' i I I I ' boo~ offer! The Elements of Style STWILLIAM . By William Strunk Jr & E.B . White RUNKJR. Last month a boxer pup called Becky ate a large chunk of that pocket classic of lucid instruction, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. The dog belonged to our columnist, Brian Matthews (see page 33). N ext issue we expect Becky to write E.s.WHITE her first column for Eurel Thanks to Readings Books and Music, Eurel -- T l1 e ------MELB() RNE STREEI ------ UNml "Someti mes you j ust need to sing Blessed present Assurance and hit a tambourine." Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales and Australia's Refugee Policy possible next Archbishop of Canterbury Facts, needs and limits "We all have to cope with evil, whether Speakers: we can expla in it adequately or not. And the Christian faith provides a much more Frank Brennan SJ and Mark Raper SJ successful framework fo r coping with ev il W it h responses from an expert panel than any other framework of beli ef l know." Chaired by Geraldine Doogue Dr Behan McCullagh, La Trobe University, St Stephan's Church on the challenge of evil 254 Hyatt s Road Rooty Hill NSW Tuesday 16th July - 7:30-9:30pm The Melbourne Anglican ALL WELCOME 1998 winner of the Gutenberg Awa rd fo r Excellence in Reli gious Communicati on Enquiries Mention this ad for a free sample copy of TMA Uniya (02) 9356 3888 or Phone: (03) 9653 4221 Fr Brendan Kelly at Loyola College (02) 9832 4455 or email: [email protected]. com.au <)> O:s: ' > CCl EUREKA STREE I:s:)> :~ NZ zm cO :S:" "'"'mC "'"'cr-C::: ~ n :;)> -<" :b.> c;;; ClY' c_. ~I Nm o> O;>J "'-< V> )> z COMMENT 0 -< 4 Morag Fra ser Prospects I 5 Andrew Hamilton One step forward, 0r another step back 0 Cl -< SNAPS HOT 6 Soccer, condign caricatures, Vatican II COVER STORY step, gongs and a joke. 28 Th e man who rea ds th e signs Artist George Gittoes' take on war is a challenge both to complacency and to LETTERS cynicism , as Michele M. Gierck Publisher Andrew Hami lton 51 discovered when she interviewed the Editor Morag Fra ser 10 N eville Hicks, Warren Featherstone Ass istant editor Kate Manton man whose work blurs the distinction Graphic designer Siob han Jackson between art and life. General manager Mark Dowell Marketing Kirsty Grant THE MONTH'S TRAFFI C Advertising representative Ken Head 1 1 Peter Browne Country matters Subscription manager Wendy Marl owe BOOKS Editorial, production and administration 1 2 Edmund Campion In m emoriam ass ista nts Juli ette Hughes, Paul Fyfe 51, 13 Sybil Nolan Mixed marriage 42 Th e short I ist Geraldine Battersby, Ben Hider, Susannah 15 Barry York Hons and rebels Reviews of The Clash of Fundamental Buckley, Kate Hird, Steven Conte, Mrs Irene isms; Lighting the Way: Reconciliation Hunter 16 Michael McGirr Writers' m eet Contributing editors Adelai de: Greg 1 7 Geoffrey Milne Dramatic moves Stories; Understanding Pow er: The O'Kell y 51, Perth : Dean Moore, Syd ney: 18 Moira Rayner Media blanks Indispensable Chomsky and Tourn ey to Edmund Campion & Gera rd Windsor, the Inner Mountain: In the Desert with Queensland : Peter Pi erce United Kingdom Denis Minns 01' St Antony. j es uit Editorial Board Peter L' Est range 51, COLUMNS 43 Th e man who kn ew too much Andrew Bul len 51, Andrew Hamilton 51 Peter Steele 51, Bill Uren 51 7 Ca pital Letter Brett Evans reviews Don Watson's Patrons Eureka Street gratefully Ta ck Waterford Coming to light recollections of his time as speech ack nowledges the support of writer to Paul Keating. C. and A. Ca rter; the trustees of th e es tate 8 Summa Th eologiae of Miss M. Condon; W.P. & M.W. Gurry Andrew Hamilton and Ray Cassin 45 Ca pital chaps Eureka Street magazi ne, t55N 1036-1758, A dialogue Brian Toohey reviews Rich Kids, Paul Australia Post Print Post approved Barry's account of the One.Tel fiasco. pp349181 /00314, is published ten times a 13 Archimedes year by Eureka St reet Magazine Pt y Ltd , Tim Thwaites Gould's gold 46 Graceful poss ibilities 300 Victoria Street Ri chmond VIC 3121 33 By the W ay Peter C. Gaughwin reviews George PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121 Vaillant's Ageing Well. Tel: 03 9427 731 1 Fax: 03 9428 4450 Brian Matthews Refining Rebecca email: eureka®jespub.jesuit.org.au 50 States of eq uilibrium http://www .eurekastreet.com.a u/ 54 Watching Brief Res ponsibi lity for editorial content is Tuliette Hughes Monsters are us Philip Harvey looks at the poetry of accepted by Andrew Hamilton 51, Geoff Page and James Charlton. 300 Victori a Street, Ri chmond Printed by Doran Printing 46 Industrial Drive, Braeside VIC 3195. FEATURES © Je suit Publica tions 2002 POETRY 20 What's right for Europe? Unsolicited man usc ripts w ill be retu rn ed 48 & 5 1 Alex Skovron The Man and the on ly if accompanied by a stamped, From Madrid, Anthony Ham reports on Map, Heaven Refuses se lf-addressed envelope. Requests fo r the shifting political landscape. permi ss ion to reprint material from the magazi ne should be addressed in writing 23 Sights set on peace to the editor. Can Sri Lanka finally negotiate its way FLASH IN THE PAN out of civil war? Ton Greenaway Th is month: 52 Reviews of the films Last Orders; Cover: Th e Captured Gun, 1986 painting reports from the troubled island. by George Gittoes. Oil on ca nvas . Italian for Beginners; Spider-Man; Cover design by Siobhan Jackson. 32 Global rules I Am Sam; The Hard Word and The Ph otograph p4 by )on Greenaway. Peter Davis shoots a mini-essay in Devil's Ba ckbone. Graphics pp6, 21-22, 34, 37, 38, 46, 50 Mexico. by Siobhan Jackson . Cartoons pp11 , 14, 16, 19 by Dea n 34 Swerving to happiness Moore. Peter Steele analyses the language of SPECIFIC LEVITY Photographs and artwork pp28-3 1 by George Gittoes. love in the poetry of Peter Porter. 55 Toan Nowotny Cryptic crossword COMMEN T : l MORAG FRASER Prospects L GOveRNMeNT TAN<, p 4 EU REKA STREET • j ULY- AUGUST 200 2 C OMM EN T :2 A NDREW H A M I L TON One step forward, another step back R ,CWT N>WS ABOUT .sylum seekc.s h.s been .t appeal against m ost immigration decisions. Judges one rem ove from the way in which they experience have offered diverging interpretations of the scope of their lives in Australia. From stories of self-harm, the law. Som e of these interpretations suggest that gassings and batonings and the storming of fences, the new laws m ay not efficaciously exclude appeals we have now m oved on to stories of applications for based on natural justice. These issues are so impor- refugee status, courts, enquiries and government tant that they are likely to be tested finally initiatives. in the High Court. H ere are som e of the m ore important item s. The enquiries have been into detention. The B uT BEHIND couRTS and enquiries are human faces Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and human predicam ents. Particularly poignant is the has been holding hearings into the detention of chil case of the East Timorese who fled East Timor up to dren. Those who have m ade submissions have asked eight years ago. At that time Australia would not have whether, given the m anifest psychological harm suf their cases heard because Indonesia would fered by children in detention, the regime can be said have been offended if the East Tim orese Th e stronger the to be in the best interests of the child. Some submis had been found to be refugees. They have sions have also asked whether it is right for the min since settled and raised their families here, criticism and th e ister responsible for the detention regime also to be but are now fo rced to apply for refugee more authoritative the legal guardian of the children, and therefore status, with the prospect that they will be responsible for deciding what is in their best inter returned to East Timor. The government th e body making ests. Few were reassured by Minister Philip Ruddock's has rejected a proposal that they should it th e more most recent defence of child detention on the grounds be offered special humanitarian visas. 1 that, if the children were released, they might be kid State governments have also becom e intransigent th e napped and held hostage by other asylum seekers. involved in asylum seekers' issues. The response. Th e Two separate delegations from the UN Commis South Australian government was drawn sion on Human Rights have visited Australia to report into the treatment of children at Woom era, government will on aspects of Australia's detention regime. w hile the Victorian government h as not be moved in Louis Joinet, chairman of the UN Working Group appealed to the federal government to on Arbitrary Detention, nam ed four areas of concern: allow the East Timorese asylum seekers any sense of the detention of children and other vulnerable people; to stay on humanitarian grounds. It has th e word. the relationship between indeterminate detention and also contributed funds to organisations the widespread depression suffered by asylum seekers; off ering legal and other services to the group. the issues raised by the administration of detention But the general field of play rem ains the sam e: centres by private companies; and the practice of hold the stronger the criticism and the m ore authoritative ing in prisons asylum seekers and prisoners who have the body m aking it, the m ore intran sigent the completed their sentences but who await resolution response. The government will not be m oved in any of their visa status. sense of the word. In its intransigence, it knows that It is as ritual a practice for government to criti it enjoys the support of the m ajority of Australians. cise judges for n ot implem enting its will w h en Those of u s who argue that the present policy is important cases are about to be heard as it is for humanly destructive and deeply corrupting of public cuckoos to sing before spring. The latest criticism life still need to persuade other Australians of the truth preceded a case being heard by five judges of the of our convictions. • Federal Court. At issue is the interpretation of recen t government laws that sought to prevent judicial Andrew Hamilton SJ is Em eka Street's publisher. V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STR EET 5 be surprised that few have heard of the And after that, it was open season on the Second Vatican Councit which is 40 Sisters. Shirley laughed about it, as she years old this year. would at the idea of having a public lec To celebrate the event and refl ect on ture dedicated to her. the Council, the lay movement, Catalyst Shirley lived simply, and never drove for Renewal, has organised a conference a car. Before she died, in 1992, she helped Historical in Sydney. Joseph Komonchak, an inci set up a property at Balnarring where loss sive North American historian who has groups which could not otherwise enjoy edited the recent history of the Council, holidays could go. Ventures like this were Okay, we know all about football passion will speak. He will be joined by John what she would have liked Vatican II to and one-eyed supporters and all that. And Wilkins, the editor of Th e Tablet, which be remembered for. we also know that China has just m ade has been the journal of record of the its fi rst appearance in a World Cup finals twists and turns of the post-Vatican II tournament. But it did stretch the imag church. ...[ ination when one of the commentators They will team again in Melbourne, fZ at China's valiant loss to Brazil in the first where Catalyst for Renewal will offer a Bott.k.rlinc. round described China as 'one of the public lecture on Vatican II given by .... Pe-ttit M~ yo ung nations in this tournament'. Try Jo seph Kom oncha k, a Conversation Riding p telling that to the fo lk who built the great Dinner with John Wilkins and an all-clay ,c ...,_ wall. seminar. Details: Sydney-Conference: high t1 12-14 July 2002, contact Patricia on (02) 924 7 465 1. Melbourne-Public lecture: It's been the month for gongs. So let us 18 July, 8pm, Knox Lecture Theatre, announce here, loudly, that writer and Diocesan Centre, East Melbourne. Din broadcaster, Peter Mares (a regular con ner: 19 July, 6.30pm for 7.30pm, Xavier tributor to Eurelw StreetL has just won College, Kew. Seminar: 20 July, Austral the Gleebooks prize for literary and ian Catholic University, 155 Victoria Pde, cultural criticism at the 2002 N SW Opportunity Fitzroy. Bookings: Maria George, (03) Premier's Literary Awards. Peter's book, knocks 9579 4255. Borderline, is a powerful analysis of Australia's refugee policy and practice. In June Melbourne was treated to the Borderline picked up a swag of awards in revelation that one of the gargoyles on 2001 , including the prize for the work St Patrick's Cath edral was indeed a that best advanced public debate, at the representation of ex-premier Jeffrey Ken Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. nett. Master stonemason Tom Carson It was also short-listed for a number of described his work as a whim, but a whim awards in 2002. But don't just admire the in a grand tradition. Remembering m edals. Read the book. Peter is currently Now, last time Eurel 6 EU REKA STREET • ) UL Y- AUGUST 2002 Coming to light L AOOR S VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 7 1 a e A dialogue This month's 'S umma' continues the exchange between Andrew Hamilton and Ray Cassin, that began with the M ay 'S umma'. It preceded the recent pub I ic controversy begun by the 60 Minutes program in which Archbishop George Pell was interviewed. Dear Ray, This change of view may have conse we simply lack imagination if we say that Thank you for your careful reading and quences for practice. Certainly those who there is any evil of which we personally courteous reply (Letters, June 2002) to the focus on sinful actions to the neglect of would be incapable. I insisted, on the other part of my May 2002 'Summa' that touched their continuing destmctive consequences, hand, that no evil that we might do would on clerical sexual abuse. You were troubled may be inclined to be m ore indulgent to ever destroy our dignity or cancel our des that, in counselling against 'simple exclu those who abuse but who appea r repent tiny. A purely punitive approach denies the sions and rejections', I appeared to argu e ant. They will forget the devastation of solidarity between those who punish and implicitly for a lenient trea tment of cler human lives that fl ow s out from the abuse. those who are punished. ics who had abused children. I would also like to expand on my char In this context I argued further against I appreciate this opportunity to clarify acterisation of the sexual abuse of children any 'simple exclusion or rejection'. I envis m y position and to carry our conversa tion as essentially an abuse of power. For this aged first an attitude that does not recog further. I wished to refl ect primarily on the form s the context of m y unease with 'sim nise the solidarity bet ween those who way in which we should imagine sexual ple rejections and exclusions'. The evil of punish and those who are punished, and abuse and those who perpetrate it, and not child abuse is rooted in the privileged and second, responses that involve a further on what we should do in response. I was powerful position that an adult has over abuse of power. Som e Catholics, for exam not argu ing fo r leniency for priests and children, and a priest may have over laity. ple, have urged that in respon se to the religious who had abused children- for a It should therefore be placed not only with scandal of child abuse, hom osexuals be Catholic priest to do that would be totally other forms of sexual misconduct but with excluded from ministry. Others have pro inappropriate. Indeed, I agree wholeheart other abuses of pow er. Indeed, of those posed excluding those who do not subscribe edly with your insistence that anyone who guilty of sexual abuse whom I have known, to all church positions on sexual m orality. has once abused a child should be excluded m any have misused their power in other I find it hard not to regard such proposals from pastoral ministry. pastoral relationships, particularly in their as opportunistic and evasive, and as lead Ways of imagining, however, have both dealings with wom en. And m any h ave ing naturally to yet further abuses of power. a history and practical consequences. After seemed driven by a strong ideology of cler They are also destructive because they will discovering some years ago that people for ical power and lay subservience. lead to the denial of sexual orientation. You whom I care deeply had been abused as This idolisation of power in the church don't need the clinical experience of Freud youths in Catholic churches and schools, tallies with a cultural mood that calls for to realise that this denial contributes to I came to appreciate the incalculable and ever harsher punishment of crime and for continuing devastation caused by abuse. diminished personal rights, and for the loss From a naive belief that the evil of abuse of scrutiny of abuses of power. In such a May 2002 Book Offer Winners lies almost entirely in the single actions of climate, to insist on the cancerous evil of 0. Abrahams, So uthbank, VIC; R.S. Boylen, Gland ore, SA; T. Dopheide, Eltham, VIC; V. Hill, the perpetrator-actions which could be the sexual abuse risks being misunderstood Drysda le, V IC; H . Kn orr, St Andrews, V IC; repented of, forgiven, and effectively for as supporting a response that is no more M . M cCa nn, Eas t Fremantle, WA; J. M cGirr, gotten- ! have come to imagine it through than punitive, which is itself an abuse of W agga, NSW; j . Smith, Kensin gton, VI C; K. Th o the eyes of its victims in more realistic and power. For that reason I insisted on our sol mas, Bundoora, VIC; P. W ilkins, Ca mpbell, ACT catastrophic ways. idarity in sin, claiming on the one hand that 8 EUREKA ST RE ET • j ULY- A UGUST 2002 dysfunctional and potentially abusive how in a religious community that is based that the sexual abuse of children is prima relationships. on the Gospel, does one hear the Parable of rily an abuse of power. That abuse is com Not all forms of rejection and exclusion, the Good Samaritan at prayer in the morn pounded wh en perpetrators appear to be however, are necessarily punitive. Some are ing, and exclude a brother or sister in the protected by those who wield power in the absolutely necessary. In a church in which afternoon ? I find these troubling and puz church, which is why my unease at Ham children have been abused and the abuse zling questions. But, as I said at the begin ilton's original comments is not lessened allowed to continue, the abuse itself, the ning of my letter, Ray, it is certainly not by his invocation of notions like 'solidarity'. minimising of its harm, and its conceal proper for them to be decided by priests George Pell has said that he accompanied m ent must be unequivocally rejected. That alone. Might our conversation pursue these Gerald Ridsdale, who is n ow serving a rejection will be ambiguous unless those questions? A ndrew Ham ilton prison term for the sexu al abuse of children, who have abused children are excluded to court as an act of solidarity with a fro m ministry, and accusations of abuse are Ray Cassin replies: brother priest. But Pell says that at the time adjudged justly and transparently. The Andrew Hamilton asks how, in a religious he did not understand the extent of Rids proper care for children demands at least community, one can hear the parable of the dale's crimes, and that he now regrets his that. Good Samaritan during morning prayer and act of solidarity becau se it sent the wrong It also seem s proper to reject all sexual then exclude a brother or sister in the m essage. It certainly did. relationships between priest and lay person, afternoon. This is not only a problem asso Of course the proble m of clerical because they are an abuse of power. For they ciated with clerical sexual abusers. The sexual abuse cannot be understood if the are asymmetrical, and begin with the shared sam e dilemma arose after the genocide in abuse is regarded as a series of discrete assumption that the priest's personal and Rwanda, where the Hutus accused of butch acts, abstracted from the context in which professional commitments exclude su ch ering Tutsis included priests and nuns. they take place; in other words, i£ respond sexual relationships. And it also seem s Som e of these priests and nuns later found ing to the problem does not cau se u s to proper to reject any arbitrary and unreview sanctuary in the monasteries and convents make honest assessm ents of clerical culture able exercise of power in the church. of their religious orders in Europe. and its psychosexual underpinnings, and of But to reject abuse of power is not to The church institutions involved did the clerical power structures that h ave reject people. N or does every abuse of not refuse to hand the Hutus over to secular created the opportunities fo r abusers. But power dictate exclusion from ministry. The authorities when arrest warrants w ere from recognising that this is so, it does not hard questions have to do with deciding eventually served on them, but they refu sed follow that it is acceptable for bishops and when and how to exclude. For abuse of all co-operation short of that. They justi m ajor superiors to continue to deal with power h as so m an y forms and grades. fi ed this as an expression of solidarity with the problem in the way that they have done, Though all sexual relationships fo rm ed by their brothers and sisters in religion, and that is, as a kind of dam age-control exer priests are abusive, there are significant dif sometimes as an expression of their con cise. In the present crisis the church still ferences between one's abuse of children, cern that due process be carried out. To the appears to be intent chiefl y on deflecting of adolescents, of young adults, of pasto rest of the world, however, the m onasteries criticism , and I do not think church lead rally dependent adults and of other adults. were harbouring people accused of appall ers can blam e anyone else for the fac t that What forms of exclusion are appropri ing crimes. Would Good Sam aritans do their actions are perceived in this way. ate in these different circumstances? And that? Hamilton is righ t, of course, in saying Ray Cassin He could be in school if his community wasn't impoverished Ca riras Ausrrali a helps so me of rhe mosr margin alised co mmuniries aro und rhe globe by address ing rh e iss ues of pove rry. Tb ro ugh long rerm developm em programs we enabl e peo pl e ro rake grea cer comro l of rheir li ves. By remember ing Ca riras Ausrrali a in yo ur WilL you are makin g a prec ious gifr rhar brings lasring change. Please call 1800 024 413 for more information. www.caritas.org.au Caritas Australia Th e Catholic Agency for Overseas Aid and Development V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 9 LETTERS Eureka Street welcomes I know that I am capable of any sin apart Un iversity blues lellers from our readers. from child abuse. But does that exception Short letters are more li ke ly give m e the right to distance myself from to be published, and all Frank jackson (Eureka Street, June 2002) is lellers may be edited. Lellers other sinners who may have committed the right: there must be 'A Better Way' in must be signed, and should ultimate outrage? The 'lack of freedom to university funding. Indeed, the situation include a contac t phone live virtuously' described by Augustine with higher-degree research is even more number and th e w riter's could be a reference to me. I support an insidious than he describes. The current name and address. Se nd to: attitude of 'zero tolerance' of child abuse eureka@ jespub.jesuit.org.a u or push on minimum finishing times and PO Box 553, Ri chmond VIC 3 121 anywhere, and I think many of our bishops maximum publications is already proving have handled this issue insensitively (e .g. to be m eretricious. the Catholic community owes nothing The emphasis in research grant applica m onetarily to convicted clerical paedo tions on the Track Record of the researcher implementing university policy. Their philes after their release from prison), but makes it increasingly important for PhD salaries at appointment were set, of course, there is a responsibility for the Catholic students to have a patron. A career-minded on the basis that providing academic leader (a nd wider Christian) community to under student would be foolish not to be beguiled ship and stimulating research were duties stand that this issue is ultimately a spirit into 'working on the professor's project'. that went with the job. The aforementioned ual issue, a life and death issue, an issue of Immediately, the risk increases that the professor-in-charge said, 'I realise that this eternal consequences. Adopting an attitude student will be engaged more in refutation process has become excessively bureau of vilification and pillorying of abusers (testing the professor's data) than in con cratic, however departments that do not (many of whom have committed suicide) jecture (speculating about different possi demonstrate that they are compliant with is not the answer. Christianity, urely, bilities for both theory and data). To meet these requirements and are graduating ultimately, must be about the possibility the funding-for-publication part of the students in a timely manner, may find it of God to heal and redeem? Department of Education, Science and difficult to obtain RTS-funded spots in the Warren Featherstone Training formula, a career-minded student future.' That phrase about willing execu Preston, VIC will be invited-some departments insist tioners came to mind. to share the authorship line with the Neville Hicks professor. Unley, SA Minimum times and maximum publi where are we on the cations are also a formula for discrimina tion. In applied fields, such as public health Redeeming or social welfare, a good proportion of stu EfUGEE dents during the '90s were doing research Having reread Andrew Hamilton's original hluhwav? degrees 'after a period in the workforce'. piece, 'Culture and Abuse' (Eureka Street, ~ . Their theses may never have been read by May 2002) several times, I do not see the 'anyone except the student, the examiners grounds for Ra y Cassin's reading into that and the supervisor' (a lthough that is an article H ami l ton's supposed diffidence overstatement by Jackson). Their period of about 'zero tolerance' with regard to child disciplined study did make many of them abuse (Eureka Street Letters, June 2002). more sympathetic and more imaginative Not for the first time, I actually think about the people whom they serve and how Hamilton 's reflective piece is powerful, those services might be improved. Proba apposite and helpful. bly they would be horrified by a recent I too am disgusted and repelled by the example where the professor in charge of 'abuse of power and trust' and 'suffocation Workshops include: 'The Media and Refugees', research wrote forma lly, concerning one of any htmger for the transcendent' entailed 'Understanding the Plight of Afghanis', student of this kind w ho had taken care in child abuse, whether clerical or not. But 'The Trauma of Relocation' fully organised maternity leave: 'Research I am also distressed by the occasion for anti 'Providing Practical Answers'. Committee was most interested in X's like Catholic bigotry and the readiness of many concluding with a panel discussion. lihood of completion' within the minimum to jettison the abusers as human beings. time '- likely to be harder than it once was This is a response which, while it may be given the absence of a scholarship for understandable and cathartic for those 6 months and child care costs'. Said the traumatised by abuse, could lose the oppor thoughtful, mature-age student, 'what do tunity for us to look again at the reality of they suggest that I do about it? ' sin and the power of God in our lives. Perhaps Some universities n ow pay senior that is what Andrew Hamilton was alluding academics a bonus up to 30 per cent above to when he talks of the 'simple exclusions salary to act as heads of department, and rejections that our culture dictates'? 10 EU REKA STREET • ) UL Y-AUGUST 2002 THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC mayor had written to the immigration min from locals- which the local employment Country matters ister supporting the abattoir's bid to have agency, Mission Employment, denies. the men stay on. Local teachers were pro Although support for the m en was strong A WORKING SOLUTION viding free English lessons. 'Meeting these among the people I m et in Young, there are people face to face makes you realise they're reports that at least som e of them have been M oHAMMAD Hus eini is one of around just people like you and m e,' Andrew threatened and abused in the streets of 70 Afghan refu gees w orking at the Graziani, an employee at the abattoir, told Young. A group of the m en, it seem s, want Burrangong Meatworks in Young, an hour the Telegraph. to leave the town. and-a-half's drive north-west of Canberra. By the time I visited Young late last Their distress would h ave intensified in He's a serious, quietly spoken young m an month, the good news had begun to unravel. early June when a leafl et began circulating with a good command of English, and he's According to a report in early May in the in Young calling on the locals to act to been working at the abattoir for nearly a Sydney Sun Herald, Mrs Gay Maxwell, a 'save' the town from ' the blight': year. 'I like the way people live here,' he long-term resident of the town, didn't want What's in store for Young very soon? Rape says, 'so peaceful, friendly people, where to be tarred with the tolerant, multicultural gangs, shootings of police officers, drugs, you can access justice. Anything's possible brush, so she'd begun collecting signatures muggings, house-breakings, murders and here, so I'd like to be h ere.' But like all the on a petition opposing the presence of the un employment? It starts with contract Afghans at Burrangong, Mohammad is on a m en. 'The media has been reporting that we labour at Burrangong Meat Processors. three-year temporary protection visa, which all welcomed them with open arm s,' she Some ca ll it multiculturalism. Ordinary m eans his future in Australia is uncertain, was quoted as saying, 'but we've never had people know it's the takeover of our towns, to say the least. a chance to put the other side of the story.' our country! Tony Hewson, human-resources man But when I asked Mrs Maxwell for an inter ager at Burrangong, says the m en were a view she didn't want to discuss the issue It's a fair bet that, coming from the Aus godsend for the company, which has had and doubted that any of her supporters tralia First Party, these views refl ect only a long- term problem s attracting workers. He would want to spea k to m e either. She did small body of opinion in Young. When wants Philip Ruddock and his department say that the m en w ere 'illegals'-they I called the mobile phone number on the to let them stay when their visas begin to aren't-and that they had taken jobs away leaflet I was greeted by a man in Sydney expire next March. Predictably, who didn't want to give m e his the minister says there'll be no nam e. He said that the leaflet was exceptions to the rules: if they written by a group of people in want to be considered for penna MY, YOUf< SMILe's JUSI Young whom he couldn' t nam e, nent settlem ent, Mohammad and and that he couldn't comment on his countrymen will have to go AS 1 IMA61N£D If FROM its contents either. He told me he'd back to Afghanistan and apply YoUR E-/'1\A IL-S/ ask the president of Australia First, under the skilled migration pro Diane T easdale, to phone me to gram. There's a suggestion that discuss the leafl et. Ms Teasdale they might get preferential treat lives in Shepparton, Victoria, even m ent, but they'll still have to further from Young than the make the trip-at their own, or unnam edmaninSydney. She hasn't the company's, expense. phoned back yet. It sounds like another bleak Since then, The Sydney Morn episode in Australia's official pro ing Herald has revealed that the gram of hostility towards asylum m an on the m obile phone is Jim seekers and refugees. But the Saleam, a former leader of the far stand-off brought with it som e right organisation, National Action. good news as well. In April the According to the paper, 'Dr Saleam Sydney Sunday Telegraph repor was jailed for 31/2 years in 199 1 for ted that the people of Young had possessing a firearm and organising rallied around the m en in the face a shotgun attack on the hom e of of the government's intransi the African N ational Congress's gence.ln a 'fascinating reversal of Sydney representative.' stereotypes', the paper reported, T ony Hewson thinks the leaflet 'the people of Young are battling is so ludicrously extreme that it the federal government to stop will actually increase support for the boat people leaving.' The Moo(£ the m en in the town. But the VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 11 Afghans in Young-and the other 8000 The poet Vincent Buckley caught som e bishops; and he was proudly conscious of temporary protection visa-holders around thing of Dormer's enigm a in his description the recusant history of his father's family, Au stralia-deserve a much stronger show of his first sighting of the m an who was to who had suffered for the faith under the of political support. They are, after all, become a close associate: Tudors. refu gees-an d are accepted as such under From his m other's fa mily he derived I noticed him sitting in a meeting, wi th his Australian law. The local federal MP, Alby grea t wealth, his grandfather being a fo under extraord inarily swarthy and battered face, Schultz, is h ostile towards anyone who's of T oohey's brewery in Sydney. The m oney looking like the popular image of a gypsy, arrived by boat. Premier Bob Carr is a vocal was tied up in a discretionary trust, whose and (with the eyes that had only two supporter of a tough stand against refugees principal trustee refused to release it to expressions, merry and sa d) cu riously and asylum seekers. And the federal ALP is him. So this middle-aged m an survived on beautiful, or at least moving. still fl oundering around, unable to sum what remained of his demobilisation pay m on the courage to reject the failed prag These were the glory days of university out- he had been a captain in the King's m atism of the Beazley years. Despite the N ewman societies, when m embers were Own Yorkshire Light Infantry during World warm welcom e they've had from many exploring new ways of being Catholic. T en War II-and pocket money from th e trust. people in Young, Mohammad and his friends years before the event, they were already When at last the obstructive trustee died, have good reason to feel uncertain about experimenting with Vatican II outcom es in Dorm er cashed in the estate and went to their future in Australia. -Peter Browne the lay apostolate, spirituality, liturgy, Europe, to pursue his vocation as an artist. ecumenism and openness to the culture of In his m em oirs, Cutting Green Ha y, the world. The architect of their style of Vincent Bu ckl ey lists some of the proper In memoriam church was a Belgian, Joseph Cardijn, whose ties the Toohey's heir now acquired: a house Jocist (Young Christian Worker) m ovem ent in the Cotswolds, a fl at in London, a regular jO HN DORMER showed the way forward. Dorm er had m ade booking at a hotel in Geneva, and a farm in contact with the Jocist movem ent at source; Connem ara. The London apartment sa t E N IGMATJC IS THE word that best describes to m eet him was to en counter a witness to above a fashionable restauran t, Mirabel, John Kenelm Dormer, wh o has died in Lon authentic tradition. which John used as his in-house caterer. don at the age of 87. He was a crea tive N ot that he big- noted himself. His pres N othing pleased him more than to enter presence in university Catholic circles in ence drew fo rth from younger colleagues tain Australian arrivals in London. He would Melbourne and Sydney half a century ago, their own deepest hopes and expectations, tour them round the fa mily castles and although few participants could say quite without any imposition of readym ade estates, taking special pride in that sacred what h e did orwh erehe fittedin. He seem ed answers. N or was his Catholicism notice site of English Catholicism, Stonor, which to spend his days and nights in student ably radical. Its Benedictine foundations had never left the family or the fa ith. Once, coffee shops, encouraging younger people had been dug deep at Downside School, the building on a chance acquaintance, he took to discuss w hat it m ea nt to be Catholic. seminary of Aus tralia's early English som e Australian students to afternoon tea at an art curator's flat inside Windsor Cas tle. Clearly, the curator was not sure how this had happened, or who Jo hn Dormer actually was; and she was speechless when h e casually asked to see th e Queen's Holbeins. By repute, artists are un world! y creatures, and Dormer had com e into his m oney too late to have learned how to manage it. Incredibl y, he let the fortune slip through his fingers. From Italy he appealed to a friend in Sydney for help. T hen cam e the m ost heart-warming part of this story. Sending a circular letter to old Newman Society members, the Sydney friend raised $5000 in a fortnight. More than that- many of the donors thanked him for giving them the opportunity to do something kind for a m an who had done so much for them in their youth. So John Dormer got back to London, to live out his days on welfare. He was still active in church circles and the art world; and he still talked of realising youthful dreams of finding communi ty. He had the great good fortune to meet and marry New York: some things never change. For those who need glasses, th e billboard reads: Kathleen Michael, a musician from Queens 'Keep using my name in vai n, I' ll make ru sh hour longer. -God' . Photograph: Trevor Hay land. Together they shared his tiny charity 12 EU REKA STRE ET • ) ULY - AUGUST 2002 flat in Earl's Court. When he became too frail to walk, his faithful wife would wheel him each day through the streets-every one seemed to know John and smile at him-to a cafe where, as in years past, he was surrounded by strenuous conversations. Kathleen was with him at home, holding archimedes him in her anns, when he died peacefully on 30 May, the day the English church celebrated the feast of Corpus Christi. -Edmund Campion Gould's gold Mixed marriage IFEVER THERE WERE an antithesis of the caricature of the eccentric and aloof PRESERVING T//[ ACE'S scientist, it was Stephen Jay Gould-palaeontologist, best-selling popular author, EDITORIAL IDENTITY and baseball fanatic-who died in May of lung cancer at the age of 60. Gould was an urbane polymath. He was multilingual, studied classical S EASONED INTER- JTY cmnmuters know music, sang in Gilbert and Sullivan groups, and dodged bullets and drug-runners that The Sydney Morning Herald and The while collecting land snails in the Bahamas. Age can usually substitute for each other He was a public intellectual of the best kind. Once a month for 27 years, he without causing the peripatetic reader more than mild distress. The Fairfax broadsheets sat down on a Sunday afternoon and wrote a beautifully crafted essay for Natural are similar, with relative differences; if they History magazine- more than 300 of them on the trot. (Not even the World were human, they might be siblings. Syd Series could stop him, he once boasted.) The best of them fill nine volumes of ney, who is slightly senior, is more urbane: the more than 20 books he wrote, and established him as one of the great science more handsome, more worldly, more self writers. In keeping with the man, these essays blend life and science, baseball assured. Melbourne is more evidently a and history. In one famous piece, he used his knowledge of statistics to argue creature of contrasts: seri ous, but with a that outstanding batting averages were a thing of the past in baseball- not radical vein of humour; established, but because modern players were any worse than the players of history, but because often 'alternative'; spiritual, but in a secu they were better. lar sense. Most of his writings, however, were to do with fossils and evolution. He is Nevertheless, the titles have so much in often credited with re-establishing the importance of palaeontology in the study common it is easy to forget that their rela tionship is through marriage, and that only of evolution. In graduate school, h e and fellow student Dr Niles Eldridge devel a generation ago they belonged to different oped an overview of the course of evolution known as 'punctuated equilibrium'. families. For more than a century, The A ge They proposed that, far from being a sm ooth process of steady change, evolution was owned or controlled by David Syme occurred in sudden jumps that punctuated long periods of stability. A well and his descendants, and when they agreed known example is the idea that dinosaurs and many associated species rapidly to tie the knot with the Fairfaxes, it was, for disappeared after the earth was hit by a large meteor. the Symes at any rate, a union of last resort. The theory provoked such dissension among evolutionists-dissension as Warwick Fairfax had first presented his suit yet unresolved-that creationists tried to suggest the debate demonstrated that in 1946. He proposed to inject £400,000 Darwin was wrong and evolution was on shaky ground. Gould, however, was into the undercapitalisedAge, but in return, an implacable foe of creationists, and took them to the Supreme Court to argu e he sought control of the business, some that evolution was an essential part of the science taught in American sch ools. thing the Symes were not prepared to yield. In 1982, he was diagnosed with a rare kind of mesothelioma. His response Sir Warwick renewed his attentions in the was typical. He read everything he could about the condition, and found that 1950s, again unsuccessfully. Around this time, yo ung Rupert the median length of survival was just eight months. He then calmly sat down Murdoch began purchasing shares in David and analysed the statistics backing that contention, and decided there was a Sym e & Co Ltd. Syme family archives show better than even chance he would live a lot longer. As it was, he lived 20 years that, in 1959, he wrote to them announcing longer, and eventually wrote an essay about his experien ce, which should be he had a proposition to put; evidently, he standard reading for all those who are told their time is limited. (When one of received no encouragement. But the indus Archimedes' colleagues contracted the sam e kind of cancer, Gould heard about try knew that when David Syme's last it through a mutual friend. He then wrote a positive, en couraging and practical surviving son, Oswald, died, a large tranche email to a man h e hardly knew.) of family shares would find their way on to Public intellectuals of Gould's type are becoming an endangered species. the market. In 1966, Syme management Let us hope that his legacy inspires others, so that his kind will not becom e agreed to a deal with Fairfax, in order to extinct. • forestall a hostile takeover by the Murdoch or Packer organisations after Oswald's Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer. VOLUME 1 2 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 13 a large, integrated, multimedia conglom er ate. If this com es to pass it will have enor $/R / 1HIS IS A NO FRILLS mous consequences for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and their tradi FLI6~f! CANNH3Al.JSM IS ONLY tional editorial identities. Per2Mlii6D 4FTER Nt CRASH! Put simply, a newspaper's editorial iden tity is its brand or 'image'. If a paper is to thrive in a competitive market, every issue must be a recognisable variant of the title. Readers do not want yesterday's paper all over again, but they want to know what they are buying. Ju st as novelty and cur rency are crucial ingredients in the editorial mix, so too are the paper's history and editorial traditions. As W .S. Holden wrote, 'the image formed by a newspaper's past is a powerful influence upon its present fo rtunes'. I began to think about the historical aspects o f editorial identity when I embarked on research into the qualities that had m ade The Age a special Australian newspaper. It is safe to assume that during the two decades the Syme family held out against Fairfax, they were contemplating not their commonalities but their differ ences. Both The Age and The Sydney Morn ing Herald were forged in the Victorian era of the serious broadsheet, but as Gavin Souter's history sh owed, the Herald, founded in 183 1, was conservative almost passing. According to Ranald Macdonald, staff separate bureaux would be maintained, from the outset, opposing universal suf then managing director of David Syme & but that the papers would in future share frage. Th e Age, a product of the gold rushes, Co Ltd, the family's preferred option was to each other's political exclusives. The move was a 'liberal' or 'radical' journal. By 1860, rem ain independent- but with the shares cam e hard on the heels of the consolidation it cam e under the control of David Syme, a t take-over prices that o ption was of the newspapers' classified advertising and through it he waged war on entrenched unaffordable. businesses under the leadership of one interests such as the Victorian Legislative Having held out so long, the Symes Sydney-based executive. Council and the Argus newspaper. The m anaged to wangle significant concessions From the stock m arket's perspective, Argus and The Sydney Morning Herald from Fairfax, including an arrangement that such m easures appear desirable. La st were natural allies, and for several years as long as they owned at least ten per cent N ovember, D eutsche Bank issued an shared a cable service that went head to of David Syme & Co Ltd, they would have analysis that criticised Fairfax's high fixed head with a rival group led by David Sym e. equal representation on its board. Gradually, costs, including staffing, and said that with Even when The Age and The Sydney however, the newspapers' managem ents further cuts it should be possible to deliver Morning Herald began to share som e services, becam e enmeshed. In 1972, Fairfax acquired another $110 million in gross annual earn fundamental differences in their politics re majority own ership of David Syme & Co ings. Whether they will enhance the news mained. The Age, instinctively more moder Ltd; in 1983, the major Syme shareholders, papers' editorial performances is a different ate, was pro-Liberal but nevertheless often including Macdonald, sold out; by late 1997, question: in th e Canberra bureaux, there supported Labor, even advocating the return David Syme & Co Ltd's board had been are mixed opinions. of the Scullin govemmen t during the Depres disbanded and its separate management Undoubtedly, the new copy-sh aring sion. It claimed for itself the m antle of politi structure flattened. Thereafter, The Age's arrangem ent is part of the gradual attrition cal 'independence and detachment'. editor-in-chief and publisher (a single of the newspapers' separate identities, a In reality, its independence waxed and executive) reported directly to Sydney. process that may well continue. With the waned, and has rarely been so unambigu During these years the sharing of editorial Howard government intent on mitiga ting ously expressed as m yth suggests. David resources gradually increased, notably in the cross-m edia ownership rules, Fairfax's Syme, for all his shameless self-promotion costly foreign coverage. chief executive, Fred Hilmer, has signalled as the champion of ordinary Victorian work Recently, there has been a fresh out that he is interested in joining Fairfax with ers, m ade deals with politicians. In the break of symbiotic sentiment, with rumours a television network to create a larger, 1950s, the paper had a comm ercial relation that the newspapers' separate Canberra national m edia empire. It seem s his vision ship with a serving Victorian Cabinet m in bureaux would m erge, or at least begin to for Fairfax is not for a newspaper publisher ister. In the 1974 federal election cam paign, share copy. In early June, m anagem ent told primarily serving two state markets but for conservative elem ents on the Syme board 14 EU REKA STREET • j ULY- A UGUST 2002 forced editor Graham Perkin to neuter an coyness. During m y research, I realised this before a hereditary constitutional monarch, editorial supporting the return of Labor. quality probably came down from David who apparently wore earplugs because she Yet the idea of a venerable tradition of Syme, a Chartist who had been brought up hates anything with a backbeat. (Or a black political independence dating back to Syme by a stern Calvinist father. Under Syme, beat? Why were there so few black musi has remained a key to the paper's editorial and later under his son Geoffrey, lurid cian s invited to the party?) identity. In the mid-1990s, The Age con political insult mingled with Protestant I grew up with rock music during the sciously invoked it to take a stand against primness in the newspaper's pages. 1960s when it occasionally had som e Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett. At the last If owners and managers keep wearing thing m eaningful to say. This was not the federal poll, when The Age's election-day away the distinguishing aspects of a news rock 'n' roll of the late 1950s, with themes editorial opposed the Howard governm ent's paper, it will not only begin to resemble of teenage love and hot cars. The closest return because of its policy on asylum other papers: eventually, it will cease to that 1950s rock cam e to being rebellious seekers, many readers would have recog resembleitsell. Happily, this rule of editorial was in songs like 'Summertime Blues' by nised its old impulse to go its own way. identity also works in reverse. The peopl e Eddie Cochran . Juvenile disenchantment Som e other aspects of The Age's edi to rial at Fairfax might care to study The Austral with parents and arguments over pocket identity are of a finer grain, and less visible ian, the paper which Rupert Murdoch money were h ardly challenging to the to the naked eye. A distinction needs to be founded in 1964 in a sustained burst of social order. I appreciate that the lyrical drawn between its liberalism in politics newspaper idealism . Although it is part of content of early rock music was not its and its often conservative feeling on social N ews Ltd, The Australian does not gener primary purpose. The 'threat' it posed lay issues. A former Age editor, Creighton ally share the copy and photographs it gen elsewhere-in its African- American ori Burns, thought the paper was 'more alive erates with other papers in the group. This gins, in its pounding beat and implicit politically than it was socially', when he was the case even during the long years sexual enthu siasm. But in the 1960s, joined it in 1964. As late as 1981, columnist before it turned a profit. Consequently, it groups like the Beatles and the Animals Phillip Adams noted that the paper had a has avoided the hom ogeneity that some possessed all of the above-and also had ' curious sort of embarrassment about times infects other N ews Ltd titles, and som ething to say. sexuality'. created its own highly identifiable, endur For a young rebel like mysell, there was When I worked on the paper's foreign ing brand. -Sybil Nolan an affinity that extended beyond the music desk during the early 1990s, The Age did and into a shared mission to change the not deign to notice the Duchess of York's world. This, lest we forget, was the world of toe-sucking escapade, or other low-level Hons and rebels inter-continental nuclear threat and the Royal peccadilloes that featured in the Cold War. Closer to home, it was the Viet tabloids. Even The Sydney Morning Herald OLD ROCKERS nam War, compulsory military service by had m ore interest in the Royals' romantic AND THE QUEEN lottery, and a series of state and fe deral misadventures. It was only when the marital governments that liked to censor things . It war between Princess Diana and the Prince A MI THE ONLY ONE to have squirmed in was also a time in which a generation- the of Wales threatened a fully-fledged consti my seat while watching all those rock and baby boom ers-enjoyed a level of personal tutional crisis that The Age cranked its pop stars performing at Her Majesty's opportunity in employment and education coverage in to top gear. golden jubilee? Witness Ozzy Osbourne, not known by their parents' generation. To me, The Age had a strange, dual bat-decapitator and scourge of decentfami Pop music spoke for large numbers of flavour, a combination of campaigning and lies everywhere, happily strutting his stuff young people and m any thousands becam e The Drawing Board is a place to reflect up on an d eva luate the design and redesign of Au stralia's public policies and institutions, as we ll as Australia's relations and responsibilities in the broader wo rld community. Since 2000, The Drawing Board has been publishing thought-provoking articles on such diverse topics as labour market policy, university funding , defence policy, and an Au stralian Bill of Rights. Our contributors include many of Australia's leading academics, policy makers and commu ni ty leaders. Isn't it time you discovered The Drawing Board 7 www.drawingboard.info VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 15 politically active. My particular musical hero was Eric Burdon, of the Animals. Grow ing up in Brunswick, Melbourne, I took inspiration from songs like 'We Cotta Get W14Y, !US\ l-OOK OVI I14C;.R£ Outta This Place'. Back then, Brunswick rr'5 fZtPIL.I'f't' IZEA!,ITY~ was a tough industrial suburb of low-income workers. Burdon's lyrical delivery resonated with m y own experience, as it did with his own as a Geordie fro m N cwcastle-upon Tyne and, later, with that of American soldiers serving in Vietnam. Burdon was not among the 'pop legends' who performed at the Queen's party. But Paul McCartney-Sir Paul McCartney was. Perhaps Sir Paul's development epito mises what happened to the rebelliousness in 1960s pop music. Wrongly disparaged as the 'bubble gum' clement in the Beatles, McCartney was actually the band's most creative innovator. Not as overtly political as John Lennon, Paul was nonetheless politically aware and willing to use his music in the service of a political cause. It was Paul, for example, who penned 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish' in 1972. Three decades later, Ireland is yet to be returned to the Irish and Paul-Sir Paul-is special guest at the Palatial Party. There is plenty of evidence of 1960s pop musicians adopting US folk singer Woody Gu thric' s motto, etch cd on his guitar during metamorphosis from pacifist to royalist? fruits of capitalism have been more forth the 1930s: 'This guitar kills fascists'. In So, what is the source of my discomfort? coming and on a grander scale for success other words, music docs not exist in a Perhaps it has more to do with me than ful pop musicians than for most of us. All it vacuum. Musicians are part of the real with them. How could I have been so naive took for som e of my old fellow rebels to 'sell world, even if their part of it may seem as to believe that rock's rebelliousness was out' was the election of a Labor government bizarre and occasionally unreal to everyone not just part of the packaging and promo and offers of secure and comfortable posi· else. There comes a time when a pop tion/ Look at the evidence of manipulated tions in the public service. At least pop musician's gotta do what a pop musician's reputation in the case ofJimi Hendrix. Now music legends commanded a high price. gotta do. Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruc Jimi was no political radical. In fact, as a -Barry York tion' is a case in point. In 1965, its 'ban the one-time member of America's 101st Air bomb' message reached millions and sold borne Paratroopers, h e supported his millions-well, two million worldwide, to government's intervention in Vietnam. As Writers' meet be precise. Eric Burdon has remarked, Hendrix merely Few stand out in the history of rock substituted his military weaponry for a Lt\UI"\CHE~ 01"\ rebellion as starkly as the Ia te John Lennon. Stratocaster. Chas Chandler, who discov n ll Ht\KBOUK He created two protest anthcms-'Give ered and managed Hendrix, tells a revealing Peace a Chance' and 'Power to the People' tale in John McDermott and Eddie Kramer's M ORE THAN ANY other event at this at moments when they were sorely needed. book, Hendrix (W arncr Books, 1992). During year's Sydney Writers' Festival, the media And it was John who, in 1969, returned his Jimi's 1969 American tour, Chandler forged turned up for the launch of Bob Carr's MBE in protest against British policy in and released a press statem ent purporting Thoughtlines, a collection of essays and Biafra and the war in Vietnam. In fairness, to come from the ultra-conservative 'Daugh articles written by the premier over the it should also be said that he returned it ters of the American Revolution'. The state years. It was a festive occasion. A number of because he was unhappy that his record ment condemned Jiini's 'exposure' to young Labor luminaries came to the venue directly 'Cold Turkey' had slipped in the charts. But American girls. The press release worked: from the funeral of Sir John Gorton. Perhaps that was John being John. the media seized on the Daughters' sup this was why they were in such rare form. Would John Lennon ever have become posed hostility to Hendrix. The phoney N ot only had they just buried one liberal 'Sir John'? Would the off er have been made? controversy created much publicity for the prime minister but they had looked on I believe the powers-that-be are always tour and fi xed Hendrix's reputation as som e while another was publicly chastised. happy to co-opt their strongest opponents. kind of radical. Gough Whitlam arrived a little late and And very few are not co-optable. Would But maybe I'm being too harsh on the the crowds parted to allow him to come Lennon, like Paul, have managed the old rockers and poppers. We all change. The forward and take a sea t. He was now 16 EUREKA STREET • j ULY- AUGUST 2002 Australia's oldest living former prime organisational chaos which seem ed to commercial theatre sector. Margery and minister and he knew it. When Mr Carr govern the prime minister's office during Michael Forde's darkish com edy- drama thanked his personal staff for being the best Kea ting's tenure. And about Keating's strat Milo's Wake is playing 28 different centres any leader had drawn together, Gough cor egies for evading minders and lobbyists in fo ur states and the ACT on a 27-week rected him. 'State leader,' h e said. It was a wh en he wanted to get hom e late in the tour, in a production created by Brisbane's family affair. Ev en Mr Carr's former high day. He said that there were tim es when La Boite Theatre Company. school English teacher was present. It getting Keating to focus on som ething The Milo's Wake tour began in Adelaide was only when the launcher, Barry Jones, was 'like trying to drag a dead horse across in m id-April and has played in Melbourne, sp ent ten minutes probing Mr C arr's a paddock '. Canberra and then several regional NSW understanding of Proust that the crowd But Watson's m ost incisive comments centres. In early July it goes to the Belvoir St started to fray at the hem. were directed against the dead language to Thea tre in Sydney. Then Launceston and With federal Labor now so long out of which political ideas are reduced. As also one- night stands in five other Tasma- government and so fa r fr om returning to it, Keating's sp eech -w riter, h e it is hardly surprising that the party finds trawled through memoranda and itself in a refl ective m ood. Political parties drafts which were couched in such tend to do their private thinking in public m eaningless clich es that they and a writers' festival is as good a place as were 'like an exchange of dead any. N eal Blewett, a former Labor health animals'. Many formulaic expres minister, has pointed out that 'the Hawke sions were 'like an old door sau and Keating governments were the m ost sage just put there to keep the literate this country has seen '. Apart from drafts out'. When a new word or both Hawke and Keating them selves, the expression was introduced, it list of politicians- turned-authors is rem ark would be done to death. One su ch able. It includes John Button, Bill Hayden, word was 'enhance'. Suddenly, Tom Uren, Peter Walsh, Susan Ryan, Robert said Watson, government policy Tickner, Graham Richardson and Blewett was about enhancing everything. himself. It would be interesting if occasion 'You 'd getup and say "I'll enhance Above: Milo's Wake. ally an author moved into politics, but so my face this m orning".' A word Ross Smith , Garry Nun n and M ichae l Forde. far the traffic is all in one direction. such as' committed' could be used This is a little surprising given the pas to m ean the opposite of what it seem ed to. nian towns in Augu st before returning to sionate political views of many authors. At 'Why do you need to say you are committed regional Victoria and suburban Melbourne. this festival, Bryce Courtenay spoke about to doing som ething when you can simply The tour concludes in Wagga Wagga (25 literacy. 'Freedom of speech is implicit in say that you are doing it?' The word could September-S October) and Penrith (8-12 the ability to read,' he said. Both Richard be a stalling tactic. October) . Flanagan and Raimond Gaita suggested that There were also plenty of signs at the Working almost entirely in the opposite what is commonly referred to as Australia's festival that the world is bigger than Aus direction, Hot Shoe began its third Austral 'security' is really a sign of a deeply rooted tralia. Visiting Palestinian, Tariq Ali, and ian tour in Launceston and Hobart (in early insecurity. Gaita wondered why in the nam e Ea st Timorese writer, Abe Soares, were May) before tapping into the Athenaeum of sovereignty was it necessary to deny welcom e for that. We needed them . At the Theatre in Melbourne for a month. It will health and other forms of care to those who opening of the festival, the Lord Mayor of travel as far as Darwin before settling back happen to be fr om somewhere else. He said Sydney, Frank Sartor, spoke of having just into Sydney's Theatre Royal for an open tha t the defensive policies of wealthy returned from Dili wh ere h e was present at ended season starting 3 1 October. nations are equivalent to living behind the inauguration of a new nation. Sydney These are massive travelling ventures. barbed wire. had donated som e buses to East Timor. C urrent Australian tou ring practice is On the same panel, Flanagan told the Sartor was sitting in a cafe in Dili when on e dependent on performing arts centres and story of his 85-year -old father who had been such bus went past. Its destination indica other venue managers (and som e theatre in the Hellfire Pass. Mr Flanagan Snr had tor still said 'Pyrmont'. companies) combining to present a wide been inspired to speak at a public rally -Michael McGirr variety of theatrical work-or going it alone because 'he didn't know what army Bruce to present other companies' shows off their Ruxton had been part of'. Mr Flanagan own entrepreneurial bats. rem embered an Aboriginal colleague called Dramatic moves It's interesting to see La Boite getting Pinky who fought ga llantly for a country su ch wide exposure. One of the Nugent which, at that time, denied him citizen SHOWS ON THE ROAD report's recommendations was that m ore ship. He also rem embered a homosexual work should tour out of Queensland, and soldier who was widely accepted 'becau se Two THEATRE productions currently tour Wendy Blacklock's touring company Per he was a good bloke'. ing Australia reveal m any of the character forming Lines has taken advantage of the Don Watson's insider's account on the istics of present-day itinerant theatre. opportunity to pick up Milo's Wake, with prime ministership of Paul Keating, Recol The David Atkins-produced tap-dancing funding fro m Playing Australia. lections of a Bleeding Heart, provided an musical comedy Hat Shoe Shuffle-currently This is a play with a very good premise. occasion for him to refl ect on political in M elbourne as part of a 3 1-town national Old building-supplies m anufacturer Milo culture. H e spoke, for example, about the tour-em anates from th e bold-as-brass O'Connor has decided to retire, hand the V OLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EU REKA STR EET 17 business over to his son Ned and hit the a one-man-show to m e. None of the other newspaper, ra dio talkback or news pro road with long-suffering wife Maura in a three characters (especially N eel's girlfriend gram, either commercial or ABC, made any mobile home-all of this unbeknown to Brooke) is developed beyond the level of reference to the event. It was blanked. the family. Meanwhile, he has decided to sounding board to Milo's tirades of com It seems that non-violent, thoughtful stage his own wake in an Irish-theme pub, plaint and self-pity. And fun though it is for and well-managed human-rights events like mainly for the chance to hear a few kind the audience at the tables, I suspect the play this are of no interest to news media. It is words about himself from his family before would be better served by a more intimate said, on what authority I know not, that he dies. But plaudits look an unlikely pros actor-audience relationship. Australian journalists or their employers, pect, given Milo's cavalier treatment of all Hot Shoe Shuffle is another experience or maybe both (with the honourable excep around him throughout his life and through entirely. Written by Larry Buttrose and tion of a cohort in The Australian), think most of the play. Kathryn Riding (using a concept by David that refugees and asylum seekers have been T his production is set as if we're in the Atkins and Max Lambert), the show is about 'done'; the news mileage now lies not in the Wren Bar of the pub, with part of the audi the seven Tap brothers and their struggle to human tragedies but in the sabre-rattling ence sitting and drinking Guinness at tables, make a dollar in the cutthroat vaudeville between the great engines of power, Minis and the action punctuated with songs from business. The idea is that they can get ter Ruddock and the Federal Court. a very good two-man Irish band. This, plus access to their dead father's very generous But the journalism fraternity's lack of the light-hearted bantering tone, provides will only if they can reproduce his famously interest is particularly odd when it extends for som e rollicking good fun, especially in difficult 'Hot Shoe Shuffle' tap-dance variety to the plight of one of their own. the first half. After the interval, the mood act in public. And only if they do so with a Cheikh Kone is a young journalist from darkens as skeletons emerge from the fam girl who can't dance for nuts and who is Cote d'Ivoire. He took the escape road after ily closet- in particular the bones of what supposed to be their long-lost sister April. he had been arrested, beaten and tortured happened to N ed's dead brother Aidan. The The boys enthusiastically begin rehears by authorities-an article of his had offended songs become more ironic and the writers ing but life is made difficult-as much by them. He stowed away in a cargo ship that make telling use of som e dark and frighten the dictatorial old director Max King who's made it to Fremantle. There he was appre ing Irish myths and legends to parallel the appointed to supervise the act as it is by hended, given no advice, interviewed, found O'Connor family's relationships. April's lack of skill. But once it's clear that wanting as a refugee and confined at Port It's an enjoyable p erformance and April is not their sister, the boys vie for her Hedland. Michael Forde is outstanding as the old affections-except the eldest brother Spring, The facts of his plight appear in a letter rogue Milo. But it feels a bit too much like who begins to resent the whole thing and to the prime minister sent by the Writers in decides to call it all off. There are of course Prison Committee oflnternational PEN, an a string of classically nea t reversals in the association rep resenting writers in 94 coun second act and the show duly goes on. tries, a few weeks ago: 0·· A.,.,O,·E·a It's paper-thin and very silly stuff. But the songs (by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, According to our information, Cheikh Ridley College George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and even Kone, journalist with the Cote d'Ivoire University of Melbourne Peter Allen), the simple, colourful cartoon newspaper 'Le Patriot', was detained by CONFERENCES sets (by Eamonn Darcy) and, above all, the immigration officials in Australia in outstanding tap-dancing from a highly December 2000. He fl ed Cote d'Ivoire in Thur sday 11 July skilled and energetic cast make this fear for his safety after reporting fraudulent Dr Chris Wright unashamedly old-fashioned show a good, activity during the October 2000 elections. author of Living as the People of God nostalgic night out. The finale, with a series Amnesty International reports that during of solos (especially Jesse Rasmussen's 2000 considerable numbers of opposition 2-6pm ~ Ethics for the People 'Puttin' on the Ritz'), duos and group acts of activists and supporters were tortured and of God: preaching biblical escalating difficulty, is dazzling. killed by the military in Cote d'Ivoire. In ethics. Cost $20, cone $10 -Geoffrey Milne spite of well-documented evidence to sup port his claim for refugee status as defined 6 f or 6.30pm ~ Book Launch Rethinking Peter Singer, IVP, ed . Gordon Preece by Article l of the Convention relating to Media blanks the Status of Refugees, to which Australia 7.15pm ~ Welcoming the Stranger: is a signatory, Cheikh Kane's initial appli a biblical view of refugees. Cost $1 o WHO CA RES? cation for asylum was rejected. It would cone $5 appear that there were serious fl aws in the ON22 M AY, Malcolm Fraser and other due process of his case, in particular the Monday 29 July speakers- including refugee advocate Paris lack of legal representation and provision Colin Gunton Aristotle, writer Arnold Zable, ACTU Presi of an interpreter during his first interview 3-5pm ~ God's Attributes fo r dent Sharon Burrows and me-addressed a at port by Department of Immigration pastors and graduates. capacity audience in the Melbourne Town officials, which was to form the fo undation of his case. He is presently pursuing an 7.30-9.30pm ~ The Spirit, Creation Hall (2500 people, and a queue that stretched & Ethics. A public lecture . arou nd the block). It was a powerful and application to the High Court, which is his moving occasion of support for refugees fina l avenue of appeal. International PEN Ridley College, 160 The Avenue, Parkville, Victoria and asylum seekers. Ye t not one TV camera believes that Cheikh Kane's life would be rsvp by 5/07/02, ph: 03 9207 4800 was seen. T h e fo llowing day not one in danger if he was repatriated ... Inter- 18 EUREKA STREET • ) ULY - A UGUST 2002 w ent underground. Matters were no better in 2000, when Amnesty reported that OH 'r'£AA IH£ K\t>S JUS! lOVE another military promise to respect the fLA'{INb , ''ftTAN\C " WHeN freedom of the press had not been matched by eff ective action to prevent the military W~ DEfR051"! from behaving like a law unto them selves, from raiding newspaper offices and ill treating 'offending' journalists. According to Amnesty, staff of at least five publica tions w ere subjected to intimidation and physical brutality. The Amnesty reports are compelling. In the light of them it beggars belief that we might risk sending a political refugee back to a country he fled after being subjected to violence just because our laws say it's 'legal' to do so. If there is any purpose to human rights agreem ents, it is to set down funda mental, universal ethical principles. Be just. Be compassionate. Do not turn away the desperate from your door. And why is it that the m edia didn't see the immediate need to support a young, black, French-speaking political journalist, their brother? Is it because he, at least, believes in the universal moral code? Or because they don't value those who take risks to write what should be said? 'Is there any other point to which you national PEN Writers in Prison Commit referees to the MEAA, of whom only one would wish to draw my attention ?' tee considers journalist Cheikh Kane to be seems to have been directly contacted. 'To the curious incident of the clog in the in grave danger of persecution in Cote Though PEN (UK) was satisfied after two night-time.' d'Ivoire solely for the peaceful exercise of telephone checks with the editor of Kane's 'The cl og did nothing in the night-time.' his profession .. . paper (who confirmed he had indeed writ 'That was the curious incident,' remarked ten for the paper), another international Sherlock Holmes. The Australian journalists' professional organisation, Journalists Sans Frontieres, -Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of association, the Media, Entertainment & apparently spoke to someone else, the' edito Sherlock Holmes Arts Alliance (MEAA), apparently did not rial manager', who said he didn't know Kane. share PEN's sense of urgency. Cheikh Kane Cote d'Ivoire is not a safe place for -Moira Rayner contacted the federal office of the MEAA investigative journalists, editors or, indeed, more than four months ago. To little avail. anyone much. It has been largely lawless This month's contributors: Peter Browne He needed immediate help finding an Eng for a very long time. In 1995, Amnesty works at the Institute for Social Research at lish-speaking advocate, getting legal advice International declared several journalists Swinburne University and produces The the moment h e contacted them and later, prisoners of conscience after they w ere con National Interest on ABC Radio National; support for his appeal to the High Court. victed of insulting the head of state. In June Edmund Campion is a contributing editor The W A branch of the MEAA has expressed 1995, one journalist was summoned to the of Eurel VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EU REKA STREET 19 THE WORLD: I What's right for Europe? From Madrid Anthony Ham reports on the shifting politics and racial preferences of a Europe that is, mostly, out to maximise its own advantage. ExcwS 20 EUREKA STREET • j ULY-AUGUST 2002 Spain is not, however, immune from the anti ing on a joint platform of anti-immigrant and law immigrant sentiment that is sweeping Europe. Prim e and-order policies, looks likely to be the next Ger Minister Jose Maria Aznar currently holds the rotat m an chancellor. From D enmark (Pia Kj re rsgaard's ing EU presidency. He has been at the forefront of Danish People's Party) to Austria (Jorg Haider's Free efforts to co-ordinate a tougher, Europe-wide immi dom Party), the extreme right is on the rise and in gration policy, a policy which will dominate the EU m any cases is part of a government coalition. summit in Seville in June. Spain is also under grow It has becom e almost fashionable to assert the ing pressure from human-rights organisations over connection between crime and foreign ers as an conditions in its detention camps fo r illegal immi incontrovertible fact-a perception elevated to the gran ts, on the Canary Islands and Spain's outposts of level of a fundam ental truth. T he real facts seem Ceuta and Mellila on the African mainland. irrelevant. The sam e report that heralded Berlusconi's In a recent survey, 70 per cent of Spanish respond crackdown on immigrant crime quoted police figures ents said that there were too m any immigrants in showing that in the past year, even with an increase Spain, and 60 per cent agreed that increased immi in immigration, crime levels have actually fallen . But gration m eant increased crime. Spain's deputy prime who takes any notice? What counts with the Italian mm1ster and interior minist er, M ariano Rajoy, government is that 25 per cent of Italians feel less recently denounced the merging of immigration and safe than they did a year ago. criminality in the popular mind. But, almost in the In Spain, a recent Civil Guard report fou nd that sam e breath, h e pandered to popular sentiment, of 18,991 arrests made in January, 5830 were of stating that 'excessive immigration pro fo reigners, over half of whom were legally resident in vokes crime'. Spain and/or from other EU countries; illegal immi grants accounted fo r just ten per cent of the arrests R ACIST STATEMENTS and assertion s of a link fo r crime-related m atters. Yet the government was between immigration and crime are no longer the m ore interested in the fac t that 60 per cent of Span preserve of an extremist fringe. iards believe immigration increases crime. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently In Britain, four days after the British National launched a drive against what he described as the Party won nearly 30 per cent of the vote in council 'army of evil'. Large-scale round-ups of illegal immi election s, the minister for Europe, Peter H ain, grants were the centrepiece of his tough-on-crime announced that Muslims in Britain were 'very isola tance. In France, the resurgent President Jacques tionist in their own behaviour and their own customs', Chirac has set up special police squads that have a and that they should do m ore to integrate into British largely unfettered power to enter predominantly society. N ever mind that the Chartered Institute of N orth African neighbourhoods to restore law and Housing produced widespread and damning evidence order. In Germany, Ronald Schill of the Law and Order that many British real-estate agents were actively per Off ensive Party has openly advocated deporting 'black suading Asian hom e-buyers to buy up in the 'ghettos' African drug dealers and the knife-stabbing Turks'. of their own kind (to the point of refusing to sell them Edmund Stoiber of the Christian Social Union, stand- homes in certain areas) . They also encouraged white VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 2 1 home-owners not to sell to 'Asians' lest property val been the typically messianic leader of this movement. ues fell as a result. Just days after Fortuyn's death, Blair announced that The alienation that has drawn so many to the his solution to rising crime was to institute a tougher policies of Le Pen, Fortuyn and others cannot be dis approach to refugee transit countries and to tighten sipated unless the unease at the heart of that aliena border controls around Europe. In a statement that tion is addressed. Many supporters crave the certainty may speak as much of the centrist parties' political of the solutions on offer. They are seduced by the paranoia and the perceptions of insecurity among notion that security, even security founded on a Europe's people as it does of any causal link between fallacy, is the m ost fundamental of human rights and immigration and crime, he warned that 'we have seen that all other rights must be subservient. As the EU what happens when we do not deal with this problem'. girds itself for a new program of expansion to the east, In short, the solutions offered by Europe's leaders the people becom e more anxious about security at and opinion-makers to the 'problem ' are precisely those home, and more suspicious that this enlargement of offered by the populist leaders of the extreme right. Europe is a project devised by technocrats who They criminalise being foreign and blame immigrants are aloof from the European people. rather than right-wing demagogues. They 'save' the country from the rise of the extreme right by swerv JAY lER PRADERA, a columnist for the Spanish news ing the government towards the extrem e right. paper El Pais, suggests that there is a causal connec To make this shift, people must ignore Europe's tion between the exclusion that immigrants more incomprehensible economic logic. For example, experience and the crimes they commit. He argues paying subsidies to European farmers not to produce cogently that immigrants are expected to demonstrate food is an issue of national sovereign ty; keeping responsibility towards their host country, while the asylum seekers on meagre government handouts is countries themselves are absolved of any reciprocal interpreted as supporting freeloaders who are a threat responsibility. Urging the Spanish prime minister to to national security. The shift to the right also requires look closely at his country, he sardonically predicted some collective amnesia among European states. that Aznar 'will surely discover not only the waters Almost all of them have, in their not-too-distant pasts, of the Mediterranean, but also the fact that, compared carried out brutal and pillaging colonial projects which to hungry drifters, the customers of five-fork restau came close to destroying the countries from which rants are much less likely to steal chickens'. many of these immigrants now flee. It requires The dramatic shift of the political centre to the Europeans to ignore the deeply disquieting parallels right is accompanied by the left's loss of power across between the racism targeted at Muslims in contem porary Europe and the racist demagoguery against Jews in the 1930s. And who ever cares to note that the diverse group of illegal immigrants who are seen as responsible for all the ills of Europe account for just one-thousandth of the population? Recent events leave us facing the disturbing pos sibility that a unified Europe defines itself by whom it excludes. The people of Europe are suddenly 'free' to declare that inclusion has its limits and that it's time for Europe to becom e more exclusive, more 'European'. This is the voice of new Europe: Trish Green of Europe. Of Europe's politicians, only one, German Throckmorton, protesting against British government Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, has refused to coun plans to build an asylum seekers' centre near her vil tenance the rhetoric of extreme racism. In a recent lage. 'I know people will accuse us of playing the race interview, he talked of his fear that politics in Europe card but I don't really have a problem with genuine was becoming re-nationalised and that there was a asylum seekers. However, I do not think a rural area disturbing rise in intolerance towards minorities: 'If like this is the ideal place. I think asylum seekers will you make verbal concessions towards the extreme have an awful time here. People are narrow-minded right, you make them strong. And so we will have to in the country. They will not be accepted.' take action against them, not appease them.' After reading these words, I headed back to But Schroeder's is a lone voice. In just about every Lavapies and spoke with Marina Lopez Garcia, m en tate of the EU, leaders and politicians have been tioning what I had read. She said simply: 'But Madrid scrambling to appear tough on the twin evils of illegal is a city of immigrants. We are all from som ewhere immigration and crime-in that order. There is little else.' • to differentiate left and right on economic policy, so each side feels compelled to outdo the other on these Anthony Ham is Eureka Street's European corres other issues. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pondent. 22 EU REKA STREET j ULY-A UGUST 2002 After decades of civil war, the Tamil Tigers and the Sinhalese majority are finally coming to the negotiating table. Jon Greenaway returns to Sri Lanka to report on the prospects for conciliation. 0 THt N> GHT oe 2.1 )uly 2001, 14 the Sd L•nbn govemment often fmget cmwl thwugh "cudty pwccdu VOL UME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 23 When the walls began to shake as the northern tip of the island in 1995. Pres and infrastructure projects. Sri Lanka's shooting and explosions came closer, staff sure groups are still seeking redress for national mood, which for so long alter and passengers fled the building in panic. violent reprisals committed by the nated between fear and vengeance, is turn The surviving rebels crossed the runway, military against the people who stayed ing optimistic. Maybe, just maybe, the engaging defence forces all the way, and behind after the LTTE withdrawal. Bala country is heading towards a conciliation occupied the vacated terminal. Three galle's response: 'If you look at it from the that will mark the beginning of the end modern Airbus planes belonging of half a century of misunder to the n ational airlin e were standing and bitterness between blown apart, two by grenades the Sinhalese community and fired at them from the roof of the the indigenous Tamil terminal. The other would later minority. be written off after being sprayed with 200 rounds of small-arms 'A:r ONE POINT I was worried fire. that things were going too fast,' At 9 .3 0am, six hours after the says Sunil Ba stian, from one of attack began, three m ore airmen Colombo's thinktanks, the Inter were dead and all of the Tigers national Centre for Ethnic had perished. Three of them took Studies. 'But this time we have a their own lives by detonating firmer ceasefire agreement. explosives strapped to their torsos. There's a better mechanism for The country woke to the undeni- monitoring, with a third party able truth that the war involved, so my hunch is that could not be won. once negotiations have started it will be much more difficult for T E SWEEPING views from the the parties to get out of them.' windows of the office occupied Three years ago an LTTE sui by the head of the Sri Lankan cide bomber killed the founder of army takes in much of Old Bastian's thinktank, Tamil parlia Colombo, an area known as mentarian and constitutional 'Fort'- a nod to the past when lawyer Dr Neelan Thiruchelvam, Europe's colonial powers fought as he drove to the office through for control of the island. From his the morning traffic. Thiruchel desk Lieutenant General Lionel vam had been in the vanguard of Balagalle, a neat man who sits efforts sponsored by the previous with a straight back and restless administration to bring in a new feet, can see a number of loca constitution that would address tions hit by Tamil Tiger bomb Tamil aspirations for self-rule and ings and suicide attacks since the bypass n egotiation with the war began in 1983. -· -. Tigers. (Th e LTTE have never It is three months since the ~ - claimed responsibility for this act new government of Prime Min either. Its rep res en ta ti ves still ister Ranil Wickramasinghe and Above: Government so ldiers supervi se returni ng fishing fami lies at the allude to his slaughter as one of the L TTE sign ed a ceasefire Wanni checkpoint on th e edge of the Jaffna Peninsula. the many 'lamentable' losses of agreement. Balagalle talks of the Page 23: View through house in Vadaramachy Ea st, damaged during heavy life during the conflict. Post- fighting in March 2000. relief felt by the rank and file at mortems at this stage of moving the break in fighting. soldiers' point of view, during the fight forward are, they say, 'counter-productive'.) 'They have their doubts about the sit ing, every other day w e had bodies in bags It is understandable, then, that Sunil uation, which is natural given the past going back to Colombo.' Bastian quickly tempers his optimism by experience, but they are quite happy and The benefits of an end to open hostility drawing attention to the failure of five they hope that it will last,' he says. have been quickly r ealised across the previous attempts at negotiation. The Balagalle is described by observers as island since the parties signed a Mem o sticking points then were devolution and a moderate in the faction-riddled defence randum of Understanding (MOU) on 22 the renunciation of arm ed struggle forces. His term as army chief was extend February under the watch of the Norwe points yet to be discussed in the current ed by Prime Minister Wickramasinghe, gian government. Checkpoints have come peace process. who ignored calls by hawks to replace him down, travel between government and If the substance of an agreement is to with General Janaka Perera (currently Sri LTTE -held territory is now possible. Trade be shaped at mooted talks in Thailand (at Lankan High Commissioner to Austral has resumed between the north and south, the time of writing there had been no ia). It was General Perera who swept the and almost daily there are announcements agreed date but the government was push Tigers from the Jaffna Peninsula at the of deals being done on development aid ing for the end of June), both the LTTE 24 EUREKA STREET • )UL Y- A UGUST 2002 and the Sri Lankan government will need of landmines. The road itself- the obj ect shirt. All LTTE cadres have cyanide to to shake off a history of 70,000 dead and of a determined campaign by government swallow if captured by Sri Lankan forces. more than a million people displaced. forces to open the land route to the iso In this blank landscape, pounded flat by Each party has its particular challenges to lated Jaffna Peninsula over the las t years of fighting and controlled by indoc overcome. Will the current Sri Lankan decade- is at best an undulating strip of trinated people who are forbidden to drink leadership be prepared to risk a backlash crumbling bitumen. At worst it's a corru or smoke, who are not allowed to marry from the Sinhalese electorate by ceding ga ted dirt path that threatens to remove before they have served five years and are one third of the island and half its coast the undercarriage of any car travelling over 30 years of age, Prabhakaran looms line to the LTTE? Will either side be able faster than walking pace. as large as if this were a religious cult in to trust the intentions of the other when Halfway to the town of Kilinochchi, Mississippi. sticking points are reached? And, most which fu nctions as the headquarters for In April, Prabhakaran gave his first crucially, will the LTTE be able to func the Tigers, the driver of our coughing Toy press conference in a dozen years. It drew tion in the opaque world of political ota van (owned by the Sri Lankan Red 350 local and foreign journalists along the negotiation in which outcomes are so Cross) stops to pray at a Hindu shrine. He A9 from the south. Judging from his much less concrete than they are on the is joined by the driver of a truck loaded startled expression throughout, Prabhaka battlefield? with soft-drink bottles and by groups of ran was taken aback by the attention and All this is to be played out under the the vigorous questioning. still-distant, yet watchful, eye of a US N oneth eless, he used the administration anxious to protect its expanding security interests in the region . LEW ANN !, an area in the northern hinterland of the island often referred to as the 'jungle headquarters' of the LTTE, is in truth more flat land and open space an atta ck by th e Sri Lankan Air Force on Vadaramac hy East, March 2000. Left: LTIE ca dre with hi s cya nide ca psule. Th e man was wounded during LTTE advances towards )affna during 1999- 2000. His job is to film battl es for propaganda and fundrai sing purposes. than dense bush. But as a description of a Above: Van on Mannar place that is remote to the point of ca useway, where the former checkpoint no longer operates. inaccessibility, the term is apt. Tamils are taking advantage of After crossing at the checkpoint on the th eir new freedom of movement. A9 road between government and LTTE Ph o tographs by jon Greenaway. territory north of Vavuniya, we pass through a landscape devoid of any sign of other travellers on their way to and from opportunity to pledge his support for the human activity. Its silence contrasts Jaffna. To one side is a billboard showing Oslo-backed peace process. sharply with the bustle among the Sri a painted likeness of a young Velupillai In a disciplined and hierarchical organ Lankan armed forces on the other side. Prabhakaran, the talismanic leader of the isation like the LTTE , Prabhakaran has The occasional telegraph pole, stripped of Tigers, smiling out at worshippers and been the paramount authority. He has its wires and lying at a drunken angle by passers-by. m asterminded the Tigers' progression the side of the road, is a reminder of our In every building used by the LTTE from a band of a few guerrillas to an army isolation. The remains of houses, snapped there is a photograph of the rebel leader, capable of fighting a front-line war. in half by shells and pock-marked by bul older and in uniform, standing under 'Our 20-year conflict has been because lets, are evidence that farmers once lived palmyra trees with a pistol on his belt and of one fanatic,' says a director of the Sri here and tilled the fields that are now full a vial of cyanide on a necklace outside his Lankan Board of Investment. The Board VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 25 is currently trying desperately to attract S.P. Thamilchelvam. Wounded in battle If negotiations proceed, it is difficult investment to help restart an economy in the 1980s (he now walks with a cane) to imagine the LTTE administering a crippled by the last administration's war Thamilchelvam has become one of the T amil homeland in the north and east budget. Spending on defence accounted for Tigers' leading ideologues and the man with the kind of openness the civilians in a third of GDP and contracted the responsible for drafting policy for government-held territory have economy last year. 'One fa scist fanatic has meetings with government nego tiators. come to expect. held 18 m illion people to ransom.' Indications are that the LTTE are now However, those who have m et Prab prepared to negotiate a federal arrange 0 N MANNAR IsLAND, a sand bar jut hakaran since this round of negotiations ment that will be a substitute for the ting out from the north-west coast of Sri started say that the Tiger leader h as creation of a separate state. Lanka, I visit one of a handfu l of LTTE changed. Thamilchelvam himself gave one of offices opened in government-held areas R. Sambandan is the elder statesman the strongest hints yet of a willingness to as a prelude to full de-proscription of the of the Tamil United Liberation Front compromise: 'When the negotiations start Tigers. (TULF ), the main Tamil parliamentary and proposals and counter-proposals are Sitting in an austere room- bare walls party from which Prabhakaran's youth put on the table and when we, or rather and plain furniture- the head of political wing split to form the LTTE in 19 79 . The the Tamil people, find their aspirations operations for the region declares his wish TULF is currently in an alliance with four m et within the proposals put forward by to combat pornography and the use of other Tamil parties that support direct the government, then we will be able to narcotics. The govern negotiations with the LTTE (and, by spell out whether we would be satisfied m ent, h e implies, has extension, the Tigers' stated aim to be the with a federal system or any other system allowed both to spread sole representative of the Tamil people) . of governance.' among the youth. Sur All of the parties in the alliance have But Thamilchelvam also had som e prisingly, given the had m embers attacked or assassinated strong words for the government-a sign history of the LTTE 's by the LTTE when Tamil parties were that LTTE militancy has not evaporated. harsh treatment of Sri seeking a political solution that excluded 'In Jaffna and other heartland areas Lanka's other, Muslim, the Tigers. there are still checkpoints and school minority, the man bears 'I met Prabhakaran in the Wanni on children subjected to body checks every a Muslim name, Amir the 12th of April and I have m et him sev da y. The presence of the checkpoints in Thap. But he refuses to eral times before that in Chennai and densely populated areas is a thing that has talk about his past. Madras in the mid-'80s. I met him for the been spelt out in the MOU that is being When I ask three other first time in 1979 when he came to see contravened. The people are also being cadres in the Wanni to me in my own constituency to offer m e prevented from returning to fanning and nominate a social issue protection. He brought news that some fishing.' that needs attention Sinhalese radicals were wanting to bump 'The onus lies with the government,' they produce the same me off.' Thamilchelvam concludes. His words are response, word for word. Sa mbandan tells m e this in the dining a warning that face-to-face talks are con With the LTTE 's history room of the parliament buildings, hidden ditional upon full implementation of the of silencing even Tamil on the outskirts of Colombo . Earlier in the ceasefire agreement. (The most important dissent with violence, it day he had met with the prime minister condition for the LTTE , de-proscription, seem s unlikely they to urge that the momentum of the peace was tipped to come by the end of June.) will make allowance for political groups process be maintained by continuing to Yet though the LTTE are shaping to with competing views, let alone for lift restrictions on the north and east. become less of a paramilitary group and internal debate-despite T h amilch el 'I found Prabhakaran very different this more a political- bureaucratic organisa vam's protests to the contrary. time to how I fo und him in the mid-'80s. tion, Prabhakaran still has a key role to 'That is going to be the challenge for He's mellower, he's more thoughtful, very play keeping the Tigers from splintering. them ,' the National Peace Coun cil's mature. He's becoming a different person. 'There are rumours of groups within Perera says. 'They organised demonstra He talked to me about his family, his chil the LTTE stating their dissatisfaction at tions in support of themselves in Jaffna dren. You know, you can't keep fighting, having given 18,000 lives for the demand in April but have not staged any since. It you can't just keep on attacking camps, for an interim administration,' says Jehan is possible they are confident now they killing soldiers and ca pturing weapons Perera, Director of the National Peace have the support of the majority of Tamil it's an unending process. He has come to Council. Perera is a long- time campaigner people and so maybe they can come at realise that Eelam is not going to for an end to the conflict on terms that greater openness.' be a military achievem ent.' would sa tisfy the desire for self-rule. Since the cessation of fighting, the peo 'Prabhakaran is a supreme leader and ple of the north and east, what the LTTE IFTHA T CHANGE in Prabhakaran m ea ns as long as he is alive the LTTE will rem ain call Eelam, have enj oyed a rare period in that others will assume more responsibil intact as an organisation. Even if there are the sun. The Jaffna Peninsula, cut off from ity in the LTTE leadership, then one of dissidents, they will not be able to take the south for the last decade, is now open. the m en likely to step up will be the any sizeable chunk of the organisation Families long kept apart by restricted leader of the L TTE's political wing, with them,' he concludes. movement have been bussing around the 26 EUREKA STREET • j ULY-AUGUST 2002 country to reunite. Goods have fl owed to nally displaced have started to make the church on Mannar. He sells plastic combs, the north and, though prices are still up trip back to their villages. They are still fruit, cigarettes and not much else. to 20 per cent higher than in the south wary- afraid that the pause in fighting Though their village is only four miles because of transport costs and LTTE tax may not last- and only a handful of the away, Mr Soosaithas will not move his ation, Jaffna is regaining some of its lost 65,000 refugees in camps in southern wife and nine children until transport status as a trading town. The threat of the India have approached the United services resume and there is som e sign of war that has brought pain to all commu Nations High Commissioner for Refugees help to rebuild their home. nities in Sri Lanka is lessening day by da y. ' Nothing is for sure. But the impact of two decades of con There is no permanent flict can still be seen in the psychiatric peace in sight, so for now wards of T ellepalai District Hospital to we feel safer here.' the east of Jaffna town. DrS. Sivayokan, In the Wanni, people one of only two trained psychiatrists in have begun trickling back Jaffna, estimates that nea rly 30 per cent to their villages. Two of the peninsula's current population of days after Selamdi, a 6 7- 500,000 have at least minor symptoms of year-old retired fisher stress due to trauma. man, moved his wife and daughter's family from Mullaitivu back to his home in a village on the eastern coast of the Jaffna Peninsu Ia, he concedes that they took a risk. But the accommodation was terrible where they were. There was no work and the mosquitoes were very bad, he tells m e as w e sip hot t ea in the shade of his meagre hut riddled with rifle shot the 'symbols of war' as h e calls them in his lim ited, clear English. 'We know that if there is no peace agreement we will have war again, but if we lose our lives it is in our own place.' 'Anxiety, depression, insomnia- these The refrain of Sri Lan sorts of effects. But so many do not see it ka's war, as in Kashmir as abnormal because everyone else is Left: Selamdi, a retired fisherman, two clays after ret urning to his and the Middle East, is experiencing it as well,' Dr Sivayokan tells village. He was lucky-one of the wa lls of his one-room house was that damning phrase m e as he prepares to chair a meeting of still standi ng. 'intractable conflict'. The outreach workers and counsellors. Above: Th e Mariadas fami ly, returning home from a ca mp in the Sinhalese majority would 'There have been the deaths and dis Wanni with their seven children. Their first ac t on arriving home was never comprehend the appearances, separation- some have been to ri ght an overturned tab le and set on it a photograph of th e son w ho Tamil wish for identity died fighting for th e Tigers in july 2000. displaced nine or ten times in the last 20 and cultural preservation years-and the impact of this has been through self-rule, and the greater because coping strategies are to be returned. The refugee agency is LTTE would never renounce arms. Now, limited by poverty and often the lack of reluctant to recommend a return to their 19 years after Prabhakaran's first guerrilla family. homes until there is a durable solution in raid in the north and Colombo's fatal 'The ceasefire has helped but it will need place and efforts begin in earnest on Tamil riots, Sri Lanka is tantalisingly to be sustained because it takes a long time infrastructure repair and removal of close to a solution. The final, irreversible to get rid of traumatised memory.' mines. More than two-thirds of arable steps will be the hardest for both sides to The firmest indication that Sri Lanka land in the war zone is still seeded with take. • is finally on its way to peace will come anti-personnel mines. when the refugees move back to their K. Soosaithas runs a shop in a thatched Jon Greenaway is a freelance writer living homes. Some of the 800,000 people inter- hut, in a refugee camp on land next to a in London. [email protected] VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 27 PROFILE M I C HELE M. GIERCK The man who reads th H ""''"ARC piming, hi' voice full also space-for reflection, painting and confronting and compelling. Yet, some of passion. There's intensity but also a speaking out. how, he also manages to capture extraor tinge of weariness as he tells of his latest Within weeks of his return to Australia dinary mom ents-glimpses of hope and investigative travels in Afghanistan . in March, Gittoes had spoken on ABC determination in the inhumane darkness 'Afghanistan is totally destroyed,' laments Radio National and local radio country that is otherwise overwh elming. His artist George Gittoes. wide, featured in Tales from a Suitcase depiction of Mirow and Awliya demon He describes a huge camp for internally and Dateline (both on SBS) and had his strates this capacity. The scene is Somalia. displa ced people inside Afghanis tan : travel diary published in major print The artist's notes beside the drawing read: sub-zero temperatures, dysentery and m edia. 'The art world still doesn 't see Mirow is the grandmother of three little pneumonia (life-threa tening conditions in journalism as having any place in art,' girls Awliya 16), Madaye 13) and Mariana this part of the world), little if any access Gittoes says. Nonetheless, he is proud of IS) . All are weak but Aw li ya is nearest to aid. 'It's a living hell.' It makes him cer the journalism in his own work. death. Mirow brought the children to the tain of one thing: it would be a mistake to George Gittoes has for the last two aid centre after their mother had di ed. She repatriate asylum seekers from Australia to decades been in a rem arkable number of had to carry them, as none were strong Afghanistan under current conditions. hot spots around the globe. It is an unusual enough to walk. So Mirow would carry Gittoes travelled in Afghanistan with path for an artist, and made even more Awliya and Madaye lone on her back and Medecins Sans Frontieres, visiting much exceptional by the fact that Gittoes is one in her arms) for a kilometre- leave of the country. He was filming, photo ardently opposed to war. 'All war is my them and go back for Mariana, and so on graphing and drawing. Descriptive notes war and I've made it my war. My war is a for two weeks- which it took her to reach border the charcoal figures he brings to war on war, and that's what my whole the aid station. She must have foraged for life on the page; the people he draws often life's work is about. It's a cry for humani food as there was none left in the village watch their own image em erge. Back in ty. I've made myself an advocate for all they left ... Australia, in his studio hom e bordering these people who are caught up in these bushlands and bay in N ew South Wales, conflicts.' It seems like a heavy load. 'I w ent through a ph ase in my art there is shelter and solace from the world Gittoes' work is not for escapists. His where I was interested in light,' says in which he immerses himself. There is images from the front line are realistic, Gittoes, 'physical light as a metaphor for Left: M irow, the gra ndmother, w ith Awliya and Madaye. Right : Mirow ca rrying Awliya. 28 EUREKA STREET • j ULY-AUGUST 2002 George Gittoes' work draws him to th e extremes of • human ex peri ence: he is artist, advocate and e s1gns journali st, habituall y in the thick of things . spiritual light. I always loved the work of imagines what it would be like if the post A solitary preacher read to them from a Monet and van Gogh, who translated the man could speak to u s. It is the breadth of ragged bible-he was a tall man in a yellow light of the landscape into colour ... What the story that Gittoes seeks, and he's pre ish coat sitting high on a sack of grain. He I look for now is light in the human spirit. pared to experim ent to achieve that. In the spoke in French with a thick dialect-his You usually find it in the places of great future he hopes to film interviews with voice hoarse and broken-but I could recog est darkness.' the people h e is drawing, so that their nise the sermon on the mount. 'Heureux les Gi ttoes' 2001 exhibitions, 'Lives in the stories can sit beside his own work. cceurs purs: ils verront Dieu' ... blessed are Balance' (South Africa), 'Across the Lines' 'Premier war artist' and 'a leading fig the pure in heart for they shall see God .. . (Yem en ) and 'The Persistence of Hope' urative artist' are common descriptions of (Melbourne) used a variety of media. His Gittoes. In 1995 he won the Blake Prize Gittoes never did find out whether the photographs record a specific moment. for Religious Art for The Preacher, an preacher died. Afterwards, h e look ed The drawings capture what the cam era extraordinary painting from Rwanda. everywhere for the yellow coat and con canno t. The paintings are often the tinued the search several years later, essence of the whole experience distilled 23 April1995, Kibeho Camp, Rwanda: unsuccessfully. 'I'd like to think he sur into a single image. For his multimedia Two days ago there were thousands of vived,' he reflects, but it is more a wish practice, Gittoes uses the model of Vin people standing and pleading for help . Now than a probability. cent van Gogh's letters to his brother everything is flattened- bodies crumpled The ongoin g connection the artist Theo, particularly as they referred to amidst rubbish- their few discarded maintains with people h e m eets also Roulin, the postman in Arles. Gittoes: possessions ... extends to the problems they face over 'You read what van Gogh has to write This afternoon as if walking though an issues like, for example, the clearing of about the postman, with so much love. invisible door, I came into a group who landmines. And Gittoes establishes per Then put that next to the painting and the were calm. Though bursts of machine gun sonal relationships. Some, like the one drawing [of the postman]; it m eans so fire surrounded them-continually getting with a young Cambodian wom an called much more than just seeing the painting closer with terrifying inevitability- they Lot, have been sustained over years. and the drawing.' Gittoes believes that remained a solid congregation-bound When Gittoes first came across her in text is integral to his own art. He also together not by walls, but by prayer. 1993, Lot was begging near Angkor Wat Left : Lot, her drawing, and fri end George Gittoes. Right: Gittoes' Bl ake Pri ze-winner, The Preacher. Top: Gittoes' 199 1 etching, Hounds, from th e Empire State Suite. VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EU REKA STREET 29 tem ple. Bo rn with birth defects fro m rights lawyer so that she can work towards interest is in human beings, and human defoliants (an often-forgotten consequence the banning of child slavery. ity, and it's about passion. So after a few of th e Vietnam War) she was also unfor There are others: individuals like Mis years I just had to swing back.' tunate enough as a child to have crawled sey from Rwa nda, M oh ad Jabary in During this time Gittoes and his part on to an anti-personnellandmine. Gittoes' Hebro n or Ghuncha in Pakistan. But they ner, Gabriell e Dalton, had begun tutoring friendship with the beggar without legs are never just drawings in his books. These Aboriginal children who came fro m far and just one digit on one hand began pub are people Gittoes visits as often as he can. western NSW to Kirinari Hostel in licly, on the streets. He noticed her pretty He delights in their personal ach ieve Sylvania for their secondary education. face and her intelligence. ments, the odds having been so stacked Through a combination of documentary Lot had been bought by an old man: against them . He revels in their stories. m aking and interest in Aboriginal issues, for him, she was an ideal beggar, and she T he relation ship between th e artist Gittoes swung back into political art. At was bound to him for life. (Gittoes nick and the people he collaborates with (never the tim e, Indigenous rights were not high named the man Pol Pot.) When Gittoes once in the interview does he refer to them on the political agenda. Track s of Th e first drew her, Lot looked at the work and as 'subjects') is integral to his life and Rainbow, filmed in 1979, took a group of then motioned him to draw h er with work. ' All the people who I dra w and work these Aboriginal children back into places hands and feet. That image becam e the with get to see the results of what I'm of special significan ce in the N orthern ..... ~ .,, .. .,,, ( ...... ,, ;I,((H.t o. Git1ocs' workbooks are in the great tradi tion of art and text- the words extend ing the images, th e images fi xing the moment in imaginati on and memory. These four pa ges from Drawing on Peace: Observa tions of United Na tions Peacekeeping are Gittoes at hi s best- wry as well as profoundly involved in the li ves he records. At left, famili es arb itrari ly divided by a fence in the Golan Heights shout to one another through megaph ones . At ri ght, the child in th e army grea tcoat is Misha, from Po lisa ri o in the W este rn Sahara. Th e coat is her fa th er's. She took it when he re turned home fro m war, and swaggered in it as he di d- chi ld sa tire. artist's gift to her, one she deligh ted in . doing, and then they get involved and they Territory. It was followed by Warriors and When, six years after their initial encoun want to go on telling their story.' Lawmen, a Gittoes and Dalton co-produc ter, Gittoes return ed once again, Lot was What was it that m oved Gittoes from tion that highlighted the conflict between still begging in front of the temple, but his early 'light as spiritual light' artistic white and Aboriginal law . Its making, in she spoke to him in perfect English . How ph ase to a m ore humanist, political 1983-84, endeared the m akers neither to could that be? aesth etic? the N orthern Territory government nor to Lot had determined she would gain her All he'd ever wanted to do was paint. the police. own freedom . When her owner resisted, He won his first Book Week Illustration But the documentary proved the turn she went on a hunger strike. 'You won't Award at five years of age. In 1968, as a ing point in Gittoes' career. 'Everything own anything,' she warned him . It took young artist, he went to the US. Inspired cam e together in Warriors and Lawmen; her near death to m ake her owner relent. by the civil rights movem ent, his work for the first time I combined film with Having won her freedom , Lot used it to was figurative, political. Returning to journalism and storytelling and painting.' negotiate the right to retain her two prime, Australia, he found abstract art dominant There was a m om en t during the fi lming strategically located, begging sites. These and no-on e interested in his fi gurative when Gittoes turned to Dalton excitedly: days Lot pays for her own tuition at a work. 'You reach a point you get so broke 'I've found it, I've found the perfect for private school and begs in the afternoon. you can't survive doing it. So I had a period mula for the rest of my life's work . This 'She m akes a packet,' Gittoes laughs, so away from it. I thought for a while this is what I'm here for. This is it-working proud of her. Her ambition is to go on to was the right way to go, but essentially across the m ediums in this way.' But there university to study and become a human- you are what you are, and m y w h ole was m ore still to discover. 30 EU REKA STR EET • j ULY-AUGUST 2002 In 1986, film-making beckoned him bodies scattered. He realised he must fight His recent visit to Afghanistan was to overseas for Bullets of the Poets, a docu the Contras, and reported immediately to be followed by a visit to Berlin to com mentary about fi ve Nicaraguan women the Sandinista Army. When the arm y plete som e work for the International revolutionaries (Sandinistas) and poets. informed him they could not was te a gun Campaign to Ban Landm ines, and to They found poetry to be a powerful weap on anyone so decrepit, he replied, 'What attend a subsequent m eeting in Amster on in times of struggle and social change. if I get my own gun?' dam . But Afghanistan drained Gittoes in During the filming, Gittoes m et poet A crack American Special Forces unit the sam e way Rwanda had seven years Ernesto Cardinal, who had inven ted a with the latest Ml6 sub-m achine guns before. Once in Europe he became aware literary movement called 'externalism '. was stationed nearby. So determined was that he had lost what he refers to as his Cardinal solved a problem Gittoes had the old man, he sneaked in and stole one. 'protective force field'. There was only with both the art world and the intellec He returned to the village and, with rudi one thing to do: the Amsterdam leg was tual world. Externalism rejected both m entary technology, turned the flash sub cancelled. Gittoes headed hom e to wife m odernism and postmodemism . Life was machine gun into something that could Gabrielle, h is two children and the com to be an immersion, out in the fi eld, not take local ammunition. munity at Bundeena in N SW. Without locked away in a solitary room . Cardinal's Gittoes explains how the man's story that secure base, Gittoes is sure he would assurance was that through participation, affected him. 'I drew The Captured Gun. have fallen apart long ago. ~~ .. ...-\:$'" .... (.~.....t.- ..... -~"'....a..---.- In 'Night Vi sion', Afri ca n so ldiers in Ba icl oa wea r night-vision goggles w hi ch help them see in th e dark but which also disori ent them. hil dren's toys ca n be mistaken for rea l guns-with obvious co nsequences . Th e last dra w ing, right, is of two men, Mohammed jahabara and 75-yea r-old Mohama Abed Alkann an, in a Beth lehem hospital. Both were wounded at th e Hebron Mosqu e. Both had family to be contacted. Gittoes beca me both artist and go-between. ' things would happen'-life itself would For me this became the metaphor for the He adds, 'I've always felt directed. My provide the m etaphors. There was no whole conflict, because at that time you whole life is reading the signs. There is equivalent m ovement in painting, but had one of the smallest countries in Latin no map, no pattern, no model, and you Gittoes knew immediately that he was America taking on the military might of can't m odel yourself on other artists. I do an 'externalist'. 'I realised w hat I was America. That's what this crippled little believe there is something better than a like an ugly duckling realising you 're a man and his resourcefulness, to me, epito map-a system of little signs and symbols swan. ' mised.' The artist, as Cardinal had taught, that you learn to read ... I work on this Out in the fi eld in Nicaragua with a had not had to invent a metaphor. He had invisible map and I really think it's there group of Sandinista soldiers, Gittoes fo und already found the m etaphor that said for all of us, and that's what keeps us alive.' h im self accompanied by ' a little old everything about the conflict. 'That has But it's been a long haul. Gittoes' path hunchbacked, crippled man'- his assigned become my yardstick for work ever since.' has had its ups and downs. His sense of minder. He was intrigued by the fact that (See cover for Gittoes' The Captured Gun.) vocation and his independence as an art this fellow carried a US weapon when the Gittoes arrived in Nicaragua unsure of ist come at a cost, but he has clearly fo und rest of the patrol carried Russian versions. what he was doing. In m aking Bullets of the language and audience- national and 'How did you get an American rifle?' he th e Po ets, the synthesis he h ad fi rst international- for his art. His exhibition, inquired. experienced in W arriors and Lawmen 'The Persist en ce of H ope', will tour This was the story. The old man had returned. It was a defining period in his nationally in 2003. • returned home one day to find everyone work. Sixteen years later, he's still follow in the village dead, their dismembered ing that path. Michele M. Gierck is a freelance writer. VOL UME 12 N UMB ER 6 • EU REKA STR EET 3 1 Refining Rebecca O u, ooc, A •om eue n•med Becky lshmt fm Beckett Obviously the decline of the language is due to (Due to is well, all right, Rebecca), recently discovered a copy of The loosely used for through, because of or owing to ... in correct Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White and use synonymous with attributable to-p45) the gradual destruc chewed up large chunks of it. tion (as in cases of canine irresponsibilityL neglect or immobi When you live with an editor, you are accustom ed to seeing lisation of the great repositories of language usage, such as, inter Strunk and White lying around upstairs and downstairs and alia (Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo- certainly in m y lady's chamber-or 'offi ce' as she prefers to call Saxon words-p 76) su ch as, am on g others, The it, fo r som e reason. Multiple copies of Strunk and White man Elements of Style. ifest them selves throughout the editorial household the way versions of the Bible might prolife rate in a vicarage, or copies L E LANGUAGE, you see, is not deteriorating because of sloppy of the old Miller's Guide might be lovingly archived in the town usage; sloppy usage is creeping in because the important arbiters house, the country estate and the beach retreat of a bookie. of language, the textual authorities, are being silenced, over In our house, Strunk and White stares out from m ore than looked. one bookcase, stands on a kitchen bench, prim and degage, And I don't think dogs are m ainly to blame, fra nkly. I m ean, between The Cook's Companion and Cooking with Verjuice admittedly Becky is culpable, and any jury would send her to and, despite its pocket size, is daunting in its sheer puritanical the pound for gross literary turpitude-the m ore so if a coroner presen ce and ubiquity. (There is no comma after Verjuice had examined those critical parts of Strunk and White that she because in a series of three or more terms with a single con particularly rendered unreadable: 'Words and Expressions Com junction, use a comma after each term except the last-Strunk m only Misused', which no doubt she totalled with one foul and White, p2.) blow; and 'Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding's' Looked at from one point of view, the mastication of Strunk (test all the cappuccino's, CD's and Pizza's that you see round and White was not a particularly serious event. There remain, town against that one). after all, numerous alternative copies. Yet I worried about it. Becky's crim e could certainly be revealed as deliberate, Might not Becky, in savaging our Elements of Style, have inad m ore than negligence or 'doggy derring-do', as the man said, vertently-or rather, in savaging our Elements of Style, might and would conceivably qualify under rigorous cross-examina not Becky (the subject of a sentence and the principal verb tion as m alfeasance or tort. But that's another matter. should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that To fight the pernicious conspiracy that has embargoed, can be transferred to the beginning-p29) have inadvertently quarantined, segregated, marooned, sequestered and estranged struck another blow at the language? If Strunk and White is a the great repositories of language usage, we m ust get them repo itory of good usage, and it assuredly is, who knows but back into circulation, and they must be m ade m andatory what Becky's attack might not have deprived the language of reading. If we're quick enough about this, we could have Strunk just a little m ore of its authority and reach . (In prose the line and White included in the an ti-terrorist legislation presently between the atrocious and the felicitous is sometimes alarm under discussion, so that anyone over the age of eigh t fo und ingly fine-p77.) not to have Strunk and White in his or her possession and further T hink about it. Something or som eone is waging war on found to fail an on-the-spot, sh ort-answer test on its basics, the language. Have you actually m et or heard of the person wou ld be declared a terrorist under the act. A lan gu age who changed 'impact' to a verb ? Of course you haven't . Any terrorist. m ore than you know who is responsible for the abandonment In the last analy is (a bankrupt expression-p49L it is not of 'uninterested' and the conscription of 'disinterested' to do in terms of (a piece of padding usually best omitted-pSO) both jobs. (Disinterested means 'impartial'. Do not confuse it undisciplined dogs that we should see the crisis in English, at with uninterested, which means 'not interested in'-p44.) Or, least for the foreseeable future (a cliche, and a fuzzy one-p59), who ruled m agisterially (be sparing in the use of adverbs-p75) but as a case of literary terrorism and therefore to be appropri that the adj ectival use of 'appropriate' should be extended to ately (!) included in the strategies of the war on terror. This have a moral dimension ? (see any speech by Philip Ruddock in should be the thrust (a showy noun, suggestive of power, hinting which the word 'detainee' also appears); or that 'mitiga te against' of sex-p6 l ) of our cam paign to revive the language. T he sh ould replace the correct 'militate against '? Or that prosecution rests (empty, derivative gesture) . • 'hopefully'-but don't start m e on 'hopefully' (n ot merely wrong, it is silly-p48). Brian Matthews is a writer and academic. VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STR EET 33 ESSAY PETER STEELE Swerving to happ1ness • A letter to the world: love and Peter Porter Q,WA no HNO th c gmin of Petec Poctec'' poetry addressing love. And 'ways' they are, not only because is to proceed allusively, since few things are more of the decades during which the poems were written, characteristic of his imagination than its tendency to bu t because part of Porter's agenda is to bring to the touch off associations, as a single match m ay light fore love's elem ent, small or great, of enigma. It is an one candle-and som etimes one powder-train-after aim which makes for probative writing-for testings another. So in coming at the matter of love in Por of the water, soundings of the rock. Reflect a little on ter's poetry, I shall begin with a fra gm ent not fr om some of the elem ents in Milosz's fragm ent. his own poetry or from his uncommonly spirited Of fa lling in love, he asks, 'Does it occur suddenly prose, but from the Polish/American poet Czeslaw or gradually?' Porter writes of love, passingly or at Milosz. In a recently published piece, 'Falling in Love', length, in at least a third of his poems, and common Milosz writes: ly he is talking abou t the intersection of love and tim e-of seized or fugitive m om en ts, of snapped and Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur sud revisited incidents. He is classical in his attention to denly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment love as that which may be stronger than death but 'already' ? I woul d fall in love with a monkey made of which is always attended and m enaced by mortality; rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. and in the matter of love, as in the matter of art, he is With an oriole. With a ferret. With a m arten in a pic engrossed recurrently by the relationsh ip between ture. With the fo rest one sees to the right when riding distantiation and imminence, a relationsh ip often in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little- known expressed by dreams, which bid for our total atten poet. With human beings whose nam es still rnove tion, and yet are by definition fugitive. Elias Canetti me. And always the obj ect of love was enveloped in envisages in a notebook entry a 'labyrinth made of all erotic fa n tasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to the paths one has taken', and Porter's fra mings of love a 'cristallisa tion,' [sic] so it is frightful to think of that have som ething of that about them. They have the object as it was, naked among the naked things, and dark vividness of labyrinth, and a fixed attention to of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was oft en things done or yet to be done. in love with something or som eone. Yet falling in love When Milosz says that he would 'fall in love with is not the sam e as being able to love. T hat is some a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With thing different. a botanical atlas. With an oriole' and so on, I am Porter's poetry is of quite a different temper from rem inded of the fact that Porter is a master of what that of Milosz, but I find these lines rem arkably sug might be called dom estic or intimate bricolage. That gestive when one is considering Porter's ways of is, he writes partly with a hospitality towards the 34 EU REKA STR EET • j ULY- AUGUST 2002 countless items which surround love's occasions, and 'Little Buddha' is one of many poems by Porter partly from a sense that these may do m ore than which cock the wariest of eyebrows at the human attend certain m om ents, and may in fact be love's proneness to go a religious way: but it is quite as talismans, its lares and penates. I offer in evidence reserved about the endorsem ent of banality as an the poem 'Little Buddha', whose epigraph is 'Ich bin authentic human way. If 'love' is to some degree a der Liebe treuer Stem ', which is rendered, later in the floating signifier in the poetry, it is not one fit to float poem, as 'I I Am love's ever-fa ithful star. ' in shallow waters. Porter is impatient of, even incred ulous about, the m erely ornam ental. He can in season To see its porcelain smile have as vehem ent a sense as, say, Giacom etti's, that Is a surprise in that room commonplace entities are copious with significance With the electronic junk, though what that significance may be it is part of the The albums, the morning gloom , business of the poem s to feel for. Their feeling for it, The empty Pils neatly piled in turn, requires excisions and exactions. Porter's By the futon, the light sunk poem s task the reader, since the experience which To a hangover of dream s they both enact, and are, is itself tasking. Hence the And yet, whatever it seems, imaginative span which tautens through, for instance, Whether indifferent to the second stanza of 'Little Buddha'-'Unbelievers, Fa te or expectation or still stung', etc. Luck, its surveillance tells you The last three lines of that stanza-'And the call Love can't walk out through the door. sign from afar I In darkness and light is "I I Am love's ever-faithful star."'-may remind us of two things . Unbelievers, still stung by The first is that, as Virgil was to Dante, Auden is to The need to construct a trust, Porter; and the second is that Dante himself can be Like to set some piece of kitsch m ore than a bete noire to Porter (which he occasion In place, a Madonna, bust ally is) and can be a kind of provocative counter Of Shakespea re, Sports Day trophy, example to many of Porter's essayings of love's Anything numinous which definition. Auden wrote often of love as though it Shines in the Hu manist dark, knew him thoroughly while he badly wanted to know For they are set to embark it: Dante, in the Vita N uova as well as in the Com On an unknowable sea m edia, wrote of love both as summoning and as chas And the call-sign from afar tening-as that which enjoins and confutes, and above In darkness and light is 'I all surprises. Porter's m entality, sensibility and idiom Am love's ever-faithful star.' all differ from Dante's in abundant ways; but the poets do share a conviction that insofar as there are stelle You sing this and try to prove or sterne to be invoked when love is in question, these It by rational choosing, are burning things indeed. To be 'the numinous By doing without the bounty animal' may be all very well, but it is also, propor- Of high rom antic losing, tionately, to be the taxed animal, if love is Keeping instead to a love the numen . Durable as accounting, Traditional as the rhym e's E RTER, WRITING OF love not as an abstraction or in Approximated sublim e, isolation but as something given, lived or quested for, And you let the Buddha fix writes of it with mixed feelings. Mixed feelings are On you its unchanging look indeed his m etier. His poems blend them , attempt to Outfacing digital clicks transform them, and display them . This is so, too, And the brandishing of books. when, after the fashion of Milosz, he falls in love with 'a poem by a little-known poet'. There are, when we But the warp rem ains in the soul, think about it, ways and ways of being 'little-known'. The obscenity of fa ith, Porter, for all his wide and deep versing in the range The creed that runs in the blood, of the poets of the past and the present, is interested, The seventy years of safe I think, not in the esoteric but in the imperfectly Excess succeeding control, divulged. The 20th-century theoretical interest in that A dream of desert and fl ood, which is 'made strange' in language is som ething Of God at the index points powerful in Porter, not only in the fashioning of his Whose gift of loving anoints own poem s-many of their titles, alone, bear witness The numinous animal to this- but in his attention to the poetry of others. With lyrical avatars, That many a magus is spurious does not m ean that The lure of impersonal m any a magic is not genuine in poetry; and it is this Truth, a silence of the stars. starry but elusive magic which commands homage VOLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EU REKA STR EET 35 in much of Porter's writing about other poets, as about distinguished though some of its exemplars may be, music and the visual arts. Sometimes love itself is as the art of poetry as itself an art of love. Whether cited by name: but even without this, one would see this is so, and if so, whether this is good news or bad, allegiance as part of the agenda, and indebtedness as is a question rehearsed, at least implicitly, in count part of the theme. Such poems, themselves writing less exercises, in prose and in verse, in our own time. through mixed feelings, foster a more perfect divulg On one account, all poetry is doomed, or possibly ing of what has been going on in the arts addressed. summoned, to be an art of linguistic narcissism. This Porter, who is unflinching in his characterising of 'a view can have its consolations: as Auden put it, 11 11 11 lift ascending to the floors / of non-existence [where] ' After all, sighed Narcissus the hunchback, on me They wait there for us, I our friends and lovers recog it looks good."' Porter, who is among more impor nizable I as we shall be by their perfect missingness', tant things a virtuoso of the linguistic, has little to is still abundantly haunted by ghostly poetic m en learn about the proneness of words to fold back upon tors-as for instance in his poem, 'Happiness': them selves. But like anyone for whom language is felt as both intimate and instrumental, and for whom The world's a window on to death the world of things and persons alternately beckons With killers closing in to kill, and turns its back, he can scarcely let the matter rest But love of life's a shameless zest there. After all, for som e poets at least, the primary Persisting still. question remains, first to last, 'what is going on?', to be followed closely by, 'and does this call for praise, The sun eclipsed by passing cloud, or for blame, or for both? ' When, as for Porter, things The icicle upon the sill, 'go on' seamlessly in word and in world-where pas With feeling in their gift were proud sion for utterance and passion for understanding are Of standing still. virtually indistinguishable-the matters of love in or of the world, and of love in or of language, are things To have survived another night which have to be renegotiated in each poem. Is all the pelting bloodstream 's skill Canetti, again, has a notebook entry which goes, And purpose through the octave's height 'To dismantle noise', which I take to be a good policy; Sounds surely still. and another which goes, 'Elegant, well-curried words', which I take to provoke second thoughts. Much of Our language lacks George Herbert's nerve, Porter's writing about poetry, about drama, and about His m ore can only make ours less, music, could have been done under the rubric, 'In And yet we cross his lines and swerve praise of those who dismantle noise'. But he has a To happiness. constitutional aversion to mere gleam or gloss in the fruits of the mind, and a deep suspicion of that curry Porter has written illuminatingly, elsewhere, of ing of language which looks for all the world like a Herbert's art. This time, we have a version of 'imita currying of favour with literary, cultural or political tion' in its literary sense, namely a piece of writing Maecenases. Hence the writing of poems which be which, itself deeply indebted to a preceding work, still come, if anything, all the warier as they make their contrives to make its own distinctive and divergent way into the initial wave-chop, or the high seas, of way. On this occasion, happily, the more Porter does love. H ere, for instance, is 'Verb Sap': this, the more he emulates Herbert, a poet for whom complexity and simplicity were matched as a matter Nothing they say of this of course, and one in whom replication and transfor Infinite mystery mation both bid for priority in his many hundreds of Love could disparage allusions to prior texts. The 'love of life' to which More than its usual Porter refers in his poem is, one sees on a little reflec Course through extremity tion, also a love of the life of Herbert's poems, for all Safe into marriage their otherness in doctrinal stance, in 'nerve', and as Porter would agree, in calibre. Without Herbert's High expectation of distinctive example, there would have been no such Personal happiness, poem as Porter's 'Happiness'; but without Porter's Magic achi evement poem, some of Herbert's own stringencies One takes on dozens of would be less apparent. Lovers, another stays High on bereavement- C ONS IDERING H ERBERT, and Porter, and Milosz On the 'little- known poet', I am reminded that the tradi Each plays the cold self ga m e, tional preoccupations with 'the art of love' and the Seeing in love's face a 'art of poetry' can be fused, and have been, many times. Secret opponent I have in mind not so much the poetry of seduction, Where the advantage is, 36 EU REKA STREET • )ULY- A UGUST 2002 Mirrored attraction or perhaps the condescension, of an inspector of insu Pious atonem ent. larity who was a long way from home. But this and others of Porter's poems were to be moved aside by a Poetry knows its role, magisterial work, his 'An Exequy', which is m odelled Lending its rhythms to after Bishop King's 17th-century poem of almost the All that's enduring, sam e nam e, a poem which also addressed the death, Servitude, blandishment, and invoked the presence, of a lost young wife. 'An Irrationality, Exequy' is well known and has had admirable atten Even procuring. tion elsewhere. But let m e make a point or two. Rudolf Arnheim , in his Parables of Sun Light, This is a poem which displays Porter's instinct writes that: for thought as a testing at once of the prevailing and of the countervailing. One consequence of such an T he tranquillity of domestic animals keeps us from attitude is that his writing is incorrigibly dram atic. It rem embering how breathless a vigilance is required is not only a question of such ironising contrasts as for th e ordinary pursuit of life in the wild. Watch a those italicised in rh ym e-' disparage/ m arriage', goldfinch hastily pecking his seeds while his hea d 'achievem ent/bereavem ent', 'opponent/ atonem ent' darts in all directions to m ake sure that interferences and so on- the gambit taught by Rochester, Swift and from anywhere can be responded to with lightning Pope. There is also, in the poem, a rake of mind across mystery, institution, emo tion, psychic contrivance, expediency, summoning, and piety as accommoda tion. And it is in such a milieu that poetry is invited on-stage, to be a kind of servi tor of the largely charmless, though the still enchanting-'Servitude, blandish men t, / Irrationality, / Even procuring. ' I doubt whether I am alone in hear in g beh ind th ese words an echo of M ozart's Don Giovanni, with all its m odalities of attention to love thrown in, including that of Leporello. I mention this because that opera is, at least, about beguilem en t: and as operas must if they are to be at speed. How much fortification of the environment it all, it enacts the beguilem ent which it also deprecates. took to protect us from a way of life in which con Porter's poem is called, with cryptic eloquence, 'Verb stant mortal danger is a pervasive condition ! Sap'-'a word will do for the wise one'- and it is launched with an allusion to 'this / Infinite mystery / That 'constant m ortal danger is a pervasive con Love'. T hese are m oves to hint at a relationship dition' is an imaginative axiom of Porter's poetry. between insight and enigm a in what is to fo llow. Arnheim's 'in the wild' can be transposed, at a milli Auden, in one of his half-dozen m ost fa m ous poem s, second's interval, into the human stockade. (I think adj ured the poet of his choice to 'sing of human here too of the attitude reported of an Inuit tribesman unsuccess / In a rapture of distress'; that knottedness who, asked about the beliefs of his people, replied, at the heart of aspiring song is also the key point of 'We do not believe: we fear. ') The emblem s or tokens Porter's attention . It is as if love and poetry give each of this exposedness are m any-above all, perhaps that other warran t in his writing, both of them commit of exile, upon which Bruce Bennett's book on Porter ted to Canetti's turn towards a 'labyrinth made of all (Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry, OUP the paths one has taken', and each supposing that the 199 1) is eloquent, and which is surely norm ative for outcom e may be an encounter not with the Minotaur, an understanding of much of his work. It is certainly but with a Cretan light. true that 'An Exequy' is anim ated by a sense of past, Such a supposition has its critical case at the pitch and present, and future 'constant m ortal danger' to which Milosz refers-those fa llings in love 'With animated too by unillusioned resoluteness in the human beings whose nam es still m ove m e. ' Once midst of such a state of affairs. This in part is how it upon a time, Porter's poems were anthologised with looks, and sounds: a special eye to his 'Phar Lap in the Melbourne Muse um', w hich concludes by saying that 'It is Australian The room and days we wandered through innocence to love / The naturally excessive and be Shrink in my mind to one-there you proud / Of a big-boned chestnut gelding who ran fast.' Lie quite absorbed by peace- the calm There is more at issue here than the concessions, and Which life could not provide is balm VOL UME 12 NUMBER 6 • EU RE KA STR EET 37 In death. Unseen by me, you look allusion, its precision of reference coupled with Past bed and stairs and half-read book vivacity of interpretation. To these, though, I would Eternally upon your home, add the fact that the poetry, even when its esprit is The end of pain, the left alone. marked, is pitched as a warding. And if we are not I have no friend, or intercessor, attentive to that as this poetry's way, it is unlikely No psychopomp or true confessor that we will know what the poetry is. But only you who know my heart One thing which makes the conclusion of 'An In every cramped and devious part Exequy' remarkable is its holding, to the very end, a Then take my hand and lead me out, tension between love and warding. Well enough for The sky is overcast by doubt, Bishop King, granted his resurrectional expectations, The time has come, I listen for to say at the end of his poem, 'Dear (forgive I The Your words of comfort at the door, crime) I am content to live I Divided, with but half a 0 guide me through the shoals of fear heart, I Till we shall meet and never part'; but as Porter 'Fi.irchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.' wrote in his "'Talking Shop" Tanka', after a citation of John Donne's naming his dead wife's blessedness, 'The shoals of fear'. We hear of these, or their 'I can't go on, I I share death not faith with Donne.' equivalents, at other points in Porter's poetry. At the Porter's 'An Exequy' faces to the last his own expos end of 'Essay on Dreams' he writes, 'And dreams have edness-a heart cramped and devious, a sky overcast by doubt, the fears shoaling- and it appeals, in the words of a scripture in which he does not believe, to a love in which he cannot bear not to believe. To write like this is indeed to find aesthetic closure; but it is also to shake the house of art. To mention the house of art is to be reminded of another remarkable poem of Porter's, his 'John Ford Answers T.S. Eliot.' Eliot said of that 17th-century play wright that he had a 'distinct personal rhythm in blank verse which could be no one's but his alone', but Eliot had plenty of reservations about Ford's work, as indeed others have had. Porter's Ford never heard of history I or style, bu t like our child redivivus has striking things to say of his art- and of hood games I they knock us into love with presen t the loves with which it is concerned. Here is the poem. fear.' In 'Death's Door', Porter meditates on the fact that we 'with no evidence say love is real I Though You knew I wa s a lawyer, why be surprised fear like Fafner keep the iron gate'. If it is true that all by my di stinctive style? Overall, my plays dramatic characters are conditioned by the plays in aren't centred, but what I know of men which they occur, it is also true that all estimations tells me centres will form only when take their colour or flavour in part from the poems in storms erupt to make them. My poetry which they occur-they are not ubiquitously deploy is what a lawyer might describe as small able tokens. Still, that love and fear are often twinned instances growing grea t occasionally in this poetry is surely not an incidental matter. After (that is on sporadic and ingenious all, what other two emotions or dispositions make occasions): for this I listened to the manner more peremptory claims on our attention? men and women, tiring of the m eans they use My own sense, though, is that it is the tally of to hide their thoughts or to mislea d the dangers that may menace us, rather than of the their interlocutors, may suddenly, fears to which those dangers may give rise, which as philosophers will do, rush into compact most exercises the poetry. Porter's writing is com forms of language not malleable monly that of someone who is standing to arms: the as dialogue- their passions striking them 'vigilance' to which Arnheim refers is one of its without advertisement or strategy, animating principles; and, in it, love attends those they loop around them such forensic toils who, with good reason, are vigilant. It is a common as make plcached gardens out of parkland. place of criticism of Porter's poetry that there is no The paradox is poetry, a sort of apt way of reading it which relaxes alertness; the versified cascade not requiring metaphor evidence cited for such a proposition would include but like a fountain in a blindfold villa its elasticity of wit, its copiousness of cultural unmistakably an image of the heart. 38 EUREKA STREET • ) UL Y- AUGUST 2002 Why, three hundred year ahead of me, as anything else. He also knows that, for all its poten you should commend me for belief in love tial vehemence and its frequent majesty, language eludes me. What is there else to write of? itself, in all its works, is perpetually liable to appear You with the urgings of an impotence strange. Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, appropriate to your short-breathed age will put we could not understand it; for Porter, there is some your own adopted crinkle-crankle doubt thing leonine about language itself. Nonetheless, it into the sort of poetry which won't is a major way, perhaps the major way, by which we assimilate mankind-instead pathetic can be ourselves at all, and as such it has an intimate Nature and the ramblings of a rhetor God and perdurable relationship with the love, or the loves, are called to make your language beautiful. by which we can also be ourselves at all. Hence, as You are a Psalmist doing without the smell I take it, the centrality of a poem like 'John Ford of burning fl esh. Good and evil mixed, you say, Answers T.S. Eliot.' is not the way to justify a knack Porter's Ford says, 'what I know of men I tells me with cadencing, and further, I make occasion centres will form only when I storms erupt to make fill the cast-list. And here yo u're wrong them.' In another of his poems, 'Bellini and Heine since you resort so often to that arid Come to Dinner', Porter has Bellini say, 'The calm concept 'character'. Brutish husbands, vengeful lovers before the storm, the calm which follows it, I any are simply steeds the words can ride-if every one, Countess, can show us that. It is the calm I within speaker were the same at each intrusion the storm which I compose.' To compose 'the calm on a sentence, then personae might make character within the storm' is, recurrently, Porter's aim-the instead, I write the only poetry calm of language, even while it is mediating agitation, the broken heart has known-not sympathy disarray and inconclusion. Some poets, and among for this or that distracted humanoid them some of the best, write as though following a but palaces and obelisks and tombs formula from Canetti, who speaks of 'Pause after of diction, and I set before you shapes pause, and in between, quadrangles of words like for with names and callings, sub-contract them to tresses.' Porter's way is usually more supple, and more a place of some malignity and then subtle, than that. Of some of his own work, and espe I watch. As they come into focus, syntax cially when he is speaking of love, it might be said stirs and seeks its opportunity: that 'The paradox is poetry, a sort of I versified cas for this the human race was made, to build cade not requiring metaphor I but like a fountain in a its only lasting Babel, rusticate blindfold villa I unmistakably an image of the heart.' the puffed-up feelings and the blemishes Ford was nothing if not provocative, and his voice of tragic pity. I have the instrument in Porter's poem remains so. 'I write the only poetry I to deal with ruined love-to outlast thought the broken heart has known-not sympathy I for this by being before thought what it would say. or that distracted humanoid I but palaces and obelisks and tombs I of diction' he says, and 'for this the human race was made, to build I its only lasting Babel'. In saying this he is the inheritor, and the modifier, of a A TTHE BEGINNING of his poem 'The Truest Poetry long tradition of the poets who model fulfilled or is the Most Feigning', Auden enjoins, 'By all means unfulfilled love as something lodged in language, that sing of love but, if you do, I Please make a rare old lodgement itself being a consolation, but also being a proper hullabaloo'; Porter's Ford may not be making reminder that consolation is called for. Porter has a a rare old proper hullabaloo, but he certainly favours longstanding fascination with the most famous of all the ellipses and enfolding conceits commended in that broken towers, the one which is called 'Babel'. Around poem. The John Ford who speaks here is, in lawyerly this he deploys, in various poems, sentiments ranging fashion, making out his own best case, and his voice from mockery to celebration, the tower embodying is no more to be identified simply with that of meanwhile a haunting blend of endeavour and hubris, Mr Porter of Brisbane and London than are the vari of spectacle and futility. Babels are both profoundly ous other ventriloquial utterings which can be heard unsatisfactory and permanently unforgettable, and as in the Collected Poems. At the same time, his brief such they are well placed to stand for language, and touches on some of the most important elements of for the loves which sometimes recognise themselves Porter's practice. One of these is a deepset policy of in language. writing of love as something which is radically Of some of these last, Porter can speak in comic implicated in language: speechless love is none of his vein, as when for instance, he says in 'Throw the Book business. There is, it is true, some clone of Cali ban to at Them': be heard in Porter's writing, that Caliban who, speaking to Prospera, says bitterly that, 'You taught Proust could get ten thousand lines from me language, and my profit on it I Is, I know how to one night at a party and Robert Browning curse': Porter knows that language is as prone to taint knew he was in love only when he found he'd V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 39 said so on the page. How Elizabeth at the spaces between the lines rather than at the lines loved his profile when it hovered over her themselves; but love is death's congener in his poetry, in trochees ... as it so frequently is in the music and the opera of which he has written for a long time. One early poem, At the same time, the jests are shadowed things-as 'A Hoplite's Helmet', begins: he writes a few lines later in the same poem, 'Today in Rouen there is an Avenue/ Gustave Flaubert, but Inside tb is helmet nothing spoils the stillness/ at his desk'-and activity A brain known to great brains upon the tower is often perturbed. Few contemporary poets have been more deft than Porter in represent Moved to kill, ing language in its degenerate mode of ostentatious The object was in the orders. babble, so it is natural that Porter's speaking love, or speaking of love, should so frequently take the way The helmetless lover of second thoughts, of second sayings. His John Ford And boozer fathered as many says, in one of those remarkable endings to poems which, in Porter, both encompass all that has been New skull s as any, said and leave another wing of thought jutting out But he put the helmet back on ... into the future, 'I have the instrument / to deal with ruined love-to outlast thought / by being before Another, 'To Start a Controversy', offers an eager thought what it would say'; but Porter for one knows archaeological scholar who dilates on the remains of that Babel is both the first and the most famous of an ancient couple preserved, by volcanic deposits, in ruins, and so that there are, literally, no last words. the posture of lovemaking, and concludes: Any attention to Ford or to his contemporaries uniquely, Shakespeare- must remind us of the con ... Gentlemen, arc we stancy with which love and death have been paired Not also in the actual presence in description, celebration, and lamentation. Anyone Of DEATH; now we may unveil their whole who needs reminding that for Porter to write of World. Death was what made them what they were. mortality is the normal thing must have been looking From knowledge of death they made up love, Whose shape we see, acting against oblivion. www.mup.com.au In 'All the Difference in the World', there is a contrast between 'wounds made by words / and the Terrorism and Justice enduring silence of those / who can talk of love / only MORAL ARGUMENT IN A THREATENED in the cadences of memory'-cadences which, here, WORLD have only the most ironic of consolations about them. 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Porter • is about as far from a mystagoguc as it is possible to 40 EUREKA STREET • j ULY- AUGUST 2002 be-indeed he can sou nd like a sweet-tempered Moscow I or ask your daughter if she loves you ?'; in Thomas Hobbes, or a Voltaire suddenly visited by 'Essay on Clouds', he writes, 'N ight awaits the upper geniality-but he has a singular readiness to attest wind. I I decide I should not like to live I in a uni the astounding-the astoundingly bad and th e verse kept up by love I yet unequipped to tell a joke I astoundingly good, both, and their turbulent fusion or contemplate the sources of its fear.' And there is in experience. He is, in a special sense of the word, a indeed a jesterly path, as when, in 'Essay on Patriot barbarous poet. I mean the term in the sense implied ism', Porter writes, 'Compared to my true patriotism I in Hopkins' line, 'barbarous in beauty, the stooks the imperialism of my legs and bowels, I the suze arise'; Hopkins, ever the intellectually sophisticated rain ty of my eyes, I grave hemispheric rulings I of the and the experientially exposed, was speaking of being wide Porterian peace, I my love of country is a pallid in its vivid nakedness, its undeniable impingement. passion.' Everything he wrote, good and bad, came out of that; In an uncollected poem, 'A Lido for Lunaticks', and although he liked masquerade as much as any of Porter continues to essay descriptions of love, which us-his technique itself being a version of masquer are framed sometimes after the guesses of earlier ade-it is this undeniable imminence of the real that enquirers, and sometimes under the press of experi propels his writing. Peter Porter shares that barbarous ence. The poem 's title is warning enough to keep us disposition. Where Hopkins has shocks of wheat, wary as to conclusions, but the probings are not Porter has the shock of loving mortals. perfunctory. 'Love is the gloriously I Mechanical This is fine in some circumstances, as when, in operation of the spirit', 'Love can behave ... like the the late poem, 'Jam on the Piano Keys', Porter writes, Carthaginian I Army'; 'Love's proper face I Will not 'Love and the dead are sufficient subject matter'-a be authorised but will concede I In waters calcinous view which Yeats also held, or said he did. But another and camphorous I That a solipsism of dreams is what looming question may still present itself-something the heart I Expects in its projected Heimatland-' 'Love implied at the end of the little piece from Milosz with is the inward journey of the soul': it is a traditional which I began, when he says, 'Yet falling in love is claim, but the formula is pressed, immediately in the not the same thing as being able to love. That is some poem, like some coin of the past which is bitten to thing different.' What is at issue here is not only an test for its soundness. individual's psychic bent, nor only our traffickings 'A Lido for Lunaticks' has for epigraph a quota with one another, but whether or not the whole tion from Emily Dickinson, 'And Life is over there'. amatory shebang is a charade. Emily Dickinson, who Porter's last words in his poem are, 'If, as we trust, I might be called the eminence blanche behind some Life is over there, then is this love, I This inconclu of Porter's imagination, said in one of her poems, 'This siveness which orbits us, I A spacious Swiftian tele is my letter to the World I That never wrote to Me', a ology I Of backs being turned and elsewheres to be move which tests the world not only for responsive at? ' I think of the last words in Keats' last letter ness but for its very identity. Peter Porter's poetry, '! always made an awkward bow'. Truly significant I would say, tests the world for identity, and questions make an awkward bow: they have the never more than when he is writing of love. ungainliness of the uncertain, as does Porter's ques tion here-which is how we may know that they are C ANETII ASKS, 'What if it were all just an overture genuine. And I should like to conclude this essay, and no one knew to what?'-'overture' is good, surely which is also a kind of laudatio, a formal salute to and floats the proposition, 'In the play of language, distinction, by quoting once more from Rudolf Arn death disappears.' Porter's reservations about both of heim, as he muses on the ways in which words may these notions would be profound, but he would discharge meaning: understand instinctively why they were being framed. He is, after all, a constant favourer of the 'what if' When the meaning of a word is not known, its sound disposings of the intellect and the imagination, and and its ingredients of particular connotation may con he is himself a necessarily crumpled magician of jure up a distinct referent. Antimacassar is to me a language, for whom death keeps on betraying its pres mastodon tic battlewagon, and the dictionary's assur ence, however spectacular the linguistic panache may ance that the word designates a delicate backrest cover be. Given a lead in m uch by Auden, he migh t also be is not strong enough to dispel the barbarous vision. led by a climactic claim in Auden's 'In Praise of Lim e stone', where the 'older colder voice, the oceanic Peter Porter knows that love can indeed be a 'mas whisper', says that 'There is no love; I T here are only todon tic ba ttlewagon', and that it can be 'a delicate the various envies, all of them sad.' backrest cover'. His poems are 'not strong enough to There are m any ways of addressing the 'older dispel the barbarous vision', and that is part of their colder voice', not so much to rebut it as to hold it at unique authority. • fence-'In Praise of Lim estone', is, after all, am ong other things a love poem . In 'The Storm ', Porter asks, Peter Steele SJ has a personal chair at the University 'Why write poem s? I Why, fo r that m atter, march on of Melbourne. V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUR EKA STRE ET 41 [HEsHoRrLIS] The Clash of Fundamentalism s: Crusades, THE CLASH OF U nderstanding Power: The Indispensable FUNDAMENTAliSMS Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali. Verso, 2002. Chomsky, Peter R. Mitchell & John Schoeffcl CIIISIIIS. JIHIOS lNDMIDfDIO ISilN 1 85984 679 3, RRP $49.95 (eds). Scribe Publi cations, 2002. ISHN 0 90801 Tariq Ali was first known as a radical student 172 5, RRP $35 leader, and his subsequ ent work has main Som e intellectuals are great haters. Think of 1!.!1 tained the cheekiness and radical commit Evelyn Waugh. Others, like John Pilger and ment of his earlier life. The dust jacket of this Noam Chomsky, are great hateds. When they · ·~jtr argument-that September II arose out of are on tour or publish, the local commenta successive reactions to the imposition of tors turn on them with the adjectival savagery TARIQ All imperial power-carries photographs of a usually reserved for Crows players in the didactic Osama bin Laden and of a presidential George Bush in Collingwood m embers' stand. which the faces are transposed. If, like me, you wonder why Chomsky is a Ali's preface adopts the sam e confidently and ch eerfully ten fox for hunting, this collection of C hom sky's speeches will be dentious tone: illuminating. He is sardonic and reasonable, with a gift for looking behind what the camera is showing you and revealing how the I want to write of the setting, of the history that preceded these cam eras came to be there and who has written the script. Because events, of a world that is treated virtually as a forbidden subject in his subject is freq uently the manipulation of news, and he includes an increasingly parochial culture that celebrates the virtues of commentators among the cheerfully duped, he will never be popular. ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity and extols the present as a But, whether right or wrong, Chomsky is always interesting and proces without an alternative, implying that we all live in a a touch infuriating. He has a 19th-century faith in scientific consumerist paradise. reasoning, no time for m etaphysics or theology, an unshakeable The distinctive gifts Tariq Ali brings to the book, however, suspicion of conventional wisdom, a passion for disagreement, and make it worth reading. He was brought up in Pakistan and is able a great ability to trust facts. A good but not a nice mind. He offers to represent a non-Western perspective from within. He knows and a bracing antidote to denial, not simply for the complacent, but also recognises the importance of the long slopes of history and not for reformers who need to believe that change will come quickly to simply of the markers. He has engaged m any of the main actors in justify their commitment to social m ovement. fr ee conversation. I find attractive Chomsky's basic intuition that those with Above all, he sets the conflict between the US and terrorists into power and wealth will understandably try to shape society in their the broader historical perspective. This is lacking in m any com own interests, and to clothe these interests in the language of the m entators on the war against terrorism, who, like an Alcibiades common good. I find his trust in science and facts less conducive to without charm, demand passionate allegian ce devoid of under a humane world. But when it comes to the hunt, my sympathy is standing. -Andrew Hamilton SJ with the fox and not the m en with bugles. -A.H- Lighting the Way: Reconciliation Stories, Journey to the Inner Mountain: In the Desert Dianne Johnson (eel.) . The Federation Press, with St Antony, James Cowan. Hodder & 2002. ISilN ] 86287 427 1, IUU' $29.95 Stoughton, 2002. ISBN 034078 658 2, RRP $29.95 Lighting the Way brings Australia into sharp, Australian on journey-into-seli goes into Egyp three-dimensional focus with its examples of tian desert, detours to m eet locally famous Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people work- solitary who turns out also to be Australian ing together to promote reconciliation. Their and introduces him to the spirit of the D esert collective efforts might involve collaborative IIG I-1 !:1 1-Mill.WI\Y Fathers. Australian writer returns from the artworks, community projects or political lj 1'\, 1 1 "- , desert to write a book about it. Satiated reader activism. The Sea of Hands, for instance, is an pauses doubtfully, recognising in this recipe encouraging symbol wherever it goes. Not just the possibility of something meaty or of a moi about politics or social change, this collection of ' souffle. stories has a radiant sense of power, hope and gentle determination. Cowan offers something more solid than souffle. When he links The stories give an Aboriginal perspective on our shared his his exploration of Anton y, Evagrius and Isaac of Nineveh to his own tory. It's distressing for w hite Australians to confront past and journey, he does not reclothe them as 20th-century travellers, but present injustices and personal ignorance. But it's also a relief. leaves them in their strangeness. They are not homogenised as Lighting the Way is interested in healing individuals, reuniting commodities fo r the bargain-hunting soul. families and re-sanctifying the land. It imagines a transformed And because Cowan is perceptive about the process of writing Australia in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous people talk and has given himself tim e to read his chosen texts closely, he is more and know more about each other, sharing power. In the often illuminating. abstract, this might seem depressingly impossible. But Lighting the As a reader who comes to the stories of the desert with modern Way looks at real situations where people have made it work. questions, he refers more to psychology and sociology than literary It's written in a roundabout style. This is confusing, and som e composition or theology in interpreting them. He sees the desert as times makes the information less accessible. But Lighting the Way a break with the classical world. I would see greater continuity does succeed in demonstrating the human potential to love radically. precisely because of the often unspoken theological tradition of the If this book is any indication, the reconciliation movement is one communities that generated the texts. But if you wish to sample the of the best things ever to happen to Australia. desert, Cowan's confection will leave you with a taste for more. -Susannah Buckley -A.H. 42 EUREKA STREET • j ULY-AUGUST 2002 BOOKS: 1 BRE TT EVANS The man who knew too much Recollections of a Bleeding Hea rt: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, Don Watson. Random House, 2002. ISBN 0 091 835 17 8, RRP $45 E,K CA TING " wit" hb duty Watson joined the prime min occasionally to toss 'a bloody big ister's staff in early 1992, just a rock into the pond' of Australian few week s aft er Keating h ad politics. In early N ovember 1992, knocked off Bob Hawke for the when Labor was fa cing the pros Labor leadership, and s tayed pect of political oblivion at the until the bitter end in 1996. From hands of John Hewson and his the beginning he kept a diary Fight back policy, the then prime with the intention of writing a minister decided to dump a whole book. Watson is a historian by cliff-s ide of boulders into the tod trade, a gifted w riter, and for four dler's pool that is Question Time. years h e was also a political 'I say to the Opposition that, insider. This rare combination of in the unlikely event of its attributes has enabled him to cap becoming a government, th e ture the texture of the Keating Labor Party would not obstruct Labor government in a way that the passage of the C ST legisla few other writers could ever hope tion in the Senate.' A rippling to match. Though probably too wave of shock spread across the long for its own good, Recollec H o use of Representatives, tions of a Bleeding Heart is des slapped into its walls, then rolled tined to becom e a classic of back again. Australian politics. The Opposition thought all When first approached about its Christmases had come at once; the job, Watson was far fr om be 'Bye bye, Paul,' they chanted. ing a confirmed admirer of the After all, had not their hated Labor leader. His wife's publish enemy just endorsed the Coali Th e mercurial, grumpy Kea ting was often a difficult ing business had been sent to the tion's key policy? Surely the gig man to work for, but th e highw ire moments ... wall by 'the recession we had to was up ? Meanwhile, on the gov have' and like many other Aus ernment benches-none of whom somehow made it all worthw hile. As Wa tson says: tralians he was understandably had been forewarned- there was wary of Keating's public persona: stunned silen ce. But slowly it 'Paul Kea ting is a kind, charming and very the aggressive and vituperative dawn ed on e ve ryon e wha t in telligent man w ho would risk his own life to politician of TV legend. On first Keating was up to: he had just m eeting, however, he was sur m ade it crystal clear that there save yours or to get an un wa nted crease out prised to discover a m an who was only one way to avoid a con of his trousers.' seem ed tired, withdrawn, even sumption tax-you had to vote m elancholy. 'It would remain the Labor back into offi ce because the Senate Don Watson, was watching the pandem o dominan t impression. It's why I liked him wouldn't protect you from it. nium on closed-circuit television and m ar and knew at once that I wanted the job.' (It's By the end of the day Keating's tactic velling once again at his boss' 'crazy like a a strange, yet revealing, reason to take on was being applauded in the m edia as a fox' political style. The mercurial, grumpy the sort of job that is capable of killing even m aster stroke. The coming election would Keating was oft en a difficult man to work the hardiest workah olic. But, then, as be a referendum on Hewson's tax policy, for, but the highwire mom ents like this Keating recently joked, Watson seems to and Keating's risky manoeuvre had branded som eh ow made it all w orthwhile. As possess the inclinations of a fruit bat-'he the Coalition with a death sentence just Watson says: 'Paul Keating is a kind, charm always heads back to the darkness to feed'.) three letters long. ing and very intelligent man who would In rapid succession the prime minister's From the relative safety of his parlia risk his own life to save yours or to get an new speech-writer acquired a Henry Bucks m ent house office, Keating's speech-writer, unwanted crease out of his trousers.' suit, a Diners Club card and a room at V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EU REKA STRE ET 43 Canberra's Telopea Park Motel. 'In the space per cent 'APEC', then 100 per cent 'Packer But h e was always ready to forgive him. of a week I drifted a thousand miles from Vendetta', then 100 per cent 'Annita'. And So why did the two men click? What ordinary life.' He drifted all the way to the sometimes, according to Watson, it could they had in common was a love and skill for new parliament house and he found the turn very black indeed. He once said of Jolm language, and a shared project. Watson writes: atmosphere surreal. 'Inside it wants for Howard: 'I'm going to drive an axe into his Politics and history are alike and insepara nothing except reality', Watson writes. 'It chest and lever his ribs apart.' And this ble in that the craft of both is storytelling. smells of nothing, tastes of nothing, and is from a man who, Watson assures us, abhors Masters of both juggle past and present to the colour of nothing. Having no past or violence ('Brave heart was too violent for create coherent narratives, the historian to provenance it evokes nothing, unless it is him'). make the past knowable, the politician to the end of history.' When you work there 'it In the end, Watson comes to a startling do this with the present. can cross your mind that you are dreaming conclusion: 'by the time of his prime min or extinct'. istership Paul Keating was in some funda When it was all over, Watson moved out And if this wasn't enough to cope with, mental ways unsuited to political life'. He of the rabbit burrow and drifted back into like Alice, he also disappeared down a rabbit tells us that the same man who stood in ordinary life. He eventually stopped send hole. Watson found that the long, bending front of the word 'Leadership', spelt out in ing ideas to Beazley's office and got on with corridor that bisected the prime minister's letters ten feet high, when he launched his own writing. Keating cleaned out his suite of offices made it resemble nothing Labor's 1996 election campaign, disavowed desk after 37 years in Canberra, gave his less than a large rabbit burrow, and 'if you the concept many times while prime min prized, and pristine, M ercedes Benz to live in a burrow long enough you become a ister. He tells us 'it was very faint, but Jimmy Warner, his long-time driver, and bit like other things that live in burrows; it something in Paul Keating's defence of Law moved back to Sydney. The finality of his narrows your vision but it may also heighten rence echoed Evatt and the Petrov Royal divorce lay ahead. The popularity and long your instincts'. He also found a game in Commission'. Did the man have a political term electoral success of his nemesis, John play that might have been invented by Lewis death wish? Howard, lay ahead. And despite Watson's Carroll: the Pointy Heads versus the Bleed 'Keating', Watson argues, 'was an superb first stab at the story, his- ing Hearts. unusual prime minister in no stranger way tory's judgment still lies ahead. The Pointy Heads were, of course, the than this: h e seemed not to understand that economists. The Bleeding H earts were just he could make himself more popular and EV IDENTLY, Paul Keating hates book about everyone else. It is important not to trusted if he played sometimes to the hol launches, but he turned up to the one for caricature this division. Everyone in the low centre of the job-to the ceremonial, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart at the prime minister's office believed in the free sentimental, cliched dimension of it'. Such Sydney Town Hall and even made a brief market, explains Watson, it's just that the a view almost amounts to a denial of poli speech. He told the crowd, 'the only reward Pointy Heads were inclined to believe in it tics itself-Hawke, and certainly Howard, to a public life is public progress- there is to the exclusion of everything else, includ could never be accused of it. no other award ... I don't care about the ing, at times, common sense. The Bleeding What was the cause of this lack? Watson books. I don't care about the accolades. H earts wanted a broader definition of what writes discreetly about the state of Keating's Truly. What I care about is whether it all constituted the 'main game'; they wanted marriage, but it is clear that the thing he mattered. ' to include symbolic issues, like history, the valued above all else-far above political So did it matter? How much of the arts, the Republic. Watson joined the Bleed power, for example-was foundering and Keating story do Australians still believe ing Hearts and sat down to help his prime causing him great anguish. Was it also the in? How much of it did they ever believe in? minister. way he came into the job, crawling over the In January 1996, just before his govern He wrote hundreds of speeches, thought political corpse of Bob Hawke? Or maybe, ment was put to the sword by the elector up jokes for Question Time, drafted press as Watson likes to think, Keating just had a ate, Keating ga ve a major speech in releases, worked until 3am, hallucinated 'fanatic heart', like that other Irish- Aus Singapore. It was an eloquent restatement through lack of sleep, handled his kids' tralian outlaw, Ned Kelly, prone to self of the story that he had developed as prime homework via fax, rewrote the verbless destructive rages, intemperate speech, and minister with the aid of people like Don sludge that emanated from the bureaucracy, a loathing for the Establishment. Watson. H e told his audience of Asian and worried about his boss' psychological Whatever the reason, it m eant that businessmen that Australia had left its state. There is a lot in this book, but always Keating was never capable of forging a con traditional racism and xenophobia behind, at its centre lies the desire to explicate one sistent, respectful relationship with the elec but had maintained its traditional egalitar of Australia's great mysteries: what the hell torate. By the end of his time as PM, Watson ian and democratic values. He extolled makes Paul John Keating tick I says the government needed 'a Redfern the virtues of Australia's economic reno A diagram ofJohnHoward's brain would speech for all the other Australians', but by vation and painted an optimistic picture probably show a small area marked then it was too late, no-one was listening to of Australia's developing role in Asia. If 'Cricket', a slightly larger one marked 'Fam the government's story any more. such sentiments look hopelessly out of ily (Mine and the Queen's)' and the rest, say Over time Keating became a sort of hero date that's because, as Keating always 90 per cent, would be labelled 'Staying in to Watson, yet, with the historian's under said, when the government changes, so Power'. As Watson describes it, the Keating standing of such things, the loyal speech does the country. • brain is a very different beast. Like a chame writer also knew that real heroes have real leon on steroids it exists in a state of con flaws. When he wasn't being beguiled by Brett Evans is an ABC journalist and au thor tinuous mutation. One moment it would Keating's charm, he was being frustrated of Life of the Party: A Portrait of Modern be 100 per cent 'Mahler', a second later, 100 by his wilfulness and lack of discipline. Labor (UNSW Press). 44 EUREKA STREET • )ULY - A UGUST 2002 BOOKS:2 BR I AN T OOHEY Capital chaps Rich Kids, Paul Barry. Bantam, 2002. ISBN 1 86325 338 6, RRP $45 E,WITA U 'M TO wmk" ad.OT· treat Rich and Keeling as freshly tised, companies som etimes have to minted business geniuses. Astonish go to the wall. Risks have to be taken; ingly, BT saddled up for another ride. money has to be lost. Capitalism About the only difference this time works even more efficiently, how around was that it lost far more ever, if capital is not squandered money. becau se investors have the wool The young millionaire who liked pulled over their eyes. to portray himself as riding a bike to In Australia, three main institu work was soon to add three power tions are supposed to ensure that boats, a helicopter, a Whitsunday investors are well informed: the hideaway and two Sydney mansions financial sector itself, the regulatory to the private jet-to an overall tune authorities and the m edia. As Paul of $40 million. When the Australian Barry dem onstrates, all three under Securities and Investments Commis sion belatedly started breathing down performed during the events leading Left to right: )odee Ri ch, Brad Keeling, Rodney Adler and john Greaves. up to the collapse of One.Tel, the his neck after the plug was pulled on company at the centre of his latest Even as late as Ma y 200 7, when th e ship was One. Tel, Rich transferred a large part book, Rich Kids. of his share in these assets to his wife Barry is a boon for those who feel well and truly sinking, The Au stralian quoted Maxine, under the Family Law Act. they should know som ething about from a report by Goldman Sachs entitled Keeling did OK, too. Like Rich, he business, especially as the expansion was paid a bonus of $6.9 million in of compulsory superannuation means 'Grea t Start. One. Tel is here to sta( Th e 2000, bringing his weekly pay packet their retirement incomes will increas to well over $140,000. ingly depend upon what happen s in in cident showed th e difficulties facing th e Apart from fooling BT again, Rich the share market. With Barry as their media, especially in cases where parent really worked his charm on three guide, they should come away wiser other unlikely victims. Two were but hardly reassured. companies had in vested in On e. Tel. also rich kids, James Packer and A former BBC journalist who Lachlan Murdoch. The third was a moved to Australia in 1987, Barry writes Mirror-now part of the Daily Telegraph supposedly sm art company, Optus. The with pace and verve. He has the knack of wrote an adulatory piece about the 'suc Hawke and Keating governments had pro keeping his story simple, despite amassing cessful' young millionaire who rode his tected Optus in an effort to establish it as a hundreds of hours of interviews and stacks bike to work. As Barry notes, the Daily serious rival to Telstra, but it has proved a of financial and legal documents. The result Telegraph ran a similarly effusive piece 11 disappointment. N ot least of the reasons is is that Rich Kids is entertaining, convinc years later, even though it was obvious that the astonishing deal it offered to One.Tel. ing and, ultimately, disturbing. Rich's next venture, One.T el, was disinte Before deciding to pay crazy prices for The book begins with the story of how grating in much the sam e fa shion as its own slice of the microwave spectrum, one rich kid, Jodee Rich, started a computer Imagineering. One.Tel used Optus as the carrier for its company called Imagineering in 1981. It Following the Imagineering disaster, m obile-ph one cu stomers. Every time grew at such a breakneck speed that admin Rich took an extended skiing holiday over One.Tel signed up a new custom er, Optus istrative systems, to the extent they existed seas before returning to Australia to buy a paid it a $120 cash bonus. Barry gives vivid at all, were soon overwhelmed. But the private jet to indulge his passion for flying. accounts of how One.Tel dealers couldn't share market-encouraged by the backing But the entrepreneurial urge never died. In believe their luck. They were soon stand of one of the nation 's m ost respected fund 1994, he entered the boom ing phone m ar ing on street corners, and even beaches, managers, BT- loved it. Less than a decade ket by starting One.Tel with Imagineering's giving $10 to anyon e who would sign a later, computing was still a growth industry, former marketing manager, Brad Keeling, contract. Half never bothered to make a but Imagineering was falling apart. Rich as his joint managing director. True to form, phone call. Even calling an eventual halt was given the boot, but not before taking the pair drove the new company at a frenzied to the folly cost Optus over $15 million in $8 million out of the company. pace and ended with the usual crash. compensation. N everth eless, he still had his admirers. Although some journalists and financial For its part, One.Tel found that many of Shortly after Imagin eering announced a analyst s expressed doubts based on those who did use its phones never paid large loss in 1990, the then Sydney Daily Imagineering's history, most were happy to their bills. Many others never go t a bill in VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STRE ET 45 the first place, such was the administrative Murdoch organisations invested heavily in why business journalists did not subject shambles within One.Tel. The losses were One. Tel. Jam es and Lachlan receive a well One.T el to tougher examination earlier in only exacerbated when One.Tel offered free justified drubbing from Barry. By th e tim e the piece. One answer is that the share calls between its own mobile custom ers they cut Rich and Keeling loose, they had market pu ts constant pressu re on media and sold fixed-line services below cost. lost almost $1 billion of their own an d their companies to cut costs in an effort to boost The business model was clearly a recipe shareholders' money. Other shareholders, the share price. Ye t a well-informed market for disaster, as was the chaotic nature of including som e prestigious investmen t often depends on the media having enough One.Tel's financial controls. Yet two of banks, lost close to anoth er $1 billion . resources to blow the whistle on dodgy Australia's rising young execu tives, Ja mes Even as late as May 2001, when the ship companies. Constant cuts to journalistic Packer and Lachlan Murdoch, succumbed was well and truly sinking, The Australian resources may please the market by helping to the lure of Rich's 'vision'. Jam es is the quoted from a report by Goldman Sachs the share price. But it does so at the perverse son of Australia's richest-and toughest entitled 'Great Start. One.Tel is here to cost of choking off the flow of accurate businessman, Kerry Packer. Lachlan 's fa ther stay'. The incident showed the difficulties information to investors. is th e fo rmer Australian citizen, Rupert facing the m edia, especially in cases where Barry h as produced a sorry tale, Murdoch, renowned for his skill in building parent companies had invested in One. Tel. sparklingly told. Sadly, there is every chance a global media em pire. Such an up-beat banker's report is legiti he will have no shortage of material for a In these circumstan ces, sm all-time m ate news, but was not balanced often repeat performance in a couple of years. • shareholders could be excu sed for being enough by m ore sceptical opinions. favourably impressed w hen the Packer and Barry's analysis prompts the question of Brian Toohey is a Sydney-based journalist. BOOKS:3 PETE R C. GAUG H W I N Gracefu I possibi Iities Ageing Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study o[ Adult Development, George Vaillant. Scribe Publications, 2002. ISBN 0 908 011 64 4, RRP $3 0 A GEING JS AN issue in search of a ent periods of our lives. Such a mind shift policy. There has been som e tin kering at may help am eliorate negative attitudes that the edges-the compulsory superann uation surround th e discussion of ageing. guarantee, promises to increase nursing- George Vaillant's book, A geing Well, is home beds and initiatives for aged care, for a study of the various positive and negative example-but governmen ts over the years facets of ageing, fro m our earliest days and have neglected to provide a coherent policy throughout li fe . Vaillant is a psychiatrist at that demonstrates an understanding of age- the Harvard Medi cal School and his book is ing as a fact of life rather than as an in con- based on what is arguably the longest study venience to be tolerated. T his is clear from of ageing in the world, the Harvard Study of recent media coverage and the launching of Adult Developm en t. an independent inquiry into the state of The stu dy focu sed on three cohorts: the aged care in Australia. There are now about Harvard Sample, the Inner City Cohort and 2.4 million people over 65 and that figure the Terman Wom en Sam ple. It began with could swell to 4.2 million by 2022. In the the Term an Wom en Sample in 1922 (before next ten years the number of people over Vaillant was born), and was part of a study the age of 85 is likely to increase from of gifted children. In 1937 (when Vaillant 260,000 to 389,000. was three), the Harvard study began, and As with these statistics, discussion of with age, though chron ological age is not a was deliberately confined to Harvard stu- ageing tends to focus on those who have guarantee that they h ave been attained. dents who were considered to be healthy in reached 65 and over. What appears not to be Th in k of King Lear and his daughter: m ind and body. The subjects were all men. appreciated is that ageing in fact commences Cordelia dem on stra tes m ore of t h ese In 1939 Sh eldon and Eleanor Glueck began when we are born and ceases when we die. attributes than her fa ther ever does. a prospective study of 500 youths sent to We age every day: tomorrow we will be The development of a capacity to love is reform school and 500 matched schoolboys chronologically older than we are today. at the heart of ageing well. who had not been in any legal trouble. This Common sense, wisdom , discernment and Preparation for ageing m ight more cor- group becam e known as th e Inner City understanding are attributes we associate rectly be described as preparation for differ- Cohort and again the subjects were all male. 46 EURE KA STR EET • ) ULY - AUGUST 2002 It was Vaillant who brought all three opment- a series of positive steps and their cohorts together to form what is now known pathological opposites. For example, in as the Harvard Study of Adult Develop infancy a child could develop a sense of m ent. Vaillant is now the director of the trust (in those giving care) or its pathologi study. cal opposite, a sense of mistrust (because What is different about this study com the carers are not trustworthy). In Erikson's pared with other studies of human develop schema, to grow as a healthy person one m ent (for example, the work of Erik Erikson, needed to master each of the eight stages. to whom Vaillant pays tribute, and Daniel Failure to master a particular stage, though, Levinson's The Seasons of a Man's Life) is did not automatically m ean that one could that Vaillant's study is prospective. The not then master the next stage, though it others have tended to be longitudinal follow becam e harder the more stages one did not back studies, which must dep end on master. m emory, whereas prospective studies record For adult development, Vaillant revised events as they happen. This is similar to Erikson's m odel and changed 'stage' to what Michael Apted has done with his 'task', which he says is more scientifically famous 7 Up series, though Apted's cohort correct. In Vaillant's model there are six is much smaller. sequential tasks: Mem ory can be affected over time and • Identity: the adolescent separates from shaded by defence m echanisms, examples his parents of which are recounted in the book. • Intimacy: the person becom es 'recipro Sheer cost explains why there are not cally, and not narcissistically, involved many prospective studies. Other difficul with a partner' ties include m aintaining con tact with the • Career consolidation: the person finds 'a subjects of the study, and the fa ct that, over career that is both valuable to society and time, the subjects can becom e unrepre as valuable to h erself as she once found sentative, for reasons such as death or loss play' of interest. • Generativity: the person 'm anifests care The Harvard study, then, would appear for the next generation' to be unique. It has managed to integrate • Keeper of the m eaning: the penultimate three cohorts of now elderly m en and task- the person passes on 'the tradi women who have been studied continu tions of the past to the next generation', ously for six to eight decades. Further, it is which leads to a widening of the social a study of the well, not the sick, although a circle N ew Directions Sabbatical number of the subjects becam e unwell with • Integrity: the person achieves' some sense New spirit for a new world the passing of the years or through abuse of of peace and unity with respect both to R enew one's own life and to the whole world'. their bodies. A lot of psychiatric studies your spirit in a flexible program, a global examine sick people, that is, those present Emotional maturation is the develop community, and the scenic ing to psychiatric hospitals or clinics, and ment of increasingly adaptive coping m echa San Francisco Bay area. Whether you draw conclusions from them . Such studies, nisms. Another term for coping mechanisms want to take a break or take on new h owever, often do not take into account is 'defences', and most of us have probably, experiences, you wi ll enjoy a wide those who have experienced misfortune at some time or other, had the charge 'you're range of spiritual, recreational, and and who have survived it in a positive being defensive' levelled at us, usually in a academic resources. fashion; A geing Well has exam - moment of argument or crisis. But a mature ples of many such people. defensiveness is necessary to enable healthy N ew D irections development, or successful ageing. As a sabbatical for one or two semesters wHAT IS AGEI NG ? Is it decay (after age 20 Vaillant puts it, 'successful ageing m eans we lose millions of brain cells a year), or giving to others joyously whenever one is seasonal change (the head of healthy black able, receiving from others gratefully when JESUIT SCHOOL OF T HEOLOGY hair becom es a sparse grey thatch), or con ever one needs it, and being greedy enough at Berkeley tinued development up to the m oment of to develop one's own self in between ' (p6l). a member of the death (like an oak tree)? As Vaillant points That last clause probably encapsulates the Graduate Theological Union out, ageing is all of these. It is also true, difference between healthy adaptation and though, that septuagenarians, because of unhealthy maladaptation. 1735 LeRoy Avenue their social and emotional maturation, can At Appendix B, Vaillant illustrates the Berkele)! CA 94709 do som e things better than 25-year-olds difference between immature defences and {800) 824-0122 can. mature defences. Immature defences, such (510) 549-5000 Social maturation is, according to as projection and passive aggression, are Fax(510)841-8536 Vaillant, the sequential mastery of life tasks. about an unreal focus in life, whereas mature E-mail: [email protected] People familiar with the work of Erik defences, such as altruism and humour, www.jstb.edu Erikson will recall his eight stages of devel- enable life to be lived realistically and not VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 47 in a defeatist manner that sees oneself always as a victim. Mature defences enable people to adapt to life; immature defences The Man and the Map are likely to create malad jus tmen t and with it concomitant and ch ronic pain. Defences are more thoroughly analysed in an earlier book by Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (Little The dead flags Brown, 1977), which also contains stories Of a city square clattered of some of the people in this book. Vaillant lists as significant a number of Their stone curse, the findings of the Harvard study: Moss climbed, paper Then another face, • It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us; it is the good people who Cups swirled, yet on this But nods into his map Shivering with half a heart happen to us at any age that faci litate Thursday the sharp hour, enjoyable old age. • Healing relationships are fa cilitated by a The mad whip Under a larrikin breeze. I scan capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness, Across a spiteful bare The ghosts and for taking people inside. (By this Dawn disturbed him Aboard my singleminded tram metaphor I mean becoming eternally enriched by loving a particular person.) • A good marriage at age 50 predicted As it abandons him. The last Not at all. Stood there positive ageing at 80. But surprisingly, Studying the grim Frame is a man low cholesterol levels at age 50 did not. Map of a great town spread Statued alone with a chart • Alcohol abuse- unrelated to unhappy childhood- consistently predicted Arm to arm, now buckling Dying on his hands, unsuccessful ageing, in part because Nodding to the compass-points alcoholism damaged future soc ial Now flapped badly supports. For confirm, a bent At middle crease, flimsy • Learning to play and create aft er retire ment and learning to gain younger friends As the sky ... Glad Smile staining his face as we lose older ones add m ore to li fe's To have spotted him, strangely Then, like a prophet enjoyment than retirement income. A consolation against On a swirling precipice, • Objective good physical health was less important to successful ageing than sub jective good health. By this I mean that it He lifts his arms aloft The encroached week is all right to be ill as long as you do not And the Cathedral bells, To liberate the map ... feel sick. (p 13) It gathered stock, it almost I was transfixed Thus, it is who we are and what we do with ourselves that predicts how w e will age. To By a man who wrestles Hovered back to the earth age well, we must also be prepared not A map, who carries a shaggy It mocked, before merely to tolerate difference, but rather Coat, shabbily the hairs The final gust grabbed accept difference for what it is. In accepting difference we will learn much th at in the The limp sail of its cloth, long run will enable the development of Of his ankle glint, a shade new perspectives on life. His chin and the eyes Levitated it In other words, as Vaillant puts it,' a test Fish-mouths. Wednesday's faded Like a triumphant glowing of successful living, then, becomes learn ing to live with neither too much desire and Print wearily tumbles Rug into the minarets. adventure nor too much caution ~ and self-care' (p6l). Across his boot, unstrung He examined this, then sagged As it disappeared And still. He turns .lHROUGHOVT THIS book there are many stories of people who were comfortable in Away into the cluttered sun Behind a stone facade, themselves, but with whom others felt But the sky shakes And crumpled to a knee; immersed uncomfortable. They did not conform to Its head. He shakes first one In a howl I still can see. stereotypes that someone or some group had defin ed as the n orm; they were differ Alex Skovron ent. One such person is Professor Mark Aurelius Stone. (Some of the names in this book are a delight.) At an early stage of the 48 EUREKA STREET • ) UL Y- AUGUST 2002 study researchers deemed Stone's response m otheri her mastery of Erikson's stages of into a world that encouraged and loved her, to the Rorschach test- as 'just ink blots' basic trust, autonomy and initiative was she learned to encourage and love and thus to be temerity. One psychiatrist called him blighted. became able to pass on the fruits of that a 'robot'. Another considered that Stone Susan defended herself against h er learning. had not lived because he had not suffered. mother and life by using one of the imma One reviewer described this book as a Another described him as a 'rather con ture defences, passive aggression. In 'must-read' for anyon e in their 50s or 60s. stricted sort of person'. But one visitor to defending herself Susan was simultaneously That may be true, but it is also quite limiting. the staff conference discussing Stone had defeating herself. She continued this In my opinion this book is a must-read for the courage to ask, 'Why is it we all seem to behaviour throughout school. However, in people of many ages, especially those in dislike these successful people?' Another her 20s, three important things happened their 20s who are wondering what they can then added, 'He sees things pretty much as that served to turn her self-defeating behav make of their lives. Vaillant comments: they really are.' As Vaillant goes on to iour in to mature coping strategies. She found 'Lives change, and so the course of life comment, 'like it or not, the Rorschach a mentor with whom she could identifyi is filled with discontinuities.' designs are just ink blots' (pplS0-2). she learnt that her anger towards her mother (p287) Vaillant reports that, at age 75, Mark was healthyi she entered into a loving mar Aurelius Stone remarked, 'I seem to take riage that was to last over 40 years. THER E IS AN emphasis in this book on the things as they come more than most peo Susan Wellcome, then, is an example of way new opportunities can present them ple.' In his 70s, Stone had cared for his wife someone for whom adverse early life expe selves and be grasped positively. This is who was crippled with multiple sclerosis, riences do not necessarily mean a blighted part of ageing well. Of course luck plays a continued to supervise graduate students, life forever after. Sir Michael Rutter, the role. And sometimes opportunities cannot paid his laboratory expenses out of his own noted child psychiatrist, has written that be grasped for a variety of reasons, not the pocket and expressed his interest in the 'the notion that adverse experiences lead to least of which can be others who work to environment by trying to improve the lasting damage to personality "structure" prevent such a thing happening. For exam beauty of his suburban neighbourhood. has very little empirical support'. ple, sometimes people who are perfect for Vaillant comments: 'taking things as they Rutter's comment notwithstanding, particular employment miss out, because come was how for seventy-five years he had there continues to be strong debate, par of preconceived notions about them . so successfully survived' (ppl54-5 ). ticularly among psychiatrists, lawyers and Employers can fail to see beyond the sur Mature people of whatever age can adapt judges, about whether people with nega tive face or the stereotype, can fail to recognise to the circumstances in which they find early life experiences can change a negative that a person has grown or changed. So this themselves. There are no doubt periods of pattern of behaving to one that is more is also an important book for employers, mourning when things are not quite what positive. Susan Wellcome would appear to managers and policy-makers: those people one hoped for, but the challenge is to move answer the question in the affirmative. whose decisions often affect the lives of on without excessive regret, which can Life experience, however, seems to sug many others. become paralysing. gest that there are no firm answers to this The strengths of Ageing Well are multi Susan Wellcome is an example of some questioni at best there are possibilities. ple. It is well written and free of the jargon one whose early life was problematic. Therefore, for example, people who have that often limits works written on psycho Vaillant m et her when she was 76, and she dealings with those whose past behaviour logical topics. Where the use of technical 'appeared a perfectly ordinary gray-haired, has been negative need to ensure that they terms becomes necessary, Vaillant care somewhat overweight old lady' (p64). She do not becom e responsible for some greater fully explains what they mean in ordinary was a person who 'could welcome the out tragedy-ruining a life that has begun to get language. side world in and yet remain attentive to back on track, for example. This book could have ended up as a dry, her own needs' (p65). Vaillant points out what h as been albeit important, study of the ageing proc Susan's history revealed that her mother present in the clinical literature for years: ess, som ething of interest only to those was difficult and selfish, a woman who genes and environment both have an influ who study gerontology. Fortunately, it did disliked children and who tried to prevent ence on who we are and what we becom e. In not. This is a wise book, a book about her daughter taking any initiativei h er that sen e, understanding the difference in acceptance, resilience and hope. • mother told Susan that she wished Susan people becomes crucial. Once Susan had never been born. Susan's early life was Wellcome moved out of what can only be Peter C. Gaugh win is an Adelaide reviewer shrouded in a deceit forced on her by her described as a pathological environment and lawyer. Imprints Booksellers- Adelaide's leading independent bookshop committed to justice, equity, peace, reconciliation ... Imprints an active contributor to the culture. BOOKSELLERS 107 Hindley St, Adelaide ph. 8231 4454 fax 8410 1025 email [email protected] www.imprints.com.au V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 49 BOOKS:4 PHILIP H ARVEY States of equilib r1um• Darker and Lighter, Geoff Page. Five Islands Press, 200 I . ISBN 0 864 18723 8, RRI' $ 16.45 Luminous Bodies, James Charlton. Montpcl1er Press 2001 ISBN I 876 59708 9, RRP $19.95 IT'' cu,.ou' HOW m•ny of Geoff P•ge'' oc H•d ey D>V;d.on' ;o chmch poems take u p a page. Author faces name- throaty on the sacred tiles sake in som e moment of courageous per- and hea di ng for the altar. sonal understanding. Understandings m ultiply, result of a mastery of the art of This is a poetry of direct engagement self-perception. He confesses 'I like to spend where the voice has a w eathered common an afternoon I I reflecting on the mortals.' sen se and the tricks are not sh owy. At one level there is a poetry of unspoken Another Australian character is the' clark- moment-putting down the dog, unpack night-of-the-soul agnostic', someone Page ing belongings after a separation- a poetry would seem to know from personal of losses, small ruptures that define the experience: difference: 'the way a n et I m eans double faults- I I the way one loses I games to He builds no temple out of bricks love.' ('Poetry and Tennis') and does not like to preach. Then slowly we are drawn into a wider Who climbs his family tree I I The other He thinks conviction more impressive world that is also one of privacy, personal with his new Nintendo I Entirely self slightly out of reach . indwelling, that inexpressible inner privacy engendered'. Behavioural patterns beget new that is existence. 'Sermon' starts by asking ways of seeing, pleasurable with instant In privacy Page can celebrate the sanc if art can ever express what an individual recognition. This has its clark side too, as tity of the individual, while his poems on experiences, and after concluding that it for example in 'The Big Black Cat': Religion (Big R) are sceptical of all fixed cannot, takes the idea a step further: positions, including the sceptic's. The Bigotry's a big black cat human scale is his m easure, while in his The memories balanced on your knees hard questions abou t right living, we leave the living purring as you stroke its back Page is the determined Protestant. are likewise fictions more or less. and sharing the TV. A NEMERGENT Catholic sensibility The messages Everybody has a cat; informs the poetry of James Charlton; the all run one way. there's no one who's not fe lt diction is stable and the tendency is adjec No one knows your true address. the purr of satisfaction when tival. Like Page, he has a trained Imagist some talkback smooths the pelt. propensity. 'The petrel's beak points I to Something of a corrective for those who nothing except the fish/ he writes in would hallow the page. A steady building of No-one? Page uses the sweeping statement 'Tasman Peninsula', while the end of the telling phrases into a poetry of experience is to confront our own innocence or denial. sentence warns of something more going one of Page's best skills. Easy everyday Once out of the private world, though, Page on, 'which in turn I symbolises nothing but rhythms are his forte, where w e would least can be a little unsteady. His poetry of social itself, II a lesson I resisted, I much as that expect to find deeper meanings. Rhyme protest meets with varying success, owing raptor ... 'The changes are contemplative, happens from time to time like some to the sam e easy speaking tone. The ironies internalising. At its best, such an enterpris unmen tioned accident. Occasionally he lose their steeliness in protracted declama ing poetry leads into a state of affirmation even breaks through into genuine small tion, as in 'A Short Statem ent of Policy'. and self-transformation. triumphs; in 'Starting Over' for example, A passion for the short three-line verse Charlton will not avoid the suffering of where a couple in their 50s 'setting out is just one example of Page's immense debt creation, and in naming suffering walks the from rented space, I their differences in to William Carlos Williams. Epigrammatic, firlelirle poetry always must between bathos history' can exclaim 'This time, yes, they' ll plain-dealing and powered by everyday and despair. His report of a rabbit shoot get it right'. The move fro m the objective to Imagism, Page has the insuperable advan keeps to the facts: the subjective comes effortlessly. tage of explicit meaning. Take this six-line Page is a canny portraitist of Australian poem calleci'The Analogues': One pulse ceases; suburban mores, a place where you find another quickens. girls who have 'vaguely got religion', widows Those speedboats on the Boobera One set of teeth jerks open; in their 80s who are 'teetotal or "a touch, as if along an ancient spine another clenches. thank you"', a grandson 'on the internet I wincing under water ('This Rabbit') 50 EU REKA STREET • jULY- AUGUST 2002 The problem of talking about suffering while employing a richly sensuous, indeed pleas urable, language is, however, one that Charlton does not altogether come to terms with, and in this he is not alone. Acceptance is achievement. The mood lightens when Charlton reaches states of physical equilibrium. He is most at home with bodiliness, his own body or that of his Heaven Refuses lover, 'suspended happily I between hope and hopelessness.' In the poem 'On the for Chris Wallace-Crabbe Rim' he talks of how 'our bodies, these portable monasteries, I sit on the rim of silence.' And in the natural world he can There goes that hat again, speak of insects as 'joint heirs of such doffed by the seventh wind molecular inheritance I that where our skin into the blue postm odern stops, I I our bodies do not stop'. This last is a greeting that is also a peace offering to but this time past retrieve, th e web of nature, that elsewhere stings a dispassionate balloon resisting anchor or bites. for the vaster-see With these concerns at the centre of his thought, the urge to mystical union becomes practically the cherub's cheek puff mad almost a common occurrence, though the as the cap filigrees value is never lessened. 'Mystical' would into the high northern so-long have to be on e of the more unfashionable longing for ozone. words of our times, and 'mysticism ' has been replaced silently by the popular catch all, 'spirituality'- How else, though, to She pats her ruffled Medusa explain the fo llowing, from 'A Lagavulin with a vanity that dawns Night': 'I'm in a country you've already I I as it glimpses both Ecclesiastes entered; in a house I you've already seen.' Or this, the poet gazing at a boulder very and Eccles: her brows unite like those gazed upon a few years ago by like knitting, chins collapse another Tasmanian, James McAuley: progressively, as the eye (squinting with opprobrium) I looked until I saw, or thought I saw, loops upward, dragging an infinitesimal the prissy visage kicking rise and fall: into the dialectic. igneous passion in motion, stabilised for an aeon But heaven refuses to antithesize, and now stilled, and the last she'll or perhaps not. snatch of the absurd expatriated ostrich I fe lt part of a backdrop of presence, as it levitates evenly as if all things participated beyond even theosophy's heptalogs in a gossa mered influence, is light- the speck a cloud of utterance. winks its lazy, spiky valedictory ('Brea thing Boulder') once, and is absent, There is political and love poetry in this its plume snuffed in a puff of decency first collection, but definitions like these beneath the sandy yonder. are the special guides Charlton leaves us. In such a pace, in such a breath, we have squarely left the page and found in human Alex Skovron language a m eans to the ineffable, to a new onen ess with the world. • Philip Harvey is a poet and librarian at the Alex Skovron's n ext book, The Man and the Map, will be Joint Theological Library, Melbourne. published by Five Islands Press in 2003. V OLUME 12 N UMBER 6 • EU REKA STR EET 5 1 kitchen and under the seats on the bus. As a result, Italian for Beginners is always unexpected and hysterically honest. -Siobhan Jackson Arachnid kid One might cavil at a few plot tricks, and Crossing the bar at the end there is the now-common British Spider-Man, dir. Sam Raimi. Spider-Man fantasy of Australia as a distant paradise, comics have always been different, more Last Orders, dir. Fred Schepisi. There are but this is a fi lm not to miss. Don't wait noirishly funny than the others. His pos faint echoes of Chaucer in this delightful around for closing time. -Tony Coady tures are not the posey-heroic beefcake of film. It follows a group of friends on a Superman and Batman- he squats splay pilgrimage to fulfil the last wishes of one of legged on the side of buildings, not trying to their boozy company that his ashes be scat The real thing be attractive, and the web that shoots out tered from Marga te pier. They even visit from his wrist is rather icky. His muscles Canterbury on their way, but the tales they Italian for Beginners, dir. Lone Scherfig. are for agility rather than di splay, so his tell (mostly to us, not each other) are the 'Lights, camera, action'-I'm quite sure they looks are more Robin than Batman. But bitter-sweet flashbacks of memory, not don't say that on any film set, but if you 're unlike the ambiguous duo, Spidey is episodes of instructive fiction. These flash making a Dogme film even the temptation definitely no gay icon. He's straighter than backs explore the pains and complex is removed. Rule no.4 of the 'Vows of Chas Superman and Lois put together. triumphs that lie beneath the phlegmatic tity' in the official Dogme Manifesto allows The movie does a good, workmanlike surface of the lives of these ordinary men no special lighting of any kind. But that's job. Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man/Peter and their women. not your only restriction-no added music, Parker has large eyes and Raimi's direction Australian Fred Schepisi has gathered no tripods, no black-and-white, no murders, has him using them a lot, cultivating a an extraordinary cast of British stars to no costume drama, no personal assistants sense of alert stillness that builds intensity bring to life his adaptation of Graham Swift's to your pet iguana. Despite these restric without seeming to try. The story is well prize-winning novel. Michael Caine plays tions, and quite possibly because of them, known: orphaned, bullied swot yearns after butcher Jack Dodds whose post-mortem Italian for Beginners, officially certified beautiful, ill-treated girl-next-door, is bit instructions are the last orders of the title. Dogme film no. 12, is in all respects a joy. ten by genetically modified spider on science The film opens with Jack's friends Ra y (Bob Set in an uninspiring suburban corner of excursion, develops super powers and must Hoskins), Vic (Tom Courtenay) and Lenny Copenhagen, Italian for Beginners explores make moral choices. Peter Parker has (David Hemmings) meeting with his son the minute tragedies and comedies of adolescent conflicts with his loving aunt Vince (Ray Wins tone) in their local pub for everyday loneliness. When the local priest and uncle, but his teenage arrogance and a priming ale before their uncomfortable pushes his organist over the church balcony, bad temper are shown to have incalculably journey begins. An uneasy presence is the th e priest is retired and a young replace terrible consequences. So then the under urn containing Jack's ashes and an uneasy ment, Andreas (Anders W. Berthelsen), is lying theme is power and the matching absence is his wife Amy (Helen Mirren) brought in to preach in his place. responsibility it carries: a moment of self who cannot bring herself to make the trip. Despite having no congregation to speak ishness can/will destroy others. Instead she is visiting their severely retarded of, Andreas finds himself in the midst of a There is of course a baddie, and Willem daughter June (Laura Morelli) in the insti community quietly in need. Jmgen (Peter Dafoe is wonderful as the Green Goblin tution to which she has been confined for Gantzler) is impotent and shy and in love much more scary in his own skin than in SO years without a single visit from her with Giulia (Sara Indrio Jensen); Giulia costume. The lines, the bones of his real father. June has never shown a flicker of doesn't speak Danish so can't tell J'ngen face are so stylised you could just look at recognition of her mother. Vince's connec she loves him; Halvfinn (Lars Kaalund) is him all through the film. As you do, in fact, tion with his father is real but ambiguous. violently grumpy and in need of a hair cut; whenever he is on-screen. He acts everyone As the past unravels in layers of flash Karen (Ann Eleonora Jmgensen) cuts hair, if off the set, but that is no criticism of the back, we learn of the betrayals, compro h er horribly sick mother isn't in the salon; others. Kirsten Dunst is subtle and, like mises and delicacies that have formed these and Olympia (Anette Strilvelbrek) sells cakes Maguire, curiously still as her character, lives. Caine's nudge-wink Jack beautifully on the rare occasions sh e doesn't drop them Mary Jane, the love interest. complements Hoskins' restrained portrait first. Their lives aren't quite hell in a hand At times the scenes have a feeling of of the reticent, overshadowed Ray who is basket but they are definitely in need of a tableau; Raimi is true not just to the idea of nonetheless a semi-professional gambler. little repair. Their one shared joy is a weekly Spider-Man but to the whole comic feel, David Hemmings is fine as the ex-boxer Italian class for beginners. without sending it up, which is a difficult Lenny full of menacing grievance, while The performances are glorious-every thing to pull off. On the whole, he manages Tom Courtenay's undertaker Vic presents one. Inspired improvised dialogue works it and has given us something worthwhile a dignified, wry fulcrum for the group. Ray seamlessly with the hilarious and beauti and very watchable. I just hope this means Winstone's Vince shows the virtues of fu lly shaped script. Although Dogme doesn't that kids will go out and buy the comics understated acting and, as the young Jack, allow directors credit, Scherfig deserves a now, and that Marvel will reissue the old J.J. Feild gives a flamboyant, insinuating great deal. She has dug a story out of the grot ones without trying to update them. portrayal of irresponsible charm. that accumulates in the corners of your - Juliette Hughes 52 EUREKA STREET • )UL Y- AUGUST 2002 And som ehow writer-director Scott Missing out Roberts has managed to create this disap Ghosts made flesh pointing mess with one of the best casts 1 Am Sam, dir. Jessie Nelson. Sam is intel ever assembled for an Australian produc Th e Devil's Backbone, dir. Guillermo del lectually disa bled, Annie is socially disa tion. How do you make a film in which Guy Taro. Although Mexican director, Guil bled, Margaret is disabled by regulations Pearce isn't charism atic, Kim Gyngell isn't lermo del Taro (Cronos ) describes his and Rita is disabled by a hunger for perfec funny, and Ra chel Griffiths isn' t sexy? It supernatural m elodrama a an allegory of tion. You may have noticed a pattern emerg must take a lot of planning. the Spanish Civil War, I suggest you forget ing. 1 am Sam has a good point to make, it The three Twentyman brothers are bank the symbolism and treat the war only as just m akes it too many times and with not robbers. Dale (Pearce) is the brains of the background, as you settle clown to watch nearly enough nuance. The point is this: operation. Mal (Damien Richardson) is the this beautifully photographed, atmospheric bringing up a child is confusing, challeng nice one. And Shane (Joel Edgerton) is the ghost story with go thic influences. ing, frightening, even disabling at times, psycho- although, like his siblings, he too Set in Spain in the late 1930s in the final but if you show abundant and uncondi has a heart of gold. The boys are released months of the civil war, the action occurs tional love your child will probably come from prison by som e criminally inclined in a rundown and isolated rural orphanage up trumps. A handsom e senti which is being used to house m ent and basically true, but children who are the flotsam what thunderous complexities of the conflict, as well as the it fa il to acknowledge. resident orphans. The over Despite having the intel crowded orphanage is strug lectual capacity of a child, Sam gling to survive because of a (Sean Penn, right) has cared for shortage of food and m oney. his daughter Lucy (Dakota Fan A young boy, Carlos (Fern ning, far right) for nea rly seven ando Tiel ve, an inspired choice years as a single parent. When for this pivotal role), is left at her intellectual capacity starts the orphanage after his father to challenge his own, child has been killed. As the new welfare authorities step in, ingredient in the existing believing the unconventional tension am ong the boys and situation i detrimental to the meagre staff of five, he is Lu cy's developm ent. Lucy is immediately bullied to hand put into care, but Sam vows to over his comics and his other get her back. childish treasures. I am Sam is about judg He is allocated bed 12 in ment and love and how pain the cavernous, echoing dormi fully blind we can be when it tory, the bed form erly occu- com es to judging others. If you pied by a missing boy named want a good weep and sniffle, this film is Sydney cops to pull a job. It quickly becomes Santi. Santi disappeared on the night a huge right on the m oney, but it just doesn't quite apparent, however, that their corrupt law bomb was dropped in the quadrangle of the pull off the very difficult (granted) task it yer, Frank Malone (Robert Taylor) is rather orphanage. It fa iled to explode and was left sets itself. Sadly, Sam's intellectual disabil too friendly with Dale's missus, Carol standing upright with it nose buried in the ity becomes a dull metaphor for the mis (Griffiths), and the big job he's planning is ground, a monument to the futility of war. takes and confusions of any parent and in so designed to end in betraya l. Like the other boys, Carlos hears a noc doing fails to acknowledge the individual So far, so good. From similar cliched turnal ghostly voice of ' the one who sighs', realities of bringing up kids, disabled or not. beginnings many a good caper flick has but it seems that only he catches glimpses -Siobhan Jackson been constructed. But soon enough the bad of a spectral figure in the physical and emo dialogue starts to grate and you find your tional claustrophobic gloom of the orphanage. self getting embarrassed for the actors. He becomes aware too of the staff ten Heist on own petard Before you know it, your mind-set adrift sions: the hatred of the brutal young care by story illogicalities- has wandered, and taker, the weary hopelessness of the Th e Hard Word, dir. Scott Roberts. All you are playing Spot the Location ('Oh, headmistress, and the frustrated love of hei t m ovies have the sam e plot: a team of look, there's the Anzac Bridge'). By the time Ca ares, the aged professor. gu ys must pull off an audacious crime the credits roll you have worked out your As the mystery unravel , the brutality against the odds, preferably with the use of weekly shopping list. within the orphanage m atches the worst ga dgets, charm and humour. But to be a It's important to support the Austral that is occurring outside its walls. The great example of the genre, this simple ian film industry-it's always in dire ghost predicts deaths to come. Living pas narrative must run with clockwork preci straits, after all-but don't waste your sions override the all-pervading fear of the sion towards a killer ending. Unfortunately, $ 13 .50 on The Hard Word. Make an dea d, and earthly matters are horror enough. Th e Hard Word is not a grea t heist movie; investment in the future and donate it to As Professor Casares observes, 'You it is, in fact, a cowpat of a film: one that VCA or AFTR instead. shouldn't fear the dead, you should fear the comes out steaming, but falls in a heap. - Brett Evans living.' -Gordon Lewis VOLUME 12 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 53 Monsters are us H ow MANY MONSTeRS lived unde. yom bed when you we" language is as obscene as the timeslot allows- there is literally seven? Perhaps the monster is your sister, who lurks among nothing they won' t say. Don't be put off by this. It feels the dust bunnies one evening as you, perhaps humming a sleepy authentic, unlike the swearing in Sex and the City, which some little tune, walk to your bed. Then she grabs your ankle. times has a self-conscious 'aren't-I-daring' air. Both Sex and Six You recover, eventually, with enough sympathy and hot Feet Under are well worth a look, the former because it is a cocoa. Many years later, that very scene is reprised in The Sixth true essential: Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte m ean Sense, and you shriek just a bit louder than the rest of the audi something to women everywhere. In a world where women are ence. Friends start to back out of cinema dates with you unless often the poorest of the poor, they are relatively without money the movie is PG, tops. 'I'll come with you to Crush, but forget worries. They dress extravagantly in a world that also contains the Carrie rerun,' says one, heartlessly. burkas. They choose whether and how to have sex in a world She cannot understand that, shrieking aside, I enjoy the that also includes clitoridectomy and honour killings. The frisson of terror, even the chill of horror, in my entertainment. people in Six Feet Under make similar choices but they Perhaps it's because horror's themes are big, really big, taking exist in a world that is less fairy-tale than Sex in the in the meaning of things, the nature of existence, the reasons City. for living, power, good, evil, love, death, soul-struggle, moral dilemma. And if we can also get these things in an episode of S TRANGELY ENOUGH, the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is Blue Heelers then horror offers us something else as well. not far removed from either Six Feet Under or Sex in the City. Good horror makes you think, under the pressure of fear. Shake It is a fairy tale but it delves as deep as any philosopher would speare knows how to leave both the mundane world and the want. Websites on it proliferate, discussing the themes that shadow world in our minds. His witches in the Scottish play arise in the series-everything from its treatment of Christian were saying things attributed to 'real' witches at the time, and ity, or Kant's ethics, to Plato's cave. The 'All Things Philo the play's bad-luck history ever since has spawned a culture of sophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel' website is fun fear for actors- you don't muck around with old Mac. And while and can be found at http:/ /www.atpobtvs.com/index.html. Buffy Hamlet's father's ghost may well be explained away in lives in an American Our Town called Sunnydale, which hap whatever theory happens to appeal more than the words that pens to be built right over a portal in to Hell. Shakespeare left us, a well-performed first scene of Hamlet has Joss Whedon, the series' creator, makes the cast read you shivering. Shakespeare before shooting each episode. Allusions abound, The best things on TV at the moment are dealing with all sometimes even direct quotes. Spike the vampire, in an early that big stuff. Channel Nine has been showing Six Feet Under episode, when he is still pure evil, promises his lover that he (around 10.30pm Mondays) and it should have an army of will kill Buffy, adding 'I'll chop her into messes.' N o other direct admirers. They have programmed it after Sex and the City, reference to Othello is made in that episode. It is just one of obviously gambling that it might keep those parts of that audi the many little surprises. If you are female you will adore Spike, ence that don't then switch over to Seven for Buffy the Vam the cute almost-reformed vampire who loves Buffy. But I have pire Slayer. All three are, along with Spin City and West Wing, to tell you that in this you will come up against opposition the very best of American television drama. from young males in the family, who will all barrack for Angel Six Feet Under is about a small-town, family-run under (Buffy's first vampire lover; it's a long story-don't ask) and taker's business. The father dies in a car accident and Nate deplore Spike as a scurvy knave. Fisher, the estranged eldest son, finds that he has been left half 'I suppose you and Mum think he's a lovable rogu e, a bit of the business to share with his repressed gay brother David. a scapegrace,' said my nephew bitterly. 'Oh yes,' we chorused. There is a lot of interesting detail about embalming and tarting 'He's a real scamp, isn't he? Love those cheekbones!' Nephew up dead people, some of which might bother the fragile went off to his computer muttering about pearls, swine and the stomached. There is some terrific acting-Rachel Griffiths is tragedy of menopausal brain-softening in close relatives. • compelling and attractive as Brenda, Nate's lover. The series is complex and intelligent, but will shock some people. Its Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer. 54 EUREKA STREET • j ULY-AUGUST 2002 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 105, July-August 2002 Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1. Changing weather patterns fo r one whose enthusiasm m ay wax and wane. (4,3,3,4) 9. It's strange to lisp on 'u', a letter in ancient Athens. (7) 10. Hear about a horse to back ? 0 no, it goes up in sm oke! (7) 11. Baggy clothes? Change the top, but they still look dishevelled! (5) 12. Accept an (old) coconut, perhaps, as partial paym ent. (2,7) 13. T urned up for the photo? It's on the nose-sort of! (9) 14. Like 9-across, but it's the 'thank you ' letter. (5) 15. Som e sound I'd cancelled. (5) 17. Partial to those with narrow-minded concern for the interests of their group? (9) 20. Impractical idea, a fantasy rising from use of 10-across, perhaps. (4,5) 22. Line of poetry becomes crisply brief when the beginning is changed. (5) 23. It sounded as if it teemed, but the day was suprem e. (7) 24. Like the curate's egg, good where no splits som ehow appear left out. (2,5) 25. Som eone to turn to for info rmation and supplies-like Solution to Crossword no. 104, June 2002 Capability Brown? (8,6) DOWN 1. Four off the bat; referee, however, needed for 8- down . (8,6) 2. On location, heard that recognition occurred when noticed. (2,5) 3. Christmas berry on tree where stars are seen. (9) 4. A number of tutors develop muscles. (7) 5. Shell for crazy person ? (3,4) 6. Kind of m easure for youngs ter in charge. (5) 7. So-called bait etc. confused the university instructor when giving the talk. (7) 8. It's that time of year when the wea ther supports the gam e. (8, 6) 14. Sister set out for France with grea t sadness. (9 ) 16. Dispossess one who snaked off-or vipered off, if you like! (7) 17. English poet who m ay be extravagant with money? (7) 18. Search in eastern area in order to amalgamate. (7) 19. Common sense about confused clergyman produced a reaction that was som ewhat apprehensive. (7) 21. Strange dog in the outback. (5) Thi s subsc ription is: Your Contact Details: Gift to: (Please also fill in your own contact details, left ) 0 New D Renewal D Gift 1Mrs/Mi5s/Ms/Mr Fwst Name I IMrs/ MISs/ Ms/Mr Fwst Name Length of subscr ipti on: ~~Su~rn=a=me~======~ D O ne yea r (1 0 issues for $63, $54 concess ion fo r IStreet No. Street Name Street Name pensioners, students and unemployed. Inc. GST. ) 0 Two yea rs (20 iss ues fo r $11 5, $98 concess ion. Inc. 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Australia's Refugee Policy
