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$244.60 with free delivery (phone 1 800 814 433) $199.20 with free delivery (phone 1 800 814 433) 2 bottles Rochecombe 1996 Sauvignon Blanc- Given a 5-star rating in the 1998 2 bottles Pipers Brook Ninth Island 1995 Tamar Cabernet- A bright, ruby-red w in e edition of Austra lian and New Zealand Wine Vintages. A typica l cool-climateSa uvignon w ith an aromati c nose of sw eet bl ackcurrants, chocolate and li quorice. Th e palate is Blan c ex hibiting intense gooseberry fruit characters, enhanced by herbal aromas and soft, round and mouth-fi lling w ith spicy wood and a mild but firm tannin finish. A very a hint of fres hly cut grass. The long flavoursome palate is full of th e sa me gooseberry fruit easy drinking w ine. Drink thi s unwooclecl Ca bern et now. and a touch of rose petals lingers on the finish. Excellent drinking now. 2 bottles Stefano lubiana 1996 Prima Vera Pi not - Released in spring (P rimavera) thi s 2 bottles Rochecombe 1994 Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot!Cabernet Franc- Given a youthful fru ity Pinot Nair is made for your immediate consumption. Refl ecting a 5-star ra ting by Robin Bradley in the 1998 editi on of 'the little gold book'. Thi s is a full bouquet of blosso m and promise of summer, thi s w in e is so ft w ith a generou s pa late of bodied Ca bern et matured in French oak. It is a complex w in e ex hibiting blackcurrant spi ce and cherry fl avours. Serve w ith quail, ri sotto and pasta dishes. and herbal aromas. Idea l for current drinking w ith red mea t dishes or cheese. 2 bottles Rochecombe 1994 Cabernet Sauvignon/ Merlot/Cabernet Franc - Given a 2 bottles Moorilla Estate 1996 Chardonnay- Recently give n a 5-star ra ting in 1998's 5-star rating in the 1998 edition of 'the little gold book' . This is a full -bodied Cabern et Australia and New Zealand Wine Companion; awa rded a trophy at the 1997 Royal matured in French oa k. It is a complex w ine ex hibiting blackcurra nt ancl herba l aromas. Hobart Wine Show fo r the' Best Tasmanian W hite Wine'. Intense citrus and stonefruit Id ea l for current drinking w ith red mea t di shes or cheese. aromas sk ilfully integrated between layers of crea my/va nil Ia oak trea tment. It has terrific 2 bottles Rochecombe 1996 Sauvignon Blanc- Given a five-star ra ting in th e 1998 and penetrating fl avour, subtle oa k and an additional zesty ac id structure and finish. edition of Australian and New Zealand Wine Vintages. Atypi ca l cool-cl imateSa uvignon This w ine w ill ce llar for fi ve yea rs or more. Bl anc ex hibiting intense gooseberry fruit characters, enh anced by herbal aromas and 2 bottles Notley Gorge 1996 Pinot Noir- Given a 5-star rating by james Halliday in a hint of fres hl y cut grass. The long fl avoursome palate is full of the sa me gooseberry fruit the 1998 ed ition of th e Australia and New Zealand Wine Companion. The 1995 Pi not and a to uch of rose petals lingers on th e finish. Exce llent drinking nowor ca n becellared won a gold m edal at the 1997 Roya l Melbourne Wine Show and th e 1996 is probabl y short term. Serve w ith Tasmanian sea food, chicken or light pasta dishes. better. This is a medium bodi ed w ine display ing fres h berry fru it, combined w ith oa k 2 bottles Stefano lubiana 1997 Riesling- Tas mania has a reputation for producing fl avours from age ing in French oa k for 6 month s. Drink now or ce llar fo r 2-3 yea rs. Ri es lings in the tru e German style and thi s Ri es ling does not disappo int, having an 2 bottles Dalrymple 1997 Sauvignon Blanc - Given a 5-star ra ting in th e 1998 edition intensely aromati c bouquet, reminisce nt of limes and pass ionfruit. The palate is fres h of th e Australia and New Zealand Wine Companion. This vintage is a pale straw colour and elega nt, w ith loa ds of citrus and spicy characters. A rea l food-friendly w in e. w ith some green. Strong gooseberry and passionfruit aromas abound. Th e palate 2 bottles Fishburn &O'Keefe 1996 Trout White-The cool 1996vintagea llowed Greg ex hibits the sa me concentrated gooseberry and pass ionfruit flavours w ith so me vegeta l O 'Keefe (ex Normans) to experiment w ith a relati ve ly new w ine style, known in characters. Drink thi s w in e now and enjoy. Tasmani a as 'a lbino Pi not'. M oderately ripe Pinot Noirfruit was w hole bun ch processed 2 bottles jansz Methode Champenoise- Given a 5-star rating in th e 1998 edition of (per sparkl ing w ine producti on) and allowed to ferment at cool tem perature. This was A ustralian and New Zealand Wine Vintages; a 5-star rating in th e 1997-98 edition of blended w ith 20% Chard onnay to produce the 1996 un wooded Trout White. Showing the Penguin Good Austra lian Wine Guide. Thi s sparkling w ine is 50/50 Pi not Noir and an elega nt pale blush colour (enhanced by th e clea r w hi te glass bottl e), this w ine has Chardonna y. Ca ndied fruit an d herbal complex ities combine w ith a very fine, smooth lifted strawberry Pi not Nair fruit on th e nose. So ft and full fl avoured on the pa late, th is palate. Th e fl avours are pure and crea my. w in e is intended to be drunk w hilst sti ll young (at hea rt) and sli ghtly chilled.
------~ ORDER FORM Authorisation I hereby authorise you to debit my credit ca rd account w ith the appropriate i 'B' 1 800 814 433 free 9a m - 6pm M onda y to Friday amount on despatch of my w ine. I ce rtify th at I am over 18 yea rs of age. j Have your credit ca rd hand y. o FAX 1 800 819 955 Signature Date ~ Reply Paid 9, TBW, PO Box 91, New Tow n, Tas 7008 Cheque payment ~ Pl ease make cheques payable to Tasmani an Boutique Wines (mail ord ers onl y). ~'. D No. of cases of Extra Premium 5- Star Dozens @ $244.60 $ , D No. of cases of Extra Premium Se lect Dozens@ $199.2 0 $ Address/delivery details ~ Total Cost $ Mr/Mrs/M iss/M s/Dr ______~ 0. Credit ca rd Address E
D Vi sa D M asterca rd D Bankca rd D America n Express D Diners Club Suburb/tow n ------Ca rel No. State ______Pos tcode ______1 Phone: work ( home ( "0 -~ Expiry Date Name on ca rd: Fax : ( Mobile: ( > Volume 8 Number 2 March 1998
A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology
CoNTENTS 29 AN ARTICLE OF FAITH FOR A SCEPTICAL DEMOCRACY 4 Mark McKenna on Manning Clark COMMENT and new things constitutional. 7 34 CAPITAL LETTER I'LL BE WATCHING YOU Tony Vinson and Karl Langheinreich 8 confirm all your paranoias about Big Brother. Sizing up: Kim Beazley LETTERS and Laurie Oakes 37 at the ALP Conference 10 ARCHIMEDES in Hobart. THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC 39 Photograph by With Moira Rayner, Jon Greenaway, Chris McGillion, Margaret Simons BOOKS David Glanz. and Peter Pierce. Peter Craven reviews Bernhard Schlink's The Reader; David McCooey on the third 13 volume of the Cambridge D.H. Lawrence SUMMA THEOLOGIAE Biography (p40). 16 42 THE COST OF FREEFALL THEATRE Dewi Anggraeni on the unfolding Geoffrey Milne on a not-so-wild production crisis in Indonesia. of The Ideal Husband; Michael McGirr muses over the adaptation of Tim Winton's 20 Cloudstreet (p44); Peter Craven reviews The LABOR IN ELECTION GEAR Herbal Bed and Into the Woods (p45) . Cover: Photograph by David Glanz, David Glanz behind the scenes design by Siobhan Jackson. at the ALP Conference. 47 FLASH IN THE PAN Graphics pp5, 11 , 12, 26-27, 29-30, 24 Reviews of the films The Wings of the Dove; 33, 34-35 by Siobhan Jackson. Amistad; Ma Vie en Rose; Wilde; Boogie Cartoon pl5 by Dean Moore. THE KOOKYNIE POEMS Photographs pp3, 20-23 A suite by John Kinsella. Nights; Oscar and Lucinda. Lucille Hughes by David Glanz. flashes back to Australian cinema at the Photograph p44 by Michael McGirr. 26 inaugural Festival of Australian Film. AFTER WORK Eureka Street magazine Damien Broderick speculates about 50 Jesuit Publica tions WATCHING BRIEF PO Box 553 the future of pay and labour. Ri chmond VIC 3 121 Tel (03 ) 9427 73 11 51 Fax (03) 9428 4450 SPECIFIC LEVITY
VoLU ME 8 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 3 COMMENT ANDREW HAMILTON A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology Publisher Michael Kelly SJ Editor Morag Fraser Assistant editor Kate Manton Clouds of Consulting editor Michael McGirr SJ Production manager Sylvana Scannapiego witness Graphic designer: Siobhan Jackson Sub editor: Juliette Hughes Production assistants: Paul Fyfe S), Chris Jenkins SJ, Scott Howard
Contributing editors I N Till"" TWO MONTHS h.s come welcome news that Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ, Perth: Dean Moore reconciliation has taken place between Fr Tissa Balasuriya Sydney: Edmund Ca mpion, Gerard Windsor and the Sri Lankan church authorities. More disquieting has Queensland: Peter Pierce been the news that Fr Paul Collins' views in his recent book, Papal Power, are under investigation by the Congregation South East Asian correspondent for the D octrine of the Faith. Jon Greenaway Without prejudging here the truth of the criticisms made of their books, I am concerned at two points by the process Jesuit Editorial Board to which Fr Balasuriya and Fr Collins are subj ected. Peter L'Estrange SJ Andrew Bullen SJ, In the first place, the m ere n ews that a Vatican Andrew Hamilton SJ Congregation has begun proceedings causes grievous harm Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ to the person accused, even if the charges are totally groundless. It initiates an open season when every hound Business manager: Sylvana Scannapiego inside and outside the Catholic Church can tear the hare to Marketing manager: Rosanne Turner shreds with impunity. Advertising representative: Ken Head This is not merely unjust to Fr Collins, a genial and dedicated Catholic priest, but is harmful to the Catholic Patrons Church in Australia. For Paul Collins has won a sympathetic Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the support of Colin and Angela Carter; the hearing for Christian positions among people who would trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; normally class themselves among the 'educated despisers of W.P. & M.W. Gurry. religion'. His work on ecology, in particular, has attracted many young people who had assumed that the Church has Eureka Street m agazine, lSSN 1036-1758, nothing to say on the issues of the day. Australia Post Print Post approved Secondly, the investigation launched into his writings pp34918 1/003 14, is based on denunciations by people whose names remain is published ten times a year anonymous, and on opinions offered by officers of the by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3 121 Congregation. The judgment will be given by the Department T el: 03 9427 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450 which h as initiated the prosecution. There will be no e- mail: eureka@werple. net.au opportunity for Paul to meet his accusers face to fa ce. In a Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by community which is built on justice, love and truth, cannot Michael Kelly, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. procedures which better embody these values be found? Printed by Doran Printing, Perhaps a starting point might be the teaching of Jesus, 46 Industrial Drive, Braeside VIC 3 195. who, Matthew's Gospel tells us, insisted that grievances be © Jes ui t Publications 1998 first addressed by face-to-face conversation: Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and 'If your brother should commit some wrong against you, fiction, will be returned only if accompanied by go and point out his fault, but keep it between the two of a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Requests for you. If he does not listen, summon another, so that every permission to reprint material from the magazine case may stand on the word of two or three witnesses.' • should be addressed in writing to: The editor, Eureka Street magazine, Andrew Hamilton SJ teach es at the United Faculty of PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121. Theology, Melbourne.
4 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1998 CoMMENT: 2
LINCOLN WRIGHT Asia: Future conditional
A S V OLUME 8 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 5 CoMMENT: 3 JAMES GRIFFIN Truth casualties on Bougainville M mNC AND ANACYSH of the n•ne-yw degradation and loss of land needed revision, and the government Bougainville war have all too often been slack and unreliable, (not the mining company which did make offers) obtusely failed with even respected journals of record being reluctant to accept to meet its obligations under an agreement made in 1974. In corrections to ill-informed feature articles. fact, the perception in Port Moresby, seeming to justify this, Lindsay Murdoch, a recently revealed authority on Papua was that Bougainvilleans were much better off than other New Guinea, stated in The Age (24 January 1998) that 'PNG nationals. late last year backed away from an undertaking given by its Instability in governm ent in Port Moresby also prevented representatives in July that the people of Bougainville would it fro m grappling quickly with the problem but, once violence be free to determine their own future'. broke out, Prime Minister Namaliu offered a package of 20 per No such 'undertaking' has been heard of in Port Moresby cent (previously five) royalties to landholders, the sale of the or Canberra. government's 19.1 per cent equity on generous terms to the Several days later a Lindsay Murdoch feature was captioned: province and a K200 million development scheme. 'Canberra must let Bougainville chart its own destiny'. Its pre The democratically elected provincial government accepted cede was: 'Ten thousand lives lost in a nine-year civil war won this and declared opposition to secession, while setting up a the people the right to vote on whether to remain part of PNG' committee to seek extension of its powers. A small group of (The Age, 28 January 1998). rebels, led by Francis Ona, rejected any compromise and Fortunately for those who bothered to read the text, it was assassinated a provincial minister whose proposal for peace stated only that Bougainvilleans 'may' be given such a chance barely stopped short of complete autonomy. and that Port Moresby 'had refused to confirm' that it would This group was primarily responsible for the subsequent allow them such a vote. Port Moresby has, however, according destruction of their province. to Murdoch, allowed that 'the dispute be internationalised', These facts have been obscured, particularly by journalists because the United Nations has been given 'a monitoring role'. for whom Bougainville is a new patch, and by the publicity It is to be hoped that Lindsay Murdoch does not mean to suggest quite rightly given to the indiscriminate violence of the PNG that the UN will proceed to do more than this. The UN has security forces. (Less attention, however, has been given to the made it clear that it has more urgent priorities and can spare no barbarities of the rebels.) Nevertheless, it would have been substantial resources for what it prefers to see as an internal anomalous if the Prime Minister had not called out his security PNG problem. forces, however incompetent, to deal with saboteurs of his Bougainvilleans have already been over-nurtured on the nation's primary industrial base. Francis Ona had no mandate idea that they have some 'absolute right to self-determination'. from Bougainvilleans to lead a rebellion or to dub himself 'Father Even non-rebels have been led to believe that this could be of the Nation'. sustained on geographic, racial (because of skin-colour!) and There is then no moral right at the moment to a referendum cultural grounds. This is not so; no such 'absolute right' exists. on independence, although pragmatic grounds may be found in Nor is it clear that, if it did exist, a majority of Bougainvilleans the future if government in PNG were to break down would wish to exercise it. irretrievably. A more sensible ground for an act of self-determination Lindsay Murdoch's ' 10,000 lives' allegedly lost in the civil would exist if Bougainvilleans, conceived of as a 'minority', war is not based on any justified estimate. He has simply taken could demonstrate that they had been significantly oppressed up a round figure bandied about by pro-rebel propagandists. and discriminated against by government and other citizenry. (Lately the figure has become 20,000.)To make any sensible This is far from the truth. At the outbreak of hostilities in estimate of lives 'lost' through the war one needs more than December 1988, initiated by a small group of landholders led hard mortality figures, even if these become available. Medical by Francis Ona, Bougainville was the most prosperous and best services in Bougainville pre-1989 were better than anywhere else governed province of PNG. It enjoyed a level of autonomy which in PNG, owing to the ancillary services associated with the copper left it mostly to the devices of its own people and one which mine. Frances Ona stopped them, as he did the mining revenues had been agreed to by acknowledged and democratically elected which funded medical services for the rest of PNG. Ultimately, provincial leaders in 1976. Its decentralised government was as his gangs burnt down Arawa hospital. Ona has been known to well resourced as that of any other province and it had greater declare that Bougainville can dispense with Western technology. internal resources to draw on. If the lives lost in Bougainville have 'won any rights', as Bougainvilleans held high offices in state and church: the Murdoch claims, it should be the right to be protected from the first Commissioner of Police, the current Ombudsman, a deputy likes of Frances Ona and from ill-inform ed, though no doubt Prime Minister and an Archbishop of Port Moresby were all well-intentioned, partisan journalists. • Bougainvilleans. However, there was a genuine grievance at the site of the James Griffin is an historian and Professor Em eritus at the great copper mine: the terms of compensation for environmental University of Papua New Guinea . 6 EUREKA STREET • M ARC H 1998 Negative steering U ITY MAY BE STReNGTH, md political ministers and advisers found to be deep in conspiracy as in their disunity may be political death, but a party being found to have lied about it. that fears ideas and avoids debates is hardly a party preparing Couple with this some skilful positioning by marketers itself for government, or worthy of having it should the other of Labor's being caring and sharing (but not profligate) on side shoot itself in the foot. social issues, and some success at positioning Howard as The highly choreographed ALP party conference, in which mean-spirited and uninspiring in the same area, hope for some hardly anything was left to chance, in which even the slightest wrong-footing of Peter Costello on tax reform, and the flicker of tension was quickly smothered, and in which everyone ingredients are there for the sort that would see Labor restored with anything to contribute was chloroformed, was hardly the to the front benches. ALP showing itself either as a party that had learnt lessons from But is it as simple as that? Labor is not the only party with voter rejection, or a body with passion and ideas capable of access to marketing resources. The Howard charge-that the attracting committed support. new Labor platform is virtually a policy-free zone, yet hopelessly It was an interesting contrast with the Constitutional contradictory in messages sent out about economic Convention in Canberra two weeks later. This column is being intervention-is not without substance. And it takes more than written before that is over, and with no ultimate outcome in generalised messages of concern for the halt, the blind and the view, but what has been striking about its first 10 days has lame for Labor, with its record, to paint itself as the human been the way in which delegates of different stripe have grappled face of economic rationalism and globalisation. with ideas, changed positions, sought to accommodate other It was against Labor's record, and the performance of not a views, and sought also to position themselves properly for the few members of Beazley's current front bench, that John Howard political consequences flowing out of the convention outcomes. won an election by evoking images of economic insecurity and That impression will persist even if it ends up in debacle. government by deals with privileged groups. There has been, in short a debate. Certainly, there have Howard may well now have dashed the hopes of some of been immovable objects confronting irresistible forces, and self his constituencies: are these now so disillusioned, or converted indulgent rhetoricians preening themselves in their own by a Labor public relations porridge that they will see their applause. But what distinguished the great majority of the rejection of Labor as just a mistake, one they are now delegates, young and old, male and female, the professional and eagerly waiting to repair? non-professional politicians, was the way in which they gave some impression of seeking to persuade and to convince, and H owARD HIMSELF, of course, has made enough mistakes to of themselves listening and adjusting along the way. be vulnerable in two areas which once worked for him-an Even accomplished Labor politicians such as Gareth Evans image of general competence and an image of general, if and Kim Beazley himself, showed some willingness to mix it uninspiring, decency. In that sense Labor can even hope to win in debate without great evidence of fear that they might be government by default. But that would be about as silly as it embarrassed by being bested. gets. The ineptitudes of Howard in Government, not least over And while, for most, it was an emotion and an instinct the various travel rorts affairs, have stained politicians fairly rather than pragmatism or logic which was the lodestone, there evenly, and merely heightened a general cynicism about their was present some idealism and some fervour which political probity. The bipartisan pratfalls in NSW-where the Carr Labor parties would love to harness but cannot. And never will, so Government found rare common cause with the Liberals in the long as they put their fortunes in the hands of spin doctors. fag-end of the Christmas parliamentary session to screw extra At the moment, the polls seem to favour Labor. At least superannuation all around-has probably compounded it. they suggest that it is in there with a strong chance of tossing Even more dangerously, it renews an increasing despair out the Howard Government. This is, of course, the reason for about what politicians, of either stripe, are capable of achieving all of the caution, the demands for discipline, and the need to at all. suppress internal debate. A party that deserves support must show that it is practical Even the economic uncertainty caused by the Asia crisis, and responsible. But it must also be able to harness some and the political uncertainty caused by Australia's somewhat idealism, and inspire some enthusiasm and passion from more than token involvement in the latest Iraqi adventure have potential supporters. John Howard may have demonstrated that the capacity to undermine two areas where Howard is one can do this, in some vital constituencies, merely by articulating reasonably strong: the impression of sound economic a deep discontent with the performance of the other side. management and a broad general stability. If it is true that, in that sense, he won government by Another issue being trotted out involves gambles as well. default, then a Kim Beazley who did the same would be in even A show of firmness with micro-economic reform on the more diabolical trouble at about the same time in his term. • wharves, moreover, would probably win more votes for Howard than it losesi the risk for him is not so much in having his Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times. VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 7 L ETTERS Eureka Street welcomes letters righ ts of all its m embers', the prohibition of from its readers. Short letters are female ordination is not among them. Limit of the law more likely to be published, and Religious institutions are no t 'anti all letters may be edited. Letters pathetic' to human rights law, as Professor From Rev. Dr Christopher Dowd Of', Dean, must be signed, and should Charlesworth suggests; they require m erely Mannix College, Victoria. that these laws fully respect the religious include a contact phone number Professor Hilary Charlesworth's article, ' No values and customs of community groups. It principled reason' (Eureka Street, November and the writer's name and address. is true that human rights Ia w poses a 1997) printed under the heading 'Theology If submitting by e-mail, a contact challenge for religious traditions but it is and the Law', is long on law but short on phone number is essential. equally true that the challenge is theology. The references attached to this Address: [email protected] reciprocated. article include only one book about theology, A few other points of clarification: Eli zabeth SchU ssler Fiorenza's In Memory of The activity of the Holy See, in alliance Her. T his paucity of theological background with Islamic delega tes, at various United explains Professor Charlesworth's inability to Nations conferences in the 1990s was think of any ' principled rea on' why the informed by opposition, not to women's exemption of religiou s institution s fro m righ ts, but to certain a ttitudes towards Australia's sex discrimination laws in the sexuality, reproduction and the treatment of area of the training, ordination and appoint children which are irreconcilable with ment of priests and ministers should continue. Catholic belief, chief! y abortion, described by Professor Charlesworth is not the first the Second Vatican Council as an 'infamy' person in recent da ys to raise th e ominous and an 'unspeakable crime' (Gaudium et spe . prospect of the abolition of the religious nos. 27, 51). exemption provided by the federal Sex It is not the case that the Catholic Church Discrimination Act. Any attempt to do this did not condemn s lavery until the late would itself be an ins ta nce of religio us the principle of the separation of Church and nineteenth century. St Thomas Aquinas, the into lerance, a violation of interna tional State. It wou ld be discriminatory against most authoritative officia l Catholic human rights law recognising the right to those religious communities whose creeds theologian until very recent times, fr eedom of religion and an interference with req uire distinctions on the basis of sex to be characterised slavery in the thirteenth made concerning the conferral of century as contrary to the right use of power o rdina tion . More importantly, it (Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 2, a. 4) . Pope would viola te what the Professor Paul III condemned the enslavement of the herself seems to recognise as 'a higher native peoples of the Americas in 1537. N or VERONICA BRADY law above that of governmental is it the case that there was no authority'. Should any government be ackn owledgement within the C hurch of Reading at the fool ish enough to remove the freedom of religious belief and practice until exemption from the Act, the only the Second Vatican Council. Again, Aquinas Hill of Content Bookshop. course of action open to the religious taught that Jews and pagans were not to be organisation to which I belong would compelled to accept the Christian faith, their This is your chance to meet be civil disobedience on the principle children were not to be forcibly baptised and critic and author that 'We must obey God and not m en' their rites were to be tol erated (Summa Veronica Brady (Acts 5.29). Th eologiae, lla IIae, q. 10, aa. 8, 11, 12 ). This The question of who can or cannot is not to deny that there have been who will be in Melbourne be ordained in the Catho.lic Church is ambiguities and deficiencies in the Church's for one night only to di scuss her an internal matter exclusively for that new biography of the renowned Church, to be determined according to the Church's understanding of itself Australian poet Judith Wright, a nd its priesthood on the basis of Cou NSELLI NG South of My Days theological criteria drawn from its own If you or someone you ($39.95 HarperCollins). sacred texts, traditions, authority, truths and va lu es. As for the ordination know could benefit from of women, the Catholic Church has professional counselling, Monday 2 March 1998 always had a very clear, well-known please phone at 6.00pm position on that question, one which in recent decades ha been repeatedl y Martin Prescott, (FREE entrance) confirmed by the C hurch's highest authority. Doctrinally, t he issue is BSW I MSW I MAASW 0 86 Bourke St Melbourne settled even if, politically, pockets of Tel.· 9662 9472 dissenting recalcitrance persist. At any Individuals, couples and ra te, it is an issue with which state families catered for. human rights law has absolutely HILL OF CONTENT nothing to do. Whatever defects there 179 Centre Rd, BO OKSHOP might still be in the commitment of Bentleigh 3204 the Catholi c Church to 'the human ph (03) 9557 8525 8 EUREKA STREET • M AR H 1998 unwise to question our shared Lord about the stage management of His Grand Opera. Islam also shares our God, but no one wants to gain first-hand knowledge of a fatwa. Our Orthodox in-laws seem to have continuing support of the Third Person in spite of their obstinacy about fi lioqu e, but their calendar SYDNEY DWELLERS may like to stroll down might be brought up to date. Although it must be exhilara ting for to Politics in the Pub at the Harold Park T h is month, scholars to keep removing doubtful truths Hotel in Glebe, held every Friday night the writer of each letter we that prop up a shaky edifi ce, they might from 6.00 to 7.30pm. March discussions publish will receive a pack of consider us unlettered fo lk who enj oy a cup include: 'China Today' with Professor postcards featuring of tea and bun in the warm parlour of Mr Daniel Kane and Associate Professor cartoons and graphics, C hips; and don't really care about those Hans H endrischke (March 6) and by Eureka Street regulars, beastly chaps outside that are saying 'A Night with Kim Beazley' (March 13). Dean Moore, Siobhan Jackson unspeakable things about his mum. And who 11 5 Wigram Road, Glebe. Enquiries to and Tim Metherall. cares where he was born? Pat T oms (tel 02 9358 4834), Win Childs GeoH Hastings (tel 02 9552 3599) or Katherine Barton Watsons Bay, NSW (tel 02 9810 9551). attitude to such matters in the past but rather to point out that Professor Charlesworth's Twigging to it FOR THOSE IN M ELBOURNE-O* n the last oversimplifications fail to take into account Friday of each month of 1998, a musical the historical complexity of lines of thought From fohn W. Doyle Sf celebration featuring the music and writ and practice within the Catholic tradition. Norman Davies last year brought out an ings of H ildegard of Bingen (b.1 198) will Christopher Dowd immensely popular revised edition of his be held in St Ignatius Church, Richmond. Clayton, VIC m onumental Europe: A History. On page 496 The presenters will be singers Juliette and he has one Inigo Lopez de Recaldc claim: 'Give Geraldine Hughes, and supporting me a boy at the age of seven, and he will be instruments, with a narrator or prayer Cursory riposte mine for ever.' leader. Fridays 7.30-9.00pm: March 27, Is this a misreading of the highly From Liz Curran, Executive Officer, Catholic defamatory ' till he is seven' version that used April24, May 29, June 26, July 31, August Commission for Ju stice, Development and to be popular with writers hostile to the 28, October 30, November 27, December Peace. Jesuits and their schools? Or is it an only 18. 326 Church Street, Richmond, Mr Barich, in his response (Eureka Street, slightly less unbelievable rendering for today's Victoria, tel 03 9428 1212. Suggested September 1997) to my article 'Wrong way public? donation $5. on rights', notes that it is not right to say John W. Doyle that Australia's report to the UN was Kew, VIC IN MAY, the Catho*lic Commission for 'cursory', as it was over an inch thick. For Justice, D evelopment and Peace will the record, in referring to the report as Jesuit Social Services invites you to launch a new Australian Human Rights 'cursory' I was referring to the report's A NIGHT FOR LA WYERS, Regist er. M aintained by the Com content and quality, not its size. Liz Curran INSIDE PENTRIDGE mission, the register will record East Melbourne, VIC Please join us for this unique Australia's fulfilment or neglect of occasion inside D-Division before dom estic and international human rights the gates are closed permanently. obliga tions. Information will be sought Magnum opus from over 120 non-government Thursday, 2 April, 7:30-9:30pm organisations, including churches, dis Cocktails will be served From Geoff Ha stings ability advocates, ethnic communities, law from 7:30pm Although much of Robert Crotty's article societies and community legal centres. (Eureka Street, D ecember 1997) is not Guest Speakers, 8-8:30pm: The Commission is relying on non unknown, he presented it with his usual Mr Justice Coldrey, Suprem e Court of government organisations (NGOs) to ineluctable clarity, fortunately for us, in the face of such conv incing sch olarship. Victoria; Ari Frieburg, Professor of supply the information that will make Although our fai th is eponymously known Criminology, University of Melbourne. the Register a useful tool and would appreciate hearing from you if you are in by the Second Person, he is doctrinally part 8:30-9:30pm: Jika Jika Tour available of the Holy Trinity, when geography and time a position to supply details. have no meaning. DONATION $40.00 per person The CCJDP is located in new offices It is miraculous that Jesus bas survived Cheques payable to: at 383 Albert Street, East Melbourne, VIC being the soft target for so many centuries, Jesuit Social Services 3002. Postal Address: PO Box 146, East when the First Person has more to answer PO Box 271, Richmond 3121 Melbourne, VIC 3002. for, and for longer. Perhaps we get our sense RSVP 25 March (entry cards will be Tel: 03 9926 5 701 of caution from our long persecuted Jewish forwarded). 03 9926 5709 friends who know experientially that it is Further information: 03 9427 7388 Fax: 03 9926 5 792 VOLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 9 THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC themselves from those cases. Former outcome is unacceptable then the people, Victorian QC and recent High Court through their Parliamentmy representatives, appointee Justice Harness did, in a case can change it for the future. That, after all, Court codes involving the Western Mining Corporation was the reason for the Commonwealth's last year. But Ju stice Callinan considered enacting the Native Title A ct: to manage the arguments overnigh t, then decided he the social and economic effects of the High 0 N FEBRUARY 5 the N garrindjeri should si t. He had previously expressed Court's decision in Mabo, in 1992. Aboriginal people went to the High Court strong views on the scop e of the During the 1990s the High Court made in Canberra. They had ch allenged the Comm onwealth's power to make laws a series of constitutional interpretations constitutional validity of a fe deral law that under the ' race' provi si on s in the that 'found' unwritten Common Law and allows a bridge to be built between Constitution, had advised the Com democratic rights implicit in the prosaic Hindmarsh Island and the South Australian monwealth government on Hindmarsh words of our States' -rights-focused, 98-year mainland. Aboriginal women say that it Bridge issues, and had also advised his old Constitution. The Common Law and would violate their spiritual beliefs personal friend and strong advocate of the democratic rights 'found' related to legal rep associated with the island, the subject of a Hindmarsh Act, Mr McLachlan, who was resentation in serious criminal cases, access confidential report that was lea ked to the the perceived de fa cto, if not de jure, to the courts, freedom of political speech, media by then Opposition m ember, now proponent of that legislation. His decision procedural fairness based on Australia's defence minister, Ian McLachlan in 1995. was a surprise, even to the Commonwealth, international human rights treaties. The case is significant. The Court will which had expected Callinan to disqualify 'Progressives' welcomed them, but be asked to find that the Commonwealth's himself. conservative political leaders and some constitutional power to make laws for Ngarrindjeri lawyers were then left to lawyers mounted an increasingly bitter Aboriginal people can be used only to benefit consider a further, unprecedented, challenge a ttack upon the institution and its them, not to impair or diminish their rights. to his decision, to the Full Bench of the incumbents, accusing them of ' judicial If so, it would be argued that the Wik bill, High Court. There are no formal procedures activism '. Indeed, Callinan's appointment rejected by the Senate and likely to trigger for such an appeal: typically, the decision is was controversial, assumed by some to be a double dissolution, would have a left to the individual judge. They are meant to put a capital 'C' conservative on detrimental effect on Aboriginal unlikely to invite further delay by doing so. the bench and stop the rot. entitlements to make Mabo-style land Judges of the High Court-in fa ct all The argument that judges' views do, but rights claims under the Commonwealth's judicial officers- are expected to act in what sh ould not, play a part in the law's Native Title A ct. som e would say is an unrealis tically developm ent was being run, simultaneously, Battle lines have been drawn-the NSW 'impartial' way. Of course, since judges are a few hundred metres away in the old government and the Comm onwealth's human beings and social animals, they do Conu110nwealth House of Representative, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity have views. The discipline of the law is where the Constitutional Convention was in Commission arguing that the Hindmarsh designed to structure hearing, argument fu ll roar. The Convention was debating a new Bridge Act violates Australia's interna tiona! and decision-making processes to minimise constitutional preamble, asitdecided on what human rights obliga tions, the South the risk that those views might disa dvantage form of a republican government should be Australian, WA and the Northern Territory or privilege one party over another. put to a referendum for the people to adopt govemments supporting the Commonwealth. During the 1960s and 1970s the or reject. The case did not proceed on that day. 'conservative' opinions of the majority of The words of the proposed Preamble The preliminary argum ent was about an the High Court and its decision s, were not what inflamed the debate-and it even more seriou s justice issue: the particularly on issues of taxation, trade and was fiery-but the very notion that the perceived integrity and impartiality of the commerce, the relative balance of State and Australian people should, by expressing High Court itself. Commonwealth powers and individual their values, democratic aspirations and Lawyers for the Aboriginal plaintiffs rights and freedoms, were a ource of som e most precious lights, enable the High Court moved, with the cautious respect of which anguish to 'progressive' lawyers. They did to take them into account in interpreting only lawyers are capable, to ask one of the not accept then, as 'conservative' lawyers the Constitution and statutes. A vigorous justices, recently-appointed Queensland QC do not now, that the High Court m erely critic of the High Court's recent direction, Ian Callinan, to disqualify himself. A discovers and pronounces upon existing government-appointed delegate Professor reasonable person, they argued, might in law. The function of the Common Law Greg Craven, told the Convention that such the circumstances reasonably apprehend doctrine of precedent (fo llowing th e a preamble would not only give the High that his consideration of the case might be reasoning in earlier, similar cases by superi or Court greater opportunities to 'fi nd' rights affected by bias. courts in a hierarchy), and the development not expressed in the Con stitution and Usually, judges who have professionally of the law through the application of rules 'make' law, but since the Preamble was the advised those involved, directly or indirectly to n ew factual, po litical and social 'lymph gland' of the Constitu tion- would before they joined the bench in cases before circumstances, is to prom ote the law's create a kind of bill of rights, by stealth. them, announce the fact and di squalify orderly development. If the 'new' lega l Surprised members of a working group 10 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 reported that Professor Craven had launched His decision may have done more harm inevitable-it is just a matter of when and, a personal diatribe at an eminent to respect for the High Court than the last most importantly, by how much. constitutional lawyer, formerly one of the 30 years of both conservative and progressive Civil unrest has already come to advocates in the Mabo case, Ron Castan 'activism'. It may, in fact, have achieved Indonesia, with riots across Java and other QC, accusing Castan of improperly more for the cause of codification of official islands in response to price-hikes in influencing the group's recommendations powers and discretions, and the essential items. (Commentators have to achieve such an end. constitutional protection of citizens' rights suggested this could raise ethnic tensions. Australian law has never been in relation to the institutions of their So far, however, in most instances, only completely codified. One can never government, than all the political particular shops have been targeted, not all anticipate all future circumstances in which grandstanding on the floor of the old House Chinese businesses in the towns concerned). a law has to be applied or interpreted. Even of Representatives. The Government is preparing for the 'codes', as many European justice systems -Moira Rayner predicted unrest. Three extra battalions of prefer, leave interpretative auth ority to troops were stationed in Jakarta at the end courts. of January and cheap train tickets, which Our Australian Constitution is partly Asia: Present tense had been extensively advertised, were unwritten, too. It provides, for instance, intended to return the unemployed to the that all executive power lies in the provinces for the holiday after Ramadan. Governor-General. This is subject to an T.:ERE IS A DEGREE OF SELF-DECEPTION in Asia Many took the opportunity to go back to unwritten convention that it will be at the moment in the way those who have their home villages. As far as the Government exercised only on the advice of his ministers, benefited from a decade of staggering growth was concerned that meant fewer people to who are accountable to the people through are handling the currency crash. Bangkok's cause trouble in the capital city. Parliament, as the Governor-General is not. streets are still covered in locust-like If it is to be among the unemployed that Even that convention turned out to be swarms of 500-series Mercedes-Benz, even discontent will ferment, they certainly are ambiguous: its most contentious exercise though payments on 90 per cent of them an expanding group. Some 800,000 was in the use of the unwritten 'reserve have not been received in the last two Indonesians have lost their jobs since powers' by Governor-General Sir John months. Malaysia's newspapers are still Suharto's January budget signalled what Kerr, in 1975, to dismiss the elected advertising home loans despite the credit was to come, and that number is likely to Whitlam government when the Senate squeeze that has led the Government, very rise to well over the one million mark by blocked Supply. quietly, to impose an unofficial ban. Wives the end of February. At the World Economic The thrust of the republican cause had of the wealthy across Asia are being Forum in Switzerland, held in the first its origins in the damage then done to the applauded in front-page photos for handing week of February, concerns were expressed perceived impartiality, and lack of over their jewellery and gold to the nation. at the prospect of unemployment rising in accountability, of the Governor-General. Folksy remedies such as this and other countries as well, particularly The present incumbent, Sir William Deane, donating US dollars to special accounts Thailand, where one and a half million are has in his turn been accused of political have only feel-good value of course. Some expected to be put out of work in the near partiality in speaking publicly of the need of the figures that detail the extent of the future. Some local estimates put it at for Aboriginal reconciliation. damage in the private and public sectors are 2 million by the end of 1998. In principle, courts are impartial arbiters breathtaking. Indonesia's foreign debt is In Bangkok, a demonstration by workers of fact and deciders and interpreters of the double current estimates of its GDP. Siam from an auto-part manufacturer, angry with law. In practice, the law recognises the Cement, a former state monopoly that made their bosses for withholding the traditional humanity and fallibility of judges, and that big money from the construction boom in end-of-year bonus, turned into a small-scale they do 'make' law. If the latter is to be Thailand, now has debts equal to its total riot. The event in itself was not as interest limited, then this end should not be sought profit for the last seven years. With such ing as the public reaction, with many news through the appointment of judges holding fundamental problems, even the healthier paper editorials suggesting that 'professional perceived views (in any case, judges tend to looking economies have a long way before agitators' were involved, and speculating change their attitudes considerably once recovery. And the worst may be yet to about whether this was the shape of things they shift to the other side of the Bar table.) c01ne. to come. This is a place-one cable news Judges themselves could express their con The two darkest clouds on the horizon service chose to describe it as a 'peaceful ventions formally, and perhaps they should. are social unrest and the devaluation of the Buddhist country'-that last saw street It is unfortunate that the latest High Chinese currency. These two events seem violence six years ago, during the military Court appointee did not follow crackdown of 1992. But if there is to be an the unwritten judicial conven explosion of violence in the region, tion that where there is even a Indonesia, with its massively devalued scintilla of the possibility of an rupiah, escalating inflation and succession apprehension of bias-not difficulties is the more likely site for it. [S ee actual prejudice or prejudgment, Dewi Anggra eni's analysis, p1 6.] which was never alleged-then From the current crisis a few heroes in the interests of trust in the have emerged. One of them is Tarrin justice system, he should stand Nimmanhaeminda, Thailand's finance aside, voluntarily, honourably, minister. Four months ago, when the and blamelessly. Democrats came to power, he was forced to VoLUME 8 NuMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 11 pick up the pieces of an economy that had compromises the scheme. Nevertheless, arrival. Cuba was not Poland, Fidel said. been allowed, by a capricious and blatantly it is a start that encourages internal trade And clearly he had a point. corrupt administration, to disintegrate. He in South East Asia. A similar consensus The Poland John Paul II visited in 1979 has gone about his work steadily and with on tax, interest rates and structural was a country living under an externally a quiet assurance. His Stanford-educated reforms could be the next move. imposed dictatorship. The unpopularity of smoothness and market-fearing ways have And there is that acronym, IMF. It has this imposition had been demonstrated in endeared him to those who cry out for been derided from Melbourne to Manila. the popular uprising of 1956 and again in restructuring. He utters the magic The IMF's strict regime is of course the strikes that gripped the country in 1970 incantation 'investor confidence' at the brutal-high interest rates and budget and 1976. These events-and the manner of announcement of every reform, as if simply surpluses will hurt, and hurt those least their suppression-helped galvanise invoking its name will make it return. able to take it. However the IMF is only opposition to the regime. When the Pope Perhaps that is the only way it will. acting on behalf of its master, international arrived in June 1979 a nascent popular move As Tarrin sees it, nothing would deter capital. The irony is that those who now ment was already well developed and it that confidence more than a drop in the value lament the lack of control over foreign centred on powerful social forces represented of the Chinese renminbi. At a press gathering investment, such as Dr Mahathir, are the by unionists and intellectuals. Indeed, for foreign journalists, he announced he'd ones who were profiting from its Poland's Premier Edward Giereck, who had received assurances from the Chinese imprudence just half a year ago when it reluctantly agreed to the Papal visit, was so leadership late last year that it wouldn't funded shallow development projects for frightened by the prospect of another uprising happen-at least for a few months. short-term gain. that he chose to follow the Pope's open-air China has been affected by last year's The IMF is indeed enforcing flat-earth Mass in Warsaw from the relative safety of a currency disturbances, but compared with economics that will usher in a new form of hotel overlooking Victory Square. South East Asia it is relatively unscathed. Its colonialism, inasmuch as it will force The Church's long identification with growth is down from the 13.5 per cent of four amendments to foreign ownership laws and Polish nationalism obviously helped years ago to a less leviathan-like 8.5 per cent. break up government cartels. But without undermine the credibility of the official This might seem 'a beautiful set of numbers', international capital around you can kiss ideology. And the Pope certainly gave Poles but China is developing from a low base and everything goodbye. This could be the most great heart and an all-important sense that its economy is in transition. As more of its significant step the region takes to catch up they were not alone in standing up for their people switch from rural to urban work, the with the developed world, which sold off rights. But the Pope's moral entreaties in economy must churn along to provide them the farm long ago. defence of human rights and national with jobs. The concern is that growth at -Jon Greenaway independence could not take the place of a around 8 per cent will not be enough. well-constructed program of political action One option for the economic mandarins against the regime. Moreover, the Pope's would be to devalue so as to avoid losing No cigar visit didn't ignite that action. It was the competitiveness against Thailand, price rises in July 1980 that spawned Indonesia and the Philippines-conn tries ToWARDS THE END OF JANUARY, after his Solidarity, the lessons learnt from 1956 to that export cheap radios and, like China, visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II told an 1976 that helped inform its strategy, and even cheaper shirts. This would not be to audience in Rome that the trip had reminded the decision of the Soviet leadership not to gain new markets (China's foothold in the him of his first visit to Poland in 1979 and attempt to salvage a clearly crumbling West is substantial) but to prevent their he expressed the hope, 'to my brothers and empire that saw off communism in Poland. loss. Analysts fear that if the renminbi were sisters on that beautiful island, that the Cuba could hardly be m ore different. Its to be pegged down by even a modest amount fruits of his pilgrimage will be similar to revolution is home-grown. Those with the the region could see a whole new round of greatest stake in preserving the benefits of currency spirals. the revolution are working-class Cubans: Quick action from a regional rather than most of the revolution's opponents a national basis would help to prevent this. middle-class urban whites and seigneurial Japan could open its markets more to South Cubans-are not captives in their own East Asia, whose exports inside Asia are country but have long since fled to the US substantial (half of Thailand's exports go to and elsewhere where even their hostility to South Korea and Japan), thereby giving them con temporary Cuba is waning. The the opportunity to increase trade and foreign economy is not in free fall . Cuba has weath cash reserves without scaring China. The ered the severe drop in living standards that difficulty is, as Tarrin himself notes, that the fruits of that (earlier) pilgrimage'. It was accompanied the collapse of the Soviet bloc regional cohesion is sorel y lacking. the first time the Pope himself had drawn a and has returned to growth. The Pope's Mahathir's proposal that ASEAN trade in parallel between Cuba and Poland but not visit was not an intrusion into some kind of their own currencies would help to insulate the first time that the connection had been comatose time warp of the Cold War. It was Asia from collective devaluation, made. Ahead of his visit to Cuba, many part of an opening to the outside world that jeopardising trade contracts between commentators were suggesting that John has been going on for the last decade. member countries. However, whichever Paul II would sound the deathknell for Similarly, the Church in Cuba could currency is used as the base (currently the Fidel Castro and his socialist revolution. hardly present more of a contrast to the Singapore dollar is being put forward) Even Fidel himself addressed the issue in a Polish Church. Historically Catholicism it might develop a strength that broadcast to the nation ahead of the Pope's has had a weaker hold over Cuba than over 12 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 .ij any other country in Latin America. It was always a minority religion in practice · -§{gM~ theologiae (estimates are that only 15 per cent of Cubans were active Catholics before 1959) I I and it had a marginal impact both on the Flotsam and jetsam country's political and cultural life. The recent 'upsurge' in interest in the Church is T HEOLOGICALLY, THE SUMMER MONTHS IN AusTRALIA ARE FALLOW. Because few of the exaggerated. For instance, the number of major quarterly periodicals arrive from overseas, you have to do with the monthlies. baptisms in Havana increased fivefold These make better beach reading, anyway. They are also important because they between 1979 and 1994. But in actual show the sweat and breath of faith often sanitised in long articles that require long numbers that represents an increase from reflection in the writing. 7500 a year to 34,800- out of a total city If I were marooned on a desert island with one subscription form, I would send population of nearly 2 million. it unhesitatingly to the Tablet, unrivalled for its broad and unbiased coverage of Anyone who followed John Paul IT 's Catholic life. If the occasional bottle washed up other periodicals, I would be delighted visit with an open mind could see that to find The Christian Century, Commonweal and L'Actualite religieuse. But if other these fundamentals have not altered in any significant way. The Pope's three Masses in regular reading like the National Catholic Reporter, America, the Month, N ew provincial capitals-Santa Clara, Camaguey Blackfriars and the exemplary Expository Times turned up, I would not complain. and Santiago de Cuba-were only moder But recently one of the most stimulating monthlies has been the Furrow, a ately attended and fairly sedate affairs. Some magazine that reflects the experience and conversations of a turbulent Irish church. observers suggested that this might have The catalyst of debate has been a series of clerical scandals. But the deeper issue is been due to the novelty of attending Mass the gulf now felt between modern Irish culture and the practices and words of the or to a fear that attendance might incur the church. A recent Irish video shown on the ABC told the story: when traditional wrath of the regime. It probably had more to Catholic hymns can be preened in the concert hall for an ageing audience by beery do with the fact that the Church in Cuba baritones and cutesy kids, you know they no longer belong to any living culture. was weakest of all in the countryside. Many contributions to the Furrow are concerned with diagnosis. The usual The Pope's final Mass in the Plaza of the suspects are rounded up to help with the enquiry: religious teachers, the media, Revolution in Havana, by most accounts, out-of-touch bishops and the materialism of the age. The better sleuths, however, attracted about 250,000 people. This would like the frequent contributor Brendan Hoban, see the crisis as one of faith, hidden be on the low side of a major pro-Castro for many years by unreflective religious practice and by a religious formation that rally. And it passed without incident. There relied on socialisation, encouraged submission, and discouraged questioning. was none of the generalised euphoria that Different remedies are offered. Some critics, like Breandan O'Madiagain, a accompanied the Pope's 1979 visit to Poland. university teacher, argue for a more rigorously intellectual approach to the teaching John Paul II was not a native son coming of faith. Others, like Irene ni Mhaille in the November edition, significantly from a home to free his people but an outside missionary background, argue for the importance of touching the heart. celebrity breaking the monotony of daily Australian observers will find the scene familiar, and most will sympathise routine. with the writers' wish list: an informed and critical faith, a deep and affective 'Every utterance, prepared or commitment and sensitive leadership in a participative church. Equally, they will spontaneous,' editorialised London's the nod knowingly at the occasional search for scapegoats-luckless religious teachers, Tablet after the Pope's first trip to Poland, the harried parish clergy, or the suddenly inquisitive and irreverent media. 'was a challenge to a system that has nations They will also find familiar the perplexity and anxiety before an unravelling enslaved.' In Cuba the Pope did at least as church and a changing culture, and the fear that, in Sean O'Connaill's phrase in the much to legitimise the revolution as to December issue, the Irish Catholic Church will form 'history's latest landfill'. The undermine it by acknowledging its achieve collapse of the nineteenth century Irish cultural settlement, however, will hardly ments and criticising the US embargo. The Pope's central m essage, that surprise anyone who has followed the patient chronicling of its erosion by writers liberation could not be reduced to its social like John McGahern. and political aspects but required the If their account is accurate, strong clerical leadership of a passive community, exercise of freedom of conscience, was for which some critics argue, will not be an effective response, because it has been significant and obviously well-received by one of the most significant forces for secularism. At a time when young Irish want many Cubans. But it was also measured space, it will simply deprive the house of its verandah and garden, forcing them to compared to what he aid in Poland in 1979 stay inside or to find another home. ('the future of Poland will depend on how The alternative that the most persuasive commentators offer the Irish (and many people are mature enough to be non perhaps the Australian) church is not to look for one-stop solutions, but to get on conformist') and is an oft-repeated one. with living in the world that is given and to explore the openings to faith within it. Fidel alluded again to the parallel This was the path of Augustine and Origen in similar times of change. between Cuba and Poland in his farewell The contributors to the Furrow do this with a life and a rhetorical verve that address to the Pope. 'There were those who marks them out as distinctively Irish. They offer hope for the Irish church. They presaged apocalyptic events [as a result of also make the Furrow great reading, even on the beach. • this visit],' he said. 'Some even dreamed of that.' Those who refuse to see the Cuban Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches in the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. V OLUME 8 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 13 revolution for what it is-an authentic, if again bear the brunt of the changes. the north of the town, instead of at the imperfect, expression of Cuban national Other jobs were lost when the Federal government-favoured but wildly unpopular ism-will go on dreaming. After all, they Government closed down the Australian Badgery's Creek on the edge of Sydney's have done so now for 40 years. Defence Industries small anns factory for western suburbs. -Chris McGillion lack of orders. Specialised machinery, now How would passengers get fro m Lithgow impossible to replace, was broken up and to Sydney? There is talk of Very Fast T ra ins, Up hill, sold off. 'Will your husband be going to the even m onorails, and even tunnels under downsize wake?' I asked my cleaner. Her husband the Blu e Mountains. A public meeting was started work in the coal industry at the age held at the Workies to di scuss the proposal L ERE WILL ~E A WAKE this Saturday in the of fourteen, and never had a day out of work and attracted hundreds of people who were Lithgow Working Men's Club. It isn 't for a until Clarence closed and suddenly his only minimally discouraged by a Federal person. It is for a coal mine-the larence wife's clea ning, previously for pin money Government representative telling them Coal Mine, our neighbour and the former only, became their sole source of regular that Lithgow was not, and wo uld not be, employer of more than 300 local men. There incom e. 'N o/ she said. 'They all get very serio usly considered. is plen ty of coal in the ground, apparently. drunk and very silly clown at the Worki es, 'Politicians La ck Imagination ', said the The larence Coal Mine is one of the largest and he thinks they'll get drunker and sillier headline on the local pa per. Lithgow still in the world, wi th tunnels that run under than ever.' 'Is he depressed?' I asked her. dreams of the days of bi g government. T he ri vers and nati onal parks. It could take the She paused. 'More at a loose end. He coal mining union has even suggested that men forty minutes to get to work, driving in needs to do things/ she said, and cleaned on. the State Government should buy th e the dark, underground. When we moved here, many of the locals Clarence Colliery and re-open it. But as the But a few weeks ago th e Clarence didn't regard what I do-writing-as real Mayor says: 'Clarence lost $34 m ill ion last Coll iery closed, and the jobs di sa ppeared. A work. Now I fee l almost ashamed that I am year. That's half a dozen schools. I ca n't see skeleton staff will stay to pump water out still ea rning when the work they used to do, the taxpayers being very impressed.' of the mine just in case at som e stage in the literally at the coalface, has disappea red. Lithgow is hostage to a changing world, future, world coal prices justify re-opening. We never really thought we were m oving to but there are igns of hope. The Mayor In the meantime Clarence is the latest this town. Lithgow, we had been told, was refu ses to be downhea rted. Council is casualty fo r the town of Lithgow, once a hole. In win ter the air sm elt of sulphur looking at giving rate holidays to attract call ed the industrial hearth of Australia, and coal. In s ummer, the town was new business, and is go ing into property and now struggling to fi nd new self-i mage unexceptional-a m odera tel y prosperous development-developing industrial land and pride. In the last decade, more than working- class country town, revolving in ord er to make it attractive to new 2500 jobs h ave di sa ppeared out of a a round coal mining and el ectri city industry. Tourism, making a museum out workforce of around 8000. In the last twelve generation. Lithgow had few pretensions. of the city's industria l past, is a real though m onths, ten percent of the remaining jo b When it was successful in the Tidy Towns sadly ironic option. A minerals processing have disappeared. One hundred and eighty competition a year ago, the local newspaper plant is li kely to open, processing silicon workers, mostly women, were sacked when had a misprint in its banner headline: for computers, and som e of the Be rlei the Berlei Bra factory closed. 'Lithgow a T in y Town'. Lithgow had no wom en have already been re-em ployed by a T he work went off shore, to Indonesia. decent deli, very few cappuccino machines, company that is making coats for sheep The announcement immediately preceded, three Chinese res taurants. N o, we weren't part of a new technology for sh ea ring that a nd perhaps helped to prompt, Prime moving to Lithgow. Rather, we were m oving will doubtless mea n that someone else's Minster John Howard's announcement of a to the m ountains, a nd Lithgow jus t job is lost, som ewhere else. pa use in the elimination of clothing and happened to be the nearest town. 'Market fo rces will prevail,' the Mayor foo twear tari ffs. But it was too little, too We used the town, rather than sought to says, with more than a note of bitterness. late fo r the Berlei women. Lithgow, more join it. I think it was when we first went to - Margaret Si mons than any other Australian city (m ore even the dump that I realised how beautiful it than ewcastle on a per head of population was. The dump is nestled between hills and Moonee by basis) has been a victim of the nineties. I escarpments, with a view over the vall ey asked the Mayor, Gerard Martin, whether below. Anywhere else, it would be prime he blam es economic rationalism . 'Oh yes/ housing. But it is actually hard to find an L ,''"" ~ "~~~~~~~ ~n Aum,Ji,, he said, 'Blessed Professor Hilmer. I saw he ugly spot nea r Lithgow. It is blessed with held at Moonee Valley on Austra lia Day, go t a gong in the Australia Day Honour . un ung charm s. And communities are was not rea lly that. For decades greyhounds It's about ten years too late and they should irresistible, unavoidable, and now we belong a nd tro t ters h ave ru n under lights . have hit him with it. ' to this one. I take my children to the local Thoroughbred racing was following an old Ma n y jobs have been lost in the playgroup, and have seen the other mothers trend, in the hope of capturing a new electricity industry . The N SW industry is there cope with children's illnesses, with audience. Som e of the 32,000-plus who still in governm ent hands, although Prem ier pregnancies wanted and unwanted, and ca me to the Valley had seen it all before, in Bob Carr wants to sell it, but in the last lately, with redundan cy. Hong Kong at Happy Va ll ey for instance, decade government has become such a lean It isn 't surprising that an element of the yet here was night raci ng not in exotic and mean employer that it is hard to believe cargo cult has em erged. The council is surroundings, but in Au trali a's suburban that any more rationalisa tion would be sponsoring a campaign to persuade the quintessence, Moon ee Pon ds. possible in private hands. N evertheless, if Federal Government to build Sydney's Although the m eeting was proclaimed the power industry is sold, Lithgow will second airport on the Newnes Platea u to as potentially the most im portant event in 14 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1998 Australian racing since the introduction of hieroglyphic will need to be added to form I turned up with some apprehension. In the TAB in 1961, the press build-up to it guides, to tell us how h orses go at night, as the day meeting I had backed six second was anxious. Expectations of a sell-out well as in the wet. place-getters, although one becam e a winner crowd seem ed to have been dashed when Night ra ce fields are restricted to twelve after protest. I also had L'espion, which heavy rain fell during the weekend, and runners. Each jockey wears a distinctively won the Hobart Cup, a race called for the Monday was grey, chill, cloudy with coloured cap, a move akin to putting fortieth time by the genial Milton Pettit. At scudding showers, a reminder that not every numbers on cricketers' backs in one-day the Valley there was no night form to go on. day in Melbourne in January is a summer's gam es. No simplifying, popularising move The race card was very patchy. There was a day. Concerns were expressed over the was overlooked. Course spruiker Garry Gray terrible sprint in which the top weight was human toll. Moonee Valley staged an affected a casual look, going without a tie Go Davo Go. Yet two races later, over the afternoon m eeting as well (rather than losing and in compan y with a woman called only sam e 1200m distance, was the Australia this regular racing day to another club). Emma-Kate, to whom horses seem ed a de Stakes at Group One with $200,000 prize After that eight-race card, jockeys, trainers lightful mystery. money. When known as the William Reid and stablehands had to gear up for seven There was a Paul Kelly concert to bridge Stakes, this event was won in five successive more races at night, before turning out of the gap between the day and night meetings years by the great galloper Manikato, who bed at four next morning for track work. (during which time track repairs were made is buried in a garden near the m ain entrance Horses in Hong Kong don't travel far to the and the rail was put back in its true posi to the track. No Manikato tonight, but the track, but at the Valley they had come from tion). Stilt-walkers tried to mance uvre their top sprinters Al Mansour and Spartacus Camperdown and Cranbourne, Terang and way through the crowd. For the young, to lined up, together with the highly rated Geelong, and had to get back there, long whom the event, not the races, was the Special Dane. after midnight. purpose of the evening, there was a night My daughter celebrated when Jugah Bay Veterans of Hong Kong racing were club, Cafe Cosmos. One consequence of won the second. She was among friends. interviewed. When once top Australian the various entertainments was that the Half of the 199 7 Year Twelve class appeared jockeys sought fame in Europe, now they space and amenities available to m embers to be in attendance, making the members' tend to work in Macau, Malaysia and was yet more constricted. One's back bar resemble the Cactus Club. Indeed especially in Hong Kong. Some are burned complaints, no doubt, would not be 'good thousands of tyro racegoers took scant by the experience, such as Damien Oliver, for racing'. interest in the punt. Though there was nearly who cut short his contract last year. It was It was to be a night to rem ember. a Cox Plate crowd, it was easy to get a bet. in Hong Kong that Darren Beadman was Commentators reminded us that history Racing seemed incidental to the people whom rubbed out by stewards for almost a year, would be m ade. Which horse would win the Valley was so keen to attract. Had they thereupon embracing religion. Darren Gauci Australia's first night race? In fact there been watching, they'd have seen Go Davo fulfilled a three-year contract, but with no was no simple answer. The very good Sydney Go surmount the handicaps of weight and apparent intention of ever going back. colt, Vitrinite (named after a kind of black his name to win easily. Then- in the Remarkably, David Hayes relinquished the coal, hence supposedly a night omen tip), Australia Stakes-I overlooked the obvious reins of Lindsay Park to brother Peter in won the first from Mr Machiavelli, but in and missed the wi1mer. Three-year-old fillies order to train in Hong Kong. Currently he twilight. The programme was four races in have excellent records in feature sprints at heads the trainers' premiership there. Hayes before darkness was visible. Twilight the Valley and so it ought not to have surprised told the press about horses who go better m eetings have long been held in Melbourne when Stella Cadente, with the talkative Shane under lights than in daytime. Presumably in summer. The true n ovelty-and test-of Dye up, won from Al Mansour. the converse is also true, and another night racing will have towaitfor the winter. The meeting was televised around the country. This dispersed and distant audience OK, O K- - SO Plf'IE.R Fi\16 [;>AYs OF PE.BA"TE. WE. ALL AGRE-eD may be the best hope for night racing, once ON O~f. ""fi-11N0' Sf.AN CONNI'.:RY (/JA 5 1He BE-51 ;JAMeS BOND ht?W CAN We &E.\ BACK TO TI-l& CON511"TVIICN? the youth who were briefly enticed return to more familiar diversions. Heading off for the tram, I was reassured by how typical a m eeting this had been. Battlers and stars mixed on the track, hoons and toffs in the m embers. The time of day was immaterial, and the pleasures-for those used to savouring them-as seam y and exhilarating as ever. -Peter Pierce This month's contributors: Moira Rayner is a lawyer and freelance journalist (email: Moira Rayner@compuserve. com); Jon Greenaway is Eureka Street's South East Asian correspondent; Chris McGillion is the Religious Affairs editor for the Sydney Morning Herald; Margaret Simons is a freelance writer; Peter Pierce is Eurelw Street's turf correspondent. V oLUME 8 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 15 THE R EGION ANGGRAEN1 The cost of freefall I NDONWA WATCH"s " "' """ WATCH 16 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1998 party, Golkar, has renominated him, the action duly followed reaction. Those who were less than happy consoled them selves by the other two parties, POI (the Indonesian Democratic Party) with the knowledge that Suharto had never been known to and PPP (the United Development Party). delegate powers to his vice-president. Neither would the At first, the speculations were whether he would or would People's Consultative Council give a mandate to the not step aside and let someone else take the helm. Now that he vice-president. has come out in the open and declared that he is willing to be re-elected, the guessing game has moved its focus back to the D ISSATISFACTION ABOUT SuHARTO has not only come from identity of the vice-president, which, during the time of those whose homes and livelihood have been destroyed by the speculations about Suharto's health, had been temporarily fires and the economic crisisi it has also come from those who pushed to the back burner. have thus far benefited from government policy that brought The position of vice-president is important, because if about 7 per cent economic growth on a 'basket-case' condition Suharto's health fails him before the five-year presidential term of the 1960s. The source of the dissatisfaction is the increasingly is completed, the vice-president will become leader, at least blatant protections and monopolies given by Suharto to his until the next General Assembly of the People's Consultative family and close friends. Council. So theoretically, the vice-president will have to be The country's technocrats are exasperated because this someone who has the respect of the military and the civilian practice distorts the economy, and small businesses are angry elite, who has sufficient political nous, and more than a passing because they feel powerless in the face of unfair competition. knowledge of economic matters. In brief, someone competent Even overseas car manufacturers and exporters were protesting but not controversial. And in this crucial time for the national when Tommy, Suharto's youngest son, was given tax breaks economy, approval by international financial markets is an for his national car project, Timor, which was, by the way, unwritten yet important criterion. manufactured in Korea by Kia Motors. The issue of the vice-presidency assumed international Banks owned by Suharto's family and friends flouted importance mid-January when, in the tradition of opacity and prudential regulations and loaned astronomical sums to cryptic language, Harmoko, the chairman of Golkar, detailed themselves or people who obviously had no intention of the preferred qualities and characteristics of the would-be paying their debts, leaving the banks insolvent, swelling the vice-president. Among others, he said the person would have national debt. to be well-versed in science and technology. Heads promptly With the plummeting value of the rupiah, companies find turned to the Minister for Research and Technology, it impossible to service their debts, which are mostly calculated Dr B.J. Habibie. Habibie is one of Suharto's most loyal and in the US dollar. They have had to lay off their workers, raising longest-serving ministers, so it was feasible that Suharto wanted unemployment even higher. As the Idul Fitri-marking the end to reward him with the vice-presidency, and possible succession. of Ramadan fasting month-approached, social problems were This hypothesis was reinforced by the fact that Helmut Kohl, compounding. These workers, especially those who had been the German Chancellor, had sent his economic envoy to laid off without reasonable packages, were not able to fulfil the Indonesia, to express Germany's preparedness to help Indonesia tradition of going home to their villages for the Idul Fitri with its national debt of US$140 billion, of which the private celebration with their extended families. They were going to sector debt, according to David Edwards, the Indonesia specialist hang around the cities feeling cheated and very angry. Those at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, is estimated at US$65 billion. who have retained their jobs are also resentful because their Germany is the second biggest foreign investor in the country purchasing power has been slashed. after Japan, and it is worth noting that Habibie is German- Responses to the IMF US$42 billion rescue package have educated and known to have close associations with been varied. People are increasingly aware that the so-called Germany's policy makers and German companies. rescue is of benefit to the rescuers. The loan carries a market operating interest ratei it is also designed to arrest the rapid TEDOWNSIDE OF THE PUBLICITY of this issue was manifested in slide of the market for the rescuers' products. Indonesia's the plunge of the rupiah to exceed 11,000 rupiah to one US downfall will affect the economy of Japan, the biggest foreign dollar, immediately after the news hit international media. investor in the country and one of the major importers of Within three days it slid further to 16,500 rupiah to one US Australia's and many developed countries' goods. The crisis will dollar. International market leaders blanched at the possibility therefore flow on to Australia and other IMF participant of Habibie taking control of the country's economy. He was countries' economies. seen as a loose cannon when it came to spending-he is known Technocrats and the educated middle class in Indonesia to have extravagantly ambitious technological projects which welcome the IMF's requirement to dismantle the monopolies might well propel Indonesia into the twenty-first century, but and protections so far enjoyed by the chosen few. However, smash the economy to pieces on the way. Even Australia's they are cynical about the withdrawal of subsidies on domestic Gareth Evans went public in voicing his concern at the possible fuels and electricity, for that may not only have far-reaching dire consequences for the country if Habibie became vice consequences in the general population's capacity to pay for president, or president. In an economy so dependent on foreign their necessary commodities, but may also paralyse small investments, the loss of confidence on the part of foreign businesses. In many cases, it is a difference between having investors was detrimental. something to eat and starvation. Nationalists are suspicious of Domestically, the news about Habibie as the possible the IMF's good faith and regard its taking over the economic candidate for vice-presidency did not meet such an emotional reforms as a kind of imperialism, especially when it turned out V OLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 17 that the financial body had not in any case been able to arrest contesting the presidency despite receiving visible support fr om the fr ee fall of the rupiah. the younger generation. Her faction of the Indonesian So, observers ask, why has all this crisis not driven the Democratic Party (PDI) is not represented in the Legislative force for a change of government? The fact is, what we see in Council or the People's Consultative Council. In January there Indonesia is a stalemate. w ere some moves to bring together three very influential The three institutions holding the m ost power in the personalities in an endeavour to gather enough force to call fo r country are still symbiotically intertwined. The first institution Suharto to stand down. They were Megawati, Amien Rais- is Suharto himself. Despite the uncertainty about his health, leader of Muhammadiyah, a Muslim organisa tion consisting of he still has the mental capacity to keep the most important scholars, teachers and business people-and Abdurrachman card close to his chest and keep everyone guessing. And when Wahid (Gus Dur)- leader of a grassroots Muslim organisation. people are guessing they are not sure of their own positions, All three had publicly expressed their desire to see Suharto retire hence dare not take steps in case they are the steps to the from the presidency. However the m oves failed to eventuate slippery slide. The second institution is the military, known because Gus Dur refused to take part. In an interview with ABC by its acronym ABRI. The top offi cers of ABRI are Radio National's Sandy McCutcheon, Gus loyal to Suharto. According to Dr Arief Budiman, Dur said that he did not want to see his founding professor of Indonesian Studies at the followers used in a mass m ovem ent that University of Melbourne, these officers are fully might end up victimising some sectors of the dependent on Suharto. They no longer have strong community, thus threatening national unity. roots in the body of ABRI, but they command Individually or together, neither respect because of their closeness to Suharto. Megawati nor Amien Rais has any realistic The younger officers-according to Budiman- chance of contesting Suharto's position. Like arc inherently m ore independent of Suharto, and Megawati, Amien Rais has no representation still have genuine roots in ABRI. However, they in either Council. are not independent enough to oppose Suharto, Those who genuinely want change are first, because they do not necessarily want to take outside the system. In fact, that is part of the power, and are not certain that the population reason they can afford to express their will rally behind them if they do. Secondly, the demands- they are not benefiting from the current generation of ABRI officers have been Suharto government. Those who are in the educated and trained professionally, so turning system, but are concerned with the direction against their s uperiors presents an enormous the government is taking, arc nonetheless psychological barrier. Feeding on the above two worried that if Suharto falls the country will institutions is the ruling party, Golkar. Its plunge into chaos. In brief, there are n o existence depends on Suharto's continuing feasible successors on whom everybody can patronage and the nodding approval of ABRI. While rely to handle unrest. Civilian oppositions are Suharto's power com es m ostly from G olkar, 1964: Megawati Su lwmoputri not sure enough of the ground swell in their without Suharto, Golkar will lose its listens to a speech by her fa ther, favour, and the military arc watching whether raison d 'etre, and ABRI's protection . President Sul 18 EUREKA STREET • M A RC H 1998 Caritas Australia Keeping hope alive through Project Compassion For Dinh Van Cong and his family, their new cow is very important. Cong's family is one of the poorest in Yen Dong commune in Vietnam. His parents bought the cow with money from a revolving loan fund run by the community and supported by Caritas Australia. They've already sold one calf and put the profit towards building a new house, with a reed door and bamboo rafters. The Catholic agency for Your donation to Project Compassion will help • overseas aid and development. others like Cong's family to invest in their farms and become self reliant. ~ Caritas Australia ~------Your donation will help people help themselves Yes! I would like to be part of the work of Caritas Australia and its global partners. 0 a cheque for Ll_$ ______,1 is enclosed, or 0 Please debit my credit card: 0 Bankcard 0 VISA 0 Mastercard 0 Diners Club 0 American Express card number: DDDDDDDD DODD DODD Exp date I I I Amount I $ I Signature L______, State Postcode L~------' Donations $2 and over are tax deductible ESpc Cut this coupon out and send it to: Caritas Australia, GPO Box 9830 in your capital city Labor in election gear 'I"" AHE "MES 20 EUREKA STREET • M ARC H 1998 anti-racism. To the business community he was saying: we can Yet all along the line it was a case of giving with one hand cut a deal; we can be tmsted to put investment in its proper and taking with another. So shadow Industrial Relations place above 'excessive' Aboriginal rights. minister Bob McMullan lambasted the Workplace Relations Act Both groups heard what they wanted to hear: the party for putting hospitality workers' penalty rates at risk, but refused members clapping and cheering, and the Queensland Mining point blank to say Labor would repeal the law. He attacked Council greeting the possibility of further Labor concessions enterprise bargaining- but emphasised that Labor would give on mining leases as a 'positive step'. unions (and therefore employers) a choice between it and So the resolution, passed with much emotion and applause, centralised wage bargaining. The platform promises training reflected both interpretations: 'Labor remains resolutely programs for the unemployed, but insists that the jobless also opposed to the Howard Bill in its unamended form, which is have 'reciprocal obligations'. discriminatory, divisive' and on the other hand 'utterly incapable of providing the certainty wanted and n eeded by those with competing It is 44 years since Barry Jones observed his first ALP interests.' It insisted on indigenous people's conference, by coincidence also in Hobart. As he continued right to negotiate over resource mused to delegates at one point, times have changed. developments while assuring Labor's support for This year's conference had nearly two hundred retrospective validation of leases affected by the delegates and one hundred or so proxies. A substantial Wik judgment-and there are thousands of them. minority were women. Procee in s ere broadcast The conference motion on Wik will probably on the Internet. be of little lasting significance. It is likely to be In 1954 there were thirty-six delegates, all male, subsumed in the serious politicking around the who met in secret. The ALE was about to split. Jones Coalition Bill when Parliament resumes. But it summarised the balancing act at the heart of remembered how a number of delegates walked out Beazley's strategy. On the one hand, he has to in disgust and, i the pirit of the French Revolution, convince that section of Labor's core, blue-collar took an oath in a nearby tennis court. (and white-collar) constituency lost in the 1996 It appears the term 'cross-factional deal' had not election that the party has changed its economic yet been invehted. rationalist spots. On the other, he has to reassure the media and business that there will be no wild lurch to dangerous (and expensive) populism. Even the promises on education were hedged around with Beazley wobbled along the tightrope at this conference. For qualifications. Mark Latham, Shadow Minister for Education two brief moments the crowd had its heart in its mouth as his and Youth Affairs, told delegates: 'Labor simply can't afford to foot slipped off the wire. Would the stoush over the party advocate more money for more programs of the old kind, presidency or Cheryl Kernot's airport outburst bring him especially in education. Learning has become far too important hurtling down? In the end his stability was assured by the way to fund failure, or support institutions that fall short of our the party's Left and Right co-operated to ensure that the centre expectations of success ... Each of us in the Labor Party who of gravity remained in the middle. has benefited from good government schooling and higher So what, after all this, might we expect from a Labor education knows that-even for the most disadvantaged of government? By the time the conference ended there was a tidy people-hard work costs nothing.' pile of pledges for branches and union leaders to popularise over If there were cracks in the political facade, they were the coming months. Some promises were politically cheap-they grouted with generous dollops of 'community'. Beazley used were identical with the party's position at the last election. his conference time sparingly, so when he spoke for a Labor remains opposed to a GST, to further privatisation of Telstra resolution praising firefighters and lifesavers, it was a signal. and to upfront university fees for Australian students. In office, it To ram the point home he spoke on the final day, contrasting will abolish fees, improve Abstudy, reduce the age at which stu Labor's values to the Liberals', in particular their Thatcherite dents can claim mature-age Austudy, make HECS more' equitable' belief that 'there is no such thing as society'. Whereas in the and increase the proportion of public funding for the university past a Labor leader might have emphasised his social democratic sector. It will also abolish nursing home entry fees commitment to the welfare state, to taxing the wealthy and use tax income to finance capital improvements. (however mildly) to fund public hospitals and schools, and to other progressive measures, Beazley took a quite different T HE INDUSTRIAL FRONT Labor promises a range of tack. He praised Australia's 2.6 million community improvements, including getting rid of Australian Workplace volunteers effusively. Agreements (individual contracts) and the anti-union 'Volunteers form what has been called the third sector of Employment Advocate, and removing the industrial relations our economy, alongside private enterprise and the public sector. clauses in the Trades Practices Act. While the lofty aim is to Often voluntary organisations are able to do their work more achieve full employment, the more modest immediate target cheaply than either the public or private sectors-they use of cutting the level of unemployment to 5 per cent would, if volunteers, and often have the expertise the other sectors don't achieved, be welcome. Labor will reinstate training programs for have. In addition, they can often be more effective-being closer the jobless and tweak government to a more interventionist stance. to the ground, they understand community needs better.' V OLUME 8 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 21 The media concentrated on the closing moments of the Pending Kernot's elevation to the House of Representatives, speech, in which Beazley annointed Kernot quasi-shadow Jenny Macklin was the female shadow minister given the chance minister for the over-45s. But it is the Labor leader's emphasis to shine. With the chance to lambast the Liberals over child on 'the third sector'-politically cuddly and so very, very care cuts and nursing home fees, she gave the delegates what cheap-that may well turn out to be of more long-term they wanted to hear. But her most thoughtful contribution was significance. not made to the conference but to the fee-paying business If this was a crucial philosophical retreat, it clearly passed observers. Calling on the latest World Bank Development the Left by. On the surface, factional dilierences had simply ceased Report for support, she made a pitch for the concept of social to exist. Substantial fundamentals-the idea that government intervention is a numbers of motions necessary component of stabilising nations integrating with the and amendments were world economy, rather than an expensive irritation. It's not ostentatiously moved known how the business people reacted, but we are W 22 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1998 The intellectual glue holding Labor's latest platform together was provided by Gareth Evans. He buzzed and weaved around the conference floor full of smiles after steering two key planks- Labor's values and its economic policy-safely through on day one. His sharp mind might make him invaluable, but he's no man of the people. There were sniggers from the public gallery as he attacked enemies of Wik as 'troglodyte acolytes'. What some delegates called his arrogance nearly brought about one of Labor's rare own goals, in the discussion on foreign policy. Many had hoped that Labor would at least shift to the left on the question of East Timor. Shadow Foreign Affairs minister Laurie Brereton spoke twice to emphasise the ALP's commitment to self determination. But any impact was cancelled out by Evans, Foreign Minister until 1996, who insisted in a speech from the floor that the policy was identical to that when he was chatting with the Indonesian dictatorship. Luckily for Labor, the media contingent had collectively turned its back on the foreign policy session. Evans stuck to his guns when speaking later to Eureka Street. There was no reason for Labor to be more upfront in voicing concerns over East Timor. 'I'm quite unmoved [by such demands] in opposition as in government. What matters is getting a result.' He was piqued at any suggestion that he had done less than his best for the East Timorese. 'I worked my guts out. I put at risk my relationship with Alatas. [But] if you're going to solve the East Timor problem it's going to be in a way that persuades Suharto to act. This is the calculation which lies behind the kind of behaviour in which I engaged. ' Embarrassing Suharto would tend to push the situation backwards, he said, citing the way that Bill Clinton had publicly called for East Timorese autonomy in Bogar in 1994. 'The next day Suharto came out through his spokesman and said that political autonomy was off the agenda.' The same pragmatism was reflected on other topics, too. Labor's platform, he happily admitted, 'walked both sides of the street' in balancing off the interests of voters and business. 'It isn't a wimping out. It's a reasonable, sophisticated response.' He was unrepentant over smothering even the tiniest hint of a wealth tax. 'One of the most significant forms of wealth accumulation is inheritance' and Labor had no intention of going down the path of death duties. There was never any question of repealing the Workplace Relations Act. Labor's policy was always going to be a question of balance between flexibility and the role of the Industrial Relations Commission. It was a policy tempered by realism and sophistication. 'This is the sea change in Australian politics- Labor is becoming more and more the natural party of government.' Within the year we shall know if the voters agree. 'Government lost integrity when Labor ideas which the people Australian society in the spirit of 'world's best practice'. who elected John Howard had a right to believe would remain While the Left might squirm at som e of the policy part of the furniture of Australian politics-because he said they prescriptions that follow, it no longer has an alternative vision. would- were then dispensed with. Ideas like affordable child It shares with the Right ever more common ground. But how care, health care, educational opportunity and secure pay and can you convincingly attack a government for failing to live up working conditions.' to its 'comfortable and relaxed' slogan when your policies have The problem for Labor is that many of those sa me ideas been and are likely to continue to be equally stressful? ca me under attack during its thirteen years in office. It was The answer from Labor throughout the conference is that Labor that ended free tertiary education, introduced enterprise while there would be losers in this brave new globalised bargaining, embraced privatisation and cut the top rates of both economy, Labor would not let them through the safety net. But corporation and inco me tax. And lost in 1996. it's a pale and vapid message to take on the stump. Barry Jones, reflecting on the last Labor government in his There is in reality plenty of room to implement a presidential address, said: 'I'm not sugges ting that we should MacTiernan-esqu e agenda of higher taxes to fund grea ter public have changed our policies ... We failed to provide 'after sales services. Evans, in his speech on economic policy, boasted that service' to reassure voters who felt threatened by the speed of Labor had cut the top marginal rate of income tax from the 60 social and economic change.' cents in the dollar it had been under Treasurer Howard in 1983 Gareth Evans was even blunter. 'Under the Hawke and to 47 cents today. Without those cuts, 'We would be collecting Keating Governments, the Australian economy, and Australian now around $30 billion more revenue annually,' he said. For society, was fundamentally transformed and became equipped many Labor voters this kind of tax holiday for the wealthy is as it had never been before to meet the challenges of a globalising nothing of which to be proud. Just think what could be done for economy ... Rather than resisting forces of change as so many welfare, child care, education and health with $30 billion a year. earlier conservative governments had done ... the Hawke and Beazley's bid for respectability rules out that kind of policy. Kea ting governments were, if anything, constantly ahead of the But if workers feel Labor offers no serious alternative, Howard cutting edge.' must still fancy himself to win a second term. • No wonder then that the conference was bland. It was not stage-management that killed any fervour, but the Labor David Glanz is a freelance journalist. leadership's continuing co mmitment to revolutionising Photographs also by David Glanz. V OLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 23 P oETRY JOHN K INSELLA The Kookynie Poems for Joyce H eywood The Garden For years after they'd left turnips would appear each season the townsfolk heading down for the woody harvest. For a while it was as if the town had one up on the desert, Hanging Rocks but the lineage weakened, like the mines failing, A picnic excursion the hotels drying up, to a most incredible place- the creek thinning, and this way out, deep in the Goldfields the gardeners leaving town but you have to watch out- and the desert the wind'll rip through rescinding. and howl, like the dingoes rubbing themselves and singing the hessian walls of the house, painted three times over to keep the weather out, to keep the desert out, Geranium to keep the stories out you have to tread carefully as mineshafts might open up You plant a cutting and swallow you, and wait-investing bottomless, silent, the dry red soil suspended beneath with all the water the rocks. you can spare. In the shade it grows with the heat. As if it's too good to be true, you become anxious almost wanting it to finish, to have spent its time-as it would even in a perfect climate, a variety of species surrounding it. 24 EUREKA STREET • MARC H 1998 The Dam Funeral Expenses To drown Though death had hacked in a dry place at her hands and feet doesn't bear and Mother had spent thinking about. the family's savings The long dam on bolts of black cloth, they used for races, the Infantile Paralysis the Salvation Army retreated from the eldest. picnicking with the children For years after only she nearby, singing wore brightly-coloured clothes and clapping hands, the rest of the family kicking up a din, dressed in funereal black. smothering the shrieks of bewilderm ent as Mr Cram dived and jammed his head between the rocks, his blood spreading out into the dead calm Cradle Snatching of the dam, the heat. To fill their cribs, cradles, nurseries, bright halls and ball rooms, boarding houses and missions, Niagara conservatories and parlours, small and large houses, They named it in hope orphanages and prisons, that it would yield the greatest they came out of the desert of riches. The name was not with children gathered, a metaphor for gold. not looking back over their shoulders, It signified the huge always travelling to the city shift of water by train. A few of the white over the Falls. children cried-it could have been them, But it wasn't to be, almost, sometime, they imagined and water remained brackish in the confusion. and expensive- the town's wealth siphoned off the mines crackling underfoot like parched circulatory systems. Kookynie, once a prominent mining town on the Western Australian Goldfields, has long been deserted. V o LUME 8 NuMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 25 PROJECTIONS DAMIEN BRODERJCK After worl< T Ao moN """ u; th>t tht ;ole cmc architectural draughtsm en and women Instead, as matters stand now, the for penury is work, the harder the better. traded in for computer-aided design (CAD) dispossessed can look forward to nothing Unlike victims of flood, drought or war, programs. but misery and anxiety, marginal lives of those without jobs are stereotyped as In the fifties, the glossy magazines boring pointlessness. shiftless folk who cannot or will not work. preached a coming age of 'cybernation'. It One startling solution to these disasters In many cases it's true, but in many didn ' t h appen, not quite, n ot then . is simple and feasible. It has been available more there simply are no jobs available. Cybernated industries, it was claimed, for more than thirty years, but a moralising The obvious solution to the plight of those would create as many new jobs as they prejudice stops us looking it in the eye. without money or property seemed to stare m ade obsolescent. Probably true, but the It demands no radical revolution, yet while us in the face: find or create work for them. stark and worrying reality is that those new it answers the extremes of poverty that still Dig the fields, paint the barn, work the jobs-or not all of them-cannot be filled afflict large pockets of the industrialised loom, run the messages, clean the by the displaced workers. world it also eases the way into the coming chimneys-with your own body if need be. N or can they be taken up by quite a large dispensation, a world almost entirely Get a job! proportion of the young out-of-work. This without jobs. The age of downsizing and computers tragedy has never been simply a matter of And that's its drawback. It stands in turned that sanctimonious diagnosis on its ins ufficient ' re-training programs'. profound opposition-or so at firs t it head. As long ago as the 1960s, an army of Increasingly, the new jobs dem and a level seems-to the traditional work ethic. the technologically redundant started to of education beyond the experience, and This is the suggestion, bluntly put: gather. Many dismal tasks once so reliable perhaps the co mpetence, of many society will pay everyone, as an inalienable in sustaining the under-educated poor were dispossessed industrial workers. right, a basic minimum dividend being done more cheaply and efficiently by M eanwhile, near-slavery returns in a so-called Guaranteed In come-drawn machines. backyard sweatshops where entire families, from the cybernated pmductivity often immigrants lacking in and wealth of Lhe nation. language and bargaining skills, s truggl e to compete on I N 1996, the prestigious Canadian Massey Poverty, it's supposed, deregulated m a rke ts with radio lectures were to be delivered by Robert is a character defect. imported goods from newly Theobald, an early proponent of this industrialised nations without Guaranteed Income solution. T he Massey If that claim were ever much in the way of labour offer was abruptly withdrawn in September true, in today's era of protection codes. None of this 1996. Theobald observed: is stable, and it cannot go on I was proposing that we required radical! y structural unemployment much longer. different goals for the 21st century: social Yet the jobs superseded by it is no better than co hesion, co-operative decision-making machines are often precisely and ecological integrity. I argued that these self-righteous cant. those involving the greatest goals had to progressively replace current degree of tedium, exh au stion com mitments to maxi mum economic a nd lac k of c reativi t y. If growth and international competitiveness. people weren' t losing their I naturally expected opposition to these Within the last decade, medium-level earning-power, there'd be great rejoicing views . But I expected it to follow the jobs started vanishing as well, swall owed in the land. lec tures, not to prevent their broadcast. by flexible computers, or shared out to In the abstract, h a nding over to people who would rather not do them. computers all those necessary tasks which Recently, they have been broadcast here Typing- pools were swapped for word are dirty, dangerous, tiring and uninteresting by the ABC, with immense success, and the processors on every desk, bank clerks would promise the human species a n ew book of the lectures has been a surprise replaced by autom atic teller machines, era of freedom and personal growth. best-seller. 26 EUREKA STREET • MARc H 1998 Back in 1963, Theobald had published Conservatives tend to be horrified by this bureaucracy that stifled and humiliated Free Men and Free Markets. 'What practi suggestion. Government is incompetent, the poor would lead to a revival of the 19th cal steps n eed to be taken,' he asked, 'in they cry, m eddling and corrupt. Handouts century's bustling free-enterprise drive. order to reap the benefits of the scientific to the 'work-shy'-extorted from hard The Guaranteed Income proposal, and technological revolution rather than workers-is a travesty of the proper order of perhaps because of its politically protean its destructive growths?' His answer was things. Worse, it's counter-productive character, rem ains provocative but untried. shockingly offensive to conservatives of because it eats away the inner worth of the The core idea remains alive. recipient, and tainted A imple version was devised by anyway, being the fruit of economists Cyert and Jacobs: a negative Isn't this rampant socialism, a poisoned tree. income tax, issued monthly. On all income One can share some from other sources, though, a family would the sort of error exploded sympathy for this distaste be subject to high taxation, perhaps 50 per in the fall of the Soviet for bloated Big Govern cent. You could have a free lunch, so to mentwithoutimmediately speak, but you'd pay double for dinner. empire~ Curiously, the shouting down Theobald's Once the family's income reached twice notion was being promoted suggestion. A guaranteed the minimum rate, their guaranteed income minimum income less would cut out, along with its confiscatory in the 1960s not by leftish resembles the demeaning taxation level, and they would switch back radicals but by such saint receipt of an extorted, to the ordinary graduated schedule of tax. stigmatising dole than the The price of the program was estimated at of the free-market as freedom to breathe the about half the cost of a small war. In its Milton Friedman, Nobel common air without absence, Americans are now paying in any paying for every breath. case for a small war-again t many Economics laureate in 1976. In the early 1960s, of their own marginalised citizens. Theobald examined the case of a family of four in ASA N I NVI O L A BLE ENTITLEM ENT , a both left and right, and still is. He proposed which neither parent held a job. Drawing guaranteed income would offer those who'd 'th e establishment of n ew principles on official estimates of a 'modest but been made technologically redundant the specifically designed to break the linl< adequate income' [since then wildly eroded chance to engage in dignified self-help. At between iobs and income' [my emphasis). by inflation), he suggested a basic income of present, it is difficult for jobless people to Increasingly, the interests of the individual $1000 per adult and $600 for each child. So get a bank loan to start a mall business, or citizen had been subordinated to those of the family would have earned, as a right, buy and fix up their home, or pay for the the economy, filching freedom and dignity $32.00 annually with no strings attached. protracted study and skill development that from a significant proportion of the population. Today the equivalent might A third of a century later, the frightful be, say, eight times that much: woes of the black and other marginalised $2.5 ,000 in all. Force a generation of 'underclasses' in the USA, and the growing Enough to get by, in short, kids out of the loop, distress of those in a trap of welfare without but hardly luxury. An impor the option of careers, prove how prescient tant proviso to bear in mind is and expect them to trash he was. this: because basic income your Porsche, murder Happily unrepentant, he says, 'One right has nothing to do with recent poll shows that people would give up how you spend your time, you each other, and burn out income for leisure if they had the choice. aren't prohibited from work Personally, I find this development ing for pay, or without it, if you their furious grief wonderful. I have long been in favour of full can find a job. On the contrary. with neurotoxins. unemployment, believing that job Isn't this rampant socialism, structures were not the best way to get the the sort of error exploded in work of the culture done.' [My emphasis.) the fall of the Soviet empire? Curiously, the might lever them back into still-vital parts The terms of Theobald's proposal were notion was being promoted in the 1960s of the work force. 'Further, and of potentially unequivocal: not by leftish radicals but by such saints of great significance,' Cyert and Jacobs the free-market as Milton Friedman, Nobel suggested, 'a guaranteed minimum income We need to adopt the concept of an Economics laureate in 1976, who favoured would make it more feasible for private absolute constitutional right to an income. direct payment to the poor as a way to slash industry to sponsor long training programs, This would guarantee to every citizen .. . the tangle of aid programs. for it would no longer be necessary to pay the right to an income from the Federal A laissez-faire conservative and substantial wages through the period of Government sufficient to enable him to monetarist, Friedman argued that a training and low productivity.' live in dignity. No Government agency, gu aranteed incom e would return to all Theobald was more optimistic still. judicial body, or other organisation individuals the freedom to seek their own Productive groups, which h e termed whatsoever should have the power to economic advantage. Once that process was 'consentives', would come together on a suspend or limit any payments assured by rolling, the magic of the market would voluntary basis, working iust because they these guarantees. supervene. Scrapping the complicated wanted to. Decades later, this is a pattern V OLUME 8 NUMBER 2. • EUREKA STREET 27 we recognise from garage bands, high-tech Fear of being out of a job has two roots decade, perhaps not until the 2030s. We garage start-ups, and Int em e t special interest that need no longer be axiomatic. One is the need drastic cures for the social problem s groups. All those, of course, tend to be loss of adequate incom e. The other is loss of that exist now and will worsen in the funded directly by doting, well-paid parents. m eaningful activity. Without the fram e decades before advanced technology makes Much of the arts in this nation is already w ork of discipline and satisfaction that them disappear for good. produced under such a schem e, although brains and hands obtain from m eaningful National investment in a guaran teed Australia Council grants are uncertain and work, people start running amok with incom e schem e might prove much more m eagre, a year's grant usually budgeted boredom , diverting them selves with the tha n a cos tly exer cise in h uman e frugally over four or five by dedicated artists ancient, arbitrary and zestful custom s of conscience-salving. who could get more on the dole. tribal h ierarch y and conflict. Force a A corpora tion tha t down sizes i ts Still, m any will reject any redistribution gen eration of kids out of the loop, and workfo rce in fa vour of robots is surviving as of wealth, beyond a pittance paid fo r in expect them to trash your Porsch e, m urder a parasite on the in vestment of the past. Its humiliation. Poverty, it's supposed, is a each other, and burn out their earnings, after all, are the product of every chara cter defect. If that claim were ever true, furious grief with neurotoxins. erg of human effort that went in to creating in today's era of structural unemploym ent the econom y and the technological culture it is no better than self-righteous cant. C ONSENTIVES M IG HT PRODUC E goods that which m ade those robots possible. T he work ethic (better, the job ethic) embody, both in them selves and in the So we can see a guaran teed incom e as an cannot su rvive long while a culture of workers' sense of creative satisfa ction, the inheritance, som ething owed to all the m achine abundance disintegrates m ores of virtues of hand-crafted design in a m achine children of a society whose ancestors for austerity and fa natical toil- them selves world. Brilliant computer 'shareware' does gen era tion s h ave together built, and o nly a few t h ou sand years ol d . It' s just that right now. Since wages and salaries purchased through their efforts, the resource undeniable, though, that a gu aranteed would no longer be all-important, cost of base sustaining today's cornucopia. We are incom e would run straight into the hostile purchasing such goods might be m inim al, all stakeholders, in som e minimal m easure defensiveness of those committed to the hardly greater than raw m aterials and at least, in the common wealth. • work ethic. Societies remain stratified, after tra n sp ort- m a ybe compar able w ith the fashion of a scarcity economy, according computerised factory production. Damien Broderick is a novelist and writer to the jobs its members hold. Since the The eventual ri se of nanotech nology about science. This is an edited extract fro m policy of fu ll em ploym ent is faltering and building things cheaply, from the atom his new book on the future of technology an d doom ed, we must do an about-face and up- will make even these fond hopes passe. work, The Spike: A ccelera ting into the perceive the m erits of u nemploym ent. But that will not happen for at least another Unimaginable Futme (Reed Books) . 1998 Three Personal Stories AUSTRALIAN invites you to hear CAROLINE JONES BOOK REVIEW Presenter of 'The Sea rch for Meaning' rad io ser ies and books, and author of An Authentic Life, in February/March: to be released in Jun e 1998 David Williamson on literary theory JOAN GOLDING Mother of Martin w ho died from AIDS after being Kerryn Goldsworthy on the nursed at home for three years Wherret brothers' Desirelines ROSALIE JONES Michael Sharkey on Principal of Star of the Sea College, Gardenvale Bryce Courtenay's Tommo and Hawk speak of their spiritual journeys Edward Colless on the art of lmants Tillers faci I ita ted by M arie Joyce, Associate Professo r of Psychology, Head of the School of Social Science Peter Craven reviews the film version of at the Australian Catholic Univers ity Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda Friday 27 March 1998 at 7 .30pm Joe Rich on John Howard Xavier College Chapel, Barkers Rd, Kew Donation at the door to cover the expenses of the Richard Hall on Anne Whitehead's Paradise Mislaid evening (suggested donation $5) En qu iries : Kate M cKenzie, jes uit Provincial Office New Subscribers $55 for ten issues plus a free book BH : 03 981 8 39 60, AH : 03 9853 6453 Ph (03) 9663 8657 or Fax (03) 9663 8658 28 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 ESSAY MARK McKENNA An article of faith for a sceptical democracy Now is the time to design a constitution for the people of Australia. It is not a time to patch up the work of our grandfathers. The people must begin now to draft a constitution which will give every adult in our society an equal voice ... I believe the time has come to elect a convention to draft a constitution for the people of Australia ... the basis of all just power [and] the source of all wisdom. -Manning Clark, Melb ourne Town Hall, 10 November 1976 I N F"'"A'" 1990, MANN>NC CCA" wwto to NSW L•bm MP F""" A V oLUM E 8 N u M BER 2 • EUREKA STREET 29 conservative side of politics, labelling Clark as a red republican served the convenient purpose of positioning him as an enemy, while also questioning his own, and by implication, the Labor Party's loyalty to Australia. Yet Manning Clark was not a 'life-long republican' nor was his republicanism as unequivocal as many in the labour movement might wish it to be. Clark came to republicanism late in life, most probably in his sixty-first year, at the time of the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 19 75. It was not a distaste for m onarchy, ala Thomas Paine, which was to drive his belief in Australian independence, but the destruction of a Labor government a government which he saw as 'possibly ... the final chance for Australia to show the world it was capable of building a society free of the errors in both capitalist and communist societies'. Clark was more disturbed by the use which Sir John Kerr had made of the protective cloak of monarchy in dismissing an elected government than he was by the presence of the monarchy in Australia's Constitution. Writing in The Age, March 1977, and taking the republican side of the argument against the m onarchist Sir Mark Oliphant, he clarified his position: It wa in Australia that men holding the office of Governor or Governor-General used their influence and th ei r power to serv e the interest of conservative forces. By comparison in the United Kingdom the reigning monarchy has behaved with a dignity and impartiality singularly la cking .. . in th e Antipodes. Despite his appearance on many republican 'platforms' in the years following the dismissal, Manning Clark's particular brand of republicanism was idiosyncratic and elusive. As a public intellectual, he often spoke in the tongues of various historical actors. His prose was at once romantic, em otive and melancholy. It breathed both the fire and brimstone of a harsh God, and the Dostoyevsky-like compassion of the seer who took pity on the human condition. At times, it was difficult to discern who was speaking. In his public statem ents on the disrnissal and his millenarian visions of Australian society-encouraged largely by the 'future industry' in the mass m edia, Clark did not frame his dreams of Australian independence under the banner of the republic. In fact, he rarely used the word, and on the few occasions when he did, he only nodded in the direction of the inevitability of the republic. To acknowledge his reticence to embrace the republican label is not to suggest that he was cold to the spirit of the term, but it does raise interesting questions about his legacy and the true source of his inspiration for present-day republicans. SURVEY ING CLARK' s PUBLIC SPEEC HES in the years following the dismissal, it is impossible to ignore their radical prescription for constitu tiona! change. Manning Clark was not a minimalist. He spoke passionately about the need for a complete overhaul of the Constitution, and when detailing the precise form this constitutional change might take, his solution were often drastic. In 1988, he called for the Senate to be deprived of all power, for an Australian President with purely ceremonial responsibilities, and a people's cons ti tu tion which enshrined the principle of one m an one vote. These sentiments were consistent with Clark's call in 1976 for a constitution to be drafted by the people. Until Clark's death in 1991 , his perspective on constitutional change was fa shioned largely as a response to the events of November 1975. His tendency to lean towards a uni-cameral system and the centralisation of federal power, places him at some distance from the more tradi tiona! notions of republican federalism which emphasise the dispersal of power. Yet in looking to Manning Clark for inspiration, we need not follow him blindfolded. The power and relevance of Clark's voice to today's debate on the republic lies in its poetic sensibility- in the general direction which h e pointed rather than the minutiae of his proposals for constitutional reform. Clark's political legacy is a reminder that there is more to an Australian republic than the postal address of the Head of State. It asks us to lift our minds above the level of insular pragmatism and shallow nationalist endeavour, and to imagine a republic founded on the principles of human equality, social justice, reconciliation and environmental protection. In this sense, a return to Clark's thoughts on the reform of Australia's Constitution might act as a healthy antidote to the conventional wisdom to be found at present in some sections of the labour movem ent, where there is an eagerness to proclaim the death of the big picture. In the wake of the Senate's refusal to grant supply in 19 75, Clark chastised the Labor Party for forgetting the vision which had brought Whitlam to power in 1972. He claimed that it was not sufficient for Labor merely to engage in an exchange of abuse with the conservative parties as to 'which party was the more competent in making capitalist society work'. Instead it ought rise above the armchair vision of comfortable consumers in blissful pursuit of personal wealth. These aspirations are not simply feel-good statements; there are sections of the con titution which might be most effectively amended to ensure a truly inclusive Australian republic. 30 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1998 The model Republic: For Australia to have a Governor-General is something like trying to sit down and eat a plum pudding on December 25 north of Cairns. -Manning Clark, 1977 Since the modern debate on an Australian republic began in July 1991, we have heard much about the need for an Australian Head of State. The Australian Republican Movement and the Keating Government have made the case for an Australian President, stressing the anachronistic nature of the monarchy in The Preamble does not Australia's Constitution and public culture. They have pointed to the undemocratic features of the speak of the sovereignty British monarchy, such as male primogeniture, discrimination on the grounds of religion, and the nonsense of the h ereditary principle-all of which are anathema to the Australian mythology of of the people but the egalitarianism. The plum pudding of monarchy has always looked ridiculous on Australian soil. That agreement of the people. much is common sense. Yet to reiterate the two-centuries-old arguments of Thomas Paine, and paste them together with a familiar brand of emotive nationalism, does not require a great deal of As we now know, rr inventiveness. Aboriginal and Torres .1. HERE ARE TWO ARGUMENTS FOR AN AUSTRALIAN REPUBLIC-the nationalist and the democratic. To date, our Strait Islander peoples republicans have discussed the nationalist argument with considerable force. They have also expressed the n egative democratic arguments against monarchy. But in their official policy platform they have did not give their consent failed to explain the positive democratic argum ents for an Australian republic. Rhetorically, the to Federation. Except for movement's vanguard pay lip service to the form of democratic community they hope the republic will usher in. the colonies of South Robert Hughes offered an eloquent example in December 1996: Australia and Western The republic wants the source of collective loyalty to be the Australian people as a whole, in all its variety Australia, women were of creed, race, origin and opinion. Republicans know that the old fantasy of the monoculture no longer works and cannot possibly be returned to. ineligible to vote in the These sentiments speak directly to the positive democratic arguments for a republic. They emphasise Federation referendums. respect for cultural diversity, and allude to an inclusive model of a republic. But it would take a In addition, the Preamble considerable leap of faith to believe that this model can be achieved simply by the appointment of an Australian Head of State. Having an Australian President is an important first step in the process of fails to include reference constitutional reform, but alone, that cannot hope to solve the dilemma that lies at the heart of the post to Western Australia. colonial polity in Australia. In an age of globalisation, the great challenge for an Australian republic is to reconcile the desire for national identity with the reality of cultural diversity. We need a new way of On any reasonable test, thinking about ourselves as a people. The old notions of national identity which em erged from the spread of nationalism in nineteenth century Europe can no longer sustain us. Australians, of course, are not the Preamble does not homogeneous-ethnically, culturally or linguistically. When we go in search of a common identity we reflect the status of are left with the principle of the fair go, scepticism, and a laconic appreciation of the good life-qualities which are by no means unique to human beings who live in Terra Australis. Our identity is fluid, fickle Australia as an and gloriously diffuse. Vale Norm, Les Patterson, and other blokey representations of Australia. The independent nation challenge for republican Australia is to turn away from the search for national identity-this will be handled willingly by advertising agencies and the entertainment industry-and look instead to a political -nor does it reflect the definition of national community. shared democratic The question which Manning Clark asked repeatedly of Australians in the last years of his life-'What do we believe and what do we stand for?' was one which related directly to constitutional reform in a principles which might multicultural society. 'We inherit from our past no professions of faith,' said Clark. 'No-one has written act as a binding force in a an Australian Declaration of Independence. No-one has drawn up for us a list of self-evident truths-that among these are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... If anyone asks us who we are and culturally diverse society. what we want to be we lapse into the great Australian silence.' (Th e Bulletin, January 26, 1988) The minimalist republic will not fill Clark's hall of silence. If a republic is to replace the powerful symbolism of monarchy in Australia's Constitution, it requires an equally powerful articulation of democratic sovereignty to fill the void. An Australian Head of State is not enough. The Preamble to the Australian Constitution is one possible repository of shared democratic principles and values. Both the Keating Government's 1995 blueprint for the republic, and the formal ARM platform, at least until February '98, fail to make any case for the alteration of the Preamble. In one sense, this is contradictory. We need only read the first paragraph of the present Preamble to understand why. Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established ... VoLUM E 8 NuMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 31 This Preamble is an appropriate reflection of the values and priorities which prevailed at the time of Australian federation. It contains no inspirational flourishes or rhetorical appeals to individual liberty. In dry, m easured, and calculated prose, it embodies the three unifying features of Federa tion Australia loyalty to the Crown, beli fin God, and the shared need to provide national unity for white Australians through the introdu ction of federal government. These principles are no longer the unifying force they were in 1901. Leaving aside the more obvious incongruity which would result if a republic were to retain a monarchic Preamble, the present Preamble is inappropriate for other reasons. The function of the Preamble is to articulate the intentions of the constitution that it precedes. It is not formally part of the Constitution, although it can potentially be relied upon by the High Court as a The question which source of the principles which guide the Constitution. The current preamble indicates the agreem ent of Manning Clark asked the people of Australia to federation. Yet for Australians in 1998, the concept of the people expressed in the Preamble is too narrow. The Preamble does not speak of the sovereignty of the people but the repeatedly of Australians agreement of the people. As we now know, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples did not give their in the last years of his consent to Federation. Except for the colonies of South Australia and Western Australia, wom en were ineligible to vote in the Federation referendums. In addition, the Preamble fails to include reference to life-'What do we believe Western Australia. On any reasonable test, the Preamble does not refl ect the status of Australia as an and what do we stand independent nation- nor doe it reflect the shared democratic principles which might act as a binding force in a culturally diverse society. In the 1990s, a republic that is genuinely inclusive must first address for~ ' was one which the issue of the Preamble. Not to do so would be to miss the enormous potential the Preamble carries to heal the injustices of the past and unite Australians in cultural diversity. The Preamble to the new South related directly to African Constitution, with its language of reconciliation, 'social justice' and 'fundamental constitutional reform human rights', is one model which might prove useful for Australia. in a multicultural society. BASED ON A READ ING OF THE REPUBLIC AD VISORY COMMITTEE REPORT, the report of the 1988 Consti tu tiona] 'We inherit from our past Commission, and the extraordinary bipartisan declaration made in Federal Parliament in October 1996, which affirmed Australia's commitment to the 'equal rights' of citizens, regardless of 'race, colour, creed, no professions of faith,' or origin', I have attempted to write a Preamble which distils the essence of those principles that have said Clark. 'No-one has been most frequently m entioned as the core values of Australian democracy. These fall into seven broad categories-the sovereignty of the people, the equality of all Australians under the law, tolerance of written an Australian difference and cultural diversity, and equality of men and women, equality of opportunity, respect for the Declaration of Constitution and the rule of law, and respect for the environment. Out of respect for the framers of the original Preamble, to emphasi e the evolutionary nature of the Constitution, and to avoid an unnecessary Independence. No-one debate as to whether God's blessing should be sought for the new constitution, it is probably prudent to make appropriate historic references to the old Preamble, while remembering to insert Western has drawn up for us a list Australia. After the words 'under the constitution hereby established' (see original Preamble above) a of self-evident truths bridging line is required. Professor George Winterton has suggested the following: 'And Whereas that Federal Commonwealth of Australia, evolved into an independent nation under the Crown of Australia.' that among these are the It is at this point that the new Preamble would follow on. right to life, liberty and We, the people of Australia, have decided to constitute the Federal Commonwealth of Australia as an the pursuit of happiness independent democratic republic. ... If anyone asks us who In a spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that the territory of Australia was previously occupied by Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, Australia's indigenous people, many of whom suffered we are and what we want dispossession of their traditional lands. to be we lapse into the As a people of many cultures, customs, and beliefs, we hereby declare the principles which bind us great Australian silence.' as a sovereign and free people. We will uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. We will respect the dignity of the human person, the equality of men and women and the right of all persons to equality under the law, regardless of colour, race, gender or creed. We will promote the liberty and welfare of all Australians, and we will respect the land and environment which we share. To these principles, and to this constitution, we, the people of Australia, agree to be bound. (This preamble has been through many drafts, and I am indebted to George Winterton and John Hirst for suggestions.) In this Preamble, I have tried to include those principles which were excluded from the original Preamble-especially the sovereignty of people, the equality of men and women, and the acknowledge ment of Australia's indigenous people. Naturally, there will be those who remain sceptical of any attempt to articulate the shared democratic principles of 18 million people from over 140 different cultures. But 32 EUREKA STREET • MARC H 1998 there may be a higher price to be paid for remaining silent. We share the same continent, the same institutions, and the same citizenship. Perhaps it is in the area of citizenship that the Preamble can play a positive and educative role-not to mention the benefit of explaining the rationale behind the move to the republic. The above Preamble shares the same concerns and preoccupations that characterised the last years of Manning Clark's public life. The first and most important of these was reconciliation between black and white Australians. Although Clark accepted his Order of Australia from Queen Elizabeth in 1977, he declined the invitation of the Hawke government to attend the bicentennial celebration at Circular Quay in 1988. In one of his last public lectures, delivered in Perth in 1991, Clark insisted that 'Europeans in Australia must accept and allow Aborigines to decide what sort of lives they want to lead.' The thought of a republic without reconciliation would have seemed incongruous to Clark-another white man's party. A new Preamble could provide a meeting place for black and white Australians, thereby laying down the first principles of liberty, social justice, land rights, and genuine self determination for Aboriginal people. From this meeting place, it may be possible to advance the process of reconciliation, and reform other sections of the Constitution that bear particular relevance to Aboriginal Australians. In particular, section 51 [xxvi], the so-called 'race power', should be amended to ensure that it can only be employed for the benefit of Aboriginal people, as Father Frank Brennan has recently argued. If the 1967 referendum ended constitutional discrimination against Aboriginal people, then the declaration of a republic should leave no doubt. Finally, the existence of a new Preamble may lead to public debate on the issue of a Bill of Rights. The two issues are clearly related. One of the few human freedom guaranteed in the Australian Constitution-the free exercise of religion [Section 116]-owes its existence in part to the insertion of the phrase 'humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God' in the original Preamble. Both clauses were added at the Federation Convention in Melbourne in 1898- Section 116 largely at the behest of the Victorian delegate Henry Bournes Higgins, while the inclusion of God's blessing in the Preamble was due to the efforts of the South Australian Patrick Glynn. According to Glynn, Higgins wished to ensure that the insertion of the phrase could not be read as a de facto authorisation of Christianity as 'the law of the land'. Because the Preamble expresses the values and belief of the people, it can also set out the broad philosophical principles that will serve as a guide to the formulation of human rights and freedoms. For example, if a new Preamble speaks of the sovereignty, equality, and freedom of the people, then the principles of freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom from racial, cultural or religious discrimination are natural bedfellows. Whether these human rights and freedoms are enshrined in the Constitution or m erely statutory, Australia has the advantage of being able to draw on the experience of several comparable nations which have recently adopted Bills of Rights, such as Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. Radical change in Australia is as likely as a frog growing feathers. ""T""' -Manning Clark, 1977 .1. HROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, MANNING CLARK oscillated between optimism and despair. Although he called for Australians to 'keep alive the vision', he was aware that Australians were 'pragmatists, not ideologues, and certainly not revolutionaries'. Yet his knowledge of the fundamental sceptici m of Australian democracy never deterred him from advancing ambitious proposals for constitutional reform. More than any other historian of his generation, Clark fulfilled his commitment to 'point to the questions of great moment so that they can be opened for debate'. For Australian republicans, Manning Clark's public life serves as a constant reminder that constitu tional change can never be minimal. Rather, it is an issue of belief and principle, inclusion, justice, and human rights. To say this is not to suggest that Australians should stand to attention with hand on heart and weep tears for the Constitution. That is not our way. But neither hould we wallow in the grim realities of Section 128, or imagine nai:vely that a republic is capable of 'speaking' to all Australians if it addresses only the question of the Head of State. For too long now, we have approached the issue of the republic from the perspective of the pragmatist-mechanics first, rationale last. If more Australians are to become republicans, then the language of change must 'speak' and 'listen' to them in all their diversity. A new Preamble is one meeting place where this conversation can begin-an article of faith for a sceptical democracy. • Mark McKenna is a m ember of the Political Science Program in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and author of The Captive Republic, CUP, 1996. In a slightly more extended version, this essay shared first prize in the H.V. Evatt Foundation Essay Prize for 1997. VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 33 THE N ATION T oNY VINSON & KARL L ANGHEINREICH I'll be watching you Every breath you take (breath analyse r) every move you make (motion detector) every bond you break (polygraph) every step you take (e lectronic anklet) every single day (continuous monitoring) every word you say (bugs, wiretaps, mikes) every night you stay (light amplifier) every vow you break (voice stress analys is) every smile you fake (brain wave analys is) every claim you stake (computer matching) I' ll be watching you (v ideo surveillance) - Words from the prophetic song, ' Every Breath You Take', by The Police, adapted by G. Marx in T il be Watching You, Reflections on the New Survei ll ance', Dissent, Winter 1985, pp26-34. 'T,coNTINuou; co;; m ""''cv in summarised by a recent parliamentary Australia is happening surely but inquiry as the right to enjoy private space, imperceptibly so that people don't realise to conduct private communications, to be what's happenin g to them - just like free from surveillance and to be accorded lobsters being boiled.' respect for the sanctity of one's body. This is how an expert in thefield recently The compromising of this right is not described to us the progressive erosion of experienced equally throughout society. the right to privacy which many had hoped Around the world, evidence is accumulating had been stopped by public opposition to that those who suffer disproportionately the Australia Card a decade ago. under the emerging regime are the poorly At the time the Australia Card was educated, social assistance beneficiaries, mooted, a newspaper editor declared: 'There young persons, the homeless, and groups has never been such a cry of opposition that h ave a cultural preference for from the nation over one topic.' The idea of communal, public activities. each individual being assigned a personal Making surveillance routine may also number aroused such passionate and pressures of a less blatant kind which now advantage those who gain knowledge of the widespread opposition as to encourage hope undermine privacy in advanced industrial system and take action to circumvent it. in some quarters that Australian societies. Their extent has prompted the For this reason, it seem s likely that many of governments would think twice before Canadian Privacy Commissioner to these systems will disproportionately net attempting further infringements of people's comment, 'I wouldn't go so far as to say the marginal, amateur, occasional violator right to privacy. privacy no longer exists, but it's certainly rather than the persistent offender. This optimism overlooked the breathing hard to stay alive'. He had in Australia is a world leader in adopting technological and social-organisational mind the kind of consensual view of privacy new technology, in particular personal 34 EUREKA STREET • MARcH 1998 information and communication devices. most sacred and important element of the early stages of its operation , CCTV Surveillance technologies exist which are social bond, is damaged. equipment sometimes provides assistance capable of recording conversations through Consent cannot be inferred from passers to the police in the prosecution of crime. walls and seeing around corners or in the by being aware of signs indicating the However, the effectiveness appears to wear dark. The number of applications for warrants presence of cameras. One concern is that off over time and crime is often displaced to for li tening devices in NSW exceeds the some act, quite possibly harmless and best nearby streets not in camera range. Indeed, number of applications for listening devices forgotten, once recorded, has the potential this was the police justification for recently and wire taps in the whole of the USA. On to become a source of humiliation and even ins ti tu ting intensive photographic a comparative population basis, in 1995, blackmail. Equally important is the fact surveillance in Bankstown to deal with instead of 1341 such applications, the that some of our most important values, the 'fall out' from suppression of street number for NSW should have been 26. including the right of crime in Cabramatta. So Closed circuit television (CCTV) is used peaceful assembly and far as the apprehending extensively in places as varied as public the right of freedom of of offenders is concerned, transport, ATMs, large retail stores, association, are dep in some places the equip shopping centres and malls, the foyers and endent to some extent ment has operated for lobbies of hotels and large offices, elevators, on the right to privacy. years without an arrest car parks and sporting arenas (with the These arguments are being made. The police capacity quickly to produce photos of an not wasted on Austral in areas of surveillance individual spectator in the crowd). Bits of ians, many of whom are sometimes more information that, in the past, did not have shown in surveys concerned about keep threaten an individual's privacy and that they are concerned ing an eye on police anonymity, are now capable of being linked about the intrusion of officers than they are by computers. surveillance. Of great about monitoring mem The new surveillance triggers a shift importance, in the bers of the public. from targe ting a specific s ubject t o longer term, is whether Not that the police categorical suspicion-of youth, ethnic the exchange of privacy should be able to groups, the family and friends of pris- for alleged ben efits, influence the operation oners, to mention just three groups. especially the preven- of the cameras. According tion and detection of crime, actually results to official guidelines, a videotape should 1N THE WORKPLACE, movementS can be in the achievement of those aims. The point only be released to a police officer on receipt tracked by electronic devices, telephones is crucial, because once the right to privacy of a signed request from the local police monitored, speed of work m easured, and is lost, whether intentionally or Patrol Commander. But the reality is that workers observed-areas such as toilets, inadvertently, it can never be recaptured. police are not kept at arm' length from the showers and change rooms-without their Sir Zelman Cowen, in his 1969 Boyer equipment and sometimes actually direct knowledge. Miniaturised 'tiny brother' Lectures ('The Private Man', ABC), warned its operation at Cabramatta. Moreover, cameras are used to do this. They are us to beware of bald assertions about the supposedly independent operators pass capable of catching detail in low light and efficacy of various forms of surveillance in 'stills' of individuals and vehicles taken are being installed anywhere and the absence of tangible supporting evidence. from the videotapes to police occupying the everywhere. The seeming imperative to He did not believe that such evidence same premises for their evaluation and adopt such technology as it becomes existed and cautioned that almost any notation. available is summarised in the phrase: 'have form of privacy invasion can be, and is, In the circumstances described, once it technology, must use'. defended on the grounds of the public becomes clear that CCTV is not a simple Should the adoption of such technology good. The onus of justification must solution to either the prevention or the cause concern? always rest on the shoulders of the solving of crime, councils may be forced to It has been argued that most people will claimant, he said. find further applications to justify the initial accept some form of surveillance in What Cowen suspected decades ago is and continuing expenditure of surveillance exchange for a greater feeling of safety. still the working conclusion of several systems. This is known as 'function creep'. After all, the argument runs, if you are official inquiries in to privacy in The NSW Privacy Committee has found doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to contemporary Australia, as well as that a surveillance system in George Street, fear from surveillance. authoritative overseas research. An ACT Sydney, has identified traffic offences and This argument presupposes that nobody Government review, for example, has been buskersas problems, whilesystemsinBritain can have a good motive for wishing to unable to locate research showing the have been used to search out truants from protect information about their lives. The sustained usefulness of CCTV as an effective school. While the George Street system NSW Privacy Committee has rebutted this crime prevention measure. was being trialled, a number of serious approach by showing that it involves an A similar conclusion has been reached offences occurred-including a stabbing, a inversion of values. Instead of privacy being by the New South Wales Privacy Committee shooting and an armed holdup-which were a valuable human right, it is depicted in the in relation to the CCTV system installed in not prevented by the presence of CCTV. 'nothing to fear' approach as a shield for the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, at a cost The Cabramatta system has been used to evil-doers which prevents unlawful activity of approximately$ 700,000, and with annual target the parking of vehicles on footpaths, from being brought to light. The presump operating costs of around $300,000. people sticking up posters and disposing of tion of innocence is reversed. Trust, the Anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the shop waste in unacceptable ways. VoLUME 8 NuMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 35 Writers have foreseen this electronic in shopping centres or at a railway station. Meanwhile, is there anything to show mediation of society-Orwell vividly depicted These procedures not only represent a for the style of policing which has been the potential for state domination, and in the m ajor invasion of privacy but, amazingly, adopted at Cabramatta? technical implementation of Kafka's night photos of youths who have not been After a year of operation there does not mare, modem society suspects everyone. charged with offences-and bearing such appear to be any evidence that the drug However, it is Jeremy Bentham's concept nebulous inscriptions as 'seen talking to problem has been reduced, let alone of the panopticon- in which prisoners are ... '-are displayed for the perusal of crime eliminated. A senior police officer controlled by the constant sense that they victims. The consequences of such actions commented in March that the police 'had are being watched by unseen eyes-which include an implied criminality which may reached a standstill with the problem'. has the greater illuminative power as a h ave disastrous effects if the photos are Although almost no CCTV evidence has descriptive metaphor. seen by family members and been used to prosecute offenders, it is The shift from investigating a specific acquaintances. claimed that some have pleaded guilty after subject to ca tegorical suspicion is clearly being told they have been 'caught' on video. illustrated by current control and surveil BODY SEARCHING OF YOUNG PEOPLE raises This reflects experience in England where lance practices in relation to young people. similar issues. According to the relevant some people confess as soon as they are told Some of those practices, heavy-handed in Commissioner's Instruction, searching of the tape's existence, without even seeing the extreme, can only be described as should be conducted in a way which is it, despite the fact that the quality of speculative information-gathering rather respectful of privacy and away from the evidence provided by CCTV is often open than investigation based on reasonable public view, 'in a manner that does not to challenge. suspicion. In the process, time-honoured subject the person t o unnecessary Is anything being attained that could rights, such as the presumption of embarrassment or degrading treatment'. In not have been achieved by more adequate innocence, fa ll to one side. fact, searches occur in public places, like policing? Probably the only tangible Take the now fairly widespread practice shopping arcades and car parks at outcome of the Cabramatta surveillance of police photographing young people, Cabram atta. project has been an increase in the number frequently in the absence of any evidence of In one recent case, the young man who of police in the area. Now that the existing wrong-doing and sometimes in circum was apprehended was escorted a confrontational s t yl e of policing is stances which are personally mortifying, considerable distance through a busy area beginning to be modified as part of a State for example, in front of other local residents in his underclothes, before being placed in and Local Government initiative, it is a paddy wagon. The Drug Misuse and possible that the extra staff may be used for Trafficking Act 1985 (NSW) confers on constructive community policing purposes. I WANT TO INVEST WITH CONFIDENCE police the right to search persons reasonably Those who visit family m embers and suspected of possessing a prohibited drug or friends in prison are also singled out for AUSTRALIAN plant. The trouble is that, as with the unbalanced, intrusive surveillance. If jailers' photographing of young p eople, the work were limited to the physical safe ethical 'reasonable grounds' criterion is overridden keeping of those in their charge, then the Agribusiness or by 'op erations' (read intimidatory ham-fisted intrusion on the privacy of reafforestation. TRUSTS campaigns) which are indifferent to the prisoners' partners and children, which Mining or recycling . Investors need to preserve privacy. Such operations deters many of them from visiting loved Exploitation or are also counterproductive, because they ones, would be of small consequence. The can choose particularly alienate ethnic youth who situation is, however, that, in all civilised sustain ability. Through the AE Trusts you desperately need health and social support. countries, it is considered a policy of self Greenhouse ga ses con invest your savings Control based on categorical suspicion interest for the community to encourage or so lar energy. and superannuation in h arms important human rights, but the maintenance of prisoners' relations with Armaments or over 70 different presumably the police take their lead from family and friends . Everyone community enterprises, each expertly the governm ents they serve. T h e '"r benefits from such an approach. enterprise. selected for its unique Government of NSW could hardly have set combination of earnings, clearer expectations in this regard than by .1 HE PROBLEM IS that the 'have technology, environmental extending the reach of legislation which must use' element of NSW Corrective sustainability and social empowers police to remove unsupervised Services has never outgrown that need for responsibility, and earn a young people from the streets to prevent high-tech toys. In order to visit inmates in competitive financia l them from becoming involved in crime or several maximum security prisons, one return . For full details incurring harm, and to break up groups of must now submit (w h en it is working) to make a free call to young people. There may be short-term a fingerprint scan. Naturally, a neutral political advantage in the categorical sounding name-biometric identification 1800021227 treatment of youth as a dangerous species, h as been given to the process. The lnt•est ments in tile Australia// Et!Jical Tru sts can but we m ay all live to regret the harm done traditional reassurances have been given onlr be made t!Jrougb tbe current prospectus that 'function creep' will not occur. Only registered ll'itb tbe Australian Securities to the social fa bric. How far off for Australia Co mmissiou and ai'Ciilableji-om. is the type of proposition put recently by a those oblivious to the history of surveillance Australian Ethical Investment Ltd town in England seeking a CCTV system: technology would be comforted by the I 'nit 66. Ca 11 berra B11 siness Centre 'there is a problem with a non-alcohol Minister's reassurances that 'regulations Bradfield St. Doll'uer ACT .!60.! related disorder in the form of youths'. have been prepared to the effect that, even 36 EUREKA STREET • MARcH 1998 if it were possible, it would be an offence to reconstruct the algorithm to a fingerprint.' Tell that to the partners, family m embers and friends who now decline to visit. One mother who does continue to visit has said Putting on the glitz of the procedures, 'Now I know that I too am a criminal'. INTHE PAST FEW DECADES, the arts community has sold itself as an essential part of What can be done? Australian life. All major cities, and many smaller communities, now have arts festivals We have focused on N ew South Wales, and complexes. The arts, like sport, has become a part of everyday life. but the trends are not confined to one state Not so, the sciences. With the exception of science museums, and some fields of or one country. The question is whether medical research, promotion of science and technology has been largely ineffectual. But Australians are going to allow technological there is a new push to raise general awareness of science in Australia. and other cultural pressures, which promise Last year the Federal Government announced support for aN ational Science Week, simplistic, short-term improvem ents in from 2 to 10 May 1998. The idea is based on the British expansion of the Edinburgh social order, to erode established notions of Festival into a week of science-based events throughout the UK. In Australia, each state justice and freedom? and community will organise its own activities during National Science Week. This question is anything but abstract if A limited pilot last year was a success. It made unashamed use of Nobel Laureate and you have absorbed the atmosphere of the media natural, Peter Doherty, and had the active national involvement of the ABC. The town centre of Cabram atta. Older people event went far beyond egghead lectures to bespectacled audiences; one highlight which avert their gaze to avoid seeing the deals comes to mind was Doherty's encounter with Roy and H. G . at Club Buggery. taking place before them, under the eerie This year, it will be all stops out, and Melbourne will be a focus. On Australia Day, presence of the fishbowl lens which sees the Victorian Government announced it was providing $200,000 towards the staging of everything and yet sees nothing, and solves Science Now!, a forum of public debates, media events, workshops and activities for little. The natural-talking, socialising or youth designed to bring the freshest Australian science to public notice. Science Now! simply resting-regis ters and causes is supported by all the major science organisations in Australia-including the two apprehension, whereas the underhand goes academies, the federation of all the science professional organisations, and Australian undetected. Science Communicators. The Federal Government is also kicking in $60,000. (At this Of course, privacy rights are not absolute. point Archimedes has to admit his own interest, as a member of the organising Sometimes they have to be infringed in the committee.) nam e of some greater collective benefit. Why all the fuss and bother? Because, at a time when public interest in science is However, the potential for harm is so great growing, Australia has been left without any regular, dependable forum for public that we must hesitate before creating even discussion of advances in science, technology and medicine. In the past, that role was apparently justified surveillance system s. filled by the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science As international com m enta tor G. Marx has (ANZAAS). For more than 100 years the ANZAAS Congress provided a convenient said, 'Framing the policy debate around gathering where researchers could explain their discoveries to a lay audience and h ow to reform su ch systems m ay be scientists from different disciplines could come together to swap ideas. misguided. The issue is instead, should the But last October, ANZAAS voted itself out of existence. It had not kept pace with the systems be there to begin with.' ('I'll be times and lacked support from scientists, who pragmatically decided there was more Watching You, Reflections on the "N ew value in going to specialist meetings to talk to their peers than in trying to enlighten non Surveillance"', Dissent, Winter 1985.) scientists. It lacked support from the public, who felt they were getting stale science at Individuals should not be obliged to defend a hastily organised, often expensive conference which appeared in their city only once their rights; rather, those who violate the in a blue moon. What in the early 1980s had been the forum for the release of the right to privacy should be obliged to defend preliminary findings of the Costigan Royal Commission into organised crime, was their actions. The only acceptable justification almost totally ignored in Adelaide last year. would be concrete proof that the invasion But ANZAAS went out of business just when it was needed most. Most research serves a greater common good. The benefits money is now distributed on a competitive basis. Scientists have to win their own achieved must outweigh the harm created. funding-the greater the support they can gather for their work, the better their chances. If such an analysis had been undertaken in Hence, for the first time in living memory, scientists are actively seeking publicity. relation to the surveillance system s This movement happens to coincide with news editors' realisation that readers, introduced at Cabramatta and elsewhere, it listeners and viewers are interested in learning about science and medicine. The polls is unlikely that a sufficiently good case could show there is more enthusiasm for news about science than about politics and economics have been made for them to proceed. The and, in some areas, even sport. Science Now! is hoping to capture some of this spirit. It same is true of the biometric identification will seek out young, active researchers who have fresh things to say about the latest system in the prisons. The test of 'benefits Australian work. The organisers want to assemble panels of experts from Australia and outweighing harm' must be applied elsewhere to debate the potential ramifications of the latest research-Dolly the Sheep, retrospectively to these serious invasions of emerging diseases, nanotechnology. privacy. In the next two months, we'll see if science get its act together. The bill of This kind of analysis will only be under entertainment may not be as immediately appealing as the arts, but the long term taken in a coherent and consistent way if a implications for our lives could be equally profound. • firm framework is in1posed. Therefore, the NSW Law Reform Commission's apparent Tim Thwaites is a freelance scientific writer. VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 37 intention to recommend the creation of a set more discussion at the fringe of the issue compatible with the requirem ents of a of standards in legislation, is to be encour the nature of the 'operation', how long democratic society'- aged. Given the prevailing (blind) faith in photos can be retained, and like matters. The important thing now is to get on technological solutions to society's ills, there There must be scope for questioning the and vigorously apply these principles before must be san ction s for breaches and a entire legitimacy of the procedures used, we find ourselves rationalising an confirmed regulator in the form of a Privacy and this is more likely to occur when the irreversible situation with N ewspeak in Commissioner to ensure the application of relevant inquiries are directed by a Privacy the fashion of one English Chief Constable: the standards. The present situation is that a Commissioner a li ve to the dangers of 'We do not fear an Orwellian future. Big future posi tion of Commissioner has been cumulatively unde rmining privacy Brother has arrived and we love him.' • identified in a ministerial press release. The standards in our society. circmnstances we have desctibed, however, are Jurisdictional boundaries must be Tony Vinson i s Professor Emeritus, too urgent to tolerate further delay in actually rearranged to give primacy to the role of the University of N ew South Wales, and creating the position. Privacy Com missioner in such matters. Director of Research at Uniya, the Jesuit What about the policing practices which Even while we await the enshrinement of Social Justice Centre, Sydney. standards in legislation, there is ample show such scant regard for the privacy rights Karl Langheinrich is completing a degree in guidance already available in the form of a of youth, ethnic people and other groups? social work at Sydney University and set of principles, such as those contained in The present procedure of complaints to the collaborated on this project during a field the 1994 A ustralian Privacy Charter. Ombudsman, resulting in conciliation of the practice attachment to Uniya. parties, is quite unsatisfactory. The charter presents eighteen principles and declares that exceptions to them Such an approach s tarts from the Further footnote references are ' ... sh ould be clearly stated, m ade in position that questioning and photographing available on request: tel. 03 9427 7311, accordance with law, proportional to the people going about their business is email: [email protected]. au acceptable and that what is required is n ecessities giving rise to the exception, and Santa Clara University 1998 Summer Sessions & Institute June 22-July 10 (Mornings) Johannine Spirituality - Joseph Grassi, S.T.L. Hebrew Bible - Marilyn Schaub, Ph.D. Moral Issues- Barry Stenger, Ph.D. July 13- July 31 (Mornings) Process of Catechesis- Catherine Dooley, O.P. Psychological Issues in Spirituality - Patrick Howell, S.J. The Liturgical Year: Feasts & Seasons- Sharon McMillan, SND June 22- July 31 (Afternoons or Eve nin~: sl The Choir: Its Repertory and Its Music - Fred Moleck, Ph.D. Process of Spiritual Transformation - Pamela Bjorklund, Ph.D. The Lectionary in Homily and Hearing - Rev. Gerard Sloyan Private instruction in organ, voice, and composition Liturgical Music Institute (Evenings) June 22-July 31 -led by Fred Moleck, Ph.D. Topics: Sunday and Feast-day Eucharist, Psalms and Can ticles, Music for RCIA, Music for Weddings and Funerals, The Lively Choir, More than Voices: Instruments Sessions may be taken separately Contact: James W. Reites, S.J., Dept. of Religious Studies, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053-0337 , USA 408/554-4831 • FAX 408/554-2387 • [email protected] http://www-relg-studies.scu.edu/gradhome.htm 38 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 BooKs: 1 PETER CRAVEN Recrimination and redemption The Reader, Bernhard Schlink, trans. Carol Brown Janeway, Phoenix House, Orion,l 997. ISHN 1 861 59063 6, RRP $20 BERNHARD SCHLI NK's TheReadercomes history. It is a book about guilt and the way m ere tracing of an action) and the terrible with some of the highest recommendations in which images of guilt complicate an arch of history. around. Ruth Rendell says, on the inside entire iconography of the world. The question which The Reader raises cover, that it stands as far above a holocaust I don't know when I last read a short is whether Schlink is manipulating the genre book as Crime and Punishment does book that had this kind of fit between its Holocaust in order to dazzle the reader and above the average thriller. It has been singled shape and its reverberating moral. This is turn his heart upside cl own. I don't really out for its excellence by people as different also a deeply dialectical book which brings think he is. He is clearly a m as ter of suspense as literary critic, George Steiner, and to mind a writer like Camus. and a writer with a style so bare it's shaming. Timothy Garton Ash, political commentator But he does seem to have written-weird on Germany and Eastern Europe. though it sounds to say it-one of the great After such credentials, whatforgiveness? political novels of our period. I should say that I picked up The Reader He has achieved this by never deviating knowing the book's reputation but nothing from realism and by never losing focus on about how the story unfolded, and I found it the enigmatic fe m ale face at the book's by turns riveting, astonishing and very centre and the shadowy face implied by the m oving. I also wondered about my reaction. narrator as he sketches his own development. It begins as a kind of love story, a sort of Th e Reader is about potential love and tense, erotically terse episode in what seem s desecration in the vicinity of history. It is a to be a Bildungsroman. A fifteen-year-old book of considerable intelligence and boy meets, by chance, a woman in her mid- subtlety which manages to encompass a thirties. He happens to see her getting theatre of subjects, from the asinine quality changed. They becom e lovers. She is a tram of law to the grey area of underage sex, conductress and he is a smart young high without ever losing its power of moral school boy. implication. She's keen for him to keep up with his It is, among other things, a book about schoolwork and he reads books to her, the tracing the lineaments of the face of modern kind of books he's discovering himself, like Germany, but if it succeeds in this grand War and Peace. Their relationship, as aim it does so by virtue of its m odesty, its Bernhard Schlink depicts it, is full of a short views, its thriller writer's sense of baffled, physicall y exact but psychologically form. unexplained, mystery. Krieg, by Gerd Amtz, 193 1. Every year is a strange year in fiction but This woman is beautiful; she is down- nothing else I read published in 1997 would to-earth and unpretentious. The writing Schlink seems to know precisely the be more guaranteed to m ake every kind of h ere, capturing the boy's sen se of story he has to tell and he has the writer's reader sit up very straight indeed. Th e wonderment and the woman's bemusement equivalent of perfect pitch . A belt slashing Reader is that rarest of all things these and privacy and silence, in the midst of across a face, a working woman's pride, days: a short popular novel, artistically on attachment, is wonderfully done. It reads lovers asleep on top of one another, the the level, which has the electric quality of with the veracity of spellbound m emoir, so assumption of an SS uniform, kindness in a great film. • quiet that it takes the reader som e time to the midst of atrocity and what price or moral realisehowthenarrativehascreptuponhim. calculus could possibly be applied to it. Peter Craven writes a column for Th e Like the first person narrator, Bernhard Th e Reader is a n ovel about the Australian. Schlink is a legal academic, but he is individual face of an historical outrage, the apparently also a writer of crime novels. Holocaust, which is also, for never less than Th e Reader has what looks like an open explicable reasons, one of the fundamental Books reviewed in plot. Thecentralclue(whichiwon 'treveal) myths of our own dispensation. Eureka Street is on show for the dimmest reader, but as I said before that I wondered at m y own the action unfolds the blows it delivers are reaction to it becau se it is a work of may be ordered from staggering. enormous poignancy and power which THE jEsun BooKSHOP Th e Reader is centrally concerned with occupies the space, at least to som e extent, how someone might or might not have that Helen Darville- D emidenko's The Hand PO Box 553, Richmond, been involved in the Holocau st. And with That Signed the Paper might have, had it VIC3121 whatever private foibles or disabilities been a coherent work of art based on a Tel: 03 9427 7311 might colour and complicate what it sounds proper sense of history and a sense of the fax: 03 9428 4450 like nonsense to call a complicity with necessary scale between any fiction (the V OLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 39 B OOKS: 2 D AVID M cCooEY The old stable ego D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, David Ellis, Cambridge Universi ty Press, 1998. ISBN 0 52. 1 2.5 42. 1 3. RRP $69.95 COUW ""' 'M'G'NeD in 1910 peripatetic life, his en orm ous number of coverage of 'The Woman Who Rode Away'. wthat a miner's son, a young schoolteacher acquaintances and correspondents, and his Kate Millett's attack on this story in Sexual named D. H. Lawrence, would die two prodigious output. Dying Game shows just Politics (1 970), it would be fair to say, turned decades later (in Vence, France, of how much- and how quickly-Lawrence a generation of feminists off Lawrence. tuberculosis) a famous (or infamous) and wrote, despite illness and displacement. Millett, however, is not m entioned in the well-travelled author, regarded as both a This volume covers the publication of Cambridge biography, and Ellis never loses devilish and a messianic figure ? This Kangaroo, Th e Plumed Serpent, Lady his equanimity in the face of a white question partly accounts for the Cambridge Chatterley's Lover, and Birds, Beasts and woman's auto-sacrifice to a tribe oflndians. biography's major novelty: its three volumes Flowers (recognised as Lawrence's best book Nor does he seek the consolation of an are written by different authors. There are, of poems), as well as Lawrence's renewed allegorical reading, as Brenda Maddox does though, unifying features: their size; their interest in painting. It was also the time of in her life of D . H. Lawrence, The Married inclusion of chronologies, H erculean Lawrence's greatest m obility, living in Man, which presents the tale as one about indexes and appendices; and their reliance Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, the USA, and artistic creativity. on the Cambridge editions of Lawrence's Europe. (Ellis reports that when biographical Despite the authors' postmodernist nod works and letters. Given Lawrence's short responsibilities were divided, John Worthen, in their Preface to the untenability of what life the biography's length is notable. As author of volume I, complained that while Lawrence famously called 'the old stable Kinkead-Weekes, the slightly m ore Ellis 'would be able to request travel grants ego', a number of characteristics become fl amboyant author of volume II, puts it: for exotic places, all he could apply for was apparent in Ellis's narrative (as they must). 'summary and generalisation should go to the the bus fare to Eastwood' ). This is the period in which, disgusted by (admittedly m ore economical) devil; since There is som ething impressively the Great War and his treatment in England, the life of things tends to be found in detail'. isolationist about the Cambridge biography, Lawrence is concerned with 'Western This is certainly so with a figure such as relying as it does almost completely on decadence' and communal living (both Lawrence, not only for 'ideological' reasons, primary sources while being almost wholly containing traces of the puritanism that such as his strong belief in spontaneity, but indiffer ent to modern critics and never really left Lawrence). There is the also for more pragm atic reasons such as his biographers. An instance of this is the wavering between the 'East' and 'West', 40 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1998 and Lawrence's occasional mes ianic sense heroic. A paradoxical feature of large And for Australians? Thankfully we no of himself coupled with his millenarianism biographies is that while their size and longer suffer youthful professors (shipped (Lawrence is at his most tedious when at attention to detail makes the subject more out from Oxbridge) beginning a lecture on his most prophetic). More humanly, we see human than before, the heroic nature of Australian literature by denying the his oft-noted gift for mimicry, and his such a project reflects some of that heroism existence of such a subject, and turning in generosity to younger writers. We also see back onto the subj ect. While this is true for relief to Kangaroo (as J. I. M. Stewart once his temper, the product of his conscious Lawrence, Frieda tends to come across le s did). Ellis's account of Kangaroo usefully decision to cast off bourgeois propriety and well: long suffering, for sure, but also faintly shows how the two things do and don't inhibition (though I don't suppose the dog comic in her attempts to fight off other intersect. Certainly Lawrence's reactions he savagely belted and kicked for going on women who saw the1nselves as Lawrence's to Australia are as expressive of his own heat would have found any consolation in muse; not quite able to handle Lawrence's pathology as of this country's. Ellis also that piece of sophistry). illnesses; and not worried about rushing off proves Lawrence didn't actually m eet These rages were often explained by to her lover (with a brief stop for Middleton Australian right-wingers. Lawrence's early memoirists as 'tubercular'. Murray first) shortly after Lawrence's death. In 1924 Lawrence wrote to E. M . Forster: Ellis rejects ' tubercular' theories of Perhaps it is simply that we do not 'To me you are the last Englishman. And I Lawrence's personality, arguing that see Frieda dying gam ely. am the one after that'. It is a characteristic Lawrence contracted TB later than most phrase, but surely only half true, since this believed (dating it to 1924). This makes E LLIS 1 S BIOGRAPHY IS EXHAUSTIVE, though it biography shows that despite the differences Claire Tomalin's theory that Lawrence gave n ever falls into the trap of turning between the young and the old Lawrences, Katherine Mansfield the disease an unlikely supposition into fact, and the narrative and Lawrence never wholly kicked himself free of proposition (and his comment-'You revolt literary criticism sit together well. Although his biography: his background, his parents, me stewin g in your con sumption ' the readings are biographical, they are and his Engli shness (Tony Tanner calls him horrible, but not pathological). For the last critically illuminating at crucial times. This a 'strangely English genius' ina recent Times years, though, Lawrence was sick, and the is particularly so with the account of the Literary Supplement review of Dying physical changes are apparent in the three Lady Chatterleys. Ellis also shows, Game). For all his desire to break out of photographic record. without undue digression, Lawrence's conventionality, and to broaden the ways No matter how sympathetic his milieu, and while the world's reaction to of talking about sex, Englishness stuck to biographer, Lawrence's foolishness doesn't Lawrence during his lifetime is often only him, right down to the policemen who, in fail to shine through: his dalliance with implied it is nevertheless clearly felt w hen deference to class, let the Aga Khan view at fascism, his irritability, his casual racism, required. leisure Lawrence's paintings that they were and his authoritarianism. Even his ideas on What Lawrence has to offer today is less in the process of confiscating. And the most love (at least in 1925) were centred on clear, and it is not something with which 'shocking' parts of Lady Chatterley are spoken power (the idea that 'the act of love itself is this biography deals (though its ambition iri a broad Derbyshire dialect (and the class an act of power' is strangely akin to som e of suggests that the answer must still be 'quite conflict within Mellors that this represents the ideas of that generation of feminists a lot'). Certainly, Lawrence's stocks have is similarly expressive of a kind of English who rejected Lawren ce) . But Ellis been higher (but they have also been lower). ness). It is somewhat ironic that Lawrence demonstrates that Lawrence's interests and Some of his interests (occultism, theosophy, expressed the dictum 'N ever trust the art beliefs often changed, like his ideas on primitivism) h ave little to do with ist, trust the tale', since-in his case at miscegen a tio n , which m oved from contemporary interests, and som e (perhaps least-making such a distinction is not really disapproval to acceptance. While Lawrence quite a lot ) of his writing is m erely possible. It was Lawrence, after all, who spoke is often viewed as a modernist, Ellis shows blathering. His ideas on sex seem to come of 'shedding sicknesses' in his books. • how uncomfortable he was with the from a radically different context. But this modernist project (he described the Penelope means, at the least, he is of historical David McCooey lectures in literary studies section of Ulysses as 'filthy'). Moreover, interest. A more 'applied' reason is the at D eakin University. Lawrence's Romanticism didn't m ean an vestigial urgency of the unhealthy interest in subjectivity: dramas that his fiction CARL MERTEN SCULPTURE seeks to pl ay out. In 'Did I feel a twinge in my right toe, or particular, Lawrence is AND SILVERWARE STUDIO didn't I? ' asks every character in Mr Joyce con cerned with tha t or Miss Richardson or Monsieur Proust. 'Is PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND CORPORATE ancient concern: how to the odour of m y perspiration a blend of SCULPTURE COMMISSIONS live. The uncomfortable frankincense and orange pekoe and boot MEDALLIONS, BAS-RELIEF, FIGURATIVE power of some of blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and AND CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE Lawrence's answers can be Shetland tweed?' IN BRONZE, SILVER, STONE AND STEEL seen in a comment made SCULPTURE AND SILVERSMITHING COURSES This, from a man who argued against by Ellis: 'In all Lawrence's what he called 'sex in the head', suggests major novels there is this BE CREATIVE, WITH CARL MERTEN something of his com plicated relationship pattern of offering 'CHINOOK' Torryburn Road Ura ll a NSW 2358 with bodily matters. powerful reason s for Ph: 02 6775 5593 While Lawren ce's limitations are made despair but not then email: [email protected] plain (and his rages were real, whether allowing his characters to website: http:/ /www.com.au/ neiss/modoz/html tubercular or not), he remains somewhat abandon hope'. V OLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 41 THEATRE G EO FFREY MrLNE Wall<: on the tame side mM'" of). c. Willi•mw n'' abroad (like Lewis Fiander, Madge Ryan Australian 'opening night' by several rather ins 1977,"c' th ""'e prin cipal trading currency in and old heart-throbs like John McCallum tired years. the unsubsidised commercial sector of the or Keith Michell ), up-and-coming stars of In the heyday of JCWs and the other Australian thea tre has been the large-scale, TV, film and stage or occasionally even commercial managem ents in post-war spectacle-based musical rather than the actors of genuin e reputa tion on the Australia, there might have been som e grea ter intimacies and intricacies of the Australian stage (like Patricia Kennedy and excuse for this kind of approach: a dearth of spoken-word drama. True, in recent years, Julia Blake). locally- trained professional Australian we have seen the geriatric Rex Harrison and Another common tendency in this kind actors m eant that stars had to be imported Claudette Colbert touring in 1987 (w ith of commercial touring production is that from abroad in order to ful fi l the artistic 'Australian' actors in the second-s tring they often looked suspiciously like the West needs of the play. The excuse (if not the roles) in Frederick Lonsdale's long- forgotten End or Broadway version that preceded the commercial imperative) changed som ewhat light comedy Aren't We All! and when the Australian Elizabethan Pa ul Eddington and vario us Theatre Trust came into being in 'Australian s' going round the 1955 and entered in to semi-commer country in T erence Rattigan's cial deals with the international im equa ll y light dra m a Th e presarios of the da y: then, the idea Browning Version a nd its was that we had to import the direc accompan ying confection er's tors and the stars fro m abroad in flu ff, Harlequinade, in 1988. order to 'raise the standards' of a There have also been more recent promising but as yet unfulfi lled talent commercial revivals and touring ba se in this 'young country'. productions of ' dramas' like But by the time the T rust-created Steaming (as recently as 1990) state drama companies cam e of age and Trainspotting (last yea r), in the 1970s and 1980s (drawing upon while t here is still a vestigial a strong pool of trained actors fr om enthusiasm in those parts of NIDA and elsewhere and upon an Australia that still call England equally strong pool of dra wcard h om e (especially Per t h and celluloid personalities), the Trust Adelaid e) fo r Ray Cooney's farces largely gave up importing drama pro of the Run For Your Wives stable. ductions-especially since it couldn't A common fac tor in this genre pick a commercial winner to save its of production in days gone by life. At about the same time, the old was the tendency to import a JCW 'Firm' packed it in and was second-string English director to replaced by the likes of Harry M. Miller reproduce the West End produc (with the brash new Am erican hits tion in a 'local' production with Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar) and imported actors in the lead roles in turn the foreign multinationals, (preferabl y known to local audi Cameron Mackintosh and the Really ences through British or Ameri Useful Group, with their franchised ca n TV shows for the purposes of productions of Evita, Cats, Les the marketing cam pa ign ) and Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, with 'Australian' actors in the Miss Saigon, Sunset Boulevard and supporting roles. so on, dutifully facsimiled to the The preferred locals tended Australian public fro m head office in to he either emigre pom s w ho London and Broadway in productions had m ade the resting place of cast almost entirely with Australian their undistinguish ed English performers. careers in Australia, Australians It was thus with some interest who have m ade their names that I went along to the Melbourne 42 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 'opening' at Her Majesty's Theatre of Peter nostalgic trip down memory lane to the man in London' as his father calls him) Hall's production of Oscar Wilde's 1894 English rep of the 1950s or the Elizabethan Wilde also invests something of himself, play An Ideal Husband, fresh (so to speak) Trust of the 1960s (the sam e thing, really) but in a carefully encoded kind of way. from its performances in Brisbane last De and I looked around at the curtain call to see Resolutely unmarried at 43 (though he cember and Sydney in January. This is actu if Hugh Hunt, Robin Lovejoy or Professor 'looks weeks younger') and looking unlikely ally an Australian remount of Hall's 1993 Quentin would leap to his feet and applaud ever to achieve that happy estate, he is production for his own company at the Old the standard-raising performance we had harangued by his father to get engaged by Vic (a nd later on Broadway) by a just seen. For younger audiences, it is of lunchtime or he'll be cut off with a shilling. conglomerate of producers, including John some interest as a curiosity piece: an When he finally proposes to Mabel Chiltern, McCallum (late of JCWs and the British indication of where the modern theatre has her guardian (Sir Robert, just now saved by film industry), the prolific Sydney producer come from, not to say a mark of how far it Goring's intervention ) refuses on the John Frost, the well-subsidised Queensland has come. grounds that he 'cannot bring Mabel the Performing Arts Trust and British In the event, English-born Australian love that sh e deserves.' entrepreneur Bill Kenwright. music-theatre perform er- turned-s traight When Goring asks why, there is a grim In brief, little seems to have changed in actor John Waters does a creditable job in pause before Chiltern asks: 'Do you really commercial drama production in England the stiff-necked and rather thankless role of require me to tell you ?' since about 1955. To see this in 'the Maj' in Chiltern, while local Josephine Byrnes Here, we too pause for a moment: Melbourne in February 1998 (or at the Lyric seem s to find it harder to master the observing his ambiguous look, a nd in Brisbane or Sydney) is to enter a time artificiality of the st yle as his pure and suspecting that Chiltern knows some dark warp that takes us back something like 40 idealising wife. Englishman Nicky Hen son secret hinted at by Goring's camp behaviour years. After watching a mixed cast of English (an Oscar Wilde look -alike as the foppish for most of the evening, we half-expect the and Australian actors posing about mostly Lord Goring) gives what is ultimately the obvious revelation of moral perversion. in straight lines in expensive but oddly m ost interesting performance in the show, Happily, the matter is resolved by one of dowdy-looking costumes, delivering their while transatlantic Stephanie Beacham is the twists in the marital-farce plot, but lines often out front and putting most of suitably (if rather two- dimen sion ally) there would have been many a sharp, know their energies into the craftsmanlike but wicked as the thieving and scheming Mrs ing intake of breath from the closet gay old-fashioned task of building up to Cheveley. As Wilde's rather interesting audience of the day. Likewise, when asked climactic exits (and the carefully contrived embodiment of'theNew Woman' as femme what kind of 'ideal' husband Mabel expects exit-line rounds of applause, at least from fatale, she certainly gets to wear Lord Goring to be, she replies (again, know those in the audience old en ough to the best frocks! ingly, it would seem, in this performance): remember such old acting tricks), I 'He can be .. . [tantalising pause, with glance wondered if this was an exercise in faithful A N I DEAL H usBAND is a curious play. at fiance, striking dandified pose] ... what museum theatre or som e peculiar kind of Partly in the style of an Ibsen or Shaw he chooses.' post-modern turn. morality drama, partly melodrama tic But Wilde has earlier (in the third and Carl Toms' set design, admittedly, struggle between the forces of good and evil fourth acts) shown u s anoth er, more makes som e concessions to the modern and the power of love and forgiveness and sympathetic side of Lord Goring's economies of stage production. The three partly domestic farce in a style recalling behaviour; for all his camp flippancy, he is fully-flown box sets of yesteryear here give Feydeau, it is as often tediously long-winded the only character to know really what way to nicely minimal representations of as it is shot through with Wilde's trademark should be done in the circumstances faced bits of Sir Robert Chiltern's reception room perverse wit. I say 'perverse' in the way he by Robert andGertrudeChiltern. 'You must and morning room and Lord Goring's library, turns the accepted tenets of Victorian tell the truth' and 'you will be forgiven', he adroitly changed behind a front-drop morality and society into epigrammatic says repeatedly. This is the way things turn rep resenting an English bronze penny barbs of well-aimed satire at Victorian out in the play, as Wilde no doubt wished bearing the august portrait of Queen Victoria hypocrisy-not in the sense the English they would in his own life. (signifying the ultimate monetary value of justice system applied to Wilde's off-stage Goring is thus portrayed as the less than ideal husband Chiltern's moral behaviour. Shakespearean 'wise fool ', or even as sell-out? Or the austere gaze of Victorian And here is the pay-off. The play is Molieresque 'voice of reason'; either way, England's moral values?). The fluid staging about a man with a dark secret which-if Wilde has struck a telling blow against so achieved is about the only thing that found out-would lead to a scandal; he is perceptions of the frivolous gay stereotype, shakes us out of the deja vu feeling of the b eing blackmailed by someone who however cryptically encoded in the text it production as a whole. Hall has obviously threatens to reveal all. It was written at a might be. decided that in reviving this little-performed time when Wilde was also being For this subtle but poignant insight, play around the time of its centenary, the blackmailed, his own dark secret about to Peter Hall (a long with the actor Nicky production style of his earliest years in the provoke a huge scandal. In the play, Sir Henson) earns considerable credit. It is a English theatre (he made his directorial Robert gets away with his, thanks to the pity that the artificial, old-fashioned, debut at Stratford in 1956) was the love of his wife and friends; alas for the commercial style of his production as a appropriate way to go . Radio microphones author, real life was not so kind. T o this whole allows us no further insights into the for all of the cast are the other modern extent, the play is partly autobiographical. rest of the play. • innovation. But it goes further. For the older members of the audience In the person of the perennially trivial, Geoffrey Milne is head of theatre and drama who have flocked to this, it is a warmly effete and useless Lord Goring ('the idlest at LaTrobe University. VOLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 43 THEATRE: 2 MICHAEL M c GIRR Cumulative effect Cloudstreet, adapted by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo from the novel by Tim Winton Dnected by Neil Armfield. s n>Ncv'' WWO< NOeTH 'HO" h" no w" •bout " uncomfoctob\e on ' ""my CCW" •n •ching no"•\gU foe' time •nd shortage of restaurants. Its annual summer's night in Sydney as anyone could place which few of those in the audience production of cafe latte is sufficient to float imagine. Even so, at the end of the could ever have known. the Titanic. p erformance, the audience peeled Some readers of Cloudstreet have One of the newer restaurants, opened themselves off their plastic chairs and wondered why the book doesn't end when this time last year, is called Cloudstreet, clapped and cheered with a level of the two families are finally united in the and takes its name from the novel by Tim appreciation whichmusthavelefttheresident marriage of Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb. Winton, a paperback copy of which stands bird life longing for the quiet days when the But it continues into a darker sequence in on the counter. One foo d reviewer warned stevedores had the nm of the premises. which the Nedlands Monster, Australia's gourmands on their way to the establish- In a way, the venue chosen by Perth's first serial killer, the man whom not even ment against trying to find Cloud Street in Black Swan Theatre Company and Sydney's the assassination ofJFK could get off Perth's their street directories. Company B Belvoir for this co-production front page, creates a line in the sand between The curious thing is n ot that did suggest reasons why Winton's story two worlds: then and now. Cloudstreet, the restaurant, features a continues to appeal so profoundly. The Cloudstreet is not a familiar saga about cuisine so different from that availabl in terminal was vast and empty. The play the loss of innocence. But it does deal on the rest of latte land. You can have risotto curtained off only a fraction of it for its use many levels with different kinds of loss, with spinach and gorgonzola, followed by and left the remainder to mock the efforts and to do thisitmakes use of what somebody Tilbaroo veal, linguini, hokkien noodles of a bar, food outlet and souvenir stall to fill once called the most fascinating historical and caramelised orange with marscapone such a cavernous space. period: the one just beyond our fingertips. custard, all adding up to a pretty hefty If you stepped outside, immediately Rose's world begins to change when a calorie count. The curious thing is that the opposite, the bright lights of Darling boyfriend, Toby Raven, tries to change her cuisine in the restaurant is totally different Harbour and Sydney's casino, Star City, ea ting habits. He introduces herto spaghetti. from the diet familiar to the unruly cast of hung over the water. It is rare that a theatre Justin Monjo worked with Nick Enright characters in Winton's novel, Cloudstreet. space does so much to allow you to to adapt Cloudstreet for the stage. Monjo And it is a book in which food plays an experience your own emptiness before you had previously adapted, with Richard important role. even sit down. Once the story begins to Roxburgh, another Winton book, That Eye Cloudstreet tells the story of two unfold, its richness oflanguage and character The Sl 44 EUREKA STREET • MARcH 1998 because, he says, it deals with human has written remains unclaimed for either But the house in Cloudstreet has bare boards em otions and spirituality in a strongly stage or film adaptations. In the middle of and one of its inhabitants, Oriel Lamb, lives physical way. 'That Eye The Sky is much 1998, Jam es Vogel's film version of In The in a tent in the back yard. Cloudstreet, the more plot-driven than Cloudstreet,' he Winter Darl<, s tarring Miranda Otto, carpet, boasts its eff ectiveness in noise explains. 'It has a strong spine.' Richard Roxburgh, Brenda Blether and Ray reduction . An essential pa rt of the 'Cloudstreet is about finding much Barrett, will reach our screens. But it is personality of the hou se is the noises it deeper answers. It is about the passage of Cloudstreet which has lodged in Australian makes. It's fine fo r a book to have a life time and living through experiences ... we culture in a way that few novels succeed in beyond its own pages. As long as what the realised w e would h ave to ta k e the doing. characters in Cloudstreet live through, and audience through a long experience. There If you go buying carpet, for example, one what happens around their table, doesn't get is no other way to get at the core themes of manufacturer now has a product on the swept under the carpet at the same time. • the work'. market called Cloudstreet, a deep-piled, Winton 's work continues to fascinate soft -coloured weave, available in a range of Michael McGirr SJ is Eurel T HEATRE: 3 P ETER C RAVEN Rude botanicals The Herbal Bed, by Peter Whelan. Melbourne Theatre Company with Frances O'Connor, Robert Menzies, Charles Tingwell, Mandy McElhinney. Directed by Simon Phillips. Into the Woods, by Steven Sondheim. Melbourne Theatre Company with Rhonda Burchmore, Lisa McCune, Gina Riley, Anthony Weigh and Tamsin Carroll. Directed by Roger Hodgeman. A NEWPLAYCENTREDonShakespeare's The Herbal Bed has on e bearably signature is discernible in the casting and daughter, no less, fresh from British acclaim dram atic scene when John and Susanna direction of Marton Csokas as Susanna's and starring that brigh t young star Frances Hall, together with her pu tative lover, would-be lover (a wooden and external O'Connor, seemed th e kind of thing likely appear before the vicar-general of the Bishop performance which would only pass muster to pack out the Playhouse for months. Why of Winchester, a puritan layman. There the if the play amounted to more) and Leigh on earth was t he Melbou rne T h ea tre drama crackles for an instant like a shred of Russell in a truly ghastly piece of campery Company putting it on for a barefourweeks cellophane on a summer's day. For the rest as her accuser, the rake and drunk, Jack in the Fairfax Theatre which can seat two what we get is tosh of the most footling Lane. O therwise the production galumphs hundred people at best? kind, a kind of aimless, agglutinative, along with occasional epiphanies of camp Well, the proof was in the pudding and garrulous approximation to seventeenth- hysterics (the vicar-general clasping his The Herbal Bed turned out to be indigest- century soap. hands above his head in hallelujah fashion ibleand half-baked fare. Peter Whelan seems The Herbal Bed is a dreadful caution, a at the end of his scene). Amid the banalities to have had the happy idea that a dialectical caveat to anyone who even thinks of writing Phillips specialises in the kind of coups de costume drama somewhat along the lines in anything but the style of the day except theatre which would drive anyone to a of such modern classics as The Crucible for very good reasons. T here is nothing to it steady diet of X en a: Warrior Prin cess and and Saint Joan-a high-sounding, eloquent but the accum ulation of local colour and remain gratified that they had made the historical play-m igh t be written about mock archaisms, these two fa lse antiques better choice. Shakespeare' daugh ter. And well it might. highlighted with modulated hideousness Th e effect is murder on his weaker An excavation of history which also doffed by the assumption of 'Crucible' accents, actors, left naked in the midst of the cheap the cap to feminism in the vicinity of the those kinds of West Country sub-American tinsel, and m urder on the audience who great Bard himself. After all, Susanna Hall, voices which actors are forced to assume have to endure them in the first place. None daughter of W.S ., had been accused of when they are afflicted with the prospect of of which is to deny that Shaun Gurton has lewdness and the case had come before false accusation or th e wearing of Puritan produced an efficient, attractive set and some antechamber of the ecclesiastical peaked hats. that Jamieson Lewis has lit it effectively in court in Winchester in 1613, th e year I should acid that the Melbourne Theatre Melbourne's most flexible theatre space. It Shakespeare downed his last pint and read Company's production of The Herbal Bed should be a mercy that the cast of The his last book. manages to be a crushingly dull show de pite Herbal Bed is as strong as it is but somehow It sounds like a fair enough idea, a jolly the good offices of Simon Phillips (who is that strength (which is formidable) proves enough attempt to turn the clock back, but inclined to direct everything like the £eyer to be not nearly enough. the result is so drivellingly silly that it kind of production of Peter Pan) and a cast Robert Menzies as John Hall is patient, should put people off costume drama for half of whom could be seen without shame pa sionate, bitterly haras ed and decently another generation. on any stage in the world. Phillips' personal loving. It is not his fa ult that one moment he VOLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 45 is wide-eyed with horror at what his wife hypothesis of a character which O'Connor link. Rhonda Burch more, as the smothering and fr iend are accused of and the next anim ates very beautifully but she is too mother Witch wanting to keep herRapunzel moment full of passionate intensity at their honest an actress to create a runaway figure safe from the world, has the necessary betrayal. Dramatic exposition just isn't Peter of her own imagining. magnetism to lift the show from being Whelan's strong suit and The Herbal Bed The only explanation of the high and simply an en semble piece. She sings lurches from one rag of a bright idea to an other. mighty reputation of The Herbal Bed is dashingly-handling the elaborate bits of Bud Tingwell as the Bishop, a cam eo that a sufficiently brilliant director must rap with elan-and there is enough dramatic relief, is a monument of surprised church have invented a drama round this husk of presence to make this singer's performance manly bewilderment. He is superb, full of mmination and gossip and wishful dramatic a special thing. smiling public concern and mildness and thinking. It's just possible-because it's Lisa McCune doesn 't put a foot wrong he does succeed in lifting a piece which always possible- that with enough tinker as Cinderella: she seem s to have deepened seems to be sinking steadily, like a very ing and enough i magina ti ve animation even h er sense of Sondheim's idiom in the last slow stone. these haystacks of theatrical excrescence year and the singing is adroit too. In a That is also true of Barnabus Goche as might burn with light. Who knows. largish cast Gina Riley is especially bright the vicar-general, who gives a performance Into the Woods, by contrast, was vibrant and real as the Baker's wife and both the which is within an inch of m agnetic m enace enough in the hearts and minds of the first newcom ers Anthony Weigh as Jack and but which Phillips allows to shriek bat-like night audience, which was pleasing to see Tamsin Carroll as Little Red Riding Hood around its own shadow. Goche is obviously becau se the production was a kind of bounce along without being excessively a terrific actor but this is a demonstration swansong fo r the departing director Roger camp. Old troupers like Peter Carroll as the of histrionic skill that dips in and out of Hodgeman. I have not been a consistent storyteller and Old Man, and Robert Grubb reality, and leaves the audience diverted, admirer of Hodgeman's work, but this was as the Wolf and Prince, added flair. but dizzy. On th e other hand, Mandy a solid, inventive production of the The second half of the show, in which McElhinney as the maid gives a beautifully Sondheim musical, with the sam e surging the resolved archetypes m ore or less fall observed performan ce, full of surface quality as Hodgeman's 1997 production of apart, is less successful writing because it warmth and shrewd coolness. She fl eshes A Little Night Music. exhibits a dark streak of pessimism which out her character so that the strongest Admittedly, the Sondheim of Into the is brightened only by sentimentality at the suggestion of personality is imposed by Woods is not the Sondheim of A Little end. Hodgeman handles this well without dint of the actor's will. Mandy McElhinney, Night Music, which not only includes his melodramatising a dramatic development who has been seen in the youth offerings at on e sh ow-stopping tune (' Send in the that goes to the edge of anarchy. the Fairfax in recent m onths-The Balcony Clowns') but has-via the adaptation of Although Tony Tripp's sets-with their and The Three Sisters-is a superb character Bergman's Smiles on a Summer Night Romantic Grimm-style designs in massed actress who should do great things . one of the best books ever to grace a Broad cut-out- look good en ough , there are This leaves Frances O'Connor, who has way musical. moments in this production wh ere it could already done great things and who was the When Into the Woods was written, be lifted by more scenic m agic. This Into the reason some of us were there in the first Sondheim was deep into his minimalism , Woods diverts the eye but it doesn't ravish it. place. O'Connor h ad an extraordinary concocting a kind of serialistic adaptation Still, that is in keeping with the pace, stillness when she first appeared on the of Schoenberg that can make jazz opera humanity and energy of Hodgeman's MTC stage in Lady Windermere's Fan a sound like an endless plain of recitative, a production. Into the Woods is not quite as few yea rs ago and she fo llowed it up with a bit like Andrew Lloyd Webber minus the subtle a piece of theatrical magic as A Little bright, burning performance as Olive in pastiched tunes. Night Music nor does this production have, Ray Lawler's Kid Stakes under Robyn This is unfair, of course, becau se or call for, performances like Helen Morse's Nevin's direction. Her film work, especially Sondheim has the courage of his or Pamela Rabe's, but it is at the sam e level the recent Kiss or Kill, is so remarkable that minimalism a nd the t oughness a nd of achievement. there is at least a case for saying she is the imagination to create a kind of theatrical Hodgeman has his limitations as a finest actress we have produced for years. language out of his m elodic impoverish director, but they are least evident in the She looks like a naturalist until you realise ment. And in the case of Into the Woods, American repertoire for which he has an what she is doing naturally is som ething the text-which consists of a kind of affinity. It is good to see him so completely you have never seen on stage or screen portmanteau of the m.aximum number of on top of a 'commercial' production of a befor e; and that, apart from an ything else, fairy tale motifs- can seem like an allegory piece of nearly avant-garde frippery like is a high feat of style. of the composer's predicament. The title this. Into the Woods is a gallivanting but I have no doubt that Frances O'Connor song, which has a certain bounce, is repeated worried piece of work and Hodgeman does could get to the bottom of any good part she so often that the audience comes out with justice to its moodiness. was handed, but this is the least interesting it stomping through their heads the way Whether Into the Woods can ever be performance she has given for som e time things might m ove inexorably through the more than an interesting failure, there is a simply because the material is so slender. head of a parrot. lot of interest in its fizz and fireworks and Whelan's characterisation of Susanna makes None of which stops Hodgeman 's rather steady contemplation of potential ges tures towards a night world of production of In to the Woods from being a failure. By comparison, The Herbal Bed necromancy and an amoral world where all stimulating exp erie nce. Sondheim's looks like a ready- made period piece. • imaginable loves are satiated but he does musical is skilfully constmcted (particularly n ot h ave the courage to act out such in its euphoric first half) and the Melbourne Peter Craven writes a column for The possibilities, leaving Susanna a walking Thea tre Company cast is without a weak Australian. 46 EUREKA STREET • MARcH 1998 Bonham Carter the the worthiness tests and even succeeds in chance to play in a darker being moving, particularly when Djimon registe r than u sual, Hounsou as Cinque, the Africans' leader, is turning her crisp beauty on screen. Hounsou has a wonderful pres to sombre account. (She ence, and it is his performance along with is an Oscar nominee, Nigel Hawth orne's (as Martin Van Buren, deserved! y.) the pro-slavery president) that lifts this The film starts on a movie out of banality. Amistad is really train, the London under interesting when it tracks the history of ground, with its pulse of Van Buren's determined attempts to force a m odernity and death. verdict against the Africans, even dismissing Softley has shifted James a too-favourable judge and jury, and installing forward by a decade; this a judge thought to be more complaisant. is a London of late-period When that fails, Van Buren appeals to the orientalism-all Arts and Supreme Court, stacked with Southern CraftsMovementcurves planters, providing a fascinating lesson and industrial incursion. about the desirability of separation of So the m etallic beading powers. Political interference by the on Bonham Carter's executive in the highest court of the land? gowns is never m erely It could never happen here. beautiful (although it -Juliette Hughes certainly is that too-Th e Wings of the Dove is Pale pink sumptuous beyond Peter Greenaway's reach and Merchant Ivory's in1agining). When the Ma Vie En Rose, dir. Alain Berliner action shifts to Venice, decay and splendour (independent cinemas). Hanna (Michele Flying high become the visual corollary of the tumult Laroque) and Pierre (Jean -Philippe Ecoffey) of the characters' lives. are new to the neighbourhood. They hold a The Wings of the Dove, dir. lain Softley This is ensemble cinema of the best housewarming party a t which they (independent cinemas). This fine film starts kind, cinematography, acting, script and introduce their four children. Ludovic, aged with gusto and n ever looks back. The directing-even costuming-all concerted seven, makes his appearance dressed as a opening credits roll across a brittle dance of to complex story-telling ends. girl, complete with earrings and lipstick oval lights on dark water. It is a brilliant -Morag Fraser applied more competently than most seven pre-emptive coup- Shakespearean prologue year-old girls could manage. 'This is in Venetian glass. Watch me, it says, I glitter Ludovic,' say his parents. 'He's the joker in and dissemble; I'm always more than Stack heroics the family.' But he's not joking. Some time I seem- worse, better, m ore dangerou s. later, he is visiting the house of Pierre's This is subtle, grand cinema, with every Amistad, dir. Steven Spielberg (general boss, Albert (Daniel Hanssens), for a play sombre or gorgeous visual element a servant release). It could fairly be said that this is date with Albert's son, Jerom e (Julien of m eaning. Spielberg's attempt to do an African version Riviere). Ludovic dresses up as a gi rl, Henry Jam es' late novel of the same of Schindler's List. Amistad is a partly appoints a teddy bear as vicar and pretends name (published 1902) is a convoluted tale fictionalised account of the extraordinary to get m arried to Jerome. Unfortunately, of Janus-faced adult love. Softley, whose revolt of 53 Africans in 1839 against their the clothes Ludovic wears belong to Jerome's casting and direction does James justice, slave-trading kidnappers. The story is full sister who is recently deceased. takes astute risks: for example, he gives the of brutality, tension and pity as you would This is the beginning of a long series of prodigiously talented Michael Gam bon just expect, but suffers from that curious incidents in which Ludovic's behaviour, two short scenes to establish the degraded Hollywood m alaise-piety mingled with however unconventional in its own right, authority of the father of the film's heroine, predictability. Was it too much to ask that manages to touch raw nerves in the adults Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter). Croy is Baldwin (Matthew McConaugh ey), the around him. His father is retrenched and human night soil but appallingly Africans' defence lawyer, should not be Ludovic gets the blame. His mother becomes sympathetic. And unforgettable. Softley played as a cute young brilliant maverick? emotionally frayed and Ludovic is again uses his scenes- all opium and greasy That John Quincy Adams (Anthony held responsible. They move house and smoking caps-to generate the familial Hopkins) should not be played as a cute old Ludovic is again the villain. Most stories of context of Kate's own desperate mani brilliant maverick? That the courtroom this type go to great lengths to show how pulations of the two people she loves. Money scenes should have some gravitas instead of the behaviour of parents affects children. complicates affections, in Kate's case fatally. the tired repartee of goodie lawyer versus This one is the other way round. At no point Or tragically- the story of Kate's triangular baddie lawyer (an over-directed and very is it explained why Ludovic insists that he is attachment to a declasse journalist (Linus subdued Pete Postlethwaite)? a girl. Only that his parents can't cope. Roache) and an American heiress (Alison The story is a great and inspiring one, Of course, there are dozens of films in Elliott) comes close to tragedy, and allows and deserves a better script. It will pass all which the right person is trapped in the V oLUME 8 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 47 wrong body. It could be an adult in a baby's mothers who miss the children they have taken of Wilde (and Lord Alfred Douglas). form, a child in a dog's, a child in an adult's, lost, and fat men with lots of cash. But the This suggests a genuine delight in the way a giant in a small person's, etc. Ma Vie En film is not a simple list of losers who can do things lool< ed, and a lesser interest in the Rose shares the same opportunities for little besides drop their flares; it explores things under the surface. comedy as films such as Lool< Who's the importance of self-respect in the face of Because of this visual imperative, the Talking, Big and Honey, I Blew Up the Kids exploitation, and the appreciation of art in stories of Oscar Wilde's life are reduced to and it uses plenty of them. Unfortunately, as a base, but lively, form. When all is said and vignettes. His marriage to Constance, for far as gender is concerned, many of us have done, the characters are looking for the example, is almost told through montage. forgotten how to laugh and there are times same things most of us crave: recognition His passion for Douglas (and other men) when this film realises it should be taking and community, some of which they find, seemed to be only available to us through itself more seriously and falls a little flat. some of which they don't. Anderson directs sexual encounters. -Michael McGirr SJ Boogie Nights with enormous good humour Perhaps Wilde really was too glib, too and stark simplicity, which make for anecdotal, too extravagant, too dazzling in thoughtful, dark, humane cinema. his public life, so that anything else about Get down All the performances work. Reynolds is his life seems banal and a bit of a bore. The seventies man incarnate, Wahlberg is makers of Wilde are certainly great admirers Boogie Nights, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson intelligently brainless and Julianne Moore of the dazzle. (general release). Its sartorial sleaze and plays porn star Amber Waves with -Annelise Balsamo splendour alone would make Boogie Nights enormous compassion. The stand-out an important historical document. performance-brief but brilliant-is Alfred Seventies' Italian nylon and eighties' Molina as a madly menacing playboy, danc Picture book diagonal-zip shirt fronts may suggest a film ing about in tight jocks and a silky gown to with more style than substance, but far the strains of Rick Springfield's [esse's Girl. Oscar and Lucinda, dir. Gillian Armstrong from it: Boogie Nights is a surprisingly Don't be put off by the R rating: all the (independent cinemas). Something is subtle film with a quality that slowly soaks surprises in Boogie Nights are welcome. missing in the heart of this film. It has you right to the bone. -Siobhan Jackson pectacular performances, grand cine Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) makes matography and broad sweep, but the piano 'exotic' films, and while he is quite happy wire with which Peter Carey kept his for people to enjoy them for the sex alone, Cider with Bosie original magic-realist novel together has he also dreams of powerful narratives and slackened under Gillian Armstrong's classy characters that will keep audiences direction. Bits drop off into incoherence, or in their seats beyond the first strip. Mean Wilde, dir. Brian Gilbert (general release). confusion. while a young night-club employee who There is one thing that really cannot be Carey's was a risky novel, anyway, with dreams of being a 'big, bright shining star' disputed about Wilde. Stephen Fry was born its blend of harsh religion, sombre father walks by Jack's table. Quicker than you can to play the part, and is absolutely perfect as and-son narrative (deriving from Edmund say 'pants down', Dirk Diggler is born. Oscar. And yet, in some ways, Stephen Fry Gosse's famous autobiography) and While tracing the rise and fall and rise of is the only good thing about Wilde. Of Dickensian cavalcade. Armstrong is faithful this young stud, Boogie Nights also affords course his role is more than considerable, to the detail but not quite mad enough a look at the surrounding world of coke he is in practically every frame of the film, perhaps, or ruthless enough, to keep the snorting girls on roller skates, porn-queen and being so good, he pretty much carries wild shimmer of the story as she translates the film. it to film. Odd, really, considering the And this is not really to material there to be worked with. Even the suggest that no-one else can fantastic church drawn up the river to act, or that the production remote outpost of Bellingen seems to have is somehow shon ky. In fact, more lead than glass in it. the acting is good and the Part of the problem lies with the lack of production is sumptuous. balance in performances. Ralph Fiennes' But I think that it has all strung-up Oscar is a craftsman's cadenza, been poorly served by the but it has an isolating effect-the other writing and the direction. performances seem to bounce away from it I was looking forward to a into a different order of being. And not complex exploration of always a very interesting one. Cate Wilde and his circle, but Blanchett, as Lucinda, is left to compete the writer and director with Fiennes' compulsive arthritic postures chose only surface areas to and the result is a kind of frantic grimacing. explore Wilde's life. For Sometimes the two characters spark and example, at times it felt as you get a rush of understanding of their if there were some plan shared obsessions and their angular passion. afoot for the audience to be But mostly they miss one another. It is a treated to a recreation of curiously disappointing film. Morgan Freeman in Amistad every famous photo ever -Morag Fraser 48 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 managed to make the Top romantic comedy and Hollywood westerns End look it too. This film together with a few low-comic Aussies is definitely one of Euro thrown in. Our hero manages to be a Bondi peans telling tales to other lifesaver in the opening scene, as well as a Europeans about one kind fearless pioneering logger working for a of Australia, of the way white people live 'good' timber company. The 'bad' timber Festival ofAustralian Film . The first festival with Aborigines on outback stations. The company is headed by Ludwig Rich, who of Au tralian film passed with sm aller adoption of orphaned Jedda by Sarah mugs the Jewish-businessman-villain turn fanfare than it deserved during January in McMann (Betty Suttor), the 'Missus' of (one's political correctne s muscle gets a Melbourne. Buffalo Station, is explained by the recent fair workout in these older films). Tall The earlier films had a fascination: the loss of her own baby, but there is a disturbing Timbers would certainly have earned the immersion in another time was often feeling that it is as though she had adopted approval of Mrs. Humphries when she took gripping in a way that even really good later a young wild animal rather than a child. A young Barry out from Christowel Street to films such as The Castle, Mad Max 2 and tight-faced icon of pion eering white see this picture. There is no other way to The Year My Voice Broke could not match, womanhood toughing it out alone on the account for the hero's prophetic similarity because the older films had the power of station (only with about 25 'native women' to Bazza McKenzie, in spite of his being so things half-remembered being rediscovered. servants), she does manage somehow to nicely spoken. The older films give us now far more than excite pity as she bosses everyone around. The stereotypes are so juicy and blatant their directors intended: rehearsals of There are saving graces in the telling, that you enjoy them as they dive beyond sensibilities that never pass unexamined or though-a continual acknowledgement of cliche to something rich and strange: the unlayered today. This was evident in the the whites' lack of understanding and of prissy Southern English accents of the fact that all the films were organised into true mys tery as opposed t o the principals ('Ay thawt yaw'd nivah cahm.'); groups: 'The Place'; 'Those Who Were Here manufactured 'mysterious otherness' of t h e nutty Irish-Au ssie servant-class First'; and so on. non-European culture as expressed by a pastorale; the Engli h playboy cad with the Floating Life, directed by Clara Law (in Somerset Maugham or a Kipling. It is as little m oustache and distressing teeth; the the category 'Those Who Cam e Later'), tells though the Australian story is trying to resentful Pommie employee who tries to about migration generally and Australia establish kinship with the grand Briti h bring in Union Troublemakers, then resorts particularly, by sensitive exploration of a colonialist myth but cannot prevent the to bombs and who is in the pay of Ludwig multi-generational Chinese family's bastard truth popping its head up all the Rich-who also employs the playboy cad experience. Leaving Hong Kong for obvious time. who is the roguish but goofy heroine's fiance reasons, they attempt (and fail) to recreate Jedda grows from a 'funny little scrap' and who has seduced and abandoned the their family's harmonious balance in to a voluptuously nubile maiden of no tribe intelligent-and-saturnine-looking sister of Australia. They are wealthy and educated, whose exuality must be correctly placed the aforesaid resentful Porn ... The real which brings issues other than physical with the ' half-cast e' head s tockman problem, the one continuously disturbing survival into sharp focus. One of their narrator. Missus' husband, ('Boss Dad' to fact about this film, was the hero's suit. daughters has already established her career Jedda) is always dubious about his wife's Why did they go to all this trouble to and set up a home in a place like plans; his racism is real but less oppressive establish him as the finest fl ower of colonial Templestowe or some equivalent Ultima to the girl than the neurotic patronage of manhood and not find him a suit that was Thule in Sydney. her adoptive 'm other'. Marriage to the head remotely big enough for him? The term ' trackless suburbia' takes on a stockman and life near Missus, playing Let George Do It (1938 , directed by Ken new twist as her ageing parents attempt to house in a cabin with frilly curtains, is the G. Hall) is densely ignificant with What go for a walk in their new neighbourhood, only possible future. The adolescent Jedda Made People Laugh Then and Why Isn't It not knowing that there's nothing, no-one (Ngarla Kunath) is thus primed to fall for So Funny N ow. Some of the humour is too anywhere. They lovingly admire their Marbuck (Robert Tudawali), a doomed dated and simple for our multi-layered daughter's huge white house until she stranger from another tribe who comes to referential system s. But it is never soft terrifies them with her litany of things work on the station . Denied her real there is a grittiness about it: you can smell wrong-shoddy building, venomous insects. heritage, she is drawn to him in a way that the beer and tobacco and BO across the She means to educate them in what she has makes you cringe at Chauvel's implication stalls and sixty years. The pace and chaos had to learn, but she has quietly come that she is reverting to 'primitivism'. But are like the Marx Brothers: who doesn't like undone here alone in this utterly foreign its sheer vividness and complexity make a good laugh at a cross-eyed chemist while place. This is a fine and complex film, this a film that should be on all film study George and his m ate are drunkenly trying showing the indissolubility of a family courses. to buy poison for him to kill himself on the scattered among continents, yet still with In the hilarious 193 7 Tall Timbers crying-jag end of a spree? The music halls power to bring healing and sanity. (directed by Ken G. Hall), the sam e quality, taught the incredible George Wallace how Jedda (directed by Charles Chauvel, of trying to interpret Australian life through to get laughs and he puts every bit of schtick 1955) is to look at: the bright colours of the the European (and American) paradigm, he's learned out there. N o-one in this film processing give it an Albert N amatjira fails in an endearingly ridiculous way. is straining to present Australia to the world, quality; the aerial sh ots of Northern Showcasing the Glorious Australian Timber only to amuse Australians, and conse T erritory are given a containment, a Industry and the Enchanting Australian quently it tells a great deal about us, palatability to European senses. We know Bush simultaneously, it attempts to pack something that one sees all too rarely. people can look 1950s but the Chauvels dramatic stereotypes from English light -Lucille Hughes V OLUME 8 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 49 WATCHING BRIEF Of snal M oNDm ARE o"'mNT Beethoven Choral Symphony was a nice touch, although the this year. Media Watch is no playing was rough in spots. The drawbacks were more nebulous. more. It was so perfectly placed Without a Torvill & Dean, or even a knee-capping, how are after Four Corners. You'd be Australians going to be riveted by sports where for divers reasons sitting there with your mug of their athletes have as much chance of winning as, well, T & D at tea (or indeed chardonnay) at Lillehammer? ('And here is Kylie Rafferty, fresh from her trium 9 .15pm after yet another fearless phant rise to sixteenth place in the grand slalom .. . ')We were up investigation, pondering the against Norwegians and Swiss and Austrians who ski all day and perfidy of those in high places and feeling a tad ineffectual, when on skate all night and luge in between times. They could never beat us would come that cock-a-snook theme. Immediately you cheered at swimming, or even at lighting a barbecue, but I think it was up: some horrible bastards were going to get a bit of a boot up the telling on the stamina of the Aussie viewer. backside, and you were going to get a good laugh. 'Pompous', There is good stuff around if you're prepared to dig, and to learn 'pedantic'-the epithets were displayed as badges of honour, because how to set the video: the ratings season has seen the return of The no matter what Littlemore's faults might have been (and these have X-Files, The Simpsons and Good News Week. There is a one-off on been pointed out to us exhaustively by Ross Warneke and various SBS-very appropriately on March 17-an interesting and other housecarls of the media barons whom Littlemore's 15 minutes sometimes slyly funny documentary on St Patrick. The only so affrighted), he was not bothered by the thought that powerful drawback is the title: Patrick; His Life, His Legend sounds like the people didn't like him. I am going to miss him dreadfully. Wouldn't he sort of book the school library threw out in the 1970s on the have had a field day with the appointment of Michael Kroger! grounds that it hadn't been taken out since 1949, but don't be put Four Corners was pretty good again in its first program for the off. There is knowledgeable stuff here and some terrific photography. 1998 ratings season on February 9, as it demonstrated that quite a The writings of the legendary saint are compared with the hype few Victorian coppers were not exactly Victoria's finest. In the prepared some centuries later by Vatican spin doctors, and same week Today Tonight hit a new low as it went for the time the result is worth a watch, especially (with its revelations dishonoured formula of pillorying some poor bloody youth as a dole concerning the origins of St Brigid) for old Brigidine girls bludger. I suppose they'd figured well, Singer's gone and Littlemore's likemoi. gone so they might as well have a burl at beating A Current Affair in the hypocrisy stakes. Not easy, but they gave it a real effort. W USED TO SING A SPECIAL HYMN to St Brigid, a really glutinous Somehow I doubt that Frontline will ever make the crossover to one called 'May Brigid Bless the House Wherein You Dwell'. Its commercial channels as the D-Generation did. musical style sat somewhere between 'But Only God Can Make a Seven gambled heavily on the Nagano Winter Olympics to pull Tree' and 'Mammy', while the lyrics were quite impossible to its ratings up, but on the second day it was beaten by Nine's The enunciate without going into an Irish brogue. We would spend the Shawshank Redemption. When people would rather watch a five rest of the day with a terrible urge to say 'begorrah'. Now, the year-old movie than the Olympics there has to be a reason, probably documentary informs us, St Brigid owes her existence (as does several. It couldn't be a revolt against ads intruding because Seven Patrick his legends) to some eighth-century scribes who got to work has been reasonably restrained, and the filleting of movies by slews on the Druid deities of the Irish people to effect a Christian of ads would have turned Shawshank into the usual surreal collage takeover as stealthy and complete as economic rationalism's that has made Australian commercial television such a hissing and takeover of the Labor party. Brigid was a con traction/confabulation byword among visitors from countries with rules about that sort of of the triple Celtic goddess, and some of the things those goddesses thing. So no, it wasn't the commercial interruptions. I think it's got up to would not have impressed the Brigidine nuns I knew in the something to do with what the Olympics are becoming. sixties. Mother Basil would have called them bold-faced hussies. It's a shock to realise just how long it is since Sarajevo meant ('With painted faces and stove-pipe trousers-you'd think that only the 1984 Winter Olyrnpics-and Torvill &Dean. (Only history butter wouldn't melt in their mouths .. . ') teachers and your old Dad ever thought of the start of World War I.) There was a different spin going on in Papa bile-The Men Who By Lillehammer in '94 there was a scramble by the skating judges Could Be Pope (Compass, ABC, February 8 ). Seeing the processions to make sure that they couldn't be ravished again by art on ice. The of grey-haired stone-faced bachelors in robes of varying sumptuosity bronze medal awarded to the British pair was a joke as the gold went made me wish that there were a Stuart Littlemore to cheer us all up to the usual plain-label Russians, and the lights went out on ice afterwards. There was one particularly dandyish specimen who dancing. Nagano was both better and worse than Lillehammer. was a real worry. A positive Beau Brummel of a cardinal he was, in Better because of the opening ceremony and the well-justified an alb as diaphanous as a Dinnigan, under a chasuble that Lacroix inclusion of snowboarding. Akebono, the sumo grand champion, would think over-ornamental. If that one gets up, then we can all chased away the evil spirits with a mighty stamp on the dojo at the look forward to an ex cathedra pronouncement concerning the grievous start. There was a great deal of frantic chanting of the kind that sin of shabbiness. (The Franciscans will just have to go.) • made you think of Ned Seagoon being Bulgarian. Lots of fervent scrambling up sacred poles and stuff like that. I enjoyed it, and the Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer and critic. 50 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1998 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 61, March 1998 Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1. Break down what was written for 13-across, perhaps. Strange mood creeps upon us without reasonable beginning. (9) 6. Who holds 15-across at the pearly gates? (5) 9. Giant in charge of the sinking ship. (7) 10. See 4-down. 11. Tears out to find the blockheads. (5) 12. Take umbrage about forty-nine I had expected to be able to bounce back. (9) 13. The quiet movie could have been called 'On the Beach' for its visual effects-or sound system? (3, 5) 15. Found in 13-across, they sometimes point to the solution. (4) 19. Repeat act! (4) 20. Frustration shared as nitpicking continued. (8) 23. Would such a one crave iron in the diet? A juicy steak, more like! (9) 24. One mile per litre? Not right to apply force! (5) 26. Smuggled old wine as part of the plunder. (7) 27. Being hard of it is a trial. (7) 28. Admit defeat and hand over the profits. (5) 29. Now and again, provide a deputy. (9) DOWN Solution to Crossword no. 60, 1. Duty list put back and seen by staff, possibly. Could cause an explosion! (9) January/February 1998 2. Treat the queen to the cold shoulder even though she is more attractive than most. (5) 3. Scottish fellow almost a stick-in-the-mud. He'd be better off in the Benedictine way, say. (8) 4 & 10-across. He, well-known in the movie world, and I, unclad perhaps, could be called a bookish couple. (5, 3, 7) 5. Measure tilt and call for support. (6) 6. To choose the French garnish could bring trouble. (6) 7. State of the past or present? Could cause strain! (9) 8. Severely criticise the leg of lamb, for instance. (5) 14. Patience and perseverance could have cured Anne. (9) 16. Incidental allusion to the car's right flicker, perhaps. (9) 17. Tim went through a strange phase-espousing an Australian philosophy of life. (8) 18. My friend is adept at fencing, even without any physical training. She has a stake in it! (8) 21. Special brand I use for the trimming. (6) 22. & 25 . 6-across and 23-down, as leading Personal Investors, broke zero order, with this award for 4-down and 10-across. (6, 5) Our mistake! Missing clue for Crossword no. 60, 23. Novelist exercises caution with the unknown. (5) January-February 1998, no. 22 down: 'A featme to 25. See 22-down. be found in, perhaps, every chmch. (4)' Please send two free copies of Eureka Street to: Name ...... Address ...... Postcode ...... Myna1neis ...... Address ...... Postcode ...... Tel ...... Special Book Offer SEAMS OF LIGHT: BEST ANTIPODEAN ESSAYS Edited by Morag Fraser l.TNWIN A good essay lures you pas t your prejudices, into th e deep. You ' re on th e writer's ex pedition into paradox, probing refractions and shadows, teas ing out new understandings. Seams of Light in vites you to take th e plunge w ith so me of Australi a's most exciting w ri te rs: Deni s Byrn e, Bri an Castro, john Clarke, lnga Clendinnen, Bi ll Cope, Robert Dessa ix, Helen Garn er, Kerryn Goldsworth y, Peter Goldsworthy, lvor lndyk, Sh ane Malon ey, Dav id Marr, Les Murray, Barry Oakl ey, Peter Porter, Peter Stee le, Peter W alker, Chri s W all ace-C rabbe. 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