The Halifax-Portal Lectures AUSTRALIAN A Series of Four Ecumenical Lectures BOOK REVIEW Sponsor"d b) th" Catholic .111<1 Anglic.111 Bishops of NSW 4th May 1999 'Lambeth '98: Canterbury Tales' Archbishop H . Goodhew, Angli can APRIL: C hurch, Diocese ofSydney. 11th May 1999 'The Synod for Oceania-an An essay by Adrian Martin exercise in collegiality' Bishop David Walker, Catho li c Foong Ling Kong on Diocese ofBroken Ba y Ghassan Hage's White Nation 18th May 1999 'Two Steps Forward, One Step Back-an ecumenical line dance' Mrs Morna Sturrock, journalist, Peter Craven on Greg Dening's historian and author, Angli ca n Diocese Readings/Writings of Melbourne. 25th May 1999 'The Gift of Authority 1999-the Peter Steele on contribution of ARCIC to the Jack Hibberd's poetry discussion among the churches'. R ev. Dr Peter Cross, Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne and Ramona Koval on Member of ARCJC. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace - Free Entry Tuesday Nights at 7.30pm Therese Radic on At Lidcombe Catholic Club 24 John Street, Lidcombe, NSW The Theatre of Louis Nowra Close to station. Free parking ava il able. M ea ls and snacks available in the Coffee Lounge from 5.30pm
Philippa Hawker on Angli can Viscounr C harles Hali fax (1839-1934) was deepl y involved in most questi ons Lee Tulloch's Wraith facing the AJ1 glj ca n C hurch of his day. Abbe! Etienne Po rtal (1855-1926), a French Vincentian, met th e Vi scount by chance in 1889. Their friendship led t O dialogue about C hurch reunio n. The Malines Conve rsa ti o ns ( 1921- 1926) berween Catholics and Angli ca ns hosted by Cardinal Mercier were thei r most no table success. These two men New Subscribers $55 for ten issues plus a free book exprt>ss the spirit that tht>se current le ctures seek to foster. FO R FURTH ER INFOR.MATION. CONTACT SR. PATRIC IA MADIGAN OP. Ph (0~) 9429 6700 or Fax (03) 9429 2288 LIA ISON O FFIC ER FOR. ECUMENISM , PO LDING H OUSE, 02 9390 5 I68.
Art Monthly I l S TR II. I I
IN THE APRIL ISSlJE
Joan !(err asks ''hat docs it take to nuke a \:a tiona] Portrait Gallen \\ ork;
Suzanne Spunncr on the dress in bshion fcsti \ Titles include From the I lorsc's \ Iouth Christopher I lcathcotc Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story C\amincs the recent spate of A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology CoNTENTS Xanana Gusmao, 30 profile by Jon WAR AND MEMORY: Greenaway, p25. 4 A EUREKA STREET COMMENT FORUM With Frank Brennan and Michael McKernan. Hugh Dillon follows his uncle's experience in World War I through the cinema of 7 Steven Spielberg; Ross McMullin tracks the CAPITAL LETTER AIF in France during March and Aprill918 (p34); Peter Cochrane reviews Ken Inglis' Sacred Places (p3 7); Peter Pierce comments 8 on Jan Bassett's As We Wave You Goodbye: LETTERS Australian Women and War (p38); Alison Lewis considers reconciliation, memory 10 and monuments in today's Germany (p41). WHEN IN ROME Dan Madigan on bishops and power. 11 29 THE SPY WHO DIDN'T LOVE ME ARCHIMEDES Andrew Hamilton on unofficial observers in the Catholic Church. 44 POETRY 12 'The Fassifern', by Thomas Shapcott. THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC Cover design by Siobhan With David Glanz, John Coleman 45 Jackson. Photograph of and Peter Pierce. INTEGRITY: THE LONG WALK Xanana Gusmao, Associated Antony Campbell on the vision Press AP. of unconditional love. Graphics pp5, 10- 11,21 13 by Siobhan Jackson. SUMMA THEOLOGIAE Photographs ppl4- 15 48 by John Coleman. HIGH-TONED TERFEL Photographs pp23-28 16 Peter Craven reviews the big baritone. by Jon Greenaway. BUSH LAWYER Graphics pp30-41 from the painting by Grace Cossington 50 Smith, Reinforcem ents: 17 THEATRE Troops Marching, c. 1917, oil THE DEFINING QUALITIES Geoffrey Milne on Belvoir St Theatre; Peter on paper and hardboard; collection of the Art Gallery Sir Gerard Brennan on the values that Craven on the dangers of staging Oscar. of NSW and used on the cover shape Australia. of A s We Wave You Goodbye: 52 Au tralian Wom en and War, ed. Jan Basset, OUP. 21 FLASH IN THE PAN Photographs pp32- 33 COMMUNITY LAW Reviews of the films The Dreamlife of by Hugh Dillon. Moira Rayner on the shrinking of Angels; The Thin Red Line; Tango; Photograph p50 Community Legal Centres. Central Station and Analyze This. by Heidrun Lohr. Eureka Street magazine 23 54 Jesuit Publications COVER STORY: EAST TIMOR WATCHING BRIEF PO Box 553 Jon Greenaway surveys the situation Richmond VIC 3 121 Tel (03)9427 7311 from the ground, and interviews 55 Fax (03)9428 4450 leader-in-waiting, Xanana Gusmao. SPECIFIC LEVITY V O LUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 3 EUREKA SJAEEr A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology Publisher Daniel Madigan SJ Humbly Editor Morag Fraser Assistant editor Kate Manton Consulting editor G oo's eNTRY~= ~~,~~~stitution•l deb"e ' Michael McGirr SJ century ago is instructive. At the 1897 Convention in Adelaide, delegates were agreed Graphic designer that God be given a miss. There was no need for a vote. Siobhan Jackson Edmund Barton thought it better to keep God out of any such Production and business manager discussions. But then the draft proposals were referred back Sylvana Scannapiego to the colonies. Every colony reported that God had to be Editorial and production assistants given a guernsey. Juliette Hughes, Paul Fyfe SJ, Patrick McMahon Glynn then got his opportunity. There Geraldine Battersby, Chris Jenkins SJ was general agreement at the 1898 Melbourne Convention Contributing editors that the m ention of God would render the whole Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ, Perth: Dean Moore constitutional package more acceptable to the voters. So the Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor preamble of the imperial legislation to which the Queensland: Peter Pierce Constitution is an attachment states the people's humble United Kingdom correspondent reliance 'on the blessing of Almighty God'. No matter how Denis Minns OP lofty the sentiment or principled the aspiration, timing and expediency count for much in the art of constitution making. South East Asia correspondent In 1988, the Constitutional Commission advised that Jon Greenaway the preamble be left well alone because it 'could be a source Jesuit Editorial Board of passionate debate which would be a significant distraction Peter L'Estrange SJ, Andrew Bullen SJ, from other substantive and more important proposals Andrew Hamilton SJ submitted to the electors'. Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ Ten years later, that all changed. At the 1998 Marketing manager: Rosanne Turner Convention, there was a working group on the preamble. It Advertising representative: Ken Head divided into subgroups. One subgroup recommended the Subscription manager: Wendy Marlowe retention of our reliance on God. Another, chaired by Lowitja Administration and distribution O'Donoghue, and including a spectrum of representation Kate Matherson, Lisa Crow, from Gatjil Djerrkura to Leonie Kramer, recommended a Mrs Irene Hunter preamble which recognised the indigenous peoples as the Patrons original inhabitants. They resolved ' that this separate Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the referendum question on the Preamble be put to the Australian support of C. and A. Carter; the people at the same time as the referendum on the republic'. trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; W.P. & M.W. Gurry Billboard Billboard Billboard Billboard Billboard Eureka Street magazine, ISSN 1036-1758, Frank Brennan SJ & Tim Costello will discuss 'A Secu lar Soc iety? Australia Post Print Post approved pp349181 /00314, Politics and the Church', with Morag Frase r in th e chair. Tuesday is published ten times a year 27 April, 6.30pm, Seymour Centre, Sydney; Wednesday 28 April, by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd, 6.30pm, Coll ins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne. Tickets: 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3 121 Sydney 02 9364 9400, Melbourne 03 9347 6633. Tel: 03 942 7 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450 Arena magaz ine, Eureka Street and the Fabian Soc iety are jointly email: [email protected] sponsoring a series of even in g discussions cal led 'Regenerating http://www .openplanet.com.au/eureka/ a Social Ethic', beginning Wednesday 14 Apri l, with Race Mathews Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by and Geoff Sharp on 'Co-operation and Community in an Era of Daniel Madigan, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. Globalisation', and then 'Democracy, Stakeholding and Govern Printed by Doran Printing, ment' on Wednesday 28 April, 8pm. Location : 35 Argyle Street, 46 Industrial Drive, Braeside VIC 3 195. Fitzroy, Melbourne. Enquiries: Wendy Marlowe, 03 9427 7311. © Jesuit Publications 1999 Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and Pub lic Lecture: 'A Letter to the World: Love and Peter Porter', to fiction, will be returned only if accompanied by be given by Peter Steele SJ, on Tu esday 25 May, at 6.30pm, in a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Requests for the Sunderland Th eatre in the Medical Centre, University of permission to reprint material from the magazine Melbourne. The poet, Peter Porter, will read briefly from his work should be addressed in writing to: at the beginning. All are welcome. The lecture is being sponsored The editor, Eureka Street magazine, jointly by the University of Melbourne and th e Europe- Austra lia PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121 Centre at the Victorian University of Technology. 4 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 The working groups reported to the convention. The nomination procedure and the dismissal Aboriginal atheist, Pat O'Shane, spoke in favour of procedure set down in the 'Bipartisan Appointment retaining God in the preamble because, 'This is a state of the President Model' are not perfect. But they are ment about who we are and the values w e hold dear.' better than the existing arrangement whereby the The convention referred the reports to a broadly Prime Minister can act unilaterally, informing representative Resolutions Group which, according Cabinet of his nomination and instructing the Palace to Attorney-General Daryl Williams, was 'close to to dismiss. I agree with Archbishop Pell who, when unanimous in its deliberations', including the putting the wood on Prim e Minister Howard to show acknowledgment of the original occupancy and leadership at the Convention, conceded that the custodianship of the land by Aborigines. The m odel is 'certainly a compromise-like every decision convention, on the m otion of Malcolm Turnbull, then made in a body of 152 people; like every decision made overwhelmingly vo ted that the 'republican model, and in a democracy. But must the best, differently other related changes to the understood, be the destructive Constitution, supported by this enemy of the good?' Convention, be put to the people The preamble question in a constitutional referendum.' should get up if the formula of Unlike a century ago, there words wins the approval of has been no decade-long series of Aboriginal leaders such as con ventions. There has been a O 'Donoghu e and Djerrkura. one-off convention which is to be fo llowed by this The republic question has no chance of getting up year's referendum, and if there is a transition to a unless Peter Costello and Kim Beazley agree. If republic, there is to be another convention three to Costello stands mute beside Howard while Reith fiv e years after the change. It is not for anyone, trumpets the direct election m odel, the republic will including the Prime Minister or the Australian surely go down. Republican Movem ent, to tamper with the outcomes Costello and Howard together hold the trump of the convention. The preamble question has to be cards, given that only eight of the previous 42 put at the sam e time as the republic question referenda have succeeded, all but one having been regardless of speculation about adverse motives of proposed by non-Labor governments. Each of them monarchists or the Prime Minister. will have his own motivations for playing the trump If we were starting from scratch, I would happily card as he chooses. Once again, timing and expediency subscribe t o a preamble that omitted God and will count for much. If Costello has his GST by June, acknowledged Aboriginal prior ownership of the land. he will hold the trump card and we are more likely to But we are midway through a dem ocratic process have the republic on time. Should Costello be held which requires a vote on a preamble which acknowl up in the Senate, Howard will play the card, and God, edges God, and Aboriginal custodianship. In the spirit Howard and Her Majesty will all retain their places, of the Convention Communique, our politicians for the time being. • should also try to reach agreement on equality before the law and recognition of Aboriginal rights 'by virtue Frank Brennan SJ is Director of Uniya, the Jesuit Social of their status as Australia's indigenous peoples'. Justice Research Centre. COMMENT: 2 Mrc H AEL M c K ERNAN War and remembrance S OMEONe I 'Now vm wm '' Amtmli,n, bom of hit a land mine. In a coma for many months, with Ukrainian parents. The parents met in a Displaced injuries to his feet, legs, and face, he recovered to be Persons camp in Germany after the Second World discharged to the care of his parents, he was War; both of them had worked as slave labourers for wheelchair-bound, with little short-term memory and the Germans during the war. They remained in camp limited ability to communicate. His m other died in until 1949 when they were accepted for Australia. the zeal of her care for him. Both were then factory workers throughout their My friend is an educator, and years ago clashed working lives. Their eldest child, born in Germ any, with a senior RSL official over the appropriate way to was conscripted to the Vietnam War and, in an involve young Australians in recalling the story of armoured personnel carrier on his firs t few days there, Australia at war. The man was angry- but from the V OLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 5 fastness of his certainty that his war was the only real war, that professional veterans, would want to continue to hold the only he and his mates, among Australians, understood war. He community out, would want to say that a woman with a bellowed that she could not possibly know the cost of war to Ukrainian name could not understand the real m eaning of war. Australian families. My friend did not bother to tell him of the Each nation seems constrained by its own past in different hundreds of hours by her brother's bedside at the repat hospital, ways. In Britain, for example, Tony Blair has argued that or of the decades of patience and denial for her parents, herself excessive pride in the grandeur of the imperial past has and her brothers. prevented the people from embracing the challenges of the There is som ething mean, narrow and ungenerous in the future, the challenges of change. The Australian embrace of thinking of some Australian veterans about other people's wars. the past can be characterised by a failure of imagination and by Men from the First World War had difficulty accepting the next an assertion of exclusion. Our past, the approved non-'black generation into the fellowship of the RSL, armband' past, does n ot include the believing that their own experience was destruction of Aboriginal society; it did not unique. Second World War veterans were include, until very recently, non-British slow to welcome Vietnam veterans to the migration society, or women. And we are sa me sub-branches from which they had now go ing to write these things (rather, our once been excluded. Indeed, the official RSL Prime Minister is now going to write these argued strenuously against the type of things) in our preamble? claims Vietnam veterans were making It is a failure of imagination that seems against Agent Orange and seem ed to resent to thwart our understanding of our own the pensions and entitlem ents that flowed pas t . In our government's refusal to from governm ent acceptance that service apologise to the 'stolen generations', we in Vietnam had caused many veterans the have grieved at the hardness of heart, and most appalling physical and psychological Roll of Honour for 1939-1945 on the wall of the dominion of abacus and chequebook, illnesses. the eastern cloister, Australian War but the root of the problem is a failure of Memorial, 1967. The cloisters now list more When the Australian War Memorial than 100,000 names. (From Ken ln$lis' imagination that cannot allow us to include staged its first ever major international Sacred Pl aces, reviewed at p37.) those who challenge our clean and heroic exhibition, 'Children of the Holocaust'- the drawings, poem s images. We limit ourselves to an approved national story. But and letters of the children of Terezin, most of them subsequently from Anzac Day we can learn that we can change, that we can murdered-there were veterans who argued that the display was open ourselves to a developing past. inappropriate. It was not about 'us'. In vain did Mem orial staff We who were not there do not know Lone Pine, the Nek or argue to these men that the display showed what it was, Pozieres. But we had a Charles Bean and we have a Bill Gammage ultimately, that our troops were fighting to defeat. It was as if and those who have followed him to help open our imagination the story stopped at the perimeter of Tobruk, or on the torture and to impose reality on our understanding. We might not know of the Kokoda Track; as if we had no interest in a war, but we have had generations to absorb and develop the wider story, a story that was not our own. story for us through celebration, commemoration; through 'r books, song and film. By imposing Anzac Day on our calendar, .1. HERE WAS A DANCER, in the early years, that Anzac Day would we have given ourselves the space, the room, to read and think accentuate, indeed perpetuate, the exclusiveness of the Anzac about these things, and with a regularity mimicking the brotherhood. The Dawn Service is a case in point. Established liturgical calendar, the repetition has worked on us. variously around Australia in the 1920s, its origins gave A nation should, perhaps, take its time in developing its expression to the fact that it was at dawn, at Gallipoli, that unique occasions; then they will come from the people the Australians firs t storm ed into battle. Naturally, the Dawn themselves, as we have witnessed in the first century of our Service had an exclusive Anzac flavour. By the time the story. We might now be able to m ake a national 'sorry clay' Melbourne Shrine was dedicated in 1934 it was accepted there work. The story would be told, hesitatingly at first; with more that the Dawn Service was for returned men only. Others would confidence as both the story and ceremony took hold an d come and stand aside, spectators only, as everywhere in expanded our imaginations. Then, slowly, we might become Australia, they were spectators at the march later on in the more alert to wider aspects of our Australian narrative. day. The fellowship of Anzac was not really for them . Anzac Day might show us the way to a more whole-hearted But they were grieving parents, sisters and younger understanding of our past. It might open us to ways of thinking brothers, wives whose hurt would never heal. As time wore on about ourselves and about Australia that are inclusive, not timid they forced themselves into the rituals of Anzac Day, as did and repelling. If Anzac Day, and our understanding of its schoolchildren and cadets, m embers of the defence forces, those national significance, could offer us a fuller sense of our past, with a sense of history and those who wanted to know more the diggers in whose name it was all done would once again about Australia. The liturgical regularity of the Day, the contribute more than they could ever have anticipated to a unchanging nature of its rituals, the constancy and impact of better, more generous and more imaginative Australia. • its story, all worked their way into the Australian way of thinking. Gradually Anzac Day becam e a day for all of us and Michael McKernan is an historian and former deputy director the exclusivity of the veterans gave place to their recognition of the Australian War Memorial. See also Eureka Street's War that this was Australia's cl ay. Only the rau cous few, the and Memory Forum, pp30-44. 6 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Regional realpolitik E AST T•Mo' will •lmost mtoinly be Indonesia has a stronger interest in a smooth trans1t1on a de facto independent state well before than might immediately appear, but, once the agony and the Jacl< W'a terford any plebiscite. As it becomes more and humiliation are over for it, it is difficult to see it being of much more clear that East Timorese are almost practical assistance. Still less would it want an East Timorese certain to opt for complete separation from Indonesia, it becom es success to be taken as the spur for other groups in the diverse less and less likely that Indonesia will play any active role in its nation to strike out alone. Indonesia has been forced-by the affairs, even before independence is a fait accompli. It may be Asian economic collapse and the pressure imposed by the that its own demands for statesmanship stop it doing what international rescue of its economy-to be realistic. Occupation Portugal did so precipitately 25 years ago-walk out, leaving has had high social and economic costs, and has infected its everything in chaos. But it is also hard to imagine that a cash relations with m ost other nations of the world. strapped Indonesia will continue with the $50 million or so Yet some of the ambivalences of letting go are bound to annual subsidy that its disastrous adventure has involved, or strike in its domestic politics. A weakened army whose systems that the civilian and administrative infrastructure will hang and personnel still make up much of the infrastructure of central around for any retributions. administration has had much prestige and blood tied up in its And as in Timor 25 years ago, it is by no m eans certain as yet little Vietnam. The army is in any event stretched for resources, that the various East Timorese politicalleaderships are ready to and fearful about its capacity to cope with simultaneous crises resolve differences, or that the extra bitternesses and animosities in Sumatra, the Moluccas and the Celebes, let alone Irian Jaya, between different groups created by the Indonesian occupation or law and order in the capital. Two elections are pending and, will be put aside, even for a time. Those with most stake in an though it appears there is a consensus of sorts about letting independent nation have been speaking the language of East Timor go, there is no guessing how one populist or another m oderation and reconciliation now for som e time. But that so might use the events to stir up indignation, or to direct anger many of them would clearly prefer an interregnum, even one to external forces, away from domestic corruptions with a continuing Indonesian presence, before the formal estab or incapacities. lishment of a new nation, shows just what uncertainties exist. And even among those who rejoice that the people will be SOME OF THE PERMANENT REALITIES MATTER. Australia m ay make free to choose their own destiny, there must be som e pessimism a virtue of helping Timor as much as it can . But it is difficult to about the future. East Timor is desperately poor, and scarcely imagine that this will be at the expense of its far m ore significant able to feed itself. There may be som e long-term prospect of relationship with Indonesia. If Timor ceases to be an irritant in sharing oil revenues with Australia, but they are far off and, on Australian- Indonesian relations, there will be those who will be the prospectings so far, cannot sustain the state. seeking to make the relationship even closer. And, in the As a province oflndonesia, it received from Jakarta about $50 m edium term at least, the reconstruction of the Indonesian million a year more than came out, but, even then, its average economy is as pressing a task as the construction of an East per capita income was in the lower third of any of the Indonesian Timorese one. It is not in Australia's, or the region's interest, to provinces. Indonesia's colonial predecessor, Portugal, treated have a Balkanised Indonesia, least of all one inspired by East Timor disgracefully even by its own standards. So, even if communal grievances and drastic economic depression, rather there were an effective reconciliation of grievances between than a natural development of just claims for m ore civil, groups, East Timor lacks almost all of the social and physical political and economic rights inspired by growth. capital necessary to keep its head above water. Direct financial Back in Canberra, the cynic might think that the primary aid, practical assistance in improving agriculture and importance of developments in East Timor lies in their capacity communications infrastructure, and an attempt to build up an to cause past politicians, particularly Whitlam, embarrassment income base may provide some flotation for so long as it is over their complicity in the Indonesian take-over, or in creating sustained. But it will be many years before there will be anything leadership pressures inside the Labor party. like self-sufficiency, from economic activity yet to be imagined. This is a bit unfair. Alexander Downer and, to a lesser extent In this sense, an independent East Timor will not be in the John Howard, deserve credit for the way they have played position, say, of a Papua New Guinea, which has a wealth of Australia's hand- and the fact that Australian fingernails were resources and which was left, at independence, with arguably dirtier than most has been a factor pushing Indonesia along. too much government infrastructure: it will be having to build They have been pretty realistic about East Timor's prospects, up its institutions from scratch, without itself having the and resisted some impulses, which might have won them local money to pay for it. praise, to push for an immediate Indonesian abandonment. So far, the international gestures of goodwill are encouraging. And Laurie Brereton has exercised skill in anticipating events, Australia, with a twin moral debt to the country, will play a lead and in re-fashioning Labor policy to suit. He may also have played role. Other countries are also making promises. But it is not hard a role in persuading at least some in the Labor Party that not all to imagine some of them getting impatient within a few years of its policy contradictions can be swept under the carpet. • even if there is a relatively smooth transition. And that could be so even if the leaders of the country show some skill in settling Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times. See also Jon things down. Greenaway, 'Ea st Timor on the Move', p23. V OLUME 9 NUMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 7 L ETTERS Eureka Street welcomes letters from its storms of criticism and controversy'. I was readers. Short letters arc more likely to living in London at the time Blacl 8 EU REKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Second, Ma uldon displays the sa m e 1t seem s to m e that we need some fres h refusal to engage with practical concerns thinking about e nergy, and especia ll y Going deeper about the reform agenda that drives many of electricity, options in a greenhouse-conscious us (like Ha nner) to the feeling that there are age. It would be nice to think that universities From Sandy Ross irreconcilably different world views in might help with that, transcending m ere Roger Mauldon's response (Eureka Street, operation here. Mauldon acknowledges the prejudices. And madam, what price the Jesuit March 1999) to John Ha nner ('Contesting validity of Hanner's concerns about the effects heritage of meticulou clea r thinking? Welfare', Eurel V OLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 9 THE CHURCH: 1 D AN M ADIGAN When in Rome W NAN "c"""""' '"" wa 10 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 there be to claims of this kind if the bishops every attempt i made to k eep those concluded First Vatican Council, so there are not allowed to voice their considered interventions from the public forum. The was little in its teaching to balance the opinion 1 What kind of collegiality and bishops at the Synod for Oceania were told absolute centrality it gave to the papacy. communion consists in allowing only those that their own speech es were not to be The Second sought to remedy this by voices to be heard that conform to a position distributed becau se they became the insisting on the importance of the local already settled without reference to the property of the Synod. The only bish op, and of the college of bishops with worldwide episcopacy? The Pope's July 1998 authoritative statem ent to emerge fro m a the Bishop of Rome not as their 'boss' but letter on the theological and juridical synod is the papal document prod uced as the enabler of their unity and its focus. status of episcopal conferences makes som etimes more than a year later when the Rome may have learned to talk the talk, clear h ow Rome understands the limits of issues raised in the m eeting are safely out of but the bish ops seem to be telling it that collegiality. the news and a bland exhortation will pass it h as more to learn before it can walk Sometimes bishops do speak candidly unnoticed. the walk. • in synods and courageously question the The role of the bis hop was l eft presently accepted disciplines. But then unexamined by the somewhat hastily Dan Madigan SJ is Eureka Street's publisher. THE CHURCH: 2 A NDREW H AMIL TON The spy who didn't love me INo"cu" VOLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 11 The Mo1 h's Traffic more in this room . If there was a fire I don't congenial. They might not have been crash know how we'd all get out. You have to log hot on the wages, but they don't even Dial tone off on the computer every time you go to pretend any m ore. Telstra measures down the toilet. It's like factory work, clocking to within 30 seconds on a 013 call.' C HOOKS KEPT in cramped conditions tend off and on.' These human battery hens also have to to moult and go off their feed. It's not so In practi ce, management can monitor live with the risk that their ca llers will turn very different fo r the self-s tyled battery any call. The workers even worry that on them . 'Fa ce to face a client is more hens at Ccntrclink call centres. conve rsations between them selves could pleasant and restrained,' says John. 'People C laimants m ight get fru strated waiting be listened in to through their head sets. If will vent their anger on the phone-it's to deal with a disembodi ed voice, but for there are priva cy laws, the staff aren't sure phone rage.' the workers on the other end of the line, what they are. Wom en phone workers ca n face the every shift is hour upon hour of concentrated The culture of privacy is much stronger 12 EUREKA STREET • A PRIL 1999 • Susan and a few workmates are trying to 1 a e sign up colleagues into the National Union of Workers. 'There are people just waiting for the forms. I haven't spoken to anyone who doesn't want to join.' Mannix, Pinochet and justice Compared with established industries, their demands are very modest- fortnightly 1 THE EARLY 1960s, Fr Noel Ryan used to go each morning to Raheen where he celebrated pay rather than monthly, penalty rates, Mass for the aged Dr Mannix. One day, he told us that he found Dr Mannix already vested clarification of entitlement to breaks and a and ready to celebrate. The Archbishop explained that this was the opening day of the clear policy on the monitoring of calls. But Second Vatican Council, and that he believed in Councils. Behind the gesture was a long even modest gains are likely to be difficult tradition of French and Irish theology and a lifetime of pastoral practice. Both theology and to get. Pat Wood , who specialises in union practice are illuminated by Jeffrey Murphy in the Australasian Catholic Record (January recruitment at call centres, knows how 1999). Murphy reproduces and comments on Mannix's remarks, sent to Cardinal Suenens, tough it can be. about the draft document on the Church for the Vatican Council. 'Wh en Optus was setting up it Mannix rejected the document, claiming that it was authoritarian, and sounded more approached the union and had an award. like 'a legal document than a spiritual proclamation of religious faith, and still less like an Twelve months later, before the unions had evangelical one'. In a month, too, when it has been reported that the Vatican has appealed time to organise properly, they offered their to Great Britain for Pinochet's release on the grounds of a doctrine of national sovereignty, new employees a !non-union] employment Mannix's comment on justice within the Church remains pertinent: 'It would be a grave flexibility agreement.' scandal if the observance of justice were seen to be inferior in the Church than in secular Outside the major corporate sector it's tribunals'. A good inscription for a new statue? even more difficult. The union mobilised The same journal also contains sobering comments on the contemporary Church by outside one workplace in central Melbourne Genevieve Carroll and Michael Mason. They reflect on the initial results of a recent survey after a few workers rang in to complain of regular Catholic church-attenders. These amount to about 18 per cent of all Catholics. about pay, breaks (an absence of them) and Since only one quarter of this number is aged between 15 and 40, the percentage can be an employment contract in which workers expected to fall. The report generally reveals a reasonable knowledge of the central signed away WorkCover entitlements. doctrines of faith, but the younger respondents are m ore attracted to experiential rather Woods and her fellow officials handed than dogmatic ways of describing God. The results suggest that we may expect that out information about workers' rights and Catholics of the future will display a looser sense of Catholic identity. urged staff to ring for membership. 'Because One of the ways of addressing Catholic identity is through religious education. In a fresh they're all casual they're shit-scared to say and stimulating article, also in ACR, Richard Rymarz reflects on the experience of those anything,' she said. A few responses cam e educated as Catholics in the 19 70s in order to comment on religious education. Whereas in nonetheless, but staff turnover wiped in the 1950s, young Catholics developed a Catholic identity through belonging to a out most of the gains in short order. network of Catholic institutions, those who remained Catholic in the 1970s did o by One of the CEPU's most rewarding personal decision, often in the face of peer-group opposition. In contra t to those of an successes was in a Melbourne call centre. ea rlier generation, memories of childhood include little reference to religious teaching. About 40, m os tly women, workers Rymarz ascribes this in part to the lack of hard content in religious teaching. He suggests approached the union after they were forced that in secondary schools, a more rigorous program of religious education, which is not to sign individual contracts, giving up rights primarily catechetical in focus, m ay be helpful. His suggestion has great merit, for it looks in the process. to welfare of the 80 per cent of students whose association with the Church will remain Woods had the contracts struck out in loose, as well a to the minority who will be 'practising Catholics'. the Industrial Relations Commission and This suggestion, of course, will have to m eet the difficulties facing any classroom then sat down with the women to draw up curriculum which lacks accreditation for VCE. But in Victoria, at least, it could build on a log of claims. the admirable curriculum developed in the VCE subject, 'Texts and Traditions'. This has Thanks to the women's determination the virtues which Rymarz praises, for it is open and intellectually rigorous. It has also been and their industrial leverage- they had immensely significant in the faith development of many reflective young people. specific skills the employer could not easily When reflecting on Australian Catholic identity, we can learn much from the long and replace- they won a union agreement serious exchanges in the United States. In Horizons (Fall 1998), Peter Phan discusses the including pay rises and penal tie worth up relationship between Catholic identity and Catholic education. He remarks that when we to $30 a week and the right to negotiate discuss this issue, we often proceed wrongly by asking first what distinguishes Catholicism permanency. from other belief-systems, and then by assuming Catholic education should focus on these Perhaps most importantly, 'they got distinctive beliefs. Phan claims that Catholic identity is complex and intuitive. It is best dignity,' said Woods. 'They know their developed through a cultivated imagination and through a developed historical narrative, rights. They have processes to resolve as well as through argument. For that reason, Catholic education needs not only to be disputes.' intellectually rigorous, but spiritually and imaginatively rich. That's where the battery hen analogy The success of the 'Texts and Traditions' curriculum may bear reflection in this respect. breaks down. Unlike our feathered friends, It may be that it is successful precisely because it touches the imagination. It enables young today's white-collar production workers can people to enter the imaginative world of texts in a way that allows open play to their desire dream of life beyond the bars. They have for m eaning, for story and for argument. • the potential to win the right to range free. - David Glanz Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. VOLUME 9 N UMllER 3 • EUREKA STREET 13 There was nostalgia, too, in revisiting St to St Clement, Bishop of Rome and Martyr Things of stone Clement Danes, the 'oranges and lemons' for the faith, proclaims the Gospel of Jesus church opposite Australia House at the top Christ and the sacraments 'of the one, holy of Fleet Street. The church dates to the and apostolic church are celebrated according T"' ""'":~~, :;~,~~l ow bl•nkot ninth century and was rebuilt by William to the custom of the Church of England'. on the steps of London's Westminster the Conqueror and again by Christopher On a wet, misty morning we walked Cathedral was different from any I had seen Wren in 1682. It was virtually destroyed by down the steep flagston e steps to Wales' before- he was young, clean-shaven and German bombers in 1941 and restored by finest church- St David's Cathedral named his jacket, visible at the shoulder, carried the RAF and reconsecrated 30 years ago as for the patron saint of Wales. It was here the Puma Sports label. He held out a the RAP's central London church. A statue that bishops were slaughtered by the Vikings McDonalds cup for alms, his breakfast in in front of the church commemorates Arthur and where building of the present cathedral McDonalds packets beside him. Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber began in the 12th century. It was one of several differences I noticed Command, and the more than 55,000 air The cathedral was damaged by an earth about the cathedral I had attended crew m embers who died in World War II. quake in 1248 and there was further regularly when working as a Fleet Street Their names are inscribed in books of damage- and restoration-across the journalist 30 years ago. Then, like so many remembrance around the walls of the centuries, with major restoration last Catholic churches in Britain, it was hidden church. century and early this century. It remains in a side street, a short walk from Victoria The notice at the entrance to St Clement today the parish church of St David's, Wales' Station. Another difference was the Danes points out that it is part of the Church smallest city, and that becam e patently prominent notice at the entrance to the of England which 'teaches and practises the obvious to us. cathedral, a reflection of life in the 1990s. It Catholic faith brought to this land by St A funeral was about to begin and warned that 'pickpockets operate in this Augustine and his predecessors'. It also although we had come 20,000km we were cathedral'. explains that St Clement Danes, dedicated refused admission by the church warden. I walked from the station unerringly In 'Braveheart' territory, near the to the cathedral-and was stunned. English- Scottish border, we found Instead of rounding the corner of the side another ancient church which also street I found myself in the middle of a proudly proclaims itself 'a living church': wide, open square. The square, a priest Lanercost Priory. It is in the wooded told me, had just been completed by valley of the River Irthing and was Westminster Council. founded for the Augustinian Canons It was like a welcome back for my around 1166. The stone came from nearby wife and I, who were married in London Hadrian's Wall, built to delineate and 30 years ago. We noted the item in the fortify the northernmost outreach of the cathedral bulletin which said '30 years of Roman Empire. Following Henry VIII's London dirt, dust and poilu tion' had been Dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, removed from the Blessed Sacrament part of the monastic buildings were Chapel's mosaic and m etalwork on converted into a house and much of the 11 December-our marriage elate. priory fell into decay. Restoration was We observed another profound undertaken in the 18th century and major difference: 30 years ago the crowds at structural works are continuing. The Mass were thinner, but now there was priory today serves some 600 parishioners barely a vacant seat ... Asian, African and scattered over a wide rural area. European, fur coats and parkas, young At the border town of Brampton, we and old. were warmly welcomed at Sunday Mass Westminster Cathedral, built on the by a tall, ageing Benedictine, Fr Edmund. site of a prison less than 100 years ago, We joined a handful of parishioners in a was one of several pilgrimages we made chapel in a block of units owned and to churches in Britain. The most rented out by the Church. nostalgic was to Our Lady of Dolours, It was a vibrant, guitar-strumming the Servite Fathers church off the Fulham Mass marking National Youth Sunday in Road at the top of Chelsea, which was Britain, and youth among the tiny our parish church. Like the Westminster community were the major participants. Cathedral we had known, it was- and is The parish bulletin noted that the still-tucked obscurely among other weekend marked the date when the pre buildings, a haven of peace in a heavily Reformation Benedictine Congregation trafficked area. Little had changed in this had its continuity guaranteed by the cathedral-like church with its long vesting of two secular priests in 1609. entrance way, its huge, overhanging cross We left with a feeling of optimism with red background in front of the altar about the future of an ancient Church in and three beautiful stained glass Britain. windows above the altar. Westminster Cathedral, by night. -John Coleman 14 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Left at the altar S TPETER's BASILICA and the Vatican Museums, housing the On Sundays, Paris takes to the treets in gleaming new cars Sistine Chapel, are hidden behind a patchwork of scaffolding as that have replaced the old hunchbacked Citroens in the new Rome prepares to welcome 25 million visitor and celebrate the affluence of the European Union. Families drool in front of shop millennium. windows at exotic pastries, crowd sidewalk cafes, and lounge They were part of our pilgrimage to churches on a European on the mountain of steps leading to the Church of the Madeleine. tour which also included Florence and Paris. It is still the focal point, the dominant feature, of that area Days-rather than the brief hours that were available to of Paris-the massive, columned Church of the Madeleine. us-are necessary to absorb the splendour of the churches and Apparently that's as far as it goes: we attended a 9.30am the works of art ... like Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Sunday Mass in the church and there were fewer than 70 people Chapel, gleaming in restored brilliance. in that vast interior, mostly elderly. Only the odd family. I left St Peter's with two simple images: long shafts of The church was sorely in need of a good wash, the dust of the sunlight flooding the centre and the shape of the toe on the long, age gathering on the columns and statues. straight-backed statue of St Peter obliterated by the touch of It was, sadly, a reflection of the times: of affluence and millions of hands across the ages. m aterialism . -John Coleman In Florence, the traders gathered in the piazza and at the bottom of the steps of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, as they have done for centuries, flogging garishly painted pictures. As the carabinieri patrols hove into sight, the sellers packed up and melted away, to reappear seconds after the police drove off. The piazza has been the centre of Florence's religious life for 1600 years. It was here in 429AD that, legend has it, a dead elm flowered in winter when the remains of St Zenobius were being transferred to a new cathedral. The present cathedral dates to the 13th century and the baptistery, to centuries earlier. The baptistery is famous for its three sets of bronze doors depicting biblical themes, including what Michelangelo called 'The Gates of Paradise' with scenes from the Old Testament originally modelled and cast by Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425- 1450. Nearer our hotel was the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, in white and green marble, dating to 1279. With works by the greatest artists of the 15th century, Michelangelo called the church 'my bride'. The Church of the Madeleine So where was the crowd? Perhaps those race had attracted Sunline, unbeaten in her Hoarse who might have been at the Heath had gone eight starts. And there was more-the Group to the Avalon air show. Or are large Two Carlyon Cup and the llSth renewal of attendances only to be expected at the track one of the most famous sprint races on the Couw T=,~~:~,~r'e~me pedect in spring time? Australian calendar-the Group One afternoon at Caulfield, Melbourne's most With a rare and not yet desperate unity, Oakleigh Plate over 1100 metres. 'Going like pleasant and enticing racetrack? the three Victorian racing clubs have an Oakleigh Plater'-a synonym for break On Oakleigh Plate day it was 29°C. The combined this autumn to stage a double neck speed-has escaped from the track program was of high quality. The triple crown series, one each for three-year into the vernacular, at least for those of us monocultural pall of the Australian Rules old colts and fillies. The first leg for males in middle age with their memories intact. season, long as a Canadian winter, had the Alister Clark Stakes at Moonee This, then, was a reconfigured program. barely begun its descent on Melbourne. Valley-had already been run and won An ancient race (in Australian terms) The racebook ($2.50) was so classy that it narrowly by the awkwardly named Dignity survived, together with new, more valuable came with two bookmarks. Even catering Dancer, a top draw gelding by Zabeel. He confections. The 'triple crown' concept is had improved. There was decent, cheap had survived a protest from Mossman. Now borrowed, of course, from the United States, food and red wine by the glass. Sadly, the two met again- in a disappointingly where it refers to the classic trio of the typically, Abbotsford Invalid Stout sm all field of five. The fillies' triple crown Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont provided the beer drinkers's only refuge began this day with the Angus Armanasco Stakes. Dignity Dancer is aimed for its final from the grim choice of other CUB Stakes, named for the near-nonagenarian leg, the Australian Guineas at Flemington, products. former trainer. From N ew Zealand, this and for the Australian Derby at Randwick. VOLUME 9 NU MBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 15 BU SH BusH LAWYER SEAMUS O'SHAUGHNESSY So too is Arena, the Victoria Derby winner who today lined up at Warwick Farm in a venerable race- the Hobartville Stakes. Baby, don't you We slipped into reserved seats opposite the winning post, u s h ered there by attendants whose courtesy belonged to the drive my car age of their own youth. They turned their backs on the tilt-walker; shook their heads I TRAVEL ABOUT 1000 KJLOMETRES A WEEK to and from and around my circuit in my car. when a bugler welcomed the field on to the Because I spend so much time in it, the car is almost a mobile study in which I keep tapes, track by sounding the charge. This 'F Troop' sunglasses, a small law library, swimming gear, a camera tripod, a panama hat. Recently flourish done, the two-year-olds lined up the car was stolen, stripped and burned, and all my stuff was destroyed or pilfered. for the Veuve Clicquot Stakes. The winner Perhaps it is salutary for magistrates occasionally to have the experience of being a was the oddly spelled Redoute's C hoice, victim of crime. It puts us in touch with the anguish of those who suffer the consequences first of three winners for the ubiquitous sire of criminal activity. The inconvenience and sense of violation and loss made me burn with Danehill this day, and for jockey Jim anger and resentment for days after my car was stolen. I kept thinking of things that I had Cassidy. At his first start, the colt overcame had in it, some of which were irreplaceable, and almost none of which were insured. all the trouble that h e had made for himself. But these encounters are a test of the principles and philosophy of sentencing offenders. Watch for him in the spring.· Without principles and a just philosophy of punishment, sentencing would degenerate into Call the Cops carried our money at Eagle arbitrary vigilantism. Sentencing is aimed at the protection of the community and the Farm, but was knocked over at the furlong. upholding of community values and standards. But what does this mean? In the next at Caulfield we took a bashful According to traditional legal theory, sentencing is designed to deter offenders and quinella in a bad mare's race but were potential offenders, denounce anti-social conduct, exact retribution from and rehabilitate tipped out by Darren Gauci on Danson people who have broken the law. Which factor will predominate depends on the given D'Or. Soon enough it was Dignity Dancer's circumstances of individual cases. turn. Although Cassidy lost an iron in the There are few guidelines or binding precedents for magistrates or judges to follow. We straight, the gelding ran a tick outside the have no sentencing abacus. But neither is sentencing an arbitrary stab in the dark. Of course record h eld by Vo Rogue and course, a magistrate must explain why the particular penalty is imposed. The offender and Waikikamukau, and won with authority. the community are entitled to know what the court took into account, but it is impossible Twenty minutes later, so did Arena in in practice to provide an arithmetical formula for the calculation of all the relevant factors. Sydney. This is a high class three-year-old It is largely done by trained intuition. Let me illustrate. crop, with plenty of scope when they turn A few days after my car was discovered burned out, I had the difficult exercise of four to challenge Might and Power. sentencing an 18-year-old woman for car stealing. A friend of hers had knocked the car off ABC adaptation buffs, savouring Vanity and invited her to come for a drive. She ended up driving the vehicle, knowing it to have Fair on television, had the omen bet in the been stolen. The car was recovered. Carlyon C up, which Gauci won on Car theft is a very prevalent crime and is very expensive for insurers and their Thackeray. In the Oakleigh Plate, one grey customers. Because of its prevalence and the forensic difficulties, police investigations are narrowly edged out another, Dantelah usually perfunctory. Unless someone is actually found in possession of a stolen car, there beating Paint by a nose. It was the latter's is little hope of a successful prosecution. The penalties are severe. Lawyers call these 'the first real glimpse of form since he'd won the objective features' of the case. Blue Diamond h ere two years ago. The On the other hand, while she demonstrated some anti-authoritarian tendencies in court Armanasco was next: Sunline sprinted (not necessarily a bad thing generally but decided! y unpragma tic in the circumstances), this effortlessly at the top of the straight but young woman had played a minor role in the car theft and had no criminal history. Her plea was a sitting shot for theDanehill filly Rose of guilty indicated contrition or at least honesty (she could have pretended that she had not O'War. These are top horses. One looks known the car to be stolen ). forward to their next encounter with as Because she seemed to have so little idea of how much trouble she was potentially in much relish as the clash of the colts. It's a (possibly two years in prison), I thought she was both immature and rather innocent. She pity that they will perform to half-empty was also obviously humiliated by the whole affair, which is no bad thing if she draws the stands and in near silence. appropriate lesson. These were the 'subjective features'. * Redoute's Choice went straight into the Despite the dim view I take of car thieves, there are strong pragmatic reasons for being $1, 000,000 Blue Diamond the following lenient with this woman. If a person is rehabilitated and reintegrated into our community, week, drew the outside gate, but still won he or she is one less problem for law enforcement authorities to worry about and one more brilliantly citizen trying to make a civil society. On the other hand, cast young people out, and they -Peter Pierce will come back to create more and larger problems. Heavy punishment should be reserved for heavy crimes. This month's contributors: David Glanz is I have offered her the opportunity to do som e community service work. If she does the a freelance journalist; John Coleman has work well, she could go free without a criminal conviction. On the other hand, if she worked as a journalist in Australia, Britain chooses not do to the work, she will suffer the stigma of having a record for dishonesty. It's and the United States. He was editor of The now her choice . . . • Catholic Leader, Brisbane, from 1981- 94; Peter Pierce is Eurel 16 EUREKA STREET • ArRrL 1999 Egalitarianism, The defining qualities tolerance, and freedom in The former Chief Ju stice of the High Court offers his views "' T on the values that shape Australia. combination can V ALUES ARE BROAD ARTICLES OF FAITH, of belief in what In speaking of Australian values, we are speaking be identified as is good or useful* . Some of our individual values come of the values of a pluralist and ethnically diverse from, or are verified by, practical experience; some nation. So the question must be asked whether there the most come from beliefs we have taken from others and, is a set of Australian values. To answer the question, with or without qualifications, have made our own. we must start at the beginning with the aboriginal fundamental and As the good and the useful can depend on inhabitants of this country. circumstances, no value can be stated in terms that Professor Stanner, that sensitive observer of the characteristic are universal and absolute. Liberty and equality are Aboriginal peoples, noted that their societies were Australian estimable values, but absolute liberty can be the immensely old, virtually completely isolated, and enemy of equality and absolute equality would existed in a fairly constant environment with an values. These are demand the curtailing of liberty. unprogressive material culture. Unchanging order, Values are expressed in broad terms, without the enduring through a continuing present, was at the the values which qualifications necessary to define the precise moral heart of Aboriginal values. Theirs was a self-regulating or legal precepts which they indicate. Although their society, dependent on the complementary functions have facilitated content is imprecise, they are powerful influences on of clans and moieties. 'There [were] no great conflicts thought and conduct. Values continually contribute over power, no great contests for place or office'. They the development, to the formation of our attitudes to specific issues or were nomads, for whom possessions would have been and are now problems. We may not always form our attitudes or an encumbrance and for whom the significance of act in harmony with our values, but we assume that their country and everything that was in it was necessary to the they tell us what is good or useful. Values give us our spiritual rather than material. To the Aborigine, land character, affect our conduct, inform our relationships, meant 'h earth home, the source and locus of life, and maintenance, of and mould our future. They define our identities. everla stingness of spirit'. The Aborigine belonged to So it is with a society whose members generally the land; it was not an item in the market economy. a multicultural embrace a set of values. Values give a society its 'The things of the Market', says Stanner, 'm oney, character, they determine (mediately or immediately) prices, exchange values, saving, the maintenance and society. They are its laws and institutions, they inform the society's building of capital- which so sharply characterise our relationships with other societies and-significantly- civilisation, are precisely those which the Aborigines values which they are the charter of the society's future. National are least able to grasp and handle.' Aboriginal society encourage values define the identity of the people. National had 'a general design or plan of life at the opposite values are derived from the religious and philosophical pole to our own'. (See W.E.H. Stanner, White Man initiatives beliefs of the people, from their history and from the Got No Dreaming, 1979.) physical environment. It may not be possible to list By contrast, we Australians of European ancestry unfettered by exhaustively the values of a society or to express them placed our trust in continual change to improve our in terms susceptible of application to provide the way of life; we placed reliance on possessions and the history or class solution to specific cases. As values are expressed in market economy. We may have cherished the land broad terms and are derived from sources having a we owned, but we did not belong to it or take our or ethnic origin. diverse impact on individuals, they have a greater identity from it. David Malouf has noted (in The Age, currency in flowery political rhetoric than they do in Bicentenary Edition, 23 January 1988) that: They are values deductive or legal reasoning. However, there can be We came as immigrants and brought our culture which foster and no doubt about the close relationship and the need with us-not just a language and the many forms of for accord between a society's values and its laws and social organisation, but the crops and animals we are fostered by institutions. The invocation of values in rhetoric needed to feed us and from which, through effort and demonstrates their talismanic power. industry, our economy has grown ... a v1gorous · 'Useful' relates only to beliefs about matters that are otherwise So there ... is, at the centre of our li ves here, a deep morall y neutral- prudence in comm erce, for exa mpl e. irony: that the very industry that gives us a hold on democracy. V oLUME 9 NuMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 17 the earth has no roots in the land itself, no history, culture, in natural gifts and acquired characteristics no past. or incidents. Egalitarianism bespeaks tolerance and We maintained order by the exercise of it must be sustained by tolerance. Without tolerance, hierarchies of power and we were familiar with differences would produce divisions that would tear competitions to acquire power. We emphasised the social fabric. In Australia, tolerance is expressed individual rights and responsibilities, rather than the by the aspiration of a 'fair go' for everyone. Although rights of groups. Our relationships with people outside Australia has known sectarian bitterness, no our nuclear families seldom involved greater Australian colony was settled as the fiefdom of a responsibilities than the avoiding of harm. Our society religious group. We have had no established religion embraced Christian values but they took root only in and ideologies have excited few passions. Australians the shallow soil of a society marked by materialism are less morally judgmental than Americans, perhaps and antipathies between the different Christian because convicts were more disposed to tolerance than affiliations. Puritans. Tolerance was not strained in earlier times Immigration from non-European sources by gross disparities in material wealth and, when the introduced further variations in the patterns of life of economy was in reasonable repair, there was enough the Australian community. Value systems based in to go around. A relaxed lifestyle was generally enjoyed non-Christian religions accompanied an increasing and Jack's opinions were as good as his master's. diversity in the ethnic composition of the Australian Tolerance attributed an equal dignity to all, to the community. We becam e more familiar with the weak as well as the powerful, the poor as well as the cultures of Asia and the Middle East, we observed rich, the fringe-dwellers as well as the mainstream. It 18 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Egalitarianism, tolerance, and freedom in testified to experience that 'the gap between the haves combination can be identified as the most and the 'have-nots' in our affluent Australia is actually fundamental and characteristic Australian values. widening'. Whatever economic rationalists may These are the values which have facilitated the proclaim in defence of economic freedom, great development, and are now necessary to the disparity in wealth erodes and ultimately maintenance, of a multicultural society. They are undermines a society. Arguably, values which encourage initiatives unfettered by the Church in history or class or ethnic origin. They are values which I HAVE SPOKEN thus far about Australia as a pluralist, foster and are fostered by a vigorous democracy. multicultural society. The absence of an established But there is a downside. Whom do the egalitarian religion in any of the Australian colonies, the easy Australia has Australians treat as equals? Geography and history going, materialist lifestyle that has been possible for been too made us remote from other places and peoples, and many and the inability of m ost of the principal our immigration laws were designed to maintain an Churches to inspire their congregations, have blunted insistent on the Anglo-Celtic enclave in the South Pacific. For the interest of many Australians in the spiritual life. generations, mainstream Australians did not admit We are a secular society, albeit religious belief is incidents of Aborigines to their hallowed circle, nor did first respected and, in a rather vague way, Christian values generation migrants easily achieve that status. are esteemed. hierarchical Egalitarianism assumed a sameness of ethnic and The preamble to our Constitution declares that social structure. Indeed, the White Australia policy the people of the Colonies relied 'on the blessing of authority, was justified by the view that it was the necessary Almighty God', and that relationship of the people too concerned with the fabric and conduct of our institutions, too timid in protection of equality in working conditions. Egalitarianism, confined by fear, promoted justification for- indeed, it gives a transcendental challenging us, intolerance. It can still do so, if differences that ought m eaning to- the three values we have been the laity, not give rise to distinctions are permitted to do so. discussing: egalitarianism, tolerance and freedom. Fortunately, for most Australians, ethnic differences Speaking of human rights, the Pope said recently, in with the radical now have significance only if the ethnic group isolates his message for World Peace Day, 1999: itself from intercourse with the general community. Every person, created in the image and likeness of requirements We have become a more confident nation. Of course, God and therefore radically oriented towards the there are still some Australians who feel secure only of the Gospel. Creator, is constantly in relationship with those in a homogeneous society, isolated from the rest of possessed of the sam e dignity. the world and separate from those people who are seen And we, the as different. For them, equality, tolerance and freedom Scripture assures us that we have the dignity of stop where their fear begins. children of God, each equally precious in His eyes: laity, anxious A confident society is imperilled by fear. Fear egalitarianism. We are bound to one another by an not to be turns us inwards, away from our fellow men and obligation of mutual love; none is to be judgmental women; fear destroys the confidence that a nation of another: tolerance. And all are blessed with that distinguished must have in itself if it is to prosper and play its part freedom without which virtue would be impossible. in the community of nations. If we have lost that understanding of ourselves and from our fellows, Paradoxically, economic freedom risks another our values, we do not fully celebrate our own fear. It is a fear that grows from the disparity in wealth humanity and the lodestar of our future is dimmed. fearful of the between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'. The 'haves' But let those values be infused by the spirit of the fear a loss of possessions; the 'have-nots' fear oppression Gospels and they become the dynamic to produce a loss of status or and exploitation. Many 'haves' resent interference vibrant, inclusive and confident people. with economic power; many 'have-nots' retreat into The working document for the 1998 Oceania possessions, alienation and antipathy to social order. Generally Synod declared that witnessing to Christianity 'is have found the speaking, State power has been exercised in Australia inspired by charity and justice, by solidarity with the to foster equality, not to perpetuate privilege. Perhaps poor, the marginalised, the oppressed, in short, the Church a safe the pendulum has swung too far in deregulating some less fortunate of this world.' elements of the economy if equality is now at risk. If this were the way in which we understood haven for our The Governor-General, Sir William Deane, in his 1999 egalitarianism and tolerance, our society would be address to the Australia Day Council of NSW, has marked by social justice, cohesiveness and peace. We complacency. V OLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 19 Generally would lose the fears, and the antipathy, that gross (2 January 1999) says the Statement is intended to disparity in wealth engenders; w e would be a guide the Australian Bishops so that they may 'affirm, speaking, State stronger and more confident member of the family admonish and correct' their people. of nations. Is faith the product of submission under coercion? power has been The freedom, especially the freedom of Or is it the acceptance of a Divine gift by an informed conscience, that we enjoy in Australia facilitates and refl ective mind? Is truth so fragile that it cannot exercised in obedience to Divine Law. It was Newman who defined be openly examined and debated? Fear of dissent, fear conscience as the law of God, 'as apprehended in the of disobedience, fear of loss of control are self-fulfilling Australia to minds of individual men'-which 'though it may fears for they mistake the authority of the Church to suffer refraction in passing in to the intellectual teach for a power to compel belief. There need be no foster equality, medium of each ... is not therefore so affected as to concern about the acceptance of truth in the minds not to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still and hearts of men and women of goodwill provided has, as such, the prerogative of commanding the truth is clearly, rationally and fearlessly perpetuate obedience'. proclaimed- a proviso which raises a substantial Pope John Paul, again in his World Peace Day question for the Australian Church today. It would privilege. 1999 address, and following Vatican II, asserted the be a mistake to think that, in today's Australia, an importance of freedom of conscience: episcopal ipse dixit is sufficient by itself to produce Perhaps the that assent of the mind and will from which a steadfast Religious freedom ... constitutes the very heart of faith will grow. human rights ... People are obi iged to follow their pendulum has Arguably, the Church in Australia has been too conscience in all circumstances and cannot be forced insistent on the incidents of hierarchical authority, to act against it.' swung too far too concerned with the fabric and conduct of our in deregulating In the light of this clear statement of principle, it institutions, too timid in challenging us, the laity, is sad to note the different tone and message in the with the radical requirements of the Gospel. And we, some elements report of the 'Statement of Conclusions' of the the laity, anxious not to be distinguished from our meeting between some Australian Bishops and the fellows, fearful of the loss of status or possessions, of the economy Roman Curia before the Oceania Synod. The prelates have found the Church a safe haven fo r our are troubled by: complacency. if equality is The Australian Church is our Church, our a concept of conscience that elevates the individual responsibility, our beloved home. In that context, conscience to the level of an absolute, thus raising now at risk. ... egalitarianism means that, while Bishops, Priests and the subjective criterion above all objective factors and People have different functions to perform, each has having no point of reference beyond itself. Great disparity an equal responsibility for, and an equal right to, in wealth erodes The prelates are concerned that: performance of those functions. Tolerance requires that we understand that the Church, Divine in origin, The tolerance characteristic of Australian society depends on humans to perform their several functions and ultimately naturally affects the Church also. While it has many and we must accept the failures and the shortcomings positive elements, tolerance of and openness to all of ourselves and others, keeping our minds and hearts undermines opinions and perspectives on the truth can lead to on Him who is our end and purpose. And freedom indifference, to the acceptance of any opinion or a society. empowers us to follow our conscience and, hopefully, activity as long as it does not impact adversely on to choose to bear the burdens of the Christian life other people. and to rejoice in the love, divine and human, which But an honestly formed conscience is surely they bring. absolute for the individual and, as Newman points Australian values pose no threat to the Christian out, 'conscience is not a judgment upon ... any life, but neither do they absolve us from the burdens abstract doctrine .. . but bears immediately on of following in the way of the Cross. Therein lies our something to be done or not done'. greatest challenge: Are we, am I, ready to abandon No doubt the prelates are seeking to confirm the the prayer of St Augustine-'Not yet, 0 Lord, not yet'?• teaching authority of the Church as a repository of spiritual truth which is not to be discounted by m erely The Hon Sir Gerard Brennan AC KBE is former Chief private reflection. And, as Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki Justice of the High Court of Australia. has pointed out (in 'Authority and Freedom Can Coexist', The Australian, 28 December l998),freedom This is a transc ript of a ta lk giv en for the jesuit Lenten of conscience is consistent with the acceptance of the Seminar Series, Discerning the Australian Social 'defined and narrow' authority of popes and bishops Conscience. Th e book from th e series, in cluding th is which has 'authenticity only with respect to its proper talk with additional footnotes, wil l be avai lable mid July and central objects: faith and morals'. But the ($2 4.95 plus postage and han dling)-ca ll the jesuit Statement uses the language of command, Bookshop, ph 03 942 7 731 1, for advance orders. ecclesiastical government and discipline. The Tablet 20 EUREKA STREET • ArRrL 1999 Community law A v,cronw comNM,NT Vo LUME 9 N uMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 21 reviews against refusal of assistance; and and more 'customers' who could not be single hour of legal work. The hundreds of m ake and review decision s to m ount helped. T he Chief Justice said, on ABC lawyers, and others, who volun teer their resource-intensive cases. One of its m ore radio, that he fea red the loss of volunteer time, are foregoing (if they charged their extraordinary recommendations is that the lawyers. Law Institu te President, Andrew professional time at a nominal fee) about secretariat should ensure all staff and Scott, wrote in Th e Age that lawyers would $16 million every year. +volunteers undergo m andatory integrity be unlikely to remain attached to the pro Are community legal centres ' efficient'? checks to ensure the security of the posed m ega- legal-centres or enthused by Probably not, if they are judged as though custom ers. (Why?) the prospect of 'mandatory security checks'. they were legal firms, but then, dem ocracy T he secretariat sh ould, the review The State Attorney-General accused the isn't tidy, either, but necessary. CLCs are, recommends, make improving client profession of being 'afraid of change'. however, very cheap. Their major problem service delivery its priority, rather than, as They are afraid, but not necessarily of is the overwhelming pressure to meet is his tori call y the case, legal and social refom1 . change. The profession, and the volunteers, unexpressed and unpredictable needs, as The Federation of Community Legal are afraid of being pruned to death. And it legal aid dries up and small, suburban firms Centres h as said that, in its view, does seem that a remarkably heroic 'rem edy' can no longer service low-paying clients, am algamations would be a 'recipe for is being proposed for what is, on a balanced and gradually disappear. disaster'. CLC workers have written to the view, not a major ill. Are there enough CLCs? N o. Do they Law Institute Journal, pointing ou t the Victorian CLCs received, in 1996- 1997, m eet every need? N o. CLCs are still where, review's failure to take into account the about $5 million in government funds. Over historically, they sprang up. But to adopt a loss of trust and social capital associated that time they saw about 70,000 people and planning approach, instead of community with the loss of small centres in poor advised or represented about45, 000 of them . development, and to require an 'equitable' neighbourhoods. One worker claimed that This was with just 120 full-time staff and spread, means that government must fund the review was 'a blueprintforcorporatisation' m ore than 700 volunteers (estimated as according to need, and support community of a community movem ent, taking away equivalent to the equivalent of 62 full-time development. N o-one can make a volunteer, yet m ore political control from their staff). CLCs are, on the crudest fi gures, volunteer. N o-one can have a community constituencies. Another pointed out that cost-eff ective: each client was 'm anaged' legal centre, without a community behind it. amalgamation and regionalisa tion would for less than $1 15 per head, total, which is T h e writers of the report feel (o n necessarily lead to 'conflicts of interest' less than most lawyers' would charge for a anecdotal evidence) that regionalisation will not affect the supply of volunteers. As one myself, I can only say that I would be unlikely to choose to work for fr ee in a for-fee environment; or in a bureaucracy; or SOCIAL POLICY FOR THE if I were to be 'vetted' or my performance ' m an aged' from afar. Info rmality and CONFERENCE consultative, colla bora ti ve decision-making STRANDS 21ST CEITURY process m ay be frustrating, but central to 1 Work and Welfare the ethos of CLCs. I am unlikely to be much • Social and Economic Inequalities JUSTICE AND inte res ted in working outside 'my' • The Life Course, Families and RESPONSIBIUTY community. I would not be interested in Social Policy being a lowly number in a hierarchy run • Funding and Delivery of Services according to a government regime. • Restructuring Social Support CLCs were never 'planned': they grew 1 Open 21-23 JULY 1999 UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES where there was a need identified by FORUM SESSIONS ordinary citizens, community groups, and local lawyers who decided it was in their 1 Dangerous liaisons? Policy researchers and the media interests to give their energy to it. Lawyers, 1 Conflicting accounts: must KEYNOTE SPEAKER FURTHER INFORMATION like cats, cannot be herded. increasing support for older people Daryl Williams, a former Perth QC, now JILL ROE For more information contact mean less help for the young? Macquarie University The Conference Manager the Commonwealth Attorney-General 1 Strengthening families: what role Social Policy Research Centre responsible for Commonwealth legal aid for the state? PLENARY SPEAKERS The University of New South Wales funding, has never m ade a secret of his • Building a future that works: solutions SYDNEY 2052 to unemployment PETER TOWNSEND belief that lawyers should continue to give 1 Stuck in the nest: causes and University of Bristol and their services to the deserving poor. But ad consequences of young people's London School of Economics Conference Hotline: 02 9385 1631 hoc charity, and high-profile pro bono cases, prolonged dependency ANNE-MARIE GUILLEMARD General Switch: 02 9385 3833 are no substitute for access to justice for the • Social policy in the next millennium: University of Paris V Fax : 02 9385 1049 most wretched of people. Community legal policy utopias and dystopias (Rene Descartes) email: [email protected] centres are fra gile and sprawling. If we tidy them up too much they may wither on their ~al~m. • .. SIP. RC.".'j' CONFERENCE WEBSITE Moira Rayner is a lawyer and freelance - 1--a.- www. sprc'.unsw.edu.au TH( UNMR:S!TYOf NEW SOUT H WA L£$ journalist. 22 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 THE R EGION JoN GREENAWAY East Timor, lam, ferry bound for Surabaya. R ,ucm ''"M EMt Timoe, violonoe security forces to control them, that leads Observers inside East Timor talk of the like to talk of miracles. 'Eli', from the village the victims to fall back on their devout guiding hand of the military in the of Salele near the Timor Gap town of faith. 'I believe God protects those who are emergence of these groups and in their Suai, says h e doesn't know how he survived honest and good/ Jaimitu explains as he extreme rhetoric. They say that the the a ttack of machete-wielding thugs comforts his wife inside the house in Dili military's involvement initially fo llowed from the pro-integration militia group where they are hiding. Their three-year-old the October theft, by a band of guerrillas, of Besi-Meraputi (Indonesian Flag). He says son was kidnapped at the end of February by 40 automatic rifles from a remote military h e can only comprehend it by believing Mahidi. They have also burnt his family's base in the south. According to these God saved him. home, probably because they discovered observers, fears of a surging resistance and 'They slashed me all over and attacked that h e provided food, money and louder calls for independence led the army my wife and six others including a trainee information to guerrillas in the area. to create the militia to keep opposition to priest, but none of us died. "Do you think Jaimitu is careful not to draw attention their presence in check. However, ABRI's you are protected by something special?" to himself and goes disguised when he leaves chief in East Timor, To no Suratman, denies they said to us.' the house-he feels that members of two the claim. Jaimitu de Jesus is amazed he was not other militia, Nagem era and the extreme 'I think some people have confused our killed in a shooting attack by youths loyal Aitarak group, are looking for him. support for the civil guard [for which they to Mahidi (Life or Death Integration with These m en, 'Eli' and Jaimitu, come from recruited 1000 youths at the start of Indonesia) outside a church in the inland two areas that have witnessed some of the February] to help maintain law and order/ town of Ainaro. worst fighting between the militia and pro he said. 'We do not support these militia.' 'I stopped in front of the chapel to say independence sympathisers. The militia He was speaking from his Dili home, prior hello to som e people as is our custom, but groups have mushroomed in the troubled to meeting with ABRI commander, General instead of shaking hands they started districts of the Western areas of East Timor, Wiranto, who quietly slipped into East shooting. They sh ot me three times-two and over the last three months they have Timor in the first week of March. of the bullets pierced my clothing only, but changed the political landscape. Before, it Butfew believe him. Jesuit Father Karim one was fired at my chest yet I received no was the Indonesian military (ABRI) against Albrecht, who provides aid to refugees wound.' Falintil (Fretilin's band of gu errillas) in dotted around East Timor, believes that Perhaps it is the absence of any other arm ed struggle, but the militia now dem and there is som e involvement of the military. protection against the militia, particularly to be included in n egotiations over the 'One gets the impression things are being the lack of any concrete m easures by territory's future. manipulated/ h e says. 'The military V OLUME 9 NUMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 23 Below: Armindo Mariano, head of the Ea st Timorese provincial assembly. Above: Th e free-speal commander wanted a bargaining tool when Many fear that when the autonomy brea k down. While Timorese make up near it cam e to sitting down with Fretilin and proposal is presented to the people there to 50 per cent of the teach ers at primary talking about disarmament. He must have will be an escalation of violence. Settlers school level, they are less than ten per cent been aware of the implications- if he was native to other islands have been leaving in of the total in the province's high schools. not he is stupid.' their thousands, in trucks stacked high Doctors make similar compla ints about The parish priest at Suai on the southern with furniture, by the crumbling road to difficult working conditions. Again, the coast of East Timor claims that the militia Atambua and Khupang in West Timor and Indonesian s outnumber local medicos by and the local military collaborated on a 2 7 by boats leaving Dih for Surabaya. The nine to one. If they were to join business February attack on the house of a suspected government has kept no record of the m en and administrators in leaving the pro-independence sympathiser. The attack exodus, but business people estimate that island, as som e suggest could happen, then resulted in eight people receiving machete the slide in their profits indicates that well East Timor would cease to function. Talking wounds and 1000 people fl eeing to Suai. over half of the 200,000 settlers have to the traders who make up the Batara Indra Even the region's Governor himself, Abilio returned home since the end of last year. group which controls about three quarters Soares, concedes that military personnel Johannes Jukam, a biology teacher from of the trade in and out of East Timor, you have become involved. the nearby island of Flores, stands in Dili's get the impression that they are preparing Even if this is not a plan hatched from Post Office flanked by parcelled furniture, themselves to leave at a moment's notice. on high, it seems there are rogue elements beds stacked up to the roof. He tells of his 'About 80 per cent of the outsiders have within the military who are aiding and fear that the release of the autonomy already left and that means there are no abetting the militia groups. proposal will lead to fighting. buyers left in East Timor anymore, because Gil da Costa Alves, leader of the 'Others think that too, that's why you the outsiders were the ones with the money,' Association of East Timorese for Peace, a see this,' he says pointing to the stack. says Junawan Sudipya, head of the group. dialogue group bringing together political 'I know many teachers who are giving up 'Compared with last year there has been a opponents, was blunt in his response to and going home because students feel free 75 per cent drop in profits.' Suratman's claim that the military is not now to attack them because the discipline Sudipya is also worried that increased behind these groups. 'Bullshit,' is gone. They don't want to be here when expense of scarce supplies will add another was his reply there is civil war.' dimension to the unrest in East Timor. To illustrate his point, Johannes 'Rising costs have led to personal threats A T THE LATEST ROUND of UN-sponsored introduced m e to a colleague from Java who and the targeting of businesses as well. The talks between Indonesia and Portugal in still bore the scars from a beating he received rice stock is depleted and soon will be New York, held in the first week of March, at the hands of a student disgruntled by his finished. We are very worried that soon Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas said poor grades. there will be riots here.' that the finalising of the au ton om y proposal During the one-week school brea k at The limited supply of rice in East Timor h is Government will put to the East the start of March, teachers from around has seen prices soar. A SOkg bag of rice in Timorese people would be delayed until East Timor protested to the Department of West Timor is selling at about US$13. the end of this month. The alternative Education as part of their demand for better Currently in Dili it costs almost double offered by Indonesia is Habibie's hastily security or a transfer out of East Timor. If that am oun t. The turbulence in food made offer of independence and his pledge they were to leave en rnasse, the education growing areas is also jeopardising the local that East Timor will not be left in the lurch. system in East Timor would completely (continued p27 ... ) 24 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 PROFILE JoN G REENAWAY X an ana He counts Nelson Mandela, murderers and thieves among his friends, likes Celine Dian and Mariah Carey, has a manner about him that would charm a platoon of Gurkhas, and could very well be the President of an independent East Timor. I N CAPTIVITY inside Jakarta's maximum Despite his insistence that he cannot arm ed wing, Falintil. The resistance was security Cipinang prison, Jose Alexandre lead his country into peace and develop- totally outmatched by the Indonesian 'Xanana' Gusmao was an internationally ment, he is being credited for having kept military and had all supply lines cut off. recognised symbol of the East Timorese EastTimorfromdescendingintocivil war- While in the jungle the resistance adopted resistance to Indonesian rule. Now he is so far. The arm ed pro-integration militia Maoism (with which it h ad flirted m aking a rapid metamorphosis from that have multiplied since the beginning of previously) as its guiding philosophy, and guerrilla leader to statesman . Even before the year are reported to be responsible for the theory buttressed Gusm ao's militancy. he was m oved to house arrest in early scores of violent incidents. In late February, With the death of their commander, February he was visited by national leaders Gusmao sent word that resistance groups Nicolau Lobato, in a battle on N ew Year's and international dignitaries who recognise should stay calm. Anger is high as clashes Eve in 1978, the resistance was scattered. A that he will play a pivotal role in East have continued, but as year later it reformed, to design a Timor's future. yet there has been n o plan of guerrilla warfare based on Yet this is also a m an who likes to laugh response from the mobility and the covert assistance of long and hard to give back the minutes to organised resistance. villagers. Xanana Gusmao became his life that smoking takes away, and who By his own admis- its comm ander and remained so until misses his fellow inmates from his time at sian, Gusmao was a captured while hiding in the Cipinang. reluctantfreedomfighter basement of a hou e in Dili in 1992. 'They had so many nicknam es for me- as a young man. Local After such a history, it is hard not Commander, Commandant. I would talk elites began taking over to be incredulous when Xanana with them and they would visit me and when Portugal rushed Gusmao talks about forgiveness, yet complain about this and that. We used to to decolonise in 1974 he stresses the point. play soccer together also. I spent m ore than and, appalled by their 'All representatives of the East five years there and on my first night in this incompetence, Gusmao Timorese people have to sit together house I was so lonely.' planned to leave for and make political compromise. This Many see him as an obvious choice to Australia to find work. He stayed at the is the right time to forgive all the past, to become leader if East Timor goes its own insistence of friends and workmates, but work together for change and to accept way. The comparison withNelsonMandela, tried to remain apart from the internecine whatever can happen.' who asked to m eet with him when he squabbling that racked East Timor before N o-one need apologise to another, visited Indonesia, has been m ade m ore than its occupation. because in those m orally compromised once. He is, however, quick to downplay His desire to be involved got the better times everyone made mistakes.' the suggestion that he might head a free of his misgivings about Fretilin's leadership; H e hints also that being unable, East Timor. he joined in May 19 75. 'This really was not physically, to resist Indonesian occupation 'N o, I do not want to becom e President, what I had wanted. UDT (Timorese of East Timor after his capture forced him because if you look at almost every DemocraticUnion)parents,Apodetiuncles, into playing the role of conscience to the revolutionary struggle, the lea ders who are Fretilin children. What contemptible international community. It is a role to therewhilein oppositionbecom e leadersof freedom this was,' h e wrote in his prison which he has become accustomed. a new nation and they have nothing more to journal, published in 1995. 'If I was free now I would be on the next give,' he observes. Then followed a coup, scattered plane home, but I am not thinking about 'When I was fi ghting, I saw the enemy skirmishes and Timorese interrogating m y release. I am happy that in the past and I shot him ... it was not so complicated,' Timorese as the politically conservative weeks I have been able to m eet people and he adds with a wry laugh. 'But good govern- and Portugu ese-sympathising UDT push things in the direction of a good m ent demands more capable people.' wrestled Fretilin for control. Fretilin resolution for East Timor.' I suggest to him that he and Nelson prevailed. Even though he was now one of Perhaps his m ellowing while behind Mandela fill the sam e place in the history of their number, he was disgusted by the bars helped foster the National Council of their respective countries. 'It was a great corruption and indolence of som e of its Maubere Resis tance (CNRM) w hich pleasure to m eet him because he was an leaders. That reverie was upset by the incorporated groups opposed to Indonesian example to me,' he responds.' But I think it Indonesian invasion of December. Xanana rule, bringing old UDT and Fretilin foes is just the coincidence of our situations, took to the steepling hills of East Timor's together. In 1992, international spokesman both being in jail, that makes people put us hinterland with the rest of the resistance. Jose Ramos-Horta presented their model of on the sam e level, but I cannot accept being He rose through the ranks quickly to a phased withdrawal of Indonesian rule to elevated like that.' becom e a senior commander in Fretilin's the United Nations. Since then, diplomacy VOLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 25 has overtaken war as their main method of meetings with diplomats and government January on pro-independence students who undermining Indonesian rule. representatives, he has been pitching them demand Gusmao's release. They are Gusmao is convinced there is enough a plan of complete disarmament, under the destabilising the tentative moves towards good will in East Timor to bring about watch of a UN peace-keeping force, prior to dialogue and consensus, he argues. peaceful change, but he says this spirit is holding a plebiscite. Publicly, he is more 'They cause trouble wherever they go being undermined by the burgeoning pro accommodating of the Habibie Govern but they are like empty drums-they sound integration militia that intimidate those ment's opposition to a vote in East Timor. off big but there is nothing behind it. If who do not openly reject independence. 'We cannot force the situation; we have Xanana returned to East Timor, I don't 'I think this kind of violence is criminal to be flexible. Other mechanisms could be know if he could control them.' violence, not political violence,' he says in adopted if they are democratic and Xanana Gusmao admits the difficulty reference to scattered incidents in Dili and representative. We could accept another in bringing groups together, because he has in the countryside. 'We have asked the way of consulting the East Timorese people been so long away from the coal face of East Indonesian military ABRI to dismantle [the if it is democratic and representative. Timor politics. pro-integration militia] Mahidi and 'But if we had such a consultation and 'It is hard to know who is around now. Meraputi and to disarm these groups.' The I saw that it was unfair, I would be so So many people who are active I don't emergence of the militia was confirmed, unhappy. I think only a way agreed to by know, and they are so much younger than however, when Gusmao agreed to meet everybody is acceptable.' In March, the UN me. It is not only the five years in prison but with long-time opponent and leader of secured an in-principle agreement from the 18 years before that in the jungle.' Mahidi, Joao Tavares, in mid-March. the Indonesians for the holding of a If the principals in the power play in After meeting Xanana Gusmao in early referendum. East Timor are from what Gus mao describes March, East Timor's military commander as the 'transitional generation-we grew up Tono Suratman denied that ABRI was I NDONESLA's Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, after Japanese occupation during the war arming and supplying the militia. stated in February that if Xanana Gusmao which altered the nature of Portuguese rule', 'Some of these people are using the name accepts a final decision on the future of East then their extras are the young. Poor rural of ABRI loosely,' he said at his home in Dili. Timor he will be released, which could youth attracted to the opportunity of 'Yesterday some youths stole some rice mean that he would return to his troubled asserting their machismo with the militia; from the government stock and said "ABRI homeland a free man as early as August. students drawing on their support network told us to take the rice." Everyone is saying, Gusmao says that if he is freed he will not overseas to agitate for change. To fill the "You better be careful because I have a take the opportunity to settle old scores hole left by Indonesian doctors, teachers gun", but it is just talk.' with integrationists but try to bring groups and businessman in an independent East Tono Suratman took over from his on either side of the independence issue Timor, the country would have to find the predecessor after he was killed in a together in dialogue. next generation of professionals and helicopter crash along with the Eastern On the question of Gus mao returning to community leaders among the Timorese Regional commander and ten others. East Timor, military chief Tono Suratman themselves, according to Gusmao. Falintil's field commander, Taur Matan said he believed it would help. He believes 'The young people in East Timor lack so Ruak, all but admitted Falin til was respon the resistance leader is genuinely much self-confidence,' he says. 'There is so sible, in an interview published in the Far committed to peace, but warned that, ' some much hate-they are so ... fragmented. If Eastern Economic Review last year. Timoreans don't agree with Xanana'. we do not help them they will feel left out. As Indonesia and Portugal continue to Indeed, talking with some community Usually people want to participate and cur negotiate the terms and conditions for leaders in East Timor itself, I got the rently they do not know how to contribute.' deciding its future, East Timor is very tense. impression that Gusmao's goal will not be One person who wants to see Xanana The streets in Dili are deserted at night. easily achieved. Armin do Mariano, the head Gusmao return is Gil Alves, Chairman of People stay indoors to avoid roaming bands of the East Timorese provincial assembly, KOTBD (Association of East Timorese for of youths. The quiet is periodically thinks that Gusmao, if and when he returns Peace). A foe of Gusmao before 1975, he is interrupted by the sound of gunfire, which to East Timor, will be more likely to advance now trying to bring Timorese of different fuels debate the following morning: was it the interests of Fretilin and Falintil than political colour together to establish a police trying to disperse a crowd of try to bring about consensus. framework for dialogue. Just to get bitter pro-independence youth throwing stones, 'Maybe if Xanana is released he will enemies over the last two decades in the or the more sinister work of the militia? only talk to his own group,' said Mariano, one room together in mid-February took During one night in the first week of March, who is openly committed to keeping East one month of intensive dialogue. Governor there was a shooting and a machete attack, Timor part of Indonesia. 'Falintil must Soares attended and Xanana Gusmao is one and a young woman, badly beaten, was surrender their arms first, because for 20 of the Association's patrons. dumped outside the Governor's Office on years they are the ones who have been ' One thing they [the Indonesian the foreshore. doing the robbing and the killing.' Government] should do is release Xanana, Elsewhere, towns and villages in the 'Xanana is not the only leader in East because he is intimately experienced in the Liquica, Bobonaru and Ainaro districts near Timor,' he added. 'He is a big man now problems of East Timor and he has to help the border with West Timor are being because all his expenses are paid by the solve them,' Alves says. terrorised by the militia groups. government, but when he returns he will On the evening of this meeting, two Gusmao recognises that in such an just be like the rest of us.' youths were shot and killed near a bus environment a referendum on autonomy or East Timor's Governor, Abilio Soares, station in Becora in Dili's out kirts. • independence is out of the question. In his blames a lot of the unrest since the end of -Jon Greenaway 26 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Refugees from the mountain village of Turiscai, 40kms south-east of Dili; parish priest Fr Minuto stands in the middle. Ph otographed at Motu Ulan, on the outskirts of Dili. (. .. continued fro m p24) In an article published in the Jakarta N ot only are there the three main parties harvest, which u sually provides 40 per cent Post in February, Megawati's close adviser, (headed by Megawati, Amien Rais and Gus of East Timor's n eeds. All imported Kwik Kian Gie, argued that there will be Dur) contending with the once pre-eminent foodstuffs, including such basic necessities m any unforeseen consequences fo r East Golkarparty; therearealso n early lOOmore as cooking oil, have increased in price Timor if it is given independence. He parties and allian ces, m any with a chance because ships have stayed away or have worried aloud about the fa te of Indonesian of snaring enough seats to influence the charged extra fo r their cargo . settlers. He also noted that '[Habibie] would appointment of a n ew President in 'We want to stay as long as we can, like to submit a proposal regarding the December. Som e of these have quite radical depending on whether we feel secure,' says solution of the East Timor problem to the platforms; the Coalition of Islam Parties an other trader, Phing An. 'At the m om ent People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) ... recently adorned m osques in Jakarta with we are unsure and it is difficult to replenish But which MPR? The new MPR which is to banners shouting ' Allah's armies are going our stocks. We'll just let them run be instituted through the general election to Ambon '. out and then we will go.' in June?' Political scien tist, Dr Indria Samego, Gil Alves, from East Timorese fo r Peace, from the Institute of Sciences in Jakarta, A LTHOU GH INDONESIA does not have itS senses there could be a shift in Jakarta's doubts that Megawati or any other President elections until June and the official position after the elections. 'Independence w ould reverse a process of Indonesian campaign is a short one, beginning on is a long way off. First it would have to go withdrawal from East Timor. He argues 18 May, the m ajor parties have already through the national assembly, and I think that the withdrawal is too important for begun jockeying for position. On the first that is quite difficult. That is the point that Indonesia internationally, even though it is w eek end of March, PDI, the party of any East Timor leader should think about,' not a dom estic vote winner. Sukarno's daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri, he says. 'Megawati is trying to cast herself in the held a rally in the West Timor border town ' There is a campaign of disinfor mould of opposition parties in other of Atambua. Megawati has criticised the mation about independence goin g on countries-always criticising what the idea of Indon esia's severing its links in Jakarta, along with sm aller parties government does, in order to draw attention with East Timor, while speaking at length talking of defending the unity of the to oneself,' h e says. about the n eed to bring unity to the Republic of Indonesia. That is the problem 'It is very difficult for Indonesia to defend Republic. we face.' the integration of East Timor on the world V OLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 27 stage, and in current circumstances the no n eed for us to be part of Indonesia villagers during ABRI's search for stolen good will of the international community anymore,' he says 'They need to supervise weapons. They say they will not go back until is very important for Indonesia.' a period of transition which would last as they are convinced that four civilians But Dr Samego suggests there will be long as it would take us to get the basic prominent in the district administration little pressure on an outgoing Habibie level of state infrastructure. are relieved of the guns they have som ehow G overnment to manage a withdrawal 'That will not be so long if, with a new managed to obtain. Tono Suratman says process car eful! y, b ee a use the only attitude, we can achieve gooclunclerstancling that the four have been disarmed, but the Indonesians concerned about the situation among the people of East Timor.' parish priest from Turiscai confirmed when in East T im or are a sm all number of East Timor's Governor, Abilio Soares, visiting the refugees at the beginning of academics and activists interested in self believes in dialogue, but he also wishes to see March that they still have the guns. determination and human rights. out the remaining three years of h.is term. An While the public agen da o f the pro-Indonesian militia seem s obvi ous enough, there are suggestions that the adoption of the in tegra tion cause by district heads and officials is m ore likely a pitch for power and leverage in a rapidly ------changing political environment. These m en came to their positions of influence in an atmosphere of tight military control and economic dependence and they lean towards Jakarta now because that is all they know. M AU BARA, one h our's clri ve on the road leading west along the coast from Dili, is a centre for the Besi-Merapu ti militia. Driving a truck loaded with rice, we speed up when passing by their ba nds . We don't want to be stopped to give them a ride-and m aybe lose our load. The militia's strength there, according to Gil Alves, is cl ue to the district head's bringing them in to avoid being voted out in upcoming elections. Dili. 'Merdeka' is Indonesian for 'independence'. 'The incumbent was put cl own the list of candidates for the elec T h e h aphazard m a nner in which integrationist (naturally enough ), he does not tions and top of the list was someone with President Ha bibie is responding to calls for th.ink there is any need fo r the UN to be links to Fretilin,' he explains. 'So he got self-determ ination- not only in Timor but physically involved in East Timor. angry and started the militia up in Maubara.' Aceh, Irian Jaya and Sulawesi- does not 'There is no need for outsiders, as the local Governor Abilio Soa res agrees with augur well for careful treatment of East Timor. military is capable of handling security in Alves that this individual in Maubara is a After a late-February m eeting w ith a East Timor,' he said w hile taking time off problem, along with the local military com delega tion of pro-i n clepenclence community from talks with local Fretilin representatives mander. 'The civil administration is part of leaders from Irian Jaya, he asked that they in his Dili home. the problem,' he says. 'I am going to replace be patient as he had a lot on his mind and 'We can leave discussion about the options the district chief and have the military this was the fi rst time he had hea rd of for EastTimorto the United Nations dialogu e commander replaced in Maubara, because support for separation from Indonesia in in New York and we can just concentrate on opposing groups have agreed to reconcilia West Papua. having meetings to stop the violence.' tion if they are removed.' East Timor's leaders all expect East The refu gees from this violence do not Three hundred and twenty refugees Tim or to be volatile in the coming months, themselves share the Govemor' s faith in ABRI. sheltering in an old Portugue e fo rt in but they di ffer in their views on how best A group of 300 farmers from the mountain Maubara town aren 't saying who is causing to h an dl e i t. Xa n a n a G u sm ao (see village of Turiscai, 40 kilometres to the the violence and why. They just know accompanying story) believes firmly that south-east of Dili (see photo, previous page), that there was enough trouble in their there must be disarmam ent, an inter have not heeded the request, made by ABRI nearby village of Guico three cl ays before na tiona! police force present, and dialogu e commanderTono Suratman, that they return for them to feel they had to leave their between opposing groups. to their homes-they cannot see any change farms. Only one oldman was bold enough 'It is very important that the inter to the cause of their fear. They left in to say that they were too afr aid to talk. As national community accepts that there is November last year after the death of three they were being registered for assistance by 28 EUREKA STREET • APRJL 1999 nuns from a convent in Liquica, two youths from Besi- M e ra puti turned up and stood by proprietorially as rice was di stributed. EVEN IF EAST TtMOR manages to overcome political manoeuvrings, social upheaval and unscrupulous ambition, it still faces the AN' in me. hurdle of the radically diverging views held Tu~ urr OT~' HUM~~~~~ en~~ t ~:.:~:~ becom"tcapp ed of conven tion. So the 'great leaps forward' in science often start with a nice piece of lateral by those who will be prominent during East Timor's period of transition . thinking, something which jolts the mind out of a well-trodden path. H ea d of East Timor's Assembly, At the University of Melbourne School of Forestry in Creswick near Ballarat, Dr Branko Annindo Mariano, believes that autonomy Hermescec has been doing some lateral thinking of a practical kind. When som eone is the best solution for East Timor. 'If we go m entions 'wood', most of us think of three things-a source of energy, a source of paper, independent then there is a 70 per cent chance or a useful structural material. Not Branko. He thinks 'chemicals'. of war,' he says. 'If we choose autonomy Actually, the link between wood and chemicals is ancient. But you just need to be a then there is a better chance for unity I think. lateral thinker to see it. The connection begins with the recognition that wood is an It is better that we are part of Indonesia, infantile version of oil, the backbone of today's petrochemical industry. Oil is the result of because in our history they are the only millions of years of heat and pressure on decomposed organism s, plants and animals. In ones who brought us together. Before we fact, the groups of compounds present in oil-carbon-based 'organic' compounds-are the were split by the Dutch and the Portuguese.' same as those comprising all organisms, including trees. At the same time, Xanana Gusmao is What Hermescec has understood is that by decomposing wood carefully (or 'unstacking' already thinking about how an independent it, as he puts it), we can collect the organic compounds it contains. In this way, wood East Timor will support itself, and will look becomes a cheap, renewable source of useful chemicals. Further, he's developed a process to renegotiate the Timor Gap oilfield treaty to do the job, and he calls it fast pyrolysis. si gned by Australia a nd Indon esia. If you throw a log of wood on a fire, you end up with worthless ash . If, instead, you heat 'I remember one Australian who told me the wood to more than 500°C without oxygen, you can produce ch arcoal, a convenien t not to worry about the treaty, let them energy source worth about $100 a tonne. But by using fast pyrolysis, Hermescec and his develop your oil fields for you and then team can break wood down into a series of chemicals, each worth more than $1500 a tonne. later on ... (laughs) ... When you get your It can all be done at low cost and at little risk to the environm ent, using sawdust or independence you get your oil.' forestry waste or almost any other plant material. Up to 70 per cent of the wood mass is Establishing consensus on matters of converted into ch emicals, says Hermescec, the other 30 per cent into energy. And that process w hile m aintaining differe nt m eans you don 't even need to add energy to power the process. opinions is the publicly pledged goal of 'In the past,' says Herm escec, 'people only looked at pyrolysis (decomposition by heat) many. Timorese recognise that they do not of wood as a process for producing en ergy. That's because traditional pyrolysis is like boast a history of peaceful co-operation. driving a bulldozer into a wall-all the chemical compounds in the wood are smashed at And at the m oment it seems East Timor is random, resulting in a huge number of compounds in low concentrations.' in the middle of a cruel experiment: a country divided by sporadic warfare and the The secret of fast pyrolysis is carefully controlling temperatures and conditions to military control of another nation over two ensure that the wood is taken apart without smashing up its ch emical structure. Even a decades, now suddenly faced with a decision degree or two can make a difference to the products derived. But the chemical products about self-rule while the citizenry is subject must be kept apart, to ensure they do not react or inter-react further. The trick is to end up to intimidation and attack. with a small number of compounds at high concentration, instead of a little of everything. Many, such as teacher Beatrix Andradu, The three important chemicals which are produced are furfuryl alcohol, a group of who has a Timorese fa ther and Javanese phenols, and cellulose. The alcohol can be used in m any industrial applica tions, especially mother, believe that before things improve to make polym ers which are resistant to heat and corrosion. Almost all furfuryl alcohol in East Timor they are going to get worse. used in Australia at present is imported from the US or China. 'They have not prepared anything for The phenols can be u sed to make adhesives, explosives, plastics, medicines and food independence,' she says. I think it would be additives. At present, phenols are mostly derived from petroleum and the global market is good if Indonesia gave East Timor- like worth about $20 billion. The cellulose is relatively pure, and can be used for making rayon, Bishop Bela says-16 years to become plastics and possibly even paper. The world market for cellulose is around $200 billion. independent. But if East Timor does not Australia imports m ore than one million tonnes of cellulose and paper products a year. becom e independent then it will be Branko Hermescec thinks fast pyrolysis could even solve the problem of the disposal of dangerous here because the people who are black liquor, a notorious effluent from the paper industry that ha proved very hard to deal pro- independence will fight. with. 'If we stay with Indonesia we will have It just goes to show that there is life after oil. And all it takes is a little lateral thinking.• fighting, but if we leave we will have fighting too.' • Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer. Correction: Archimedes, March 1999-'a bout as much as we spend on CSIRO and Jon Greenaway is Eurel VOLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 29 EUREKA STREET F ORUM: W AR AND M EMORY H uGH DrLLON Uncle Hughie and Private Ryan ,_r _____ INA D>AW" ' " M' D"' I h•ve' few 30 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Weather dull.' On 12 September he jotted: was far too inadequate to express the War Memorial in Villers-Brettoneux, visited 'Our position under heavy fire at night. Had lowering sense of sadness and desolation France in 1917 and wrote to his wife: a very narrow shave.' No details aregivenof which came over me. The graveyards, haphazard from the needs Mazingarbe is an ugly village joined at these experiences, which I assume h e would of much to do and little time for thought. have remembered for the rest of his life had the hip to another larger (and equally ugly) And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a he lived to old age. Perhaps he m erely village called Vennelles. The surrounding milky way across miles of country where regarded the diary (which it was illegal for farmland seems almost dead flat for miles, men were tucked in where they fell. him to keep in the trenches) as an aide except for massive s lagheaps which Ribbons of little crosses each touching each m emoire. But for two surviving letters one punctuate the sky line together with striped other across a cemetery, set in a wilderness could be forgiven for thinking that he was industrial smokes tacks and gigantic, of annuals and where one sort of fl ower is either very inarticulate or somewhat angular electricity pylons. It is easy to see grown the effect is charming, easy and oh insensitive. He was neither, as the letters how exposed infantry were out of their so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no show, but it is frustrating, as I search for trenches. Mining has ceased in the area, other memorial is needed. his essence, to know that most of his and the slagheaps are now covered by grass. thoughts and memories have gone The huge double-towered pithead, called But it was, of course, not enough and with him. 'Tower Bridge' by the British troops, which permanent m emorials w ere required. had domina ted the area in 1915, has Dominating each Commonwealth war H UGH CERTAINLY was an innocent. He disappeared. So have all the other pitheads, cemetery is Lutyens' Cross of Remembrance, wrote to nuns and his diary records that he and with them many of the people who had on the face of which is set a bronze sword. regularly attended m ass and confession once lived there. While the iconography of the cross is while he was in the army. He kept a Frost-crusted puddles lay everywhere. obvious, the sword is an ambiguous symbol. photograph of his mother and sister in his Beside the railway lines were stacked piles It is emblematic of soldiers, but it also diary. In a letter he wrote to his parents two of harvested corn. Cabbages grew in the unintentionally recalls Wilfred Owen's 'The hours before he was killed, his anguished tiny front gardens of the miners' cottages Parable of the Old Men and the Young' in love of them and his fear of death is almost (those few still occupied) and chooks which Owen has Abraham n ot only palpable: wandered randomly in the bleak, bare fields slaughter the innocent Isaac 'but half the searching for food. seed of Europe, one by one.' I am glad to say that I am still in the pink The taxi driver dropped me in the m ain Among the graves, I saw a gardener. In and hope this will find all at home the street of Mazingarbe and I stopped for a this quiet place I couldn't help but think of same. I may tell you we have been in the coffee at a bar which was a snug fit for the Mary Magdalen e's surprising encounter trenches since Sunday night and their (sic) three people in it. The old woman who with the 'gardener' at Jesus' empty tomb on has been heavy artillery fire all the time. served m e was so sullen that I thought Easter Day (cf. John 20:15-16). A small We have had a hitting up but nothing in better of m y plan to ask her for directions to contingent of British gardeners manage co mparison with our friends over the way. the cimitiere deguerre anglais, but outside teams of Frenchmen in the Commonwealth I wouldn't like to be in their shoes .. . Don't a thickset man with a beard and sad eyes war graves in France. Terry Smithies, a worry yourself on my account as I expect to (reminding me uncannily of my father) took Manchester man, supervised 21 cemeteries be all right with God's help. Your ever m e gently by the shoulder and walked me in the Lens area, tending thousands of loving son, Hughie xxx. to the main road and pointed out the way. graves. He told me that during the war men Two days later a large part of his Division I walked briskly up the main road, were buried som etimes in blankets, but was wiped out in the abortive attack which massive trucks buffeting past m e until often not. Everything depended on the became known as the Battle of Loos. Had h e I reached a small, green, arrowed sign with urgency with which the task had to be not died when he did, the odds were that he white lettering on it: 'T ombes de Guerre du carried out and the danger the burial parties would have shortly afterwards, as did so Commonwealth-Posse 7 Military Cemetery were subjected to. Officers, especially many men at Fosse 7 and nearby cemeteries. (Quality Street)'. My heart began to pound. aristocrats or those highly respected by their I have always struggled to compreh end I slowed my pace. I was approaching sacred troops, were often buried separately the experiences of the men in my family ground. You don't race into a cathedral. It is rather than in communal graves. who went to war. R.H. Tawney, the great not just a matter of respect or ritual; you English social historian (who fought as an need to attune yourself to the spirit of the A ITER T HE WAR, the Imperial War Graves infantryman on the Somme), once remarked place. Commission tidied up the cemeteries and that the first requirement of a good historian Hugh now lies in a row with seven other marked the graves of their dead with plain was a good pair of boots. With that aphorism Gordon Highlanders and another 120 white stone tablets, inscribed with the in mind, in November 1988, I went to find soldiers under immaculately kept lawns. soldier's regimental badge, his number, Uncle Hughie in France. At the foot of each white headstone are rank, name and regim ent, the date of his I caught a train from Paris north to planted roses and other British plants. In death and his age, in that order. Below these Arras. In Arras it was very cold and light little bronze cupboards set in the gates is a identifying details is inscribed a religious snow fell as I sought a taxi. We drove along visitors' book and a booklet from the War symbol (a cross, a Star of David, etc.) and a highway for 25 kilometres and every Graves Commission indexing the graves. It then a short epitaph usually provided by kilometre or so passed a war cemetery. The provides brief biographical details of the the family. On Hugh's headstone we find scale of the fi ghting started to dawn on m e. dead soldiers. the details: 3/6864 Private Hugh Dillon The taxi driver complimented m e on m y Sir Edward Lutyens, who designed the Gordon Highlanders 23rd September 1915 French but the truth was that my vocabulary Cenotaph in London and the Australian Age 23 . V oLUME 9 N uMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 31 His pious Catholic family took solace especially of the Great War, is that they were Paul Fussell claimed that 'the real war [fear, fro m prayer. On his headstone they had had passive victims. No-one has expressed tllis mutilation, agonising dea th] was tragic and inscribed: 'Sweetest Heart of Jesus/ Have conception of them more elegantly and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or Mercy on Him/ May He Rest in Peace/ compassionately than Wilfred Owen him philosophical analysis to suggest, but in Amen.' Som e famili es were stoical, hoping self in a letter to Osbert Sitwell in July 191 8: unbombe cl Am e rica esp eciall y, th e that their young m an's death had been m eaning of the war seem ed inaccessible. For 14 hours yes terda y I was at work m eaningful. Second Li eutenant K.R.B. As experience, thus, the suffe ring teaching Christ to lift hi s cross by numbers, Kershaw's kin tried to persuade themselves was wa sted.' and how to ad just his Crown; and not to that 'He who dies for King and Country imagine he thirst until after the last halt; lea ves nought undone that man can do. ' T EVEN S PIELB ERG's Saving Pri vate Ryan I attended his Supper to see that there were S Other families let their grief fl ow more unlocks the grip of the writers on our no co mplaints; and in spected hi s fee t to see openly in poetry. Som eone who loved imaginations. Indeed, the power of the fi lm that they hould be worthy of th e nails. com es from the fact that Spielberg leaves I see to it that he is no room for the use of our imaginations. If dumb and stands to Omaha Beach (and the So m me an d attention before his Passchencl aele a nd M azinga rbe) were accusers. With a piece abattoirs, Spielberg is the first populist film of silver I bu y him maker to show us the slaughter, to make every day, and with the war 'accessible' to a mass international maps I m ake him audience. familiarwith the topo Spielberg has said that he wanted to graphy of Golgotha. make theaucliencefeel that they are on Omah a And Sa ssoon, beach. H e su cceeds m as terfully. The writing in his diary of constant shell and machine-gun fi re, the 1 7 Janu a ry 19 1 7, cries of frightened and wounded m en have somewhat snobbishly the urgency of a powerful engine screaming 19-year-o ld Pri va te A.T. Maclea n wrote: analysed the fatalism of the troops he saw out of control at a higher and higher pitch. 'His echoes roll from soul to soul.' But the on the ship returning from England to France Your heart races. The film m akes you want most poignant and m oving of all the gra ves aft er leave: to run, to hide, to shoot those Germ ans who at Fosse 7 was that of 29-year-old Lance are shooting at you so relentlessly, if only [B] ecoming a military serf or trench galley Corporal Maclea n of the Seaforth High you can survive to do so. slave is a very easy way out of th e diffi culties landers whose young wife mourned him in When the Americans are shown shooting of life ... They are like ca bbages goi ng to utter desolation: 'I have lost my soul's down Germans running out of bunkers, Covent Garden or beasts dri ve n to market. companion, a life linked with my own.' perhaps to surrender, you fi nd that you Hence their happiness. They have no I sa t by Hugh' grave and tried to hear want to shoot them too because they have worries, because they have no future; they his voice. Through our common nam es, been trying to kill you. You are angry about are only alive th ro ugh an oversight-of the I had a strong sense of connection but, as that and the fear of your own immediate enemy. They are not 'going out' to do Geoff Dyerrem arked in his superb extended extinction absolutely eradicates any fellow things, but to have things don e to them. essay, The Missing of the Somme, 'it has feeling for the Germans. You do not care becom e impossible to see the war except But these literary views are not the whether they want to surrender or fight on; through the words of Owen and Sassoon'. whole story. Sassoon was known by his the answer is the sam e. It is only when the So familiar are their poems and images that own battalion as 'Mad Jack'-he was not at Germans are all killed that sanity and any they mediate and filter virtually all our all a passive victim, but a reckless fighter. feeling for these human beings returns. attempts to come to grips with the actual The gentle Owen wrote to his mother a One American hops into the trench and experiences of the m en who fought and died month before he was killed: takes a Hitler Youth knife from a body. Yo u in the Great War. I felt frustrated because suddenly realise that it was a 16-year-olcl I have been in acti on for some da ys. I ca n the understanding and insight I had hoped boy whom you have just mentally executed. find no word to qualify my experi ences for by presenting myself at Hugh's graveside As we saw in the case of Wilfred Owen, except the word SHEER ... It passed the had not crystallised. there is a primitive killer in the guts of the limits of my Abhorrence. I los t all my I wandered among the graves, loath to gentlest of m en. earthly fa culties, and fought like an angel leave. Having seen Hugh , I became Saving Private Ryan is not 'vulgar ... I captured a German Machine Gun and fascinated by all the others lying with him, patriotism', as one critic has suggested, scores of prisoners ... I shot onl y one man and their stories. For the next three days, nor, as another has suggested, is it ' a Fifties with my revolv er; the rest I took with a I walked for miles around Arras visiting w ar movie with a Nin eties budget ' . smile ... I came out in ord er to help these war cem eteries, reading the visitors' books Notwithstanding its occasional flaws, boys-direc tl y by leading them as well as and the epitaphs on the headstones. In one I suggest that this movie may be as close as an offic er can; indirectl y by wa tching their cem etery near the Canadian War Memorial we shall get to a modern cla y Iliad or Goy a's sufferings that I may speak of th em as well Park at Vimy Ridge, I found three graves Peninsular War series of etchings. It is not as a pleader can . together: an unknown German soldier was simply tragic- we have been taught by buried between two unknown Canadians. In Wartime, his study of 'understanding Owen to see all war art as tragic- it is The received view of our dead soldiers, and behaviour in the Second World War', profoundly and deliberately shocking. I am 32 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 conscious that the general reader knows th e hapless German. Hanks may be the who have not that the Iliad is a great work but may not Jimmy Stewart of our day, but Jimmy been brought to have read it. To understand the comparison Stewart would never have been portrayed justice'. Although let us see a fra gment of Homer's appallingly thinking about murdering a prisoner. he argues that the front-line troops had no clinical description of the killing of Hector Spielberg draws together a number of war aims but survival, and were loyal only by Achilles: threads I had hoped to tie for myself at to their buddie , even he would not deny Mazingarbe, but could not. First, he exposes that the Nazis and their followers had to be [Hector's! flesh showed where the collar us to, and forces us to undergo, in an auditory defeated. The deaths, even the dea ths of the bones hold the joi n of the neck and shoulders and visual sense at least, the experience of Germans, were not m eaningless- N azism at the gullet, wh ere a man's life is most combat, 'the real war' as Fussell puts it. He was consumed in the funeral pyre. quickly destroyed. Godlike Achilles drove seeks to understand som ething which has Saving Private Ryan is Spielberg's sad in there as Hector charged him, and the always been beyond those of us who have psalm of thanks to Fussell and all those like point went right through his soft neck: but not been through it, and demands that we him. But it is also the battle experience of the ash spear with its weight of bronze did understan d. We learn by Everyman. The German machine-gunners not cut the windpipe, so that doing, so to speak. Second, at Omaha killed large numbe rs of Hector co uld still speak and while I think that he wants Americans, but were themselves heavily answer Achilles. He crashed us to know Everyman at outnumbered and were, of course, also killed in the dust and godlike Achilles war, his more refined in large numbers. Private Ryan helps us triumphed over him ... purpose is to m emorialise comprehend Gallipoli, the Somme and H ector , confronted by the deaths of those young Passchendaele. And, perhaps, Milne Bay, Achilles, had sought a 'gentle men by finding their Stalingrad, Long Tan, Iraq, Bosnia and m en's agreement' that the man meaning. But th e meaning Kosovo. After I saw it, I had nightmares for who was triumphant in their cannot be understood in three days and a new understanding of duel would honour the body isolation from 'the real war' Uncle Hugh. • of the other. Achilles, filled they underwent. with anger at the death of his T h e scene in which Hugh Dillon comes from a long line of fri ends and consumed by Private Ryan's mother is sailors and soldiers. bloodlust, refuses. He is intent visited by a priest and an on the destruction of his enemy army officer to announce who has been killing Greeks the deaths of her three sons I WANT TO INVEST WITH CONFIDENCE I with little effective opposition. has been ridiculed by See the similarity with som e Australian critics. AUSTRALIAN Americans at the Omaha The wide shot of a large bunkers? Both Homer and white country house set e-thical Spielberg show us 'the real war'. amid fields abundant with Agribusiness or Sa ving Private Ryan is crops jarred those critics reaffor estation . TRUSTS morally and p ychologically w h o thought they saw Mining or recycling. complex, as is a battlefield. Spielberg romanticising Investors Exploitation or For example, in the second act, America in an almost reflex can choose Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) fashion. Spielberg's purpose, sustoinability. Through the AE Trusts you and his squad move out to however, is not romantic. Greenhou se gases con invest your sav ing s save Private Ryan. In the It is to show domestic or solar energy. and superannuation in course of their m eanderings around the America's 'unbombed innocence' and to Armaments or over 70 different countryside, they attack a German machine contrast that bucolic ignorance with 'th e community enterprises, each expertly gun post. Naturally enough, the Germans real war'. enterprise . selected for its uniqu e defend themselves and one American soldier Spielberg's 'sappy ending' (as the N ew combination of earning s, is mortally wounded. The one surviving Yorker critic put it), in which we see the German surrenders. The Americans decide veteran collapse in tears in a Normandy environmental to execute him. war cemetery, does not diminish the force sustainability and social While h e is digging his own grave, the of the points he makes. His Stars and Stripes responsibility, and earn a German desperately seeks to befriend the flapping in silhouette over the cemetery are competitive financial nerdish non-combatant Corporal Upham backlit and colourless. This is no Red, White return. For full details who has been brought along as translator. and Blue jingoism but a stark, black-and make a free coli to The corporal begs for the German's life and, white reckoning of the cost paid in blood after som e rumination, Captain Miller and anguish to win Europe back 1800 021 227 decides to let him live. Miller, having from N azism . ll ll'est mell/S ill tbe A11 stralian Etbical Trusts can oniJ• be made th ro11gb tbe Cllrrenl fJrospectlls ordered his squad, against their wishes, to registered n•itb tbe rl 11 stralian Sewrities attack the machine-gun nest fe els guilty EUSS E.LL, AN AMERJ CAN, describes in his Com mission and ai'Cii!able from: about the m edic being killed a nd is war m emoir, Doing Battle: the Making of a Australian Ethical Investment Ltd obviously tempted to 'atone' by allowing Sl VOLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 33 EUREKA STREET F ORUM: W AR AND M EMORY Ross M c M uLLIN 'Fini retreat Madame' In the extensive media focus last year on the 80th anniversa ry of the end of the Great War-lift-out supplements in the broadsheets, a Four Corners reassessment, feature articles and ana lys is-there was a discernible attempt, particu lar ly by some British hi storians, to 'set the record stra ight' about the contribution made by th e Australian Imperial Force (AIF). In their sights were extravagant claims like the one published last November in The Sunday Age, alongside a photo of Sir John Monash and head lined 'How this Man (a nd 333,000 Other Australians) Won World War 1'. Neither British rev isioni sts nor Austra li an big-noters should undermine the rea l achievements of the AIF at the Western Front, argues Ross McMullin, who has been researching its crucial role in the desperate defence of March/April 1918. ON2 1 MAO c " 191 8, 34 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 What the Australians encountered was happy as if they had got leave to Australia'. Villers-Bretonneux • disturbing. 'Found a great many stragglers Late on 28 March, with the situation were ten miles from British regiments ... who are drinking still very fluid, Elliott's 15th Brigade was east of Amiens, and looting out of control', Elliott wrote, directed to m ove to the villages of the vital transport and communications ' ... everything is in a dreadful state of Hedauville and Varennes. They marched centre which was a primary German goal. confusion.' The Australians realised they through a cold and rainy night and arrived ' The covering of Amiens is of first had been fortunate to avoid the enemy's wet and tired. The briga dier placed two of importance,' Haig declared. Preventing the initial onslaught, and that the British units his battalions in Varennes, and proceeded Germans from crossing the bridges across in thefrontlinewhen the Germans unleashed to Hedauville with the other two. Having the Somme near Corbie was a top priority. their artillery were understandably shaken been assured Hedauville would be vacant, This responsibility, which had been and exhausted after their ordeal. Elliott was surprised to find British soldiers assigned to another AIF brigade now needed Nevertheless, the scenes witnessed by occupying it. fo r an urgent task elsewhere, was to be the arriving Australians led them to the About 9.30am h e called at the main taken over by Elliott and his men as soon as conclusion (confirmed by subsequent chateau, and found it 'literally packed with they arrived. research) that the quality of British resistance officers ... still in bed'. The staff captain in It was another all-night march, over 20 was decidedly variable. Some units had command told Elliott that no orders to miles. The weight of the packs on their displayed the utmost valour, but there were vacate had reached him, and there were backswa 'torture', wroteWalterDowning, also episodes of disintegration and ba ck other buildings in H edauville Elliott who recalled the march vividly: pedalling which had a s now-b alling could u se as h eadquarters. Elliott We went through towns and villages, over effect-neighbouring formations tended explained that his main priority was not to cobble-stones, cart-tracks and high-roads to conclude they had to conform install himself in the chateau but to obtain ... shambling along, keepi ng the step, but or be outflanked and isolated. appropriate accommodation for his m en, with stumbling fee t and hanging heads. The who were waiting in sodden fields under desire for sleep was a dull pain; rest seemed A S THE AlF FORMATI ONS advanced persistent drizzle after marching all night the sweetest thing in the world, but we bit towards the oncoming Germans, they were and had been warned to expect only one our tongues and kept going. We drowsed as outnumbered by distraught civilians and hour's notice of a possible further move to we marched, literally walking in our sleep, soldiers going the other way. Thousands of the very front line. and in the five-minute halts at the end of French women, children and old men were Elliott agreed to leave his m en outside every hour we dropped to the ground and struggling along with the po es ions they until midday while the British staff captain slept. Some mechanically kept walking; had hastily ga thered after their hom es were found out what to do. Meanwhile Elliott's we called to them to make them stop. threa tened by the rapid German advance. brigade intelligence officer spent the morn Moving in the sam e direction were many ing reconnoitring in nearby villages. He They made it to Corbie, an exceptional dispirited British soldiers, who assured passing returned about midday and told the brigadier fea t in the circumstances, as Elliott AIF inquirers that the German were not what he had heard. Pompey decided to force acknowledged after the war: far away and advancing in overwhelming the issue with the staff captain: I ... have seen them triumph in battles, numbers. The Australians pressed on. I ... asked him had he received any orders and have greeted them bea ten, but never Their advent transformed the mood of yet. He replied that he had not. I asked why disgraced, returning fr om a stricken som e of the villagers. When they recognised he had not telephoned or gone to Varennes field- they were proud moments; but these reinforcements as Australians, women to fi nd out. He replied that he had no I have never been prouder than when, on with crying children clinging to their skirts telephone. I told him that I had a telephone one occasion in France, we returned to homes they had abandoned. he could use, and then, being irritated by marched, at night, 26 miles ... Some, weeping with joy and relief, cried his listless manner and wa nt of interest, 'Vive l'Australie!' These scenes, as the AIF ERE WAS WORK to be done straightaway. and by the fact that my men were being T was welcomed back to the Somme, are Elliott ensured that the vital Somme drenched to wait his convenience, I told among the finest episodes in Australia's crossings were secured, but was soon him that I had formed a most unfavourable history, summed up in the gruff reassurance concerned about the fro nt south of the river. opinion from what I had heard of his one of the rescuers gave to a frightened Entrusted to hold it was the British 14th division, and that his own want of energy Frenchwoman-'Fini retreat madame, Division . Elliott's officers reconnoitring and initiati ve were strong confirmation of beaucoup Australiens ici.' these British positions reported them to be what I had heard, and that unless he got There were other special moments. 'Pa s gravely defective. orders and moved his men out of the village necessaire maintenant, vous les tiendrez,' Another problem was troubling immediately, I would assume command enthused a venerable Frenchman. A nearby Elliott. Because the French civilians had and march them ou t of the village, if Au tralian asked som eone for a translation. departed so swiftly, soldiers so inclined necessary, under arrest. Upon being told-'Don't need to leave now, could avail themselves of a variety of you'll hold them'-he replied laconically: This assertiveness had the desired effect, provisions, notably alcohol; there was 'We'll have to see the old bloke isn't but as Elliott and his m en were settling into plenty of wine and fine champagne. Elliott disappointed.' The Australians' morale, their new billets an order arrived directing accepted that a certain am ount of petty de pite the daunting circumstances, was the briga de to proceed immediately to larceny was inevitable, but system atic repea tedly noted by observers, including Corbie, a town in the critical sector n ear looting was another matter altogether. He Pompey Elliott: ' ... the boys ... marched the junction of the Somme and Ancre rivers. issued strict orders and installed guards at here last night as full of jokes and looking as Both Corbie and the nearby town of all the main liquor repositories, but became Vo LUME 9 NuMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 35 increasingly frustrated that his breach, halted the enemy; in fact, Elliott New Titles efforts were being undermined claimed proudly, his brigade actually gained by British negligence. ground despite being confronted by The Country of Lost Children When a British captain was Germans in superior numbers. Further An Australian Anxiety apprehended in Corbie with a south, Villers-Bretonne ux was also mess cart full of looted champagne, endangered, but another AIF brigade PETER PIERCE Elliott decided that enough was retrieved the situation there just in time. Drawing on a wide range of sources enough. After handing the culprit 'I was never so proud of being an - poetry, fi ction, newspaper reporrs, to the military police, he resolved Australian', wrote Elliott. 'The gallant paimings and films- The Country on his own initiative to issue a bearing and joyous spirit of the men ... of Lost Children a nalyses the notice declaring that the next thrills you through and through. You simply cultural and mo ral implications of the fi gure of the lost child in officer caught looting would be cannot despair or be downhearted.' Australian history. summarily and publicly hanged Later in April another British division Ap ril 1999 in the Corbie market square, and was given responsibility for securing Villers 240 pages 20 halftones his body left swinging there as a Bretonneux while Elliott's brigade was given 0 521 59440 5 Hb $90.00 deterrent. He had this extra a spell. Elliott became convinced this 0 52 1 59499 5 Pb $24.95 ordinary notice displayed division's defence arrangem ents w ere A History of the Australian prominently in Corbie. Under inadequate; when the Germans tried again neath, in a postscript, h e (as he was sure they would) to reach Ami ens, Environment Movement admitted the drastic penalty he he concluded that the British would be DREW HUTTON & LiBBY CONNORS was threatening was probably unable to hold the tactically crucial town. A history of the increas in g consciousness of the valu e of th e illegal, but he was prepared to do In that eventuality, he predicted, his own A ustralian environmem and the struggles to protect it. This whatever was n e cessary to brigade would be directed to recapture it, so book disc usses ways in which it has become a social maintain order; if he ever had to he prepared a plan. Just as Elliott envisaged, movement and political force in its own ri ght, and covers execute his threat, he proposed the Germans did attack, the British were some of the key ca mpaigns and iss ues in a li vely and to rely subsequently on a royal driven out of Villers-Bretonneux, and the illuminating way. pardon. 15th Brigade (together with another AIF February 1999 320 pages 20 halftones 2 maps Looting ceased immediately. brigade) had to carry out a counter-attack 0 521 45076 4 Hb $90 .00 0 52 1 45686 X Pb $29.95 'None seemed inclined to make along the lines of his plan. of themselves a test case under This night enterprise was an astounding Double Vision ~~ the circumstances,' Elliott success. It ended the German thrust towards Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific SO observed. His Corbie ultimatum Amiens, and was acclaimed by m ore than Edited by NiCHOLAS THOMAS & DIANE LOSCHE made one more in an already one well-credentialled observer as the most Double Vision yields a fres h understanding of long list of Pompey anecdotes, brilliant accomplishment of thew hole war. hi story, colon iali sm a nd culture in the Free Pass and the story soon became On the scene at the time was Will Dyson, to the Pacifi c. It ex pl ores the ambi va lences of famous even beyond the AIF. the Australian artist who had volunteered Museum of European perceptio ns of the Pacifi c a nd On 4 April the Germans to provide a distinctive illustrated record of Sydney with launched another imposing theAIF experience. Shortly after the Villers juxtaposes them with the indigenous visual each order cultures that chall enge wes tern assumptions (ex p 50/9/99) assault towards Amiens, and Bretonneux counter-attack, he wrote to his about arr and re presentation. L._~~~- penetrated the 14th Division's brother, the writer Edward Dyson: front: ' ... as I expected from the the boys are more eager, cheerful, bucked February 1999 320 pages 50 halftones manner in which they were 0 52 1 6434 1 4 Hb $90.00 0 52 1 65998 1 Pb $34 .95 up and full of fight than ever before. Weather holding the line', Elliott noted, is good, food is good and they are at the 'they gave way very badly ... and A Military History height of their reputation. What they have the situation looked disastrous.' done is in so striking a contrast to what the of Australia He instructed Captain H.D.G. others did not do ... God alone knows what JEFFREY GRE Y Ferres, his senior custodian of terrible things are coming to them, but An ex panded and substantially the bridge across the Somme a whatever they are they will meet them as updated edition of one of the mile east of Corbie, to 'stop all they have met everything in the past. These most acclaim ed overviews of stragglers and compel them to bad men, these ruffians, who will make the Australian military hi story fight'. Armed with this directive, life of Australian magistrates busy when ava il abl e. Ferres instituted wholehearted April 1999 284 pages 27 maps they return with outrages upon all known measures; assisted by detached 17 tables municipal bye-laws and other restrictions 0 521 64283 3 Hb $90.00 parties of the legendary British upon the free life-they are of the stuff of 0 52 1 64483 6 Pb $29.95 cavalry who were keen to help, heroes and the most important thing on he collect ed about 500 14th earth at this blessed moment. • Division infantrymen and positioned them in a makeshift Ross McMullin has written a biography of defensive line. These remnants, Will Dyson, and the centenary history of the together with the 15th Brigade ALP, The Light on the Hill. He is currently men Elliott rushed into the writing a biography of Pompey Elliott. 36 EUREKA STREET • A PRIL 1999 EUREKA STREET F ORUM: W AR AND M EMORY PETER Coc HRANE Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, K.S. Inglis, The Miegunyah Press (Melbourne University Press), 1998. ISBN 0 522 84752 8, RRP $49.95 ~ ,- ..... l'(.. -· -·- the national on the one hand, and post a. 'c"o""'"" in che 1980, "'* ... \;) ""' Bcreated"'"' a fi e ld of war m emorial literature _J ---·--.... .,._ modern accounts of cultural his tory where before there was none. Why? Ken concerned solely with inscription and nar Inglis, Australia's pre-eminent historian of ration on the other. He makes unique inter meaning, suggests we long to know m ore as ventions into Australia's national history. the Great War slips beyond all living As it happens, the core of his interventions m emory. We are on the edge of when no-one are in the fi eld of the cultural history of war. is left. Sacred Pla ces i a landmark in the fi eld. Time has disarmed the critics. Anzac If family extends to aunts and uncles, Day and Rem embrance Day, the two days then every second Australian family was of the year when Australians honour their bereaved by the bloodbath of 1914- 18. Three war dead, h ave a n ew-found pa thos. hundred thousand left these shores to fight. Once-formidable soldiers are now old men, Sixty thousand died. One in five. Many 'unthreateningly mortal'. Respect for their who did get back di ed before their time. patriotism is uncontroversial. Literally Before the war's end, m emorials had begun millions of people now claim an ancestor to transform the Australian landscape. All who was there. At the archives of the over the country committees took shape to Australian War Memorial in Canberra the raise a local monument to those who served word librarians hear most is 'great-uncle'. Remembrance, like the body, was now an and those who died. Obelisk, stone soldier, Curiosity has joined grief as a compelling academic subject, hardly confined to war, avenue of honour, clock tower, clockless sentiment. Thus the n ew his t ory of but war was a vital locus for its investiga tion. tower, m emorial gates and so on. There is commem oration comes out of a wider Ken Inglis anticipated the semiotic turn nothing quite like war to provoke a people process-a rebirth of popular enthusiasm for by more than a decade. He was able to into acts of public art. Con temporaries spoke the rituals of remembrance which is elabo extend Australian social history in this of a 'war m emorial movement', understood rately fostered by government and m edia. direction while not breaking with its foun as a shared quest to find the right way, Social history has shifted too. Scholar dations in the study of more prosaic patterns materially and spiritually, to honour the ship and the recovery of popular m emory of material existence, a duality that many soldiers and to deal with grief. 'I do not have fed off one another. With the end of later practitioners could not sustain. His know where the body of m y boy lies,' said the Cold War and the demise of intellectual eye for words and ritual, imagery and one mother standing in an avenue of honour Marxism, the discipline moved away from symbolism, links an unfailing interest in in King's Park, Perth, in 1920, 'but his soul the study of material circumstances and social and political action which extends to is h ere.' working lives towards the realm of national culture and representation. There Some took comfort in spiritualism representations-the language, symbolism is no en try for 'language' in his Index because which was immensely popular in the and ritual through which people construct it consideration is passim, while 200 aftermath of war. The painter-cum-fiercely their reality. This has been called the illustrations, most of them photographs of patriotic cartoonist, N orman Lindsay, drew linguistic or semiotic turn. The commemo m emorials or their ceremonies, give the solace from a Ouija board w hich he believed ration of war, a topic once vulgar, banal visual dimension of argument the weight it brought him m essages from his brother and, for some, 'right wing', became a deserves. Some captions run to 150 words Reg, killed on the Sommein 191 7.lnanother legitimate site for social historians, a rich including cross-references and quotations. family a grieving sister believed she was in source of information on natio n , Inglis steers between a highly relativist touch, through a medium, with her dead community, sexuality, identity and more. ethnographic history which resists study of sibling, but she shrank from further V o LUME 9 N uMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 37 review which is an encyclopedic and commem orative act in itself. It is a national in ventory and much more-a major View from the contribution to the em otional history of Australia. Sacred Pla ces is a other side '"r history of grief's hard labour. As We Wave You Goodbye: Australian .1 HE PO INT THAT fe miniStS rightly press Women and War, Jan Bassett (ed), Oxford about memorialism is that it is inscribed University Press, 1998 . within a particularly m asculine story of ISBN 01 95540867, RRP $45 nati on-building. Wom en's con tribution to the war effort went m ostly unrecognised on war mem ori als until aft er World War II; wom en did more fund- raising than men- it A FTER DEPLORING THE GENDER IMBALANCE in previous Australian anthologies was said they were harder to refuse; they of writing about war, Jan Bassett has produced one in which there are no m en . played secondar y rol es in memorial As We Wave You Goodbye ranges temporally from the Boer War to the Gulf cerem ony, rarely speaking, mostly laying War. The writers include nurses (on e of them killed by the Japanese on Banka wreaths and until recently they were Island), resistan ce fighters (the innocuous! y sty led 'White M ou se', Nancy Wake), prevented fro m marching in Anzac Day m others, w ives and sisters, and- in Ethel Cooper- a possible spy. Besides these pa rades. Allegorica l females on m emorials amateur, if often highly skilled w riters, are arrayed practising poets and were uncomm on enough, but realistic ones n ovelis ts, Judith Wright, M ary Grant Bruce, Katharine Prichard among them . signifying wom en's contribution to the war Illustra ted judiciou sly by the work of women artists, much of it held in the effort were rare. Th e Brisbane Women's Australian War M em orial, Bassett's book is variegated and fresh. It is less the Club worked their way towards a bronze I record of anguish ed waiting far from battle than of imaginative engagement panel commemorating wom en at war, bu t both with the cares of the homefront and with the trials of those on active the depression of 1929 blunted both fund service. -Peter Pierce raisingand resolve-the design was scuttled in favour of a pa n el depicting an 'overwhelmingly masculine procession of I warriors'. contact: 'T ake your dark powers to others, sense, all the dead were missing, and their Inglis understands that the prehistory we can wait/To know the whole of w hat loved ones were deprived of the traditional of a memorial is at least as revealing as the you tell in part,' sh e wrote. For m ost m ourning rituals of their culture. object itself. The em otional story of any people, an other way to deal with grief had At the core of Sacred Places is the story m onument is as much in its making as in to be fo und. of ritual's mediation. Inglis extends the its adoration . But he goes further and in one Freu d pondered the m ourning and thesis developed by Jay Winter in Sites of respect challenges the feminist construc con cluded that 'the healthy mind, possibly Memory/Sites of Mourning (CUP, 1996) tion. He shows, convincingly, that the helped by ri tual, avoided m elanch olia by which argued that traditional forms of male-centredness of mem orialism fulfi lled detaching its mem ories and hopes from the expression were recharged by the experience an em otional need am ong women to mourn dead'. Inglis is generally sceptical about of war and the universality of bereavem ent. lost m en. It's one of those obvious points such generalisations, but he shares with What Winter did with breadth, sweeping that somehow needs m aking. Thousands of Freud the desire to understand how ritual over bereavem ent in three combatant wom en worked in th e war m em orial helped people to transcend the slaughter nations with forays into literary, artistic, movem ent. Thousands more took solace and get on with their lives. filmic and architectural themes, Inglis does from its achievem en ts. Memorialism's T here are more than 4000 public war with depth and inten sity. H e ch arts gender bias was fashioned by men and memorials in Australia, about a third of m emorialism 's history back and forth across women unified by grief's hard labour. To do which are from the Great War. Every one of the land, in city and country, in foreign justice to the text the Index should have an these has a history of conflict or accommo fi elds which are forever Australia, from entry for 'mothers' or for ' tea rs'. The effigy dation, or both, over form , style, wording, colonial wars to the world wars, from Korea of a simple private, standing passively in a location, violation or renovation and other to Vietnam and on. In a final, important town square, served m ost women better sensitive issu es. The search fo r an adequate chapter, the book proceeds into the '90s than any fe male form could do . Questions language of loss was a communal activity, where the Anzac tra dition, softened by time abou t wilful participation are h ere, m ore en tirely voluntary, uniting rich and poor, and reconfigured by multiculturalism , has revealing than questions about exclusion. driven by powerful em otions and under m ade its com eback. There is one awful episode in Sacred written by Australia's unique wartim e There is a thoroughness here reminiscent Places w h ere the racial dimension of circumstan ces-every serviceman had been of the offi cial war historian C.E.W. Bean's bereaved motherhood is momen tarily a volunteer and h ere war m em orials were vision fo r the Australian War Mem orial in visible. At the unveiling in the township of surrogate graves for bodies that did not Canberra-to list on bronze tablets the Goombungee on Queenslan d's Darling com e hom e. 'What m ost families could not nam es of all 60,000 dead. Aided by his Downs, Rose Martyn, Aboriginal mother of afford, none would be allowed. ' Unveilings assistant Jan Brazier, who is acknowledged Charles, killed near Ypres in 1917, stood were a kind of substitute funeral. In that on the title page, Inglis has produced a vast apart, at the back of a white crowd united 38 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 by grief. She was alone and in tears and she figure and other simple m emorials going up and feelings as - was offered comfort by no-one. Inglis around the country. 'Squat figures on squat they bent to lay a devotes a good deal of attention to the pedestals which might have been fa shioned tribute .' Where recovery of the Aboriginal contribution to by an aboriginal', wrote one. But no-one som e writers see rhetorical deceit, Inglis Australia's wars, including the 'Black Wars', listened. Memorialists set their course. All sees first a link between grammar and to the black community's own ways over the country they opted for a 'naive' popular appeal, the emotional possibilities of rem embering and related minimalism which kept things simple and of form and language. polemics about commemoration. secular. Inglis argues that commemoration of Australians preferred a stick of stone, or war became a civic religion central to M ODERN ISTS CLAIM ED the Great War the obvious piety of a common soldier, Australian nationalism . That argument enabled them to expose what Ezra Pound standing passive and pensive, to the more depends on evidence of wide support and called a 'botched civilisation' with a new, articulate, allegorical monuments going up limits to opposition. Opponents did speak raw language of dislocation, paradox, irony, across Europe. The implication is that a out. Controversy over the economics of anger and despair, an expression in poetry, calculating n ew-world pragmatism, a war or divisions kept alive by the m emory prose and the visual arts which snapped the deliberate rej ection of old-world symbols, of conscription would continue, but conflict ties to a discredited heritage. Recharged by was as much a force here as artistic naivety. on days of ritual remembrance was mostly the slaughter, their work expressed a The argument goes further. There was called off. Many of those who said war rejection of all that had gone before. They emotional consolation in both artless m emorials were a plot to deceive, an claimed the Great War was a great divide. architecture for more war, could accept But powerful continuities carried into the that they were also sites for mourning. p eace after 1918. The rupture with Leftist opposition was compromised by traditional ways of seeing and saying was sadness which crossed political trenches to never close to complete. For many, the a truce point in between, and by a belief pursuit of m eaning and the need to grieve rarely explored on the Left- that right had r ... called for a solace that was both patriotic prevailed . and sentimental, an idiom archaic and But if some criticism subsided in the softening, tailored to post-war sensitivities. sadness, much was also silenced by the i What Paul Fussell described as the idiom of power of the cult around Anzac which was I 'high diction', modernists referred to as lies so congenial to anti-Labor ideology. Even a and propaganda, and platitudes burbled by decade later, commemoration was still in dignitaries: Pound's 'poppycock', Robert the shadow of the conscription referenda of Graves' 'Big Words'. 1916- 17. The idea that the No vote was a But the grieving wanted Big Words. The kind of desertion that caused many deaths urge to find purpose rather than waste in at the front was, argues Inglis, 'a judgem ent the slaughter was powerful. They found an that kept Labor m en all over Australia off appropriate language of loss in traditional war m emorial platforms'. Hugo Throssell, values, classical, romantic and religious VC and socialist, spoke out against war on forms which had the power, it seems, to a commemorative platform in 1919. He m ediate bereavement. They drew on a past was never invited on to another one. The Mrs Margaret ('Granny') Ria c that was still available, on a poetic/literary for th e Fountain Fund, Thirrou l, with Alessa ndro No vote had guaranteed that Australia's inheritance which linked the King James Casagrande's model. In D.H. Lawrence's account, was a voluntary army but the champions of Bible, Pilgrim 's Progress, and Quiller she oecomes Granny Rh ys . (From Sacred Places.) Yes were quick to make the most of this Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse. In simplicity and the art of the sparing epitaph: 'singular purity' among armies. At the heart the English-speaking world, Australia in Kipling's 'Lest We Forget ' is ' that of Sacred Places is an unresolved tension particular, they looked to Kipling and conjunction, that pronoun and that verb between the evidence for the coerciven ess Binyon and to the words of town mayors unbounded by any noun ... a message ideally of the cult of Anzac on the one hand, and and vice-regals and patriotic generals. suited to the contemplation of dead soldiers the claim thatitwasa 'civic religion' on the There were Big Words spoken at Thirroul with unfocussed gravity.' Elsewhere, Inglis other. The argument is probably stronger in 1920 at the unveiling of the town' stone writes of the stone soldier and the m en in for the 1990s, covered in the final chapter, soldier, outside the School of Arts. D .H . bas-relief bronze: 'The simpler the form than it is for the 1920s when Lawrence, Lawrence was briefly at Thirroul in 1922. requiring n o artistic quality beyond despite such a brief sojourn, sensed coercion The stone soldier figured in his novel verisimilitude, the more readily could beneath a thin veneer of Australian Kangaroo (wherein the town was renamed viewers project on to it their own democracy. 'Mullumbimby'). Inglis has made Thirroul, unprompted thoughts and feelings.' Sir and Lawrence, a recurring point of reference Bertram Mackennal's Cenotaph in Martin I F SACRED P LACES is about 'the reverence at in Sacred Pla ces. Lawrence described the Place, Sydney, is sufficiently 'blank' to allow the heart of a very irreverent country', as stone soldier as 'naive but quite attractive, people 'to feel comforted in its presence, Jill Kerr Conway suggests on the dust jacket, with the stiff, pallid, delicate fawn -coloured unconstrained by any prescription of it should also be said that Inglis shares this soldier standing forever stiff and pathetic.' m eaning beyond the words 'TO OUR reverence. This is evident in the language He rather liked it. He knew nothing of the GLORIOUS DEAD' a nd ' LEST WE and shape of the book itself and, of course, distaste, among critics, for this vernacular FORGET', free to deposit their own thoughts the title. Compare Sacred Places with VOLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 39 George Mosse's seminal Fallen Soldiers: Thirroul's stone soldier, presumably in the thousand machine guns were installed Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars early 1920s. Thirroul had appeared 11 times beside, or within, or on top of, just about (CUP, 1990). There are broad thematic in Sa cred Pla ces before the machine gun every kind of monument. Some, like the similarities, but the two books are entirely came into the picture. Inglis makes no Emden gun, were even made the central contrasting in language, mood and thrust of comment but does quote Lawrence: 'it feature: a German weapon cem ented into a analysis. Fallen Soldiers comes out of a looked exotic, a thing of some higher pedestal honouring Australians.' The text modernist lineage linking George Orwell culture, demoniac and fallen'. on 'Trophies' does indeed refer to Councils to George Steiner to George Mosse, a What troubles me is this: if there were insulted by the offer of an instrument of tradition of scepticism if not outright possibly more enemy guns located around war, but t h e sheer number of gun hostility to the commemorative tradition Australia than true m emorials, and if these installations suggests that these councils in Europe and the US. While Mosse accepts guns were indeed a form of 'memorial', were a decided minority. the popular demand for archaic and ennobling then why give them just 28 lines in the Jonathan Vance's Dea th So Noble language and form, his interpretation is middle of chapter four? Guns were a most (University of British Columbia Press, 1997) blunt and unsentimental. His subject is the significant 'form' of memorialism. Why is relevant here because it argues that Myth of the war experience with a capital not ask questions about them from the Canadian communities clamoured after 'M'. Its tangible symbols are military start? Why not treat Thirroul's stone machine guns and artillery pieces too. But cemeteries, war monuments and com soldier, and the machine gun behind it, as Vance sees a significance in this where m emorative ceremonies for the dead. The a job lot, even if the gun did arrive a short Inglis sees none. Vance links these trophies purpose of the Myth is to make war time later? What did Councils say when to a cult or a 'myth of victory', which m eaningful and sacred, to offer a 'vision of they asked for a gun or were asked to take shaped thinking about the war for decades war that masks its horror, consecrates its one? What was said at their unveilingsz and was mythical in two important memory and ultimately justifies its purpose'. Were there ceremonies for guns? Why did respects- firstly in representing the nation's You are not far into the Introduction before some want a machine gun and others a soldiering efforts as a 'triumph of romantic you realise that Mosse is dealing with aspects trench mortar? How did Inglis come to miss individualism and heroism', and secondly of human perception and memory the irony of an instrument that caused so in taking military victory to be a dramatic which trouble him deeply. much death alongside a memorial for proving of race superiority. Vance then finds bereavement? these th emes recurring in Canadi an W AT DOES ING LI S THI NK about the As Inglis says on page 178, 'By the end of literature, art and other commemorative modernist scepticism which figures 1921 about five hundred artillery pieces, forms after the Great War. Again, the prominently in the historiography of the four hundred trench mortars and four troubled perspective-far fro m breaking war and its m emory, and which continues with the myth-ridden spirit of the past, the to generate important publications in the war rekindled it in the form of these fi eld? This is a difficult question to answer post-war themes. because Inglis does not engage with this It does seem that Australian w ar literature. I suspect that he recoils at the memorials were not like Canadian ones. crude implications of words like 'mask', Symbols of victory on our m emorials-the ' consecrate' and ' justify'- with their triumphal arch, the Greek goddess of war suggestion of commemoration as exercises were rare. Butwhatofthose trophy memorials in rhetorical deceit and manipulation, their ;.._ and what of the rhetoric of commem oration? \ preoccupation with power rather than ·,-::.",. Inglis does not see either as embodying a participation. Is it the Inglis aesthetic which I myth of the war experience, that is, a certain ·c::...· . eschews this language, or is it a deeper political interpretation of what the war was about difference? Or is it that Sa cred Pla ces so and what participation in it m eant, an vindicates Australian war memorials that interprHation which romanticised modernist scepticism is misplaced here? soldiering and celebrated blood or race. If One clue is to be found in a short passage these themes were not present in the headed 'Trophies' in chapter four. It is just _! rhetoric, then how was m em orialism 28lines long, but it may have implications I immunised from the wider socio-political for the entire book. 'Trophies' is part of a context where they certainly were present? longer discussion of the major forms taken My sense is that something important is by war m emorials. The term refers to guns missing both in the analysis of memorialism fired by enemies which were shipped across II t • itself and in its contextualisation. the world and made into memorials all over I wonder, if 'trophies' were a chapter in Australia. Thousands of local councils Sacred Pla ces, instead of a few lines, would decided to have one. From this account it the conclusions be different ? Does a would seem there were more guns spread machine gun,' demoniac and fallen', change Th e Tas manian Soldiers National M emorial, the meaning of a stone soldier, 'stiff and around Australia than true memorials, that Hobart. Benjamin Sheppard's statu e w as se nt to is, memorials which did not display the London for casting in bronze, and exhibited th ere. pathetic'? • spoils of the victors. As th e helmeted fi gure w as not identifiabl y Australian, th e sc ulptor was abl e to supply a Inglis m entions Thirroul here too. A replica for Halifax, Yorkshire. (Fortman Postca rd s, Peter Cochrane is a freelance historian based machine gun was positioned behind Australian War M emorial. From Sacred Places.) in Sydney. 40 EUREKA STREET • APRiL 1999 EuREKA STREET F o RuM: W AR AND M EMORY ALISON L EWI S The Berlin Republic: a haunted house? Ca n national identity be forged on foundations that give place to moments of glory as well as national shame? This question, at the core of the Howard Government's procrastination over reconciliation, is currently pre-occupying Germany and its new Social Democratic and Green Government. Th ere are signs that w ith the changin g of the political guard and the move from Bonn to Berlin we may well see a new approac h to pub I ic attitudes to remembrance. Recent debates about collective memory and the Holoca ust reveal that reconci li ation with the vi ctims of history need not be a prerogative of the left or the right or of any one generation. T ACAWAC o"'""' thm" no doubt It mm' to b' on' of th' imniO< of m' mory •nd how th' Holo"u" " n b' that Germany has stepped out of the German history that ghosts from the past reconciled with the new self-confidence of shadows of the past. As a brief guided tour habitually reappear just as a new chapter of the nation. of the Potsdam Square in the geographical history is in the making. This seem s to be The most interesting question to ask of and historical heart of Berlin will reveal, the case with the new epoch of the Berlin the new government is what has happened Germany is well on the way to recapturing Republic, new not only for the shift of to the pledge of the generation of '68 never much of the aura of excitem ent and self- government fr om Bonn to Berlin. The t o fo rget Auschwitz, n ow tha t this confidence of a bygone era . return to pow er of the Social D em ocratic generation is in power? How will the '68ers, Nothing testifies m ore to this than the Party, for the first time in coalition with who mercilessly chastised their fa thers and frantic building activity around the square the Greens, is the real novum of the Berlin m others for their complicity with the Third andthe recently completedpublicspacesof Republic . But as the n ew Bundestag Reich, fo r 'looking away', rem ember the the Marlene Dietrich Square and the Sony prepares to occupy the old Reichstag in the Holocaust? Will m em ory of the victims' Centre with its m ega-shopping arcades, transition from the old capital to the new, sufferings be accorded a m ore pro minent cinema and entertainment complexes. Chancellor Schroder's coalition has been place in the Berlin era? As awareness of the Visitors to the red information box on the plagued by a series of public spats that diversity of stories that make up Germany's site are hard-pressed to find remnants of the suggest that the 'h ouse of Germany' is national history is heightened, some are communist past here. The last vestiges of haunted yet again. starting to question whether rem embrance the Berlin Wall, which rendered the square As Germany m oves to assert a new of the crim es committed by Hitler's band of dysfunctional for 40 years, are gone, and sense of national identity, it finds itself 'willing executioners' should assume a pub- nothing remains to remind of the great faced again with the legacy of the Holocaust. lie form at all. Shouldn't recollection of this ideological divide between East and West. At the core of current debates is the issue of stain on Germany's history be a matter for Even harder to find are visible reminders whether the Holocaust can be reconciled each individual's conscience instead? of the Nazi era, unless, of course, you with a national mythology that is no longer The beginnings of the current debates stumble upon the Reichstag and Albert founded only on this one event, that is, on about collective m em ory were harmless Speer's m onumentalist architecture in the 'negative nationalism '. Certainly, the fi rst enough. A speech delivered on acceptance Ministry for Air Traffic a few streets away. impression is that Germ any, which has of the Peace Prize of the German Book But, as I am told on m y guided tour of the provided a m odel for other m ore forgetful Traders by one of Germ any's veteran building sites of the area run by a local nation s in m a tters of recon ciliation writers, Martin Walser, on 11 October 1998, history collective, the Nazi past is not far between the perpetrators and victims of was greeted initially with a s torm of away: alongside the sandstone and glass history, isshowingsignsofmem ory fatigue. applau e. That is, by all but one of the boxes of the Sony Centre lie buried several But it is not that it wants to forget Auschwitz invited guests. The displeasure it invoked of Hitler's bunkers. And down the road or, as in the 'Historians' Debates' of the in the Head of the Central Com m ittee for beneath the rows of Eas t German luxury '8 0s, in any way lessen the singularity of Jews in Germany, businessm an Ign atz apartments lie several m ore. They were the crimes of N azi Germany. Instead, the Bubis, sitting in the fro nt row, was only unearthed during the excavation work after pressing issue now is what place Germans apparent later. Bubis was enraged and the fall of the Wall. should accord the Holocaust in collective accused Walser of 'intellectual arson', a V o LUME 9 N uMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 41 charge he repeated in a speech given on the Auschwitz has been invoked routinely, and private thing, as Walser would have us 50th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms on not only in Germany, to guard against the believe, this skirts around the issue of how 9 N ovember 1938, the Reichsluistallnacht. dangers of every conceivable political evil. nations are to organise their rituals of An embittered argument resulted, and And perhaps it is timely to raise the issue rem embrance. Walser fails to distinguish attempts at m ediation between Walser and again. But Walser has conceded to Bubis between recollection as a private act and Bubis only led to further faux pas and that his rem arks were not intended as a collective remem brance, between each misunderstandings. polemic aga inst the claims of forced individual's need to make peace with his or In his speech Walser had protested labourers. Surely, his critics ask, his her own sense of guilt and the needs of a against the use of Auschwitz as a ' moral lame nt at th e pe rpe tua l staging of collecti ve to commemorate official acts of club' and its instrumentalisation in moral Germ any's disgrace in the m edia cannot heroism and shame. He implies, moreover, and ethical debates. This claim was hardly be aimed at the preponderance of programs that there is complicity between public new, but it left ominously open exactly about the Third Reich on television ? remembrance and forgetting. And more which debates Walser was referring to. T he It is har d to see h ow the worrying, h e o ve rl ooks t h e need for m emory of Auschwitz, he seemed to be sm attering of documen solidarity with the victims of German saying, was in danger of being trivialised by taries about the War history and their right to preserve the m ass m edia representations, by empty and Je wish m emory of their suffering. In a bizarre twist rit ualised forms of rem e mbrance and life on of his tory, Walse r appropriates the insincere acts of lip service. 'Everyone vulnerability of the victims, arguing that knows our historica l burden , our normal Germans are the victims of the everlasting shame', and no day passes, Auschwitz m oral police. Those Walser contends, 'in which we are not who deny Germany the reminded of it'. But the ro utine staging right to normality aim to of Auschwitz as a threat had had the 'hurt' normal conscience opposite effect. It had fostered the stricken Germans such as desire to 'look away' rather than him self. It is enough that he to confront the past. Indeed, carry around his own private Walser had found himself forced ' black armband view of to look away' at least 20 times' history', but docs he have to or more in face of the 'perpetual wea r it on his sleeve as well, he presentation of our shame'. seem s to b e saying. To an To the frustration of his critics, Walser Australian ear this sort of rhetorical refused to name names and identify ca uses. the gesturing must seem familiar. Was he referring to the compensation claims French- """~;... In many ways, the Walser debate of the labourers forced to work in German German cross- represents a litmus test by pointing up indu stry under the Nazis, now under cultural channel arte taboos and changing levels of tolerance negotiation, as Bubis inferred? Or was he could be seen as intrusive, in the self-understanding of the German alluding to the instrumentalisation of especially when Walser has30 other nation. Walser has made quite a reputation Auschwitz in debates about euthanasia and channels to choose from. Or, as one scathing fo r himself, not as the moral conscience of the ethics of biotechnology? And who were commentator suggested, had some- the nation, but m ore as a keeper of the holy the elusive eli visions of 'opinion soldiers' one stolen his remote control? grail of the h eart. His em otional outbursts who wielded their m oral clubs at the troops have often functioned as a type of of recalcitrant mourners? Only in reference w. LSER's PLEA for remembrance as a seismograph of the collective unconscious. to the planned memorial to the victims of form of private confession best conducted His political affiliations have vacillated over the Holocaust near the Potsdam Square did far from the comme rcial crowds was the years. He campaigned in the early '60s Walser become concrete. The cem enting of condemned not only by Bubis. For many fo r the SPD, was a one- time m ember of the the 'centre of the capital city', he claimed, observers, the pietistic politics of m em ory Communist Party of Germany in the late was a' nightmare the size of a football fi eld'. implied by Walser's inward-looking '60s and a critic of the Vi etnam War, but by The m onument was not m erely a prime conscience-gazing was only too reminiscent the '80s had become a renegade to the left example of the 'perpetual presentation of of the fateful stance taken by German camp. He gained a profile in the '80s as our shame'; it was 'amonumentalisation of intellectuals who claimed to have emigrated som ething of an intellectual loose cannon our shame'. Memory in the public domain, 'inwards' under the N azis when remaining when, in defiance of political correctness he concluded, had become an 'obligatory in Germany. It reveals a deeply entrenched on the left, he voiced his wish to see East exercise', an inauthentic fo rm of penance fear of the public sphere and politics that and West Germany reunified. He refused to that had lost its meaning. Only as a matter has a long tradition in Germany. The accept the division of Germany as a of private conscience, as personal recollection, devaluing of politics has its origins in the perman ent fixture on the his torical could m emories of the Holocaust be kept belief that the soul is the home of true landscape of Europe, recall ing it was a alive and protected from the harsh world of human values. It is this belief in the higher punitive measure imposed by the Allies politics. rewards to be reaped through spiritual values after the war. The point about the misuse of the that has seen German intellectuals too often For years he defi ed pressure and censure Holocaust in political debate is h ardly turn a blind eye to abuses of power. by speaking from the h eart about t he n ew. In the post-war era, the threat of If m em ory, like one's conscience, is a 'phantom pain' from the amputated limb of 42 EUREKA STREET • APR IL 1999 the other Germany. Curiously, history was pillars was scaled down. Even before the the day to b e • to vindicate him rather than his colleague, modified model was revealed, public opinion las ting obj ects Gunte r Grass, who argu ed fo r had turned against both the winning design of inte rest and immortalising the division of Germany as and the idea of a m emorial altogether. va lue to future generations. penan ce for Auschwitz. And it may well Among the sceptics were the Christian The final argument to be levell ed have been Grass that Walser had in mind in Dem ocratic Mayor of Berlin, Eb erhard aga ins t the m e m oria l cam e fr o m his rem a rks about ins trumentalising Diepgen, the incoming chancellor, Gerhard ex-Ch an cellor an d Social D em ocra t , Auschwitz. After all, Grass has only been Schroder and the political n ewcom er, H elmut Schmidt. He contended that the too keen to assume the role of the nation's Minister for Culture, Michael Naumann. site was open to abuse since there was no conscience and guardian of morality. Grass After years in the wilderness, it seems way of controlling the use the public made was, moreover, the last recipient of the the new Left has rediscovered the value of of the m em orial. Most worrying to him Peace Prize and caused a far m ore minor n a tionhood and nation al identity. A was the possibility that the m onument scandal in 1997 when, in his acceptance consensus is em erging in some quarters could be desecrated by neo-Nazi graffiti. speech , h e castigated the G e rman that the masochism underlying the notion This had the potential to damage Germany's government for its treatment of of a m onument to the victims of the nation reputation internationally and would run Kurdish refu gees. ill befits Germany's n ew sense of national counter to the spirit of the m emorial. Since pride. What other 'normal' nation had done the layout of the pillars was explicitly A S ONE COMMENTATOR in the weekly the sam e? A host of arguments has been design ed by Eisenman to prevent the newspaper Die Zeit remarked, it is no made against completion of the project, gathering of small groups of people-the gap accident that Walser's seemingly unpolitical som e m ore pertinent than others. Since between the pillars is only 92 em wide demand for priva te recollection of the war Australia has yet to have a proper public in order to encourage individuals to wander goes hand-in-hand with an 'obsessive desire debate about Ken Inglis' suggestion that alone through the landscape of m emory, it is for normality'. It seem s to have escaped the Australian s consider commem orating hard to imagine the site's attractiveness attention of m any that Germany has long Aborigines killed in the 'Black Wars' (see to vandals, dru g dealers or neo- becom e a 'normal' European nation with a Eurel V OLUME 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 43 conventional ways. The place has no centre, no focu s, and there will be no guided tour available to tourists. Each individual must experience it alone. From the outside it looks deceptive, like a field of corn frozen The Fassifern in time. Inside the maze, it will be far more unsettling, unpredictable, a bit like the experience of the Jews 'inside' the Third That name itself suggests a sandy creek, Reich, Eisenm an hopes. shade of bottlebrush or blackbean or feathery Part of the resistance to the model clearly wattle-in summer there will be certainly snakes springs from its unconventionality and and if you're lucky you'll catch the flick and ripple a bs trac tness . Peopl e feel safer with of a platypus in the larger pools. Tiny fish memorial sites that have unambiguous or yabbies will tickle bare toes. This is boyhood. messages and leave nothing to chance, even if these lessons themselves are subject to Boyhood is always hot, it is summer. Boyhood the vagaries of history. To this end the knows where to find all the big pools in the creek, Minister for Culture has recently proposed it is excited by the old stories of the gigantic fish a compromise which links a scaled-down a river cod not seen since Oxley-but that feathery 'Field of Memory' to an exhibition space and an equally monumental 'Wall of Books' shadow has not gone away. Boyhood knows every ripple of glass and steel to house one million might lead to the catch. Boyhood also teases snakes. books on the Holocaust. The Germ an parliam ent still hopes to But in the mottled creeks of the Fassifern, snakes m ake a decision before the summer break. bask in their own priority. This extends further than boyhood But Naumann's compromise solution has and is a part of the country that m akes town boys a m ere ripple thrown up legal and financial complications over the surface. The Fassifern keeps secrets in each creek that m ay well mean further delays. While and though the shallows may be dappled and feathery the ou tcome is too close to call, the odds are now, past holds its own shadows, like the giant brooding fish. that a m onument will be built. But which one-Eisenman's original proposal or a When we scrambled down the bank in a rush to fish 'memorial with user instructions', costing several-fold the original design, currently or to swim or simply to escape like wrigglers or snakes favoured by som e in the government? As into the delight of water, our noise was like parrots, feathery Thomas Assheuer, writing for Die Zeit, has bright but raucous and squabbling. We asserted boyhood observed, to refrain from making a mark or with laughter and punches and thought nothing of it. It was our creek a sign is itself a gesture full of portent. If the and when we go t there it obeyed us. We were shadows, a ripple. m em orial is not built this would send a signal to future generations that could be We never coaxed out the m ythical cod, though we did catch the ripple far m ore injurious to German y's reputation of platypus and sometimes the flash of a kingfisher. We were the fish in m atters of reconciliation than if it excited by movement and sunlight. But we did learn that creek proceeded with the project. If it builds it, or its aspects, and we even developed a caution with snakes the m em orial will not be for want of public - it took only one scare. We were trapped in our boyhood discussion about the issue. If handled well, like the kingfisher and parrot in their own brilliant feathers. it could be a tribute to the liberal and enlightened way Germany has managed its public acts of remembrance. The creek was the smallest part of the Fassifern, tail feathers In this regard, Germany must stand as a or wingtip- the valley spread richly all round. Its creek, model, particularly for coun tries like even so, gathered everything in and defined it. Even in boyhood Australia, in which debates about collective somehow we understood that. We accepted the mythical fish m emory and national shame and about as a sacred emblem without question. We allowed the snakes recon ciliation have received little their ancient right of passage before us to the creek. encouragern ent at government level. In Australia w e are still a long way from the The Fassifern returns to this, gathering snakes, a creek, sort of consensus achieved under Kohl and feathers on the sand, platypus or fish-a ripple still shared by the new government, that it som ewhere. Boisterous bare bodies. Summer. Boyhood. is not enough to say sorry to the victims of history-the nation must be publicly seen Thomas Shapcott to be saying sorry as w ell. • Alison Lewis is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Melbourne. 44 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 THEOLOGY Integrity: the long walk Antony Campbell continues his series on an unconditionally loving God. This month: unconditional love-the vision. IV We love God because God first loved u s. ( 1 fohn 4:19) BE ING LO VED IS THE MOST MARVE LL OUS MAG IC OF LLFE . Our being loved by God- that God loves US- iS in the Bible. It is in the Christian tradition. It is inevitably sullied by fear and superstition . How much more magical might it be, if only the fear and superstition could be kept away. Can we, each of us, accept our being utterly loved by God? I cannot prove that God loves us. N o theologian can. We do not prove love. We know it in our hearts, we believe it, we act on it- we cannot prove it. Sign s, yes; proof, no. If we are desperate enough to try and prove that we are loved, our relationship is in trouble. With any faith it is ultimately the sam e. We do not prove; we believe. The factors involved in belief are complex. Among them is the attractiveness of the vision fai th offers. A vision of our world and ourselves as unconditionally loved by God needs to be attractive and coherent if it is to compel our belief. For Christian faith, that vision cannot come out of m odern fantasy; it has to have roots in the scriptures, in the traditional experience of God, and in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Like it or not, we decide between visions of our world- but not on whim. Vision time is also decision time. + Re-visioning faith A God who loves creates what God loves. Plenty of people ask why God would create what becam e such a thoroughly fo uled-up world as ours. An honest answer is simple: I don't know, nobody knows; those who think they know need to think further. Free will and human sin are too simple as answers. They do not explain a world of disasters and diseases and the rest. The honest answer drags along a further question: is our fouled-up world utterly unlovable? To m e and many the answer is no. Strange, but we and our world are lovable, can be loved, could be created. If God could fi nd us lovable and create us as we are, is there a place for original sin? Are we, as we are, what God wanted? Sin is obvious, but love forgives. 'I, I am the One who blots out your transgressions fo r m y own sake, and I will not rem ember your sins' (Isaiah 43:25 ). Isaiah has God fl atly contra dict the 'God would not be God if He did not punish the transgressor' of Jam es Joyce's retrea t-giver (in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; see also A. Campbell, Eureka Street, December 1998, p3 7) . Forgiveness open s the way to salvation. Salvation is being in a right relationship with God. If we think about it, knowing we are loved by a forgiving God is the most enduring motivation for right behaviour in relationship with God. Crea tion leads to incarnation- the core of Christian faith. God became human; the Word was made Above: One fl esh . Theologians give various answers as to why the son of God should have become the son of Mary. incarnation of My own answer verges on absurdity but is also one that in its absurdity m akes sense fo r m e. God became the unconditional: one of us because of unitive passion, because a loving God longed to be one with the beloved. a wounded The final steps in this brief re-visioning of faith are Christ's passion, dea th, and resurrection and the Canadian lights continued presence of Christ in the eucharist. It is an absurd scandal that the son of God should have died a wounded as a criminal on a Roman cross ('Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles', German's cigarette 1 Corinthians 1 :23) . But if you love human life, you don't opt out of it. In Jesus' time and place, if he stood in the mud of by what he lived for, what his life m eant, conflict with the political authorities was a certainty and Pa sschendaele, crucifixion its outcom e. Rescue or avoidance would have m eant opting out of the reality of human life. November 1917. Resurrection is the pledge of our future with God. The eucharist is a loving God's presence to the beloved Ph otograph from in ways that go beyond and yet continue the incarnation. These are sentences where chapters are needed, the Public Archives but they will do to point towards a possible picture. of Canada. VOLUM E 9 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 45 'Absurd' is a strong word. I use it because it describes where I find myself on these issues of faith Creation leads to and I am not alone. 'Stumbling block' and 'foolishness' are other words for absurdity. To finish that quote from Paul: 'but to those who are the called ... Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God' (1 incarnation-the Corinthians 1:24). That is the power of the vision that goes beyond absurdity. In the often cruel chaos of our world, a loving God may seem absurd. Denial does nothing for the chaos and the cruelty- except that core of Christian it strips away any possible permanence of meaning. Beyond absurdity there may be m eaning. faith. God became Fundamental to my faith • human; the Word For m e, three decisions are primary in my faith. They come first; everything else comes after them. They come in question form: i. Is there a God? ii. Do I survive my body? iii. Does God love mel was 1nade flesh. To all three my belief answers 'Yes.' Whether there is a God is a matter of belie( not knowledge. Someone who believes in a world with Theologians give God cannot escape the whisper that 'perhaps there is no God'. Someone who believes in a world without God cannot escape the whisper that 'perhaps there is a God'. This ruthless 'perhaps' is inescapable. vanous answers When we look at our universe, the possibility that it just happened cannot be denied- even if the odds are incredibly slim. The possibility that it was created somehow cannot be denied either- even if it as to why sometimes seems incredible. When we have said 'created', we have said it all; the 'somehow' is of minimum moment. I look at our world in all its wonder. With Stephen Hawking, I ponder why there the son of God should be a universe for science to describe. And I believe in a creator or sustainer God. I believe that I survive my body, that when the worms are done there is still a 'me'. I can't prove it, should have become even to my own satisfaction. I know there are others (including most in our Older Testament) who believe that when life is ended they are snuffed out like a candle-leaving even less trace. I cannot prove them wrong. But a merely physical and material existence would be ultimately m eaningless for me and I do the son of Mary. experience a meaning in life. I do believe I survive my body. I believe that God loves me, loves us, is primarily our lover rather than our judge. What vision attracts My own answer me to this belief? The vision recognises the human race as lovable. Possibly no century has faced human ugliness as ours has ('an unequalled sum of death, misery, and degradation', Norman Davies)- and yet verges on absurdity we may still be able to recognise ourselves as lovable. The vision recognises our physical world as worth creating. No previous time has been so fully aware of the world's disasters as we are with our television but is also one and modern media-and yet we may still recognise our world as worth creating? that in its absurdity Th e magic • n1akes sense for me. Visions resist language; words are refractory tools. An experience that took the wind out of my sails points towards the vision that is so difficult to describe. I was saying to a friend how I hoped that there might God became one of be relational beings peopling worlds across our universe. She asked why. I replied that it would make the creation of our universe in all its immensity more intelligible. It would dispel that sense of human us because of egocentricity, with us existing all alone in the vastness of an infinitely expanding universe. She looked at m e and said: 'Tony Campbell, if you really believed in God's passionate love, you'd realise that God unitive passion, loves enough to create the entire universe just for you.' In that expressive Irish phrase, I was gobsmacked. My head knew she was right. But I couldn't get my insides around it; I still can 't. Such love is unbelievable; because a loving God I believe it is right; I still hope there are millions of other peopled worlds in our universe. Are we passionately loved by God to that extent? I believe we are, but it beggars belief. A vision is there longed to be that I'd love to be able to describe. A vision is there that I'd love to be able to see. I believe-and stumble along in the semi-dark as best I can. It gives a whole new sense to Paul's 'through a glass, darkly' (1 one with the beloved. Corinthians 13: 12). What would it mean to be loved by God to that degree? What would it mean to take that on board in our lives? At the bottom of it there is an act of faith: the conviction that a God exists. For me, on top of that act of faith sits the conviction that God is primarily loving. None of the other possibilities canvassed in classical theology have completely satisfied m e. They may sound fin e in a theological treatise; they do not carry weight for me in the world I live in. So I believe in a God and in a God who loves. The Older Testament even gives me words for it: 'you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you' (Isaiah 43:4). Back then to basic questions: is our world creatable and are we lovable? My answer is grounded in classical and orthodox theology: should we think something good to be beyond God, if we creatures are able to do it? Any good we can do, God can do better. If we can perceive the lovable in another, why shouldn't God? If we can see worth in our world, for all its appallingness, why shouldn't God and why shouldn't God have created it? For me, that's the gist of it. It can do with a little bit of filling out. Our world. When I can ask those who have been close to the poorest and least advantaged of people, my question is, 'If you were God, knowing their situation, would you create these people?' The answer after a long pause-has been, 'Yes, I would.' For all the squalor, degradation, and harshness, there is a joy 46 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 in life and a nobility in people that eager missionaries and hardened journalists find lovable. If we can, can't God? Is it so unthinkable to have created our world? An evolutionary world might entail risks. How Possibly no century many of us would want God to have held back before these risks? At the heart of horror, within a N azi concentration camp, there can be nobility beyond belief: 'when they come to judgement, let all the fruits has faced human that we have borne be their forgiveness' (anon. , Ravensbri.ick ). Ourselves. We need not stop at appearances-' so m arred was his appearance' (Isaiah 52: 14) . Behind ugliness as ours has appearances we can be surprised to discover people we didn' t expect to find. Often there is gentleness or loveliness or a wealth of experience that was hardly hinted at externally. Do we want to deny that insigh t ('an unequalled sum to God? We are able to love- despite appearances, even knowledge. We kn ow the fragilities and fa ults, the weaknesses and vulnerabilities, even the m eanness and bitchiness of those we love and till we love of death, misery, and them . And they know ours-and they love us. Surely God loves better than we do? Our God. Can God's love be less than unconditional? Classical theology requires God's love to be degradation ', perfect. Is perfect love less than unconditional? Was Shakespeare right: 'love is not love I Which alters when it alteration finds I Or bends with the rem over to rem ove' (Sonnet 116)? Should we expect less of Norman Davies) God than unconditional love? Parents can love their children unconditionally. Should we expect less of God? and yet we may still A God who so loves and doe not intervene is a God of mys tery. Anger, fru stration, grief, and pain must be part of the im age of su ch a God. The Older T estam ent does not shrink fro m such language. We are be able to recognise helpless before the pain and suffering of our world. Should we claim the mystery of God's also being helpless to eliminate pain and suffering fr om our world? We may not experience God intervening in our ourselves as lovable. day-to-day lives, but God is not powerless either. As those who love u s do, God too has the power to inspire us, challenge us, support us, encourage us, and be there with us. • Antony Campbell SJ is professor of Old Testament at the Jesuit Theological College within the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. Next month: Un conditional love: the challenge. Santa Clara University 1999 Summer Sessions June 21-Julv 9 (Mornings or Afternoons) Arts, Spirituality, and Liturgy- John Buscemi Pauline Writings- Joseph Grassi, S.T. L. Mystery of Christ-Frederick J. Parrella, Ph.D. July 12 - Julv 30 (Mornings) Liturgical Catechesis-Rita Claire Domer, O.P. Eucharist and Culture-Ma rk Francis, C.S.V. Culture, Religious Expression & the Gospel - VirgilioEiizando, Ph.D. Spirituality and Ministry- Jean Marie Heisberger June 21 -July 30 (Afternoons or Evenings) Art ofSpiritual Direction-Pamela Bjorklund, Ph.D. Keyboard Improvisation Skills for Liturgy-FredMoleck, Ph.D. Private instruction in organ, voice, and composition June 22-July 29- Liturgical Music Institute (Evenings) The Celebrating Church II -Fred Moleck, Ph.D. 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.scu.edu/PastoraiMinistries V OLUME 9 N uMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 47 B.,N T'"m, "tho 48 EUREKA STREET • A PRIL 1999 the working musical paragraph through this bass might manage it when those powers Pinza in the old Bruno Walter recording; a most autumnal and facetious of operas. It is were beginning to slide, but it remains masterpiece of understatement that came a work where the dramatic situation is remarkable that Terfel should attempt this close to milking. The 'Madamina, il catalogo consistently crude but the music is 'light' of all roles when he is so young and be so e questa' was equally ingratiating. A book and refined, it has a 'cla ical' dryness in dramatically convincing in it. I suspect that of the Don's conquests open before the pop the face of all this buffoonery and the the monkey he has on his back is Fischer eyed face of this singer with the mobile eyes cartoons that are sketched are nothing if Dieskau-anothernon-Italian singer-who and limbs. It was a terrific rendition, oozing not fine-lined. And there is a poignancy, a made a magnificent stab at the with a self-conscious charisma that a recurrent melancholy that Verdi gets from 'l j{ T role with Bernstein. thoughtful director would admire but watch Fal taff's reactions to his vicissitudes, which very carefully and harness. is consonant with the gentle cynicism of v vHATEVER IT IS, Bryn Terfel wants to Wotan's Farewell, however, was entirely old age that pervades the work like a conquer the world of opera and its environs. 'straight' as well as absolutely sure. Here premonition of winter. It's the environs that may prove the worry. there was the grave intensity of the father Musically, this is a fine production. He has done Scarpia recently and now banishing the child of his heart, the voice Young co-ordinates very skilfully, Kenny is Falstaff. He has said jokingly that the stark with loss and bewilderment. sparkling and authoritative as Alice Ford, Australians should ask him to do Wotan, so It would be wrong to say that in the and there is splendid teamwork from he seems to have little fear of biting off second half, after the interval, the glory had Rosemary Gunn as Meg Page and Irene more than he can chew. And nearly departed but it was a bit of a pity that Bryn Waugh as Mistress Quickly. Michael Lewis everything he touches turns to gold. Terfel stuck so much to the particular is a frenzied, appalled Ford (full of memories Sometime opera librettist David Malouf Broadway corner he has so far recorded. He of the blood-and-thunder Verdi in his big remarked that Terfel's recital in Sydney was at his best with the big voice numbers moments) and Amelia Farrugia is a graceful (which included the Finzi settings of from Rodgers and Hammerstein, 'Oh What Nannetta. The ensemble work is superb. Shakespeare's songs) was one of the very a Beautiful Morning' and 'Some Enchanted And Bryn Terfel, majestic, restrained, greatest he had ever seen. Evening' though he doesn't sing the latter authoritative through every shift and turn, In Melbourne a few weeks later we saw which is written for his kind of voice-with is marvellous. another side of Terfel. This was the second the authority that Ezio Pinza or Giorgio The production by Simon Phillips is of two concerts (duplicating the same Tozzi brought to it 40 or 50 years ago. And not, though it is one of the best things the program) but in this case conducted by when it comes to 'Oklahoma' Terfel's voice, newly appointed head of the Melbourne Roderick Brydon rather than Richard which can take on precisely the Theatre Company has done. Hickox (whose concert with Terfel, sharpness of the Broadway Phillips' approach is busy and stylised the previous night, had been booked baritone, is nevertheless not as in a way that robs Falstaff of some quantity out many weeks before and who had idiomatic as Howard Keel. He is of its ease and naturalness. He has his to return to Sydney for Billy Budd). wonderful to listen to, of course, singers skip about the stage like pantomime This was Terfel, the international but he would be wonderful to listen creatures and the sight of Falstaff having to star. The first half consisted of 'Non to doing 'Three Blind Mice'. In the be' fey' under directorial instruction scarcely piu andrai' from Figaro and the case of 'How to Handle a Woman' tallies with the besotted heterosexuality catalogue aria from the Don together you wonder if anything is that is the opera's central datum and abiding with the 'Feuerabend' and Wotan's governing the choice other than comic absurdity. But Phillips handles at farewell, 'Leb wohl, du Kuhnes, the desire to do homage to another least the broad conception of the final scene herrliches Kind', from Die Wall VoLUME 9 NuMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 49 THEATRE GEOFFREY MILNE last year and the huge co-production with Black Swan Theatre (WA) of Tim Winton's Cloud Street, also last year. Company B is Life as performance clearly a company of national significance. Its 1999 season is as eclectic as any in the past. The Sydney season began with David Hare's The Juda s Kiss, continues C OM eAN' B " Bol'o" St Th'"'" " semi-thrust stage, seating upwards of a just with a n ew Australian play by Justin one of the most adventurous and successful financially viable 300 people. Downstairs Fleming (Burnt Piano, in March and April) major theatre companies in Australia of the is a smaller, black-box style, end-on studio and a remount of Leah Purcell's monodrama past decade, as witness its recent admission theatre like most of its kind throughout Box the Pon y (in April and May) befor e to the clientele of the Australia Council's the country; it seats about 110 in orderly Shakespeare's A s You Lil< e It (from late Major Organisations Fund. Supposedly tiered rows. May into July). After that, there's more n ew Sydney's second theatre company (in the Company B's productions since 1985 work, from Christine Evans (My Vicious way the hierarchy of these things is meant have ranged from radical reinterpretations Angel, in July and August) and from the to work), Company B- on the of the classics, contem contemporary Russian Alexej Slapovskij strength of what I've seen of porary Australian (The Little Cherry Orchard, from November it- is consistently its best. drama to recent new 10) . The touring season sees Cloudsueet in The Belvoir St Theatre in writing from abroad. M elbourne in July and August (in Surry Hills was the former Australian playwrights association with Play box, the MTC and the salt and sauce factory vacated as diverse as Robyn Victorian Arts Centre Trust) and Adelaide in 1984 by Nimrod when it Archer, Jack Davis, in August (with STCSA and the Adelaide turned its back on the home Jenny Kemp, Louis Festival Centre Trust), as well as Th e Juda s of its golden years to pursue Nowra, Stephen Sewell Kiss, which is undertaking a massive tour its final grandiose and fatal and Tobsha Learner until the end of June. expansionist phase in the have rubbed shoulders David Hare is the most fr equently bigger Seymour Centre. The with Chekhov, Shake staged English playwright in Australia at sad remainder of the Nimrod speare and Brecht on present. (He is also sufficiently ubiquitous Theatre Company's life is now on e hand and David in England to have copped a pejorative history, but its second theatre Hare, Jean Genet and mention in Martin Crimp's recent version and something of its spirit David Holman on of Moliere's Th e Misanthrope!) Skylight live on...... _ ~ another. The repertoire has been seen all over Australia since 1986 Fearing the loss of yet another Sydney is genuinely eclectic: partly reminiscent of and the rather tedious Amy's View covered venue- and worse, a much-loved and the old Nimrod, partly parallel to the STC, most of the east coast last year. Hare's lived-in alternative one-a huge consortium and there has been some acrimony between ca reer parallels David Williamson's in some of over 600 theatre people, calling themselves the two in recent years. But that's another ways; both appealed to new wave audiences Understudies, purchased the building in movie ... in the 19 70s with their slightly shocking June 1984 and set up what is now known as Likewise, a vast array of directors have ways of looking at the world. Now they are the Belvoir St Theatre Ltd. Many of the staged productions there (the list includes the darlings of the maturer consortium were previous m embers of Barry Kosky, Kingston Anderson, Bogdan subscriber sector. Nimrod, including actors, stage managers, Koca, Jim Sharman, Gale Edwards and designers, directors and administrators. others) but Neil Armfield remains the JuDAS Kt ss is yet anoth er fin-de Robyn Archer was a consortium m ember principal name associated with the siecle bio-play about the life, loves, tastes and so were Alan John, Kerry Walker, Robert company's major successes. Mostly a and opinions of Oscar Wilde- fo llowing in Menzies, Geoffrey Rush, Mary Vallentine, 'nomad' director throughout his career, the wake of sundry others, like the Abbey Neil Armfield and Chris Westwood. These Armfield surprised by opting to become a Theatre's The Secret Fall of Lady Constance canny folk setup not one but two companies, 'settler' Artistic Director at Company Bin of 1997 (seen at the Melbourne Festival in with separate boards of management and 1994. Among the finest productions I have 1998) and the notable film_of the same year. with separate legal identities: Company A seen from Belvoir St have been Stephen The play is in two long acts, each responsible for the theatre and its operations Sewell's Hate in 1988, the extraordinary focusing on an anguished dilemma for and Company B the resident production adaptation by Dave Holman of Gogol's Wilde. In the first, he is torn between fleeing organisa tion. Even if the production Diary of a Madman in 1989 (with Geoffrey to France (to avoid arrest and the company failed (no idle thought in Sydney Rush a superb Poproshin), a Hamlet in 1994 humiliation of an inevitably public trial) in the light of events at the time) Company (one of the best imagined and realised! have and staying with Lord Alfred Douglas. As A would still retain the venue for others, or seen in this country) and John Harding's Up we know from history as much as from the so the story went. So far, this eventuality the Road in 1996- all directed by Armfield. rest of the recent Wildeana, he procrasti has not arisen. Other Company B productions that have nates and stays. Company A has done little to alter enhanced its reputation have b een In the second act, set in the Naples villa architect Vivian Fraser's 1974 refurbish Chekhov's The Seagull in 1997, a savagely to which Wilde and Bosie have retreated ment. The main Upstairs Theatre retains a pared back production by Michael Kantor after his release from prison, the question is marvellously intimate, if eccentric, of Brecht's The Caucasian Chall< Circle whether to bow to his wife's threat to cut 50 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 off his allowance-and never let him see their children again-unless h e leaves the Don't put your Oscar disreputable Bosie. At the moment when Oscar decides again to stay, the matter is taken out of his hands. Bosie caves in to his mother's financially loaded invitation to rejoin the family and exits with his straw 0~ .. W•we >',ON THt '~~ rr~~~f a~!:~o~y playw VoLUME 9 N uMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 51 commander, Captain Bo sche (George Clooney), liken the company to a family, or, most movingly, as they come to recog nise that the Japanese, who they must kill and who must kill them , are, like them, ordinary men, decent m en, bewildered men, caught in a situation they can do nothing about. To say that The Thin Red Line, an adaptation of James Jones' best novel, follows the m en of Charlie Company as they fi ght to gain control of the Melanesian island of G uadalcanal during the first months of the Pacific war is to describe only thefilm's firstlayer. Though the action sequences are intensely confronting, much of the m eaning of the film corn es through voice-over, as the soldiers contemplate what the war has done to them, to their sense of self, and as they think about the world in which they now exist. The strong ensemble cast-Sean Penn as First Sergeant Welsh, Vale Stanley Kubrick Sue Lyon and Jam es Mason in Kubricl<'s 1962 film of Lolita. the cynical NCO who holds the company together, Jim Caviezel as the idealistic for their 20 years. When Marie's mother Private Witt, who dies a hero, and Elias appears briefly, it's impossible to imagine Koteas (Captain Staros) who so loves his No waking her as a child. Marie and Isa are self-reliant, men that sending them to their deaths insular, burning inwardly with angers which becomes too much to bear-are quite The Dreamlife of Angels, dir. Erick Zanca. the script only partially explains. But their outstanding and glue the action and the There is a dark angel and an angel of light. performances are captivating. You never contemplative sequences together. For that Both of them are at a loose end. Isa (Elodie stop wondering how they reached this point matter, so does the beautiful Daintree forest, Bouchez) carries her world in a backpack; of emotional development; you almost pray where much of the filming took place, and she gets a job doing piece work in a garment for their release from a world which is which provides the backdrop for the film's factory where she meets Marie (Natacha drawn in fine detail. Their life may be a powerful contrast between the wilderness Regnier), who takes her in off the street for dream but there is no waking from it. and the destructive power of m echanised a few nights. -Michael McGirr SJ humanity. In spite of her apparent kindness, it is But ultimately Th e Thin Red Line soon clear that Marie does not connect belongs to its director, T errence Malick. He with other people so much as collide with The art of war has made only two previous fi lms, yet such them. The fl at she is minding belongs to a is his reputation that established box-office woman who has recently died in a car The Thin Red Line, dir. Terrence Malick. It stars like Clooney and John Cusack were accident; the woman's daughter is lying in seem ed entirely appropriate that I saw The jostling each other for bit parts. In evitably hospital in a coma. Marie is indifferent to Thin Red Line on the day Stanley Kubrick Malick's war will be contrasted with that of the fate of her hosts; I sa becomes absorbed, died. I have always considered Kubrick's Steven Spi elberg in Saving Private Ryan. It even obsessed, by them. She starts a vigil at 195 7 masterpiece, Paths of Glory, to be the is not to denigrate the latter to invoke once the bedside of the daughter, a stranger, greatest of all anti-war films. Now, for m e, more the distinction between art and craft. becoming her guardian angel. She reads the Thin Red Line, made more than 40 years There is a universality about The Thin Red girl's diary and then continues it in her own later, is on a par. The anti-Homeric m essage Line, as there is about Paths of Glory. The h and. Her luminous handwriting becom es is the sam e: there is nothing ennobling two of them may not win the popularity almost another character in the film. about battle, no matter how high-minded polls, but they were made to last. Meanwhile, Marie is obsessed by a wealthy are the ideals m en bring to the conflict; -John Salmond nightclub owner, Chriss (Gregoire Colin). patriotism is a sham; in the end war is Hers is a dark obsession, strengthening its simply about individual survival. Moreover, grip as it becomes more hopeless and who the real enemy is becomes uncertain. Strictly tango destructive. In Kubrick's magnificent final scene, as the This film has a wonderful sympathy for French soldiers stop jeering at the fright Tango, dir. Carlos Saura. This is an eloquent working-class women. It includes a range ened German girl they have captured and film. It communicates through colour, of richly compassionate portraits, some weep with her instead, they have come to music and most of all, the passionate lasting a matter of seconds. It's not so easy realise this. So do Terrence Malick's men of movem ent of the dance. to know if that compassion is extended to Charlie Company, as they listen with The film's story is an afterthought, little the depiction of Isa and Marie. They are old resigned hostility to their gung-ho new more than an excuse for the celebration of 52 EUREKA STREET • APRJL 1999 the dance we know as the Tango. Story? soul and community in the heartless flux of intimately, and one area that most American Well in short, a film within a film. commuting. movie industry folk are familiar with is A gifted film director (Miguel Sola), in The central metaphor, indeed the whole going to a shrink. deep depression after his wife leaves him, film, risks cliche. The narrative ingredients The script (by Ramis, Peter Tolan and immerses himself in making a film about are familiar. There at Central Station we Kenneth Lonergan) is generous with irony the Tango. One of the film's main investors find a hard-edged biddy (Fernanda and alludes copiously to Mafia mythology (usually surrounded by a gymnasium of body Montenegro) supplementing her teacher's in other films, even TV. (The name of Robert guards) pressures the director into casting pension writing letters for literate or De Niro's character, Paul Vitti, is obviously the backer's mistress whose talent is sight semi-literate customers at a dollar a piece. a nod to The Untouchables' villainous Frank unseen. Fortunately, she can dance a flashy Biddy has long since been corrupted by her Nitti.) And as usual De Niro shines: if there Tango and the director falls in love with the own skills of survival. But she recovers were any meaning in the truckloads of backer's girlfriend, which even to the casual self-respect and discovers love as, against trophies churned out by the Tinseltown movie-goer seems both a bad career move the grain, she assumes responsibilities of speechnight, he'd be the Dux based on this and a distinct threat to longevity. care for a young boy (Vinicius de Oliveira). performance, since he never gives a bad one The linking story is weak and at times Boy has been orphaned when his mother, anyway, and this part was obviously written threatens to become tedious, but have you one of the biddy's customers, is knocked straight into his DNA. been to the opera recently? over by a bus outside the station. Boy The only problem I had with Analyze Spanish director Carlos Saura has made discards childhood illusions and finds a This was that I found myself guffawing several notable films about music and dance. place in the world as the relationship unstoppably at a man weeping bitterly, in In each of them he has emphasised colour, develops. Boy and biddy discover new the throes of a rending personal crisis that style and elegant movement at the expense identity, and we discover identity-seeking was threatening not only his sanity but his of storyline. In the case of Carmen the story Brazil, in that most cliche-ridden cinematic life. A Mafia boss has to look very strong wa already familiar. For his film Flamenco, form of the road movie. indeed-any hint of trouble in bed or head three pages of script sufficed. But cliches of narrative and form are will see him 'whacked' very soon. Billy No, if you want strong narrative this movingly transcended in Central Station. Crystal (below, with de Niro) as Ben Sobel, isn't your sort of movie. But it is if you want Biddy is soon a very specific Dora, utterly a New York psychiatrist with a few problems dramatic dancing, passion that threatens to convincing in her muddled journey from of his own, was a fine lens for our percep burn the screen, gorgeous colour and opportunism and strike-first vengefulness tion: we view Vitti through his perspective. cinematography that matches the best I've to love. Boy becomes Josue, maturing before We can talk the talk of neurosis, angst, seen in years. our eyes out of macho pose and illusion alienation, so that Vitti's disgust when That Italian master of light and image, without ceasing to be a believable Brazilian cedi pal issues are explained to him becomes cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, has boy. Brazil, at the station and on the road hilarious. He is, after all, a criminal who excelled himself, using his cameras and from Rio to Born Jesus in the north-eastern has killed and robbed, yet we end up feeling lights to achieve a wondrous spectacle. As backlands, is not the Brazil of exotic sorry for him even as we laugh, sorry in a Storaro himself observes, 'stories are mostly stereotype, but the Brazil of everyday life at way that we don't feel for the gently auto told in words to the detriment of music and the grassroots with its peculiar mix of nomous, but emotionally wounded Sobel. image. The art of screen-tellingis to narrate tedium and drabness, vibrance and The abiding mystery is how Mafia thugs through light and movement'. passionate intensity. continue to be sympathetic, and how many Many say it, few can do it! Once or twice a twang of sentimentality of Hollywood's best efforts concern them. Performances are adequate. Sola plays a in the relationship of Dora and Josue, or too -Juliette Hughes reflective director; Cecilia Narova, as the long a pause on local colour among the wife, dances better than she acts and Mia shrine pilgrims up there in the backlands, Maestro (a dead ringer for Tara Fitzgerald) is brought this old Brazil hand back from the suitably sexy. However, inevitably the film illusion of being there again. But most of is a triumph for the camera, lighting, design the time I was deeply moved to recognition, and the sheer magnetism of the dance that and beyond, to new learning about the inspired it. human condition and the mysterious True, at the end I felt the film was working in it of what some of us call grace. danced out, but only by a whisker. -Rowan Ireland - Gordon Lewis It's a shrink wrap The road to Brazil Analyze This, dir. Harold Ramis. An old Central Station, dir. Walter Salles. Go to school pal of mine is a psychotherapist; she Central Station and encounter Brazil. Not laughed so hard at this movie that she Brazil whose future has arrived, as the didn't dare drink any more mineral water. military regime used to proclaim, nor the 'God, the boundary issues! Spot-on!' she Brazil of exotic carnival colour, but director kept gasping while trying to tell me about scriptwriter Walter Salles' Brazil of restless, the movie without breaking up. After all, disappointed survivors: Brazil searching for you do your best work with areas you know VoLUME 9 NuMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 53 On the menu Y.w,ru; o' "'' Fou' Comen their own grooming. (No mums wearing curlers and moccies; no program dealing with spies in the tats on the dads.) The kids were as handsome and glossy as you'd Church might have occasionally expect silvertail kids to be. (Why were their cadet uniforms like the wondered if they'd stumbled onto Confederates?) And their adolescent rebellion-ah , that. It consisted a less knockabout episode of of furtive snoggings with Tara girls (where King's Boys' sisters tend Father Ted-one where perhaps to go) whose harmless little display of boxer shorts during a maids' Mrs Doyle and Dougal were being run by the bishop. I was also chorus in the school production was met with a response from reminded of that episode in Blackadder where the witch-hunter authority that left m e slightly amused but a bit queasy. almost got Edmund. Add to that rich memories of the Elizabethan It brought back something from the distant days when I was an Blackadder where the preposterously puritanical aunt was served English teacher. I remembered my employer, a middle-aged religious, an anatomically allusive turnip, and you've got a perspective on chesting (or rather, bellying) a small junior who had committed what's been going on lately in all the areas that used to be taboo at the crime of talking on the way into the school chapel. There was dinner parties: religion, politics and sex. the sergeant-major-in-your-face yelling, there were the ridiculous In most of my dinner parties, we talk of little else. I mean, what rhetorics. (Are you defying MEi Do you consider yourself above the the hell else is there? Pets? (You'll be faced with the puzzling rules of this schooU). It was more than a telling-off: this was abuse, resilience of your neutered terrier's libido, as he tries to tango with and the abuser was having a shudderingly good time. The kid was your guest's Hush Puppies.) Gardening? Forget it. You're basically shell-shocked; too well-brought-up to say 'Up yours'. There is an left with desktop publishing and perhaps quilting as long as you old saw that you regret more your omissions than your deeds ... don't mention AIDS. King's School had a scene in it that was uncomfortably similar. Not that anyone takes any notice of the old dining mores now: The girls' little bout of cheekiness (boxer shorts forsooth, be glad forget the naffness of fishknives, people are eating pizza or KFC in they weren't thong undies) was met with outrageous histrionics front of the telly where, strangely, you still see families eating at from the two teachers from Tara who were in charge, one like dining tables. And never have so many cooking programs been Hyacinth Bucket, the other more in the vinegary pageboy style, aimed at so few cooks. Programmers are very aware that despite the both of them stuck way back in Winifred Norling and the Chalet boom in eating-out and takeaway, punters are still eager to watch School when it came to questions of disciplining the gels. To hear people cooking just like mother used to. But no mother ever served the bollocking those lasses got, you'd have thought they'd lap yabbies in a balsamic guava sauce on rocket. And Ian Hewitson or danced the rowing team. And here's the rub: the poor girls took it. Geoff Jansz are unlikely to show you how to cook a leg of lamb till They cried tears of shame and general hurt fe elingness, and were it's grey all the way through, with really chewy roast spuds, hugged by the harridans so they could go back on and perform in followed by steamed pud with custard made out of proper custard that significant drama Me and My Girl. No Becky Sharps powder, not that poncy creme anglaise. People were thinner in at Tara, I'm afraid. those days ... Last year a commercial that sneered at women who cooked had I F YOU THINK I'M TAKJNG THIS TOO HARD, think about what was done to be modified after protests. Even though we aren't cooking as to Monica Lewinsky. That girl was doing no more and no less than much as we used to, we'd rather like to. It's part of the fantasy life, the sitcoms and soaps tell her she can do. In Fri ends, Dharma eJ the easy little life we all want, that the telly men are tapping into. Greg, Melrose Place, Drew Carey, people have sex in much the I still watch Bewitched on cable sometimes just because Samantha same way as you'd clean your teeth (to borrow a comment from can clear a kitchen by twitching her nose. actor/writer Mary Kenneally, whose series Australia, You 're Our ids, egos and very occasionally our superegos have all been Standing In It had far too brief a life). Girls in these sitcoms are laid out in the focus groups for the marketeers. This product will 'feisty', 'assertive', 'taking responsibility for their pleasure'. All comfort you, remind you of warm fuzzy safe things, or tingly juicy well and good. Watch a Jerry Springer show, just once, for your sins, exciting things, they tell us. Meadowlea congratulates harried and see what the most powerful country on earth is watching and single mothers; a bowl of nuked noodles counts as cuisine. Yet we what it's telling people is okay to do. Watching the BBC4 Jon Snow are watching less television. There are other things to do, and since interview with Lewinsky on Nine's Sixty Minutes, it was possible so often there is nothing worth watching, videos can be rented, to see a character that had been formed, for good or ill, by privilege, friends visited, dogs walked. indulgence, and the dominant popular culture. A bit silly, a bit self But sometimes it's worth watching the television for divers centred, a bit garrulous, but totally misguided and horribly betrayed reasons. Fascination is the best one, and I must confess to having and abused by the very systems that should have been her shield. been fascinated by the deeply weird King's School (ABC), the But the vultures still cruise for the vulnerable, and when Lewinsky Sylvania Waters of privileged pedagogy. As a sociological exercise fell into the hands of that Iago, Linda Tripp, she was taken through the six-part series was uncomfortably efficient. There was something a process that reminds us that our most cherished freedoms are only different about these young people, different from the teenagers a bad government away from disappearance. • I know, as different as their parents' cars are from the cars of the people I know. They drive shiny new pride machines, as glossy as Juliette Hughes is a freelance reviewer. 54 EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1999 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 72, April 1999 Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1. Direction flower followed for the festival. (6) 4. Such m oving praise about the present was heavenly! (8) 10. All together in foreign service added note. (2,5) 11. Irishman brought disturbance, being a nationalist. (7) 12. Armed insurrection in Dublin in 1916 is what is celebrat ed at 1-across, in other words. (3, 12) 13. Some unspecified Roman yardstick . (3) 14. T eases cunning custom er, possibly, without cause. (10) 17. Strange boa on railing discovered by early Australian. (10) 2 1. Pitcher we hear you dropped. Right for the ram? (3) 23. Critical that it's not on the house! (1 5) 25. Tum down the lamps? It's a pleasure! (7) 26. What may be true, say, flows from the mouth? (7) 27. Make up nightly account (when learner leaves) about this form of sailing. (8 ) 28. D ecrees out east were promulgated in long document. (6 ) DOWN 1. Episode you'll h ear about in the future? (8) Solution to Crossword no. 71, March 1999 2. Read out the outline in an atmosphere that is fairly hot! (7) 3. Oriental follows 1-across with new easy ritual to start with. (9) 5. A quiet approach to Margarita in new gear ? (7) 6. I can 't clown with such a grotesque gesture! (5) 7. Introductory Latin I? I m ay be enrolled in that course. (7) 8. Supplem ent the superannuation, say, of former nurse. (6) 9. Say no to such rubbish . (6 ) 15. With a damaged internal organ and a facial twitch- no w onder sh e's irritable! (9) 16. You heard about the library classification system I'd n ot hand over to som eone so naive and trusting? (4-4) 18. For a start, badly uncomfortable abdominal pain is hardly conducive to country life. (7) 19. Untangle tangle I u se for dessert. (7) 20. A m ore insensitive issue of the m agazine, perhaps? (6 ) 21. D erive satisfaction, say, from drug guy ingested. (7) 22. On 1-across 22-down, 12-across happen ed, according to Christians. (6 ) 24. Could possibly exhibit strength. 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