"We take for granted the ready availability of food from our local shops. But in a lot of countries there are no shops. And no food . '1n those countries, millions wake up hungry every day and most are chronically malnourished. "''ve found a way to put some­ thing aside to help people who have no luck, no home and can't feed their kids. I'm giving 5 cents to Project Compassion for every can of food and every frozen food pack in my kitchen . "Each week, we'll add 20 cents for every cup of tea, coffee or other drink. "The way I see it, if we all put a little aside every time we do something that we tend to take for granted, we can really do a lot to help build a better world. "It's as easy as believing that we Project can make a difference ". ., Compassio~-- ~ ;~;~~;~~~~;:,:: I I D I'd like to know more about ACR's work I I D I enclose my Project ComJX1Ssion donation $ ____ I Please debit my D Bankcard D Visa D M astercard I I I I I I I I I I 111111111 : I With the amount of$ ____ Card expiry date I ~ ~~ I I M rj M rsj M iss I BLOCK leHers please I 1 Address I ______Postcode.____ I Volume 5 Number 2 eum:-KA srm:-a March 1995 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology CONTENTS

4 30 COMMENT RIGHT BACK WHERE I STAR TED FROM 8 Peter Pierce is back on track in Tasmania. LETTERS 32 10 POETRY OBITUARIES Aftershock, by Aileen Kelly; The News Michael Kelly pays tribute to Archbishop and Weather, by Rosemary Dobson (p42). Jam es Carroll; Michael McGirr joins in the tributes paid to Professor Ronald Hender­ son (p36). 34 POSTCARD FROM KOBE 11 Allan Patience on surviving the quake. BOUGAINVILLE CORRIGENDA Jim Griffin sets the record straight . 35 BOOKS 12 Morris West reviews Emmet Costello SJ's JUST A LOT OF HOCUS BOLKUS Saints Popular eJJ Relevant; Andrew Hamilton discusses proposed Andrew Harnilton considers Denis changes to the Immigration Act. Minns' Irenaeus; Allan Patience looks at Public Goods, 13 Public Enterprise and Public Choice by CAPITAL LETTER Hugh Stretton and Lionel Orchard (p37). 14 38 MARVELLOUS (MIDDLE) MELBOURNE FICTION The Save Albert Park Campaign has Our Lady of the Lamps, by Jim Davidson. changed the face of political activism in 44 Quixote is on paternity leave, which Victoria, reports David Glanz. THEATRE means he sees television at the oddest hours. 18 Geoffrey Milne goes al fresco. See Watching brief, p50. THRILL SEEKERS Rasey Gold at Luna Parle 46 INTERVIEW 20 Tim Stoney talks to filmmaker Ana IT TAKES ALL SORTS Kokkinos. Jim Davidson asks who gets included in 47 Cover Photograph and photograph above: dictionaries of national biography, and why. the great maw of Sydney's revitalised FLASH IN THE PAN Luna Park, by Andrew Stark. 22 Reviews of the n ew -release films Quiz See also Ro sey Gold's Thrill Seek ers, pl8. VICTORIA WAIVES THE RULES Show, Heavenly Creatures, Disclosure, N ell, The Browning Version, Maitresse Photographs pp3, 7, 18-19 by Andrew Stark. Moira Rayner charts the changes. Cartoon p9 by D ean Moore. and Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, and the Graphics p 10, 50 by Siobhan jackson. 23 SBS 'Movie Legends' offering Rashom on. Gra phic p21 by Tim Metherall and Siobhan ARCHIMEDES jackson . 50 Eurel

A magazine of public affairs, the arts MORAG FRASER and theology Publisher Resolution and Michael Kelly SJ Editor Morag Fraser Production editor Ray Cassin B R>ANij~~~~~~~p~~"~'~ '"'~ng Consulting editor director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in times Michael McGirr SJ that can only be called interesting. There are serious challenges afoot to diversity and Editorial assistant: Jon Greenaway independence in journalism and broadcasting, nationally and Production assistants: J. Ben Boonen CFC, internationally. We arc seeing them at home, with Kerry John Doyle SJ, Juliette Hughes, Packer's most recent challenge to Australia's media cross­ Siobhan Jackson, Chris Jenkins SJ. Tim Stoney ownership rules. Mr Packer is able to appear on his own Contributing editors television network to suggest that Australia's current m e­ Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ dia laws are ridiculous and that it would be in the national Brisbane: Ian Howells SJ interest for him, as a patriotic Australian, to own both the Perth: Dean Moor Fairfax print holdings and the Channel 9 network. And who Sydney: Edmund Campion, Andrew Riemer, will say him nay? The Government? Will the decision be Gerard Windsor. made by the rules of principle or political expediency? We European correspondent: Damien Simonis shall have to wait and see. The signs are not reassuring. US correspondent: Thomas H. Stahel SJ Newt Gingrich, Republican leader of the American House of Representatives, and increasingly influential Editorial board spokesman for the radical right, wants to see the end of public Peter L'Estrange SJ (chair), funding for America's Corporation of Public Broadcasting Margaret Coady, Margaret Coffey, (CPB). Public broadcasting is not a big budget item in a US Madeline Duckett RSM, Trevor Hales, which spends close to a billion a day on its defence Marie Joyce, Kevin McDonald, Jane Kelly IBVM , establishment. It is not taxpayers' money that Gingrich is Ruth Pendavingh, seeking to save-it's their sense of freedom from government Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ interference. What is under attack is the notion of a publicly owned, government-funded organisation in an America look­ Business manager: Mary Foster ing for a return to individual initiative . The loss of Advertising representative: Tim Stoney government funding would force full sponsorship on the CPB, Patrons and thus the end of independence. Possibly even Eurelw Street gratefully acknowledges the the end of public broadcasting. support of C.L. Adami; the trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; A.J. Costello; A USTRALIANS WHO HA VE HAD TO SCAVENGE for independent D.M. Cullity; R.J. and H.M. Gehrig; and unhomogenised news and analysis while living in the W.P. & M.W. Gurry; United States will understand what that means. The CPB is the Roche family. a repository of serious, independent journalism . It is the source of some of the best documentary programs and eries Eurel

4 EUREKA STREET • MAR Cil 1995 COMMENT: 2

BRIAN T OOHEY pension will be offset by the trivial value of the tax concessions on their superannuation tax contribu­ tions. For the well-off, however, the concessions re­ main a highly regressive bonanza. The concessions, which currently cost $5.6 bil­ Super heroes lion, were originally introduced as an incentive to attract voluntary contributions to superannuation. When this failed to achieve the desired boost to sav­ U""'>S

VoLUME 5 N uMJlER 2 • EUREKA STREET 5 So it remains unclear why Yeltsin ment aid. Even if the figure of 25,000 Russia, and the Islamic republics of and the Russian military decided to civilian fatalities as a result of the the former Soviet Union, has failed. risk so much on the Chechen adven­ bombing and shelling is disputed, But it is less clear whether the at­ ture. Chechen rebellion, already in the scale of civilian casualties re­ tempts of the hawks to enforce great­ its third year, was beginning to col­ mains very high. And there is no er centralisation has succeeded. lapse by itself. And the frequently disagreement about the numbers For the moment both Yeltsin and heard claims that the Chechen mafia fleeing from Grozny. The level of Grachev remain in office, but only were making dangerous inroads into civilian refugees has been estimated by claiming that they are in control commercial life in the Russian at 200,000; they clearly face severe of this disastrous situation. Should capital do not appear to have much hardship in the northern winter. they fail to convince, there are fig­ substance. Economic devastation in Chech­ ures like Generals Lobed and Gromov Some military leaders may have nya is immense. The area will take waiting in the wings. And although thought that the time was right to years to rebuild, and the potential these two now appear as doves, it is make a show of military strength in economic loss to the rest of the coun­ difficult not to imagine them taking order to begin the restoration of try has to be considered also. Direct on a more authoritarian and repres­ authority. Others may have wanted foreign investment in Russia is now sive role should they have the oppor­ to sabotage the attempts of their only a tenth of the low level of last tunity. The liberals in Russia rightly colleagues to restore authority. The year, and multilateral aid and debt consider the Chechen adventure as military were clearly divided and relief have been imperilled. It is dif­ an unmitigated disaster, and one many officers traditionally thought ficult to see how the further collapse which will further complicate the of as hawks in the West (e.g. Generals of the economy can now be avoided. task of political and economic Gromov and Lobed) have appeared Finally, there is the question of recovery in Russia. among the doves. And Defence Min­ the political consequences. On the • ister Grachev-the figure generally positive side it looks as though the Stephen G. Wheatcroft is Director of regarded in Russian military circles attempts of the Chechens to turn the Centre for Russian and Euro­ as a dangerous liberal- has emerged their struggle into a religious war Asian Studies at the University of from a damaging financial scandal to involving all the Islamic regions of Melbourne. become the superhawk. President Yeltsin's motives are COMMENT: 4 even harder to fathom. Although he MICHAEL M c GIRR managed to preserve his democratic image in spite of the shelling of Parliament in 1993, h e has not emerged untarnished from the bomb­ The saint caine ing and shelling of civilians in Grozny and other areas of Chechnya. Cynics argue that he was desperate to create a situation in which next year's elec­ tions could be cancelled, although T,Pm c'' ~~~~~~~~h'~~Pope h'd boon hdd he would emphasise his concern to beatify Mary MacKillop in mid-Jan- up in traffic on Oxford Street, preserve the integrity of the Russian uary was a public-relations triumph. Sydney's gay precinct, even people Federation. For three days he monopolised the holding an umbrella in one hand and The main question appears to be: media. A Current Affair ran for an rosary beads in the other managed a Who was in charge? Was Yeltsin extra half-hour to cover his arrival at smile. It was reported that a soup able to control Grachev, and was Sydney airport and the presenter, kitchen in Oxford Street put up a Grachev able to control the army1 Mike Munro, kept reminding view- banner that thanked the Pope for The fact that these two quasi-liberals ers they were witnessing 'incredible 'coming out.' claim that they were always in scenes'. The tabloids were no less But the humour didn't all come control should not lead us to believe thrilled. Forty years ago a royal visit from offstage. If the press was infat- that they were-any more than might have prompted the same re- uated to the extent of reporting that Gorbachev was in control of the sponse. These days it's hard to think the Holy Father had flathead for one Soviet army in Lithuania in the of anything to compare. The meal and chicken kiev for another, it northern winter of 1990-91. (It is Murdoch stable offered free posters also recorded his remark, 'So this ironic that Gorbachev's biggest critic one day and commemorative medal- chicken comes from Kiev ?' at the time was Boris Yeltsin.) lions the next. The Sydney Tele- In public the Pope appeared to But, although the causes of the graph-Minor led with 'Our welcome have the same daggy but thoroughly latest developments remain unclear, to a friend' and produced a special winning sense of humour. After the some of the likely consequences are edition in order to splash 'Pope's joy' formalities at the domain, he changed more obvious. The social crisis has across the front page. key and said 'Enough for today, more been aggravated-especially in Joy, or at least humour, was the tomorrow.' Despite all expectations Chechnya, which now requires hallmark of the visit. When it was to the contrary, he seemed to be extensive humanitarian and develop- announced to a waiting crowd in the enjoying himself.

6 EUREKA ST REET • M ARCH 1995 Many said that the crowd of Local devotions are authenticated sloppy hats, h eld bowls of bread 200,000 for the beatification at Rand­ by the same person and thereby form throughout the consecration; some wick Racecourse represented the part of a larger whole. You might of the priests who helped with com­ diversity of the Australian popula­ wonder if it is the Pope's ability to munion didn't return to the altar tion. The same could have been true stretch a uniform m essage and a afterwards because, according to an of the media contingent, twice as uniform language across cultures unwritten local rubric, by that stage large as for the previous papal tour in that m akes him such a hero of the the ceremony had gon e on long 1986. In the m edia room it was Murdoch press. enough . The national anthem was possible to see a journalist from a A wiliul optimism can read things sung at the end and the Pope stayed Catholic newspaper kneeling devout­ differently. The proliferation of on to m ake a few off-th e-cuff ly during the Eucharistic Prayer 'blesseds' under John Paul II do lend remarks. 'Papa today,' he said, 'Car­ while, two m etres away, a radio re­ personality and character to the local dinal Clancy tomorrow.' One hopes porter went live to air, shouting to churches where they are honoured. that there is more than humour to be heard above the din. These this parting endorsem ent of the two individuals might have been local church . participating in two entirely dif­ Above all else, the celebration ferent events. Christianity is ex­ was a reminder of the current otic to many Australians.The fortunes of C hristianity in cam eras of the ABC followed the Australia. In the euphoria, many service dutifully but when the suggested that the beatification words 'Not even Solomon in all was the biggest gathering in Aus­ his glory ... ' were read from the tralia since the bicentenary. It gospels, they l oo ked for a wasn't. The crowd was about a Solomon Islander in the crowd. third of that drawn each year by The international m edia were Sydney's gay and lesbian mardi­ assisted by one of m any volun­ gras. The media centre in the teer marshals, the kind of gentle­ Hotel Intercontinental was under man who took up the collection the sam e roof as the gallery of every Sunday in Menzies' Aus­ Charles Billich, the artist who did tralia. This marshal was non­ the portrait of Mary MacKillop plussed by the Aboriginal smok­ presented to the Pope for the Vati­ ing ceremony that, in a superb can Collection. Billich's swish innovation, took the place of premises were lined with his stock incensing the altar at the start of in trade: cityscapes, sporting im­ Mass. 'Don' t tell m e the Abos are ages and nudes. For a few days Water divining: taking over,' he announced to MacKillop was among them. Cardinal Clancy with the ears of the world. Fortunately, As the Pope left Mascot he Pope John Paul. the international representatives quipped that the drought-break­ were soon distracted. They sud­ ing rain was the first gift from Photo: Andrew Stark denly realised that this was the Mary MacKillop. The same rain first Mass at which the Pope had was falling that Friday morning ever been served at the altar by Mary MacKillop's charisma, espe­ on the funeral of Thomas Mayne, a women. Apparently the role played cially in negotiating authority, is chemical engineer who, 60 years ago, on the altar by sisters of St Joseph readily accessible to the Australian invented Milo. The project took four was what made news overseas. Mean­ temperam ent but difficult to trans­ years but the final product now earns while, a discreet group called late. The rite of beatification, as al­ Nestle $550 million every year in 30 Ordination of Catholic Wom en ways, commenced with the local countries. Mayne didn't get a share: spoke with quiet dignity in the letters bishop, Cardinal Edward Clancy, he was a company man. Mourners pages of papers, in a paid advertise­ asking the bishop of Rome to ma ke heard that he put his loyalty to Nestle m ent in the Sydney Morning Her­ what is really no more than a simple above everything else, even, at times, ald, and at the back of the throng in announcement. This request begins his family. Mayne died at the age of the Sydney domain. with the devo tion of a l ocal 94. It was marvellous, in his case, Significant diversity is to be found community. the difference Milo didn't make. A in what different parties intend to During the ceremony, the gospel handful of people cam e to pay their make of the beatification of an Aus­ was proclaimed from the table at last respects in an unprepossessing tralian nun renowned for offering which Mary MacKillop had written redbrick church in the western sub­ education to remote communities part of her voluminous correspond­ urbs of Sydney. It was, the morning and to the poor. A Vatican official, ence. There were other telling ges­ after the beatification, a sober kind travelling with the Pope, said that tures. The ABC agreed not to focus of liturgy. • the Pope performs such ceremonies on politicians and celebrities in the in person as a way of binding the crowd. Five hundred lay ministers of Michael McGirr SJ is consulting local church more closely to Rome. communion, many in sunscreen and editor of Eurelw Street.

V OLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 7 L EITERS

Eureka Street welcomes letters Taxing questions from its readers. Short letters are Abuser pays more likely to be published, and Fro m G F Byme all letters may be edited. Letters From Michael Gorton, Eureka Street has covered the question must be signed, and should include Equal Opportunity Commission, of social welfare a number of times, a contact phone number and the Victoria. in Australia and other countries. The wnter's name

8 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 sure that adequate information and Brian Bourke: Martin Luther King education is available in the work­ (v isionary) place. Employers, in particular, must Role models John Major: Mickey Mouse (the be made aware of their obligations and sorcerer's apprentice) the risk of substantial compensation Boris Yeltsin: W.C.Fields (inadvertent­ payments if their obligations are not fro m Michael D. Breen, ly funny drinker) met. If Christopher Skase can liken himself Richard Court: Daisy Bates ( friend of Michael Gorton to N elson Mandela and Terry Waite the natives) Melbourne when incarcerated, it leads to some Paul Keating: Leonardo da Vinci interesting speculation as to who some (humanist genius) others may be. Perhaps your readers might like to add Thank you Rupert Murdoch: Jesus (nourishment to or emend the list. From Geoff Freeman for the masses) Michael D. Breen, I found the group of articles in the Alan Bond: Pericles (the Builder) Shenton Park, W.A. November edition from people at the Research School of Social Sciences very interesting. r------, I read them in two capacities. As a DOES RADICAL general rea der, a citizen perhaps, I ap­ NICARAGUA preciated them greatly. As a social re­ DISCIPLESHIP CALL? WORk/STUDY BRIGADE search and planning consultant I found June/July l 995 them useful and stimulating. In terested in the biblical Please let there be more of that cha llenge to take up radi ca l kind of thing in the magazine. Christian discipleship? Geoff Freeman Balywn VIC Ched Myers, an Ameri ca n peace and justice advocate and biblica l scholar, is speaking in Australia in late March/early April. His book Binding the Strong I Spend a month visiting Mexico and Nicaragua with the 1995 Work/Study Man: A Politica l Reading ofl Brigade. The brigade includes a two Mark's Story of j esus, with a I week option of helping on a CISLAC­ foreword by Dani el Berrigan, I sponsored community development has been called "the mostl project or staying with Nicaraguan family and studying at a Spanish important commentary on a This month, thanks to I language school as well as visiting Penguin Books, the writer of book of scripture since Barth's I the Aztec pyramids, the Island of every letter published in Romans." I Omotepe, joining the celebrations Eureka Street will receive of the July 19 Revolution and more. For dates and venues, contact: a timely copy of Cost: $3,500. For information or The Prince, Jenny Meyers at the Uniting bookings: Commillees In Solidarity with Latin America and the Caribbean, PO by Niccolo Machiavelli Church Commission for I Mission, (03) 654 24881 Box A431 , Sydney South NSW 2000, or Penguin Classics, RRP $7.95. L ______...J Ph . Kathy (02) 799 6820.

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V oLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 9 OBITUARY: 1

MicHAEL KELLY

James Patrick Carroll, 1908-1995

A usTRALCatholic Church in this coun­ show' going in that city, and lost their jobs because of try since World War li-the growth of Catholic Carroll's advice, there were Jo e Cahills and Jack education, and the Labor split of the 1950s. Renshaws (both NSW Labor Premiers) who saw To say the least, the archbishop was complex. Santamaria as divisive. 'Clericalist' Sydney did not He was always seen as a solid Labor man, yet he spent triumph over 'lay-activist' Melbourne. What prevailed much of his last week of life trying to find a job for an was Carroll's advice, that is a different view of the ostracised and unemployed former Liberal minister; relationship between church and state than that Carroll would allow no celebration of his work in abroad in Melbourne, and a different estimation of education, nor any event to mark his retirement as a how to achieve agreed goals. Its effects are felt to this bishop, yet he admitted to friends that his greatest day in the composition and disposition of the present disappointment was not becoming Archbishop of Syd­ Federal Government. ney (and with it gaining a red hat). He was accused of When James Darcy Freeman was preferred as dividing the efforts of Catholics in Labor politics and Archbishop of Sydney in 1971, Carroll was only 63. on the issue of state aid, but to his dying day he would He had a full12 years before episcopal retirement. He write or say nothing of those events, for fear of open­ had long been active in education and it was into this ing old wounds. area of church work that he invested his considerable At his death, two facts stand to the credit of his capacity. The election of the Whitlam Government view of things: a Catholic education system whose in 1972 was decisive for the future of Catholic schools. size and competence now exceed the hopes of even Kim Beazley Snr was Whitlam's Education Minister its boldest advocates of half a century ago; and an and it was under him that universal, needs-based fund­ Australian Labor Party in which Catholics contrib­ ing, particularly for disadvantaged schools, became ute openly, without being suspected of running their the basis of payment to the non-government sector. own conspiratorial agenda. To these developments This was a method of funding based on a philosophy Carroll made an essential contribution. of discrimination in favour of poorer schools rather James Patrick Carroll was born in the working­ than an across-the-board 'per capita' grant scheme fol­ class Sydney suburb of Newtown in 1908. Following lowed by the Liberals at the time. That's where the his clerical education in Rome, he returned to Syd­ fighting started again. ney where, after a series of appointments as an assist­ In August 1972, Carroll stated publicly that ant, he became parish priest of Enmore in 1944. But church authorities could work with both ALP and it was his appointment as auxiliary bishop to Cardi­ Liberal policies. This was attacked for being a crucial nal Gilroy in 1954 that was fateful. endorsement of the ALP in the lead-up to the Decem­ Among his first tasks was to advise the cardinal ber general election. Many of the same people who on how the church in Sydney should handle what was had lambasted Carroll for his stance on the Labor split subsequently called the Split. Under the direction of joined in the attack, claiming that his statement B.A.Santamaria, the Catholic Social Studies Move­ betrayed the efforts of those who, during the '60s, had ment had been active in supporting the development tried to cajole state aid from the Liberals. of the anti-communist Industrial Groups in trade But Carroll's record stands. Although Catholic unions and, through Catholic officials, in exercising education authorities in the 1960s had many fears of influence at senior levels of party administration. The imminent failure in the system-rising costs, declin­ burning issues of the day were whether to 'stay in ing religious personnel, enlarged Catholic student and fight (the Communists in the ALP)' or 'get clear populations, improved professional standards-today and fight uncorrupted (by the Communists in the Catholic education is the most robust arm of the ALP)'. church, and the most extensive means by which Carroll's advice to the bishops was that the Move­ church personnel intersect with the gifts and the ment had done its work in the unions but had out­ shortcomings of the wider culture. lived its usefulness when it tried to take over the ALP. Archbishop Carroll lived for much of this He concluded that it should not be supported in Syd­ century. What Australian Catholics make of the next ney. For this he was lastingly berated for having 'rat­ century will have been greatly enhanced by what he ted' on good and honest Catholic laymen (they were did in this. • all male) by preferring what was said to be the 'Sydney Michael Kelly SJ is the publisher of Eureka Street.

10 EUREKA STREET • MARcH 1995 VIEWPOINT

JAM ES GRIFFIN

I o'""" ,THAD ro HAW~~m::?~~~~~~~~ in~?,,::~~e~e~,: theoon eept of 'moe' oc he eventually told N oam Chomsky, prince of ate the then British Solomon Islands Pro- would know that it is not defined by skin political idiots savants, about the seces- tectorate with PNG 1 That proposal stirred colour. Or, if he is correct, then roughly sionist strife in Bougainville; so he had to up nationalism in a normally quiescent half the Solom onese could not possibly becom e a supporter of the Bougainville Honiara which, naturally, had not been be the sam e 'race', even excluding the rebels. But he has been rather too dilatory: consulted. And, if Whitlam could glibly Polynesian islands. The so-called 'black the star of the Bougainville Revolutionary say that Bougainville was 'a part of the spot' of Melanesia goes no further south- Army (BRA) has already waned, even am ong Solomons both geographically and racial- east than Santa Isabel. Bougainvilleans its immediate supporters, a minority of ly', was he not conceding, on the basis of share basic cultural patterns with other Bougainvilleans. No matter to Chomsky: 'natural boundaries' that the Solom ons Melanesians, and derive their traditional he links the rebel cause with that of the East archipelago sh ould be integrated, with languages from similar sources. In post- Timorese. In the Can berra Tim es (2 1/ 1/9 5) Bougain ville resources powering that new con tact times they have embraced the he told us that Australia could be responsi- nation rather than creating longer term a m e Christian religions and m odern lan- ble for the PNG Defence Force's brutal problem s in PNG? With PNG dependent guages (Tok Pisin and English ). attempts to suppress 'a legitimate move- on the Bougainville mine for any sem - The m oral of Buckley's mish-m ash m ent fo r self-determination'. At the Na- blance of economic independence, Whit- was that Australia, through its involve- tiona] Press Club (24/ 1/95) we were treated lam did not raise that issue again. ment in Bou gainville, was being drawn to an anarchistic melange of contemporary The sententiousness has not all com e into conflict with Indonesia. Apparently history that defied the complexities of in- from the left. Brian Bu ckley, in the Herald there were even ' Australian mercenaries' ternational relations and seem ed to deny Sun (17/12/92) info rmed us that Indone- working fo r PN G in Bougainville, sug- the protective functions of the state. sians had actually 'offered arms' to the gesting that Bu ckley's 'reliable sources' Ironically by equating the causes of the BRA. Indeed, 'm any observers believe m ay owe som ething to the BIG's propa- East Timorese and the BRA, Chomsky is Indonesia has a long-term, if not urgent ga nda. Its recent m edia release 'Austral- virtually encouraging Jakarta to pressure policy to assist the destabilisation ofPNG'. ian and British Forces N ow Invading Bou- Port Moresby to take the m ost repressive My mem ory rather tells m e that Indone- gainville' (19/12/94), actually had a Brit- line and not concede provincial autonomy sian spokesmen have been known to sug- ish submarine nam ed Conqueror off the if that will be held up as a m odel for an East gest that 'communism ' was behind Bou- Bougainville coast with plans 'to capture Timor settlem ent. gainville secession, and to be concerned BRA leaders' and 'orders to shoot any- Linking East Timor and Bougainville is, that, if successful, it could only encourage thing that m oves'. Such is BIG's credibil- of course, not original. Gough Whitlam's Irian Jayanese, East Tim orese, Sou th ity that the Social Responsibility and Jus- attitude to Indonesia's takeover was influ- Moluccans, sundry Sumatrans, etc. to re- tice Committee of the Uniting Church in enced by the possibility of secession in sist Javanese hegem ony. Buckley cannot Australia wrote to Stephen Loosely (20/ PNG in 1974-5 . For Whitlam, East Timor distinguish between alleged Indonesian 12/1994) expressing concern that this was m erely a corrupt and torpid rem nant of interest in 'destabilising' and real migh t be true and hoping that his Senate Iberian (and so, fascist) empire; a carto- s concern about 'instability'. subcommittee on Foreign Affairs, Defence graphical absurdity; too sm all and poor to and Trade would act 'urgently to prevent be viable; with too many 'half-breeds'(Whit- OME OF THE FANTAS IES WERE: further bloodshed'. N ot unexpectedly the lam 's term ) in its leadership to be regarded • The Solomon Islands governm ent had submarine has not yet surfaced. as indigenous and legitimate; quite unpre- spoken to Indonesia 'about support' for Som ehow Buckley managed to fi nd a dictable politically; bound to provoke the Bougainville secession . When ? connection between fear of a dispute with Indonesian generals and becom e a focus of • Other Pacific nations 'support Bougain- Indonesia and the desirability of con tin- discord in the region. Better to get it over ville's UN application', The UN has never ued aid to PNG. Why, he asked should quickly. entertained a 'Bougainville' application, Australia 'continue to fund PNG to the Whitlam was determined PN G would since the 'Bougainville Interim Govern- tune of $300 m illion a year when its go to independence intact. If East Timor m ent' has no standing. But complaints leaders threaten our mining enterprises became independent, what argum ents could have been made to the UN Human Rights with expropriation and are conducting a be used against Bougainville's claims? Sure, Commission and the Secretary General brutal military cam paign against the it was much smaller in population (then has sent observers. racially distinct people of Bougainville'? roughly 100,000 versus 65 0,000), but, even • The Bougainville rebels 'have the sup- N either statem ent was true: PN G sought without its copper and gold, it was more port of most chiefs and m ost of the peo- equity, not expropriation, and the war is viable than m ost of Oceania's mini-states ple'. It would be interesting to know if against the BRA, not the Bougainville would be; it was a distinct entity geograph- Buckley has the fa intest idea what a 'chief' people. The only corollary I could draw ically from the rest of PNG, although linked m eans in Bougainville but, in any case, from Bu ckley's mish-mash, is that A us- by traditions, ethnicity, intermarriage, local 100 'chiefs' met at Buka in Aprill993 and tralia should withdraw aid and leave PN G trade and missionary groups with the west- asked for the restoration of provincial to fragm ent-

VOLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 11 THE N ATION: 1

ANDREW H AM ILTON Just a lot of hokus-Bolkus

IND

12 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 Leaders found, teams gone m1ss1ng• •

L,LmERM PARTY h" found no Messi•h in John ison, is the man steering Australia into a clear future. Howard. Most of the favourable opinion polls can be But he has to attend to taws as well. The Gov- written off to the new leader's 'honeymoon', and to a ernment has become a ministerial system operating bit of serendipity in taking office at a time when the without a Cabinet, without strategic or tactical lead­ Government must begin to dishonour election prom­ ership. Keating is rem.ote from most of his ministers, ises to bring the budget into line. Most of the ingredi­ and even more from the policy battles they are fight­ ents of Liberal instability are still there, and, in Paul ing. The failure to use Cabinet has two particular prob­ Keating, Howard has an opponent who is adept both lems: it is important that battles should be fought out at chipping away at his enemies' weaknesses and at ritually, even when the outcome is clear, because it finding the issue that will divide them. binds the participants to the outcome and helps them But it is not clear that Keating has time on his rehearse the arguments necessary to defend them; just side. A high proportion of the electorate yearns to be as importantly, it helps inculcate in all ministers a rid of him, but it is frightened of the alternatives; oth­ sense of the government as a whole. ers have an instinctive loyalty to Labor but sense the The woodchip debacle illustrates the problem, tiredness of the Government and the vulnerability of with its spectre of two silly ministers each acting at Keating and his ministers on allegations of compe­ the behest of their own departments, as pure advo­ tence. In contrast, Howard's great strength is that he cates for the 'clients' they serve. does not frighten the horses and has always seemed But governments have clashes of interests all the competent. time. What distinguishes the performances of For Howard, the big risks are in his personality Faulkner and Beddall from performances of the min­ and his intrinsic conservatism. Last time around, isters in earlier debates is that a Richardson and a Howard became isolated even from his natural allies, Griffiths-even lesser performers such as a Kelly and distrusting them more and more. Like Keating, he a Lee-always knew instinctively that the survival presides poorly and delegates badly. His wife Janette of the government was the first consideration, and is an acute confidante and advise, but their closeness that the decision ultimately taken must one that can can serve to isolate him from his followers. He is a be sold to the maximum number of the government's good speaker, with a natural dignity, but has always constituencies. Their ministerial offices provided, first seemed somewhat diminished on television. he does and foremost, political advice based on views of what not, however, terrify the electorate, as some of his was best for the Government, and only secondarily shriller predecessors have done. advocacy for any particular constituency. Howard's conservatism puts him at risk not so The new lot does not do this, and now there is much because of his inclinations on matters such as no mechanism to hold things together, until there is the Queen and the flag, but because of his cautious a crisis. And when that occurs, the Keating style of instinct. Labor is doing enough things badly for gov­ crisis management-grenade-throwing- is ernment to fall into his lap, and the Liberals' best hardly ever likely to restore equilibrium. chance of yet again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory comes from continuing internal dissension K EATING's PROBLEM is that there are actual or po­ (which Keating is skilled at stirring up). That suggests tential administrative crises in all but a few of the caution, keeping the focus on government perform­ portfolio areas. Even in some of the quieter ones, he ance, but Howard must also lead, avoiding the philo­ faces substantial umest if the expenditure review com­ sophical difficulties that have so long bedevilled the mittee, as it probably must, forces big cuts in govern­ Liberals and projecting a sense of optimism and a ment spending in the course of drawing up the next vision for the future. budget. Keating' attack on Howard is much more cleverly Howard's honeymoon will wear off. But if he focused on Howard's weaknesses than is appreciated. keeps plugging at the question of whether Keating can Hammering away at Howard the Treasurer of a dec­ govern, and whether he is doing so effectively, he can ade ago, and at the supposed Lost Years, will not work: probably sustain the Opposition through a period of half of the electorate simply does not remember it, establishing its own policy credibility, even with some and both that half and the half that does remember it active dissension about outcomes. He is no ogre, after have plenty more reasons to remember Keating as all. Perhaps, as Keating suggests, he is boring, plodding Treasurer and his annual promises to turn the econo­ and lacks imagination. But he has usually seemed safe. my rotmd by Christmas. So Keating wants to portray Howard as a second-class thinker, someone who is • indecisive and lacking in vision. Keating, by compar- Jack Waterford is deputy editor of the Canberra Times.

V OLUME 5 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 13 THE NATION

DAVlD GLANZ Marvellous (middle) Melbourne

M ASS ""STS ON TH' " e m UN,. People pmh­ the fact that it would become the major political issue ing in trees to stop them being chainsawed, or cut­ of the day.' Nonetheless, the meeting was to set a ting down cyclone-wire fencing to invade building tone; of the 30 who volunteered to help, half are still sites. Demonstrations in the park, demonstrations in involved. the streets, demonstrations outside Parliament. Enthusiasm aside, the campaign nearly faltered Activists' meetings of hundreds, rallies of thousands. at the start. According to Peter Cronin, who attended Welcome to the new face of 'middle Melbourne'. the first meeting and went on to become SAP's public None of the central figures in this campaign events impresario, an amateurish organisational comes from the front ranks of Jeff Kennett's traditional approach nearly smothered it. It took the quick-smart enemies, the ALP and the Victorian Trades Hall Coun­ introduction of a division of responsibilities and the cil. Most have only scant experience, if any, of polit­ establishment of working parties to begin to create ical activism. The Save Albert Park campaign (SAP), the professional style that has been SAP's hallmark which wants the Victorian government to relocate the since. 1996 Formula One Grand Prix from the i.Imer-city park Style is not usually a word associated with protest that has been designated for it, defies easy categorisa­ movements. As a rule, a campaign's detractors harp tion. But for the past year the campaign has become on its grunge elements and alleged ratbaggery. Its sup­ the most sustained, widespread fight against the porters are too busy trying to win their aims to worry Kennett government. about style at all. But SAP has set out to make each It is a sign of both the moral outrage caused by protest a polished performance. As one newsletter the government's plan, and of the lassitude prevail­ reported: 'Save Albert Park has been making final prep­ ing among the conventional forces of opposition, that arations for mass protest. In keeping with all our a movement which began at a residents' meeting activities, it will be well-organised, dignified, peace­ beside a children's playground has become a major ful, good-humoured, and perhaps just a little different.' problem for the ruling Liberals, according to the So, the morning after 54 demonstrators were party's own polling. arrested for being inside a fence erected around them Those who came to that early protest in Febru­ as they picketed, SAP campaigners unrolled fencing ary 1994 had no intention of putting themselves at around the Grand Prix organisers' office. On the wire the head of such a campaign. lain Stewart, one of the dangled plastic signs that mimicked those deployed first residents to voice concern, and one of the few the day before to declare the area out of bounds. The with experience in the trade union movement, came day after contractors felled 404 trees across the park, armed with a resolution: 'That was fatal-I became blindfolded SAP members stood along the park's co-coordinator of the group. I certainly didn't foresee roads, one on every fresh tree stump. The thousands

14 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 Nearly two-thirds of Labor voters, according to one opinion poll, are hostile to the idea of motor racing in the park, yet they seem under-represented in meetings and rallies. There is backing from unions representing, among others, teachers, health workers, electricians, plumbers and telecommunication workers; but the strategically important construction unions vary in attitude from indifference to hostility, effectively vetoing support from the Victorian Trades Hall Council. This is not a campaign that many on the left have embraced easily or wholeheartedly.

who came to 'reclaim the park' by breaching build­ But, although the sight of an enraged, mobilised ing-site security formed a 200-metre-long phalanx and and self-professed 'middle Melbourne' in motion can twirled the campaign's hallmark yellow ribbons above be impressive, the very elements that contribute to their heads, creating a breathtaking spectacle and a its strength also contain potentially damaging weak­ surge of spirit. nesses. Those used to acting decisively within the The skill and speed with which some of these kind of hierarchies that typify business or adminis­ protests have been mounted- the 'fencing of the tration find it difficult to adapt to the participatory opposition' was carried out some eight hours after the democracy that is the normal stuff of protest m ove­ idea was conceived-reflects the particular strengths m ents. SAP's central leadership emerged early in the that SAP's core middle-class m embership has brought campaign and hugs its decision-making powers jeal­ to the campaign. They tend to be professionals­ ously. Members are consulted, but rarely allowed to actors, writers, computer specialists, the self-em­ make m eaningful choices. Suggestions for further pro­ ployed-who are u sed to deploying considerable tests have sometimes foundered because leading fig­ resources in creating, supervising and carrying out ures are too tired to make them happen, and too wary projects. 'I've been involved in campaigns where rais­ of allowing others to take responsibility. There is a ing $40 or $50 is a m ajor achievem ent/ says lain genuine failure to understand how a lively gathering Stewart. 'For this campaign, $4000 or $5000 of 200 supporters can produce ideas, en ergy and isn't a difficulty.' inspiration rather than anarchic chaos. The middle-class, property-owning, non-political W HAT IS REMARKABLE is the extent to which these image of SAP has also cut it off from important sources people, contrary to their own expectations, have of support. This is not a youthful campaign and is in changed enormously in a year or less. Many voted no immediate danger of looking 'cool'. Nearly two­ Liberal in 1992, but would rather stroll across crushed thirds of Labor voters, according to one opinion poll, glass than do so again. Others would have turned up are hostile to the idea of motor racing in the park, yet their noses at demonstrators and 'agitators', but wear they seem under-represented in meetings and rallies. their 'Arrested at Albert Park' T -shirts with pride. There is backing from unions representing, among Shortly before Christmas, the campaign executive others, teachers, health workers, electricians, plumb­ donated to a western-suburbs m etalworkers' strike ers and telecommunication workers; but the strate­ fund. On the picket line, there are discussions between gically important construction unions vary in attitude Photograph above sixtysomething former Communist Party m embers from indifference to hostility, effectively vetoing and p16 by and sixtysomething former conservatives over how support from the Victorian Trades Hall Council. This Colin Bullbrook. to respond to police violence. is not a campaign that many on the left have embraced

V oLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 15 Peter Cronin, a founding member of SAP, lives in South Melbourne: 'I'm just a baby in terms of political activism. I was one of the crowd in the Moratorium and 1975 demonstrations, but I've n ever come out before in any strong way-so it's been a bit of a surprise to myself. 'I've always been an ALP voter, but I suppose it's Kennett's style of conservatism that's really riled me. That led m e into the campaign as much as the concern for the park. 'I'm very fond of Melbourne-the pace, the lifestyle and the traditional things like the Botanical Gardens and the galleries, and sitting on the streets and having a coffee. And I see that under threat, a whole tradition that's going to go. 'The "event-led" recovery doesn't fit in with what a lot of people want. I just find it all very Sydney-I've always thought of Sydney as America and Melbourne as Europe. 'I think Kennett was shocked when he went to the first rally and saw the range of people there, the socio-econom ic backgrounds, the political allegiances. 'They mow1ted a campaign against us. We w ere branded enemies of the people who were going to rob the economy of a great deal of money, a front for the Labor Party and the International Socialists, and just a pack of Nimbys.' Cronin has organised most of SAP's public protests and events. 'My influences have been in theatre. M y family has always been very theatrical and organising con­ certs and shows, and I've always been directing amateur theatre. 'I like task-analysing things and I can get a picture in my head of the end look, and work out the steps to get there. Years of teaching disabled children has helped. 'A lot of people who come to our rallies don't normally attend rallies and I wanted to create a sense of safety, and I spent a lot of time making them look good-quality rallies in a way. I don't want to sound pompous, but they've been stylish and had a sense of flair about them. People like that. 'I've used middle-classness- n ot in the sense of mediocrity-as a campaign strategy to maintain the support and m orale of the Melbourne church-going public. Sometimes you have to fight yourself-you have to be very measured in what you say.' • -David Glanz

easily or wholeheartedly. Despite these barriers, the and public focus, and despite SAP's in-built political fight to save the park has become a statewide issue. reticence it has had that role thrust upon it. Part of the reason is the damage that construction 'I think we were filling a void,' says lain Stewart. work has already caused in the park. When trees came 'In another climate and another time we mightn't have down in large numbers, hundreds of membership reached that point but when you think about what's applications flooded the SAP office. Although Albert happened since Kennett was elected-Trades Hall led Park, which includes land reclaimed from a former a temporary flurry that collapsed after two rallies, and tip, was never in the stakes for World Heritage list­ the Richmond and Northland secondary college ing, it is obvious to many that clearfelling and the disputes have both been prominent but laying of tarmac will not enhance one of the city's haven't attracted wholesale support.' major lungs. History tends to point to the same conclusion. ERMANY PEOPLE, the campaign has become a meta­ Two Grand Prix races have been staged in Albert Park phor for all they believe to be wrong with the Ken­ (the main Victorian venue over the years has been nett government. The project is in flagrant violation Phillip Island, with eight), but it was abandoned as a of the wishes of large numbers, perhaps the majority, racing circuit in 1956. There is no reason to believe of people living in the vicinity of the park. There has that problems of noise, pollution and traffic have been no consultation of any meaningful kind, and this shrunk since. situation has been exacerbated by the amalgamation But perhaps the main reason for the campaign's of local cou ncils. With government-appointed prominence is that it has helped to compensate for commissioners instead of elected councillors in the an abdication of leadership by Labor and the Trades town halls, there is no constitutional vehicle for ex­ Hall Council. It is nearly two years since the coun cil pressing, or even measuring, popular dissent. last called a mass rally to voice discontent at the Ken­ The introduction of legislation to help the Grand nett government's agenda. And the ALP in Victoria Prix on its way fits an increasingly familiar pattern seems more concerned to exorcise the ghosts of 'fi­ whereby State Parliament overrides the checks and nancial irresponsibility' than to mobilise those goad­ balances available to citizens. More than 50 statutes ed by government policy. Discontent has not passed by the Kennett government prohibit the right disappeared in the state but it has often lacked a clear to take matters to the Supreme Court. At Albert Park,

16 EUREKA STREET • M AR C H 1995 residents have lost the right to sue over any damages ment is still well-placed to carry out construction arising from the construction of the circuit or the run­ work, if necessary with a substantial police presence ning of the race, and the right to protest has been to deter protesters. On the other hand, the odds are a severely curtailed. By the end of January, 160 SAP sup­ little more favourable to the protesters than it might porters had been arrested, thanks to the Grand Prix seem. In the past six months the government has legislation allowing race organisers to declare parts retreated on privatisation of the Port of Melbourne, of the park-a publicly owned open space-off-limits suffered a string of setbacks associated with the cam­ at any time of their choosing. paign to save Richmond Secondary College, and seen Kennett's enthusiasm for the race reflects his another protest movement force the reopening of the general approach of a 'major events-led' recovery-a inner-city Fitzroy Swimming Pool. fascination with the Crown Casino and showbusiness In the end, the outcome may be depend on some­ and sporting extravaganzas that jars with many who thing as simple and unexpected as, well, attitude. For believe that the bread and butter priorities of govern­ the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who love ment have been relegated to a distant second place. It the park and hate arrogance, autocracy and waste, too has also fed whispers of cronyism: the key figure behind the Grand Prix plan is Ron Walker, federal Liberal Party Julia Hamer, a volunteer in the SAP office, lives in St Kilda West: treasurer, a director at the casino and 'I've been in the area for two years and became involved with my partner through our friend­ an acknowledged buddy of the Pre­ ship network. It was something that was going to be across the road from us and, I suppose, mier. opposed to my whole way of life. Most significantly, perhaps, to 'But [my commitment] fairly rapidly deepened-it isn't at all just a local issue and I've many people the Albert Park plan every sympathy for the broadening of the movement. There are so many things that concern symbolises the government's spend­ me about the running of this state. There's been a reversal of the situation with Queensland. ing priorities. SAP has argued-so far We're now the kind of state to be despised by right-thinking people around the rest of Australia.' without rebuttal-that the race will Hamer is the daughter of the former Victorian Liberal Premier, Sir Rupert Hamer, but cost at least $250 million over 10 diverged from the family tradition as a student in the early 1970s: 'I went with a leftwing years, and the government's promise friend to a Billy Graham event. My friend protested and was punched in the stomach by to cover race organisers against loss Graham's goons. That set me thinking a lot, I can tell you. means that much of this will be at the 'I've always been a strong member of the teachers' union, but I've never been an organiser taxpayer's expense-an expense that or instigator. I've always been one of the crowd.' could largely be avoided if the race 'The experience of taking part in, and taking responsibility for, the SAP campaign has were held at an established venue, begun to alter that. Me and everybody I'm working with, we've all started to talk about how such as Philip Island or Sandown. we're changing. I see myself doing things I've never done before. Some people look to me for Not only does Albert Park need things-these are adults, not children. I feel I'm in the thick of something important. to be reconfigured in motor-friendly 'I think a lot about structures and how to set them up and make them work. It's very fashion, including the building of pit satisfying. We've got to move on and include people with lots of energy-that's absolutely garages, run-offs and other permanent essential. But there's got to be a central control. We need a balance between those two things. features, but much of the infrastruc­ 'People have developed and changed and grown in this campaign in a way I've never seen ture will need to be reassembled and before. I've seen somebody in the campaign change completely. Companionship had made dismantled annually. As one SAP leaf­ him much more open and cheerful. let puts it, the estimated $12 million 'People are working together for something they believe in.' -David Glanz this will cost each year could put 45 • ambulances and 150 ambulance officers on the road. The Adelaide Grand Prix has much has already been sacrificed to allow a little thing created fewer than 100 full-time jobs. like an upstart politician to stand in their way. Middle It was not only the founders of SAP who failed to Melbourne has set its jaw firmly, stiffened its upper grasp the campaign's ability to mobilise many thou­ lip, and resolved to fight to the finish. • sands from beyond the neighbourhood of the park. It seems that Jeff Kennett made the same mistake. His David Glanz is a freelance journalist and a member appearance at SAP's first public rally-standing smil­ of SAP. ing and anns akimbo in front of the speakers' dais­ was a public-relations blunder. Clearly, he had neither Counselling expected 10,000 to attend, nor the vociferous recep­ tion he received. It was arguably at that point that If you, or someone you know, could benefit from confidential professiona l counselli ng, please phone the campaign became a phenomenon. It was also then, Martin Prescott, BSW, MSW, MAASW, clinica l mem­ it would seem, that the Premier decided that staging ber of the Association of Catholi c Psychotherapists. of the race in the park was a point of honour. Ind ividua ls, couples and families catered for. Can he be swayedZ SAP's failure to date to win decisive trade union backing means that the govern- Elwood and Bentleigh, ph (03) 557 8525

V OLUME 5 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 17 THE N ATION RosEv Cows Thri

the second time. It was a Lu" Pm i; opoo fm bussiness"'N"'' again. Its brilliant, gro- spooky experience. Without tesque beauty lights up the harbour distraction of being responsible for like a great urban pantomime. anybody else's welfare, I found m y­ Amusement parks are strange plac­ self lost in a kind of morbid reverie. m e from es, with their 'boulevard of broken Part of the reason for this was that I those blindingl y dreams' aesthetic, their simulated had visited the local history section cheerful school photo­ pay-for-it, push-button disaster sce­ of the public library earlier that da y. graphs almost all of us have narios, and their hordes of hungry, I knew that Luna Park had a family tucked away in some album on top prowling adolescents. skeleton from sometime in the late of a wardrobe somewhere. The pho­ I have only visited Luna Park '70s, but since I was quite young at tograph circulating in the media of twice. In 1988 (t he year it was closed the time I had no real understanding the two little brothers was one of for the second time) I was working at of the events. So it was with some those familiar sibling pixie snaps the Royal Alexander Hospital for curiosity and a little trepidation that taken when there was a spare Children and we took som e termi­ I reached for the huge book of news moment in a department store or nally ill kids for an outing during the clippings which documented the var­ supermarket on an afternoon's school holidays. Being a wussie type ious stops, starts and scandals of grocery shopping. The kind of photo­ I was not altogether keen about go­ Luna Park over its 60-year history. graph that people proudly displa y on ing on the rides (I'm one of those After the initial stories celebrat­ their desks at work or carry with people who becomes instantly terri­ ing its sentimental stature in Syd­ them in theirwallets. There is some­ fied when the Manly ferry is rough, ney's cultural memory-the perfect thing chilling about the use of these or when there's the slightest bit of place to go when you had everything domestic images for a media autopsy. turbulence on the plane). This time, or nothing to do-l was soon con­ It's as if the bland optimism of the however, I was morall y obliged to fronted with hea dline after hea dline photographs mocks what we now accompany the kids on whatever screaming 'Luna Park Tragedy'. Sev­ know to be the destiny of their sub­ m eans of mechanical m ay hem en people had been killed in a fire jects. Perhaps also, the sheer banali­ caught their fancy. They were fiend­ inside the ghost train at Luna Park in ty of the portraits, the fact that eve­ ishly ambitious. Their mission was 19 79 . On page after page, the scat­ ryone has an identical version of to brave every ride at least once tered details of the story uniolded. them lost somewhere with the rem ­ within the hour. I summoned up my The victims, their faces plastered nants of their own childhood, courage, shut my eyes and hung on over the front pages of every local reminds us all the more painfully like hell. After all, I had a lifetime to and national newspaper, were four that it could just as easily have been Photograph of avoid Luna Park; they had a year, 13-year-old schoolboys, a father in one of us. Luna Park ride perhaps less, to conquer it. his mid-30s and his two young sons. As I turned the pages of the book, by Andrew Stark. Yesterday, I visited Luna Park for The faces of the four boys beamed at the harrowing particulars of the

18 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 disaster followed: the thousands of perfect metaphor for adolescence. parents who had rung local po­ They are a celebration of the lice stations the night of precipice, the liminal moment, the the fire because frenzied oscillation between hero­ their chil­ ism and failure. They are also about dr e n experimentation, about acting out possible selves in pseudo danger, a·bout rehearsing for life or death. I guess that's why my young friends from the hospital were so fearless. There is a haunting anti -alcohol cam­ paign screening on television at the moment targeting adolescents. The scene is an amusement park. A young boy finds love but throws it away by getting drunk and appalling the young woman he adores. Amuse­ ment parks are about taking risks, making mistakes but also about tri­ umphing over them . to There is something unspeakably tragic about a simulated nightmare becoming real. It's as if some un­ yet arrived written, universal contract allowing home; the four one to test the world is shockingly young boys from betrayed. As if, in response to one Waverley College, frail gesture of defiance, who had known l i{ T the world roared back. each other since kin­ dergarten and had at­ v vANDER ING THROUGH L UNA PARK tended Mass before they that afternoon I searched for some went to the park that kind of tribute to those who had night; the story of the fifth died. All I could find were some friend who was left behind official police photographs of the because he hadn't managed ruins from the fire. The pictures to fit on the little ghost train formed part of a eries of story boards carriage; the parents and on­ providing a brief history of the park. lookers who formed a human The photographs and their accom­ chain to search in the sm oke and panying text were displayed in a darkness, for fear that if every per­ small room opposite the fast food son did not link hands some might counters. never return. Or the letter in The I telephoned Luna Park manage­ Please send two free copies of Sydney Morning Herald from the ment the next day to ask whether Eureka Street to: parents of the four boys, praising the there were any plans for a memorial. It turns out there is actually a small police for their gallantry and sensi­ Name ...... tivity. And, months later, the in­ plaque with some words by Michael quests, the evidence of witnesses, Leunig on the site of the original the police, the firemen, the manage­ ghost train. Address ...... ment, the coroners, the electrical There are future plans- under experts, the villains, the heroes and the creative guidance of Martin so on and so on. Finally,the official Sharpe-for a memorial garden on verdict: cause of accident the same site with a Leunig sculpture ...... Postcode ...... '"r unknown. a little further down the track. Amusement parks are strange My name is ...... 1. HERE liAS BEEN GREAT MEDIA places. I guess, in some ways, there is no more appropriate place for a excitement in Sydney over the Address ...... reopening of Luna Park. The baby­ monument to young death. • boomer press has gone into senti­ mental overdrive, telling us all how ...... Postcode ...... wonderful it was to be a teenager in a simpler world. This is not surpris­ Rosey Golds is a freelance writer, Tel ...... ing, for amu ement parks are the and lives in Sydney.

VoLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 19 THE NATION It talzes all sorts Yes, but when it com es to dictionaries of biography, some sort s might still be more equal than others. Jim Davidson repotls. A LMOST DAILY wE ARE TOLD THAT we live in a When the dictionary decided in the 1980s to issue postmodern, postcolonial culture, and on a planet a Missing Persons volume, it was found that in addi­ increasingly subject to the forces of globalisation. In tion to the categories the initial volumes had skipped short it's a 'borderless world', as someone said the over, such as 17th-century regicides (not appreciative other day, when considering the difficulty of control­ of the monarchy) and road and railway engineers and ling pornography on computer networks. Neverthe­ contractors (lowly occupations), there was a surpris­ less computers themselves have given a new lease of ing number of notables who had been deemed, for one life to conserving, and often conservative, projects. reason or another, not to have made the grade. These The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary included Mercator, Marconi and J.C. Bach (foreign­ took nearly 50 years to achieve: the second, larger and ers), Radclyffe Hall (a lesbian), Jane of the fighting thoroughly revised, took only five. And now we learn ships, Wisden of cricket, Stanley Gibbons of stamps, that the British Dictionary of National Biography, also Mrs Beeton of the cookbook and Lloyd and Barclay of dating from the 1880s, is also to be thoroughly the banks (trade). Indeed class attitudes still swirl revised, while its editors are coming to regard around the issue of inclusion: people at public m eet­ print media as a spin-off from increasingly ings tell the editors that the Labour cabinet minister Aborigines have sophisticated computer software. and absconder John Stonehouse should be included, At a conference in Canberra last month, whereas colleagues at Oxbridge high tables-a be­ fared poorly, as representatives of a number of dictionaries of fits bright boys awarded a special place in the class national biography gathered to reflect on their system-are quite uncomfortable with the idea. well as women. ventures. Symbolically, proceedings were The Australian Dictionary of Biography in many opened by Colin Matthew, editor of the New respects follows the DNB pattern. It was conceived, Aborigines in Dictionary of National Biography, the origi­ not so much in the high noon of imperialism, but nal being seen as the progenitor of a series almost at its reverse, when the old dominions began the early around the world. The Canadian one was to stir and to realise that cultural divergence from established by a bequest left by a person who England might possibly be a good thing. If not quite volumes are kept the DNB by his bedside; there is also an Whitlamite, the first volumes were informed by many American one (scarcely discussed at Canber­ of the assumptions apparent in Donald Horne's The depicted ra), and, since 1990, a New Zealand one, which Luck y Country or Peter Coleman's Australian runs to volumes appearing in Maori. A South Civilisation. The details might be different, along with essentially as African clictionary of national biography seems cultural parameters, but basically Australia was to have ground to a halt-scarcely surprising­ viewed as an Anglo-Saxon variant culture. obstacles, while the Irish seem to have severe organisa­ The early volumes of the ADB in particular will tional problems. (Part of the reason for this may have to be revised one day, and already there is talk to be overcome: be a generous inclusiveness, which extends as of a Missing Per ons volume appearing at the end of far as President Kennedy.) the current series, 1940-1980. Some of the omissions women are The British Dictionary of National Biog­ are surprising. The shipwrecked Mrs Fraser is one, taken for raphy set a standard that the former domin­ for when the first lists were drawn up it was just be­ ions at first were in no hurry to follow-after fore Nolan, White and Sculthorpe began to mytholo­ granted, and so all the work was an imperial one, rather than gise her. And whereas early in the series most English being strictly British. (This also explains why visitors such as Trollope, Dilke, Froucle, Twopeny, are scarcely Boac\icea was given a guernsey, but none of her and Francis Adams are included, later the Hungarian Roman adversaries.) However, its collaborative Egan Kisch was not. Fortunately he has been picked present. nature and affirmative tone as it dealt with the up by the 1940-1980 period (which, unlike its prede­ greatful dead would in clue course be em.ulatecl cessors, is centred on the date of death). And an inter­ elsewhere. esting entry it should be: in Europe Kisch is famous Meanwhile the nation-building component in the for having exposed the spy Colonel Redl, who sold dictiona1y became more explicit as the venture moved Austria's defence secrets to the Russians. into the 20th century. Leslie Stephen, the first editor, In ac\clition, as Patricia Grimshaw pointed out, had been happy to include thieves and murderers, Aborigines have fared poorly, as well as women. Abo­ probably on the grounds that these figures often had rigines in the early volumes are depicted essentially greater contemporary resonance than diplomats or as obstacles, to be overcome: women are taken for barristers: but in the Edwardian period an entry was granted, and so are scarcely present. This attitude may seen to confer endorsement. not be quite as bad as that of one of the DNB editors

20 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 in the 1920s, who opined of one borderline case-in a nation, or at least of all the peoples living within a wonderfully establishment combination of certitude designated space, seem s to be crucial to su ch and clubbiness-that 'If she had been a man, we might enterprises. Increasingly they also include foreign have considered including her.' But it is now sexist nationals, and nationals of their own who may have nonetheless. Of the one thousand entries in the first made their reputation abroad-so long as they were two volumes, only twelve are on women: for the most educated, and therefore initially shaped, by the recently completed series, the six volumes 1890-1939, dictionary's country. the proportion has risen to 20 per cent. The only higher The more multicultural the country, the more proportion of women will be found, says Grimshaw, arbitrary the definition: quite early the editors of the in the index category 'eccentrics', where they stand Austrian DN B decided that, for the period 1815- 1950, at fifty per cent (of four). Meanwhile the New Dic­ the dictionary's ambit would be those lands under tionary of Biography has decided to appoint a roving Austrian rule at any given time. So Hungary goes out woman editor, who will comment on all articles as at 1867, while Donizetti is in and so is the Ukrainian they come in. Radic, who died in Stalin's purges. Both were born People might also be Austrian subjects. As if that span struck by the corrigenda that was not wide enough, the logic appear from time to time. Cer­ of the alphabet places Mozart tainly one m ay smile at the next to a leading N azi. em endation to the Atkinson It would not take a great deal entry, where one is advised to to blow apart the conception of a substitute for 'died in infancy', unified dictionary of biography. the phrase 'lived to a ripe old Increasingly the pithy, m em ­ age at Orange.' Such mistakes, orialising style will come under cheerfully acknowledged, are fire: in New Zealand ideas of a an inevitable corollary of the pre-contact Maori volume were A DB project. These articles soon abandoned when it was may turn out to be the germ of decided that the conventions of full-length biographies (like Maori narrative might be m ore Lyrebird Rising from Louise Dyer); it is easier to be properly dealt with by anthropologists than by histo­ right about these things then. But often the entry here rians. The strong contemporary interest in popular will be the only notice that a particular life receives, culture is also either largely ignored or steamrollered especially now that the criteria for inclusion have by the existing style of the biographical dictionaries; m oved more clearly towards representative live at least the group entries now being developed by the rather than significant ones. Boxers and rabbiters will British afford a partial solution to the problem . But be found in the ADB pages, as well as criminals and the simple fact is that most nations are increasingly theatricals, let alone judges and generals. Even Azar­ coming to resemble a cluster of constituencies, an ia Chamberlain scores an entry-a sensible inclusion aggregate of publics. given the fact that this is a work of reference which Already there are som e individuals-colonial must in part be aimed at the future. governors-who crop up in two or three of the various The ADB has becom e a formidable machine. DNBs. At the m om ent this affords different perspec­ Entries are determined by State working parties (there tives. But what will happen when, as was aired a is an additional group for the military) who also couple of times at the confe rence, the different publi­ determine relative lengths and find the appropriate ca tions are all accessible on the sam e computer authors. The office in Canberra gathers all the certifi­ system ? To increasing segm entation of the audience cates of births, deaths and m arriages, and checks the at home would be added a global dimension in the entries for accuracy. House style emphasises places material. This might indeed be the next logical step, and dates, but descriptive flourishes are permitted and but standardisation would inevitably follow the huge to som e degree encouraged. The result is an extraor­ proliferation of entries. It would be ironic, then, if dinary tapestry of Australian life, and now that the this, in turn, were to squeeze out the original 'national' volumes to 1939 have been recently completed, it will compon ents from the on e vastly- layered world be called upon m ore and m ore as a work of dictionary of biography. • reference. Jim Davidson teaches Humanities at Victoria Uni­ N EVERTH ELESS ONE WONDERS how the various versity of Technology. dictionaries will manage in the future. Despite the 'N ational Biographies and N ation al Id entity' disclaimer that the A DB does not have the word conference was spon sored in February by the 'national' in its title-the post-war German diction­ Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Humani­ ary was careful to enunciate its catchment area as the ties Research Centre (both at the Australian Nation­ German 'cultural and language area'-the profile of a al University), and the N ational Library of Australia.

V OLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 21 Victoria waives the rules

0 N 22 Q,e

22 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 the courts would be a m ore appropri­ ate place fo r such refl ections rather than at the discretion of an unelected governor, but in Victoria the courts' very existence depends on an execu­ tive that perceives inconveniences T AumAUAN ~!~~~~~ ' :~~w~~~nc< It do"n't take su ch as international human rights long for a barefoot child to learn that the dark bitumen of the road absorbs m ore h ea t instruments, equal opportunity laws than the concrete kerb and the white lines. Parents puzzle over the sun's path in the and applications for judicial review to sky so they can park the car where it will be in shade when they return. Archimedes be illegitimate. often ponders such summer questions as why people put the shiny side out when As to a Governor acting upon or wrapping food in foil to cook at a barbecu e. The shiny side refl ects the heat away from contra ry to the advice of the Premier, the fo od within. If the potatoes were parcelled with the dull side out, not only would both the Australia Act and the Victo­ the foil absorb m ore heat, but the shiny surface inside would keep the h eat in, just rian Constitution now require that as in a Thermos flask. 'advice' to the Governor should be When you consider h ow we learn about scien ce, it is not surprising that a certain given by the Prime Minis ter or am ount of confusion reigns. In the past 20 years, science educators have becom e Premier. Conventionally, the 'reserve aware that in fact we are all natural scientists. In particular, children bundle up th eir powers' do not require anyone's advice, everyday experiences into a coherent set of beliefs about how things happen . And if they still exist. It was certainly the then they u se those beliefs to predict future events. This m ay not seem a profound intent of the previou s ALP adminis­ observation to anyone wh o h as watched a toddler learning about gravity by dropping tration to remove them from the let­ things: it m eans a great deal m ore if you are in the business of teaching science. ters patent granted in 1986. Before acknowledgem ent of this 'children 's science', educators believed for the What does it all mean ? Just that m ost part that they were filling empty minds with science. But, as Professor Peter the Victorian Governor's authority can Fensham at Monash University and colleagues worldwide have pointed out, educat­ no longer be fo und in conven tion, ing people about science becom es a much more complex task in the face of a prior set tradition, public expectations, politi­ of personal beliefs about the world. The real valu e of learning form al science is being cal or social developm en ts. It is now able to apply it against the grain of everyday experience. But those are just the fi xed . T h ere is n o real place for situations when children are most likely to reject form al scientific explanations or conventions, anyway, in an atm os­ retain them only as som ething theoretical, u seful for passing exam s but of little phere where the prevailing m ood is relevance to real life. that if you see a head, you kick it. Children grow up, and the tussle between form al science and everyday experience Where there are no en trench ed becomes m ore intense-especially if scientific knowledge argu es for a course of constitutional term s, no fundam ental action we don 't want to take. Using a condom clearly hinders transmission of HlV. prin ciples abou t the separation of But everyday experience says only other people-'maybe hom osexu als and drug powers, no entrenched guarantees of addicts, none of my friends'-contract AIDS, so ... And Archimedes knows of human rights or civil liberties, it is nowhere in the world where freeways have solved traffic problem s, but Australia is diffi cult to deny that the rule of law is diffe rent, isn't it? fragile. This sort of thing happen s within scien ce, too. When faced with som ething new, Th ere is, as Dr Jim Thom son, scientists and engineers are just as likely as the rest of us to revert to everyday another constitutional lawyer, wrote experience, the science with which they are familiar rather than a new or esoteric a few years ago, a faint possibility-h e theory. saw it as a threat- that the Comm on­ Before bauxite is loaded into an aluminium sm elter, silica must be rem oved. The wealth might legislate to establish process involves using agitators to mix fin ely ground bauxite with liquid in large and control state constitutional law, tan ks. But engineers in Queensland fo und that the mixing was far from uniform. as was suggested som e time ago with Worse, the contents of the tank began sticking to the sides-to su ch an extent that respect to the 'one vote, one value' six m etres of encrustation could build up in a nine-m etre diam eter tank. pri n cip le . Perhap s one day the It took a group of researchers, led by Martin Welsh at the CSIRO division of Commonwealth m ight seek to legis­ building construction and engineering in Melbourne, to recognise the fundam ental late to protect the independence of the cause of what was a worldwide problem . The engineers who designed the tanks judiciary, or the rights of Aboriginal assumed the liquid in them would behave like water, which does not change its children to equal access to education, properties no m atter how fa st it is mixed. These engineers had had no experience or the right not to be deprived of prop­ with liquids such as the bauxite su spension, which becom e m ore difficult to mix at erty without jus t com pen sa tion . high er speeds. The solution was simple-the agitators were repositioned and oper­ Perhaps.There is an irony in this. In ated at a slower speed. N ot only did this cure the original problem but it significantly Victoria in 1994, Jeff rey Kennett has reduced wear on the agitator blades and produced a 40 per cent saving in power apparently completed a process begun consumption. in Au stralia by Kerr and Whitl am . A A little scientific knowledge is a useful thing, and of real practical value. An Governor with no power is, in all save appreciation of Shakespeare is considered an essential ingredient in a well-educated name, an unelected president. person- but not a knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics. That is a scandal Vive la Republique! • of our technological times. • Moira Rayner is a lawyer and fr ee­ lance journalist. Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer.

V O LUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 23 THE CAROLINE CHISHOLM SERIES: NO. 5

RICHARD HALL Should you ever go across

the sea from Ireland • • •

Transplanted tensions between Irish and English are a well-documented part of Australian Catholic history. Less well-known is the conflict, which endured until the middle decades of this century, between Australia's Irish-born bishops and the Italian Apostolic Delegates who represented the Vatican. Australian-born clergy sometimes got caught in the crossfire.

INAucusT 1948, the Job of being Btitish Fateign and their chieftain, Daniel Mannix, who were strug­ Secretary was probably as heavy a burden as it had gling against what they perceived to be viciou s ever been. The Empire was passing, and many believed prejudice on the part of the Rom an Curia and its that a third world war was imminent: Berlin was under Italian agents in Australia, the Apostolic Delegates. blockade, civil war was raging in Greece, Czechoslo­ Tensions caused by Rom e's policy of encourag­ vakia had gone Communist, and it had been a near­ ing the growth of a native clergy have been a familiar run thing in Italy. In the midst of all this, Ernie Bevin, element of church history, in Australia and elsewhere. the hard-headed former union organiser who held the What makes Kiernan's dispatches unique is their raw­ office of Foreign Secretary, must have been surprised ness and rage. Doubtless the Vatican archives contain and amused by a request from the Australian Prime harsh reports, but they are closed. Diocesan archives Minister, Ben Chifley. The Australian, who was in in Australia, on the testimony of those who have London for what was then still called the Imperial worked in them , tend to be bland and are often sani­ Prime Ministers' Conference, wanted British diplo­ tised. But Kiernan's dispatches report what the Irish matic support for a request to the Holy See that the were saying at the time, libels and all: accusations Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, be made a that one Apostolic Delega te habitually stole from cardinal. convents, complaints from the Archbishop of Bris­ Chifley, who had something of a sardonic streak, bane, James Duhig, about spy networks set up by the gave a deadpan report back to Calwell, at whose in­ delegates, and accounts of Cal well's religious foreign stiga tion he had raised the issue: 'Mr Bevin had said policy. that in a matter of this kind he would prefer not to The first award of a red hat to an Australian-born take any positive action or express any view but gave prelate, to Sydney's Archbishop N orm an Gilroy in Mr Chifley to understand that there were completely 1946, had aroused great passions in Melbourne. The neutral feelings in regard to any such honour as m ight only previous Australian cardinal, the Irish-born be paid to Archbishop Mannix.' Patrick Moran, had also been Archbishop of Sydney, It was not the first time that Calwell had tried to and from the Roman point of view the elevation of pull British strings in support of a cardinal's h at for one of Moran's 'native' successors to the cardinalate Mannix, nor would it be the last. During World War would have been an appropriate next step in the II, Australia's External Affairs Minister, H.V. Evatt, creation of an authentically Australian hierarchy. had raised the matter with the then Foreign Secre­ In some Melbourne minds, however, Gilroy's tary, Anthony Eden, and in 1951 Calwell would ask appointment was understood as a deliberate insult to Richard Casey, External Affairs Minister in the Mannix, and a sign of collusion between perfidious Menzies government, to try again. Albion and the archbishop's enemies in Rome. By the These curious interactions of church and state 1940s it seems distinctly unlikely that Eden or Bevin are revealed in a file, now released by the Irish knew the name or fame of Daniel Mannix. National Archives, of dispatches from T.J. Ki ernan, Arthur Augustus Calwell, who held the Immi­ who in 1946 became the first Irish envoy to Australia. gration and Information portfolios in the Chifl ey Kiernan, an enthusiastic partisan by nature, quickly cabinet, personified the Melbourne Irish tradition, involved himself in the politics of the Catholic with its strength of deep loyalty and its besetting vice Church in Australia. His 'team ' was the Irish clergy of envy, which James Joyce had so acutely identified

24 EUREKA STREET • M ARC I-l 1995 as the capital sin of the race. It was natural that, when Kiernan arrived in Australia in 1946, Calwell would see himself as the m an to brief the newcom er; and any dip­ lom at would have been happy to build a relationship with a cabinet minister so quickly. As Kiernan was soon to discover, however, there was more at stake than a cardinal's hat. On 6 December 1946 he sent a dis­ patch headed SEC RET to his departmental head, F. H . Boland, reporting that Calwell, as 'a Cath­ olic cabinet minister', had written to the Holy See asking for the recall of the then delegate, Archbishop Panico, and requesting the appoint­ m ent of a non-Italian as his suc­ cessor. Kiernan sent Boland copies of Cal well's letter to the Papal Sec­ retary of State, and of a similar let­ ter addres ed to the Superior General of the Jesuits. It was not only Panico who, to u se Kiernan 's phrase, was 'included in the charge': Calwell claimed that all three of the dele­ gate's predecessors had 'am assed large private fortunes in Austral­ ia'. The letters alleged that the only 'beneficial' work Panico had done in Australia was for Italians, and Calwell said he could produce let­ ters from Panico 'asking for special treatment for wealthy Italians who were interned' during the war. Ki­ ernan told his boss that 'underly­ ing the whole issue is the seemingly insolent attitude which Archbishop Panico has adopted to­ wards Archbishop Mannix', in forcing him to accept The fi rst m ention of Cardinal Gilroy in the fil e a coadjutor, Justin Simonds. Calwell's bright idea cam e in Aprill947, when Kiernan reported on a din- Always an attendant was that Simonds should be made Apostolic ner with Mannix, who told him how he had tried to lord: T. J. Kiernan Delegate. rally the Australian bishops against the imposition with Daniel Mannix. of conscription in Northern Ireland during the war. BuT THE CA LWE LL CAMPA IGN was not to be confined Gilroy and Simonds had refused. After dinner Man- Photo courtesy of to letters. He told Kiernan that he intended to ask the nix raised 'the red-hat question': 'If I had wanted to Professor Patrick O'Farrell British High Commissioner in Canberra to report to be a cardinal,' he told Ki ernan, 'I would have taken a Whitehall on the unsuitability of Italians as Apostolic different course.' Delegates, and on the importance of Mannix being A m onth later, Kiernan m et Archbishop Duhig m ade a cardinal. in Brisbane. Both m en had heard gossip that Arch­ Kiernan described Calwell to Boland as 'an extrem ely bishop Bernadini, who had been Apostolic Delegate honest and sincere m an'-the question of whether it in Australia in the 1930s, might be appointed nuncio was appropriate fo r an Australian cabinet minister to in Dublin. Duhig viewed the possibility with great conduct a religious foreign policy on his own initiative distaste and produced a m emorandum on the ques­ does not seem to have bothered the Irish envoy in tion. This unsigned document, a single foolscap page, any way. opened with: 'On Monsignor Bernadini's arrival in

V oLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 25 Australia in 1933, he is said to have declared that he would put an end to Irish influence in the church'. Duhig wrote that Bernadini 'could not conceal his prejudice against the Irish, and showed it even in his conversation with Irish priests'. The archbishop also castigated Bernadini's predecessor, Monsignor Cattaneo, and said that the present delegate, Monsignor Panico, had shown the same prejudices-' fanned unfortunately by a class of Australian priests.' The archbishop ended bluntly: 'None of these men deserves any consideration, much less gratitude, from Ireland or the Irish, and in my candid opinion if they get appointments in Ireland they would set up a spy system as they had here.' In his comment, Kiernan said that 'Archbishop Duhig has a very balanced judgment', and concluded 'that something should be done in Rome to protect our priests from being belittled simply on account of their nationality'. Panico was due to make a visit to Rome and proposed to travel on to Ireland; Kiernan suggested it should be made clear he was not wel­ come, and this seems to have been clone. In Rome, Panico must have heard about the Calwell letters. When he returned to Australia later in the year, he met Cardinal Gilroy and several other bishops. Kiernan must have had an informant at the meeting, because he was able to report that Panico had said that he was 'in ill health and very depressed'. The delegate sought advice on what to do about Cal well, and discussion 'centred on the possibility of bringing out that Cal well was acting as an individual Catholic and not in his public capacity'. An approach to Chifley had been canvassed, so that the Vatican could be told that Cal well did not have cabinet support, but Kiernan was confident that no such approach would be made.

E NICO LASTED ANOTHER YEAR before being posted to Peru, an appointment that, measured by the size of capacity to stare down bishops. the Catholic population, must be counted as a Kiernan went on to report that Panico had boast­ promotion. Kiernan joyfully reported his departure in eel of leaving 'time bombs' behind him. These includ­ a letter dated 11 October 1948, and told of being ed the appointments of Guilford Young as coadjutor present at a lunch in Sydney when about 100 priests to Archbishop Thomas Maguire in Canberra­ ga thered to welcome the Prior General of the Goulburn, and of Patrick O'Donnell as coadjutor to Carmelites. The general was an Irishman, and the Archbishop Duhig. Each of the new bishops was a event turned into a celebration at which the priests friend of Panico's, and Young had been on his staff. swapped stories about the former delegate's greed. Kiernan advised Dublin that Young had an Italian Panico was said to have established a scale of mother, that his father was a convert, and that he had charges for his attendance at functions, from £250 for once told the envoy that 'the clergy in Ireland, hav­ the consecration of a bishop clown to £20 for receiving ing an education confined to a seminary like debutantes, and the priests claimed that when he vis­ Maynooth, were not modern enough to keep pace with ited convents the nuns locked away the best table the development of the Irish people'. settings of the house, since he was in the habit of The new Apostolic Delegate, Monsignor Marella, ordering the silver to be transferred to his car. The was an amiable man but the policy of favouring the latter story seems far-fetched. After all, how many native clergy did not change. At their first meeting, Australian convents would have had silver? A few in 1949, Kiernan found him charming and attentive. Loreto or Sacre Coeur communities, and one or two He told the delegate that Australia was 'the daughter Dominican houses, perhaps. And in any case, the rev­ country of Ireland', but that he feared that some young erend mothers of Australia have historically shown a Catholic graduates were turning away from the

26 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 In July 1949 Calwell told Kiernan that if Labor won the next election Chifl ey intended to retire about halfway through the next Parliam ent and 'that as matters stand he will almost certainly be Mr Chif­ ley's successor'. The only other candidate, reported Kiernan, was D r Evatt, w ho had lost support on account of his 'pusillanimous attitude towards the Soviet, the official labour(sic) attitude here having hardened against the Soviet, and also because of his long absence overseas-always fatal to an Australian politician.' 'I CALWELL, the path to the Prime Ministership seemed clear, but his hopes were to be cmshed by one of the Irish clerics he had done so much to extol. During the election campaign Archbishop Duhig issued a number of warnings about Labor and social­ ism, and the Liberals made extensive use of these statements in paid advertisements. On election day Labor lost heavily in Queensland, and went out of federal office for 23 years. Calwell's response was to go to Sydney to see Marella, and he told Kiernan that he had protested strongly about Duhig's behaviour. Four years earlier, Calwe ll had wanted no more Italian delegates because of what they had done to Irish priests; now he went to an Italian to complain about an Irishman. In the same dispatch, sent just before Christmas, Kiernan recorded the view of Archbishop Maguire of Canberra­ Goulburn that he was not unhappy at the election result, since 'a cabinet nearly all of whom were Free­ m asons will feel m ore free t o sh ow fair play to Catholic schools'. Archbishop Panico outside M annix, however, was uneasy wh en he saw the Apostolic Delegation. Kiernan in January. He was worried that the Liberals would be less friendly towards Ireland, and that they Photo courtesy of the .. might close Australian representation in Dublin . Australian Jesuit archives. Kiernan said that 'on the surface' the new government 'Catholicism of the heart' represented by Ireland, and had been nice to him. The change of government had looking to France and 'the Catholicism of the head'. put the archbishop in a thoughtful m ood on a num ber The delegate turned this aside, saying that all they of topics. H e told Kiernan that it was unwise of the would get from Europe would be the 'Catholicism of Liberal government to want to ban the Com munist the stom ach', and ventured a criticism : 'I cannot Party, since h e fea red that ' the persecution ' of understand the coldness of the Irish people towards Communists would cem ent trade-union support for marriage.' the party. 1949 was a federal election year, and Kiernan's Kiernan referred to how Mannix was fi nancing a dispatches began to focus on the relationship of the schem e inside the unions, aimed at withdrawing 'the church and politics. In June M annix raised with m ain body of trade unionists fro m support of Com ­ Kiernan the Vatican's concern for the internationali­ munists or pseudo-Communists'. It was this sort of sation of Jem salem, commenting that with Evatt over­ cavalier claim to personal ownership of The Move­ seas he had written to Chifley, who hadn't shown m ent that antagonised so m any of the other bishops much interest. But Evatt had since returned and over the years, culminating in the the division Kiernan promised to raise it with him in Canberra between Sydney and Melbourne at the time of the the next day. Evatt assured Kiernan of his continuing Split. In fact the whole hierarchy, and not just Man­ support for internationalisation and was confident nix, was financing the organisation (Kiernan was not, that Israel would compromise. In those years Evatt it seems, well briefed) and in theory, at least, it was generally showed a desire to cultivate the Catholic under the control of a committee of the bishops' con­ vote, but Calwell believed that h e, and not Evatt, ference. The file contains only one passing reference would succeed Chifley as leader of the Labor Party. to Santamaria. Apart from the secrecy surrounding

V oLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 27 his activities, there was a good reason why Santamaria by the Communists for his protest at their treatment would have kept Kiernan at a distance: Cal well was a of Cardinal Mindszenty. 'He said that the Catholic critic of Santamaria's, so a friend of Cal well's was not Church in Australia is in a minority and in putting to be trusted. itself against the Labour (sic) Party is asking to be hurt The January meeting revealed Mannix's differ­ .. . he said he would inform the Pope of the damage ences with his colleagues over proposals for a Cath o­ being done by certain priests, particularly Cardinal lic university, although 'he, along with other bishops Gilroy and Archbishop Duhig, to their own cause, by will give it his public support'. One topic was to echo taking one-sided action in favour of the M enzies in Dublin. Mannix's diocesan paper, The Advocate , party.' had a new Irish correspondent who, the archbishop Kiernan commented unsympathetically: 'Being thought, 'exaggerated the darker side of Irish social free of any settled principles, his political actions are life'. Could Kiernan do something? (A characteristic those of an out-and-out opportunist.' Here Kiernan shows the influence of Calwell. Evatt may have been an oppor­ tunist with regard to Mindszen­ C ON OR CRUISE O'BRIEN, who worked with Kiernan in the Irish Department of External ty and the status of Jerusalem, affairs, remembers him as' a timid man, very cautious about making a decision, certainly but the same cannot be said of obsessed with church politics.' Kiernan's postings, to Australia and afterwards to the his stance on the Communist Argentine, were deliberately chosen to keep him far from Dublin. Kiernan, joining the Party Dissolution Bill. departm ent in the 1930s, had been a protege of the departmental head, Walshe, who In September 1951 Kiernan after the fall of France in 1940 had written a memorandum to de Valera outlining the again had reason to deplore the need for Ireland to co-operate with the New Order in Europe and to act, along with attitude of certain bishops to­ Catholic Portugal and Spain, as a steadying influence on Germany and Italy. De Valera, wards the Irish clergy. Guilford however, stuck to strict neutrality. The Walshe m emorandum was widely known, and Young, who was still coadjutor in 1943 when the tide turned, the US and British ambassadors in Dublin delivered a in Canberra-Goulburn, spoke of joint demarche to de Valera that they would have no communication with Walshe, and the difficulty of persuading Irish the department was effectively taken over by his deputy and Walshe's proteges were priests to come to Australia be­ dispersed. -Richard Hall cau se of a misunderstanding about prejudice against them. Matthew Beovich, Archbishop of Mannix ploy, getting som eone else to do the censor's Adelaide, who had been in Ireland, had also noticed job.) Kiernan obliged by writing to the External Af­ the sam e misunderstanding. But after this soft open­ fairs Department in Dublin, and the file contains a ing Young blotted his copybook by observing that Irish reply from Conor Cruise O'Brien, saying that the priests were not as well-read as Australian priests, and journalist was not such a bad fe llow. suggesting that elocution be taught in Irish seminar­ In April, Kiernan m et Marella, and the delegate ies: 'Many of the young priests coming here from Ire­ said that he thought Calwell had been 'emotional' in land speak almost unintelligibly.' his criticism of Duhig. Kiernan and Marella talked Kiernan noted: 'Both Bishop Young and about the partition of Ireland, and the envoy m an­ Archbishop Beovich are underneath the skin, hostile aged to equate British policy in the north with that of to the Irish priest. If they could avoid getting them, the Soviets in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Kiern­ they would.' an's report of this meeting mentions with approval a In October 1951, Calwell confided to Kiernan that 'reversal' in Marella's attitude toward the Irish clergy. he had asked the Liberal External Affairs Minister, Perhaps because of this reversal, for a time there were Richard Casey, to enlist the support of Anthony Eden few ad ditions to the file. The next significant dispatch, in a renewed push for a red hat for Mannix. Kiernan in August the following year, throws light on what took the unusual step of writing directly to Frank Evatt thought about the church and politics long Aitken, the Irish External Affairs Minister, to suggest before the open clash of 1954. The referendum on that Ireland should make its own approach to Rome Menzies' anti-communist legisation was only a month in support of the Mannix cardinalate. Ireland's sup­ away, and Evatt was in mid-campaign. At a private port would be valuable because the Australian church lunch at Kiernan's house, Evatt cited the case of a still depended on Ireland for servants in the mission priest in his electorate who had preached against him. fi elds. 'He is incensed against Cardinal Gilroy/ Kiernan told He told Aitken that a red hat for Mannix would Dublin, 'for permitting, and in Evatt's opinion encour­ give great joy to all Australians, including the Prime aging, an intrusion into politics by the Catholic cler­ Minister, Robert Menzies, who regarded him 'as the gy .' outstanding churchman in Australia'. Then he add­ Evatt reminded Kieman that he had been thanked ed: 'As a background, it is to be realised that the Aus­ by the Vatican for his support for the internationali­ tralian Liberal Party feels grateful to the Catholics of sation of Jerusalem, and that he had been criticised Australia-or rather to the hierarchy and the priest-

28 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 hood-for widespread support at the last elections and but this doesn't seem to have penetrated the ambas­ in the referendum on Communism.' The next con­ sador's mind. To have attributed papal policy on the sistory, however, did not see Mannix's promotion and appointment of bishops to the villainous prejudice of the pious hope disappears from the file. a succession of Italian church diplomats was wishful In Melbourne for the St Patrick's Day procession self-delusion- though, on Kiernan's evidence, this in 1952, Kiernan dined at Raheen with Mannix and view was passionately held by the Irish clergy in Aus­ Marella. After some gloomy discussion about the pos­ tralia. Ultramontanists to a m an, though, they shrank sibility of a Communist win in the forthcoming Ital­ from blaming the Pope: it was all the fault of his evil ian elections, and whether the subsequent papal advisers. martyrdom would be swift or slow, talk turned to The Kiernan appears to have been what used to be Call to the Nation, a pompous bit of rhetoric promoted called 'a lay clerical'-someone in many ways more by the government at the instiga tion of Paul Maguire, priestly than the priests and happy to have been made a friend of Santamaria's and at that time one of the an honorary member of that exclusive male club. After few Catholics who had Menzies' ear. It was signed by the lunch celebrating Panico's transfer in 1947, Gilroy and the leaders of other churches, but Mannix Kiernan reported with evident pride that he had been rubbished the whole thing as 'vague and useless .. . the only layman present. Soon after his appointment one key gain in one key trade union was of immense­ to Australia, Ki ernan's departmental h ead, F.H. ly greater practical worth than vague pronounce­ Boland, wrote a tactful letter to him, using as a peg a m ents.' Ecumenism was not popular at Raheen . conversation he had had with some Australians at a In August that year came a report of a m eeting conference in London. The gist of Boland's advice was with Gilroy, the only one in the file. The cardinal that Kiernan should mix beyond Catholic and Irish spoke of the need to encourage more Irish nuns to circles; the recipient's response was to denigrate one come to Australia, and said he would impress this on of the people Boland had m et. the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr McQuaid, who was soon Kiernan's friendship with Arthur Cal well locked to visit, by taking him around the convents and bush him into a similarly distorted view of Australian pol­ schools. Kiernan commented bleakly: 'If Archbishop itics, though it has also given us the odd story of an McQuaid is a simple man, he will no doubt be im­ Australian cabinet minister conducting an independ­ pressed by the happiness of emigrants in convents in ent religious foreign policy. But within a few years Australia. He m ay notice, however, that the reverend Calwell was to be divided forever from Daniel Man­ m others are almost all Australians.' nix, the man in whose interests he had so tirelessly That was the envoy's last word on the church in laboured. When the chips were down, Mannix chose Australia. Perhaps at the end he was giving up. One the Italian-Australian, B.A. Santamaria, over the Irish­ extraordinary omission in the file is his failure to Australian, Arthur Calwell. • recognise that the tensions over promotion and pre­ ferment were not simply between the Irish and the Richard Hall is a Sydney journalist and author. In 1994 rest. The Australian-born clergy had their own con­ he was the inaugural Guinness/James Joyce Founda­ flict, between the home- trained and the Rome-trained, tion Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin.

LORETO Mandeville Hall Catholic School for Girls

Prep to Year 12 OPEN DAY Wednesday March 22 lOam- 3pm

Please phone our Registrar, Ms Zena Roslan, on (03) 826 021 I for information on Scholarships and Enrolments for 1996 and subsequent years I 0 Mand eville C rescent Too rak 3142

V o LUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 29 SPORTING LIFE

PETER PIERCE Right back where I started from

I T w" "'"" 20 "'"' AGO THAT me a free admission ticket. Once s tate, Tasmania cosset s the I m et W.A. (Bill) N eilson at the ga tes inside, I found that the betting ring vulnerable m embers of its 'racing of the Elwick Racecourse in Hobart. was now under glass. No longer could fraternity'. This is not to denigrate After saying 'G'day', he tipped me I expect to be hit on the head by a the state's support for women jock­ Aparangi in the two-year-old. I took bottle thrown from the top of the eys. They obtain regular rides, not four to one and the colt grandstand while on the punt, as had as fl eeting fashion but because rac­ romped home. This sug­ happened one luckless, long-ago ing is so much a family affair. Bever­ In search of a beer, I gests that Elwick wel­ afternoon. ley Buckingham gained her break comes a better class of Other fixtures of the course had while riding for her father, Ted. In found that Cascade is urger. It also happe ns not changed. Still fielding, if now in the 1981-2 season she became the that Bill Neilson was a modish lilac shirt, was 'Increase only woman to win a senior metro­ banished in its home then Premier of Tasma­ Your Roll, Bet With Noel' Colem an. politan jockeys' premiership in Aus- nia. Imagine getting a tip tralia. An attempt to crack the town. Only the from any of the present mainland scene (as we Tasma­ bunch, let alone backing nians think of it) was unsuc­ anodyne products of it with confidence. cessful. Aparangi, by the way, Now Buckingham is back race sponsors CUB went on to win the 1978 in Tasmania , at the top of the Tasmanian Derby. jockeys' table. In the second were on tap. Food Elwick, to the north race she gave Peg's Pride (by St of H o bart and with Briavels, sire of the Tasmani­ provided a happier Mount Wellington as a an-bred champion Sydeston) a backdrop, enjoys one of bea utiful run in front, only to outcome. The the loveliest of Austral- be caught on the line by Shin­ ian racecourse settings. to. Beaten by a total of 40 unexamined saveloy In the 19th century, race­ lengths in his two previous goers often arrived after starts, Shinto was friendless at is not worth eating, a boat ride up the Der­ 155/1 on the tote. After the went. scratching of Chastity, I had and I savoured the When I was a child, backed Ju st Take Care instead, the inside of the track but without profit. sight and then the was disfigured by a drive­ Shinto's jockey had the in cin ema. That has gone, indignity of being led back by taste. I was reminded together with large race a clerk of the course dressed in crowds. Only in the spirit a Santa Claus suit. Sweating of a mate whose of nostalgia can we speak ~ under the disguise was Bill now of a drunk as being <. < · ~~ )oine<,' fo

30 EUREKA STREET • MARC H 1995 FOR 1995-96 pion amateur golfer Lindy. Tasma­ ing, one parked on the golf course. SPIRITUAL lTV & PASTORAL CARE nia, you see, is only Australia writ The spacious dirt pacing track lay small. I'd backed Fun in the Chateau, beside it. Inside the track was a foot­ A MASTER'S PLUS which won narrowly from Bill's Pref­ ball ground. In other parts of Aus­ Advanced certifica te, twelve credits beyond Master of Arts erence, owned-among others-by tralia this might be called a multi­ (comfortably two years, one-year ond two summers for either M.A.) a Mrs Pros, Miss Crack and Miss functional sports complex, but not CONSIDER Theology & Practice of Spiritual Direction Bush. at StMary's. Instead this is a venue A PERSONALIZED Pastoral Counseling Skills In search of a beer, I found that for family reunions, many of which Supervised Practicum in Sp iri tual Direction CURRICU LUM History of Spiriluolity I ond/or II Cascade is banished in its home are interrupted by would-be state FROM town. Only the anodyne products of Labor politicians canvassing for far­ Spiritual Direction A WIDE RANGE race sponsors CUB were on tap. Food distant votes. Every year school­ Pastoral Couns el ing Theories OF THEOLOGICAL provided a happier outcome. The teacher Simon Hirst turns racecall­ Paslorol Counseling Skills Poslorol Counseling Proctic um unexamined saveloy is not worth er, thus becoming a dignitary for a AND PASTORAL STU Dl ES Special Issues (e .g. Addict io ns) eating, and I savoured the sight and day. The climb to his tower is so Pastoral Counseling then the taste. I was reminded of a exacting that h e wouldn' t mate whose favourite soup is made descend for a beer until Clinical Pastoral Education from the dixie water in which savs after the fourth. (1 Unit) have been boiled. He is the fellow Practicum for who won so much one day at Elwick W HAT OF THE RA CING? Well, it's Directed Retreats tha t h e put the m on ey out of not called the 'red hots' for nothing. Group Theory temptation's way in m y m other's In the first, Scribe Hanover won with Fordham University & Practice teapot. Sadly, he retrieved it next­ authority from Paleface Jane, trained GRADUATE SCHOOL morningandleft the lot at the casino. nearby at Fingal. The second event OF RELIGION & RELIGIOUS EDUCATION DIR EC TORS It was nearly time to travel back was for pacers that had never won. Bronx, NY 10458- 5163 John J. Shea, OSA, Ph .D. up the Midlands Highway to Ross, Attracted by their names, I plunged (718) 817-4800 Jonet K. Ruffing , RSM, Ph.D. but not before a nine-year-old geld­ cockily on Ima Eagle and Dumpy's ing called Quicken had led them in Dream. The former hit the running the St Nicholas Handicap, only to be rail, the latter galloped and each lost FORDHAM be a ten in class record time by a furlong at the start. This left Roo Maskiell on Danby Road. I left a Star to beat Tears of Joy in a photo. time warp, where I had encountered After the judge had used his putter to familiar faces, gently aged; the push out the board with the placed unconvincing pretences of gentility horses' numbers, the sister of the among those in the small members' winning driver accepted his trophy enclosure; gallopers better bred than from a local businessman. It was a two decades ago, but pluggers still. set of glasses. Mr J. Kiddie expressed N o gentility, affected or other­ the hope that h er brother drank wise, was to be found a week later at plenty, while recalling that w hen he the StMary's Pacing Club New Year had driven a winner here four dec­ Meeting. For this occasion I headed ades ago, his sling had been two north-east, rather than south, to the bottles of hom e brew. The proposed contents of the revised races, through som e of the m ost As the windy afternoon wound Australian Hymn Book are set out in this parched land in the whole country, on, my selections found invigorat­ report now ava il ab le from religious book shops. where the top soil on hillsides blew ingly creative ways to lose. Perhaps, away in dust. following traditions of rural hospi­ St Mary's lies at the head of the tality, I was being warned off. Comments on these proposals valley of the Break O'Day River. Accordingly, and before I'd done the are now invited. Glover painted h ere. Along the road lot, we headed into the sinking sun. one passes the ga tes of grand prop­ Other Tasm anian carnivals were due erties-Ormley, Mala hide and alon g the n orth-west coast, in The response-by date has been extended Tullochgorum, which once had its cycling, wood-chopping and running own railway halt. La st century, (where Cathy Freeman was impossi­ to 30 April 1995 to allow greater Cornish miners cam e to the valley bly handicapped ). The folk ideal was participation from all interested participants. after coal and tin, leaving the names alive in my native island, but its of their native places around the advocates were ageing, were fewer region. One of my great-grandfathers in numbers, had come in support of Additional stocks may be ordered by died of miners' phthisis at nearby cultures surely if almost impercep­ Mathinna. Some scrabbling for ore tibly dying. • book shops from E. J. Dwyer still goes on in the hills behind St Te l: (02 ) 550 2355, Fax: (02 ) 519 3218 Mary's, but this is farming country Peter Pierce is Eureka Street's turf now. At StMary's l09th Cup m eet- correspondent.

V OLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 31 P O ETRY

Aftershock

1. The city, burning 3. Palpitations

Filmed from the night sl

My grandparents were unearthed alive from the dug-out between their apple trees. 2. Richter 6.9 Some of the trees lived to fill their house every winter of m y later childhood Th e earth rocks with the scent of peace and future, the fruit the child stored for a tomorrow after all. And the bombsites grew green and flowered, the earth rock s were built and disappeared into the past. the sleeping child

the earth rocl

Th e earth shakes the houses fall the city burns.

Th e pilots hear only their own engine and the rattle of the fighters' guns. Th e pound of their own fe ar.

The earth shal

32 EUREKA STREET • M ARC H 1995 P OETRY

Aftershock

5. Sunset across Westernport Bay

Mother you are burning my city. A cross the water under the darl

Mother, leave m e m y city across the water under the hands of sk y, cloudsk y, moonsl

6. Kyoto

A small heading to the side: Ancient shrine 1300 years national treasures sacred artefacts brok en ]mock ed lost ancient treasures artefacts 1300 years acred A small story to the side.

7. Kobe

The earth roclc:s the child

the city engulfs the child the mother the city

burns All the cities Aileen Kelly

Aileen Kelly grew up in England. A collection of her poetry, Coming up for Light, was published last year by Pariah Press.

V OLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 33 FoREIGN CoRRESPONDENCE

ALLAN PATIENCE

W wo,: ~o TH' Hou'' cm'N:?~~=:~~ ge ~=~ ~co~ Q on the gtound• iliat everything was undet twisting. Glasses and plates smashed After a couple of hours sitting in the control. The Japanese professor said he against the walls and on the floor. I common room, rugged up against the would join us, to help us on the way. screamed to my son as I struggled to get awful cold, we decided to go to the main Our trip could hardly have been off my bed. A bookshelf fell across my University campus to see what was hap- smoother. The first ferry ran on time. A path, hurling books all over the place. I pening. We had expected some official to father of another Japanese student met us was so shocked I hardly noticed and call in to see us, but apparently things on Awaji Island with another van. He crawled, unhurt, from beneath it. My son were bad at the central offices ten min- took the women, including Ulla (from was sitting up in his bed wondering utes away. Three of us went. Men in Finland) with a sprained ankle. We men whether to be scared like me. passing cars shouted Geiiin (ForeignersJi caught a bus. We traversed the Island, the The initial quake stopped. Then the at us. Used with the correct inflexion it seat of the earthquake's epicentre. aftershocks started. They rolled in relent- can be a sharp insult and the insult was Destruction was horribly evident, but it lessly, seeming to come horizontally from clearly intended on this occasion. We felt was the haunted look in people's eyes the sea and Awaji Island in Osaka Bay. abitnervousaswerememberedthethou- that was most awful. The second ferry The building where my flat is situated sands of Korean labourers who had been left on time and we scudded across the sea also accommodates several other foreign butchered by angry Japanese looking for to the huge artificial island off Osaka professors and a dozen international stu- scapegoats after the Great Kanto Earth- which is the Kansailnternational Airport. dents. It was groaning and shuddering quake of 1923. At the airport we had an insane argu- with each aftershock and I started to fear The main campus was deserted. A few ment with an official who didn't want us for its safety. laboratories had caught fire. Windows to use one of the several unused wheel- Itwaspitchblack.Mysonandiinched were smashed. Thegateswereclosedand chairs to get Ulla mobile. His case was our way out of the flat. Miraculously, our no one was available in the International ridiculous-he thought an airline should bare feet didn't even sustain a scratch Affairs Office to tell us what to do. In fact supply a chair. The fact that there were from the broken glass and crockery on the it wasn't until the next evening that the wheelchairs there, not being used, was, floor. Someone was screaming below. senior professor in charge oflnternational he declared loftily, quite irrelevant. Be- People were calling anxiously to each Affairs came by to tell us that they thought sides, we hadn't filled out the requisite other. We felt our way down the stairs. our building was safe. When pressed he forms in advance. It was only after our My son was reassuring; I was frantic. admitted he could not guarantee this to Japanese professor refused to give ground Everyone in the building assembled at the be the case. that we were allowed the use of a chair. entrance, rugged up in coats and pyjamas. We decided it would be best to try to Normally one accepts this mindless and No one had shoes. This being Japan, shoes get out of the country. All trains, buses endless bureaucracy in Japan. It is every- were kept in lockers at the entrance. These and other forms of transport were para- where. But since the earthquake it has got had fallen face down and we couldn't lysedbythefallenfreewaysandhugefires worse. move them in the dark. that had broken out in central Kobe. With One by one the planes left and our As dawn came on we began to realise the help of several Japanese students we students headed off to safety. I came back the size of the quake. In every direction, worked out that we could take a ferry to to Kobe to pack up at least some of my roofs were devastated. Huge, ugly cracks Awajiisland- the epicentre of the quake. papers and to check on a final group of radiated out through the roads. A big old Then we could take a bus (if it was oper- students. I found that one of my Japanese traditional stone barn had simply seated ating) across the island to another ferry colleagues and his wife had been crushed itself down like a great dowager, her grand that could drop us at the new Kansai to death by their falling house. Two of our dress made of rubble spreading out about International Airport. Chinese students were dead. They were her. Smart Honda Preludes peeped from We found a public phone which was housed in cheap student digs in one of the piles of smashed bricks and tiles like still operating and began calling airlines. most congested and worst-hit areas in chickens secure in their mother's feathers. Although the students were on cheap and Kobe. One week after the quake, Our neighbours were stunned like us. therefore restricted air tickets, nearly all about 200 Japanese students Many of them were too afraid to go back airlines agreed without hesitation to let were still not accounted for. into their creaking houses and sat instead the students fly out at once. The only in their cars with engines running to make difficult one was Japan Air Lines (JAL). 1ESCAPED FOR A couPLE OF DAYS in Tokyo, the heaters operate. It was bitterly cold The next morning we got ready to set a blissful shower, and I was able to wash and a few wisps of snow were falling. out. A mother of one of the Japanese my clothes. This time it was the kindness Unbelievably, no one in our building students arrived in a van to transport us- of friends. It was such a relief to see a city nor in the immediate vicinity seemed another wonderful example of the kind- still intact, buildings upright, cars travel- hurt. We were the lucky ones. An old ness of strangers. A Japanese professor ling on orderly roads. But now they are woman who had shunned the foreigners arrived and told us that it was too danger- talking about what it will be like when a in the past came by with some hot tea for ous to go over to Awaji Island, that we big one hits Tokyo-and it most certainly us. Another man wanted to know if he should stay and work as volunteers. We will. Much ofJapan is zigzagged by treach- could telephone families overseas for us conferred and agreed that we should none- erous fault lines, many of which converge (though this would not have been a lot of theless try to get out, but expect the under Tokyo. help, even if he could get through, given worst. Some had already inquired about The bureaucratic inertia and break- that he can only speak Japanese). The voluntary work but had been turned down, down was infuriating. An offer of specially

34 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 OOKS IN BRIEF BOOKS IN BRIEF BOOKS IN BRIEF BOOKS IN BRIEF

Profitable examples trained dogs from Switzerland, to sniff Saints Popular&. Relevant, Emmet P Costell o S) St Pau ls Press, out people trapped in the rubble, was at Homcbush, Sydney 1994, ISRN 1 875570 43 8 RR P $6.95 first turned down, then accepted two days I N MY SALAD DAYS, both as a student and as a member Cf..,?n. Jl"fTOil.•f" later. In the meantime people died. Some of a religious order, I was stuffed to the gills with mindless official didn't think the dogs hagiography- the records, true or mythical, of the lives would be any use. They have in fact per­ of saints. formed wonders in locating people. Of­ As a result of this over-feeding, I developed an fers of help from overseas soon got bogged active dislike for this form of history or myth. down in the interminable red tape that Japanese bureaucrats love. Biography of any kind is a treacherous endeavour. Disagreements between the Self De­ Biography plus the interpretation of the nature of sanc­ fence Force Agency and labour unions tity and the relations between creator and creature is have held up the delivery of urgently an even more difficult endeavour. When you add, as needed food and medicine. There is no you must, the ingredient of miracles and the proof single coordinating agency to oversee the thereof, then you are in deeper difficulty both as writ­ government's relief work. The politicians er and reader. are dithering and grandstanding. As a People who write about saints are writing about result two or three groups of relief work­ personages of 'heroic virtue'. Heroes, male or female, are hard to understand ers would turn up to the same place while and harder still to cope with. In wartime, we used to tell ourselves that the other places remained without assistance. best way to stay alive was to stay away from the heroes. Essential services-especially the water and gas supplies and garbage removal­ All this, of course, is irony but sometimes a touch of irony is neces ary have broken down completely. Flu and to keep our sense of proportion in things spiritual and well as temporal. stomach disorders set in. Father Costello's small book on the lives of ten saints has several impor­ Some officials in my University here tant merits. First, it's brief. The writer has forced himself to focus on the seemed to think that my departure a characters and on those elements of their development which raised them month before I was due to finish will out of the ruck of humanity. He has avoided most of the cliches of traditional entail a loss of face. I have argued and hagiography and has managed to inject an element of life and reality into been polite. But I've had enough. Nine each of his sketches. The figures in his portrait gallery are diverse and each days after the quake, my airline agreed to one is worth a bedtime reading or meditation in a quiet hour. let me fly out. I couldn't wait. The after­ If I can enjoy the book without indigestion, the generality of readers will shocks continued to roll in, weakening make a pleasant meal of it. - Morris L. West • my apartment building and scaring me witless. I heard that the bureaucrats were Hammer of heretics locked, at long last, into some really seri­ ous decision making. The question on the lrenaeus, Deni s Minns OP, Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series, agenda is what to name the quake. Should Geo ffrey Chapman, London 1994, ISBN 0-225-66600-6, RR I' $29.00 it be the Great South Hyogo Earthquake? A VID AND ELEPHANTINE READERS of Eureka Street will remember the learned Should it be the Great Hanshin Earth­ debate between Denis Minns and his fellow Dorninican Christopher Dowd quake? Should it be the Great Kansai about the right interpretation of a crucial passage from Irenaeus' Against Earthquake? They are like a pack of post­ Heresies. modernists arguing about the Holocaust. For those may have asked themselves who lrenaeus was and why he was At least they agree on the 'great'- be­ so important, Denis Minns has now written a splendid short presentation of cause central Kobe (which now looks like Irenaeus' ideas. His account is as simple as it can be for a writer as far distant Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb) expe­ from us as lrenaeus, and is livened by wit, realism and good sense. rienced what the experts tell us was the Minns has an eye for the way in which people live and write in the church, strongest recorded earthquake in history­ on Tuesday, 17 January at 5:36 in the and a sardonic appreciation of the gap between rhetorical style and real inten­ morning. tion in any author's work. He is also liberal in the best Catholic sense of the Th e very m em ory of it turns m y word, in his interest in all the ways in which people have tried to understand stomach. And the bureau crats are having the mystery of th e Gospel, and in his tolerance for those from whose errors the same effect on me. • later generations have learned. In this respect, Minns' book echoes the breadth of the Outstanding Chris­ Allan Patience has just spent five months tian Thinkers Series as a whole, in which other authors introduce the thought as a visiting professor at Kobe-Gakuin of people as diverse as Rahner and Von Balthasar, Congar and Bultmann, Handel University. He is looking forward to and Anselm. returning to geological stability at the Denis Minns' book m eets the hopes and matches the accomplishment of Victoria University of Technology. the series. -Andrew Hamilton SJ •

V oLUME 5 NuMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 35 OBITUARY: 2 MicHAEL McGIRR

Ronald Frank Henderson, 1917-1994

W.N THE ITAUAN RLM mR'<:'rOR, Fededco Fell­ the political turbulence during 1975. In 1984, he spoke ini, died a little more than a year ago, his stature was of the 'conspiracy of silence' that had blanketed his often measured in the fact that he had bequeathed to findings for the previous nine years. ordinary speech such words and phrases as la dolce The Institute of Applied Economic and Social vita and paparazzi. In the early '70s, Professor Ronald Research continues to describe the 'poverty line.' Henderson gave Australia a phrase more disturbing Currently, it claims that a couple with two children than anything Fellini might have created. The pluase and having to pay for housing needs a weekly income was 'the poverty line.' Henderson was a realist. The of $401.66 to stay out of poverty. A single parent with phrase wasn't the product of a bleak imagination. It one child needs $274.54. The poverty line remains simply made visible a sharp division in society that one of the less-well- publicised of our economic most citizens of the Lucky Country had failed to see. indicators. Henderson was born in Scotland and studied Hayden Raysmith worked with Ronald economics at Cambridge University, where he was Henderson on the poverty inquiry and again in the influenced by John Maynard Keynes. At Henderson's early '80s, when Henderson was on the board of the memorial service, Dr Davis McCaughey found occa­ magazine Australian So ciety. He remembers him as sion to quote from Keynes: 'the political problem of intellectually rigorous, astute, confident of his ability mankind is to combine three things: economic effi­ yet 'I can't recall any situation in which he was driven ciency, social justice and individual liberty'. For by ego.' One of Henderson's eulogists, Bishop Michael Henderson, such thoughts were crystallised by his Challen, spoke of his ability to identify the skills of experience at the age of 17 of organising summer others and to set them working confidently in the camps for children in a Welsh village with an unem­ sphere of social economics and social research. ployment rate of 40 per cent. Davis McCaughey said 'he brought to the He migrated to Australia in 1962, to take up the Australian scene a fresh and powerful mind, he also post of Foundation Director of the Institute of Applied brought a quickened conscience.' He put Henderson Economic and Social Research at Melbourne Univer­ in a broader context: sity. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to recog­ 'Every age has its superstitions on which it nise patterns to which local people have become depends in uncertain days. In the time of the prophet habituated: Henderson was almost immediately Micah, if things went wrong, you sacrificed some pre­ caught up by the lack of any serious local research cious calves or an excessive number of rams or poured into poverty, and began his seven-year-study Poverty out a river of oil, but to no effect for all the time what in Melbourne (1970). was required of the human race was to do justice, to In 1972, the McMahon government established love kindness and to walk humbly with its God. a 'Commission of Inquiry into Poverty' and appointed 'There were and are no automatic or mechanical Henderson to the chair. The inquiry's terms of refer­ ways of putting matters right, only the exercise of the ence were broadened under Whitlam. The final report, human will, with the informed mind, to do justly and Poverty in Australia (1975) identified a number of to love kindness. So too in our day, Ronald knew how basic principles: the world works, what adds up and what does not, That every person has the right to a basic level of and he had no use for nostrums, pet theories, even if security and well-being and all government action widely held as ideologies. Indeed, he could be should respect the independence, dignity and worth extremely impatient, not least with fashionable jar­ of every individual. gon or with indecision when the issue was clear. That every person should have equal opportunity for 'Once he had done his work it could no longer be personal development and participation in the deemed that we did not know the size or nature of community. To achieve this, government interven­ the problem. We did know. To a large extent we still tion will be required not only to redistribute income know. What we lacked as a community, what we still but also to ensure a fair distribution of services and of lack, was the will to do enough about it.' • power to make decisions. That need, and degree of need, should be the primary Michael McGirr SJ is the consulting editor of Eureka test by which the help given to a person, group or Street. community should be determined. Sadly, Henderson's detailed and humane analysis • Eureka Street is grateful to Dr Davis McCaughey of the living conditions of a whole range of people and Bishop Michael Challen for making available the beneath the 'poverty line' was largely overlooked in texts of their eulogies of Professor Henderson.

36 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 BOOKS

A LLAN p A T TEN CE The public good

H UGH S TRmON "A G>ANT in including positivistic economism­ Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Australian social science. But he is contains a range of largely unex­ Public Choice: Theoretical Founda- t oo infrequ ently read by his plored but influential ontological and tions of the Contemporary Attack colleagues, and by bureaucrats, pol­ epi stemological assumptions. The on Government, Hugh Strctton and grea t positivist error is to believe iticians and journalists (a part from Lio nel Orchard, London, Mac mil­ Peter Ward who does appreciate that you ca n escape metaphysics. lan, 1 99 4 . l ~ BN0333 60 7252RRP$39.9S Stretton's immense intelligence). His You can't. In a later volume they wisdom, blunt style, and humility choice theory. Part T hree offers an should step over the wire. They have (e .g. he doesn't have an Australian outline of a synthesised political brilliantly prepared the ground for honour and travels on none of the theory of public goods and public doing so. gravy trains which are crowded by enterprise in a m ixed economy A reviewer of Stretton's 1969 lesser intellectuals) make him an oriented to social justice and a range book The Political Sciences thought outsider in the Australian academ y. of other civilised and humane ends. it might be a work of geniu . It is This is despite his having written on The parts ca n be read separately to tempting to use similar language for m ore themes than many of his peers advantage; together they make a sem­ aspects of this volume. It will of put together. His writings address inal contribution to the contempo­ course be as a red rag to a bull as far issues in social and political theory, rary political theory of public policy. as many hard-line economic ration­ historiography, the epistemology of Parts One and Two cover great alists are concerned. But this is the the social sciences, the history and tracts of post-War scholarship-eco­ rationalists' problem, not Stretton development of Australian cities, nomic theory, public policy, politi­ and Orchard 's. The book mounts a urban planning, environmental cal theory, m anage ment theory­ formidable- probably overwhelm­ policy, housing, social welfare, eth­ with a lucidity unmatched even by ing-case against the attacks on ics, economics, and politics. the authors in those fi elds. This post­ go vernment that the rationalists Now we have an other major work Wa r scholarship is perilously neglect­ have engineered with such fr om Stretton which is co-a uthored ed in so many recent silly adven­ crudeness and cruelty. by Lionel Orchard, a former doctoral tures in post-modern analysis. These student, now academic, who di splays adventures have been as effective as I T ALSO EX PLO RE S the possibilities of similar virtues to his mentor. The the 1970s' doctrinal rows on the left a post-liberal theory of social and volume covers at least three domains, at taking people's m inds off the real political dem ocracy, going way one explicit and two implicit. The issues. How else can we account for beyond the fashionable exercises in explicit domain is the most detailed the way in which intelligent citizens interest-group peddling (e.g. fe mi­ and brilliant defence of a mixed have been m orally and intellectual­ nism, environmentalism ) that have public/priva te economic policy ye t ly sandbagged by the bullies of the held the centre stage of late. The attempted in contemporary public N ew Right into voting down grea t volume ends with sketches of how a policy analysis. The two implici t public institutions and va ndalising communitarian theory holds out new domains are a passionate defence of public policies which ca n be m ade to possibilities for thin king about a the human capacity for altruism contribute to everyone's welfare? socially responsible, just and hope­ (w hich acknowledges and accounts Part Three is of nece sity tenta­ ful democracy. for human selfishness) and a sting­ tive . But the authors must ultimate­ As the authors note:' ... our social ing and devastating critique of the ly confront the metaphysics of the experience does much to constitute epistemological and methodologica l post-liberal communitarianism with our individuality, reasoning powers founda tions of modern econ omics. which they are challenging political and ideas of good, which in turn All three domains play into each philosophy. It is not enough to dem­ co ns ta ntly resh ape our social other, informing and enriching a onstrate empirically, and admire, arrangem ents and the ideas of good complex, erudite and subtle piece of human altruism and civic virtue. If which they incorporate' (p. 276). It's scholarship. they are not going to be blown away been an awfully long time since we Part One of the book is didactic on the first economic rationalist heard such good sense in public in the best sense, laying out clearly wind that blows chillingly down the policy analysis and political theory. the va lues guiding the argument. It corridors of power and academe, com­ T he book should be read by every also provides a literature review of munitarianism has to be grounded bureaucrat, politician, voter and public choice theory that is both m etaphysically in a theory of ethics. student of public affairs all over the scru pulously fa ir and uneq uivocally In Part Three we are bro ught up to world. • engaged. Part Two loo k at the way the very wire dividing the authors' in which public goods and public version of communitari an realism Allan Patien ce teaches Political enterprise have been politically com­ from m etaphysics. The realism they Science at the Victoria University of promised by the ravages of public seem to cling to- like all realisms, Technology.

V OLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 37 fiCTION

JrM DAVIDSON Our lady of the lamps

C OUNC>UOR RoGAN CAID DOWN >n s .vo., wm-KNm, •long with the gos bilL The m•il h•d brought little that day. 'What I need', he sighed, 'is a cause.' Somewhat astonished by this rare moment of insight, he looked around the room. Mustapha was licking his paws. Sunlight gleamed insolently on the couch. The Second Empire clock ticked on, its bronze youth in straw hat gazing back at him vacantly. Picking up the local paper, the Councillor allowed himself a slight cough. He had not been well. Nothing serious, the doctor had ·said, but too much weight for a man of your age. Palpita­ tions, my dear Thomas, are a warning sign. He began to turn the pages. There was the usual highly-coloured account of a Town Hall bunfight, and Cr Rogan did have to agree that, even if the Innerpendant cocked things up-no doubt intentionally, he humphed while dismembering an adjacent croissant- there was the inescapable fact that, when he assembled with all the other crs, a great deal of bickering and in­ fighting went on. At least he could turn the page on it now. And did so-somewhat imperiously. Suddenly the eye of Cr Rogan was caught by an item about a foundry. It seems there was still one operating within the bounds of the borough-he rather liked this phrase, the bounds of the borough, and savouring it, said it out loud. And (he noted as he read on) they still had the mould­ ings of the original lamps used throughout the City. The Councillor's domain was never a suburb, as it was for ordinary folk; and in a flash he suddenly saw (amidst the remnants of his late breakfast) how Light could be made to shine upon the City.

The Councillor was not entirely happy with •Exhibition, gratified though he was that the citizenry of East Ward had elected him to represent them. There were so many ... disparate ele­ ments. Trendies, Koories, yuppies, musos, garbos, accas, alkies, plus a sprinkling of ethnic hun­ dreds and thousands-the City had the lot. And running down the middle of it was Randwick Street, not so long ago gloomy and cavernous, with high Victorian buildings tattily looking down, as though wondering what they were doing there. But now it was buzzing ... developing ... a restaurant centre for the whole city. Councillor Rogan dropped his arms; he had become quite expansive. But there was no audi­ ence.· Only Mustapha's tail, receding down the passage like a distant tram pole. The street needed beautification- tastefully, of course. There could be special paving, cast­ iron seats ... that sort of thing. Perhaps some trees, and lovely Victorian lamps, in clusters, like cauliflowers. Mother would have said hydrangeas, he suddenly thought. Having brought himself to the mirror, Cr Rogan stopped, adjusted his collar and gave his scheme (and himself) an approving nod.

Dirty cottonwool skies dabbed irritably at everybody's• consciousness the day Cr Rogan turned up at Lollard's. He did not, of course, simply turn up; a secretary had rung from the Town Hall to make an appointment. Although the massive doors were wide open, there was no sign of life inside. The councillor ventured a discreet 'Hello'. No reply. He stepped inside, and looked around. Pieces of machinery of all shapes and sizes, united only in an intimidating obscurity of function, beckoned and dangled from all directions. The councillor noted the distant furnace, closed, and then a nearby door, which opened. - Whaddya want, mate, said the silhouetted figure. The councillor explained his purpose, or rather mission, for he fell into the tone he readily adopted with tradespeople, one of patient explication. The man listened, and when it dawned on him that the mouldings that some journalist sheila had gushed over were what had brought this coot, took him out into the yard. Might be some money in it.

38 EUREKA STREET • M ARc H 1995 Cr Rogan was ecstatic. Over by the wall, with timber, iron and mouldings all around, deep and crisp and even, lay the spindly shafts of a number of lamp-posts. Stuck in a corner close by, were what he was told were the mouldings for the cast-iron. They had probably lain there, the Councillor deftly computed, since the reign of His Late Majesty King Edward VII. To whom, he found himself speculating, he bore no little resemblance .

Tripping along next day to the local Parthenon,• the centre of governance for the City, Cr Rogan faintly resembled a fox terrier in a park on a bright spring morning. The Mayor, Nino Nabarro, received him amicably-something which could not always be guaranteed. They were, of course, on the same side, but the cloak and dagger politics of Exhibition Town Hall were such that the paranoid gestures of the characters in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (usually mere flickers on a screen) here took on new meaning. -It does seem a good idea you have there, said Nino, not unwarily, as he stirred his tea. Cr Rogan clinked his cup. An ancient memory stirred, of the J. Arthur Rank man sounding the gong. This was going to be his production. It appeared that, under the Local Entertainment and Employment Resuscitation scheme (LEER), funds were available from the state government to promote constructive diversions for the populace-and, Nino explained (for his legal versatility far outpaced his English), the lamps con­ cept was certainly a construction, contained just enough fashionable flounce (as the councillor took him to mean) to be regarded as an entertainment, and would certainly provide employment. In exchange for Cr Rogan's support on the great Garbage Question-aimed at eliminating the City's involuntary Garbage Festivals-Nino promised his support. His sponsorship, even-while acknowledging, of course, the project as Cr Rogan's initiative. It was agreed that the government would be approached by His Worship the Mayor for a sum of ... (say) $350,000. The first employment the scheme provided was for journalists: STRIKE A LIGHT!, screamed the Innerpendant headline. The Councillor, attacked yet again as Bogan Rogan, was furious. The paper took the view that Randy-as it loved to abbreviate Randwick Street-should not be inter­ fered with, as it smirkingly put it. Indeed- so these layabouts argued-the street could not be improved. It was working perfectly well, and was best left alone. Typical!, the Councillor snorted as he threw the paper down. 'Victorian tizz' indeed! And anyway, what was wrong with creating another Burgoyne Street? That had, at long last, become clean and tasteful. But in Randy (for Cr Rogan hadn't really noticed that he too would slip into the familiar form) you could still be approached for money, could still see people freaked out on drugs, or .. . hear some smart-arse journalist swearing at the next table. He poured another whiskey to calm himself down. There was a great deal of room for improvement as far as he was concerned. Two days after the Innerpendant appeared, there were rumours of shopkeepers calling a meeting. Then graffiti appeared overnight in Randwick Street: NO VICTORECTOMY FOR RANDY ... BOGAN ROGAN, TOM FOR SHOGUN. Cr Rogan was becoming anxious.

A few days later the Councillor found himself• walking past St Teresa's. He stopped. He had not been to church for a very long time. Noticing that the building was open, he ventured in before he had really thought about it. There was a wonderful smell of polished wood, and a hint of incense. He made his way to a pew and, crossing himself, fell on his knees. Now he was there it was as though he did not know what to do next. He went blank, absorb­ ing the peacefulness. He decided to pray. But who to? Not having been to confession for three years, he had some timidity in approaching the Almighty. There was, of course, Our Holy Mother, a plaster likeness of whom outstretched her arms towards him. Then he thought of another Mother Mary, Exhibition's own. He would pray to her. First he asked for strength, in the face of that insupportable graffiti and the likelihood of further personal attacks. And, as he had been taught long ago, he prayed for his enemies, trusting that they would become ... enlightened. (The pun encouraged a benign smile.) Emboldened now, Cr Rogan laid his scheme for the improvement of Randwick Street, and the City, before the Blessed-and stopped. Pause. -Has it occurred to you, Thomas, a voice suddenly declared, that I might consider lamps dating from my time-unprogressive?

V o LUME 5 NuMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 39 Cr Rogan looked around. And about. But there was no one there. He tried to continue, but no words came. Puzzled, the councillor sat up, crossed himself, and then got up from the pew and began to walk out, throwing nervous glances over his shoulder.

Cr Rogan had, it must be said, expected much• more enthusiasm for his project. It was so patently an initiative for improvement. All he seemed to have secured was the enthusiastic support of real estate agents, suggesting a drink in the pub. But the Councillor did not like having his back slapped. Or beer. As he went to the Town Hall for the meeting his eye caught a new flicker of graffiti: ROGUE'N. It was quite preposterous. -Surely you can see, he said addressing a particularly vociferous interjector, that if we improve the street it will bring tourists, and custom? -Yeah? replied the pert haberdasher, who took out a pouch to roll her own. Rates and rents will go up first, but. The brevity of this reply caught the Councillor quite off guard. But at least there was the satisfaction of seeing the haberdasher's friend tap her on the arm, and point to the No Smoking Sign. Then up stood a history lecturer. You can never trust these accas, thought the councillor. Even when they spiral on to reach a conclusion somewhere near yours, they're so long-winded and argue with such misplaced emphasis that no one else lasts the journey. Listen to this one now .. . Talking about the first land sales, the boom, droning on about the last depression (or is he still droning on about the one before that?), and how development will help us to avoid the next ... Aah, the lamps. Lux in tenebris indeed ... -What I have striven to do, ladies and gentlemen, is to place Cr Rogan's splendid proposal in the broad stream of progressive measures (not all of them welcome at the time) which have characterised the advance of our community. Gravely Dr Mortlock sat himself down. -Middle class wankers, came a voice from the back. -Order, said the Mayor. Nice to hear from you tonight, Nino, thought the Councillor. The least you can do. Another councillor (of the Labor persuasion) was now on her feet, speaking against the pro- posal. Cathy Spalding was one of the better ones, Cr Rogan conceded, though he didn't care for all these jokes about dogs and lamp-posts ... foul play. Still, she had a point. Randy on a Sunday had become a puppy dog's paradise. Then up got Emma Stopforth. There were hisses from the back, and a cry of 'Pommy, go home!' Briskly she turned in the direction of her attacker, like the primary school teacher she once had been. In coolly articulated tones that carried across the room, she announced that 'At least I was brought up properly in one, unlike that bastard over there'. -Oooohhh, moaned a section of the crowd. The touch of viciousness had been unexpected. Appealing to them all now as Exhibition people, as Exhibitioners-exhibitionists?, someone helpfully volunteered-Emma began to advance the argument (a favourite of hers) that as Exhibition was Melbourne's oldest suburb, it behoved its present residents to make themselves worthy of it. Groans greeted this idea. The lamps would add to the place's ... charm, she declared, amidst ironic cheers. Emma was a figure that Exhibition lefties loved to hate, thought the Councillori they loathed her regular appearances in the letters column of The A ge. It was while the next speaker was talking that Cr Rogan realised that if the issue were put to the vote, it might very well be lost. And since the City professed to be a democracy (albeit a guided one), Council-now more or less on side-would find it difficult to pursue the matter if that should happen. The Councillor sent a note along the table to Nino, and caught his eye as he opened it. DO NOT PUT TO VOTE, read Nino, and nodded. Cr Rogan then got to his feet to make the final speech. He made great play of the fact that this was not, as had been claimed, an inauthentic restorationi of course Randwick Street had had Victorian lamps. (He would simply pass over the concept of clusters.) More to the point, it had had these very lamps-brought to his attention by the Innerpendant-and as he spoke he nodded to the reporter as if to alert the man to this rare bouqueti his brain though could not help subtitling the remark 'pearls before swine'-

40 EUREKA STREET • MARC H 1995 - Thanks to the paper, he cheerily continued, I was able to go along to the original foundry, still operating within the bounds of our City; it could do with the work that casting a new set of street lamps would provide. As could other people, setting the lamps in place ... The Councillor sat down after a ringing peroration- m ercifully free from interjections (Good old Emma! She'd drawn their fire ... ), and m arinated himself in exhaustion until he heard the word, Vote. Nino-having made no attempt to catch his eye-was putting the motion . Whether the Council should go ahead with the lamps project. The crowd, having had its fun earlier in the evening, was now fairly quiet. The vote was taken calmly, and the m otion lost: 83 votes to 46. Cr Rogan was ashen . When the m eeting ended, he m ade straight for the door in great strides. He did not want to stop and talk with anyone. - Bastards, he thought, as he tripped down the steps on the way to his car. I won't give up. In fact, he suddenly thought as he started up his engine, there is one way to stymie them, including that Nino, the local Benito. I could ... donate som e lamps to the City. Very-hard-to-refuse. Four lamps on the main intersection would make the point, and stick in their craw. We have ways .. . and fo rtunately, some m eans. As he turned the comer into his street, the Councillor hung a voluptuous wheelie. .. A few nights later, Cr Rogan pulled up his eiderdown. Get off, Mustapha, he instructed. The cat jumped off, signifying with a m eow that it had every intention of bounding back under cover of darkness. But for the mom ent it would graciously leave the good councillor to his slumbers. And so it did. The Councillor, having slept, woke with a start. A sudden pain around the heart. But just as peedily it vanished, and with a sense of puzzlement and then a resigned groan, he pulled the blankets up tightly once m ore. Perhaps he had had lights on the brain. Whatever the case, Cr Rogan was soon aware of a luminosity at the foo t of his bed, a sense of ineffable presence, something infinitely greater than anything he could aspire to. It was hard to focus on at first, but it was much, much larger than the agate of a pussycat's eye. Rather, the form of a woman dressed in sober brown and white seem ed to hover, snapping into sharp definition the moment the councillor realised he was being ad­ dressed in the sweetest voice he had ever heard. - Thomas, she said. You're dutiful, fri endly. You have tried to be a good man, haven 't you, Thomas? Tom Rogan was m ore perturbed than reassured by this kindly interrogation . Nor did he care for the suggestion of finality. The prone councillor's first impulse was to recite his CV. But on second thoughts that didn't seem to answer. - Ye-es, he said, som ewhat nervously. - Well then, Thomas, imagine my concern at what is happening to my birthplace. The poor are being shunted out. Many of them have nowhere else to go . Thom as immediately thought of Resolution 296 on lodging houses (for which, miraculously he had voted). But he might have to do better than that. - Faith, hope and charity, Councillor. That's what's needed. There's still faith and hope at m y end of the street, what with the cathedral and the mission; but down the hill, there ain't no charity. You increasingly concern yourselves with disparity. The Visitor paused, bestowing on Tom a beatific smile. - This restoration idea is not a very good one, Thom as, she sighed, her tone ever so slightly suggesting she was addressing a sm all boy. The councillor was increasingly feeling he had becom e one. - Where will it end? If you insist upon heritage colours, and the original lamps, should you not also insist upon the original streets that went with them ? Should you not tear up the asphalt, bring back the horses, and see the street littered with dollops of manure? - Surely not, My Lady, Cr Rogan ventured rather bravely. - Well, Thom as, you are a man of the world, concerned with m aking things work. We, on the other hand, deal primarily in principle. Principles can always be drawn out fr om practice and stated or restated any time; that's why, apart from questions of m orality, they must never be ignored. Why, som ebody might com e along and wish to restore things as they were even earlier. - But that's ridiculous, Your ... Worship. - Ever heard of Mabo, Thomas ? Randwick Street is well-sited; there was a Koori track there for hundreds of years. Claims might be made, and receive support from unexpected ... quarters.

V OLUME 5 N UMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 41 -Good Heavens! exclaimed Cr Rogan. But, Your Grace, we have never really seriously claimed to be absolutely, totally interested in authenticity. It's just really to enhance the buildings that are still there, to make them ... nice. - Nice! exclaimed his interlocutor, with a touch of annoyance. This niceness of yours has nasty consequences, Thomas. In dear old Exhibition, always a redoubt of the poor, it creates conspicuous consumption. It privileges the fashionable. You lot have virtually repackaged the suburb for niche marketing. Cr Rogan was surprised by the Visitor's mastery of the latest terminology. Perhaps she had picked it up while browsing in Randwick Street bookshops. At any rate she seemed annoyed. Perhaps he should not mention the Council's Strategy Plan for Tourism. -That filtered light of yours, Thomas. A nice period touch, I'm sure. But it's not a dim, religious light, is it? Cr Rogan tried to look contrite, and was going to confess it wasn't, when he had an idea. Like should be countered with like. -Let your light so shine before men ... began the Councillor, a little smugly. -Thomas, that is our light, she said, raising her hand. Let's not have a demarcation dispute about this. It's not yours, and it's not the Council's-as I believe you now have every reason to know. It is our light, she repeated, and it shines through you. Verily. See ... ? The Councillor looked at the end of his bed. Above his toes the blankets had become faintly luminous. His arm was ... golden. Looking up again at the Visitor, he saw her anns outstretched towards him. 'Come', she said, smiling sweetly. With an almost involuntary gesture, and an incredible sense of lightness, he threw back the bedclothes. It was as if he were being borne ... upwards, ever upwards. Mustapha was puzzled. The Councillor had given one almighty snore, and then there was nothing. •

P oETRY

The News and Weather

I smoothed the pelt of the hills with my long looking And the hills rose up and stretched in the early light. In the home paddocks, along the river-flats Black cattle doubled their height with morning shadow.

I heard the currawongs' cry as they swooped above me The news they told was You can't change the weather And who would want to, walking out very early With pink and grey galahs tumbling for grass-seeds.

I picked a fig from the laden tree in the garden And heard a voice that spoke in a tongue of flame From the fiery sun behind the trembling tree-top: You are lucky to be alive in these terrible times.

I peeled back the green of the fig breaking into its centre Galah-coloured, pink and grey its thousand flowerlets, And ate of the fruit of the garden and understood The voice that seemed to flash in the air above.

The message must be received, taken into one's being As knowledge is taken, biting on apple or fig­ Terrible times in the world that will not be changed­ And I walking out on such a morning early. Rosemary Dobson

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V OLUM E 5 NUMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 43 THEATRE

GEOFFREY MILNE It's that star quality, y'know

I hate a sunburnt country, well. Using the same locations, play, A Comedy of Errors, in the A land of sweeping plains; adaptations of Frances Hodgson Bur­ splendid Northcote Amphitheatre on That's why I live in nett's Tl1e Secret Garden (in 1993- the other side of town. This highly Melbourne, 94) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (this physical and heavily cut adaptation Where it always rains. summer) were added to the adult by M elbourne Maskworks, per­ repertoire by day. formed in Commedia dell' Arte half­ I SAW THIS BIT of doggerel spray­ Most practitioners of al fresco masks and with irreverently chosen painted on the wall of a flooded sub­ theatre rate Glenn Elston, co-direc­ modern songs, added a different urban underpass many years ago, as tor of Elston, Hocking & Woods, as dimension to Shakespearean I was fleeing a Melbourne beset by the inaugurator of Melbourne's interpretation. summer rains for a warmer and drier vogue for open-air theatre. Certainly Encouraged by the huge successes holiday in Adelaide. Apparently few it was his vision that got the city's achieved by the various Shakespeare of Melbourne's theatre entrepreneurs Royal Botanic Gardens onto the and Bloomsbury Set shows, other have either seen such graffiti or ex­ theatrical map nine summers ago. companies have jumped onto the perienced the city's classic summer Ironically, Elston was seized by the great bandwagon under the stars. A weather, for about half of the profes­ idea to do open-air theatre in Mel­ highly enterprising group calling sional theatre offered there in sum­ bourne while living in dank London; themselves Hungry Ghost have just mer nowadays takes place in the his instinct, not surprisingly, was to completed their third season of open air. try Shakespeare out of doors but his spooky tales in an atmospheric city Big- ticket items like Hello, Dolly I first production for the erstwhile alley, Commerce Way. Always per­ and the Melbourne Theatre Compa­ Melbourne City Council's Fabulous forming on the stroke of midnight, ny's twin offerings, Oleanna and A Entertainments in Public Places was they began in 1993 with an adapta­ Flea in her Ear, remain sheltered a children's show, an adaptation of tion of Th e Goose-Girl, followed last behind their proscenium arches. But the evergreen Wind in the Willows, summer with a superbly gruesome an increasing number of producers using several locations of the Botanic version of Grimm's The Blue Beard. are going alfresco to make holiday Gardens. This year's chilling story was Th e money for themselves and for an Elston's production of A Mid­ Sandman, adapted from the Tales of ever-increasing number of theatre summer Night's Dream quickly fol­ Hoffman. artists and technicians, and there is lowed and it has been going round Not to be outdone, La Mama no doubting the popularity of the more or less ever since. The Dream chimed in with a production, in its current wave of open-air drama. had a break in 1992-93, when it was lovely little courtyard, of David Brit­ Performing Arts Projects, for ex­ replaced by a not-so-effective ton's monodrama from the 1988 Fes­ ample, are doing prodigious busi­ Twelfth Night, but returned again in tival of Perth, Save Suvla Street. ness with an adaptation of Lady 1993-94, and this summer is sharing This was actually a production by a Chatterley's Lover in the gardens at the gardens with Romeo and Juliet, group called Soup Kitchen Theatre, Rippon Lea. Whether patrons are thus giving us a double whammy of which usually does indoor produc­ attracted solely by the full-frontal Elston Shakespeare for the first time. tions for the City of Melbourne's nudity of this play in particular, or The Elston, Hocking & Woods FEIPP program at lunchtimes. whether they have become attached domination of the outdoor scene Children's theatre has long been over the years to the company's por­ doesn't end with Shakespeare and a favourite target for al fresco artists, trayals of English literary figures and Kenneth Grahame. The company and as well as the Performing Arts their sexual antics, is hard to fath­ also did a garden adaptation of Alice and Elston, Hocking and Woods pro­ om; but there has certainly been a in Wonderland for a couple of years ductions already m entioned, Mel­ dramatic increase in attendances at and this year partnered its mandatory bourne has recently had mas ked Cin­ Performing Arts' Rippon Lea per­ Willows with a buy-in of Performing derellas occupying the gardens in St formances each year since they be­ Arts Projects' Secret Garden, first Kilda, and any number of outdoor gan. staged at Rippon Lea last year but pantomimes and clown shows. These Encouraged by the success of transferred this summer to the were joined two years ago by a new these titillating evening shows for Botanic Gardens, thus adding twin children's theatre group, Tusk Pro­ adults, the company's director, Rob children's shows by day to the twin ductions, who have done two slight­ Chuter, and its indefatigable veter­ Shakespeares by night. ly different- but equally energetic an playwright, Julia Britton, last year Elston, Hocking and Woods also and splendidly swashbuckling- pro­ began churning out kids' shows as presented yet another Shakespeare ductions of The Adventures of Rob-

44 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 in Hood on the banks of theYarra in open-air productions at Rippon Lea, narrowly 'artistic' experience that Studley Park, Kew. both confirmed that fewer than one patrons are flocking to, especially These are perambulatory per­ performance in ten is rained out. At for the adult productions. What is on formances in which the adventures the time of writing, Romeo and Juliet offer here is mainly an idyllic BYO take their course along the river­ had been rained out only six times picnic under the stars with enter­ bank, involving scenes in which since its December 8 opening; day taining theatre as a backdrop, rather Robin actually hits a bullseye with shows in the Botanic Gardens were than the subtleties of acting and in­ an arrow at 60 paces to win the heart down by only five. terpretation. It is bizarre, for of a genuinely blushing Maid Marian, Hungry Ghost has failed to deliv­ example, in Lady Chatterley's Lov­ and in which Little John tumbles er only once in its three seasons er, to hear a line like 'I love to have into a real river and Robin's Merry (perhaps fluking better weather con­ someone to talk to, som eone to share Menne (often played, politically ditions in its more limited three my intimate moments with' bel­ correctly, by female swashbucklers) nights per week seasons); day shows lowed at about 100 decibels (against swoop onto the dastardly Sheriff of can suffer more than night shows the prevailing wind) in the most Nottingham's wicked followers from because of the tendency for daytime public manner imaginable to a huge a magnificently real oak tree. Here is showers to clear away by nightfall, crowd of browsing gourmets. oneinstancewherereality beats art­ thus allowing adults to enjoy their The bottom line here is that the even the highly decorative artistry nights out with picnics of chardon­ location is the thing; the aim is of the indoor proscenium-s tage nay and pate when their offspring mainly entertainment (even in a pantos of the likes of Garry Ginivan, Romeo and Juli et, where every ves­ whose holiday productions at the tige of humour is wrung out of every Alexander Theatre at Monash Uni­ moment), although other produc­ versity are second to none. tions want us to take them more Among the plethora of outdoor seriously. What really works best in (and, for that matter, indoor) theatre these shows is the interaction be­ for young people nowadays in Mel­ tween character, location, audience bourne, there is at least one interest­ and story: I have seen first-time ing show that is a kind of hybrid. Shakespeare spectators following the This is JAM Theatre's adaptation of plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, now with the same eagle eyes as readers in its fifth season in the barn of the of Agatha Christie thrillers. But it is, Collingwood Children 's Farm. The ultimately, the eff ectiveness of the sh ow is performed inside the barn, use of the location that wins or loses but real animals from the working the public. You tend to come out farm outside (such as chooks, pigeons have had to take their rugs and ther­ singing the trees, the gardens or the and the occasional wandering pea­ moses home without satisfaction. buildings rather than the subtlety of cock or possum) occasionally mingle None of the companies I spoke to plot or character. with the make- believe spider, rat, take out 'rain insurance', all prefer­ Still to come is a production of pigs, cows and humans of the enacted ring to offer patrons the option of Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore, story. Similarly, the lowing of cattle exchanging tickets for an alterna­ 'with a company of 50 on a million and the baaing of sheep encroach on tive performance in the event of a dollar set', commencing mid­ the play's live soundscape in a way cancelled show. (In my younger days February 'under the stars' on the that young audiences find in Perth, where Festival productions open-air decks of the museum ship quite beguiling. almost invariably went on out of Polly Woodside, moored on the doors, we always worked on the banks of the Yarra. A NOTHER NEWCOM ER tO the open­ brutal principle that if it rained be­ Will it never end? Jason Buesst air children's theatre this year is fore interval, you go t your money agrees that theatre under the stars is Peter Pan, performed in the subur­ back; if it rained after interval­ here to stay, and that there is room ban Princes Gardens of Prahran by tough'). for open-air theatre to maintain (and Arthouse, a group better known for Open-air theatre companies (like increase) its hold over an obviously its nocturnal (adult) interests in the concreters and sporting entrepre­ charmed summer public, though kinkier works of Genet et al. Every­ neurs) depend heavily on the Weather there is still the chance for it to get Nadine Garner as Juliet body's jumping on the bandwagon! Bureau's forecasts; as well as warn­ overdone. In the meantime, out with and Ja ck Fin sterer as The amazing thing about all this ing ticket-holders to bring rugs, cush­ the Aerogard, the Onkaparinga and Romeo in Glenn Elston's is that the shows actually manage to ions and mosquito-repellant, both the picnic basket, and ge t on down production of go on at all, given Melbourne's noto­ Performing Arts and Elston, Hock­ to the ga rden s for an evening of Romeo and Juliet riously fi ckle summer weather. In ing and Woods also advise them to theatre magical fr esco. • at the Old Melbourne fact, very few performances are lost dial a weather hotline before turning Observatory. because of the weather. A spokes­ up. Open-air theatre is becoming a Geoffrey Milne is H ead of the man for Elston Hocking & Woods, very organised sub-industry. Department of Theatre and Drama Photograph: and Jason Buesst, production man­ And, at the end of the night, it is in the School of Arts and Media at Robert Colvin. ager of Performing Arts Projects' a broadly 'cultural' rather than a LaTrobe University.

VoLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 45 INTERVIEW

TIM STONEY

A mR :,~~~ ~~tan~~: an~o~~~m about them promoting her award-win- They don't feel part of anything, they're alienated from ning short film Only the their own communities and by and large they feel like Brave, Ana Kokkinos might they're not really taken very seriously and no onere- have been expected to look ally cares about them.' a bit jaded. However, de- Despite this bleak picture, Kokkinos points out spite finishing an hour-and- the film is mainly concerned with exploring the a-half TV interview only development of personal identity through issues such minutes before, she was as class, ethnicity and sexuality, as well as the whole only too happy to tell her question of friendship. story all over again. 'We wanted to tell the story totally from the teen- 'My interest in film age girls' perspective, the primary focus being there- started when I was 14 or 15. lationship between Alex and Vicki, the betrayals that I remember going to Mel- happen and the whole question of being able to emo- bourne University Union, tionally connect and relate to people under those 'We're telling which used to run a lot of arthouse films in those social circumstances. interesting stories, days, and seeing European films for the first time. 'Young women of that age are bitchy-the shift- and stories that From then on I wanted to be a film maker-a writer ing allegiances that go on are quite extraordinary. I people want to director-but had absolutely no idea how to go about was talking to a teacher who fe lt the fight scene really hear': filmmal

46 EUREKA STREET • MARCH 1995 F~IN

lines between money and The big power, commerce and gov­ question ernment, arefirmly drawn. Redford's film deserves Quiz Show, dir. Robert Redford (in­ its Academy Award nom­ dependent cinemas). In June 1962, ination for Best Picture. It Truth's front page pictured a is a convincing and sober­ bemused and fresh-faced Dandenong ing analysis of the motive schoolteacher watching himself win forces of America. Beauti­ Pick- a -Box on television. The head­ fully shot in Manhattan, it line blared QUIZ RUMPUS- DYER will make America lovers BLASTS 'RIG' CHARGE. There was ache with the weird blend nothing to it, but who remembers of nostalgia and alarm that the city In the course of the film this now, and who in Australia cares, (and the country itself) engenders. sympathy is gradually extended to except perhaps Barry Jones? The performances are outstand­ their victim and her ineffectual hus­ When the quiz fraud documented ing, some as good as you'll see­ band, but is withdrawn from Hulme's in Robert Redford's very fine Quiz Martin Scorsese, as the invincible parents; although superficially more Show became public in the 1958, sponsor of the show, Paul Schofield 'enlightened' than the Reipers, the America was horrified. 60 million as Mark Van Doren, the silvertail, Hulmes' hypocrisy about their own addicts of the TV game, 'Twenty ethically impeccable east-coast marriage and their daughter's friend­ One', discovered they'd been duped. academic whose son Charles (Ralph ship with Pauline gets credited with A congressional enquiry followed, Fiennes) is at the centre of the scan­ more than a little of the blame for scapegoats were lined up, lives were dal. And John Turturrow, as Herbie the final turn of events. ruined, reputations wrecked, and a Stempel, the fall guy from Queens, is Heavenly Creatures has been generation lost faith in the flicker­ irresistibly repellent. justly celebrated for its magical re­ ing screen. -Morag Fraser creation of 'the fourth world', a fan­ Quiz Show is based on part of tasy realm in which Pauline and Richard Goodwin's Remembering Juliet take refuge from mundane anx­ America. Goodwin (astutely played Angels of death iety. The sexual coding here is some­ by Bob Morrow) is the legal terrier times a little heavy-handed, but the who reveals the fraud. His rumina­ Heavenly Creatures, dir. Peter Jack­ fantasy scenes are much more than tions on the experience are the film's son (Greater Union), has been touted an exercise in pop-Freudianism. They moral pivot: Goodwin goes after net­ as a study of sexual repression and are a reminder that creative work television; individuals are con­ homophobia, the slippery border imagination is not always an agent victed but television still wins. The between sanity and insanity, and the of liberation-sometimes it can corrosive snobbery of jaded cosmo­ imprison us. Eureka Street politans living among philistine -Ray Cassin Film Competition provincials. One can only wonder what is Jackson's film, which won a Silver running through the uncharac­ Lion at last year's Venice Film Festi­ Same old slander teristically leather-clad David val, is indeed about all these things. Niven's mind? Tell us in25 words Mostly, however, it is about how Disclosure, dir. Barry Levinson (Vil­ or less and we'll award two tickets friendships formed between unhappy lage). Demi Moore is quoted as say­ to the film of your choice for the people can sometimes tragically com­ ing she decided to do Disclosure (in answer we like best. Send entries pound their unhappiness-especial­ which she sexually harasses Michael to: Eureka Street film competi­ ly, if the individuals concerned share Douglas), because she wanted to stir tion, POBox553, Richmond3121. that blend of naivete and desperate the pot. Well she's succeeded. She's The winner of December's com­ intensity peculiar to adolescence. been controversial, but not as she petition was Madeleine Sparrow, In 1954 Pauline Reiper (Melanie intended. Disclosure doesn't deal of Evandale, SA, whose reply to Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Kate seriously with the complex issue of the question 'What does Lassie's Winslet) were a pair of teenage sexual harrassment, rather it plays a love n1ean to you' was 'Love's a schoolgirls in Christchurch, New schoolyard game, waggling its finger bitch, ain't it?' Zealand. Their murder of Reiper's and saying if girls can be sexually mother (Sarah Pierse) became one of harassed, so can boys, so there! that country's mo t notorious Disclosure works with ideas sim­ crimes, and Heavenly Creatures' ilar to those of its slicker predeces­ account of the events leading up to sor, Fatal Attraction. You know the the murder, based on Pauline's dia­ story: a good, unsuspecting man is ries, manages to make the perpetra­ drawn into the net of an evil whore tors seem pitiable without ever sug­ who soon shows her true colors. As gesting that they are admirable. the good man struggles desperately

V oLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 47 Nell Specially for Victorian readers Eureka Street has six free passes to see Michael Apted's film Nell, starring Jody Foster, courte­ inine virtue, wins her way to the top. Life class sy of the Longford Cinema Instead of calling Disclosure a 'hot (see review below). To win date movie', the promoters should The Browning Version, dir. Mike a double pass, send your perhaps h ave tried the slogan 'Missed Figgis ( independent cinemas). name and address to Eureka the sexual revolution, you 'lllove it'. Terence Rattigan's play a bout Street Film Offer, PO Box -Catriona Jackson Englishness in a grand English pub­ 553, Richmond 3 121. The lic school was written nearly 50 years passes will go to the first ago. Mike Figgis and his (English six entries received. Wild child born) producer, Ridley Scott, have Nell, dir. Michael Apted (independ­ jacked up the revived play to include to get free of the whore he almost ent cinemas). The North Carolina rich punk bullies whose shower­ loses everything, but with the sup­ wilderness is the backdrop to this room reverberates with techno, and port of his family he wins through in tale of civilisation meets recluse. Dr visiting American science teachers the end. Jerome Lovell (Lia m N eeson) comes who have sensitive new-age sexual We know Tom (Michael Doug­ to inspect the body of an old woman ethics. The effect is strained. But the las) is a decent but imperfect family fo und dead in an isolated log cabin film survives-you could say tri­ guy, because he spends the first third and stumbles across a young woman umphs- because of the craggy and of the film with a splodge of tooth­ hiding in the shadows. powerful stillness of Albert Finney paste on his tie, and h e looks at His initial attempts to make con­ as Andrew Crocker-Harris, the Meredith's (Demi Moore) legs as she tact are thwarted by her suspicion of classical classics master, the 'Hitler goes up the stairs. Moore's character an unfamiliar world and unintelligi­ of the lower fifth'. gets no such sympathetic trea tment. ble speech, but a note left by the dead Finney takes the role- and the Throughout the film she is bathed in woman tells him that she is her film- beyond stereotype, and be­ deep blue light that makes her legs, daughter, N ell, who needs to be yond the hysteria about charismatic indeed her whole body, look like a looked after. teachers that films like Dead Po eLs' stiletto, waiting to be unshea thed. Feeling responsible for her well- Society fl irt with and Th e PTim e of But there are two types of woman being he enlists the help of psychol­ Miss Jean Brodie analyses. Finney's ogist Paula Olson (Nata­ is an extraordinary performance. He sha Richardson), who is able, with the firming of his lip or wants to place her in a a shift in voice pitch, to articulate hospital for observation. repression. Andrew Crocker-Harris, Dr Lovell rejects this out in Finney's rendering, embodies the of hand and what results subtlety and two-way vulnerability is a battle between their of the sacred contract between teach­ presumptions of what is er and student. It has little to do with ) best for Nell. mere friendliness. Children under­ N ell is a predictable stand it even as they abuse it. story of contact and con­ Finney is well supported by Greta flict between two differ­ Scacchi as his disaffected, percep­ ent worlds. The issue of tive wife, and Michael Gambon as what is inherent and his utterly venal headmaster. what is learnt is dealt Gam bon is one of those rare actors with glibly. With little who can shine without wilfully ob­ effort from the director scuring his fellows. to speed things up, the -Morag Fraser narrative plods along to the predictable conclu­ sion that it is we who Ouch should learn something Maiuesse, dir. Barbet Schroeder (in­ from Nell. dependent cinemas). This 19 76 film If the su ccess of For­ has obviously been exhumed to cash rest Gump lay in its hom­ in on some of the interest raised last age to simple ways, then year by Solo, but it has nothing of Nell should pull in the the profound mora l and political crowds and they should insight of Pasolini's last film. In­ leave the cinema satis- stead we are treated to kitsch S&M fi ed. In the end Jodie Fos­ without self-irony. There is also more in this film: the whore, who is ex­ ter's beguiling performance as Nell than a hint of Belle du four, but to posed and humiliated, and the good outshines all others and just about talk of the two in the S

48 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 Maitresse will probably attract the same audience that went to see Salo for all the wrong reasons. Gerard Depardieu plays a dumb bully in tight flares. Bulle Ogier plays a dumb bully in S&M gear and assorted flo a ty frocks and negligees to show she's a mysterious complex woman with a secret. The ending is bathetically silly, just like the rest of the movie, so at least you might say it's consistent. -Juliette Hughes Odd couple Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, dir. Randa Haines (independent cine­ mas), has the sort of plot that would have been easy to turn into dross of the Grumpy Old Men kind, but which, in the hands of a superb cast and an accomplished director like Haines (Children of a Lesser God), has become a very fine film indeed. Frank (Richard Harris) is a bibu­ lous, loud-mouthed, much-married­ and-divorced Irish m ariner who Movie Legends boasts of having once wrestled Hem ­ 1/,fl ingway; Walt (Robert Duvall, the world's most underrated great actor) is Cuban, a barber and a lifelong FILM woN THE GRAND JURY PRIZE for its director, Akira Kurosawa, bachelor who boasts of nothing much Tus at all. These two old men have noth­ when it was released at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, and the ing in common except the fact that Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in the same year. It also began a both live in lonely retirement in a vogue for Japanese films in the West, and for the work of Kurosawa in sleepy Florida town, but they be­ particular. come friends. Kurosawa has sometimes been seen as the most 'Western' of Japanese How their friendship progresses, directors. The label is clumsy-in 1951, few if any Western filmmakers and how it interweaves with impos­ would have used a camera in quite the way Kurosawa does inRashomon­ sible flirtations through which each but it recognises that he shared the preoccupations of European intellec­ man tries to compensate for his tuals of the early '50s. eclipsed virility, is all the story that The setting of Rashomon ('Devil's Gate') may be medieval Japan, but the film has to tell, but that is tale its moral world is that of Beckett, Camus and Sartre: a world in which enough. Walt shyly courts Elaine (Sa ndra Bullock), a young waitress traditional beliefs and practices no longer hold firm, and in which who tolerates him, while Frank individuals must endow their own lives with significance. aggressively pursues Georgia (Piper In a ruined temple-the 'Devil's Gate' of the title-a monk, a Laurie), a coquettish Southern woodcutter and a tramp gather to escape a downpour. The woodcutter matron, and Helen (Shirley Mac­ tells the strange story of a rape-and-murder trial in a nearby village: first Laine), his landlady, who is not as the murderer's account, then that of the raped woman, finally that of her hardbitten as she would like to be. murdered husband (relayed through a medium). None of their stories As in any friendship worth hav­ agree, and the woodcutter's own version of events is different again. ing, Frank and Walt each learns som e­ Who is telling the truth? And how do we know what is true anyway? thing about himself as well as about The questions leap from the dialogue of Rashomon as they do from that the other. It is life's-great-journey of Waiting for Godot or No Exit. But Kurosawa is never entirely the bleak stuff all the way, but Haines and scriptwriter Steve Conrad wisely sea­ existentialist, and the film concludeswith a hint that Godot just might son it with enough humour to keep show up after all. -Ray Cassin • even the flintiest old curmudgeon in his (or her) seat till the final credits. -Ray Cassin Rashomon screens at 9.30pm on Friday, 10 March

VoLUME 5 N uMBER 2 • EUREKA STREET 49 WATCHING BRIEF A long night's journey into daze ~ Clfi" That, in a perverse but interesting sense, Australia E,TIME. THE NOTION smc means some· may be the perfect place in which to watch televi­ thing to head counters, of course. Would-be sion. Not because what one watches is markedly bet­ RAY CASSIN-0 advertisers and the networks that woo them ter here (how could it be, if there is a global culture?) ll::::======d base their haggling on the crude demarca- but because the kind of spatia-temporal dislocation tion of the viewing day (or night) implied in the term. that television viewing allegedly brings about is But it has long since ceased to suggest, as it once did, intensified here. something about the content of what is watched. This At lam daily or thereabouts (in the spirit of the is not simply a matter of whether or not it is ratings exercise, one should not be too precise here), the Seven season. Network offers Today, the breakfast news-and-chat Remember those coy messages, broadcast soon show of the NBC network in the United States. Bleary­ after the evening news bulletin (in the days when there eyed Australians watching Today can pick up the lat­ was only one bulletin per channelt which warned est international news from people for whom it is still parents that the rest of the night's programming might 6am the previous day. And it is all delivered in the not be suitable for children? They usually involved same bland, folksy style that breakfast programs all acts of tenderness between a corpulent male in a bear over the world, including Australia, have emulated. suit and a girl-next-door type with the smile of a This is news you can trust, because the nice mothercraft nurse, which is one way of hinting at young male reporter, the nice young female reporter impending moral danger. and the goofy weatherman have But this liaison between invited you into their pseudo­ Humphrey and Fran or Jan or living room so that you can hear whatever she called herself was about it. The news runs into the doomed. The advent of 24-hour chat, the chat runs back into the programming, and the coincident news, and if you watch Today collapse of the notion of a 'nor­ (Yesterday and Forever) twice in mal' working day, have made it a row you're hooked. Physically impossible to speak of a time of you may dwell in an Australian day that is appropriate to serious, suburb, but culturally the daily 'adult' viewing. And series like routine starts with breakfast in The Simpsons, which occupy an New York. We are all Americans early-evening time slot but dis­ now. play a wit and allusiveness that Midnight-to-dawn channel presumes an adult audience, are surfing allows you to break time an obvious result. boundaries in other ways. The Ten Network shows Consider, however, what may be seen in those movies, and the fare is not restricted to schlock and hours between midnight and dawn, when, only the schmaltz. On one night in February it was possible to most deadly serious adults are awake and watching: switch from a Today report on the war in Chechnya cops, robbers, nurses, ambulance workers, truckers to Mission to Moscow, a film that has achieved at truck stops, journalists writing about any of the notoriety in movie history because of its role in the above, and, doubtless most common of all, the parents House On-American Activities Committee's attempt of crying children. Midnight-to-dawn is never going to purge Hollywood in the 1950s. to be anyone's prime time (though the providers of Basically, this wartime (1943) propaganda film 0055 'contact' services evidently believe that their (directed, like that much greater propaganda film clients are cruising this televisual graveyard shift) but Casablanca, by Michael Curtiz) was the only thing the experience of watching television in the small the committee could find that even looked like an hours, especially in Australia, is remarkable for what attempt to subvert the minds of American moviego­ it exemplifies about the medium itself. ers. And in truth Mission is a obnoxious film: it is One of the most celebrated-and notorious­ impossible to watch its justification of the show trials cliches about Australia is that life in these Antipodes in which Stalin forced his critics to recant their is characterised by its physical distance from any­ 'heresies' without reflecting on the similarities be­ where that the majority of the population imagines tween that travesty of justice and the antics of the to be culturally significant. And one of the most On-American Activities Committee. celebrated cliches about television is that it collapses And sandwiching Mission to Moscow in between the barriers imposed by time and space: that, more reports of the latest round of dismemberment of what than any other medium, the box has been the agent used to be Stalin's empire means having the entire of a global culture (though still a culture that privi­ course of 20th century run past your eyes before first leges certain bits of the globe above others). light in Australia. We are all Americans now. • Well, yeah, of course. But put these two items of received wisdom together and what have you got? Ray Cassin is the production editor of Eurelw Street.

50 EUREKA STREET • M ARCH 1995 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 31, March 1995

Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1 The sort of double code used by that rum alien chap, oddly enough . 112) 8 Show em otion about the beloved country, as Paton would. 13) 9 Which child has far to go? N ot man-Friday's' 19) 10 You old English singular version . 14) 12 Dorian's misplaced advances! 171 13 Thackeray's signature displays his diplom atic skills. 19) 15 N otice som e cold frog leer at the girl. 14) 17 Ships in rapid transit? 15) 18 Change the mat in the ute. 16) 21 In front of him , he rolls the m arbles back to allow room to bandage. 16). 22 Breathlessly composes richly evocative poem. 151 25 I would return to a watercourse beginning to run dry. 14) 27 Everything I got once or took from the crocodilian beast. 19) 28 See, Tom in front of the journalist. Well placed' 17) 29 The list of courses for people going to university. 14) 30 Begone wet misery' I need a m ediator. 12-7) 32 Twelve-the m ystic number for this m ediation, as long as you do without. 13) 33 Theatre com pany took exception to play being perform ed again. I11 )

DOWN Solution to Crossword no. 30, 1 Mechanical action- rising to a summit-a reprogramm ed robot exhibited. I 10) January-February 1995 2 Courageous but quiet. Fortunate to be so constituted. 16) 3 Fool with accomplice in crime would becom e a killer. 13) 4 As Warne unwinds for a start, his opponents are taken by surprise. 18) 5 To som e extent, the pleas I erstwhile uttered made life sim pler. 16) 6 Making the inaugural speech, his diction rung out to the rafters. I 11) 7 A hundred rough yokels. How boorish' 15) 8 A talc or other ch emical substance can be u sed to produce this one. 17) 11 Anim al to be fo und on h edge or ground or road 1 13) 14 Disturbed culprit, due happiness originally, was given beauty in stead. 111) 16 Sort of decimal double-clogging' 19) 19 From th e w ildly fl ying cranes a warning cam e of the advance of the infidel. 17) 20 Busy Sally works on the study program withou t one question. 18) 23 Harass the burrowing animal. 16) 24 Goddess of Greek city looks east rather than south . 16) 25 Decapitated two men to find half the population. 15) 26 T he boy went and changed. 13) 31 King Cole goes up north in search of colour. 13)

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Study f ora degree or your own enrichment Catechetics • Pastoral Liturgy in beautiful California Liturgical Music • Spirituality Two 1995 Summer Sessions Scholarships available for persons in church ministry June 19-July 7 (Mornings) Experience of God- Francis Smith, S.J. Call or write Christian Women Yesterday and Today- Regina Coli, C.S.J. Rita Claire Dorner, O.P. Liturgy and Music - Michael Joncas, Ph.D. Bannan Hall 339 Presiding at Prayer- John Buscemi Santa Clara University July 10- July 28 (Mornings) Santa Clara Ministry for Peace and Justice - Jon Sabrina, S.J. California 95053 USA Music Skills for Liturgical Musicians - Fred Moleck, Ph.D 408/554-4831 Christian Mystics: Julian, Catherine, and Teresa - Carmina Chapa FAX 408/554-2387 June 19-July 28 (Evenings) Application deadline Synoptic Gospels - Rev. Gerard Sloyan May 26, 1995 Spiritual Direction- Pamela Bjorklund, Ph.D. Keyboard Improvisation for Liturgy -Fred Moleck, Ph.D.