Pitts, who graphic record—of the horses traversing that bar- was also keen on photography. ren landscape and entering the close-built ancient Campbell learnt his photography just down the stone towns. road from here at the Workingmen’s College, now RMIT University. Alan carefully places his edu- lan has had two tasks to produce this book: cation and his work in the history of photography. to research the life of Campbell and to locate He was, as the title of the book says, a pictorialist aAnd order the photographs, some of which were in photographer. He wanted his photos to be aestheti- public collections, some not. It is a significant com- cally pleasing, but still a good record of the subject; posite record of lasting value. he was not, as Alan reports, of the “fuzzo wuzzo” The photos are wonderful. The life itself is school that would doctor pictures any which way also interesting. I said Campbell was a boy from to make them pleasing as art. Still, choices could the bush; he was not the son of a settler but of a be made about subject; Campbell had a liking for schoolteacher who was the teacher raised dust under travelling horses of young James his son. He was a and vehicles—for which he did very well educated teacher, able e wanted not have to look too hard—and for to instruct his son in French and H morning mists and fog. German. Campbell senior came his photos to be Mostly he did not have to adjust from a well-off merchant fam- aesthetically pleasing, his style to serve as official photog- ily in Scotland. He came with his rapher. In the Northern Territory brother to Port Phillip in the 1840s. but still a good record he had to depict a country ripe They brought capital with them and of the subject; he for development, which meant the failed several times as squatters. Aborigines had to be excluded. But The brothers were often without was not of the school Campbell was still photograph- work and they ended up working that would doctor ing them. His bosses could ignore for wages. Downward mobility was pictures any which those photos or doctor them. Alan their lot. shows a Campbell photo of the That was no doubt disappointing way to make them Daly River with an Aboriginal fish- but in the broad, downward mobil- pleasing as art. erman on the bank and a party of ity in Australia, of which there white officialdom rowing down the was a substantial amount, assisted river. When this photo was used for in giving the place a democratic tone. There were promotional purposes the Aborigine was removed, many working people doing ordinary jobs educated but not very well: his fishing rod and line remain beyond what the job required, who were capable of suspended in mid-air. Such a close examination of asserting themselves and not being pushed around. the photos marks the whole book. Captions were Campbell senior was an extraordinary teacher for a often changed from presentation to presentation; one-room bush school. Alan tracks all this down. A few pages after the His son was a rather prickly character who doctored photo is a stunning undoctored photo of thought of himself as a gentleman and did not fit in Aboriginal men and boys gathered around grave well with the bureaucratic structures that control- posts in a mourning ceremony; they are completely led him when he was an official photographer. He naked, well built, heads slightly bowed. Not seen by was sacked twice, with both times aspersions being many people at the time, now this photo is a valua- made on his photographs, a view which posterity ble record of indigenous life before it was disrupted. has not endorsed. But whether he was paid to be There are some 150 Campbell photos in the a photographer or not, his camera was always on book. Thank God a book about a photographer does hand. When he was official photographer he was include a lot of his work. Even with such a gener- taking non-official pictures and making money out ous display, I sometimes wanted more. Alan would of them in the booming postcard trade. describe a photo but alas it was not reproduced. James seems to have been a cannier Scot than his One day there might be more—another book, or an father and uncle. As a young man aged twenty-two, exhibition of Campbell’s work. just arrived in Melbourne, he married a widow, aged You see how much pleasure and instruction I thirty-five, who had inherited from her husband have taken from this book. I am very pleased now four houses and some urban land, which helped to declare it launched.

Quadrant March 2016 47 James Allan

Who Am I to Judge? The Humean Answer to Cultural Relativism

on t a American or Canadian or British or near on all the branches more or less concur) with New Zealand or Australian university, and looser talk about how it is (where the Benthamites I dare say to one in Germany, France or and Humeans diverge noticeably from the natural- Ganywhere else in the Western world, and you will law brigade). soon notice two competing claims about the status So take that as a sweeping generalisation about of individuals and societies. One is universalist; it the universalist tendency in the Western world makes claims as to how all human beings—just by today. But notice that along with that tendency or virtue, say, of being human or possessing reason outlook there exists another that is widespread. We or being God’s children or having a capacity to can think of this as cultural relativism or “Who am feel pain and pleasure or being the object of some I to judge?” thinking. This too is everywhere on dis- hypothetical social contract—are entitled to the play as you wander around university campuses in same general thing when in the same general posi- the West; nor is it hard to find amongst the pricier tion. The whole post-Second World War human inner-city coffee haunts of the bien pensants as they rights edifice is built on this sort of universalist wait for their barista-made latte (or macchiato or foundation. double shot espresso, the list grows daily) to be hand Sure, you can find within that foundation your delivered, preferably having used “Fair Trade” beans natural-law adherents, your Kantians, your social that were not shipped through Israel; and you can contract crowd, your utilitarian Benthamites, and see it reflected nightly in the pre-suppositions that a whole lot more (though not obviously Islamic- help frame the questions of all those conservative worldview adherents, it is worth noting). But effec- television presenters on “Our ABC”. (Okay, I’m jest- tively this post-war human rights outlook in all its ing about conservative television presenters being manifestations sees the whole lot of us as in some employed by the ABC—or producers, or indeed core way equal—so that the proper scope for free any top people at all. But I’m not joking about the speech or for freedom of association that you ought prevalence of cultural relativist attitudes.) Still, it is to have guaranteed to you is not dependent upon most clearly found at universities, I suspect. whether you are Burmese or British, Confucian or Catholic, plutocrat or poor, born with XY chromo- he idea behind this second widespread outlook somes or XX, two legs or one, devilishly clever or is that people from culture or group X ought decidedly dumb. nTot to judge the practices of those in a different cul- At times this attitude or worldview may come ture or group Y. “Who am I to judge?” That’s the close to Coke-commercial levels of platitudinous motivating spirit of cultural relativism. Of course piety, but there is no doubt that this universalism it only applies to those outside your own culture. is a powerful prevailing outlook today. And not just Imagine some feminist who would be prepared to in the universities but near on everywhere in the devote weeks of her time to trying to stamp out the West, in newspapers, in television dramas, from the abhorrent practice of using male pronouns (him for mouths of top politicians and their bureaucrats and all references to a singular individual human) in her the judges. own liberal Western democratic country yet would It is a new-fangled attitude. You would not have say nary a word about the weekly stonings to death found it in many places a mere century ago. You in Saudi Arabia of women who were alleged adul- would not have found it anywhere two centuries terers. Or not wish to condemn the fact that women ago, or two millennia. Yes, some branches of the cannot legally drive in that country. Or say noth- universalist outlook tend to confuse their “oughts” ing of the myriad other things that affect women and their “ises”—how the world ought to be (where around the less fortunate parts of the globe that

48 Quadrant March 2016 Whom A I to Judge? a good many people might rank as more pressing for Hume moral evaluations were very much mind- than pronouns. “That’s their culture and it’s not for dependent. If humans had evolved differently then me to comment,” is the underlying attitude. some core sentiments would be different. There is If that example veers too near caricature for no mind-independent truth, for Humeans, to any you, think of the different standards applied to moral claim. Of course there can be universal or Aboriginal problems; think of the willingness to near-universal empirical uniformities—say that critique the dominant religion at home but never 99.99 per cent of humans feel disgust at the thought the dominant one somewhere else (even for the of child molestation or at fathers not loving their exact same failing); think of those in the West who children. But these moral sentiments depend upon hold their own culture up to the most exacting and the way humans happen to be. Evolve to be tigers stringent standards while glossing over everything and you have different moral evaluations. To give a up to and including mass murder, kleptocracy and simplified analogy, there is no mind-independent barbarism in other lands and cultures (and we can truth about whether chocolate ice-cream is better think here of countries ranging from Afghanistan to than vanilla. It depends on the taste buds the evalu- Zimbabwe and a good many in between). ator happens to bring to the table. It’s the same gen- At the very least accept that the underlying eral thing, say Humeans, when it comes to moral tension between universalism and evaluations. They are dependent on cultural relativism exists. A full- the sentiments being brought to the blooded embrace of the former ome things will table. seems to leave little room for the S latter’s special treatment or excep- get hard-wired into o s that i the big dispute within tions due to culture (or “otherness”, us by the same forces meta-ethics, or that part of if you want to use the puke- mSoral philosophy that thinks about inducing terminology sometimes that push evolution. the status of moral evaluations. employed). Obversely, if standards Some things will be Even after centuries of dispute nei- are all socially inculcated or relative ther side has a knockout argument to time and place, then it is hard the result of social against the other. People just split to see much room for any robust inculcation. But on this core level debate. I men- understanding of universal values not all moral codes tion it because you need a tiny bit or levels of treatment or enumerated of that background to consider how rights, whether those jotted down will deliver the universalism and cultural relativ- by Eleanor Roosevelt or somehow same outcomes in ism might be reconciled. And here’s else derived. the first thing to realise. If you are the empirical world a moral realist (so perhaps bring to wanto t consider whether and of day-to-day life. the table theological pre-supposi- how these two outlooks or atti- tions, or Kantian ones, or modern- tudesI might be reconciled. To start day natural law ones, or just take we need to make a brief digression into the realm your moral realism from the sophomoric building of moral philosophy. The Western canon’s think- blocks of your Amnesty Internationals or United ers can be grouped into the moral realists and the Nations Human Rights Councils) then cultural rel- non-cognitivists or moral sceptics. Immanuel Kant ativism makes no sense at all. It is incoherent, full is the doyen of the former. The claim in this camp stop. In a world of mind-independent moral truths, is that there is a mind-independent aspect to moral female genital mutilation is wrong for everyone (or, judgments. “Bear-baiting is wrong even if everyone I suppose, right for everyone if your perceived moral on the planet happens to think it isn’t,” gives you truth points that way). So is polygamy. So is some the basic idea. Most theological worldviews fit here. level of proper treatment of animals, the planet, fill Most of the foundations for the modern human in the blank of your choice. rights edifice, whether consciously or not, fit here. Of course, some moral issues will be sufficiently (For example, Amnesty International’s claims sit on low-key that politeness might dictate keeping moral realist foundations through and through.) silent about wrong treatment in other places. So, The other great tradition in the Western moral too, might pragmatic political calculations occa- philosophy canon is usually traced to David Hume, sionally dictate keeping quiet about happenings in a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He was some Middle Eastern or Far Eastern place, given a sceptic. For him, it was feelings—the passions— we live in a dangerous world in which all countries that moved human actions, not reason. Reason just need allies. But that in no way changes the fact that told us how to get what our sentiments desired. And there is a mind-independent truth to the matter of

Quadrant March 2016 49 Whom A I to Judge? how religious minorities or women or anyone else evolution. Some things will be the result of social ought to be treated. So any full-blooded or even inculcation. You should expect differences. But not half-hearted embrace of cultural relativism by the all moral codes will deliver the same outcomes in moral realist is incoherent. It amounts to genuflect- the empirical world of day-to-day life. ing before the gods of political correctness. But what can we say about Humeans or moral kay, but doesn’t that make cultural relativ- sceptics? Now let me lay my cards on the table and say ism plausible? Not really. Sure, everything for that Hume is a personal hero of mine. He was pretty HOumeans is ultimately dependent on the sentiments clearly an atheist and yet a genuinely nice and good the evaluator brings to the table. But that just means person, something you can’t say about Rousseau and that if someone’s core desire is to lounge around in a lot of other political and moral philosophers. He poverty then we can say what sort of culture will wrote beautifully. He nailed what it means to allege give him his wish. If you want instead a materi- a miracle; his destruction of the argument from ally prosperous and free lifestyle, well then it turns design—a core prop of defences of any benevolent out you need a culture pretty much exactly like the theism—is ten times kinder and more perceptive West’s—lots of scope for speaking your mind; no than anything Richard Dawkins has enunciated on ability to silence opponents by accusing them of this score, and Hume did not have the advantage of apostasy and then killing them; a commitment to any then existing account of how evolution worked. the scientific method; just look around you at the Adam Smith called Hume the most nearly perfect best culture yet to have evolved. human he had ever met. For Humeans, cultures are not equal—at least But I digress. What I’m asking here is whether they’re not equal if you start from wanting freedom, people who see moral evaluations as mind-depend- material well-being, room to invent jet air travel, ent can embrace cultural relativism. I ask because birth control, the internet, and a whole lot more. the temptation may be to think, “If there are no Those require—they empirically require—what we mind-independent moral truths then all judgments have and what a lot of cultures do not have. Of are subjective and so I can’t even condemn the course if your core desire is to languish in a feudal neo-Nazi.” theocracy which is suspicious of all knowledge not But you should resist that temptation. It turns laid down long ago, then there is nothing mind- out that cultural relativism is just as unattractive independently wrong with that. You just have to to the Humean. Why? Well, first notice that this live with the consequences of your preferences. The crowd says there are no mind-independent moral same goes for those who don’t wish to work hard or truths. But there are plenty of mind-independent who want to drink or surf all day. The underlying truths about the external, causal world. Humeans sentiment is not somehow out of sync with some are not crazy French anti-foundationalist decon- mind-independent moral truth. But we can tell you, structionists. Gravity exists outside our brains. It is right now, where it is likely to lead in the empirical not a function of how we evolved or how men have world in which we happen to live. oppressed women or how the poor have been taken Put bluntly, some cultures deliver enough learn- to the cleaners by the rich. Anyone crazy enough ing to come up with antibiotics and some do not, to say that gravity is not a mind-independent truth and it is not some cosmic fluke that determines can be taken to your eighth-floor office window which is which. And some cultures, given the uni- and asked to jump. He won’t. Deep down, even if form sentiments and preferences most humans have he’s a French philosopher, he believes that gravity had hard-wired into them by evolution, deliver bet- is imposed on us humans by the external, causal ter outcomes than others. It is as simple and undeni- world. able as that. Some cultures are better than others at So Hume was a very great empiricist, one of the delivering what most of us want. British empiricist philosophers with Hobbes, Locke By the way, this sort of thinking meshes and others. We may not be able to give a deductive perfectly with Benthamite utilitarianism, and proof for causation but we can sleep easily relying that in turn is the basis of economics and basic on it, said Hume. Indeed it was because of what cost-benefit thinking. What it does not give you he saw in the empirical world that Hume thought is some undergraduate “Who am I to judge?” we need to keep facts and values separate. The best worldview. Humeans are just as happy to judge as empirical explanation of moral evaluations is that moral realists. In fact they focus that judging even they are not mind-independent. Instead think of more explicitly on what is likely to eventuate here morality as a system of constraints on action that on earth, right now, rather than on some claim evolve in unplanned ways. Some things will get about godly moral truths, or eternal human rights hard-wired into us by the same forces that push verities (ones that only some committee of unelected

50 Quadrant March 2016 Whom A I to Judge? ex-lawyer judges can discern on a five-to-four basis). despite the best efforts of Stalin and whichever The non-cognitivist Humeans also give a rejection, a Kim happens to be ruling in North Korea at the powerful rejection, of the gist of cultural relativism moment. and they do so without the need to think that you happen to have moral antennae that quiver at just hat might we conclude from all of this? My the right frequency and those poor bastards over in take is that cultural relativism is for losers, that culture do not. Or that you are somehow, after wWhatever your take on the status of moral evalua- so many billion years of life on earth, the pinnacle tions happens to be. Worse, if you don’t feel able to of moral evolution—a presupposition that seems judge culture Y from the vantage of culture X, then to anchor most everything you hear out of GetUp on what basis can you judge sub-culture A (within or the Human Rights Commission or self-styled X) from the vantage of sub-culture B? Or sub-sub- human-rights lawyers. culture M (within B) from the vantage of sub-sub- You don’t need that sort of moral preening. You culture N? (And note that you can continue to play just need to ask what someone wants and then ask that game indefinitely until you reach the point of which culture is likely to deliver it. In answering absurdity where you can’t judge anyone or anything, that question you will see that cultures are not not actually being that other person.) equal, far from it. That claim, that cultural relativism is for losers What then of the universalising outlook for together with its ancillary that the West’s culture— Humeans? Well, that just depends on how many for all its faults and flaws—is far better than any- sentiments you think are hard-wired into almost thing else so far evolved, does not require you to all of us humans through the pressures of evolu- be an absolutist about how universal human senti- tion and how many are socially constructed. If the ments and preferences are. There is plenty of scope desire for material goods and freedom is due to evo- for reasonable disagreement there. But it does give lution, then it’s easy to make claims based on how you grounds for wondering why so many academics almost all humans happen to be. If it’s some social and ABC presenters seem to subscribe to what the construct that makes most of us want the best for British journalist Nick Cohen calls the “Kill us, we our kids or lots of freedom to make choices, then deserve it” school of cultural self-hatred. claims based on widespread uniformities across all humans fall down. But the evolutionary psychol- James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the ogy evidence does not point to social inculcation, University of Queensland.

Window

In these evenings the towering lights of the battered merchant ships berthed in the harbour, and the ships distant with flashing beacons in the roadstead, anchored and waiting on the night-sea horizon at the edge of our world seen briefly from the bus-window remind us they contain men still living lives we have forgotten, lives we can hardly imagine, remind us again that the world still has adventures.

Hal G.P. Colebatch

Quadrant March 2016 51 Peter Smith

Religious Doubt in Adversity

ollowing the November 2015 Islamic terror- remarks, to action taken by his brother (played by ist attacks in Paris which killed 130 people Joaquin Phoenix) and, finally, to his son’s asthma and wounded many more, the Archbishop of affording him protection from the poisonous exha- CFanterbury, Dr Justin Welby, was widely reported as lations of the alien. admitting to feelings of doubt about the presence of It niggled at me when watching the movie and God. For example, the Daily Telegraph (December niggles at me still. I have the impression that Father 6) reported Dr Welby as pondering why the attacks Graham’s faith (in the imagined world beyond the happened, and where God was in the French vic- end of the movie) is conditional on no further trag- tims’ time of need. When asked if these attacks had edy affecting those for whom he cares. His seems to caused him to doubt where God is, he reportedly be a fair-weather faith. said: “Oh gosh, yes.” Is my reaction overblown? I don’t think so, but Now those who don’t believe in God hardly the question seems worth exploring. It comes to this. care what the Archbishop says or doesn’t say. The Whether and in what circumstances is it legitimate only people who care are those who believe in God. for believers in God, including the clergy, to allow His attentive audience is the Anglican subset of doubt to come between them and their faith? Christian believers. This believer was troubled, as I suspect were others. I don’t think his expression don’t believe that this is a matter on which only of doubt was appropriate in the circumstances. To theologians can opine. Doubt goes to the very be clear, I don’t want this to be thought of as being Iheart of the struggle that ordinary churchgoers face about Dr Welby, who I respect as the symbolic head in upholding their faith. Belief systems may start of the worldwide Anglican community. It is about off as products of authoritative debate in rarefied doubt. Some doubts pass muster, some don’t. I will cloisters but they don’t last the course unless they ponder on the distinction between the two because make sense in a language that ordinary people can in this postmodern age we can easily be lulled into understand. thinking that one doubt is just like another. A movie First it is necessary to define doubt. The OED sets the scene. defines doubt as “a feeling of uncertainty or lack of Signs is a sci-fi movie made in 2002. It’s a good conviction”. That’s fine so far as it goes, but com- movie with scary aliens. Within its genre, I gave it mon-or-garden usage often conflates doubt and dis- four out of five. I might have given it four-and-a- belief. “I doubt that,” usually means that it is not half but for its main sub-plot of lapsed and regained believed. Doubting the existence of UFOs can be faith. Mel Gibson plays Graham Hess, an Episcopal reliably taken as being synonymous with disbelief. priest in a small community in Pennsylvania, who Equally, doubting the existence of God is often syn- loses his faith when his wife is killed in a road acci- onymous with disbelief. dent. Bear in mind that Father Graham, a long- Starting with the sixth century BC, Jennifer standing member of his community, would have Hecht (Doubt: A History, 2003) explores the history consoled many bereaved families and presumably of religious doubt among all significant religions. would have encouraged them in their faith. Yet his While recognising the difference between doubt in faith is seemingly fragile. I would have taken this in the form of scepticism and straight-out disbelief, my stride if he had not regained his faith when his she often treats them as part of the same tapestry; young asthmatic son (played by Rory Culkin) was because they often are. As a considered and system- saved from death at the hands of an alien through atically held position, doubt is code for disbelief. a line of circumstances—from his dying wife’s final The Catholic Encyclopaedia puts it plainly:

52 Quadrant March 2016 Religious Doubt in Adversity

... whereas a philosophical or scientific opinion Church admits of the permissibility of doubt when may be held provisionally and subject to an it is “involuntary”. Thus: unresolved doubt, no such position can be held towards the doctrines of Christianity; their Voluntary doubt about the faith disregards or authority must be either accepted or rejected. refuses to hold as true what God has revealed The unconditional, interior assent which the and the Church proposes for belief. Involuntary Church demands to the Divine authority of doubt refers to hesitation in believing, difficulty revelation is incompatible with any doubt as to in overcoming objections connected with the its validity. faith, or also anxiety aroused by its obscurity. If deliberately cultivated, doubt can lead to Surely the Catholic Church is right in holding spiritual blindness. that “unresolved doubt” is in conflict with religious (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2088) faith. To go to the OED again, religious faith is a “strong belief in a religion, based on apprehension Few things are crystal clear when it comes to rather than proof”. Thus worldly evidence is nei- religion. But the distinction between voluntary and ther here nor there in removing doubt and bolster- involuntary doubt resonates. Believers certainly ing faith; even if it were obtainable, which it isn’t. recognise involuntary doubt because it enters their Consequently, doubt as a qualifier minds uninvited. It can be envis- to belief is a barrier to religious aged as a force which regularly buf- faith. nvoluntary doubt fets the superstructure of religious Agnosticism exemplifies the I faith but which, unlike voluntary point. Agnostics are thought to can be envisaged doubt, does not undermine its occupy a twilight world between as a force which foundations. belief and disbelief. They most Os Guinness’s God in the Dark certainly have unresolved and, in regularly buffets (1996) and John Ortberg’s Know being beholden to proof, irresolv- the superstructure Doubt (2008) are two among many able doubts. I suggest that Thomas of religious faith treatments of doubt which tell of might be given the dubious distinc- its validity. The argument is clear tion of being the first agnostic in but which, unlike enough. Without doubt faith the Christian era. It was fortunate voluntary doubt, makes no sense. Doubt generates for him that he was uniquely posi- faith in religion in the same fashion tioned at the time to obtain proof does not undermine as it generates discovery in science. from Christ. its foundations. Of course, religion and science are Richard Dawkins (The God philosophically apart. Religious Delusion, 2008) refers to an apparent doubt is not subject to evidential view of the Catholic historian Hugh Ross Williams resolution. It forever hangs about. Ortberg has a that agnostics were “wishy-washy boneless medioc- nice take on the potential effect this has when he rities who flapped around in the middle”. Dawkins reports a life-long churchgoer as saying: “I would himself mostly uses more considered language. be surprised to find out what I believed all along Nonetheless, he puts requiring proof of the exist- turned out to be true.” It is also a take which lends ence of God in the same category as requiring proof itself to scientific analogies that partly bridge the of the existence of the tooth fairy. On its own terms, gap between religion and science and, also, offer an this seems right to me. insight into the validity or otherwise of religious Those who require proof of God’s existence put doubt. themselves in the same half of the playing field as Take Einstein. He might not have been surprised occupied by atheists. In hanging out for proof, they but presumably he was gratified to learn that an are effectively atheists in limbo waiting forlornly for experiment conducted in 1919 confirmed that light proof that will never come. They are akin to abstain- beams passing the Sun bent to the degree predicted ers claiming neutrality on an affirmative resolution by his General Theory of Relativity. Go further and requiring a majority of eligible voters to pass. Sorry, take a spaceship and head for the moon. However in the circumstances, a no-show is as good as a nay. expert is the science and engineering, a leap of faith is required of the astronaut. And that faith might here would appear to be a conundrum. Not be tested if mechanical faults unexpectedly come many, if any, of us who believe in God, and to light along the way; and, undoubtedly, landing Tthink about it, are certain. We have doubts. It safely would be treated with relief that things after comes with the territory. Luckily even the Catholic all had worked out as expected. Let me stretch this

Quadrant March 2016 53 Religious Doubt in Adversity particular analogy. seemsoe t m that the expression of doubt in the Imagine that the spaceship blasts off with the West Country falls fairly and squarely in the cat- knowledge that it will be buffeted along the way by egory of involuntary doubt. Unprovoked thoughts geomagnetic storms and meteor showers. These will entered the Archbishop’s mind which he later put almost certainly cause intermittent malfunctions of in perspective. The expression of doubt after the the spaceship’s systems. The astronaut knows all of Paris attack is—to my mind—of a different order. this. At question is whether he will be resilient in This kind of doubt has the potential to separate the face of mishaps or fall apart when his navigation believers from their faith. Faith becomes a hostage systems fail or an asteroid deals his ship a glancing to fortune. And we know that misfortune is ever- blow. The hope is that the astronaut will retain his present everywhere. faith because he has been forewarned. My conclusion is that fair-weather faith is effectively no faith at all. Faith must encompass knowl- ow I would like to go back to the movie char- edge that bad things have always happened in the acter Father Graham. He suffered a grievous world and always will. The option of atheism is tNragedy. But he knew that people died in accidents. open to those who can’t square God with suffer- In this worldly context, his wife’s death was unex- ing. It might be objected that many biblical fig- ceptional. Yet his doubt became crippling. ures have doubted. Val Webb (In Defence of Doubt, Dr Welby’s expression of doubt was much 2012) provides a snapshot of numbers of them milder. Nevertheless, his reported remarks doubt- under the chapter heading of “A Great Tradition of ing the presence of God when the tragic events in Doubters”. Job is prominently included as a doubter Paris were unfolding were surprising, to say the in the face of adversity. While Job never lost his least. Adults and children die with every passing faith he lamented that God was no longer watching minute, often tragically. Thousands upon thou- over him and queried his predicament—as well he sands of people have been killed in recent years by might. Job’s expression of doubt about the presence Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and North of God has similarities with Dr Welby’s. But there Africa. Road accidents, cancer and natural disasters is a crucial difference. Job was in personal anguish regularly take the lives of children. Quite simply, if over the tragedies that had befallen him and his the confidence of the clergy in the presence of God family. Crying out in anguish was surely permis- is contingent on the absence of untoward deaths sible in the circumstances. they might as well give up the cloth. Let me con- “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” trast Dr Welby’s remarks after the tragedy in Paris This too, at one level at least, is a cry in personal with some earlier remarks of his. anguish. And it must, by definition, be permissible. BBC News (September 18, 2014) reported him Personal anguish explains and excuses tempo- being interviewed when he was touring the English rary lapses in faith. This is poles apart from the West Country ahead of Holy Eucharist at Bristol complete abandonment of faith evinced by Father Cathedral. He was asked if he doubted the exist- Graham. As for Dr Welby’s expression of doubt ence of God and responded by saying: after the Paris attack; senseless suffering on the part of others understandably evokes expressions Yes n I do. I lots of different ways really ... The of sympathy and condolence and often anger and other day I was praying over something while despair. But I would argue that they are the wrong I was running and I ended up saying to God, circumstances to express religious doubts. “This is all very well, but isn’t it about time you Let me put it starkly to add weight to the point. did something, if you’re there,” which is not How appropriate would it be to voice expressions probably what the Archbishop of Canterbury of doubt in the context of giving the last rites to should say. someone who had been dealt with capriciously and cruelly by man or fate? It is precisely in those Its i important to say that Dr Welby later put his circumstances that faith—not doubt—comes to doubts in perspective. “It’s not about feelings, it’s the fore to provide comfort to believers who well about the fact that God is faithful, and the extraor- understand that bad things happen, and to good dinary thing about being a Christian is that God is people. faithful even when we’re not.” There is a distinct difference to note here. It Peter Smith is a frequent contributor.

54 Quadrant March 2016

Saints, Swans and the AFL

Who do you think you are?

Don’t you realise that by showing support for the same- sex- attracted Agenda with a Pride Game you are also saying that you don’t support natural marriage.

Natural marriage gives a child both a Mum and a Dad.

Two men cannot replace a child’s mother; two women cannot replace a child's father, no matter how much they love each other.

Source: another-stolen-generation.com

“A lot of us, a lot of your kids are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad.”

- Heather Barwick (raised by a loving lesbian couple) March 2015

Source: www.AustralianMarriage.org www.another-stolen-generation.com

Quadrant March 2016 55 Robert Murray, Geoffrey Blainey, John Poynter, B.J. Coman, George Thomas

Peter Ryan

Peter Ryan MM, who was born in Melbourne on in anti-communist views, which gradually became September 4, 1923, died in Melbourne on December more conservative. His university friends included 13, 2015. He wrote his column in the back pages of later writer, academic and Age editor Creighton Quadrant from March 1994 to October 2015. Burns and archaeologist John Mulvaney. As many have found before and since, good arts * * * degrees do not automatically produce an income. Peter spent the next few years in advertising, small- Robert Murr ay scale publishing and public relations. In 1962 Melbourne University Press, looking Peter Ryan’s Life (I) for an ideas man and innovator, appointed him as Director. He kept the finances healthy and pub- eter Ryan, who Quadrant readers knew as their lished many important and successful books before favourite acerbic essayist for more than twenty he retired in 1988. He wrote about these years in Pyears, was one of the last of the post-war generation his book Final Proof (2010). Later he worked for of Melbourne intelligentsia. the Board of Examiners for the Victorian Supreme One of his grandfathers was an Irish Catholic Court until the early 2000s. suburban tailor and the other a Methodist lay He was particularly proud of MUP’s Encyclopaedia preacher. His father Emmett (“Ted”) Ryan, an oil of Papua and New Guinea, which had been his own company clerk and Victorian Football League player, idea. He had a lasting affection for the country of died when Peter was thirteen, oldest of three broth- his dangerous youth. ers; the death left a lasting pain. He was pleased that The controversy of which he was proudest— his father had been in the army unit that “wrested” and which most upset academia—was his attack (in the language of the day) New Guinea and neigh- in Quadrant in September 1993 on the quality of bouring islands from the Germans in 1914. Manning Clark’s celebrated six-volume History of He went to school at nearby Malvern Grammar, Australia, one of MUP’s best-sellers. MUP had but left in order to earn some money for his fam- already committed to Clark for the series when ily. The Second World War plucked him at eight- Peter took over, and he did not feel very proud of een from the ranks of junior clerks in the Victorian the later volumes. public service into intelligence-gathering behind the His 2004 book Brief Lives celebrated the lives of lines of Japanese-occupied Papua New Guinea. This fifteen of his friends, fourteen Australians and one became the subject of his first (and recently repub- New Guinean, from a prime minister and a Nobel lished) book Fear Drive My Feet. laureate to a wood-cutter and a doorman. Peter’s gift This arduous, dangerous work brought a Military for friendship led him early to journalist and author Medal, a mention in dispatches, a job teaching Clive Turnbull, one of Peter’s many older friends, elementary Papua New Guinea language such as who introduced Peter to the chummy ranks of the Pidgin to young servicemen, a commission, and a intelligentsia and sometime bohemia. Turnbull was place in Colonel Alf Conlon’s wartime Directorate one of Keith Murdoch’s talented “bright young men” of Research and Civil Affairs. in the 1930s Melbourne Herald group and post-war Still only twenty-one when the war ended, he columnist, critic and “man about Melbourne”. joined the many talented ex-servicemen studying at Peter’s lunching, partying and drinking mates Melbourne University. He was active in the Labor in this and other circles included the Asianist Club and the fight against communist attempts to commentator Peter Russo and Sydney Daily take it over—an experience that confirmed him Mirror editor Frank McGuinness, father of the late

56 Quadrant March 2016 Peter Ryan

Quadrant editor Paddy McGuinness; and authors weekends he walked on his own in the bush and on Michael Cannon (author of The Land Boomers and the logging tracks near the Great Divide. other books), ex-Melburnian Cyril Pearl (Wild Men His eighteenth birthday came just before the of Sydney) and Supreme Court judge Jack Barry. Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On enlisting, Bruce Davidson (The Northern Myth), agronomist and he was surprised that his poor eyesight was not witty scourge of the rural expansionist and Whitlam detected by the doctor who examined him. Posted minister Al Grassby, was his brother-in-law. to New Guinea, he began—still a teenager—to Friendship with wartime diplomat and later make dangerous treks in tropical mountains and Professor W. Macmahon (“Mac”) Ball and swamps where, by radio, he reported on the troop Creighton Burns helped him land the MUP job. Sir movements of the Japanese invaders. In the course Paul Hasluck, Governor-General from 1969 to 1974, of a long mountainous patrol he and Captain Les was another friend, and Bob Santamaria yet another Howlett were tricked into entering an isolated vil- of his eclectic band; they often lunched at the old lage. Japanese soldiers, already hiding there, shot Café Latin. The historian Geoffrey Blainey was one Les dead. of the younger of these friends. Chased by bullets, Peter hurried across a creek Peter’s early columns included the mischie- and hid in deep mud. “For a few minutes all was vously whimsical “Melboune Spy” in the fortnightly quiet,” he wrote, “but soon I heard the Japanese Nation, published by Sydney Morning Herald Finance calling out to each other, and their feet sucking Editor Tom Fitzgerald, yet another and squelching in the mud as they Ryan mate. The Australian, the Age searched.” and the Australian Financial Review or his homeland his Bruised and hungry, he even- were other publishers over nearly F tually reached an outpost manned sixty years of Peter’s witty, incisive loyalty and affection by Australian troops. In the New and erudite columns and articles. remained intense. Guinea campaign he was one of One Age column made Paul Keating the youngest to be awarded the famously apoplectic. To visit Britain and Military Medal for bravery. The Quadrant column was the Europe was never his The book he wrote about his pride and joy of Peter’s last years, experiences, Fear Drive My Feet, is when he could not get out much. wish—Port Moresby now recognised as one of the clas- Shortly before he died he was sharp- was far enough. sic Australian war memoirs. When ening his pen for use in Quadrant it was first published in 1959, he on the showy columnist, author and flew to Port Moresby to escort to republican Peter FitzSimons. Peter Ryan did not Melbourne his wartime colleague, Sergeant-Major think much of FitzSimons’s military history or his Kari of the Papuan Constabulary, to celebrate the republicanism. event. Kari’s wish was also to inspect Pentridge As readers would know, Peter had an eye for prison where “the white fellows” were locked up. humbug but was personally friendly, helpful and Peter began to study history at Melbourne unassuming. University, where he took out an honours degree He had the good fortune of a happy marriage, to in arts and became politically active, Like most ex- “Davey”, lasting nearly seven decades. servicemen at the end of the war his politics veered more to the Left. After working in the advertis- Robert Murray is a frequent contributor to Quadrant ing industry he spent four years as public relations and the author of The Making of Australia: A Concise manager of Imperial Chemical Industries, which History (Rosenberg). An earlier version of this tribute was one of the biggest manufacturers in Australia appeared on Quadrant Online in December. and New Zealand, and dominant in explosives. He then served as head of Melbourne University Press * * * for a quarter-century. I was on the Press’s board in the early 1960s and Geoffrey Blainey sometimes watched him at work. If a manuscript excited him, he did a lot of the editing, and was Peter Ryan’s Life (II) meticulous without being a busybody. In choosing from the pile of incoming would-be-books, he eter Ryan was a scholarship boy at Malvern became a first-class judge of whether it would be Grammar in suburban Melbourne when his widely read or simply lose a lot of money. At the Pfather died. Peter left school to take a lowly posi- same time he believed some works were so important tion in the Victorian public service, and on some that, win or lose, they had to be published. One

Quadrant March 2016 57 Peter Ryan was the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the first near Heathcote. volume appearing in 1966. Within two decades He hesitated to join clubs and societies, for he there were twelve tall volumes, narrating more was companionable rather than gregarious. He took than 7000 lives, and making it infinitely easier no part in an Anzac Day march until 2000, when for almost everybody to do research in Australian he found himself deeply moved by the clapping history. crowd, the flutter of migrant children’s flags, and Peter was the instigator, the general editor, and his own memories. the publisher of the massive Encyclopaedia of Papua In 1947 he married Gladys “Davey” Davidson and New Guinea, which in 1972 revolutionised the from Tambo Crossing in East Gippsland. They accessible knowledge on that land, soon to become had a son, Andrew, who farms in northern New independent. His contributors and consultants were South Wales, and a daughter, Sally, who lives in a formidable team, and their work on the scientific Melbourne. The three could only marvel at the topics as well as on history and government was stamina, will to live, and indestructibility of Peter widely praised. It was the kind of reference work as he was knocked about in old age by injuries and which should have been kept up to date. There were illnesses. A few years ago, just after a major opera- no volunteers for such a huge task. tion, he was found escaping from the hospital. At Fascinated by words and vexed by their misuse, the age of ninety-two, close to death, he still had Peter wrote eight books and maybe 2000 essays, writing tasks in hand. book reviews and articles for newspapers and journals, the last appearing in Quadrant when he was Geoffrey Blainey’s most recent book is The Story of dying. Many were in praise of friends. Amongst Australia’s People: Volume 1: The Rise and Fall of the favourites were William Macmahon Ball, the Ancient Australia (Penguin). political scientist, and Sir Paul Hasluck, the politician and governor-general, who Peter valued as an * * * MUP author of “immense loyalty, discretion and tact”. John Poy nter On any topic Peter wrote exactly what he thought. Our family knew Peter and “Davey” for Peter Ryan the Publisher nearly sixty years, and his firm published four of my earlier books, but he did not hesitate to write pub- first heard of Peter Ryan while still at school. licly that he had no time at all for one of my books My slightly older sister, a friend of Peter’s future and little time for this or that chapter in another. wIife Davey, told me of the exploits in student and Maybe he was right. You had to respect his even- public affairs of this boldly individual young ex- handed forthrightness. He more than made up for serviceman. I entered the University of Melbourne some of his denunciations with kindness. He show- in 1948, the year he graduated, and those of us ered praise on his staff who deserved it. Incidentally straight from school could not but be aware that the he ran a lean and orderly ship as a chief executive. gap in experience between us and those who had He became especially a target of controversy in been to war was more like a generation than a few 1993 and 1994 after he opened fire on leading his- short years. Later, after reading Peter’s Fear Drive torian Professor Manning Clark. And yet Peter’s My Feet, I realised how extraordinary his wartime writings generally displayed affection more often experiences had been. Months behind enemy lines than distaste. For his homeland his loyalty and in New Guinea, and later service in Alf Conlon’s affection remained intense. As for his social pref- extraordinary intelligence unit, could not but shape erences some were unusual. To visit Britain and character indelibly. Europe was never his wish—Port Moresby was I got to know Peter after 1962, the year he far enough. Restaurants he liked, usually a table was recruited to help the Vice-Chancellor draft for two or three, and in the years when the long a submission to the newly-created Australian lunches reigned in Lygon Street in Carlton his were Universities Commission, and then to take charge amongst the longest. of a re-organised Melbourne University Press. Both In sport he took the faintest interest. Mentally tasks were exercises in the management of crises, of he retreated when the talk turned to football, which the university had an increasing number in though his father had played League football with the 1960s. How firmly the new Director managed Richmond and St Kilda. Nor were racecourses one the then-ailing enterprise I learned when I agreed of his venues, though he liked horses. Successively to write a biography of Russell Grimwade; after a he rode Cloud, Tinkerbelle and Bonny on the small decade studying English paupers, a rich Australian hill-farm he and “Davey” set up at Rainy Creek philanthropist promised a change of scene.

58 Quadrant March 2016 Peter Ryan

Neither Peter nor I had met Grimwade, who was always ambivalent, and was especially proud of had died in 1955, but he knew and I learned that the MUP authors he discovered outside it. In those Grimwade’s will envisaged that MUP would set up years I learned too that he liked to keep his worlds the equivalent of Oxford’s Clarendon Press on his apart, the weekdays as an urban man of business magnificent two-acre Toorak property, Miegunyah. who enjoyed good lunches and dinners, and the His intention depended on his wife Mab’s will as weekends as a teetotal hard-working farmer and much as his own, since he had given her the house family man. Only his dog, it seemed, shared both as a wedding present decades before. She outlived worlds. him for eighteen years, so the 1960s were a time of I saw less of Peter after we had both retired protracted expectation for both the university and from the university payroll, he to write more out- MUP. Meanwhile the circumstances of both, and spoken columns and I some over-large books, of Victoria, changed rapidly and radically. though whenever we met we resumed conversation Russell Grimwade proved an as if little time had passed. In 2010 interesting subject to write about, Quadrant Books published Final broad in his skills and interests and e liked to keep Proof: Memoirs of a Publisher, his with the time and means to pursue H succinct and forthright account of them. The skills ranged from indus- his worlds apart, the his twenty-six years at MUP. He trial chemistry to photography and weekdays as an urban rightly chronicled a succession of cabinetmaking—his testamentary achievements, while characteristi- “wishes” included setting up MUP’s man of business cally inviting disagreement from his printery beside his workshop— who enjoyed good usual critics. One chapter I found and the interests included collect- wanting was “The Miegunyah ing Australiana (notably Captain lunches and dinners, Promise”, his account of the uni- Cook’s Cottage) and the conser- and the weekends versity’s difficulties in fulfilling vation of the natural environment, as a teetotal hard- Russell Grimwade’s testamentary and especially of native forests. wishes after Mab’s death in 1973. Peter and the MUP Board agreed working farmer and We had disagreed at the time, that the biography should appear as family man. Only Peter naturally wanting the bulk of No. 1 of the new Miegunyah Press, any eventual largesse for the Press with a little financial support from his dog, it seemed, to manage and blaming the uni- Mab but none yet available from shared both worlds. versity for the years of delay, while Russell’s estate. Peter later gave the rest of us, facing unexpected a typically jocund account of the complexities before and after the book’s launch in Miegunyah’s great hall by the uni- eventual sale of Miegunyah, also recognised other versity’s new Chancellor Robert Menzies in 1967, claims, especially for the care and conservation of “the one and only time the Press and the house the collections the Grimwades bequeathed to the achieved anything like a physical consummation”. university. None of us foresaw that two decades would pass In 2012 I joined Ben Thomas and others in pre- before Miegunyah Press No. 2 appeared in MUP’s paring a full account of the Grimwade benefac- list. tions, and the outcome—Miegunyah: The Bequests I joined the Board of MUP in 1974, the year of Russell and Mab Grimwade—was published by Peter consummated a lifelong passion for “the the Miegunyah Press in December 2015. Peter was islands” with the launch of The Encyclopaedia of invited to the launch; I expected him to disagree Papua and New Guinea, a major editorial initiative with my chapter describing the years of our joint he had begun seven years before and worked on involvement in the saga, though confident he would full-time to complete. As the Board’s Chairman approve the appropriately handsome design of the from 1976 until 1987, a year before Peter’s retire- volume. I did not see him at the launch, and before ment, I learned how economically the Director and I could ensure that he had received a copy of the a handful of trusted colleagues managed the organ- book I was told of his death. Like many others I feel isation, how meticulously he briefed the Board and deprived, of a critic as well as a friend. its various committees, and how shrewdly he negotiated legal agreements, whether with landlords of John Poynter was Ernest Scott Professor of History at Press premises or with such august bodies as the the University of Melbourne from 1966 to 1975 and ANU. I also learned how trenchant his judgments Deputy Vice-Chancellor from 1975 to 1990. could be. Towards Melbourne University itself, and to the academic world of the day generally, he * * *

Quadrant March 2016 59 Peter Ryan

Directorf o Melbourne University Press, author of many fine books and a war hero. He wore all his B.J. Coman achievements very lightly. I happen to know the man who built the house Peter Ryan at Rainy Creek at Rainy Creek, and he was astounded to learn, years later, just how famous Ryan was. He related ou could describe him as the universal man. to me the manner in which he got the job. At the Like Banjo Paterson’s Mulga Bill he was “good time, he was doing some building work at the Yall round at everything”. He could strain up a fence, Heathcote Catholic church. Peter Ryan drove up recite a bit of poetry by James Hogg or Andrew one day and made himself known as a local. “Do Marvell, give you an account of the customs of New you build houses for Protestants and atheists?” he Guinea tribes, run off a list of local noxious weeds, asked. Keith House (for that was the name of the and then pull down a weighty volume from his builder) answered in the affirmative, adding that, huge library and talk with authority on Dr Johnson, even for Catholics, “a quid was still a quid”. And so Horace, or (dare I say it) Banjo Paterson. It was not the house was built. They became firm friends and I wise to get him started, at some late hour, on Sir had the good fortune to drive Keith House and his Paul Hasluck, whom he admired or, for that matter, wife over to Rainy Creek for a memorable reunion Manning Clark, whom he admired less! not long before Keith died. And, to continue a theme, somewhat like Banjo Peter’s other great love was Papua New Guinea. Paterson’s Man from Snowy River, his was a house- His accounts of patrol officers and other Australians hold name for dozens of hack writers like myself, serving in New Guinea in former times will be well for men and women of high office and, especially, known to Quadrant readers. He had strong views for readers of Quadrant over the past two decades. on the positive role of Australia in Papua New I will leave it to others better qualified to speak Guinea affairs. I think he would have claimed that of Peter Ryan’s literary achievements and, rather, the granting of independence in 1975 was too hasty briefly mention his love of the Australian bush and and, however well-intentioned, not in the best its people, and his feeling for all aspects of Papua interests of the local people. As always, his feel- New Guinea. I should add that these comments are ings here were based on his own intimate knowl- based on only a few meetings with Peter and I cer- edge of the Papua New Guinea people and his love tainly cannot claim any long and close friendship. for them. I think the recent history of Papua New Nonetheless, such was the character of the man Guinea bears witness to Peter’s concerns. The envi- that even such brief encounters made an indelible ronmental disaster of Ok Tedi, for instance, is dif- impression. ficult to envisage under an Australian government Other than his devoted wife (known universally administration. as Davey) and family, Peter’s great love was his It is usual in valedictions of this sort to end with, farm, “Rainy Creek”, near Tooborac, not all that “He will be sadly missed”. And, indeed, we will far from where I was brought up. Here, he ran a miss his physical presence. But so much of Peter few pampered livestock including an aged horse. Ryan’s character went into his writing that, in a From the veranda of the house, you looked out from sense, you can bring him back anytime you wish, the northern edge of the Cobaw Ranges over a vast simply by pulling down one of his many books and inland plain and, on a clear day, you could (with immersing yourself in it. And there he will be— the aid of field glasses) just make out the shimmer- almost as large as life itself. Horace was right: Non ing tree-line of the Murray River. Peter and Davey omnis moriar. loved the place. Some of his best descriptive writing, in my view, came from his country experiences. B.J. Coman’s most recent book is Against the Spirit of I particularly remember an account in Quadrant of the Age (Connor Court). the smells emanating from the local grocer’s shop (in the days when there was a local grocer) which * * * immediately transported me back to my own childhood. There was also a memorable account of one George Thomas of his more eccentric rural neighbours. I do not know of any prominent literary fig- Peter Ryan the Columnist ure in Australia who could relate to ordinary rural Australians like Peter Ryan. A visiting woodcutter lthough Peter Ryan was a work colleague at or produce merchant would never guess that this Quadrant for more than twenty years, I met same man, leaning over the farm gate, was once Ahim in person no more than half a dozen times.

60 Quadrant March 2016 Peter Ryan

For the first five years or so Peter wrote his column bed awake.” longhand and faxed it to us at the Fitzroy office, His column meant a great deal to him. Once, usually from the Flemington post office near the while walking to the Flemington post office, he house he lived in during the week. At first I had no was knocked over by a car; he still made it to the contact with him at all, but when on one occasion post office and faxed his copy. He was about eighty we printed “cheery grin” where he had intended at the time. Soon afterwards he bought a compu- “cheesy grin”—an insignificant error, fortunately, ter and learned how to type his columns on it and but an error nonetheless—he decided that his hand- communicate by e-mail, eliminating the problems writing was not quite up to the job, and asked us to of handwriting and faxes. send him a proof of each column. Occasionally aris- It frustrated him sorely a few years later when ing from the proof there was something he wanted illness prevented him for the first time from sub- to discuss with me over the phone. mitting his monthly copy. Feeling that he had let It was only when the Quadrant office moved to us down, he offered to resign, as he did on several Sydney and I took over the preparation of articles such occasions thereafter. But the idea was always at home in Melbourne that we began the monthly unthinkable to us, as we assured him each time. chats that I grew to look forward to I don’t know what Peter thought so keenly. Peter on the phone was of our phone calls. They were not the same man as Peter the column- e could strain up the conversations of equals. When ist: cheerful, wise and witty. But H he began writing for us, in order there was only so much he could a fence, recite a bit of to get to know the man behind include in his columns, mostly for poetry by James Hogg the columns I read Fear Drive My reasons of space, sometimes for Feet. From then on, I was in awe reasons of propriety, and he liked or Andrew Marvell, of him. Anyone who has read that to talk about the things he had not give you an account book, of the wartime exploits of a included in that month’s column, of the customs of nineteen-year-old Melbourne boy or had just not written about yet. operating alone in the jungles of He was an inexhaustible source New Guinea tribes, New Guinea, will understand what for Australia’s social, cultural and run off a list of local I mean. political history from the 1920s to I was far from alone in my the present, and with his lifelong noxious weeds, and admiration. The editor since 1973 capacity for friendship and his wide talk with authority of the venerable American literary and deep reading he could talk, as quarterly the Sewanee Review, he wrote, fascinatingly on any sub- on Dr Johnson. George Core, described Fear Drive ject he chose. He never seemed to My Feet recently as a book “of great be at a loss for a subject for his column, and given but understated power” and noted that he was not reasonable health he might have continued for the first person to compare Peter’s prose style to many years to write with the sparkling freshness of George Orwell’s. Weary Dunlop, who knew only his final two columns on Brian Fitzpatrick. too well about such things, called it “a moving I am glad his final columns displayed Peter at account of a young man’s lonely heroism in the face his best, and glad too that when he died he was still of great adversity”. our columnist. I said “reasonable health” above. In At a Quadrant dinner in Melbourne about ten fact his health in the last ten years was often far years ago the speaker was Major-General Jim worse than reasonable, and deteriorated in the last Molan, who had recently returned from a year year or two. Typically of his generation he did not as chief of allied operations in Iraq, a position of complain about his health, preferring to joke about eminence such as few Australian military leaders in it briefly before moving on to more interesting top- our history have attained. When he arrived at the ics. But he dealt with at least one bout of cancer, venue, he asked if Peter was there, and immediately recurrences of malaria, injuries caused by falls, sought him out and introduced himself. He told numerous other ailments and several hospital stays, Peter he was glad Peter was there, because he while writing as if he were simply taking his ease in wanted to tell him how much Fear Drive My Feet a comfortable armchair with a glass of sherry. had meant to him over the years. As the two war Sleep was at times elusive. I asked him once if veterans talked it was clear which of them Major- he had really sent his copy at around four o’clock General Molan regarded as the hero. that morning, as my inbox indicated. He replied, with an air of resignation, “Better than lying in George Thomas is deputy editor of Quadrant.

Quadrant March 2016 61 Phasmida the Stick Insect Woman

She selects my leafy café where the camouflage is good, it suits a bone-thin woman whose limbs are stiff as wood. Sitting apart, alone, she devours a lettuce lunch ignoring those nearby beneath another branch. When finishing her coffee she licks the last few dregs then, using lanky arms, assembles whittled legs. “My dear man” I watch her step away i.m. Brian Ridley unsmiling and stoic, leaning on those legs Dressed, finally, he comes from his room like worn out walking sticks. bright as if setting out on a hike, “What’s on the agenda today, my dear man?”, Suzanne Edgar his pyjamas clownish from beneath the oilcoat I’ve loaned him. “Fencing. Where we were yesterday.” “Of course. Very good. Very good.”

“What would you like me to do?” “Would you mind stepping the distance from here to that tree?” “Of course. Delighted.”

And the wind catches his coat as he sails out, while with pliers I attend to the strung wire that seems as sure as a lifeline.

“497 paces if I’m not mistaken,” he delivers like a traveller returning with a souvenir, smiling, triumphant as a fisherman with what he has caught.

His death lost among the waters of days we live in, I stand in that paddock, the grass at my knees waving. Where am I now?

That man, dear man, lost and smiling, striding away.

Russell Erwin

62 Quadrant March 2016 BOOKS, ARTS & IFEL

The Novel Response to Jihad David Martin Jones

fter 2001, the Library of Congress intro- aestheticism”. Joseph Conrad also dissected the rev- duced a new category. “September 11 olutionary fanatic’s addiction to violence. Through Terrorist Attacks 2001—Fiction” identified a characters like “the incorruptible Professor” in Agenre of political novels that now includes inter alia: The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad depicted the mor- Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly ally challenged inhabitants of a bohemian under- Close (2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Jay world preoccupied with revolution, betrayal and McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Claire Messud’s conspiracy. The Emperor’s Children (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling After 1945, Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Man (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Arthur Koestler, Vladimir Nabokov and George Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days (2009). Orwell explored the corrupt demi-monde of Cold The category also includes European and Australian War totalitarian terror. Novelists like Orwell and novels like Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2003) and Conrad clarify the moral and political dilemmas Submission (2015), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2007), that confront the liberal political conscience. Given Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) that the political novel, at its best, offers insight into and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist the motive for violence, what political and moral (2007). By 2011 newspapers and journals published possibilities do the novels of September 11 Terrorist lists of the best post-9/11 novels, and US universi- Attacks 2001—Fiction evoke? ties, such as Berkeley, offered undergraduate courses in post-9/11 fiction. What does the new genre tell disenchanted modern cityscape inhabited by us about the modern liberal character adrift in an a cast of middle-class characters forms the interconnected world confronted by the apocalyptic sAetting for most 9/11 fiction. It is a cosmopolitan, certainties of the Islamic zealot? secular city of commercial transactions, sexual infi- That the contemporary novelist would derive delity and status anxiety. The denizens struggle inspiration from terrorism is unsurprising. As it with anomie, financial and emotional need, and a evolved, modern terrorism cultivated the drama of city which sustains only a minimal sense of civil the violent act. Consequently, the great early twen- association. Before any terror attack occurs this is a tieth-century novelists found it a suitable fictional world that lacks moral purpose. case for treatment. In The Princess Casamassima The characters who inhabit it are not so much (1886) Henry James perceived in the anarchists of dead souls as lost ones. Thus, in John Updike’s the time an emerging European revolutionary char- Terrorist, Jack Levy is a sixty-three-year-old school acter that was a “strange mixture of anguish and guidance counsellor trapped in a stale marriage

Quadrant March 2016 63 Books with his avoirdupois-challenged, part-time librar- after 9/11 for an increasingly dislocated existence in ian wife, Beth. Jack is a Jew, “but not a proud one”. Greenwich Village’s Chelsea Hotel. “Life itself had “Uxorious sadism protects his gloom”, until his become disembodied.” This relationship also paral- interest in Central High student and homegrown lels the disintegration of the World Trade Center. terrorist Ahmed Molloy ignites him in a brief, guilt- An upmarket gasterbeiter, Rachel abandons New ridden affair with Ahmed’s ageing hippy mother, York and her husband to return to her parents’ house Teresa. in the London suburb of Barnes, where she embarks Guilt also consumes the putative “good life” that on an affair with a celebrity chef. Hans meanwhile Jay McInerney’s characters Corinne and Russell is left in the city leading a futile life of business, Calloway endure. Corinne had “become a connois- booze and casual sex, before playing cricket with a seur of guilt”. Her lover, investment banker Luke team of Trinidadian expatriates offers him a sense McGavock, also savours “the unfamiliar taste of of belonging. marital guilt”. Inhabiting a more desirable zip code Emptiness, loss and a dysfunctional family life, than the Levys, the Calloways cling to a precari- analogously, permeate DeLillo’s Falling Man. Here, ous existence in a Tribeca loft. Corinne’s “anxiety the performance artist David Janiak, who mimics was a permanent condition”. Russell, hardened by those falling from the North Tower on September “two decades in the city”, conducts 11, forms the mise-en-scène against a seedy affair with Trisha, his for- which Keith and Lianne Neudecker mer assistant. Russell’s betrayal jus- oral uncertainty, play out their alienated uptown exis- tifies Corinne’s decision to embark M tence. The novel begins with prop- on a doomed love affair with Luke. doubt, indecision, erty lawyer Keith emerging from Meanwhile, Luke, who narrowly domesticity and an the falling towers and finding his missed immolation in the disin- shell-shocked way to the apartment tegrating World Trade Center, is absence of moral he once shared with his estranged alienated from his style-icon wife, purpose characterise wife, Lianne, a freelance editor, and Sasha, and the world of finance the bourgeois their son Justin. Like the couples in capital in which he once flourished. The Good Life and Netherland, angst In Claire Messud’s Emperor’s protagonists of the defines Keith and Lianne’s relation- Children three thirty-something post-9/11 novels. ship. Lianne observes: “I know that Brown University English majors most lives make no sense. I mean also inhabit an Upper West Side in this country what makes sense?” world of angst and deceit. Danielle Minkoff pro- Lianne, like Rachel Van Den Broek, contem- duces documentaries, and finds herself attracted plates abandoning the city after 9/11. Her more to Ludo Seeley, an Australian journalist, whilst resilient mother Nora dismisses the idea: researching a program about “the appalling history of race relations in Australia”. Ludo, about to “Nobody’s leaving,” her mother said. “The ones launch a satire magazine in New York, however, who leave were never here.” falls for Danielle’s best friend Marina, the beau- “I must admit I’ve thought of it. Take the kid tiful daughter of Murray Thwaite, a sixty-year- and go.” old award-winning journalist and “the country’s “Don’t make me sick,” her mother said. liberal conscience”. Ensconced in a “manifestly grand” apartment on Central Park West and mar- Ironically, Nora, the most resilient character in ried to children’s rights lawyer Annabel, Thwaite the 9/11 novels, subsequently dies from a degenera- finds “allure” in the transient affair. He seduces his tive disease. daughter’s best friend who “savours” its “horrible Nora’s occasional German lover, Martin deliciousness”. Meanwhile Danielle’s gay friend, Ridnour, also finds all this navel-gazing self-indul- Julius, writes reviews for Village Voice, but finds gent. Martin declares America post-9/11 irrelevant. perverse security in an abusive relationship with a “We’re all sick of America and Americans. The “preppy” patent lawyer, David Cohen. The events subject nauseates us,” he somewhat insensitively of 9/11 expose the fragility of these relationships. remarks at Nora’s wake. They disintegrate along with the tumbling “towers Rachel’s British friend Matt in Netherland shares of Babel”. Danielle goes into therapy, David scars Ridnour’s contempt for American solipsism. Matt Julius for life, and Ludo moves to the UK. thinks September 11 “not such a big deal”. Rachel In Netherland Hans Van Den Broek, a Dutch meanwhile considers Bush’s War on Terror “part of equities analyst, and his English human-rights a right-wing plan to destroy international law … and lawyer wife, Rachel, abandon their Tribeca loft replace it with the global rule of American force”.

64 Quadrant March 2016 Books

Ian McEwan also evinces a distinctly European night. Paris merely facilitates anonymous transac- ambivalence about the American response to 9/11. tions, whether this involves sado-masochistic sex, Unlike the characters in the New York novels, finance, academe or global tourism. Everything has McEwan’s protagonist Henry Perowne in Saturday a price but nothing has value, and any notion of a is a happily married neurosurgeon. He neverthe- common citizenship vanished long ago. In Atomised less worries, from his elegant Bloomsbury terrace, bourgeois professionals like Jean-Yves are “caught about the unbearable lightness of being British. up in a social system like insects in a block of Observing the mass demonstration against the war amber”. Like Keith Neudecker, Jean-Yves finds life in Iraq on Saturday, February 15, 2003, he oscillates meaningless, but with more panache. between fear of the urban jungle and enjoyment Reflecting on the corrosive consequences of the of his professional success. His sense of wellbeing amoral city, Jean-Yves has “doubts about the kind resides exclusively in the narrow circumference of of world we are creating”. By the time Submission the family. appears, Houellebecq’s characters find that “Europe, Yet, beyond “domestic grandeur”, doubt about which was the summit of human civilisation, com- the city and its ability to sustain the good life permitted suicide in a matter of decades” and stands vades Saturday. Ambivalence is the postmodern on the brink of “civil war between Muslims and response to 9/11. As hope, freedom and equality everybody else”. The city that once offered the pros- diminish, the bourgeois lifestyle becomes “smaller pect of freedom from conformity, and the opportu- and meaner”. Queasily agnostic, Perowne sees the nity “to invent ourselves from scratch”, has turned “purity of nihilism” in the Islamist assault on the pathological. West, but questions the War on Terror: Messud’s “emperor’s children” somewhat narcis- sistically discover “that nothing is funny anymore”. The world probably has changed fundamentally In uptown Tribeca, the Calloways and their peers and the matter is being clumsily handled, contemplate moving to the “’burbs”. Russell feels particularly by the Americans. There are left behind “relatively impoverished and margin- people around the planet, well-connected and alised in the new boomtown … stranding them like organised, who would like to kill him and his paupers in a city of zillionaires”. They feel they are family and friends to make a point. witnessing “the beginning of the end of the whole idea of the city”. Perowne’s solution is to go shopping. “It isn’t All that was solid has melted into acrid dust. rationalism that will overcome the religious zeal- Even Luke McGavock, “a zillionaire” facilitating ots,” he opines optimistically, “but ordinary shop- “the movement of capital around the globe like a bee ping and all that it entails … Rather shop than mindlessly carrying pollen”, thinks that “Markets, pray.” if they work correctly, supersede the will and whim Ultimately, moral uncertainty, doubt, indecision, of individuals”, rendering his life “irrelevant”. domesticity and an absence of moral purpose char- DeLillo’s New York is equally protean. “Wilful acterise the bourgeois protagonists of the post-9/11 trivia” is the only basis of civic identity and easily novels. What might this mean for the future of the dissolves. In a similar vein of metropolitan angst, cosmopolitan city? Henry Perowne considers London wide open, “waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. ven before the attack on the World Trade Rush hour will be a convenient time.” Perowne con- Center, the city of the 9/11 novels has lost all cludes that we should “beware the utopianists, zeal- sEense of a shared public morality. Yet the city had ous men certain of the path to the ideal social order. once offered the space for self-discovery and self- Here they are again totalitarians in different form, enactment that all the characters once craved. still scattered and weak, but growing and angry The modern Western city—New York, London, and thirsty for another mass killing.” Ultimately, Paris, Sydney—functions as a character in these Londoners, like New Yorkers and Parisians, are novels. In the New York novels the attack on the stranded on Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain, World Trade Center exposes the fragility of estab- swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, lished relationships and shatters illusions. For where ignorant armies clash by night”. Claire Messud, 9/11 reveals that “the emperor’s children ... have no clothes”. In McEwan’s London and nxiety about the fate of the city, however, fails Richard Flanagan’s Sydney, the prospect of a terror to generate a coherent picture of those whose attack throws the world off balance. Adisgust with it finds release in terrorist attacks on the Elsewhere, for Michel Houellebecq, the city of “kufar” love of the good life. Instead, those novels Celine has finished its journey to the end of the that move beyond the relativist political agnosticism

Quadrant March 2016 65 Books of most 9/11 fiction, like Mohsin Hamid’s The tunate Doll. ASIO “spook” Siv Harmsen orches- Reluctant Fundamentalist and Richard Flanagan’s trates the pursuit. Using Australia’s post-2001 The Unknown Terrorist, conveniently blame jihad on anti-terror legislation to suppress any doubt about the West. the Doll’s motives the conservative government of Changez, the narrator and reluctant fundamen- John Howard, in collusion with a compliant media, talist of Hamid’s story, is impeccably haute bour- transform her into a home-grown jihadi. geois. Like Hans Van Den Broek and Ludo Seeley, The Doll is innocent. But for an apparatchik like Changez operates in a mobile, professional, global Harmsen the security state, “everywhere appar- diaspora. Born into middle-class Lahore, he per- ent and nowhere visible”, must prevail over minor sonifies the American dream. He qualifies, like the details like evidence and the rule of law. ASIO novel’s author, for a Princeton scholarship and grad- manipulates a “loser” like the Doll to serve the pur- uates to a New York boutique valuation company. poses of the security state. Flanagan, significantly, Complete with unstable Wasp girlfriend (inevitably dedicates his novel to former Guantanamo internee from the Upper West Side), Changez seems per- David Hicks, and identifies Jesus Christ as “his- fectly adapted to the interconnected world of inter- tory’s first … suicide bomber”. The parable is obvi- national capital. Indeed, in that ous; the government’s manipulation flat, fast world, he “felt like a New of a non-existent threat has placed Yorker”. Australian democracy on the road His identification with the For critics of the to totalitarianism. city, however, is conditional. He War on Terror, like empathises with the attack on the Flanagan or Hamid, or f critics o the War on Terror, World Trade Center and is “scan- like Flanagan or Hamid, the dalously pleased” by the “symbol- the jihadist is either a jFihadist is either a fiction of the ism of it all”. He luxuriates in the fiction of the security security state or the reluctant “fact that someone had so visibly response of those who resist its brought America to her knees”. state or the reluctant creeping authoritarianism. By con- “Finance,” he pontificates, response of those who trast, the politically agnostic nov- “was a primary means by which els either avoid the jihadist persona the American Empire exercised resist its creeping altogether, or like DeLillo, Dubus its power.” Despite his success as authoritarianism. and Updike, offer an unconvincing a broker, Changez considers him- stereotype. self a victim of global finance. He In Falling Man, Hammad, a fic- subsequently refuses “to participate any longer in tional participant in the attack on the World Trade facilitating the project of domination” and returns Center, blindly follows the injunctions of his men- to Pakistan to facilitate the end, if not the means, tor, Mohamed Atta. Hammad believes that “Islam of Al Qaeda. is the struggle against the enemy near and far”. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist also Driven by the belief that “the world changes first assumes that the West has constructed the alien in the mind of the man who wants to change it”, Muslim “other” in order to conduct a war on ter- he considers that those he murders “exist only to ror abroad and curtail civil liberties at home. the degree that they fill the role we have designed While Hamid explores the fundamentalist’s reac- for them”. Given their predestined fate, Hammad’s tion to American imperialism, Flanagan damns only observation about his victims is that they ought the Western response to 9/11. His novel is “a par- to be “ashamed of their attachment to life”. able”, that reveals the Australian dimension of the Bassam al Jizani, another fictional World Trade “Stalinist” assault on liberty. When the New South Center terrorist, in Andre Dubus III’s The Garden Wales police discover three unexploded bombs of Last Days, shares this contempt for the “dirty in Sydney, it unleashes a frenetic search for the kufar”. He nevertheless succumbs to the temptation unknown terrorist. The search focuses on Tariq al- of spending his last days boozing and paying for Hakim, a computer operator and occasional drug private dances in the Puma Club in south Florida. dealer, and his pole dancing, one-night stand, the Bassam describes his experience with the “mush- Doll, who gyrates nightly in the red-light district rikoon whores” in an idiosyncratic demotic: “A of Kings Cross. dancing woman upon the stage wears nothing but Tariq is quickly disposed of and the media in the hat of the cowboys,” he observes. Prurience and the form of cynical Channel Six reporter Richard disgust compete within him. He soon realises, how- “shitcart” Cody, and radio shock-jock Joe Cossuck ever, that this is merely the deception of “Shaytan” conduct a three-day “wild pig hunt” for the unfor- trying to “pull him down from the highest rooms of

66 Quadrant March 2016 Books

Jannah” before he fulfils his preordained date with Ambivalence, anxiety, regret, guilt and anomie by destiny. turns dominate the mood of the urbane liberals Hammad and Bassam’s Islamically-inspired that inhabit these novels. The West has exhausted assault on the North Tower crystallises the contrast its moral strength. By contrast, only the commit- between the zealot’s religious certitude and the par- ted jihadist intent on destroying this urban secular alysing uncertainty that shapes the lives of Lianne order possesses the will for decisive action. Neudecker and Danielle Minkoff. Significantly, The 9/11 novels, then, seem only dimly aware Lianne finds the Koran’s claim that “this book is that it was in the lived experience of the bourgeois not to be doubted” in conflict with the fact that she city that modern political life and a shared public was “stuck with her doubts”. morality, as a contingent response to the problem A similar contrast between the doubts that beset of rule, evolved. Instead, the protagonists in the Jack Levy, and the certainty of his terrorist pro- 9/11 novels are politically agnostic, obsessed with tagonist, Ahmed Ashwamy Molloy, and Ahmed’s the pursuit of wealth and status for their own sake. mentor, Sheikh Rashid, drives the plot of Updike’s Permissive narcissism promotes an urban regime Terrorist. Rashid, like Hammad and Bassam, is conducive neither to excellence nor to political free- a one-dimensional stereotype who grooms the dom. Indeed, the luxurious city of the 9/11 novels, impressionable Ahmed for martyrdom. which Plato termed the city of pigs, has in many Ahmed, by contrast, represents Updike’s attempt ways ceased to be political. to explain the radicalisation of a vulnerable high In this context, Mohsin Hamid and Richard school student. Adrift in a world that is slave to false Flanagan’s novels, which view jihad as a “symbolic” images of happiness and affluence, Ahmed becomes response to American hubris, merely reinforce a the sheikh’s tool and a willing recruit to martyr- fashionable academic and media shibboleth that dom. Thus, in a scene worthy of Monty Python, the dismisses terrorism as a modern Western myth and sheikh informs Ahmed: perversely misreads the Islamist threat to democratic freedom. By contrast, the politically agnostic “Theres i a way … in which a mighty blow can writers recognise jihad’s existential threat, yet their be delivered against His enemies.” characters confront it with a mixture of solipsism, “A plot?” Ahmed asks. flight, equivocation and despair. Houellebecq has “A way,” Sheikh Rashid replies fastidiously. already abandoned himself to the apocalypse. In “It would involve a shahid whose love of God Submission “atheist humanism—the basis of any is unqualified and who impatiently thirsts for pluralist society—is doomed”. Western democ- Paradise.” racy amounts “to little more than a power sharing arrangement between two rival gangs” as Paris Ahmed indeed thirsts for paradise and the hou- descends into internecine war between the forces of ris that await him. The novel proceeds to an unlikely EuroIslam and the far Right. finale where Jack Levy persuades Ahmed not to By contrast, Murray Thwaite, Claire Messud’s detonate the truck bomb he has driven into the voice of the Olympian liberal conscience, pro- Lincoln Tunnel. Jack and Ahmed drive off, if not poses a “measured response” to terrorism that looks into the sunset, then at least to the relative safety of increasingly like appeasement. The only possibil- the Port Authority Bus Terminal. ity of sustaining the political order resides in the By contrast, the other politically agnostic 9/11 belief that the sensory charms of capitalism will novels resist explaining jihadist motivation. Instead, erode the fanatical will of the terrorist. McEwan terror functions as a deus ex machina, against which hopes that the civilising pleasures of consumption the novelist’s bourgeois characters eke out a pre- will tame the passion for jihad. Updike’s novel con- carious existence. For McEwan, O’Neill, Messud cludes with a vision of Eighth Avenue, its denizens and McInerney the terror threat amplifies the moral busily pursuing their selfish interests, but, as if by doubt that already corrodes the possibility of the an invisible hand, creating a vibrant, spontaneous good, secular, life. Meanwhile, for Houellebecq an civil order. Updike’s image of the city’s awaken- Islamist terror attack on a Thai resort where Michel ing evokes Conrad’s conclusion to The Secret Agent and Yvette cater for the European market in sexual where “the incorruptible Professor” walks the com- fantasy tourism constitutes the apocalyptic finale to mercial streets of London “averting his eyes from Atomised. the odious multitude of mankind”. Unlike the 9/11 novelists, Conrad was sufficiently he category of 9/11 fiction leaves us with a range familiar with the revolutionary-terrorist character of responses to the new jihadism that threatens to know that sensory incorruptibility constituted its tTo unravel the open, political societies of the West. enduring strength. The Professor, like the current-

Quadrant March 2016 67 Books day shahadist, was “a force”. “He walked frail, stantive than admiration for domestic grandeur and insignificant, shabby, miserable and terrible in the an agnostic predilection to equivocate the crucial simplicity of his idea, calling madness and despair moral and philosophical questions of the age. to the regeneration of the world.” Conrad, of course, was no queasy political agnos- Associate Professor David Martin Jones is Reader in tic. By contrast the post-9/11 novels offer little insight Political Science at the University of Queensland. His into the jihadist persona, and even less by way of latest books are Sacred Violence: Political Religion in recuperating a sense of moral or political purpose. a Secular Age (2014, with M.L.R. Smith) and The Maintaining political life ultimately requires the Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: recovery of a Western sense of purpose and shared Strategic Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes (2015, public morality. This demands something more sub- also with M.L.R. Smith).

John Whitworth

Ever William

here are classic figures of English literature William was, as not infrequently, under a who are universal, like Oliver Twist and cloud. His mother had gone to put some Macbeth, and others pretty well unknown socks into one of his bedroom drawers and outside these shores, like the two schoolboys Nigel had found that most of the drawer space was T occupied by insects of various kinds, including Molesworth and William Brown. Eleven-year-old William is my subject, William a large stag beetle, and that along the side and his creator Richmal Crompton, who was actu- of the drawer was their larder, consisting ally a woman, in spite of the name. The first collec- of crumby bits of bread and a large pool of tion of William stories, Just William, was published marmalade. in 1922, and the last, William the Lawless, in 1970, “But it eats the marmalade,” pleaded which gives him a long innings. It would have been William. “The stag beetle does. I know it does. longer if Richmal had not died suddenly in January The marmalade gets a little less each day.” 1969 of a heart attack. “Because it’s soaking into the wood,” said William made Richmal Crompton rich—not as Mrs Brown sternly. “That’s why. I don’t know rich as J.K. Rowling, but rich enough to have a sub- why you do such things, William.” stantial house built for her and to leave an estate “But they’re doing no harm,” said William. of £60,000 which must be at least a couple of mil- “They’re friends of mine. They know me. The lion in our money; probably more since she owned stag beetle does anyway and the others will her house in Bromley in South London. William soon. I’m teaching the stag beetle tricks” ... appeared in films and on television. There was a wireless William too and all the books were read He still had Albert. He put his face down to by Martin Jarvis when the wireless had become the where he imagined Albert’s ear to be, and yelled radio. “Albert!” with all the force of his lungs. Albert I would bet that no English person of my age moved, in fact scuttled wildly up the side of his who reads books at all has not read a William book, box. more likely a succession of William books. I read “Well, he certainly knows his name now,” nearly all of them myself and then read them to my said William … daughter, who is now thirty-two. She loved them. Why? Predominantly because they are funny. “How’s Albert?” said Joan. Are they? I leave you to be judges of that. Here “He’s been took off me,” said William. is the story of William and Albert, the stag beetle “Oh, what a shame, William.” he keeps in his sock drawer, when he is not in a box “But I’ve got another … an earwig … called in William’s pocket: Fred.”

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“I’mo s glad.” And this one is for Ginger, his best friend, suf- “But I like you better than any insect, Joan,” fering terrible pangs from eating the wrong kind of he said generously. mushroom: “Oh William, do you really?” said Joan, deeply touched. Ole Ginger is dead (Still William, Chapter 16) He ate toadstools instead Of mushrooms … My daughter had me repeat the bit about yelling Albert’s name many times, and she laughed each William is a much better poet, as you can see. time. So did I. I still do. But, to return to Marion. She isn’t sweet. She is vain, mercenary and silly, like William’s sister Ethel. ichmal Crompton Lamburn was born in 1890 Richmal can be hard on pretty girls, particularly if in Lancashire, in the North of England where they are pretentious and snobby. She wrote comic Rpeople are down-to-earth and unpretentious, or verse at school, and it always rhymed and scanned. so they say, and Richmal was more than a bit like Though she could not quite forgive A.A. Milne for that. Her father was a schoolteacher in holy orders, Christopher Robin she respected him for his verses, a common enough figure in those days. She had an one of which, she said, was in a classical metre used elder sister, Gwen, to whom she remained close all by Horace. Which? Search me. her life, and a younger brother, Jack, her first model William is the leader of a gang called the for William. Jack, unlike his sisters, was not one Outlaws, though it is a fairly small one, much for book-learning, and rather a trial to his father. smaller than the rival gang of a fat, pasty boy called He joined the Rhodesian mounted police for a bit Hubert Lane. Since all the Laneites are fat and of excitement (he got it) and later wrote adventure pasty too, this doesn’t matter much as the Outlaws stories for boys, popular in their day, none of which, always win in open warfare. as Samuel Johnson might have said, I have been There are just three other boy Outlaws, Ginger, able to peruse. Henry and Douglas, each etched in with bold Perhaps Richmal, who never married, was a strokes. And there is the Joan we have already met, lesbian who wanted to be a daredevil boy in her though most of the time she is away at boarding heart of hearts, but there is no actual evidence of school. There is not much to be done with Joan. She that. She became a classics teacher of girls, and this worships William and that is that. The real queen lasted nine years until she contracted polio at the of William’s world is a girl of six, with the face of age of thirty-three, was disabled for the rest of her an angel and a will of iron, Violet Elizabeth Bott, life and had to give up teaching. whose father has made a fortune out of selling brown She was always something of a bluestocking, sauce, reputedly “made of black beetles”. Here she is, exchanging postcards in Latin with her father when in Still William again: she was still at school. In later life her favourite novelist was Ivy Compton-Burnett and she couldn’t be “You with you wath a little girl, don’t you?” doing with P.G. Wodehouse. She was not, perhaps, “Er—yes. Honest I do,” said the unhappy very marriageable. William. But she liked young men, though she tended to “Kith me,” she said, raising her glowing face. find them rather comical. William’s elder brother, He brushed her cheek with his. Robert, is a callow youth, that is, more than a bit of “Thath not a kith,” said Violet Elizabeth. a fool. He falls in love with a new girl every month “It’s my kind of a kiss,” said William. and writes poetry about them. The poetry sounds “All right. Now leth play fairieth. I’ll thow like this: you how.”

Oh Marion, my lady fair, And she does. William becomes a gnome. Has eyes of blue and golden hair. What Richmal is writing is farce. Perhaps Her heart of gold is kind and true. that is why she is so casual about details. Ginger She is the sweetest girl you ever knew. (with whom I identified) begins with the surname Flowerdew, but somewhere along the way he I should mention in passing that William writes becomes Merridew, though we never do learn his poetry as well. We have a few snatches: given name. Henry has a sister who is sometimes a baby in a pram, and sometimes a two-year-old, He shot him dead depending on what Richmal wants to do with her. And blood came pouring out of his head Babies in prams are always cropping up and getting

Quadrant March 2016 69 Books lostr o swapped. (Richmal, like Wodehouse, is cenary and a doughty liar when he needs to be. The not particularly pro-baby.) William’s elder brother, boy hero he is most like is Penrod Schofield, created Robert, is sometimes seventeen, sometimes two or by Booth Tarkington (who wrote The Magnificent three years older. Of course Richmal wrote very fast, Ambersons) about ten years before William. Though nearly forty William books and over fifty others, her biographers stoutly deny it, Richmal pinched including two about Jimmy, a boy of seven with a some of his plots. And why not? She made the sto- stammer (how she did love speech impediments) but ries better, funnier. indubitably a good egg. And there is the young Clive James. Like Clive, There are certain writers who are inextricably Richmal is a dab-hand at irony, something she linked to their illustrators. Boz has his Phiz, Conan shares with her creation, William’s father. Irony, I Doyle his Sidney Paget, who showed us definitively can’t help thinking, is not a particularly American what Sherlock Holmes looked like. A.A. Milne has thing. his elegant E.H. Shepard and Lewis Carroll his Richmal knew what boys were like, though she Tenniel, who could draw anything had no children. There was Jack, under the sun and many things that and later there were her young rela- weren’t, but had trouble depicting illiam does his tions, Tom Discher, her nephew, a seven-year-old girl. Both these W and Edward Ashbee, her great- illustrators, but most particularly share of unmasking nephew, ordinary middle-class Shepard, were ill served by the villains, thieves, boys. I don’t recognise myself in Disney Corporation who vulgarised William, identifying rather with and cutified (if there is such a word) traitors and so forth. Ginger, but I do think boys are the images. I grind my teeth when- But he usually does like that. Parents, though benign, ever I think of it. it by accident when are essentially other, which is why Richmal Crompton had Thomas so many good children’s books kill Henry, who illustrated all her books he is trying to do them off (Roald Dahl), send them until he died. Truth be told, the something else. And to prison (E. Nesbit) or set the sto- original William illustrations aren’t ries in boarding schools. They also very good and Henry redrew them William is mercenary wreck them on desert islands of for later editions. He took about and a doughty liar course, which gives us Coral Island fifteen years to get William right, when he needs to be. where the children, Ralph, Jack and but after that the pictures just grew Peterkin do splendidly, and Lord of better and better. When he came to the Flies where they revert quickly draw Jimmy, who is only seven, he drew the same to savagery. Boarding schools can be savage too, or boy but made him shorter. Even when Henry died so I hear. Not many laughs there though, and chil- the illustrations went on looking much the same dren need to laugh. though signed by Henry Ford. Nobody knows who William the savage (More William, where he he was—Thomas Henry’s ghost perhaps? talks savage language) is continually at war with adults, but even more with what he sees as the hy don’t the William books travel? Well, they wrong sort of boy, fat, creepy Hubert, or a succes- do a bit, to India, Iceland and, to a certain sion of angelic-looking little boys with golden curls eWxtent, to Australia. But not in the US. Research in white sailor suits. Richmal produces this child I have done among the members of a poetry web- again and again, a sort of amalgam of Little Lord site (Eratosphere) seems to back this up. Some Fauntleroy and Christopher Robin. say Americans will have no truck with a society Georgie Murdoch is their epitome and his bound by class, but they love Lord Peter Wimsey. discomfiture is achieved because he insists on And they love Miss Marple too, who lives in a vil- being the centre of attention and he cannot admit lage much like William’s. Perhaps Americans (and to ignorance of anything at all. There is to be a Australians?) are more sentimental about childhood. competition to act a scene from English history. The The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is good, but it has very winner will receive a box of chocolate creams, of mushy parts whenever ghastly Becky gets in on the which Georgie (the greedy little pig) is passionately act. Crompton’s Joan is a sort of Becky and William fond. William decides they will do King John says he does love her better than any insect, but … after he “lost his things in the Wash”. Georgie has Tom is brave and upstanding and William does his never heard of him and if you are the same, then share of unmasking villains, thieves, traitors and so shame on you and read 1066 and All That or look forth. But he usually does it by accident when he is him up. The Wash is a large (and indeed muddy) trying to do something else. And William is mer- estuary between Norfolk and Lincolnshire where

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King John’s baggage-train (containing the crown “I did know,” said Georgie. “I’ve known it jewels) was lost. Or so John claimed. Rumour has it for ever so long … What did you say they were he pawned the jewels for ready money, of which he called?” was always notoriously short. Like William. “Dam and Blarst.” Here is the episode, or part of it. I have italicised “Dam and Blarst. Of course I knew.” the bits that show the attentive reader that William (William the Outlaw, Chapter 3) is up to something. You can see where this is heading. Georgie, “Who’lle b King John?” said William. covered in mud from head to foot, appears on the “I’ll be King John,” said Georgie. lawn, “uttering horrible oaths before the assembled “All right,” said William with unexpected aristocrats of the village” (“Oh Dam and Blarst, I amenity, “an’ shall Ginger an’ me be your two cannot find my things!”) Job done. The forces of heralds, an’ Douglas an’ Henry your servants or misrule triumphant! And look at the perfection of somethin’?” that dialogue. “Yes,” said Georgie, and added, “You needn’t do anything, but jus’ stand there—any of you. y principal sources are the thirty-eight I’ll do the actin’.” William books, Kay Williams’s biography “All right,” agreed William with disarming JMust-Richmal (1986), Mary Cadogan’s The William humility. “You know all about the story, don’t Companion (1990) (invaluable) and her biography you?” Richmal Crompton: The Woman Behind William “Yes, of course I do.” (1986), which is interesting, partly because she can- “About how King John went into the Wash, not find anyone who had a bad word to say about trying to find his things—” Richmal. I can’t think of any other writer, except “Yes, I know all that.” perhaps Anthony Trollope, of whom that could be “An’ the Wash is a kind of a bog—” said. Richmal didn’t like her sister’s husband much, “Yes, I know.” but perhaps he wasn’t likeable. Gwen didn’t think so “And he came out all muddy but couldn’t find and divorced him. his things ’cause they’d sunk in the mud.” There is also the Just William Society website, “Yes, I know.” www.justwilliamsociety.co.uk. To see what William “An’ he came to his two servants called Dam looked like, do an internet search for thomas henry and Blarst—” just william illustrations. “Called—” “Fancy you not knowing about King John’s John Whitworth’s poetry and prose appear frequently servants being called Dam and Blarst!” in Quadrant. He lives in Kent.

from, and why they continue to persist, you must read this book. There is no substitute anywhere that Steven Kates I know of. Read it. The book has a specific purpose. It is to provide The Indispensable Roger Scruton a way of escape to students who are caught up in various versions of a modern humanities course, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands where they are fed an endless mind-numbing post- by Roger Scruton modernist gruel. The book goes through the vari- Bloomsbury, 2015, 304 pages, $35 ous manifestations of the modern Left to explain their idiocies and unravel the Newspeak in which ou should read this book. No one else will they are encoded. But the book does more. It opens tell you this, so I will. There has hardly been up to those of us who are only vaguely aware of the aY more important book published over the past ways in which the humanities are now taught, our twelve months. If you sincerely wish to understand own entry into the depths of a problem most of us the times in which you live, there is no book like are, at best, only dimly aware of. it. In describing it I will not be able to do it justice, To use my own education as an example, I am since it provides a complex outline of the intellec- not unaware of the forms of the postmodernism tual world that continues to promote the ideas of that surround us in the academic world. I meet it in the Left, as inane and destructive as they are. But the occasional seminar and come across it in vari- if you are to understand where these ideas come ous papers and presentations. Parts of it are almost

Quadrant March 2016 71 Books common core, such as Thomas Kuhn’s notion that The phrase, “its many brilliant exponents”, science is nothing other than what scientists do, highlights the one downside to the book, which and that the notion of something called “truth” is is Scruton’s insistence on giving the devil his due. an entity impossible to discover. But it goes farther, Since the book is addressed to those who are being to argue that truth is relative, that there is more taught their postmodernism within the academic than one way to skin an empirical fact. It goes far- world, Scruton often discusses how well the various ther still, and argues that even the facts we think arguments are constructed and how difficult they we know are merely the product of the ideological are to resist unless both sides are presented in as world in which we have been raised. And it takes clear and fair-minded a way as possible. Although that one extra step to argue that to transcend our such asides did occasionally stop me mid-sentence own bourgeois outlook, it is necessary to see the (and in fact I agree with him about how interesting world liberated from our own limited backgrounds many of these arguments are), there is never any and instead, see things through the lens of Marxist doubt that Scruton sees all of it as forms of idiocy, thought. as this example shows, literally picked at random Fools, Frauds and Firebrands is about the evo- from a book filled with other statements just as lution of Marxist ideas in the academic Left. sharp: Coming from the economic world as I do, I have read the Marx who wrote Das Kapital and know In a singularly repulsive essay on “Revolutionary more than enough to demonstrate that a Marxist Terror”, Žižek praises the “humanist terror” economy, indeed any economy run on socialist of Robespierre and St Just (as opposed to the principles, will provide only misery to a population “anti-humanist, or rather inhuman” terror of that is mired in ineradicable poverty. If you are too the Nazis), not because it was in any way kind young to remember the Soviet Union, then look to its victims, but because it expressed the at North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. But in the enthusiasm, the “utopian expositions of political academic world the Marx that matters today is not imagination” of its perpetrators. No matter Marx the economist but Marx the social theorist. that the terror led to the imprisonment of half So even while these writers described by Scruton a million innocent people, and the deaths of as defend Marx, it is not the economics they defend many more. The statistics are irrelevant, waved but an array of ideas whose insanity is matched away by Lacan’s wand, reduced to the square only by their incoherence. The following is just one root of minus one—a purely imaginary number. of the many summary statements Scruton makes What is relevant is the way in which, through throughout the book that help to bring you closer speeches that Žižek would recognize to be self- to the nature of the problem we have in dealing vaunting bombast did his critical faculties not with modern thought: desert him in the face of a revolutionary hero, Robespierre “redeemed the virtual content of Itso i n longer possible to take refuge in the airy terror from its actualisation”. speculations that contented Marx. Real thinking In this way, for Žižek, thought cancels is needed if we are to believe that history either reality, when the thought is “on the left”. tends or ought to tend in a socialist direction. Hence the emergence of socialist historians, who Evenf i you know Žižek’s name, you are unlikely systematically downplay the atrocities committed to know much about what he writes, nor how he fits in the name of socialism, and blame the disasters into the canon of the modern Left, nor why Scruton on the “reactionary” forces that impeded characterises his writings as “mad incantations”. socialism’s advance. Rather than attempting This is the singularly important service that Scruton to define the goals of liberation and equality, provides. He knows these authors, has read them thinkers of the New Left instead created a to exhaustion, and can explain them to you in a mythopoeic narrative of the modern world, in way you will understand. What he also does is which the wars and genocides were attributed to make clear why you too should make the effort to those who have resisted the righteous “struggle” understand them, so that you too can appreciate for social justice. History was rewritten as and assess the damage they have done to modern a conflict between good and evil, between thought and social cohesion. Scruton explains the forces of light and the forces of darkness. why everything you know, believe and understand And, however nuanced and embellished by about the world can be instantly dismissed by these its many brilliant exponents, this Manichean people through the revolutionary perspective of vision remains with us, enshrined in the school Grand Theory. And here we are discussing nearly curriculum and in the media. every one of the major philosophical thinkers of

72 Quadrant March 2016 Books the modern age: Hobsbawm, Thompson, Dworkin, world is united in its spread of anti-capitalist vitriol. Sartre, Foucault, Habermas, Althusser, Lacan, Anyone who therefore travels under the banner of Deleuze, Gramsci, Said, Badiou, Žižek and many an anti-capitalist banner has nothing to contribute others still who do not make it into chapter titles. to an understanding of the world. They should not Unless you are a specialist in postmodernist phi- just be ignored, but what they say or write should be losophy, you will know next to nothing about most seen as contrary to human wellbeing and happiness. of them. Yet these are not just the major authors Marxist economic theory is perniciously wrong. who people the reading lists of courses in Cultural Anyone who invokes Karl Marx as an authority Studies, but it is their views that underpin the con- on anything of significance must be recognised tent of the media and political discourse across the as a charlatan. Das Kapital’s economic analysis, West. These people may be as loopy as it is possible dependent on the labour theory of value to explain to be, and their works near-unreadable nonsense, the exploitation of the working class, is as ridicu- but they inform our debates and are the essence of lous a premise in the twenty-first century as it is politically correct discourse. You cannot avoid any possible to find. The “immiseration of the working of it. What Fools, Frauds and Firebrands offers is class under capitalism” is a notion so thoroughly an opportunity to find out for yourself what passes discredited, not just in theory but by the amazing for modern thought, provided in a growth in personal prosperity since way that you will understand not the start of the nineteenth century, just their content, not just their that you have to wonder how any- dangers, but also their incredible These people may one can any longer mention Marx idiocy. This is where one of the be as loopy as it with honest intent. Worrying that most crucially important battles rising incomes are being used to of our time is being fought, and is possible to be, finance useless trifles is a problem unless you understand what is tak- and their works no one ever feels they would like ing place, you will be unable to do near-unreadable to see solved in their own personal a thing. That is why you should lives. read this book. If nothing else, you nonsense, but they The Marxist theory of ideol- will understand the nature of the inform our debates ogy is junk science. What remains icebergs that have ripped through of Marxism is the notion that our the hull of the cultural ship of the and are the essence beliefs are entirely conditioned by West and why it may soon sink into of politically correct our interests. We believe only what oblivion. discourse. You cannot it is in our interests to believe. And then because it was clear even to ut s all i not lost, as the pub- avoid any of it. Marxists that people believe all lication of Fools, Frauds and kinds of things that have nothing BFirebrands itself shows. There is no to do with their interests—that are final necessity that our great civilisation must be often even contrary to those interests objectively sabotaged by the academic swamp fever and empty stated—we ended up with the notion of “false con- rhetoric of Grand Theory. We can fight back, and sciousness”. So then we might believe what it is not as part of this endeavour, let me discuss a few abso- in our interests to believe, but instead believe the lutes of our own which may be applied as needed. kinds of things our “oppressors” prefer us to believe, In my view, these should become our own funda- such as that private property makes us more eco- mental premises as a means to identify the insane nomically secure not to mention helping to preserve and absurd. our personal freedoms. Anyone who therefore ped- Capitalism is the only economic system that works. dles any version of Marxist ideology, especially if Nothing is perfect and our societies are constantly they also argue that they are able to see past our trying to improve the material wellbeing of our citi- bourgeois perspectives and directly access the truth zens. But as an absolute no-questions-asked truth, we cannot see for ourselves, should be seen as self- capitalism is the only kind of economic system that deluded fools. allows prosperity to spread and grow, never mind Revolution is never the answer to our economic, that it is the only economic system consistent with political or social problems. Preaching “revolution” personal freedom. We must accept no other conclu- in the open societies of the West is a certain sign sion. If someone is “anti-capitalist”, then not only that someone is a crackpot. This is the form in should they be seen as ignorant to a fantastic degree, which modern nihilism travels. It is one thing to but also as an enemy of prosperity, individual ful- identify a problem and propose a solution. This is filment and personal freedom. The postmodern how we in the West have managed in piecemeal

Quadrant March 2016 73 Books fashiono t improve our social and material lives in Whyst i i after a century of socialist disasters, a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way and an intellectual legacy that has been time since the end of the eighteenth century. There are and again exploded, the left-wing position political solutions for every sort of problem, which remains, as it were, the default position to involve identification of something as in need of which thinking people gravitate when called remedy followed by agitation and discussion with upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are ultimate resolution. Our modern revolutionaries “right-wingers” marginalised in the educational instead believe that the societies we have built are system, denounced in the media and regarded beyond redemption and need to be swept away in by our political class as untouchable, fit only to a form of armed insurrection. They none of them clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense have any idea what ought to replace the world indulged in by their moral superiors? they would destroy, but they could not care less. These people are worm-eaten to the core, despica- We n live i dangerous times in no small part ble and vile, filled with hatreds and misery. They because of the academic idiocies that pollute our should not just be ignored, but shunned. They have intellectual environment. This book will not tell us nothing to contribute to modern discourse. The what to do, but it will help us understand the prob- moment someone suggests a revolutionary answer lems we face and in this way it makes an important to our social, economic and political problems, they contribution to thinking through what needs to be should be identified as a dangerous fool with no done. useful contribution to make to any aspect of modern debate. Steven Kates is Associate Professor in the School No one in a free society is “oppressed”. Not every of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT one’s lives work out as they would like and we are University in Melbourne. each born into different circumstances which give us divergent possibilities in life. Poor people enjoy having children who are then, of necessity, the children of poor parents. Some people have personal characteristics that allow them to succeed in Craig Sherborne the face of adversity while others do not. We all must contribute to society in our own ways as best The Course of Life we can, and some ways will be less remunerative or bring us less fame and esteem. To argue that Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf some class of individuals is “oppressed” may be by Gerald Murnane useful as a political tactic, but it is representative Text Publishing, 2015, 288 pages, $29.99 of no category of individuals in the West. Identity politics now continues to stoke group resentments f you’re good at maths you play the casino that create tensions that have little objective reality. tables—blackjack, poker, that sort of thing. You Dividing our citizens into the oppressors and the Icalculate the percentages; keep a mental record of oppressed is a tactic designed to breed resentment, cards dealt and cards still in the pack. An acquaint- but is utterly empty in the society in which we live. ance of mine makes his living this way. He keeps Peddlers of group oppression may make careers for a $250,000 account at Crown and spends his days themselves by breeding such discontent, but almost and nights sitting at the baize, various good luck never improve anyone’s lives but their own. charms at his elbow to supplement his equations. He put his daughter through private school this o where are we? Fools, Frauds and Firebrands is way. a book too content-rich to summarise. It is one Most Australians with the punting gene play oSf the indispensable books of our time that will, the ponies. If they’re smart they do the form, look given the nature of things, be read by only a small for patterns in barrier draws, consider track condi- number of people. But if you are the kind of per- tions, weight advantages. Most have never sat on son who reads this kind of review in this kind of a horse but the horse becomes their proxy raider publication, then you are one of the people who of fortune. If you’re in the Members area then the should read this book. There are issues the book bookie-stands, the bars, the booze, the fine clothes ignores, and I don’t agree with everything Scruton provide the air of a party. It is deliciously seedy says, but where we differ is of no moment. This is in a well-mannered way. The world has now gone from the concluding chapter and captures what has digital and so has much of the gambling but the gone before: Members Bar milieu has changed little through

74 Quadrant March 2016 Books the decades. Even now when he drives his car along lonely Gerald Murnane is a distinguished man of rural roads he is given to stop and dream up an letters but racing is an obsession that has filled the imaginary race call for company: weekends of his life with routine and excitement and, on occasions, filled up his pockets with the I’ve been for most of my life moved often to hear sweet folding stuff. Moreover it has stirred his in my mind or to whisper under my breath or imagination since childhood. The pretty colours of even, sometimes when alone, to deliver aloud a the jockeys’ garb; the pitiful dramas of desperado few phrases or a single word from a broadcast of trainers; the glamour and mysteriousness of big- some or another race never yet run on Earth. time punters; the conspiracy theories about this or that race being rigged. hyo d this? Why have this eccentric habit? Racing was there in his first novel, the cele Racing is born of the material world— brated Tamarisk Row, used for the oblique utility money,W competition, loss, winning, pleasure, disap- of characterisation. The writer obviously had a rac- pointment, deadly accidents for riders and horses, ing background—he got the visual corruption—contained on a twenty- details right and the heart-speed of hectare patch of land, right there his prose rose subtly upon the sub- t has stirred his before your eyes. For some racegoers ject. His latest book, Something for I watching a horse have a crap in the the Pain, is a full-on racing mem- imagination since mounting yard is as close as they oir. Or more precisely a gambling childhood. The pretty will ever get to the natural world. memoir. For Murnane, raised a Catholic Murnane is not a horseman by colours of the jockeys’ but with no belief in the faith as an any means. His experience of rac- garb; the pitiful adult, racing has a spiritual dimen- ing is from the grandstand plat- sion. We often hear that sort of form, binoculars up to his eyes, his dramas of desperado thing from sports enthusiasts, how hands shaking with the prospect of trainers; the glamour their particular code is like religion victory. He’s a punter who hoards and mysteriousness to them. It is lazy thinking and pre- piles of race records to inform his tentious. But Murnane is too solid wagering. He plots and schemes in of big-time punters; a thinker for such nonsense. And search of the perfect punting sys- the conspiracy theories too thorough and sceptical a writer tem as if there is predetermination even when he ventures that racing in a horse’s winning. He is a yarner about this or that used him (and his wife after she like all regular racing folk. He has race being rigged. died) as players in the workings of his hero horses and his demon “an invisible world of the spirit”. I jockeys. And he brings his novel- won’t spoil the scene by detailing it ist wits to the course. He follows people around here but weird things do happen on racecourses. My who amuse him, the flamboyant punters and flashy wife once had a strange horse stare at her from a owners. And when he goes home the races go with distance and seemingly beckon her forward to its him. His imagination is a kind of racecourse: he stall where, as she puts it, its long gaze “pierced my made toy horses as a kid and painted and raced soul and would not let me walk away”. She backed them around the floor: the beast at thirty-to-one and it bolted in. Murnane’s prose in this book, as it has been in his Racing colours for me are not unlike national others, is a sort of hypnotic replication of the act of flags or heraldic coats of arms. The colours thinking in a formal conversational way, no hyperac- of many a flag are intended to suggest the tive stream-of-consciousness. It is quiet, lean-mus- hopes or beliefs of the nation it represents cled and a relaxed mover like a good racehorse. or, sometimes, landscapes and waterways. Likewise, coats of arms often speak of the Craig Sherborne’s latest book is the novel history or of the achievements of their bearers. Tree Palace (Text).

Quadrant March 2016 75 The Interment of the Ashes

They waited a year Let him have one more birthday Cremation, though abrupt, buys you time. You can keep an urn close Hold on to the remains of your son Till the howling madness has passed And some peace is resurrected from the ashes Enough at least to go on with. A Charming Bath after Elizabeth Smither In the pause before we walk back to our cars His father takes up the spade again After work has grown sour, Not satisfied with the arrangement of the soil. and sun’s a drooping flower, He bends down to brush the stray crumbs with mauve clouds in its path, From the plaque that summarises his son don’t look up at that shower— As if smoothing a quilt. just run a charming bath. A small stagger as he rises And it is accomplished. Now, showers get you started, when sleep leaves you fainthearted, As we walk away I can hear to face a workday’s wrath, Other topics of conversation resumed but mystic calm uncharted, The exchange of other news has begun. flows from a charming bath. Someone laughs, forgetting themselves And the decent interval comes to an end. As end of day befuddles, If I hear anyone say that life must go on and mind gets wired and muddled, I will scream. Instead, I grip my own son the soul is stuffed with math, Hard, by the shoulders climb in the steaming puddle And demand that he stay alive. of a charming salted bath.

Elisabeth Wentworth Spellbound, immersed in water, receive the imprimatur of that holiest of paths, just make it slightly hotter, sink in a charming bath. When family seems so dour, stay in an extra hour, read poems by Sylvia Plath. Your thoughts will be empowered, within a charming bath. Don’t buy Latin prescriptions, throw wobblies or conniptions, pay psychics, telepaths. Repose, like some Egyptian, in a claw-foot charming bath.

Joe Dolce

76 Quadrant March 2016 Christopher Heathcote

Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

n April 1958 at Australian Galleries, the main modern painters, Sidney Nolan, a good friend, Melbourne venue handling modern art, an and Russell Drysdale, an acquaintance and rival. exhibition opened titled “Allegorical Paintings”. Both had travelled through central and northern IThese symbolic pictures charted the desperate Australia in the previous six years, enjoying consid- romance of a mixed-race couple in a world united erable success with exhibitions of desert paintings. against them. Painted by Arthur Boyd, this was Strong sales and media attention led to commercial an invented myth which dealt with the emotional shows in London. So it made sense for Boyd to visit materials of great tragedy, exploring love, passion, the outback. envy, fear and intolerance. Boyd filled five sketchbooks, and another forty- A controversial argument has latterly been seven loose postcards, on his rural trips of 1950 and erected on those paintings, which are now referred 1954. For the layman little is conveyed by the jot- to as the “Bride” series. This new interpretation was tings. They do not show scenes. Boyd’s pencil made shaped by Anna Haebich of Curtin University, Ann visual notes on a tight set of subjects: cockatoos and McGrath of the Australian National University, and galahs, bare huts and shelters, isolated farmhouses, Kendrah Morgan of the Heide Museum of Modern windmills, a line of dromedaries. He drew these Art. items with attention to certain details: the feathered For this trio, Boyd’s Bride series refers directly pattern of a parrot’s wing, the configuration of tim- to the race crimes of an oppressive nation. Looking bers supporting a wind-bore. This was information at the paintings, they claim to find unequivocal for use in composite pictures. allusions to Aboriginal genocide, tribal massacres, Aboriginal figures seen in 1950 and 1954 inter- government “eugenics” policies, hostility to racial mittently appear. Several times Boyd draws a fig- intermarriage, the forced removal of native chil- ure or two standing by a shanty, as well as gaunt dren, even indigenous health problems from atomic mothers with infants. There is a quick diagram tests. “These works are of continuing national sig- of three men crouched down and playing cards nificance,” Haebich has contended, “for the insights (a conscious echo of Cézanne’s Cardplayers), and they provide for a reflective society into the history another male trio riding in the back of a utility. of the prejudices and anxieties of white Australia All is potential scenic detail. Then, late in the fifth and its irresistible imaginings about race and the sketchbook, a sequence of seven pen-and-ink draw- human condition.” ings of Aborigines appears. Three show grouped Aborigines with horses; another two depict women rthur Boyd made a month-long trip to with buildings and a windmill; the remaining pair Central Australia in 1954. He travelled from are quick figure notations. They are simple, direct, MAelbourne by rail, changing trains at Adelaide and and without hint of pathos, the graphic outlines for Port Augusta, then it was another three slow days possible use in rural scenes. to Alice Springs. His purpose was to gather visual These drawings came from Arltunga, about 110 data for paintings of a remote landscape. Boyd had kilometres east of Alice Springs. Boyd paid a man already made a long trip to the Wimmera in north- with an ex-army jeep to drive him to see the Simpson west Victoria in 1950, and he was eager to visit the Desert, and they passed through the settlement as desert interior. they headed east. Boyd had already been shocked at A market hungry for outback paintings had the condition of Aborigines. Everywhere he went emerged in the early 1950s, and Boyd wanted to they seemed destitute, their families consigned to tap it. He was following the lead of two ambitious forlorn humpies clustered on the outskirts of towns.

Quadrant March 2016 77 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

Worse still, unofficial segregation was applied on landscapes for a joint exhibition with John Perceval the railways as he moved into central Australia. He at that venue in April 1957. Finally, in that show’s watched Aborigines being made to ride in livestock aftermath, Boyd’s ideas crystallised into composi- wagons, not passenger carriages with white people; tions of a scale and ambition rarely seen from local while at rail depots Aborigines used stark shelters modern artists. He now began painting the Bride with chicken-wire walls, being forbidden to wait series. alongside whites. But it was at his brief halt in Arltunga that Boyd ymbols should not be mistaken for content. was completely overwhelmed by anguish and dis- Kafka’s Metamorphosis is not about a cockroach may: “They are forced into this position and it has a Sproblem in Vienna. The insect-man is a symbol. serious effect on you, when you are not used to it,” And if Arthur Boyd’s late 1960s Nebuchadnezzar he explained. “You suddenly come against it after paintings visualise biblical events from the Book imagining that they are noble savage types living in of Daniel, their content involves Vietnam and the the bush.” And as his friend, the art historian Franz unrest of 1968. Philipp, reflected, Boyd felt the compassion not of The underpinning theme for the Bride works a reporter or a social activist, but of an artist. The is the plight of the outcast, the outsider, the mar- memory of this destitute community amidst rusting ginalised. To symbolise this Boyd revisited a sub- debris would always stay with him. ject from some 1940s pictures which featured an embracing couple taunted by spiteful, small-minded nce n back i Melbourne, Arthur Boyd worked people. Now he added a twist by having the lovers up composite landscapes. He set no great store caught between two faces of Australia—modern iOn these at times cloying pieces: they were commer- urban “white” society, and traditional tribal “black” cial in intent, manufactured from stock motifs to culture—which equally treat them as outcasts. If suit a market. Two of the invented views included the groom appears Aboriginal and the bride seems shanties, galahs and Aboriginal figures adapted white, each of these figures is meant to be of mixed from his sketched notes. race (signified by the bride’s dark feet or hands, and The Contemporary Art Society’s annual exhibi- the groom’s large pink ear or white hands). The tion was also imminent, so Boyd made a one-off series is not portraying the social or political con- modernist painting to submit for that show. Titled dition of Aborigines, as Boyd later explained, nor Half-Caste Bride, this was an experiment influ- do the paintings illustrate the actualities of outback enced by Marc Chagall, with a haunting jumble of poverty. Instead it is more a poetic meditation on out-of-scale figures and animals, some floating in lovers who transgress convention and are made into the air, some fading through a shack like ghosts. outsiders. Two figures were loosely derived from his outback The Bride pictures are steeped in cyclical images sketchbooks. of decay, death and regeneration. Early scenes take After this oil composition Boyd ceased painting place in an infertile dark land that has been scorched for some time. He was tied up on a public sculp- by fire; the surroundings in another phase are aus- ture commissioned for the Melbourne Olympics. tere and shadowy like the bare sets of existentialist However, he was thinking out potential modern- theatre; later scenes suggest a fecund paradise with ist pictures. He embarked on a run of drawings a creek trickling through a bushy gully. There is no showing two lovers tormented by shadowy crea- mistaking a symbolic purpose as moody skies chart tures and figures. Sometimes the lovers embrace, a transition, registering dusk, night or dawn. An sometimes the girl flees. In many sketches the male ominous swollen moon floats in the sky of several lover is Aboriginal; although in fifteen pieces he is nocturnes, and one piece features a rainbow as a Prometheus chained to a rocky island while assailed sign for spiritual rebirth. by an eagle, a beetle, and a ram with twisting horns. Boyd’s pictures are loaded with evocative motifs. Boyd did return to his easel in mid-1956, produc- The bride’s veil will transform into a cat’s cradle to ing a new modernist oil painting, Bride Running ensnare the groom’s fingers. Rival male suitors gam- Away, which went into a show at Peter Bray Gallery ble with playing cards that are all spades. Boyd’s in November. It featured the sea, dark boat and sign for fear, a beetle, is the same green shade as fleeing girl from the Promethean drawings, with the groom’s tunic. And the groom is sometimes an Aboriginal male instead of a Greek hero. If taunted by a “phantom bride”, the personification the work did not sell, Boyd now had it in mind to of idealised beauty. Chief among this vocabulary paint a series with these motifs, but he had been of symbols are the bouquet of flowers, the artist’s offered a contract at Australian Galleries. So the emblem for life, hope and amorous fulfilment; and summer months saw him labouring over Victorian the so-called “ram-ox”, a ram with horns twisting

78 Quadrant March 2016 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide? like serpents, Boyd’s enduring sign of predatory ences and pictures. Instead, Haebich plots out the corruption and animal lusts. condition of Aboriginal communities in Central The richness and complexity of these paintings Australia at mid-century. This begins with the are most evident in Persecuted Lovers of 1957-58, now opening, “It was widely believed that”; then, hav- in the Art Gallery of South Australia. It shows in ing summarised perceptions of race, the discus- close-up the lovers reclining before vague bush, the sion switches to official policies and administrative sky illuminated by a pink dawn. The pale bride, a attitudes. “These notions were validated in ‘expert’ beetle crawling through her curling orange-red hair, administrative and anthropological commentary lies face up on the black ground and reaches out and imagery,” Haebich continues, referring to the with a blue hand. She is embraced by her blue lover, racial views of the Northern Territory’s adminis- his arm reaching around her neck and through her trator F.J.S. Wise, and the anthropologist W.E.H. white veil, pressing her face tightly against his own. Stanner, as well as citing photography by the scien- His large eye gazes directly into hers, as a large floral tist Baldwin Spencer. posy miraculously bursts out of his pink ear. To the Then comes an abrupt jump. “These racist stereo right a neat dark man in conventional suit, tie and types and images moulded Boyd’s perceptions of hat kneels over the couple, aiming a Aborigines in central Australia,” rifle at the groom’s ear. This loom- Haebich remarks. But she has not ing figure has his left knee placed his mythic proved this at all. There is an error heavily on the bride’s foot, and his T in reasoning here, equivalent to right boot treads on her filmy dress. composition does not assuming all German citizens held A white spider clings to his black depict blunt social the same racial views as the Nazi cheek. government. Policies alone prove This mythic composition does reality. It transports little. One cannot treat any art- not depict blunt social reality. It the viewer in a ist as mirroring official attitudes transports the viewer in a slip- slippery realm of without firm supporting evidence. pery realm of symbols, dreams and If Haebich fills in the situation of imaginings. symbols, dreams Aborigines when Boyd visited the and imaginings. region, and shows the authori- new interpretation of Arthur ties were prejudiced, she does not Boyd’s Bride imagery was establish a link between their views pArompted shortly after his death in April 1999. and the personal values of a private citizen, Arthur Later that year a controversial article appeared in the Boyd. The necessary dots are not joined. And it is Journal of Australian Studies. “Irresistible Journeys this fault in elementary logic that leaves the thrust and Imaginings: Boyd’s Bride Series Revisited” was of Haebich’s argument as interesting, although written by Anna Haebich, a Curator of History unproven speculation. at the West Australian Museum, who has since become John Curtin Distinguished Professor at rresistible Journeys and Imaginings” is a Curtin University’s Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute. thought-provoking piece. It raises serious ques- Apparently impatient with the spin circulating “tionsI about how Aborigines are portrayed in works of across the media after the artist’s decease, Haebich art, although the article does zigzag between level- criticised recent commentary on Boyd’s oeuvre. headed claim and unverified conjecture. Haebich is Much of it was superficial small talk, she justifi- on firm ground in pointing out that Boyd used cur- ably complained. Fixing on the Bride paintings, she rent racial imagery “as tropes to create disturbing contended that these works needed to be considered allegories on these universal themes. ‘Half-caste’, for in the light of 1950s attitudes towards Aborigines. example, was an obvious trope for the quintessential There was merit to this suggestion, and it seemed alienated outsider in 1950s iconography.” There are timely to re-examine the Bride series. sources to prove this. But she is on unstable ground Haebich’s discussion came in three parts. First with her assertion: is “Boyd’s Pilgrimage to the Centre”, that is, his visit to Central Australia in the early 1950s; then Boyd also used this imagery to explore European “The Creative Crucible”, which deals with Boyd’s sexual desire and anxieties and fears of race- subsequent painting of the Bride works; and last is mixing and racial contamination, themes he “Responses to the Paintings”, moving from initial had already begun to explore in his wartime exhibition reviews to more considered scholarship. drawings about sexual contact between black But these titles are deceptive, because the former American servicemen and white Australian two sections have little to say of the artist’s experi- women.

Quadrant March 2016 79 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

Which drawings? A check of Christopher The main target of her discontent is the interpre- Tadgell’s catalogue raissoné of Boyd’s pre-1970 draw- tive approach of Franz Philipp, who in 1967 pub- ings reveals there are no such works. lished the first book on Boyd. This book included a Artists, critics and scholars will disagree with definitive chapter which distilled Philipp’s conversa- Haebich’s remark, “works that are cut off from their tions with Boyd on the imagery and meaning of his roots altogether may come to mean anything”; while Bride paintings. One might think this a commend- her assertion, “all interpretations of works of art may able undertaking, although Haebich is annoyed: be relevant and acceptable” is contrary to all historical studies, not just art. Pictures, like literary texts Phillip [sic] argued for a “simpler and wider” and legal documents, are not ciphers we can arbi- reading of the series as an allegorical ballad with trarily superimpose meanings upon. The renaissance universal application, a “dream play” in which scholar Michael Baxandall skilfully explored this in the “half-caste” is “Everyman”, the “outcast his 1985 book Patterns of Intention, showing there dreamer”, and the Bride a dream image he are questions of legitimacy, evidence and verifica- strives to retain. tion for any theorem. Besides, the proof with artistic interpretations is whether they can be pointed to Such interpretations constitute: “the censoring in pictures. It is here that Haebich comes up short, of an aspect of our national history which is fraught because she does not examine a single painting. with racial fears, desires and shame. Perhaps, they Visual art is outside Haebich’s scope. are also the fruits of a search for a ‘politically correct’ And in the instance where pieces are mentioned niche for these ‘national treasures’ …” in passing, she asks too much: Boyd’s “sketches from Censoring history and imposing political cor- the trip speak of simplifications rather than criti- rectness are not charges made lightly against any cal scrutiny of the complexities and contradictions art historian: least of all Franz Philipp. As a Jew he in race relations in the centre”, she complains. The had been forbidden to continue his studies at the thing about sketches is that they are sketchy. We University of Vienna in 1937, then the Nazis packed don’t imagine Boyd’s quick impressions of parrots him off to Dachau. But Philipp escaped from a will be ornithologically perfect, let alone depict work party, making his way eventually to England, the aerodynamics of bird flight: scribbled drawings where he was interned as an enemy alien, before made on the run are always simplifications. As for being transported to Australia aboard the Dunera. asking rapid ink sketches to show the “complexities” It was only after the war that he was able to recom- and “contradictions” in race relations, this is expect- mence his scholarly career after graduating from the ing the impossible. University of Melbourne. Such flaws could be avoided by undertaking Far from being their perpetrator, Franz Philipp background reading into art history. Instead of was himself a former victim of a racist regime that using scholarship, Haebich proceeds to put up a operated through censorship, political correctness straw man then knock him down by caricaturing and official thuggery. To be sure, in choosing to art historians as an insular clique who “enclosed” write on Arthur Boyd, Philipp stood up for the art in a “hermetic” context. Their writings reflect modern art he had earlier seen the Nazis brand “the influence of conservative trends within the art degenerate and try ruthlessly to stamp out: his world privileging ‘great art’ as elitist, ahistorical and entire book advances values that would have set the outside the influences of the mundane world and Gestapo thumping on a writer’s door. the ‘great artist’ as genius whose oeuvre is above conventional social and historical analysis,” she fumes, n ambitious attempt to link indigenous issues then continues, “Within this schema the preoccu- directly with Arthur Boyd’s Bride series pations of western artists, historians and critics are Aappeared in the 2002 issue of Frontiers: A Journal of paramount.” The prose of some academics can be Women’s Studies. “White Brides: Images of Marriage pompous, but this is an over-reaction. across Colonising Boundaries” was written by Professor Haebich’s contention seems that any Ann McGrath, who was conducting research on a discussion of Australian artists must refer to indig- Fellowship in American History awarded by Yale enous affairs; and, furthermore, that white artists University’s Beinecke Library. At the time McGrath who paint Aboriginal figures are potential racial was co-ordinator of the Society and Nation Program oppressors (“this can serve to reinforce exploitative, at the National Museum in Canberra, and she has monological and nonreciprocal relations between since become director of the Australian National western artists and indigenous subjects”). In other University’s Centre for Indigenous History. words, art historians ought to function as political Professor McGrath introduces her confident policemen. piece with aggrandising verbal flourishes:

80 Quadrant March 2016 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

Imagesf o “mixed-color” couples depicted in ‘settlement’”. McGrath assures readers that she can frontier settings could transfer weddings into well handle such a difficult contrast: multilayered imaginaries of gender, conquest, and boundary-crossing fertility. The painted While comparative research often assumes image of a bride marrying across colonised a comparison between like and like, my borders of “color” and culture suggests a transnational juxtaposition allows very different cathartic but fleeting historical moment where examples to be adjoined and thus considered representatives of the “Old” and “New” worlds together. Although these two cases of visual appear to unite freely for mutual benefit. symbolism traverse different centuries and Although paintings of such weddings are very different frontier contexts, their common not common, certain artists used the theme meeting and departure points suggest some new to depict marriages that, for both liminal questions. nations and for later audiences reflecting upon past history, could be both “settling” and The matter of legitimate comparison cannot be “unsettling” in equal measure. so perfunctorily dismissed. Art scholars would point out, besides disjunctions in style and genre, these Her dense and wordy article then fixes on sev- artists were undertaking very different activities. eral pictures of brides by two artists. The first is Miller was travelling as an illustrator, an important the minor American painter Alfred Jacob Miller, role before the age of the photograph. His task was who in 1837 accompanied a wealthy to document daily life and record Scot into America’s north-west, native peoples, producing skilled making sketches which would later cGrath treats drawings and watercolours that be painted. From New Orleans, M compare directly with those of the the young artist and his patron Boyd’s invented Australian colonial artist S.T. Gill. travelled up the Mississippi and modernist compositions In contrast, Boyd was freely invent- Missouri rivers, then contin- ing modernist paintings in his stu- ued on horseback using a wilder- as segments of dio. His compositions were acts ness trail along the Platte, North a sociological of imagination steeped in expres- Platte and Sweetwater rivers in documentary. She sionist values. One artist aimed to remote Nebraska. They followed a record; the other invented. This is meandering line of trading posts introduces race- why art historians would approach westward, encountering along relations policies the works differently, because there the way communities of Sioux, is a crucial dissimilarity between Shoshone, Utah, Cheyenne and and customs as art-as-record and art-as-imagining. Crow natives. Eventually they a context for the Oblivious to this distinction, reached Fort William, now known pictures’ production. McGrath treats Boyd’s invented as Fort Laramie in Wyoming, from modernist compositions as seg- where they moved on to the “Rocky ments of a sociological documen- Mountains Rendezvous”—a summer gathering of tary. To this effect she introduces race-relations trappers, mountain men, Indians and fur traders— policies and customs as a context for the pictures’ held that year at Green River. It was a hazardous production. “The Brides series’ historical context, expedition, taking many months, and moving far between 1951 and 1962,” she writes, “was the heyday from settled territory. of the Aboriginal assimilation policy, the first truly The other artist McGrath scrutinises is Arthur national platform of Australian Aboriginal policy.” Boyd. Her purpose is to contrast his 1950s allegori- The political temperature is swiftly fired up by add- cal paintings using a Bride motif against Miller’s ing incendiary statements about Central Australia gouache, The Trapper’s Bride of 1837, and 1841 oil when Boyd visited: version of the same subject. McGrath suggests this comparison has the the Northern Territory and Western Australia, makings for a fruitful analysis where the attitudes which had larger areas of predominantly of white people towards inter-marriage with natives Aboriginal populations, endorsed eugenic will be revealed. “Although their work and histori- [sic] policies aimed at “breeding out color” via cal influences were vastly different,” she admitted, intermarriage. With housing incentives provided “by representing transfrontier unions the two artists for white men who legally married lighter- depicted the often-neglected theme of the human, skinned Aboriginal girls, Northern Territory social, and imagined boundaries of ‘frontier’ and Aborigines called it the “fuck em white” policy.

Quadrant March 2016 81 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

From t here i is a short step to suggesting the Bride McGrath asserts that “earlier paintings in the series paintings depict tense black-white sexual relations. contain less modern but all-too-familiar imperial By structuring her sentences to alternate informa- tropes of captivity and ownership as characteriz- tion on race then on art, McGrath implies a link ing black man’s treatment of women”. These include between Boyd’s paintings and material they have no “the beaten wife, the bestial black man, the old proven connection with—as in the following: black man with the too-young bride”. No paintings with these images exist. Later she mentions that Boyd’s Brides series of the 1950s and 1960s was “Boyd withdrew one of his earliest bride paintings, inspired by a journey to Australia’s slowest The Wedding, from public exhibition. It depicted the moving frontier and deepest interior, where only ‘half-caste’ man, haunted by the white wife (and twenty years earlier police had led a large-scale lifestyle?) of his dreams, assaulting his real bride, a retaliatory massacre in a conflict originally woman of mixed descent.” There is no painting with sparked by white men stealing Aboriginal this title, or depicting a man assaulting a woman. women. Boyd’s Shearers Playing for a Bride and Nor did Boyd remove any Bride work from public Bride Running Away contain images of the bride display. as an item of exchange or captivity. Contentious pronouncements about Boyd’s art abound. No picture is cited for this: “The state as Thiss i tabloid-style innuendo. No relationship patriarchal father must officiate, but, although it between the conflict and the paintings is estab- becomes invisible in later paintings, there is no sug- lished, indeed, we are not shown that Boyd ever gestion its evil influence has been removed,” or for heard of the mentioned event. Ann McGrath this: “Marriage itself is symbolic of union, in this arranges information to lead readers to assume a case the union of a colonial nation, where colonizer causal link as if the paintings were responses to a and colonized contest the very ground on which conflict which is neither identified nor satisfactorily people walk.” These are offered as deductions, but explained. After all, “large scale” and “massacre” it isn’t shown how they are derived from Boyd’s require clarification. There is not even a reference works. Nor is visual or documentary evidence cited in her endnotes. when McGrath says some Bride paintings mirror The absence of sources is a pronounced defi- “the woman’s own desire or a state-coerced project ciency throughout McGrath’s article. Much is for her to become ‘white’”. Most misleading is revealed when endnotes are perused because, if the McGrath’s sweeping statement, “Boyd’s interpret- main scholarly works on Arthur Boyd are listed en ers often assume these paintings, especially those masse in two notes, this appears cosmetic. The dis- where phantom brides appear, narrate stories of a cussion of Boyd’s work within her text is very poorly black man’s longing for a ‘real’ white bride.” No referenced. source is given and no scholars are named in this Evidence is in short supply. Consider the expla- untrue assertion. nation of Boyd’s thoughts about a preliminary studio Professor McGrath’s approach to pictorial anal- drawing before he embarked on the Bride paintings: ysis is best described as forcing theories onto works without bothering about proof. Take her aside on He pondered whether it signified the woman’s Margaret Preston’s well-known print The Expulsion journey to whiteness, the whole people’s painful (1952), which shows a native Adam and Eve cast journey toward whiteness, or the man’s failed into Australian wilderness. McGrath expounds: journey to become “white.” What type of “an Aboriginal man and wife surrounded by native narrative was it? Who were its main actors? Was flowers are ousted from Eden by the evil angel one actor playing several parts? The paintings of Australian colonialism”. No supporting mate- concern a narrative about Aboriginal people, a rial is given for a preposterous claim (the angel is humanizing tale about a despised people and conventional). Likewise when dealing with Boyd’s a gentle critique of government policy. They Bride paintings, McGrath’s observations need to be critique the nation itself, the agency of its land checked against each picture. The Bride in one piece and peoples. is said to have a blackened eye. This is wrong: the eye is unmarked. McGrath’s article hinges on the artist’s private Disregarding historical methodology, McGrath musings given here, but she lists no source for this repeatedly imposes a political agenda upon paintings material. How do we know this is what Arthur which do not show what she tries to argue. Linked Boyd thought? It looks suspiciously like invention, with this is a use of emotive language to sway the not history: has key information been made up? reader. This is most striking with her description of Some paintings used as evidence are fictitious. Persecuted Lovers, which represents, she says:

82 Quadrant March 2016 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

a couple’s frozen terror as they lie prone in over tempera. lovemaking in the cold-blooded face of a too- After these statements, it’s a bumbling path powerful enemy. A harsh ultramarine blue sky through art that is not comprehended. As she does with a violent red sunset provides the backdrop with Arthur Boyd, McGrath misapplies artistic for a fascistic man in dark suit and hat of terms and concepts when discussing Alfred Jacob authority—symbol of a menacing state. The Miller. His adroit work observes the graphic cus- groom has bright blue/purple flesh; the “white toms of nineteenth-century illustration; although man” has a black-emerald green suit and skin as McGrath misses this, and labours to suggest influ- black as a burnt tree stump. In the background ences from religious art that are not present. Even is a holocaust landscape where a crow guards her grasp of tribal culture appears shaky: “In the desolate dead tree trunks … [The lovers are] traditional Aboriginal color lexicon white was saying goodbye before he is killed and she associated with preparation of corpses for funeral becomes captive to the state man. ceremonies,” one broad statement runs. However, this practice was true only of certain tribal groups. McGrath uses here a language of force and Besides, anthropologists would point out that there coercion. The sky and sunset are “harsh” and “vio- is no “traditional Aboriginal color lexicon”. The very lent”. Her description uses emotive terms including phrase is misleading; as is confirmed by an endnote “fascistic”, “holocaust”, “terror”, “authority”, “cap- which supplies no proof. tive”, “too powerful enemy” and “menacing state”. Little is helped by a murky prose style that con- These rhetorical trigger words imply fuses obscurity with profundity. Boyd has crafted a genocide scene, And the text is marred with such with even a bird said to “guard” over simple gaffes that it beggars belief a grim place of imminent execution Haebich and how the article was passed by ref- and sexual slavery. No sources are McGrath appear to erees. For the record, Boyd’s war given for this explanation. It’s also have decided what the service was spent preparing maps illogical. How is a figure “as black in a cartography unit at South as a burnt tree stump” interpreted works loosely meant Melbourne and Bendigo: he did not as “white”? before they began witness friends killed in action; he “White Brides” is weak because did not paint shell-shocked soldiers art is a subject beyond Ann interpreting. Yet these and trauma victims. When the text McGrath’s grasp. She gets straight are difficult pictures is firm, it usually repeats informa- into difficulty in her introduction; as which can baffle tion from secondary sources (the evident with a snap summary of the better parts of the discussion of American painter’s work: “Miller the inexperienced. Miller seem mostly cribbed from followed the classical European the museum catalogue Alfred Jacob school, attempting realism in a Miller: Watercolors of the American romantic or baroque style, drawing upon the tradi- West by Joan Troccoli). tions of religious art.” Packing together terms that Far from changing our understanding of Arthur she plainly does not understand, this sentence is Boyd’s Bride series, the article sets a very low point nebulous and self-contradictory. It is not possible in Australian historical studies. Straining to prove for an artist to be at once classical, romantic, real- her theory, Ann McGrath neglects scholarship on ist and baroque. Likewise which traditions of reli- the painter, invents supporting evidence, refers to gious art does McGrath mean: Italian, Spanish or fictitious pictures, uses innuendo and emotive rhet- Northern, and pre- or post-Reformation? And as oric, and feigns to relay thoughts from a deceased for “European school”, there is no such designation artist’s mind. in art studies. Where the American is depicted as exud- n dealing with Arthur Boyd the two social his- ing a cosmopolitan erudition, McGrath portrays torians jumped into modern art at the deep end. the Australian artist as working in a messy rush: ThI ey also hindered—and prejudiced—their efforts “Boyd painted fast, splashing his boards with thin in setting off with a point to prove. Both Haebich washes and crude loose brushstrokes for an unstud- and McGrath appear to have decided what the ied effect.” A cursory examination of Boyd’s Bride works loosely meant before they began interpreting. paintings will show how wrong this is. Besides Yet these are difficult pictures which can baffle the lacking paint splashes and “crude” brushwork, they inexperienced: and it is more fruitful to approach are carefully crafted pictures—nearly half of them paintings with an open mind, wondering what they were executed in the Old Master technique of oil have to say.

Quadrant March 2016 83 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

Take the figure aiming a rifle in Persecuted Lovers. character; which, Smith told me, resulted in the To those unfamiliar with Boyd’s art it is hard to near identical ugly troll-girls of Drowned Bridegroom unpick this symbol; and, in fixing on racial issues, and Bride Watching Soldiers Fight. This was when he we can miss sight of what is being said about human told Smith that his works “do not refer to an actual nature. The figure’s dark skin and his attire seem at event and recall few remembered observations: they odds, which is why one scholar ventured to suggest are conceived as in a dream”. this is a “citified” Aborigine. But an intrusive man Boyd met mixed reactions when a selection of taunting lovers is a firm motif, appearing in earlier Bride pictures was exhibited in London in July 1960. Boyd works to signify intolerant people who detest Given that the Notting Hill riots were still fresh love, as well as social pressures to conform. This is in local memory, some visitors misread mounting reinforced by the dark figure’s shoe treading on the tensions on West Indian migration into the art. Bride’s filmy dress, Boyd later explaining he used Britons saw aspects of their own heated race debate a boot as sign for the father—implying that in this mirrored in the pictures, which certainly drove the scene it connotes a parent/family trying to hold back positive critical response. Boyd ceased work on the the grown child. Likewise the presumption that the series after that London show. phantom bride must be a white woman undermines what Boyd broadly delves into about romantic rela- n opportunity to assess the theories of Anna tionships and marriage. His works show the young Haebich and Ann McGrath arose over the groom struggling to separate the real person he has Asummer of 2014-15 with a survey of Bride paint- married from an idealised partner. The paintings ings at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern tend to reflect on love and its choices. Art. Difficult and costly to organise, these exhibi- It’s also apparent that some works were affected by tions are exceptional events. Decades pass between a creative dialogue with other artists, a second group them. They are looked to by art historians and of Bride pictures being made for a group exhibit critics as occasions to review claims about Boyd’s with friends in August 1959. Charles Blackman was pictures and sort out legitimate interpretations in a painting pictures of girls with bunches of flowers; prudent, thorough manner. Indeed, the independ- and Boyd visibly responded by altering his bridal ent scholar Geoffrey Smith had compiled for the bouquets. The enormous blue bouquet with large accompanying museum publication a catalogue rais- eyes looking at the bride in Drowned Bridegroom soné of the Bride series—an essential resource for was probably intended to upstage Blackman, which future researchers. it did! Other participants in the forthcoming show Kendrah Morgan, a curator at the museum, affected the craftsmanship. At his best, Boyd had a wrote the interpretive essay for the illustrated exhi- visceral understanding of oil paint: he could apply bition catalogue. She mixed a thumbnail biography it with an almost involuntary fluency. But the Bride of the artist with selected highlights on government series was uneven, the figures in some works having treatment of Aborigines, comments on some Bride a cumbersome coarseness. John Brack’s feedback paintings, asides on other modern artists, and a lib- helped Boyd develop several compositions. eral quotation of comments on Aborigines made Less easy to pin down is the possible influence over the years by Boyd himself. It was hoped this of the group show’s organiser, Bernard Smith. He would be the long-needed authoritative statement was preparing to publish his landmark 1960 book on the Bride pictures which responds to a changing European Vision and the South Pacific, which included awareness of Aboriginal issues. a chapter on historical attitudes to indigenous Morgan’s article is awkwardly shaped, and the peoples, “The Ignoble and the Romantic Savage”. prose style is weak. She often uses showy phras- Smith saw Boyd regularly in 1958 and 1959, coming when straightforward words would be best. menting on pictures, explaining ideas and pressing So where an ordinary person might say Boyd was his opinions as the Bride series evolved—which led “influenced by Dostoyevsky”, the curator has him another indignant artist, Leonard French, to accuse “engaging with the writings of Dostoyevsky”. Smith of getting on his stressed friend’s back and Clarity can get lost in jargon. Take the remark that telling him what to paint. the paintings show Boyd’s “constant interrogation This winds into how Boyd portrayed Aborigines. of the fear, jealousies and anxieties surrounding When the Bride pictures were originally shown in sexuality and difference”. This sounds impressive, 1958, some critics were uneasy that they erred into but what does it mean? Elsewhere my guess is that racial caricature. The use of curly black hair, pudgy the phrase, “he relied heavily on the familiar trope nose and bulbous eyes on the groom was queried, of the outsider for the series’ conceptual platform”, one scribe complaining the figure recalled a child’s would translate into conversational English as, “he golliwog. Undeterred, Boyd mulled over the female used the outsider theme”. But meaning is muddled

84 Quadrant March 2016 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide? when Morgan writes that some pictures explore ing couple. In the mid-1950s the motif becomes a “the bride as chattel to be owned, and which could bouquet for the Bride works, then floral sprays in be interpreted as pandering to the European fan- the Nebuchadnezzar paintings, and in the Artist in tasy of black men gambling for a white woman’s Extremis series of the 1970s and 1980s the artist’s sexual favours—although this is a reversal of the hair will sprout flowers and leaves. more common stereotype of white men desiring black women”. Who is meant to be lusting after f interpretations are up for invention, why stick whom? with Arthur Boyd? Sure enough, Patrick White Instead of testing their views, Morgan extols aInd Russell Drysdale are drawn into a swelling Haebich and McGrath. This is where serious defects argument. White earns praise for raising “aware- come in, such as where Morgan repeats McGrath’s ness of inequality” by “incorporating Aboriginal comment that one piece signifies “the painful, characters into his novel Voss”, while Riders of the forced journey to ‘whiteness’, or that journey’s fail- Chariot “critiqued the problems of detribalisa- ure”, without checking how this was reached. It tion” via the character Alf Dubbo. Meanwhile, can also lead to conspicuous errors. Hence Morgan Drysdale’s 1953 canvas Station Blacks, Cape York is copies Haebich’s mistaken claim on Boyd’s anxi- said to embody “sanitised paintings of Indigenous ety over racial-mixing evident in “drawings of people”. Pressing this point, by an undisclosed eco- sexual encounters between black American serv- nomic equation Morgan detects racial undertones icemen and white women in wartime Melbourne”. to his exhibition sales: She even proposes a 1940s painting based on those drawings—a pity they are fictitious. Drysdale does not make a moral point with Morgan advances some quirky theories of her his images of Aboriginal people, portraying own. Persecuted Lovers is said to show Boyd fan- them as part of the Australian identity rather tasising about himself embracing a family friend, than symbols of white guilt. Perhaps they Jean Langley, as her cuckolded husband, the music were unthreatening in this way, they sold well critic John Sinclair, prepares to shoot. She also at Drysdale’s Macquarie Galleries show in claims men wear clothes in the paintings as “a 1953, unlike Boyd’s Brides, which were not an reference to how missionaries and the authorities immediate critical or financial success. forced Indigenous people to adopt western dress”. And the unfinished boat in an early Bride painting Let’s handle the subject matter first. Drysdale is “perhaps suggesting the fragments of a relation- assiduously painted Aboriginal figures for over ship that could not stay afloat”. As for the recurring twenty years—it was a key subject. The material floral bouquet, this evokes “the mushrooming of for these pictures came from repeat trips he made an atomic cloud”. Morgan may have no evidence to remote communities, where he took photographs whatsoever here, yet she gilds her claim with a and drew. Station Blacks, Cape York is a composite digression: painting diluted from quick snapshots of a country race meeting. Drysdale grouped figures from Althought i is tempting to speculate that different photos and left out the racetrack entirely; Boyd was aware of the British nuclear tests at although Morgan decides his removal of the set- Maralinga from 1956 to 1963, with disastrous ting “acknowledged their displacement”. This is results for Indigenous communities in the preposterous. region, this is unlikely. He had, however, made Drysdale’s finished Aboriginal works included reference in his earlier biblical allegories to the formal portraits, single and grouped figures before bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end blank settings, single and grouped figures within of World War II and the emblem of the atomic landscapes, single figures surrounded by funer- cloud in the Bride works could be read as an ary sculpture, as well as figures decorated with evocation of annihilation. traditional ceremonial designs. Morgan’s judgment of these images as “sanitised” is uninformed Thiss i grossly misleading. There are no atomic and wrong. Some portraits are sensitive studies of clouds anywhere in Boyd’s art. And far from sug- character; other compositions aspire to suggest an gesting death, a spray of flowers and leaves is his individual’s connection with powers beyond this recurring symbol for life, hope and regenerative material world; while an entire strand of his pro- love. It first appears in Boyd’s 1940s works growing duction, which was in the mentioned 1953 exhi- from the heads of hunchbacks, cripples and lov- bition, tackles what we might now call identity. ers; then changes into the branch of a dead tree This included the largest work Drysdale painted, which bursts into life directly above an embrac- Mullaloonah Tank (now in the Art Gallery of South

Quadrant March 2016 85 Did Arthur Boyd Paint Aboriginal Genocide?

Australia), which shows four silent Aborigines in cess. Using religious terms, Langton claims to have their country. Drysdale’s calculated handling of had an geometry and palette—he used the same colour range to set figures and rocks—strives to convey a insight into his soul and his struggle with the poetic stillness where people may be seen to exist in fact of his wealth, the land he held, and the rhythm with the earth. No wonder that picture sits poisoned chalice it represented. His gift of his in the front rank of Australian art. Boyd himself many paintings—and Bundanon—to the nation admired it for resisting prevailing attitudes, and is an act of atonement, a way of resolving his portraying Aborigines with “great dignity”. struggle with the spirits of the dead. Then there is Morgan’s claim that the Bride show was financially unsuccessful. According to Academic discourse has given way to priestly gallery records seven of Boyd’s sixteen large main pronouncements: the sinner is redeemed! paintings and another five small works were sold But to return to art history, most alarming is from the exhibit, one piece going to the National how Anna Haebich, Ann McGrath and Kendrah Gallery of Victoria. Several remaining pictures Morgan have redacted Boyd’s early position on went into the stockroom to show to prospective political art. This was when modernist painting customers afterwards, which is how another two in 1940s Australia was forged, that vital fight for pieces—The Dreaming Bridegroom and The Wedding imaginative freedom conducted within the mercu- Group—were later purchased by an American cou- rial Contemporary Art Society (CAS). To the one ple. Far from being dismal, that Boyd exhibition side were the Social Realist artists who, brandishing had the best turnover Australian Galleries recorded the Communist Party’s policies, pressed the cause for any show in 1958. The gallery’s director Anne of political painting and social content. Opposing Purves told me she even had to sort out a dispute them were the celebrated Angry Penguins, modern- when rival collectors, Kym Bonython and Tristan ists who championed creative liberty and rejected Buesst, each insisted they had first claim on a key political formulas: “Artists of the world unite,” picture. Albert Tucker would jeer, “you have nothing to lose but your brains.” rtistic interpretation does not stand still. It A leading Angry Penguin, Boyd was a modern- changes. It is enhanced as we discover how to ist who stood firmly against art-by-political-num- pAerceive more clearly what is latent within a paint- bers. This is brushed out of art history by Kendrah ing. Sometimes it will be obscured by theoretical Morgan’s essay. She refers glowingly to communist fashion, with badly chosen ideas imposed on works art of that turbulent period, holding up social pro- regardless of truth. test paintings of the party member Yosl Bergner We have to ask whether the latter fate is being as an exemplar of what art ought to be. His works posthumously inflicted upon Arthur Boyd, whose portraying miserable, oppressed people (some of paintings are reconfigured by Haebich, McGrath them Aboriginal) were, we are told, “a model for and Morgan to serve new agendas. Nor does it stop creating a socially conscious art that sought to raise with Boyd, as cited comments on Patrick White, awareness of the predicaments faced by disadvan- Margaret Preston and Russell Drysdale indicate. taged communities”. The word communism figures Literary and artistic history is being altered along nowhere in Morgan’s essay—she refers instead to politically correct lines. a “commitment to humanitarian values”—nor does Above all this is a question of virtue. The three her thumbnail history of Boyd acknowledge the historians effectively sit in judgment on deceased fierce struggle within the CAS to resist political artists, using a now current social outlook to debate agendas. This unswerving modernist outlook—the their moral character. Actually, Boyd’s virtue stylistic and thematic background for the Bride is the focus for a brief piece by Professor Marcia series—is denied so that current political opinions Langton, chair of Indigenous Studies at Melbourne can be forced upon paintings. University, which follows Morgan’s essay in the Australia’s modernists are surely turning in their museum’s catalogue. Langton remarks that Boyd graves. “was in a sense the inheritor of land, wealth and privilege won from a genocide”, with her essay Dr Christopher Heathcote’s most recent book is assuring us he may be forgiven for this sanguine Russell Drysdale: Defining the Modern Australian stain. Chief among her reasons is that Boyd, who Landscape (Wakefield Press). A footnoted version of she never met, was supposedly troubled by his suc- this article appears at Quadrant Online.

86 Quadrant March 2016 Mark McGinness

A Dying Art The Rise and Fall of the Obituary

y introduction as “an obituarist” at a party suffer fools gladly” translated as “complete bastard”, in Sydney more than a decade ago to “gave colourful accounts of his exploits” meant Dame Maggie Smith provoked a look of “liar”, “powerful negotiator” suggested “bully”, and Mdeep disdain. Even in the days before her portrayal “tireless raconteur” signalled “crashing bore”. A of the formidable Dowager Countess of Downton, notorious crook was judged “not to have upheld the nobody did disdain as well as Dame Maggie. One highest ethical standards of the City”. had to remind her that the obituary is not about His subjects from his days at Burke’s provided wallowing in death; it’s about celebration of life. superb copy. There was the 9th Earl of St Germans True, the life must be spent before we can properly who listed his recreations as “huntin’ the slipper, sho- appreciate it but the death is, if anything, a catalyst otin’ a line, fishin’ for compliments”; and Sir Athol to record that life. Oakeley, Bart, heavyweight wrestling champion of Perceptions of the Art of Obituary have changed Europe in 1932 who, following the prescription of over the last few decades. In fact exactly thirty the giant wrestler Hackenschmidt, built himself up years ago, the splendid (and alas now late) Hugh on eleven pints of milk three times a day for three Montgomery-Massingberd transformed the genre years, only to be told when he met the author later on becoming obituaries editor of the London Daily that the quantity had been a misprint. This fond- Telegraph. On his appointment he observed, “many ness for the aristocracy earned Massingberd the title of my acquaintance appeared to regard me with a “Massivesnob” from Private Eye, and occasionally mixture of pity and contempt ... the obits desk was (and much to his delight) “Massivepecker”. the journalistic equivalent of Outer Siberia”. But his coverage was in fact more democratic. His inspiration came from Roy Dotrice’s West The fourth of his collection of lives was devoted End performance seven years before in Brief Lives. entirely to rogues and included Ronnie Kray, the Dotrice, as the seventeenth-century biographer Mafia bosses Anthony “Fat Man” Salerno and John Aubrey, read out a dull formulaic entry about a Vincent “Big Vinnie” Teresa; even Queensland’s barrister, shut the book with a “Pshaw” and turned colossus of roads, Russ Hinze. to the audience: “He got more by his prick than his While most of the obituaries were written by a practice.” like-minded team they all bore Massingberd’s mark. It was a blinding light for Massingberd, who He may have had a weakness for a good story but he resolved then to dedicate himself “to chronicling also had a penchant for accuracy and the mot juste. what people were really like through informal anec- With Sir Athol, Hugh needed to confirm how large dote, description and character sketch”. Abandoning he was. He called the undertaker, who replied, “I’ll the hushed voice, he believed it was possible “to give just go and measure him.” One life he did write, that a genuine assessment in exactly the same way as of Liberace, has become a classic of the genre. you might if you were writing a profile on a living Obituaries rarely dwell on the cause of death, person”. although Massingberd argued with the paper’s edi- The other ingredient was “a sympathetic tor that it should. The day after the editor agreed, acceptance, even celebration, of someone’s foibles Massingberd reported that “someone had died of a and faults”. His obits were “anonymous, formal, penile implant which had imploded”. The subject detached, deadpan if you like, affording satisfaction was dropped. if necessary between the lines, to both friends and Even after his retirement as editor in 1994, his foes of the deceased”. He managed this by refining influence remained, not just at the Telegraph, but the art of the euphemism. In his taxonomy, “didn’t in newspapers throughout the English-speaking

Quadrant March 2016 87 A Dying Art world, buoyed by the extraordinary success of no need to say what killed him. There is a certain Massingberd’s publication of six collections of the squeamishness among obituarists about cause of paper’s obituaries. death. The Times had a policy not to mention it for There were two other midwives hovering over subjects over seventy. Yet the Victorians, in keeping that rebirth in 1986. One was James Fergusson, with their morbid obsession with death, went into who began producing, for the newly established excruciating detail. In 1870 Charles Dickens’s last Independent newspaper, elegantly written narra- hours were described thus: “The pupil of the right tives with striking photographs and a discrete bio- eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, the box containing dates, marriages and offspring that breathing stertorous, the limbs flaccid until half an freed his writers from the dead hand of the formu- hour before death, when some convulsion occurred.” laic approach. At about the same time, at the Times, Like businessmen, politicians do not generally John Grigg (formerly Lord Altrincham and no generate good copy. But Sir James Killen was a stranger to the breaking of taboos), carried an obitu- marvellous exception. Returning to the backbench ary of the ballerino Sir Robert Helpmann, claiming in 1971 when William McMahon became leader, Sir Robert was “a homosexual of Sir James could not bear him; or, the proselytising kind’’. Whether or in obitspeak, “There was a dis- not it was true, it had the liberating he “great and good” tinct lack of sympathy between the effect of ridding the art of the “dead T two.” Killen likened the balding, can do no wrong” maxim by allow- can sometimes be diminutive, big-eared McMahon ing frankness in discussing the pri- challenging subjects to a “Volkswagen with two doors vate lives of subjects. open” and when he once overheard to bring to life. Their McMahon telling a group that he he anecdote can say so much obits can end up as was his own worst enemy, Killen in a few sentences about one’s nothing but a litany of chirped up, “Not while I’m alive.” sTubject; more than a string of adjec- The wit of Pat Buckley, the ulti- tives can ever do. Take Dame Roma dates, appointments, mate New Yorker, fashion plate, Mitchell, a remarkable Australian, memberships, fundraiser and wife of William F., the country’s first superior court was more of the mordant variety judge and first female governor. titles and honours. but just as irresistible. After J.K. Roma’s father Harold Mitchell was To prevent them Galbraith brought Teddy Kennedy killed in France in 1918 and young to visit the Buckleys at their win- Roma was with her mother when reading like a Who’s ter house in Switzerland, Kennedy the telegram confirming his death Who entry, a good asked if he could borrow a car to go arrived. Roma then went, as usual, anecdote is essential. back to Gstaad. Pat said, “Certainly to greet her elder sister from school not—there are three bridges along the street and broke the news between here and Gstaad.” Even to her. When her mother later asked her why she her world-weariness was funny. “Life is very diffi- had told her sister, Roma replied, “I wanted to save cult and everything kills you,” she once said. “The you.” She was then only four. only thing you can do nowadays is sit fully clothed No one claiming to be an obituarist can avoid in the woods and eat fruit.” recalling the life of our heroes, especially as so many reached their end along with the century. During erhaps a susceptibility for nostalgia drives both research on the life of a much decorated Second obituarist and reader. There was Dolly Dyer, World War soldier who settled in Queensland in Pdevoted partner of Pick-a-Box Bob. In 1960, fol- the 1960s, a fellow officer, by then an old major liv- lowing the scripted routine, Bob asked: “Who’s our ing in the home counties, confided, “He fell in love next contestant, Dolly?” She responded, “Bob, this with a princess from Siam, you know. It wouldn’t is Barry Jones, a teacher from Caulfield.” do … He was brave as a lion but a mad rooter. We In 1989, some years after Bob’s death, she met all were. You know with our regiment it was either two other Queensland retirees, Les and Rae Rider. VC or VD.” The three began to attend Les Salmon’s Danceland These days when the great and the good live so Ballroom at Coolangatta. Within a few years, long, it often means that subjects score fewer than Dolly, partnered by Les (he also partnered Rae), ten words for every year of their life: Brooke Astor, was winning gold medals in competitions. For the 105; and Sir George Fisher, the titan of MIM, who next decade, Dolly danced up to five days a week, at 104 was Australia’s oldest knight. When some- skilfully executing the cha cha, the rhumba, the jive, one has led such a long, full, rich life, there seems the pasodoble and Barclay blues—tripping the light

88 Quadrant March 2016 A Dying Art fantastic, yet eschewing the limelight. She enter- n Life After Death (2006), his fascinating work on tained nursing-home patients, some not much older the Art of the Obituary, Dr Nigel Starck traces than herself, and took up marathon walking, sur- tIhe first obituary back to 1622—a brief account viving Bob by two decades. of the life of Captain Andrew Shilling, killed in There is no rhyme or reason to the lives that obits a battle with the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf. editors choose to people their pages. Increasingly, Another revelation is that Benjamin Franklin ran lives lived entirely out of the spotlight are being cel- a good line in obits when he edited and owned the ebrated. None is “ordinary”—most lives are remark- Pennsylvania Gazette. able. Bill McDonald, obits editor at the New York Dr Starck has also uncovered the first Australian Times, has said: obituary—James Bloodworth, the building super- intendent in New South Wales, published in the Whene w look to see whether someone had Sydney Gazette on March 25, 1804. It was a brief made a newsworthy impact in some way—who assessment of the man but it was, at least, a start. By “made a wrinkle in the social fabric” … we 1882 the Sydney Morning Herald was recalling the don’t equate significance with fame. In point life of Canon Thomas Smith, “blessed with extraor- of fact, 9 out of 10 people we write about dinary powers of oratory … expired on Saturday last are indeed not household names … But that after suffering prolonged ‘disease of the kidneys’ doesn’t negate their importance. Most made and ‘an unfortunate disagreement with his bishop’”. their marks in quiet ways, out of the public The art then seemed to fall into a coma. The Times limelight, but they still made a mark, possibly of London and the New York Times pressed on but on your life and mine. otherwise only famous deaths were recorded and then they were dealt with under news or features. The so-called “great and good” can sometimes The view of surviving family is, of course, sig- be challenging subjects to bring to life. Their obits nificant and where the lives are obscure ones, it is can end up as nothing but a litany of dates, appoint- difficult to defy their wishes when one has relied ments, memberships, titles and honours. To pre- so heavily on material from them and they are so vent them reading like a Who’s Who entry, a good often in the grip of grief and distress. A widow of anecdote is essential. There was Margaret Thatcher’s a racing-car driver completely lost it when she read Lord Chancellor, Quinton Hogg, Lord Hailsham in a draft obituary a description of his first wife as of St Marylebone, who performed the ceremonial “vivacious”. She shared “the fact” that her predeces- aspects of his role with aplomb. There is a story of sor had slept with every man who had got behind him proceeding through Westminster, bewigged the wheel of a racing car. With another life, the and gowned, preceded by his mace-bearer and fol- daughter of a designer, disappointed at the modesty lowed by his train-bearer, when he saw his brother of her father’s antecedents, suggested, “Couldn’t you and called out: “Neil!” A number of American tour- say that his father owned as well as managed the ists immediately fell to their knees. circus?” But sympathy cannot be allowed to reduce The portraitist Sir William Dargie was stay- an obituary to a eulogy. And while an obituary can- ing with his friend, Queensland jurist Sir Edward not possibly equal the authority and scholarship of Williams, at the Williams family house in Brisbane. an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, it In his brilliant breezy way, Sir Edward introduced must be accurate and it must be honest (even if seen his guest to his gardener, “Jack, this is the painter in a kindly light). Bill Dargie.” Rubbing his chin and looking around Given that many adults who survived the Second the kitchen, Jack asked: “Do yah reckon you could do World War were facing mortality as the century my place too?” Dargie merely smiled. This encoun- ended, some extraordinary life stories emerged. ter could probably have happened only in Australia. Henry Pollack was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1922. Another great Australian was Queensland He graduated in 1939 and the same year, as German and Wallaby rugby coach Bob Templeton, whose bombers flew overhead, he left his parents in Lodz career spanned almost half the century and four for Vilnius, the ancient capital of Lithuania, by then generations of players. Templeton’s approach was occupied by Russia. Worried about his parents, and to perfect the basics, working relentlessly on skills, at great risk to his own safety, he returned to Lodz particularly with the forwards, as well as looking at to find they had left for Warsaw some weeks before. diet, fitness and developing the players’ upper body In 1942 a postcard reached him, via the Red Cross, strength. He was celebrated for the formulation of from his mother in Warsaw, gloriously happy that his six P’s principle: “Proper Preparation Prevents he had made it to Australia, urging him to “learn a Piss-Poor Performance”. A perfect formulation for trade, be a cobbler, a welder, as long as you can earn obituarists too. your living. Don’t be a Luftmensch.”

Quadrant March 2016 89 A Dying Art

He never heard from his parents again and him dead—forty-two years after his disappear- would discover later that as his mother was writing ance—the heavy-drinking, gambling, mistaking- to him, in March 1942, people were being loaded his-children’s-nanny-for-his-wife 7th Earl of Lucan onto trains to be taken to Treblinka. In 1989 (by was accorded a Times obituary. then he had founded the huge construction firm One can never be too cautious about a prema- Mirvac), he made an emotional return to Poland. ture obit. Dr Starck recounts the story in 2001 of His family home in Lodz had disappeared, replaced Dorothy Fay Ritter, “an actress best remembered by a huge concrete apartment block. His school, for riding the range with Buck Jones in west- however, was still there and he climbed the stairs to erns made during the 1930s”. A member of staff his old classroom, empty for the holidays. He called at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in out, in turn, the names of all eleven Jewish boys in California, where she was a patient, saw that her his class, and waited for a response. Silence. When bed was vacant and asked where Dorothy Fay was. he came to his own name, he shouted, in a mixture On hearing the answer “She’s gone” she promptly of defiance and despair, “Here!” rang an obituarist pal. Dorothy Fay’s obituary was published in London’s Telegraph before it was dis- ith lives like these, is it any wonder that the covered that she had only “gone” to another wing of popularity of obits took hold and papers in the hospital. She lived for another few years. Wthe United States and Australia The British quality press— began to dedicate daily pages to Times, Telegraph, Guardian and them? e called out, in Independent—continue their daily The Australian began in 1993 H offering of lives. The Economist too with the Time & Tide page, mix- turn, the names of has, since 1995, published a weekly ing pieces from the Times with all eleven Jewish life, in under 1000 words—as Australian lives by staff writers and elegant as they are eclectic: from contributors. In 1996 the Sydney boys in his class, and John Paul II to Pamela Harriman; Morning Herald began to carry lives waited for a response. from Marcel Marceau to Alex the as a daily feature. Six years later, Silence. When he African Grey Parrot. Suzy Baldwin rechristened her page The renaissance of the art in “This Life” and, with eye-catching came to his own Australia at the turn of the century photographs and sympathetically name, he shouted, in led Time magazine to observe that edited text, produced the most the Australian obituary was “as attractive page in the country. The a mixture of defiance lively as Lazarus”. But Lazarus has Age’s Gerry Carman sustained the and despair, “Here!” begun to relapse. The tide has gone art for Melbourne readers. out at the pioneering Australian, In 2003 the Courier Mail joined with regular obits replaced by a the ranks of quality metropolitan papers with a far cheaper alternative—a full page of national regular obituaries page. It almost immediately weather. The Courier Mail no longer pays contribu- attracted some controversy when it featured the tors and its page is now largely given over to copy life of Jack Warren, identified as “Criminal” and from grieving survivors and amateurs. While the described in the narrative as having been arrested Sydney Morning Herald’s commitment has wavered in 1994 at the age of seventy in relation to Australia’s from six-days-a-week coverage, it has endured— biggest cannabis haul. Some readers claimed he was due to a succession of enthusiastic and dedicated unfit to appear in an obit, but as Greg Chamberlin, editors, Tony Stephens and Harriet Veitch, them- the Courier’s obits editor, put it, “If Ronnie Biggs selves gifted obituarists. dies, you’d expect to read about him, and this This liveliest of arts deserves resuscitating. guy is much the same—only he’s from our area.” Lazarus needs a triple bypass. The Great Train Robber was, in fact, universally remembered when he died in 2013. And, only weeks Mark McGinness has written obituaries for a number ago when the English High Court finally declared of publications, including Quadrant.

90 Quadrant March 2016 The Last Day Form 5 Photograph Fort Street Boys’ High School, Sydney, 1962

Heree w are (or were) on the school steps. Our prefects, seated in front with the principal a set of seated sphinx, fists parked on knees, seem older than us standing behind them, the less assured of future degrees and girls. Academic rank and promise both decline as rows climb steps until the bottom is top. Haloes above front row boys also fade with altitude and attitude, slip at rakish angles over smirks and smiles, morph into question marks on clowns and fools, and those whose third eye is a headache for now. Higher still, my mates lean or slouch in half-uniform and somewhere in the shade of the last sun I’ve hidden in the shadow of a boy in front. Yet as the phalanx of Fortians, Class of Sixty-Two, freeze like adults for the last shot, I change my mind (as might be expected) to peek out half-face, one of the dreamy clueless: no prospects, no idea, poet.

Ross Donlon

Memento Mori at Seventy-Eight

So clearly head of table is The loudly tick-tocking wall-clock Saint Teresa of Avila At shoulder-height above it that (After some stone reliefs depicting her good works) No one else thinks of sitting there, In traveller’s cloak and hood, her staff Afraid of what it represents, With leaves a simple Tree of Life, As on and on, insatiably, Teresa is seen going forth, It chomps away at life, its food, Humble, kindly, happy and sad, A noisily ill-mannered guest Determined to nourish with love We don’t recall inviting, but A land that’s resistant to change, Who can’t be easily ignored, That’s arrogant, cynical, cruel, A bully-boy who dominates Defeated and turning the knife in the wound. With monologues on death and won’t A lone starving dog limps howling across Allow me any peace at meals, A riverbed dry as a bone. Staring rudely until I hear “Begone, you’ve not much left of me Graeme Hetherington In which to write a timeless poem!”

Graeme Hetherington

Quadrant March 2016 91 Jenny Stewart

Lettingo G What Travel Teaches Us

discovered my camera was gone halfway across At one point during the night, I was sure I the no-man’s-land between Israel and Jordan, at overheard someone saying that the camera had, the Rabin border crossing near the Gulf of Eilat. miraculously, been found! But, of course, I had PIreoccupied with the formalities of this politically been dreaming. The camera never appeared again. tortuous part of the world, I had not noticed, as I bought myself another one, from a rather nice I did now, that my shoulder bag was lighter than Jordanian shopkeeper. “I suppose it is the pictures, it should have been. It was a bad moment, not so rather than the camera, that you are missing,” he much because of the camera, but because of the said. Yes, indeed. I gamely started taking pictures photos—my beautiful photos—taken with such care with the new camera. Attachment, I said, suffer- and passion through Egypt and Israel. ing is all about attachment. I must detach myself “My camera’s gone!” I called out to my two trav- from my photos. “You have your memories,” said elling companions who, always quicker than I, were Ottman, our Jordanian guide, sympathetically. already dragging their suitcases through the grav- Unlike the Israelis we met, who while professional elly dust that separated the offices of the officials we could be somewhat offhand, the Jordanians seemed had just left, from those we were yet to encounter. naturally to retain more human feeling. “Let’s get through the border,” David said sensibly. After we all returned home, my friends kindly Once on the other side, phone calls back to our gave me copies of their pictures, but the images, Israeli guide yielded nothing. I could only conclude wonderful though many of them were, did not have the camera had been lifted from my bag as I faffed my mana. Even the shots we had taken in common about in a convenience store where we had stopped seemed somehow different. The world, seen through beside the highway that leads south to Eilat. other eyes, had a documentary look, as if requir- I do not travel, as many appear to do, for the pur- ing explanation. Over time, the loss, as losses do, pose of taking photos. The experience (I have told started to fade. “The family will be secretly relieved myself many times) is what matters. But we relive they won’t have to look at so many photos,” I joked our travels through photos, we beguile relatives and sadly. What is a trip, anyway? The images would friends (or think we do) with the images we have have spoken to memory. Now memory had to do brought back. For me, the act of seeing and compos- without them. ing photos is part of the way I experience what I see. Because, with a digital camera, we can review he urge to get around the world is strong in what we have taken, I had in fact already picked most Australians. We love our country, but out my favourite shots—the importunate Egyptian Twe need to get away from it every now and then. boat boys, calling out “Hallo, hallo” as they tried to And for those who are ageing, travel is said to add sell us tea-towels from their rowing boats, expertly years to your life, because the need to concentrate on roped to the side of our cruise ship on the Nile; the unfamiliar events slows down the apparent passage boy in the red fez at the window in the Nubian vil- of time. Each day, even on an organised tour, can lage; the mighty pillars of the temple of Karnak; the be, as Laurence Sterne put it, “the daily expectation glimpse of the temples of Rameses and his queen of the unprecedented”. overlooking the vast artificial lake as we rounded But as you get older, there is more anxiety, the last boulder at Abu Simbel. And sadly, there which must be overcome. In this case, too, my des- were the dozens of empty Nile cruise boats tied up tination—the Middle East—had been dismissed by by the river bank, their crews long gone, testimony most as too risky. But you have to see the pyramids to the tourists who were no longer coming and before you die, and Jerusalem beckoned, too. would perhaps never be back. My very rough risk assessment before I went

92 Quadrant March 2016 Lettingo G to Egypt was that, as President Sisi had rightly or Following the Yom Kippur War, thousands of wrongly (probably wrongly) locked up most of the Palestinians once resident in the West Bank were Muslim Brotherhood, there were not likely to be resettled in Jordan. More recently, over 600,000 street disturbances. In any case, the tour company I Syrians have come. But when it comes to the secu- travelled with held the view that no sane Egyptian rity of the state, pragmatism comes first. Jordan would want to endanger one of their few sources of cut its formal ties with the Palestinians in the late foreign exchange. Sinai was considered less safe, but 1980s, and receives considerable aid from the United the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh had little attraction States on condition that it keeps Israel’s eastern bor- for me anyway. der secure, while Israel returns the favour from the Nevertheless there had been a massive falling- west. Many Jordanians have Bedouin origins, and away in numbers, not just in Egypt but in Jordan as can be fierce when it suits them. When dressed tra- well. The Egyptians, who have been showing visi- ditionally, Jordanian men sport a large knife, with tors the wonders of their civilisation for centuries, multiple uses, including, as one playfully illustrated, are not only much poorer, but I think genuinely sad- as a toothpick. Now that’s a knife. Strategically dened by the drop in numbers. As it turned out, placed posters of King Abdullah and his late father the time I chose to go (March 2015) was probably King Hussein are reminders, rather than assertions, the last feasible time for the moderately timorous of royal authority. traveller. I understood something about the Israelis: how despite their success as a nation, the strain of the orthern Egypt is a stark place. The inequali- long war with the Palestinians has told on them. ties of Cairo, particularly around Giza, are They seem not to like themselves very much. While Nstartling. There are roughly-built apartments every flying to New York is a straightforward exercise for where, encroaching on the pyramids from the east. them, in the immediate neighbourhood they are per- The pyramids themselves were smaller but also more sonae non gratae. Countries that are side by side geo- extraordinary than I could ever have imagined. It graphically can be a million miles apart politically. was hard to believe the same people, even if separated by a few thousand years, were responsible for srael and Jordan are small countries. You can stand both the ancient and the modern structures. Yet the on Mount Nebo in Jordan and see Lake Tiberias apartments were as much social protest as accom- I(the Sea of Galilee), which is in Israel, shimmer in modation. There had been an outburst of such the near distance. Compared with Australian dis- building when the Muslim Brotherhood was briefly tances, all the biblical places are almost within a in power. The rules, said the middle-class people we stone’s throw of each other. talked to, had broken down, enabling poor people Egypt is much bigger, in both area and popu- to move into the city by building on farmland. Sisi, lation. From the mid-1960s its population has they believed, had brought some order. Yet how long increased particularly rapidly, despite government can a political system ignore a teeming population attempts in the Mubarak era to improve the avail- of rural and semi-rural people with few prospects? ability of family planning, particularly among poor Cairo never sleeps. There is a hum over the women. The conflict between conservatives and main square which is never-ceasing. And the Nile modernists was not far to see. I thought of the hos- is mighty indeed. To actually see it is to understand tility towards our female guide, who defiantly did that Egypt is the Nile. On either side, to the east not wear the hijab. “I am as good a Muslim as they and the west, stretches a desert that seems as inhos- are,” she said. But it was hard to ignore the disap- pitable as the moon. proval shown towards her by both women and men as we passed them in the street. hat makes countries last, what makes some hang together, while others fall apart? It is he Hungarian artist and theorist Moholy-Nagy Wa fundamental question, one that has perplexed wrote that photography is a way of enhancing political scientists for centuries. Egypt, a state of Tour way of seeing, a potentially transformative act. ancient lineage, seemed volatile. Jordan, a kingdom He listed eight varieties of such seeing—abstract, of recent provenance, seemed stable and peaceful, exact, rapid, slow, intensified, penetrative, simulta- a surprising place of even-paced, relatively modern neous and distorted. For the average punter, like me cities, Roman ruins and crusader castles. But every though, the photograph is both less and more than country wants to show how special it is. How keen this. It is a way of seeing, but it is also about preserv- the Jordanians were to claim the Nabateans of Petra ing something from the passing of time, a relation- as Arabs. As Israel’s nearest neighbours, they have ship with the world. But there is something, too, of become adept at keeping out of trouble. the moment that can in a way be recaptured through

Quadrant March 2016 93 Lettingo G thetf ac o remembering when the photo was taken, truly unbelievable levels of desperation among those at the same time as the photo re-evokes the moment who were still trying to make a living. Each stunning it depicts. precinct of temples or tombs would be succeeded by Digital technology has transformed the act of a gauntlet of small shops selling tourist tat. Shawls the photograph, rendering it more accessible than would be draped on your arm, calculators produced. ever before. Had she returned to the subject she cov- In some places, I literally had to shoulder my way ered so brilliantly in the 1970s, I wonder what Susan past desperate vendors. Sontag would have made of this democratisation. I found myself wishing I could still travel as I Film, even with a fairly ordinary camera, required once did—lightly, with only a pack on my back. careful selection and examination of variables. There Now, there was less time, and more was expected, was focus, exposure, focal length. The prints, when although when and how one was expected to tip, they came back, were objects of craft, rather than and whether people had been pre-tipped or not, was mementoes. The prints often disappointed, but never completely clear. somehow seemed the more precious It is difficult for the touring and for that. With digital, mostly, we the toured-among to understand blaze away. If we wish, we can check t gets wearying each other. Most Australians work the photo we have taken while we I hard for what we have. It is chas- are still in the moment. Reality has being quoted prices tening but also annoying to be seen never been more malleable. that would be as a relative millionaire, a walking The urge many have (which I source of potential funds. It gets do not share) of seeing the world considered high for wearying being quoted prices that as a backdrop to repeated images the same product in would be considered high for the of themselves reaches its apotheosis Australia. When this same product in Australia. When in the selfie. I saw people taking this was pointed out, one vendor selfies lying on their backs on top was pointed out, one said, “But that amount is a lot for of the supposed rock of Calvary in vendor said, “But that me, it is nothing for you.” the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Who to trust? How much to care in Jerusalem. amount is a lot for me, if understandings prove worthless? Digital technology can be quite it is nothing for you.” “Did you post my cards?” I asked astonishing. Tiny cameras can do the shopkeeper on the Nile cruise so much. They are point-and-shoot boat. He had told me a long story heaven, unless of course, you are trying to do a bit about there being no taxes on the boat (so every more, in which case it is necessary to have some thing would be cheaper) and, feeling a bit sorry sense of aperture, shutter speed and the parameters for him, I had bought some jewellery, and some of light. postcards and stamps. I still love postcards—even Is film still better, at some level? Do the nuances though it is becoming tougher and tougher to nego- of a really good print have something that the best tiate the logistics of actually sending them. Oh yes, digital image does not? I guess a rationalist would he said, the cards had been posted by his friends say, it’s a matter of how you like your distortion. Is ashore. But I thought his eyes flicked slightly as he reality analogue, or digital? A rationalist would say said it. Of course, none of my six carefully-written it is a pointless question. What we see with our eyes accurately-stamped Egyptian cards ever reached is light converted to electrical pulses in the rods and its destination. Not one. (Eventually, all the cards cones of our retina. But is the place where num- posted for me in Jordan and Israel reached their bers fuse to become a seemingly seamless reality the intended recipients.) reality captured by film? am not sure how much we learn, as tourists, about hatever the tourist thinks he or she knows, he the countries we travel through, but every time we or she will always know less than the locals. Itravel we certainly learn something about ourselves. ThWey know you are in their country only briefly. They Travelling teaches us how little we can control, and know they will never see you again. In Israel, a first- how pointless it is to worry about it. Ultimately, we world country even if a very strange one, tourists have to let go of everything, including ourselves. It were welcome, without being particularly sought makes sense to practise for that event, without being after. Jordan, with its incredibly high exchange rate overwhelmed by the prospect. relative to the Australian dollar, was too expensive for shopping. Dr Jenny Stewart is a Canberra-based writer and The dearth of tourists in Egypt had brought out former academic.

94 Quadrant March 2016 For your daughter and her granddaughter (Lyn and Ava)

On the fridge the photograph is doing its work: you are alive, young and most dangerous of all, assuredly beautiful. Your life, now ended, is ahead of you, as you and a friend capture a street photographer’s attention.

Neither do you reach out to the future —you are simply alive with days, potent like bubbles waiting within the champagne— nor can we reach back, as if to claim, to touch.

Both of us, either side of a border we approach, prisoners of the light, of the merciful blessings of ignorance: though I, who did not know you, know what happens after the shutter clicked and held you there, and truly grieve. Your friend and you, like smug conspirators, superior in possession of what you hold, know as much as I, even more, flare a smile at the photographer, your heels clipping firmly down Pitt Street, as your daughter attends to her granddaughter in a day that’s made up of moments, any one A Taoist on Montserrat like a photograph. The Massif of Montserrat—Eocene erosions and sediments form the Russell Erwin conglomerate of Central Catalonia a “pudding stone” mountain range pushed up through crust fractures and riddled with rain made caves. The ironstone Elephant’s Trunk and Dead Man’s Head have crannies for Pyrenean violets and honeysuckle. Channels of blackthorn, starflowers and holm-oak shade rosemary and thyme. The ibex scales and Bellini’s eagle soars. A Taoist took the cable-car to the Basilica and climbed the narrow pilgrim thronged staircase to a throne room where the glassed-in Madonna and the boy on her lap were both black. He didn’t get there was a problem.

Saxby Pridmore

Quadrant March 2016 95 Iain Bamforth

A Half-Open Door Looking Back on John Berger’s A Fortunate Man

lmost fifty years since its first publication in altruism—thrived until a more individualistic era 1967, A Fortunate Man, John Berger’s clas- decided it was “paternalistic”. sic account of the life of a solo general prac- It is worth remembering that the British Atitioner in rural Gloucestershire, has been reissued Medical Association, the professional body that by Canongate with an enthusiastic introduction by still represents nearly all doctors in the United the young Scottish doctor and writer Gavin Francis Kingdom, stood in outright opposition to Labour’s which quotes passages from the impressive first plans to create the National Health Service on the reviews by figures as illustrious as Tom Maschler basis of national insurance payments: only about 10 and Philip Toynbee (a patient). A Fortunate Man per cent of doctors polled in 1948 were in favour of has been praised by everyone from Geoff Dyer to the new bill. The NHS was, above all else, a political Alain de Botton and even called the best book ever idea. In a time of rationing and relative penury about general practice; and I can recall the names of resources in the immediate post-war period, of colleagues who decided to study medicine after government moved to create a taxation-based reading it in their younger, more impressionable structure that freed GPs, for the first time, from and—dare I say—more idealistic years. the financial anxieties of having to run a medical Francis calls the book “a masterpiece of witness” practice as a small, usually home-based business although the witness is now historical, since com- (see A.J. Cronin’s once very popular doctor-novels). munities and their physicians in Britain have been Despite the profession’s initial mistrust of utterly transformed from the largely stable social government intentions, doctors now tend to be structure of the immediate post-war period (until among the staunchest supporters of the system 1979), in which GPs were key players, into today’s of universal coverage introduced by the Labour money-driven, interlinked, “on the go” society. In government and which Disraeli’s political succes- the first forty years of the National Health Service sors—“Conservatives who conserve nothing”, to GPs were legally responsible for the care of their quote Flaubert—have been trying to dismantle, patients, twenty-four hours a day, and sometimes mostly on the sly, and replace with American-style did yeoman service too, looking after them in the health provision. The 2012 Health and Social Care local hospital or old folks’ home, or delivering their Act with its compulsory tendering and restricted offspring. contracts effectively marked the end of the NHS Though the NHS was socialist in inspiration, in England (if not in other parts of the UK, which being forced through by the energetic Aneurin now enjoy, if only to a limited degree, a measure of Bevan in the historic Labour government that devolved power). Only neoliberal ideology or naked came to power in 1945, there was always an element self-interest can explain why politicians would of Disraeli’s one-nation conservatism about gen- want to replace a relatively low-cost system (the eral practice: it emphasised the social obligations UK spends less than the European Union average of those in the higher echelons—or at least of the on health care) with one modelled on US systems patrician class to which most doctors belonged— of healthcare provision that notoriously swallow so of a hierarchical society to those below (noblesse much in resources, being far more bureaucratic and oblige). The doctor was a fiduciary for the patient, inefficient than the NHS (which is free at point- and it was accepted that he or she would act solely of-use), and deliver so comparatively little in terms in the patient’s interests. This kind of moral seri- of comprehensive services. In the American real- ousness—a very British variety of institutionalised ity, unpaid medical bills are the principal cause of

96 Quadrant March 2016 A Half-Open Door bankruptcy. hats i still striking about A Fortunate Man is Now, everyone seems to believe “society” needs how, in six weeks of shadowing his charge micromanaged accounts of what its members fork Waround the clock, Berger not only formed a bond out for services. Although harassed and pressured in with Sassall but gained insight into the nature of their daytime working hours, GPs are considerably his professional activities and standing in the com- better off than before—Marx would have munity. His was the peculiar respect enjoyed by a recognised them as a very special group of high- relatively new addition to the pantomime of British earning “wage labourers”—while being subjected national life: “the unconventional doctor”. He is like everyone else to the Taylorism of standard- the representative of a unified, rational medicine setting bodies, government targets, accountancy but as one of the most prominent personalities in spreadsheets and referral “gateways” in a way his social group embodies some of the qualities of Berger’s subject would have found intolerable. the ancient healer. Rather than guaranteeing the marginal conditions John Sassall (not his real name) started on his that might allow the profession to flourish, the career as a kind of master mariner who loved deal- state and its representatives intervene so directly ing with emergencies—he had served in the navy in the profession that self-regulation (which used during the war and been a great reader of Joseph to be one of the definitions of Conrad—before maturing into a a profession) seems an antique physician of exemplary tact and concept. The urban panopticon n the 1950s and sensibility: if it was still a matter of that is contemporary Britain even I “doctor knows best” in those days, extends into the surgery. Except in 1960s, general Sassall offered his patients a can- the more remote parts of the UK one practice was open- did kind of fraternity as “an ideal is now very unlikely to encounter brother”. He knew how to listen a physician like the man Berger ended and even without interrupting, and it is safe calls “Dr John Sassall”, seemingly exciting, as doctors to say he never fobbed his patients on call for his local community at put together a body off with anything resembling a any time—“He sleeps easily, but “checklist”. Berger—clearly fasci- at heart, he welcomes being called of knowledge about nated (as perhaps only an intellec- out at night.” social conditions tual can be) by the spectacle of a In Sassall’s heyday, the 1950s professional man absorbed in the and 1960s, general practice was and their relation mystery of his job—observed, in open-ended and even exciting, as to health and a famous phrase, that his patients doctors—like anthropologists in allowed him, in a capacity both the field—put together a body of illness that existed intimate and curatorial, to be practical and theoretical knowledge nowhere else in “the clerk of their records”. (Now, about social conditions and their the world. disgruntled GPs call themselves relation to health and illness that “check-list clerks”.) existed nowhere else in the world. The book opens with a series of Having been traditionally at the bottom of the med- vignettes which describe events involving Sassall ical pecking order, general practice began to attract in his “unusually well equipped” surgery, with its some sharp minds. John Fry (born Jacob Freitag) anaesthetic apparatus and sterilising equipment established an “evidence-base” in his own practice (for minor surgery), and on home visits to patients in Beckenham long before anyone else thought to or attending emergencies. The degree of commit- make it a methodology, and debunked such fash- ment shown by Sassall to his patients, as well as ionably dangerous procedures as tonsillectomy; his professionalism and sympathy, are exemplary. Michael Balint was a psychiatrist who studied the “Sassall, with the cunning intuition that any fortu- doctor–patient relationship in depth and convinced nate man requires today in order to go on working GPs—whose opinions had never been especially at what he believes in, has established the situation cherished by their hospital colleagues—that they he needs.” were “experts” on their patients; and Julian Tudor That situation, it emerges, is one of full Hart, a stalwart advocate of the socialist founding imaginative engagement with himself as well as principles of the NHS, came up with the “inverse his patients. It is not clear to what extent Berger care law” at his practice in Glyncorrwg: this law puts thoughts in Sassall’s head (rather than words states that the availability of medical care var- in his mouth): speculations about the nature ies inversely with the need for it, especially when of life in a community are supplemented with a exposed to naked market forces. smattering of references to cultural luminaries

Quadrant March 2016 97 A Half-Open Door of the 1960s such as Sartre, Piaget and Gramsci, one who opens it. (Sassall himself talks of open- which date the book as decisively as Jean Mohr’s ing doors and the supreme importance of “the first photos. Berger discusses Sassall’s depressive contact”, even though he sometimes feels he’s “in phases, but doesn’t provide any insight into his the valley of death”.) domestic circumstances. It is unfortunate (since it While Mohr’s photographs will not be to contradicts Sassall’s insistence on the complexity every-one’s taste, being austere and grainy (though of doctor–patient dealings) that the local Forest of presented in this book with less contrast and to a Dean inhabitants—who should properly be called higher resolution than in previous editions) and “Foresters”, not “foresters”—sometimes come across consequently reminiscent of how the NHS moth- as faceless members of the Great British Public, ered a residual puritanism in British culture, with although some of the vignettes offer moments of its various stoic figures suffering in silence, bent humour and insight: I particularly liked the one in acceptance or attending deliverance, I was about the “female” partner in the long-married intrigued to read (in the graphic design magazine couple who, on examination at home by Sassall Eye) that the book is now considered a design clas- because of “bleeding from down below” (owing to sic, owing to its layout by Gerald Cinamon, with haemorrhoids), turns out to be a man. The incident words and pictures building on each other, as in a of the displaced genitalia was thereafter passed conversation. over in silence by all parties concerned, including Being delivered as images, Mohr’s suite of pho- Sassall. tos is sometimes more immediately telling than Berger refines his key notion of witness. When Berger’s text; and I must confess—reading the we call for a doctor, he writes: book again more than twenty years after my last reading—that some of Berger’s insights now seem we are asking him to cure us and to relieve our to be working too hard at significance. The large suffering, but, if he cannot cure us, we are also double-page spread that opens the narrative proper asking him to witness our dying. The value of shows a scene with two men fishing from a boat on the witness is that he has seen so many others a placid river somewhere in the Forest while the die. (This, rather than the prayers and last rites, accompanying script reads: was also the real value which the priest once had.) He is the living intermediary between us Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a and the multitudinous dead. He belongs to us landscape seems to be less a setting for the life and he has belonged to them. And the hard but of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which real comfort which they offer through him is their struggles, achievements and accidents still that of fraternity. take place ...

Living intermediary or go-between: that is an A landscape as a set of drapes? It seems a forced inspired and possibly mischievous reading of the analogy: surely Berger didn’t think it was his task psychopomp or soul-guide function once attrib- to burst in on the Foresters in the hidden recesses uted to the god Hermes, wielder of the caduceus of such private lives as they might have aspired that is still associated with the medical profession. to? It makes him sound like that Spanish devil (More intriguingly, Hermes was also the trick- Asmodeus, who took the roofs off people’s houses ster god whose services could be called on as the in order to spy on what was going on within. And chief protector of shepherds, gamblers and market here he wants to do detective work on an entire thieves.) topography! It must also be said that the obscured personages he impression of the book’s being a product and loose ends in A Fortunate Man now draw of its time is heightened by Mohr’s black-and- attention to themselves, not least Sassall’s wife, Twhite images, one of which catches Sassall stand- who is not mentioned at all in the text and whose ing in a doorway (and has now been placed—rightly presence appears to have had far more bearing on I would say—on the dustcover of the Canongate Sassall’s professional life than Berger allows. She edition)—a telling image in a book about inner was, after all, his support system—practice manager and outer landscapes, as in Robert Frost’s poetry, and presumably receptionist too. And as Sassall’s where “meaning is meant just to elude you going “valley of [the shadow of] death” quote suggests, he out as you come in” as the poet wrote in a let- is a man on tenterhooks. Perhaps Berger’s six weeks ter to Harriet Monroe in 1917: a doorway signifies weren’t quite long enough to detect the telltale an abyss of possibility. Or as an old saw has it, signs of a cyclothymic illness, with its successive the man who closes a door is not the same as the highs and lows. In his introduction Francis tells

98 Quadrant March 2016 A Half-Open Door us that Sassall’s wife’s unexpected death caused Ande w learn nothing about the circumstances him to abandon his practice and travel in China of Sassall’s even more troubling suicide, with a “learning the ways of the barefoot doctors”—which firearm, fifteen years after the book’s first publica- seems an inappropriately extravagant response to tion, which adds a taste of wormwood to the title. the death of a spouse. To imagine that Chinese Doctors, like their patients, are only ever half- rural medicine might be a “people’s medicine” open beings. (by analogy with the NHS) in the years after the Cultural Revolution when there was a concerted Iain Bamforth is a poet, physician, essayist and drive to remove ownership of knowledge from translator who lives in Strasbourg. His essay collection anybody who appeared to be an “expert”, suggests A Doctor’s Dictionary was recently published by an oddly detached kind of primitivism. Carcanet.

In a dream a face

Even those not of your time or your people, those you’ve never met, more than the day-world, their faces are, well, in your face, strong in bas relief, life grained in their skins, alive like microbes which live upon the skin, doing their necessary thing.

Maybe you had seen them once: in an advert or a crowd and somehow absorbed a look, a manner, a tic. And assumed you knew them, intimately, down to habits, the smell of their kitchens, how they got up from a chair, what their eyes see, like this man I met on the train going to Sydney:

let’s see: white shirt, weathered, tired, a stockman going to hospital for a cancer he said years of spraying chemical had induced; his voice, cracked as his hands; his eyes, looking past my youth to days I would never know, clouding, the way a screen closes around a bed. And with it acceptance, the stillness of hills.

That morning through the fog and the singing rails, that face real as a dream. And he travelling beyond the dream of blue days, of hard things like the shudder of cattle in the yards, a crowbar striking rock, the eyes of a fox in the lambing paddock. Beyond. Beyond Central.

Russell Erwin

Quadrant March 2016 99 Alan Gould

Gossamer Shakespeare Watching a Dream Unfold

he f dramas o human sleep are well portrayed up-front of our reaction is particular to a sense of in Shakespeare’s plays. Lady Macbeth sleep- first-time-ever. Dream begins in fug, concludes too walks and, in doing so, illumines her larger frequently in interruption, but while its phantasma- vTulnerable being when the impressive self-controls goria is before the inner eye, it holds us with its inter- of her daemon are down: nal consistency. To dream is to be both spelled and bound, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I observe, All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this embeds these conditions finely. In its outlandishness little hand. it takes us to an immediacy of sensation that is quite distinct from Shakespeare’s other comedies, and yet On the eve of Bosworth, Richard Crookback’s no less astute in how it bears upon the well-being of victims usurp his rest, illumining the Drang his human loves. malignity has exerted on that superb self-possession, In observing this, of course, I must take care. an anxiety invisible until dream can provide x-ray Throughout the plays, Shakespeare’s perception of it. With exquisite tease and affection, Mercutio of veritable actuality stresses its insubstantial- constructs for Romeo the fabulous dream of Queen ity, its phantasma. “We are such stuff as dreams Mab, conjuring the outlandishness of dream in the are made on,” Prospero reminds us, as though the same impulse he subverts its actuality: Shakespearean conception of the Real were fragile, a permeable membrane between the illusory and the True, I talk of dreams; palpable like those ocean-bed fissures where interior Which are the children of an idle brain seismic pressure meets the atmospheric to form the Begot of nothing but vain fantasy … original chemical combinations for sentient life.

Here, and elsewhere in The Complete Works, are n A Midsummer Night’s Dream the first sense of most delicate treatments of the oneiric as key to a dream fabric emerges from the list of dramatis the illumining of ampler character. But only in one pIersonae, where the names from Greek antiquity— Shakespearean play does the word dream appear Theseus, Egeus, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, as part of the title and take a deliberated role in Oberon, Titania—make hotchpotch neighbourhood how the drama is meditated: A Midsummer Night’s with the Anglo-Celtic names of the tradesmen/ Dream. So I take this to invite the question: How players—Peter Quince, Snug, Nick Bottom and searchingly does the dramatist evoke the displace- Francis Flute, together with credible names from ments of the dreaming mind and create the very Anglo faery, Puck, Moth, Cobweb, Mustardseed. fabric of dreaming? Of course we accept this neighbourhood of Greek What do I mean by “dream-fabric”? We recog- aristocrats and English artisans, figures both mythic nise our dreams to have an oblique imprint on con- and folkloric, for all its discordance, because we are sciousness. Gossamer-light in their touch on that forewarned we are watching a dream unfold. So consciousness, dreams nonetheless agitate, startle we expect the jolts of anachronism, whether in the and estrange. Dream propels the dreaming-ego in a name-language itself, or the behaviour of those who momentum that peculiarly compounds intense self- bear the names. absorption with radical openness to what, a-dream, The very setting of the play “brings on” and claims itself as natural narrative. Dream rehearses then disperses a dream expectation. The play opens the nicety of our emotions by defamiliarising what and closes amid the rational architecture of the might turn up in the wakeful world so that the Athenian court, quickly moves, via Peter Quince’s

100 Quadrant March 2016 Gossamer Shakespeare lowly house, to the profuse tangle of the forest in He wants to possess his best mate’s girlfriend which the absurdities, reversals and displacements because her allure “kills” him, and so it follows occur, a movement from geometry to scribble (as he must “kill” his best mate to acquire her. With it were) and back to geometry. Furthermore, this what incisive logic does he deter Helena, who wor- forest, in addition to being the fluid territory one ships him distractedly. Here is masochism, inde- encounters in dream, is an intensified landscape as cent desire, but also speech like a naked thing with Oberon describes it: all the temperate controls of wakefulness down, for all we behold at this juncture two fully wake- I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, ful lovers. Here is upset in the natural order; the Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, dove preys upon the griffin, the deer hunts down Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, the tiger. Next arrive Lysander and Hermia. They With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine. have lost their way and, after making extravagant vows to each other that almost immediately will be I take that “luscious” for the key here. If the broken, subside into sleep. Puck smears his potion, dynamic of dream is to make what “happens” simul- Demetrius and Helena reappear, Lysander wakes, taneously an involuntary and egotistical sequence, immediately to transfer his ardour to Helena who then dreamers cannot help what happens to them in turn is confounded by it and flees pursued by at the same time they experience their presence in Lysander. Hermia wakes from a dream of being in events with a hallucinogenic urgency. In dream (my the coils of a serpent. Act III opens with the absurd own for instance) we know/feel how jabber about the play-within-the- the unkillable crone pursues us, how play. There are puns and mala- the nippled figments tease us. It is he play’s focus propisms galore. Bottom is given just a dream, but our trembles, our T his ass’s head, affrights his fellow ejaculated sperm, are actual, which is not, as it is clowns, but infatuates Titania. is to say the figments have charged in Shakespeare’s Hermia arrives, pursued by the material effects. Demetrius, Helena arrives, pursued Tragedies, Histories, by Lysander; again the exchanges ut before all, dream lies—and and most of the have the intemperateness of dream tells its lies—in the action. And Comedies, on the and the mood is both distracted iBn this play there is no respite in the and murderous. Demetrius, having action’s onset through Acts 2 to 4. particularity of incensed Hermia, decides to sleep, Pursuit, vehemence, the flickery character. Rather it so is smeared with the potion, presences against dark background wakes to see Helena to whom he which include both the fairies and is on the character transfers his ardour. She takes this the feral and avian life of the for- of Reality itself in reversal of attitude as a cruel joke, est—horse, hound, hog, bear … at so it follows she must quarrel with every turn, “the finch, the sparrow respect to Love. her bosom friend, Hermia, Helena and the lark”, glowworm and but- being the only principal unscathed terfly. Here are what might be termed free radicals by the potion. Then, all by Puck’s connivance lie in play, so, to convey this dream-frenzy, let me, in down to sleep … Here is the widdershins of dream; one tumbling paragraph, give a resumé of the action it is feverish in pace, baffling in sense, and yet in these central acts … comme il faut in how the phantasma bears upon the … Puck materialises; we learn how, in his imminence in the lives of Lysander/Hermia and errands, he can usurp the laws of physics, biology, Demetrius/Helena. scale and time. Next arrive Oberon and Titania There is plot in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with respective entourages; husband and wife in with its ointments, ass’s heads, and blind wander- contention, weirdly petty as to its cause, exagger- ing through wild nature, there is a semblance of ated in its intransigence. Vitally Oberon reminds unplottedness to suit dream-scenario. And yet there us of one moral consideration from the wakeful is fortuity and symmetry intruding in strange min- world, namely the violations, desertions and troth- istrations. The antagonistic lovers arrive to sleep in breaking that belong to Theseus’s past. Why is this the same glade. The elision from court orderliness important? Theseus is head of state in this court, to dream disorder and back go via Peter Quince’s where marriages impend, and where our “dream’s” house in both directions. These patterns are quiet, enactments are designed precisely to show life’s but laid down, and to my mind exquisite in terms of power to confront Love and troth with the strange illumining Shakespeare’s fastidiousness in creating and estranging. Then Demetrius and Helena arrive. the texture of dream and its context. We have noted

Quadrant March 2016 101 Gossamer Shakespeare the tapestry, of wild beasts, of faery, of those instan- I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this taneous usurpations of scale that Puck appears to dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” have within his self-possession. And self-possession because it hath no bottom. does appear to be one key to well-being in this play. Puck has it, Hippolyta has it, Helena, for all her dis- And while bottomless and figmentary the tress, has it, and the bumpkin artisans have it. But dream may be, it has also been momentous in its Theseus’s presence, for instance, is made opaque by purpose. Men and women, in troth to spend their ceremony and perhaps self-conscious by his former lives intimately together, have witnessed behaviour infidelities. His faery coeval, Oberon, is lessened of startling estrangement, self from self, and self by the paltriness of his marital quarrel, lampooned from those where they have placed most trust. They when his queen forsakes him for an ass. To trace the have seen a queenly woman besotted by an ass. They attribute of self-possession through Shakespeare’s have been both agents and victims of intemperance, thirty-seven plays and two narrative poems might cruelty, betrayal. If this is how dream deals, it is be one of the most profound studies of human well- also how wakeful life might deal, as Theseus’s past being it is possible to pursue. shows. So the animus of the Dream has been to rehearse these troth-makers for the volatility by o wh are the dreamers in A Midsummer Night’s which Life’s unfolding can reverse or distort the Dream? Most conspicuously it is Ego, which is to circumstances and appearances in Life where we sSay each witness or reader of the play in isolation and blithely trust. This is the subtle, charged purpose beset by the phantasmagoria of Shakespeare’s forest. of dream in the experience of being human, and Here is the neat conceit of the play. Whatsoever the howsoever in the post-play Lysander and Hermia, shuffle and cough reminding us we are each part of Demetrius and Helena measure up as husbands an audience in a playhouse, that word dream in the and wives, keepers of the future, they have been comedy’s title reminds how each witness to dream rehearsed for the strangeness of their own natures. is alone in these eerie deep-forest sequences where Wonderful comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, a beautiful queen can be distracted with love for an but it is also an acute study of humans being pre- ass, where honest, good-mannered youths can tra- pared for partnership. duce their beloveds and seek to murder their best And Theseus’s veteran consort, Hippolyta, friends. understands this very well when she comments on To add to this eeriness, the play has a qual- “The Dream”: ity of echolalia. There is the play-within-the-play of Pyramus and Thisbe, but there is also dream- But all the story of the night told over, within-The-Dream. Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, And all their minds transfigured so together, Helena and Titania are dreamers like us in a way More witnesseth than fancy’s images, that Oberon and Puck are not. We have noted And grows to something of great constancy: Hermia’s nightmare of the serpent: But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

Methought a serpent eat my heart away, “More witnesseth.” Here, I take it, is the key And you sat smiling at his cruel prey. to Shakespeare’s understanding of the dream phantasmagoria, and how it integrates itself with And here’s the point. The play’s focus is not, as life’s perplexity and unfolding. There is character it is in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Histories, and most in the real world, and there are figmentary of the Comedies, on the particularity of charac- impersonations in dream, and the one informs ter. Rather it is on the character of Reality itself in the other and is modified thereby. Here is that respect to Love, the dynamic that forms itself when permeable membrane, and here is a very high order Dream and Wakefulness interact to prepare human of characterisation indeed. beings for lifetime commitments to each other. The dream concludes at the end of IV.i, and with Alan Gould’s ninth novel, a picaresque titled The bumpkin propriety Bottom ushers us back into The Poets’ Stairwell, is published by Black Pepper Press in Real: Melbourne.

102 Quadrant March 2016 Neil McDonald

Two French Masters Bertrand Tavernier and Julien Duvivier

hosefs o u who follow from Australia the moves through the gilded chambers and labyrin- work of the French director Bertrand thine corridors of the Foreign Ministry in a whirl- Tavernier are frustrated—with ourselves. wind of papers and slamming doors proclaiming ATfter years of complaining that the great director’s there are three principles of diplomacy—respon- work was not being seen theatrically in this coun- sibility, unity, efficiency—only to announce later try, when in 2014 his latest film, the political satire that the principles are legitimacy, unity, efficacy. Quay d’Orsay, was released in “certain cinemas” we Given this material Tavernier, as he puts it, “saw missed it—or at least I did. It’s now called The French the possibility of comedy with serious undertones Minister, and I was looking under the original title. and at the same time a way of mixing crazy char- I have since discovered that there were reviews in acters and events and in a way that everything was the Sydney Morning Herald and on SBS which also believable”. The film was shot on location at the escaped me. Those “certain cinemas” don’t seem ministry, with Taillard’s habit of bursting through to have given The French Minister anything like a doors and sending papers flying becoming one of long run, even though the film was a hit in France, the film’s best running gags. His arrival in most where it won two Césars. But back then I should scenes is heralded by the sound of slamming doors. have been urging you to view the film theatrically, In one sequence we see a door being repaired in the where Tavernier’s commanding exploitation of the background, and a final title states “no doors in the wide screen can be seen at its best. Still, it is now Quay d’Orsay were damaged in the making of this readily available on DVD and, if anything, its sat- film”. ire is even more relevant in 2016 than it was eight- Tavernier uses these whirlwind movements een months ago. What is more, when The French of the minister—where we see him, again in Minister was screened in America some good critics Tavernier’s words, “multiplying himself as though managed to get Tavernier on record about the film he has several hands”—as one way of creating the and his working methods. So there are some advan- frenetic pace of the film. A major influence was tages in coming late to a story. Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, one of the great Quay d’Orsay or The French Minister—Quay 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies (even if it was d’Orsay refers to the large quay where the French released in January 1940) with some of the fastest Foreign Ministry is located—is based on a graphic pacing of the era. (Tavernier is a formidable film novel (comic book to my generation) co-written historian.) There were, however, no screenings of by Christophe Blain, who was in a way describ- the American classic during the shoot. “I stop being ing his own experiences working for Dominique de a film buff when I’m making my own film,” he says. Villepin, the French Foreign Minister between 2002 While Tavernier may achieve the same kind of and 2004. Many Australians remember de Villepin frenetic rhythm as Hawks, his methods are very dif- from the television coverage of the UN debates on ferent. Like most American directors of the 1930s, the Iraq War, when his icy dignity and eloquence Hawks allows his viewers to forget the camera. were in marked contrast to the condescending rude- Set-ups are mainly at eye level and there are only ness of Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, a few unobtrusive moving shots. Although Hawks and the arrogance of the Americans. According to created some memorable images, particularly when Blain it was very different behind the scenes. working with cinematographers like James Wong The film’s minister (given in the script the spec- Howe, his films are calculated to make their audi- tacular name of Alexandre Taillard de Worms) and ences believe they are spectators watching the action played with great panache by Thierry Lhermitte, unfold. The hectic pace of His Girl Friday is created

Quadrant March 2016 103 Two French Masters through the superbly timed and delivered acceler- film so they can appreciate fully its richness and ated dialogue, which is so fast that when I screened complexity. the film for my students back in the 1970s many of them could not keep up with all the wisecracks. echnically The French Minister is extraordinar- Tavernier certainly uses accelerated dialogue; ily accomplished, with twenty-first-century after all, that is the way the French usually speak— Ttechnology employed with skill and restraint. A just watch their news programs—but he also new DVD release in the Eclipse Series 44 from employs a restless camera, fast cutting and at times Criterion, however, takes us to the beginnings a split screen. He is famous for covering scenes in of French sound film. It is Julien Duvivier in the single takes with the camera following the action Thirties and includes titles that have never been seen either hand-held or from the dolly. (The word dolly outside Europe, carefully subtitled, with excellent refers to the legend that to get a moving shot an background notes. early director mounted a camera in a pram. It then Duvivier was best known in Australia for his became the name of the wheeled platform on which American films—the wonderfully romantic The the camera would be set up. The special features Great Waltz (1938), Tales of Manhattan (1942), a on the DVD show Tavernier’s cinematographer, portmanteau film in which he worked with Charles Jerome Almeras, employing a small mobile crane Boyer, Edward G. Robinson and Charles Laughton; for some of the moving shots.) Tavernier has no res- and later the two Don Camillo comedies that he ervations about drawing attention to the camera, or made in Italy, The Little World of Don Camillo (1952) to his editing for that matter. For him they are just and The Return of Don Camillo (1953) shown on the part of the narrative. arthouse circuit here at the time. Duvivier’s master- The mobile camera seems to pull the minister piece, Pepe le Moko (1937), did not reach Australia along as he storms through his domain proclaim- until the late 1950s, when as I recall it was treated by ing his opinions on American neocons, the need for our local critics with the respect it deserved. The film instant reactions and the principles of modern diplo- had been bought by Walter Wanger and remade as macy, all the while demanding rewrites of speeches Algiers in 1938 with Charles Boyer in the role of the he has barely read. But as with Hawks there are tragic Pepe, the part created by Jean Gabin. Wanger counterpoints. In His Girl Friday in the midst of tried to destroy the prints of the Duvivier version he the high-powered lunacy there is a quiet scene had virtually plagiarised. Fortunately he failed. where Rosalind Russell’s reporter interviews a con- In the film community, as distinct from the demned man. Tavernier takes this sort of change of academics, what caused us to take Duvivier really pace much further. Maupas, the minister’s chief of seriously was when film-maker and scholar Barrie staff, is played by Niels Arestrup as softly-spoken, Pattison returned from France proclaiming Duvivier grey-haired and unassuming. He is also very funny. as one of the great directors of the 1930s. In fair- Whether it is quietly making phone calls to resolve ness to my academic colleagues I should note there a crisis while the minister harangues his staff about is online a splendid essay by the late Sam Rohdie how they should provide him with highlighters that on Duvivier’s career that discusses Duvivier’s silent aren’t squishy, or deftly managing to get Taillard to films that date back to just after the Great War. see reason, the contrast between the characters is Australia was not totally ignorant of the great both comic and profoundly truthful. director’s earlier work; in 1935 La Bandera, starring Tavernier has said he has little time for dumb- Jean Gabin, about the Spanish Foreign Legion, was and-dumber comedy where the characters are buf- shown at the Savoy in Sydney, where it was greatly foons. The French Minister is effective because it is admired by the young Damien Parer. But until now about intelligent people who are played straight. there has been no real context. Like all the great comedies the film is fundamen- The Eclipse DVD goes a little way towards rem- tally serious. Dominique de Villepin himself con- edying this deficiency. The first film of the set is firmed The French Minister’s accuracy, although he David Golder (1930). It is perhaps not the best to thought he was probably even more outrageous in start with if you are discovering Duvivier’s body of real life than on the screen. work for the first time. The film is slow-moving with The film concludes with the writing of one darkly shadowed interiors contrasted with brightly final speech, only this time we see it delivered. It lit location shots and is of course an early sound comes from the real speech the real French Foreign film. This is not the problem you might expect. As Minister gave to the United Nations opposing the with the best of the early sound directors, Duvivier invasion of Iraq, and Lhermitte is as impressive as has recaptured the fluidity of silent film. We can see de Villepin was at the time. It is the kind of resolu- the beginnings of his characteristic moving cam- tion that virtually requires viewers to return to the era, which he employed to comment on the action

104 Quadrant March 2016 Two French Masters ando t establish a setting. There are too the extreme ter portrayal of a family who in the words of the close-ups and, at times, even the closely packed, youngest son—the Carrot-Top of the title—“are a tightly framed images characteristic of his darker group of people forced to live together under one works. roof who cannot stand each other”. Based on the best-selling novel by Jewish writer Duvivier builds up his portrait of their lives Irene Nemirovsky, David Golder is the story of a detail by detail: the father ignoring his wife’s banker who has risen from Polish refugee to become suggestions as to what he should wear on a hot day; a power in the financial world. Unlike American her casual cruelty as she dismisses an old servant; films of the same period Golder is not a stereotypi- the arrogant selfishness of the eldest son as his cal hero or villain. He may ruthlessly reject a former mother fawns on him; and the way the youngest partner’s plea for help but Golder is neither cruel boy is expected to do all the chores around the when he turns on his avaricious wife, nor pathetic house and is given only a nickname. At first Carrot- when he sacrifices his life to pro- Top seems well able to look after vide for a manipulative daughter himself. There are delightful scenes who may not be his own. p to then Baur where he plays with a young child This was the first of seven films U and they have a mock wedding and Duvivier made with the great stage had splendidly bathe naked in the stream—the actor Harry Baur. Baur’s work has embodied the man’s boy’s shivering seems only too real. not been familiar to Australians, But the indifference of his father, but he was a giant of French cin- increasing sensitivity his mother’s systematic cruelty, ema of the 1930s and he appears in to his son’s needs. mental and physical, and, above all, all of the films in this collection. seeing other families who are happy A physically imposing and rather Now as he probes drives him to attempt suicide. He ugly man, he had a powerful screen further, with the is rescued at the last minute by his presence and an extraordinary emotions beautifully father. There follows the finest scene range. Although Baur had made a between father and son I have ever few silents he was primarily a stage understated, it becomes seen on the screen. Up to then Baur actor when Duvivier persuaded almost unbearably had splendidly embodied the man’s him to appear in David Golder. He increasing sensitivity to his son’s seems to have easily adjusted to moving yet completely needs. Now as he probes further, the camera. There are a few the- unsentimental. with the emotions beautifully atrical moments but nothing like understated, it becomes almost the unabashed overplaying of John unbearably moving yet completely Barrymore or Paul Muni in their early sound films. unsentimental. The great actor is matched by an Baur’s is a rich multi-layered performance that even extraordinary performance by the child performer in the big moments is never sentimental. Robert Lynen. Both these superb actors were later murdered by aurs i equally fine as the indifferent father in the Nazis. Lynen fought in the Resistance and was Poil de Carotte (1932), the next film in the col- imprisoned in Germany. After several attempts to Blection and perhaps the best starting point for any- escape he was executed. Baur was imprisoned by one discovering Duvivier for the first time. Poil de the Gestapo and tortured. He died of a heart attack Carotte, which translates as “carrot-top”, the rather three days after his release. demeaning nickname of the main character, was a favourite film of Duvivier’s. This was the second uvivier was nothing if not versatile. His next time he had filmed the story, based on an 1894 film, shot in 1933 and also included in the col- novella by Jules Renard. The silent version of 1925 Dlection, is an early Maigret, La Tête d’un Homme. is available and according some online postings is The novel had been published in 1931 and the very good; I have not yet been able to secure a copy author, Georges Simenon, wanted to direct the film of the DVD. version, but this project fell through and Duvivier The sound Poil de Carotte is a masterpiece. It was brought in. Much to Simenon’s disgust was filmed in the summer of 1932 in Correze, in Duvivier cast Harry Baur as Maigret. Simenon had south-western France. There is a sunny lushness wanted Pierre Renoir, who had played the detec- about the exteriors that anticipates Jean Renoir’s tive in La Nuit du Carrefour, directed by his brother Partie de Campagne (although Renoir’s main influ- Jean Renoir the year before. But there had been a ence seems to have been his father’s paintings). For delay in the pre-production of Raymond Bernard’s all the beauty of the rural settings the film is a bit- Les Miserables and Baur was available. Duvivier also

Quadrant March 2016 105 Two French Masters removed the mystery of the original, concentrating and Fernandel gives a delightful performance as a instead on the duel of wits between Maigret and self-important hairdresser. Marie Bell as the widow, Radek, the devious murderer played flamboyantly Christine, strikes just the right note of compassion by Valery Inkijinoff. and understanding as she uncovers these stories. Despite all these changes, paradoxically La Tête All four films in this collection have been care- d’un Homme is painstakingly faithful to the atmos- fully restored. Ideally they should be available the- phere of the novel: the grubby lodging rooms, the atrically, but as Bette Davis says in Now, Voyager, sleazy, aimless hotel society; and, Simenon’s objec- “We have the stars—why ask for the moon?” tions notwithstanding, the film gets the Maigret of the books just about right. Baur had the seeming y old friend David Brill recently directed detachment, the massive physical presence and the a documentary, Dean Semler’s Road to gruff authority Simenon described. Not in the book HollywoodM , an affectionate portrait of the distin- is the inspector’s breakdown when Radek kills one guished cinematographer’s return to Australia last of his men, but the moment is truthful and effective. year to visit a class of primary children in his home- The final work in the collection is Le Carnet de town of Renmark. Brill weaves in some reminis- Bal (1937), the first of Duvivier’s portmanteau films. cences from Semler’s wife, friends and colleagues A wealthy widow, newly alone, visits the names on such as George Miller about the making of Mad an old dance card—the carnet de bal of the title. Max II, not to mention Mel Gibson, Hugh Jackman Her journey lets us experience an array of stories and Angelina Jolie. Brill also gets some good anec- enacted by some of the best actors in 1930s French dotes from Semler himself. cinema. Louis Jouvet is delightfully sleazy as a dis- The film was shown on SBS at 5.35 p.m. on barred lawyer turned gangster, while Harry Baur Saturday January 23 with no publicity whatsoever nearly breaks your heart as an old priest who was from SBS. Reportedly, publicising a documentary once a concert pianist, but having lost his gift now about an Oscar-winning Australian cinematogra- directs the church choir. Sad as this may be, in a pher “was not a priority”. I’m informed this idiocy nice touch he is seen to be rather good at it. We has attracted some scathing letters of protest from also get a last glimpse of Robert Lynen as one of distinguished broadcasters, so watch out for the the choir. Raimu is at first amusingly pompous then repeat screening—perhaps this time in a prime- pathetic as a provincial mayor with a parasitic son time slot.

Bonyi

Bidwillii. Jurassic cousin of the Monkey Puzzle. They live five hundred years. Watermelon-sized 10 kg spiked green cones, four to a tree. Maton has been carving guitar headboards Known, unaffectionately, from Bunya pine for twenty years. as conck-ya-pines, a couple was hospitalized by a cone Aboriginals eat the shoots, in Nelson Queen’s Gardens. peel the bark for kindling. Another killed a cockatoo in Parramatta. Nuts are consumed raw, A big one, nicknamed Titanic, boiled, bbq’d or roasted, fell sixty feet and flattened a horse. (in the latter, a drilled hole avoids explosions), Windscreens, roofs and bonnets flavor of starchy potato and chestnut, are regularly entertained. gluten-free, makes a red tea. Ideal for Bonsai.

Joe Dolce

106 Quadrant March 2016 S t ory

Sasha Sean O’Leary

asha Orlov has schizophrenia. She works at Modern Records in St Kilda, the best record store in Australia, especially because now it’s all downloads and IPod and MP3, but Modern Records still rocks. She’s pretty wild when she gets psychotic. She can’t let go of things easily. Her boyfriend, Dom, looks out for her but sometimes it gets too much for even him. She flies off the handle and it comes out like an exploding volcano and you better duck for cover. It takes her ages to settle down. SDom had to call the CAT team once because she was so out of control and they made her go to hospital for what was supposed to be two days, only it turned into ten days. When she got out she said to Dom, If you ever call those pricks again or put me into that pysch ward again I will kill you. Then she kissed him and dragged him into the bedroom for one of their kinky sex sessions. Dom met her at Modern Records nearly two years ago when he was searching for a vinyl record of The Call’s The Walls Came Down. His first impression was that she was an Adalita-type rock chick who would say, Who the hell are you talking about? But she had a little Chrissie Hynde in her too and she knew the record, didn’t have it, but searched for it and got it for Dom and of course he had to come in every day to check whether she had it or not. He was gone on her. Dom is thirty-five and Sasha is twenty-two. Their flat or unit, whatever you want to call it, is stuffed full of bookshelves and DVDs and CDs and vinyl records and it hits you. Everyone who goes there, which is not that many, it is the first comment they make—about the books and DVDs and CDs and records. They hang out together a lot, mostly just the two of them because Sasha doesn’t trust many people. Oh and St Kilda is pretty much a very cool place, it’s near the beach and Luna Park and there’s a million cafes and pubs and restaurants but it has hookers and drug addicts too and it all comes together somehow, all over the top of each other, like some crazy urban experiment that would never work if someone had planned it. But St Kilda doesn’t have laneways, not fashionable ones like in the centre of Melbourne. Melbourne is sort of forced cool. You know, look at our laneways that we made even cooler (read ruined) by stuffing them full of cafes and fake graffiti by fake street artists and we also have pop-up bars and aren’t we just European-styled and New York-influenced. Give Sasha and Dom Victoria Street, Darlinghurst, or Norton Street, Leichhardt, any day of the week. Somehow they like Sydney better even though they live in Melbourne, or do they just like stirring the pot? Sasha did have one bad incident at work but she’s so damn good at her job her boss, Angelo, let it pass by. She nearly killed this Goth guy who bad-mouthed her. He didn’t call the cops because the owner told him he’d tell the cops he made the whole thing up. Are you getting the picture about Sasha?

Quadrant March 2016 107 Story

Dom walks in and she’s just putting the records back into their correct place after people have put them in the wrong place. She’s wearing a tartan skirt, black T-shirt and a black leather bikie jacket with zips all over it and these long, black, criss-cross, lace-up boots that finish just above her knee. Dom smiles at her and notices she has these black leather wrist bands on. “What’s with the leather bracelets?” “Oh it just complements the whole kinky bondage vibe I have going on today.” Dom laughs but then he realises she’s serious and backs up a few paces; she sees his reaction and likes the fear factor and asks him, “Can you run out and get me a banana muffin and coffee? I’m starving.” “Yeah, um, I’ll do it in a few minutes. There’s a party tonight at Wilson’s house. We should go. I know what you’re going to say but c’mon, one party; one night. For me, babe.” She looks at him and says, “Get the muffin and coffee and after I’ve eaten I’ll say yes because I’m so much nicer after I’ve eaten.” “So, that’s a yes.” “Get the muff-in and coff-ee.” He walks out onto Carlisle Street and goes next door straight into the Galleon cafe and the girl at the counter smiles at him and says, “The coffee boy is here.” Dom takes a deep breath and orders. Now, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about Dom. He’s not a weak man; he just does pretty much whatever Sasha wants, but not all the time. He sees she lives with a condition that makes life very difficult for her a lot of the time and if he can ease that, then well and good. Sometimes just going into a coffee shop can be difficult for her. And the counter girl making fun of him? He thinks she secretly digs him and he’s right but Sasha would murder them both. Dom walks back into Modern Records. He’s slim and has neatly combed brown hair. It’s long though, like, Davy Jones from the Monkees or David Cassidy from the Partridge Family, which doesn’t really suit the image he likes to cultivate. Mr Thirty- Five-Year-Old who still gets it. Not out of touch, and Sasha makes fun of him because of it. Neither of them really likes pubs or going to see bands that much because Sasha gets paranoid and the night can get very heated although they make an exception for the Prince Band Room on Fitzroy Street. For some reason she feels good there. Sasha has hair as black as a crow and deep milky brown eyes and she’s nearly as tall as Dom. Sasha eats while Dom walks through the aisles of the record store and looks at old album covers and can’t help but think that the arrival of the CD pretty much screwed up that whole alternative market for cool album covers. Tubular Bells for instance. He turns to Sasha and says, “What should I be looking for? What’s the best new stuff you’ve got? What are we listening to right now in fact?” Sasha shakes her head and says, while still munching on the muffin, “You think you’re up with it, don’t you? This is a guy called Toro Y Moi, from Texas but he lives in LA now. He’s kind of king of the chilled out music genre but he does a little house music too. Do you like it?” “Um, yeah, what’s with his name, is it French or something?” “I thought it might be Japanese or maybe Vietnamese. Hang on, I’ll Google him.” Dom really concentrates on the music now and he really does like it. He can imagine himself at home, sitting in his big armchair and just listening to it, not reading, not doing anything else, just chilling to it. And then Sasha yells out, “It’s half Spanish half French. Toro is Spanish for Bull and Y is and in Spanish and of course Moi is French for me but he looks kind of Asian, maybe Filipino.” “I can’t afford to buy it; can you download it to your laptop and bring it home?”

108 Quadrant March 2016 Story

“Your wish is my command but now you have to go. I need to be alone because I have to do stock-taking this afternoon. Pick me up at seven.” And Dom says, “You’re so loving and emotional and affectionate. It’s why I go out with you.” “Seven.”

Dom pulls up right outside the store at seven. His old 1970 black Valiant sedan fits snugly into the space. They could afford a new car but Sasha won’t hear of it. The first time they fucked (her word) was in the back seat and since then it has been the front passenger seat, the driver’s seat (not easy), the roof, on top of the boot and sprawled across the bonnet at two o’clock one morning. You don’t sell memories like that. She opens the door and gets in, leans across him and kisses his face and slams the door all in one movement and asks, “Why do you call him Wilson? He has a first name and Tom is a nice name. Is it an old boys’ thing? You know you ex-private school wankers, always using your surnames at school and not letting go of it and all that crap?” “I don’t know. I call everyone else by their first name and in fact everyone else calls him Tom.” “But he’s your best buddy and you want a special name for him.” “Are you going to be like this all night?” “Yes.” And Sasha puts her hand in his lap and squeezes gently and says, “Any complaints?” Dom just smiles and shakes his head. What can you do? Wilson lives in Richmond and Dom’s not sure what the crowd is going to be like. He usually sees Wilson on his own, at a cafe or a pub or at his place during the day when his girlfriend is at work. Wilson is a screenwriter, and unusually he’s a screenwriter in Australia who makes a good living. He’s done everything from Neighbours to indie films that two people saw at the Valhalla in Glebe. America wanted him after he got nominated for a writer’s award at Sundance but he didn’t go, said he was a freaking writer, he could submit his work from right here in Richmond, Victoria, Australia, and he has done it, mostly. And Dom is jealous as hell because he still works in a call centre and occasionally gets published in small literary magazines and he hates the question: the What do you do? question. Sasha couldn’t care less. And that’s another thing, he always has her safety, her care, in the back of his mind. They drive along Punt Road not talking and then turn right into Swan Street and Sasha looks out the window and says, “They’ve started gutting Dimmey’s for the new apartments.” “You know my thoughts on that.” And Sasha smiles because it’s one of Dom’s hobby horses. He says to her all the time, fucking Dimmey’s, all these pseudo hipsters talking about its demise like it matters to them, like they shopped there once a week or something when the truth is they once, maybe ten years ago, bought a pair of cheap black jeans they thought looked like Levis and the truth is that Dimmey’s was crap unlike Gowings in Sydney, which Dom reckons was the coolest department store in the world. Now closed. They turn left into Church Street and turn off further along on the right into Brougham Street and park outside the newish apartment block. Dom looks at Sasha and she’s taking deep short breaths and he knows she’s feeling anxious and says, “There’s only five or so people coming and you know the rules, if you’re feeling bad just tell me and I’ll take you home. You like Wilson, he’s a good guy, just remember that.” They walk down the path and up the stairs and Dom knocks on the door. Wilson answers and Dom smiles and man-hugs him and Wilson hugs him back, then steps to

Quadrant March 2016 109 Story

one side and Sasha kisses him lightly on the cheek and says, “Hey, Tom.” They walk into the big living area with the huge black leather sofa and matching armchairs and it’s minimalist city. Just a small powerful stereo and CD stackers, no books, no anything else and the room runs into a smaller dining room with a table and four chairs and further into the gleaming steel kitchen with all the accessories a successful writer should have. A man and a woman walk into the room from the hallway. Wilson smiles and says, “Dom, this is Luke and Sharon Wright, they’re producing my new screenplay if everything falls into place.” And Wilson opens his arms wide towards them and Dom walks across and shakes Luke’s hand. Luke introduces himself and Sasha hangs back and Dom reaches for her but she avoids his hand and walks towards Sharon who backs up a little because of what Sasha is wearing and she also has this awful hard look on her face. Dom says quickly, “This is my girlfriend, Sasha.” And Sasha finally smiles and they all shake hands and kiss and take seats, Luke and Sharon on the couch and Dom in one of the armchairs with Sasha sitting on the floor, her back pressed up against the chair Dom is sitting in. Tom Wilson sits in the other armchair and says, “Monty is coming over later but that’s it.” Dom nods and Luke asks him the question. Dom smiles nicely and tells him about the writing first and the call centre second and contrary to what he thought might happen, Luke and Sharon laugh and say something along the lines of been there done that. They ask Sasha what she does but Sasha’s clammed up, she’s not talking, and Dom has to answer for her, which he knows she hates, and he looks at her face, which is darkening by the minute. The talk continues and Monty arrives and the drinks start to flow and Sasha can’t find a way into the conversations and it’s frustrating her and Dom can feel it but the more he tries to include her the further away she gets and she’s getting paranoid now. Dom doesn’t know it but she’s taken a dislike to Luke and she doesn’t know why he’s talking like that, making out that she’s stupid, and she’s feeling really hot now and a joint comes around and she knows she shouldn’t but she can feel all eyes on her and takes two little drags, but it’s strong gear and five to ten minutes on she begins to feel it and it’s all bad. That pretty boy, Luke, and his gorgeous girlfriend making out that they worked in a call centre being all nice to Dom when they don’t know shit and she goes to the bathroom and splashes her face again and again with cold water and rubs her face and feels sort of worthless and she doesn’t want to go back in there. Dom knocks on the door and says, “Are you alright?” And it makes it worse and she walks out straight past him and says to him, “I’m just going for a walk. I’ll be alright once I get out into the cool air. Stay there, don’t come, I’ll be back soon.” And she all but rushes out the front door. Dom smiles at Wilson and says, “It’s alright, she’s just getting some air. Everything’s cool.” It’s not cool. Only for once Dom is letting her go, letting her find her own way. Sasha walks down the stairs and out into the street and it is lovely and cool and there’s a light rain and she walks up to Church Street and turns right and stops outside The Vine Hotel and it looks nice and quiet in there. She could just find a quiet table and have a drink, compose herself and go back. Back at Wilson’s place, Sharon passes another joint to Dom and she’s flirting a little with him and he laughs and gestures wildly to Tom Wilson and says, “Who is this girl, she’s great!” Sasha walks into the pub, looks around, gets a look from a drunk propped at the bar, so she goes around to the other bar. The harness racing and greyhounds are on the ten

110 Quadrant March 2016 Story screens around the bar but there’s only one guy, a gambling desperado, in the bar. She goes to the bar, starting to feel more anxious; the effects of the joint are still getting into the screwed-up wires in her brain, distorting the truth. She orders a beer and sits quietly in the corner and settles a little bit. She picks out a horse in the harness race for fun and watches it come in second and a greyhound race from Dapto is next and she picks the yellow dog and it wins and she feels better but her mind is still playing dirty tricks on her and the desperado comes up to her and she flinches as he leans his face down and she jerks away and the desperado moves away. This girl could be trouble.

Sharon tells Dom she has connections with Fremantle Media and maybe if he gave her some of his short stories she could pass them on. She heard about another girl she sort of knows doing the same thing and getting a gig writing for Neighbours and Dom tells her yeah, no problem, and Wilson hands him another beer and he thinks for a second about Sasha but the beer and dope have absolved him of all responsibility. He’s having a good time. She can sit in the car.

Milo walks into The Vine, orders a beer, speed in his veins, making him king of the world, but it’s Monday night and he has no outlet for his aggressive mood. He puts twenty bucks on the red dog in the race on the screen and watches it lose. Sasha has her MP3 player on, sipping the cold beer and watching the screen. She’ll go back now. Milo sees her. How did he miss her? He walks over and says, “Hey little girl, watcha doing here?” Sasha smiles at him and points to the headphones and mimes, I can’t hear you. Milo pulls the left headphone out of her ear. She darkens. Milo starts talking some rubbish and grabs her arm and says, “I like you.” Sasha pulls her arm away from him and says, “Get lost, loser.” She looks for the barman but she can’t see him, this little corner is dark, that’s why Milo missed her when he first walked in.

Wilson says to Dom, “Hey, Dom, maybe you should go check on Sasha.” And Dom looks up quickly and then checks the time on his phone. She’s been gone nearly three- quarters of an hour. He takes another sip on his beer and decides it can wait and says, “I’ll just finish this beer.”

Milo doesn’t take instructions very well and he snarls at Sasha and says, “Don’t fucking call me a loser!” The speed in his system is firing up, making him aggro. He grabs Sasha by the arm tightly, she feels scared, her brain sizzles and yells at her to get out. He is going to harm you! Get away! She can’t free her arm and he sneers at her and she reaches for her beer glass and when she smashes it into his face it shatters and cuts him clean through, slicing open his cheek and pieces of glass fly into his eyes and he screams and Sasha gets up and walks quickly out of the side door onto Bridge Road and then turns the corner left back to Church Street and walks back towards Wilson’s flat. She feels no pain for the idiot she just glassed in the pub but she’s shaking, scared of what she finds herself capable of. Dom finishes his beer and walks out to the car and sees Sasha’s not there but looks up to find her walking towards him and he smiles, everything’s OK.

A new collection of Sean O’Leary’s stories will be published by Peggy Bright Books this year. He has a blog at http://seanolearywritingblog.org.

Quadrant March 2016 111 Jean la Pucelle

I was just thirteen, When the voices came to me, I was tending father’s sheep, Down by the village stream. I saw a mighty vision, My head held to the ground. I heard the sound of angels, Some were winged, and some were crowned. My mind received impressions, As angels spoke to me: Daughter of God, now you must go, By your side, I shall be. Raise a Holy Army, Fight a Holy War. The angels, thus, commanded me, I rode the strongest horses, And led me to the sword. I had knowledge of the Amazon, The light within the spirit of man, I was wounded in the breast, by arrows, Is equal to the light, But continued to fight on. Within the spirit of woman, My picture was put in churches, Both equal, in God’s sight. When I freed my native land, I neither acted a woman, Medals were struck in my image, Nor talked as women talked, Followers kissed my hand. I wore the clothes of soldiers, I was then sorely accused, And walked as soldiers walked. Of magic, they dictated, Bound and tried, at a trial of faith, And excommunicated. They said I invoked demons, Of a relapsed heretic, But I was caught up in the lime Of church politics. They shaved my head and burned me, My loyal soldiers wept, It’s said they saw, with dying breaths, A dove rise from my breast.

Joe Dolce

112 Quadrant March 2016

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