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The Rules From Tories at Prayer Colin Colahan An Introduction to the to Socialists at Mass A Portrait Australian Constitutions GARRY KINNAN£ A History of St Peter's, Eastern Hill JOHN WAUGH Known as a brilliant pupil of the painter COLIN HOLDEN Max Meldrum and for the still unsolved This book explain s in simple, The history of an Anglican Church with murder of his girlfriend, Mollie Dean , in understandable terms the basis of the a difference- promoting a highly 1930, Colin Colahan was a witty, Australian Constitution, the federal traditional liturgy while, at times, charming, talented artist. This intimate system and the State constitutions. encouraging its congregation to a s and beautifully illustrated portrait Paperback 136 pp $9.95 erious study of socialism and other restores his life and work to its rightful political ideologies. St. Peters has also place in the history of Australian art. Poverty Law had a fascinati ngly eclectic mix of clergy. Hardback 124 pp $45.00 Hardback 352 pp $49.95 and Social Change Australian Moments The Story of the East Coast Country A 1997 Diary Fitzroy Legal Service A North Queensland Dreaming Celebrates MUP's contribution to JOHN CHESTERMAN ALAN FROST Australian literature by reproducing Chesterman traces the evolution of the extracts from some of its many books Fitzroy Legal Service from a thorn in the East Coast Country beautifully evokes published since 1922. In addition, each side of the legal profession to a valued the landscape, history and culture of far daily entry features an important or contributor to legal debate and a northern Queensland. Through this inspiring event from our history. An powerful advocate of pragmatic reform. sensitive and multilayered text, Alan attractive desk companion and a Frost succeeds in creating a mythology An entertaining and perceptive account fascinating read, Australian Moments of place in a way that is unique in brings to life the events and people who of the forces that have prompted legal Australian writing. reform in Australia from the early 1970s. shaped our history- every day. Paperback 296 pp $24.95 Paperback 296 pp $24.95 Hardback 112 pp $19.95

2 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1996 Volume 6 Number 8 October 1996

A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology

30 THE MANNIX MEMORIAL LECTURE CoNTENTS Patrick Dodson parallels the lives of Daniel Mannix and Paddy Djiagween.

4 36 COMMENT OPERA Bruce Williams is not carried away by either 7 The Flying Dutchman or The Two CAPITAL LETTER Executioners. 8 38 LETTERS BOOKS Peter Craven contrasts Conversations at 11 Curlow Creek and Night Letters; David VIEWPOINT McCooey reviews Peter Porter's Oxford Brian Toohey in the Lyons' den. Book of Modern Australian Verse (p41); Peter Steele investigates Mangu el's A 14 History of Reading (p46); Margaret Coffey JUSTICE DOESN'T PAY contemplates Gerard Windsor's Heaven There are lawyers aplenty, but will they Where The Bachelors Sit (p49); Matthew take your brief, asks Moira Rayner. Ricketson reviews Granta 53: News and Stuart Littlemore's The Media and Me (pSO); 15 Max T eichmann revisits The Regeneration ARCHIMEDES Trilogy (p52). 16 39 THIS MAN IS NO DONKEY POETRY Shane Maloney goes postmodern in Nijinsky's Leap and Sore At Heart by Peter Turkey. Porter (p48); A Threshold For My Son by Chris Wallace-Crabbe (p43); Chemistry by Peter Goldsworthy (p44). Cover: Patrick Dodson, 22 Chairpers on of the C ouncil AFTER THE HONEYMOON for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Jon Greenaway interviews the ANC's Mam 54 in front of the Clifton Lydia Kompe-Ngwenya. GET AJOB Pugh Portrait of Archbishop Geoffrey Milne on the apprenticeship of Daniel Mannix, in the actors. Newman College Dining Room, 24 Melbourne. OBITUARY James Griffin remembers Bishop Gregory 56 Photograph by Greg Scullin. Singkai. FLASH IN THE PAN Cover design by Reviews of the films Independence Day, Siobhan Jackson. 25 Courage Under Fire, The Hunchback of Photographs pp3, 22, 30, 33, BORDERLINE CASES Notre Dame, The Phantom and The 36, 49 by Greg Scullin. Visitors. Graphics pp6, 12· 13, 14, 38 Andrew Hamilton argues the case for East by Siobhan Jackson. Timorese asylum-seekers. Cartoon p 11 by Peter Fraser. 58 Photograph p41 WATCHING BRIEF by Bill Thomas. 29 Cartoon p57 by Pat Campbell. IN MEMORIAM Robert Crotty pays tribute to Jerome 59 Eureka Street magazine Crowe cr. SPECIFIC LEVITY Jesuit Publications PO Box 553

V OLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 3 EUAI:-KA STAI:-ET C oMMENT A magazine of public affairs, the arts BILL UREN and theology Publisher Michael Kelly SJ The Law and Editor Morag Fraser Consulting editor Michael McGirr SJ abortion Assistant editor Jon Greenaway eeGNCNTh oe MownoN HA" nADmONACe> fouod Httle Production assistants: 0 over which to rejoice in the 1973 decision, Roe v Wade, in Paul Fyfe SJ, Juliette Hughes, the United States. Chris Jenkins SJ, Siobhan Jackson, In the first trimester of pregnancy, all government Scott Howard authorities were forbidden to intervene in the decision to Contributing editors abort. In the second trimester, the Constitution of the United Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ States was interpreted to say that a governmental interest Brisbane: Ian Howells SJ in abortion might be acknowledged, but only to a very limited Perth: Dean Moore degree. Recognising that abortion after the third month had Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor increased hazards for the pregnant woman, the state's citizen, European correspondent: Damien Simonis the Constitution permitted the government to require that late abortions be performed only within hospitals or other Editorial board facilities licensed to perform abortions. Peter L'Estrange SJ (chair), It was only in the third and final phase of pregnancy Margaret Coady, Margaret Coffey, that the Constitution was interpreted to accord any recog­ Valda M. Ward RSM, Trevor Hales, nition to the interests of the unborn. When this stage was Marie Joyce, Kevin McDonald, reached, the Constitution permitted the state to protect the Jane Kelly IBVM, 'potential life' against the unrestricted liberty of the carrier Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ of the child. But even in this trimester the woman had the Business manager: Sylvana Scannapiego liberty to abort the child if her health-defined in terms of Advertising representative: Ken Head the World Health Organisation's 'well-being'-required it. Patrons Although there is little apparent solace for opponents Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the of abortion in these distinctions, there may yet be some, support of Colin and Angela Carter; the and that not only in the developmental recognition of the trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; interests of the unborn child. The Roe v Wade interpreta­ Denis Cullity AO; W.P. & M.W. Gurry; tions may at least be construed as an attempt to adjudicate a Geoff Hill and Janine Perrett; conflict of interests-that the state and the community also the Roche family. has an interest in the procedure, as well as the woman requesting abortion. It is not simply 'a woman's right to Eurelw Street magazine, ISSN I 036-1758, choose', even though the interests of other members of the Australia Post Print Post approved community have very little practical effect during the first pp349181 /003 14 two trimesters of pregnancy. There is, nonetheless, the is published ten times a year recognition that restrictions on abortion at least have to be by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd, considered, and, in some instances, to be enforced-in the 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121 second trimester as regards place, in the third trimester as Tel: 03 9427 7311 Fax: 03 9428 4450 requiring the mother to demonstrate that there were some e-mail: [email protected] reasons, 'physical, emotional, psychological, and the Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by woman's age-relevant to [her] well-being', why the proce­ Michael Kelly, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. dure should be carried out. Printed by Doran Printing, It would seem that a similar spirit, at least to some 46 Industrial Drive, Braesidc VIC 3195. degree, and perhaps to an even greater degree, animated the ©Jesuit Publications 1996. original decisions of the judges, Menhennit and Levine, in Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and fiction, will be returned only if accompanied by a their corresponding Australian precedents, R v Davidson stamped, self-addressed envelope. Requests for (1969) and R v W aid ( 1971). Abortion was seen from a social permission to reprint material from the magazine point of view as at least very regrettable, if not abhorrent, should be addressed in writing to: and this at all stages of the pregnancy. The petitioner, there­ The editor, Eureka Street magazine, fore, must demonstrate some circumstance or condition why PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121. this procedure should take place. These grounds have been

4 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1996 interpreted very broadly to give doctors discretion to decide mother, family or child that could have been foreseen at the whether a woman may have an abortion, by allowing it only time of the advice could give grounds for litigation. With where there is a serious threat to the woman's health for divorces over this period running at 30 to 40 per cent, and economic, social or medical reasons. But some 'necessity' must diagnosis of possible genetic defects becoming more be demonstrated. refined, maternity practitioners are very vulnerable. In his judgment in the Superclinics case in the NSW Court of Appeal Mr Justice Michael Kirby, subsequently elevated to I EAusTRALIAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS and the Australian Catholic the High Court, interpreted this necessity very broadly. He Health Care Association have been demonised in the press for recommended that the court should take into account not only re-igniting the abortion debate. But, granted Kirby's provoca­ the present conditions and circumstances of the woman seek­ tive construction and his eminence in the legal profession, they ing an abortion, but also her likely conditions and circumstances really had little choice but to contest the widening of the after childbirth The logic of this recommendation would seem grounds. Whether they were well-advised to question the whole to extend these circumstances to the whole period of the Common Law basis of the applicability of the doctrine of prospective child's minority. Perhaps this is implicit in the necessity when human lives are at stake (as they have chosen Davidson and Wald rulings, but Kirby's fellow Justices, Priest­ to proceed), or whether they might have done better to address ley and Meagher, did not think so. They thought that the rulings more narrowly and explicitly the relaxation of the grounds, only should be interpreted restrictively. Kirby's construction is a the High Court will tell. long, long way, too, from the 'conflict of interests' of Roe v Considerations of the problematic status in law of the Wade, and would effectively license abortion on demand, espe­ embryo/foetus and of the implications for public policy of cially since the foetus in question in the Superclinics case was retrospectively calling into question the legality of 77,000 abor­ apparently diagnosed as quite healthy, and the prospective tions a year may well deflect the High Court from the legal mother was far from indigent. point. But whatever the decision, the grounds will have far­ If the line of reasoning proposed by Mr Justice Kirby were reaching consequences, and ones which the Catholic Bishops adopted, then not only Catholic hospitals and practitioners but and the Australian Catholic Health Care Association could have all doctors and hospitals, of all religious persuasions and none, ignored only by placing considerable faith in the High Court's will feel under considerable threat of litigation. They will need ability to discern with Justices Priestley and Meagher, that their in all cases of pregnancy, irrespective of the health of the foetus, colleague Kirby's liberalising construal of Davidson and Wald to explore thoroughly with the patients the advisability of was indeed maverick. • abortion. Otherwise, during the period of the child's subsequent minority, any adverse alteration in the circumstances of the Bill Uren SJ is the Provincial of the Jesuit Order in Australia.

COMMENT: 2 ANDREW HAMILTON Muzzling immigration research

A MONG THE CASUALTies of the new government hos been fined to a few, self-interested centres, the capacity for good the Bureau of Immigration Research. It sponsored conferences argument to be made and to be heard will be limited. What and research, maintained a Melbourne library and acted as one comes from the centre, too, will be more likely to be concerned of the few honest brokers between Government and the com­ with persuasion that with truth. munity. There will be less opportunity, too, for the agencies that At one level, few will notice its passing. But it may be work with people at grass roots to shape the making and another stone of a mosaic, composed of tiles such as the administering of policy. Without mediating agencies, their increasing politicisation of the public service, budgetary cuts contribution will necessarily be anecdotal, and can easily be and pressure for corporate involvement in the ABC, dismissed by those who have the 'big picture'. But the involvement of the corporate sector to compensate for reduced discrepancy between the conventional wisdom that guides government funding to schools and universities, the reduction government, and experience of life that will further fuel the of municipal library services, and the closing of small publicly distrust of government. funded centres of information. In the enquiry and argument which civilise the use of If information is power, and good argument humanises its power, there are few economies of scale to be made. Such uses, these trends are of concern. For it is in the interests of the economies as they are, are made usually to credibility. • community that there should be many sources of argument and that the gathering and analysis of information should not be Andrew Hamilton SJ has worked with Jesuit Refugee Service centralised. Where information, analysis and argument are con- on refugee and migration issues since the mid '80s.

VOLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 5 COMMENT: 3 A GNES WARREN Tell the truth now

H ow MANY cRrn" M.SS it take to make the military, who'd been studying for a long time, were a war? That's the question TV networks were asking able to throw at them '- themselves earlier this month as US shells sailed into Greg Wilesmith was the ABC's Middle East the skies of southern Iraq. correspondent during the Gulf War and the only It was battle stations at channels Nine and Seven. Australian reporter in Baghdad until he was ordered The missile strikes were perfectly timed for Austral­ out by then managing director, David Hill. ian prime- time television, networks made the most Wilesmith says Doctor Young did not set foot on of the meagre pictures available, booking satellite the sands of Arabia, and is wrong to say reporters were links and rounding up experts to talk about the conned, or that they conned readers. Greg Wilesmith significance of the latest skirmish in the Gulf. says 'reporters in the Gulf were well prepared; they Channel 7's Witness threw out stories prepared knew that the American military was for the evening and brought the real-life conflict to going to run a sophisticated propa­ our loungerooms. Channel 9, not to be outdone, ganda unit; that they had learned second-guessed Witness and pitted Ray Martin the lesson from Vietnam and against Jana Wendt-commercial television would try to restrict sources of superstars head-to-head in the war for ratings. information'. The ABC 's man And just like five years ago, what's on the spot says he 'reported become known as the 'CNN Factor' was the on these restrictions through­ guiding force behind the television out the war. According to Wile­ coverage. Anthony McClellan, head of smith the great myth of the production at Witness, says the Gulf Gulf War was censorship. He conflict has shown how dependent says this only applied to the small journalists and television networks group of US journalists with mili­ are on CNN. 'We have it beamed tary units going into Kuwait. to us live and we monitor it all the To Adele Ziadat of the journalism time, only because they are department at Yamouk University in generally quicker than the wires, Jordan, the problem with Western journal­ they're certainly quicker than the Aus­ ists is that they overlook the victims of con­ tralian television networks and the flict in the Arab world, opting instead to talk American n on-news networks in about 'attack and destroy' missions. terms of breaking news'. It was CNN that broke Port He argues that while people in his country have Arthur, and beamed it around the world. access to CNN and other US television networks, the But Anthony McLellan and others were 'Gulf­ West rarely gets to hear the views of ordinary people wary' this time round, aware of the 'cultural imperi­ in his part of the world. 'I think they should start to alism ' problem that goes along with feeding off understand the plight of the Iraqi people, not just to US-driven news coverage. 'I think we just have to be attack and destroy that part of the world.' sceptical and try to rely on facts as opposed to opin­ We can only hope that the rapid globalisa tion of ion. And that's where CNN is generally pretty good.' media outlets now under way provokes public debate In the latest round of warning shots fired across on our access to information, in Australia Saddam Hussein's bow, cartoons appeared in news­ and overseas. papers with missiles labelled 'Clinton's Election Cam­ paign'. Dr Peter Young, Professor of Defence Media L ET's NOT FORGET THE MANIPULATION of the media in Studies at Bond University, had his students on the the federal election campaign. Journalists had little job looking at how the conflict was being covered. chance to question and analyse policy when documen­ They concluded that a more sophisticated, more tation was made available only after the launch of cynical approach was evident in all m edia, with print the day. The m edia may have learned lessons from taking the prize. the Gulf War, but perhaps the battle over access to Dr Young, who sounds a little like a retired Brit­ information is only just beginning. • ish army major, says Operation Desert Storm was a disaster for journalism. 'The Media was [sic] complete­ Agnes Warren was an ABC correspondent in London ly unprepared, mentally and physically, for such a war and the Middle East during the Gulf War and her in the trackless desert and they were also completely program, The Media Report, can be heard at 8:30am unprepared for the sort of m edia manipulation which and 8:00pm Thursdays on Radio National.

6 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 Owning the agenda s pim Agnew, who died la" month, will pmbably be contains elements of yearning for the white picket fence, which remembered more for his campaign against the American East appeals to the sentimentality of the country town and the Coast liberal establishment in phrases such as 'effete corps of unskilled worker who has been displaced. Howard's ideas have impudent snobs', and 'nattering nabobs of negativism' than for different philosophical bases from Labor's. the inglorious end of his public life. For Nixon, he performed The Liberal Party constituency is not just the displaced, or the valuable job of bringing redneck America on side. Pauline those who listen to John Laws and come to adopt his view of Hanson may help John Howard do much the same in Australia. the world. It too has intellectual currents, dinner tables and John Howard is not a racist. He may favour more restric­ networks. Their complaint against, say, an ABC, is not so much tions on immigration, but he is not anti-Asian. He has good that their people of ideas do not get an airing so much as when aspirations in Aboriginal affairs. He is a cultured and civilised they do, they have been questioned and debated against the man, more likely to be listening to the ABC than to John Laws. background of a different status quo. They actually want to be Why then does he, with his party, give the appearance of pan­ the status quo themselves and to have others testing their ideas dering to the sort of views that Pauline Hanson represents? against their assumptions. Why does he use code words: references to the 'aboriginal Some events conspire to help it happen. The Manning Clark industry', to the 'multi-cultural industry', the 'ABC industry', fiasco may have actually reinforced the historian's stature, but disapproving references to 'political correctness' and so on, to it also subtly underlined the fact that many people interpret signal continually to the culture of the Ipswich fish-and-chip events differently from him. The Hindmarsh Bridge affair has shop that he is really on side, if unable or unwilling to go as far damaged Labor more than the Liberals because the Labor Party, as their populist heroine? at early stages, had shortcut a stage in the debate. Just because Two reasons really, and they connect. The first, of course, the newspaper editorials agree, or the debate among those is that he wants the vote of that sort of constituency, which is allowed to play in the top leagues had produced a consensus, far bigger than many people think. That constituency consists does not mean that public opinion is on-side. There is never of very many alienated and angry people, particularly in rural any escaping the hard work of listening and and regional areas but also in the cities, who feel that they have persuading. been left out of any economic progress, ignored and disdained by the policy makers, and who have a strong feeling that social ITMAY WELL PROVE THAT the most significant aspect of the last stabilities of old have come apart. budget has been a code word not so far used by any of its propo­ The major reason why they are in that situation is because nents, but which might still resonate out in Hanson-country. of the implementation of just the sorts of policies which John If one looks about those who have gained and lost, the attack Howard believes in-indeed with more fervour than the Labor has been primarily on the indigent poor, not the working poor. Party which had been implementing them for 13 years. But their Groups, apart from old-age pensioners, who are primarily anger is not directed so much at economic forces as on a search dependent upon the public purse, have copped it. The unem­ for villains, not least those who are seen (often unfairly) to have ployed and Aborigines are the main sufferers. It may not be prospered while the dislocations were taking place, been based entirely on an assumption that their poverty is all their pandered to while their needs were ignored. Labor's wooing of own fault-their inefficiency, improvidence, dishonesty, drunk­ particular groups gave it marked advantages, but always left it enness or whatever-but it is certainly based upon the idea that vulnerable when others were able to create constituencies out dependence on the public purse saps initiative, reinforces de­ of those not supping at the table. pendence, and destroys self-reliance. Because Labor was so dominant for so long, and because it The lobby groups of the providers are being consciously had politicians, notably Paul Keating, with fine rhetoric and a pushed aside. Although there are any number of howls from sense of history, it was involved in myth-making and setting affected constituencies, particularly in Aboriginal affairs, it has the intellectual climate. For years, Labor did not win all the almost passed notice that virtually every single act of Govern­ debates, but the debates were mostly on Labor agendas. ment has been focused on shifting the ground over which fights Often, Labor could use that capacity to frame the debate occur. to split the coalition: the republic, homosexual laws in Tasma­ John Howard would probably figure, and probably rightly, nia, Mabo and other issues being good examples. This was pos­ that more people would agree about his policy than would not. sible because the political intelligentsia in Australia-the ABC In the long run, of course, those who are susceptible to would, in the minds of the Liberals, be a code word for this­ populism-who end up in fact being highly amenable to the was liberally-minded and adopted the agenda. Even those who political blandishments they purport to despise when they are did not would accept the topics set for debate. directed at others-may find this is not entirely to their liking. John Howard believes that a Liberal Party which will stay But unless Labor repositions itself to benefit from the renewed in office must itself create the myths, set the agenda, and have anger, they may, as a party, have nowhere to go. • versions of history reinforcing his view of the world. The Howard mindset is by no means a redneck one, even if it Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times.

V OLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 7 L ETTERS

Eureka Street w elcom es letters [Darville's transgression] highlight Wrong again, from its readers. Short letters are through its very excess of them'. aga1n m ore likely to be published, and Everything I have written about all letters may be edited. Letters Demidenko was intended to advance must b e sign ed, and sh ould our understanding-of the difference From Raimond Gaita between the Holocaust and Bosnia or include a contact phone number McKenzie Wark says that I misquoted Rwanda, of the difference between and misrepresented him (Eureka and the writer's nam e and address. European anti-Semitism and the kind Street, September 1996). I did mis­ If submitting by e- m ail, a contact of hatred that exists between many quote him (once, not always, as he phon e number is essential. Serbs and Croats, of the distinctive claims) but it did not support my Address: eurek a@werple. net. au place of the concept of evil amongst interpretation of what he said; if any­ our m oral concepts and of its thing, it undermined it. He cannot importance to the literary depiction of claim that the misquotation served my the inner lives of those who do and purposes. suffer it. Wark says that he did not praise That brings me to Morris' other Helen Darville but had merely 'noted' point. She says that the demonisation that she 'opened a space'. 'Noting' ti->at during the Cold War degraded 'our a young writer of critical and scepti­ culture's capacity for belief'. I'm sure cal intelligence has 'opened a space' she will agree that is an issue that which enables us to 'begin again to ask needs a lot of unpacking. the hard questions', unsupported by It is interesting to note that many 'accepted senses of certainty', 'conven­ people spoke without hesitation of the ient grand stories' or ' neat moral evil of the events depicted in The fables', looks like praise to me. It also Hand that Signed the Paper, while looks like the familiar self-congratu­ point this way. The relation between others (and sometimes the same peo­ lations of those who think they have Wark's words and my interpretation ple) showed themselves to be uneasy seen through things- Scepticism lB. of them justifies my astonishment that with the concept. Sometimes the as Peter Steele has put it. It wouldn't The Australian published them. (The unease was only about whether the have been worth remarking on were it reader will remember that my inter­ concept of evil has a distinctive place not for the fact that the belief that the est was not in Wark's article but in the amongst the moral concepts-an victims of the Holocaust 'were abso­ fact that The Australian published it.) unease that is partly generated by the lutely innocent' is one of the 'neat I have no idea why Meaghan Morris mistaken belief that 'evil' is an essen­ moral fables'. The qualifying 'absolute' finds my account to be a travesty of tially religious concept and one inher­ does nothing but muddy the waters. I what Wark said. ently hostile to subtlety, ambiguity argued that in my article. In the Nor do I understand why she and uncertainty. At other times the context of Darville's novel, the denial thinks (if she does) that her remarks scepticism was more general and of absolute innocence can on ly be about the cold war count as criticism diffuse. I argued that it is difficult to entered as a radical claim-one that of what I said. It may be true that the know how seriously to take such scep­ undermines moral fables-if it denies demonisation of each other by some ticism because the more radical that the victims of the Holocaust were of the disputants in the Cold War pre­ versions are often posturing or innocent. That is what 'we must be­ pared the way for the publication of thoughtless or both. It is one thing to gin again to ask the hard questions Peter Wilkinson's cartoon. Nothing I profess moral scepticism against the about'. said commits me to denying it. How­ background of controversies over abor­ The denial that the Jews who were ever, I would emphasise that any tion, euthanasia, sexual morality and murdered in the Holocaust were inno­ account of how that was made possi­ matters of that kind. It is another thing cent should not be confused with the ble must acknowledge the importance to profess it in the face of a sober sense assertion or hypothesis that perception of the distinction between what is the evil of the deeds that define the of Jewish guilt played a causal role in highly offensive and what is unthink­ Holocaust. I have never heard anyone their genocide and Jewish behaviour able. The importance of that distinc­ do it. That being so, I find it hard to played a causal role in the perception tion does not depend on my being right understand the relevance of an appeal of that guilt. In the right circum­ in claiming that Wilkinson's cartoon to a general scepticism about value stances the latter could be advanced and Wark's praise of Darville are when the topic is the Holocaust. I as a claim seriously intended to examples of the unthinkable. Even if I don't say it has no relevance. Only that advance our historical understanding. am wrong about that, any other it needs careful unpacking. The former cannot be. It is naturally account will have to place them in a Elaborating the concept of the taken as adding to the first the thought space whose conceptual shape is struc­ unthinkable, distinguishing it from that the Jews deserved at least some tured by sensitivity to that distinction. the offensive, seeing how it marks out of what the Nazi and their accomplices Wark says that I was more con­ one kind of taboo from other kinds, is did to them. I did not say that one must cerned to judge than to understand. part of that unpacking. Unserious pro­ take it that way, but only that it is The contrast is not as sharp as he fessions of scepticism is encouraged by natural to do so, especially when it is would make it, but insofar as he wants our lack of an adequate account of the taken together with the pretension to to make it, then I would describe what unthinkable-a term I used to cover be exploding fables. Rather than elabo­ I tried to do in his own words: I the various ways- be it in moral, rate on the difference I will put my inquired 'into the nature of the bounds scientific or philosophical reflection-

8 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1996 apparent for Teichmann but escaped me in my own reading. Goldhagen's thesis, as I understand Bar none it, is that the Holocaust was not the secret out-working of som e secret From I. Goor plan, but was the end result of a I find Dominic V. Crain 's criti cism nationally recognised political process (E ureka treet, September 1996) of of dehumanising one co mmunity of Marie Louise Uhr's 'Do N ot Pass Go' This month, people for political ends. After read­ article self-ca ncelling. courtesy of Penguin Books, ing Teichmann's review I am divided I have no academic accreditation the writer of each letter we between admitting a degree of naivety in theology, but I can read and check publish will receive which is embarrassing, or claiming the assertion s m ade by Ms Uhr, w ho two of the right to be wro ng. presents h er thoughts clearly a nd Penguin '60s Classics Goldhagen starts with the ques­ quotes fro m verifiable publications of tion, 'How could the Holocaust hap­ reference. pen ?' In answering that question he, Dominic V. Crain claims she dis­ as does anybody, explores the levels torts scriptural facts, he does not indi­ that we rule things out of considera­ in which structural anti-Semitism can ca te wh ich, calls her radical and tion. Collapsing the unthinkable into be identified in pre-war and war-tim e wonders why she does not leave the a species of the very off ensive or the German political and/or social life. church, rather than point out injustice radicall y unsettling encourages the Most peopl e seem to locate that struc­ w ithin it. illusion that a genuinely critical and tural level in the higher echelons of When Dominic has no va lid argu­ free intelligence will not be afr aid to Hitler's N azi machine. Teich mann m ent other than to label someone he question anything. Of course one can presents arguments for this view by does not agree with radical, then to use think about unthinkable propositions. quoting Himmler. Goldhagen claims his own words this can becom e plau­ One can think- as I did-about the to recognise it cl own to the level of the sible to som e sympathetic ears. I proposition that Elvis Presley is alive ordinary citizen . The book is his perceive no contempt for the catholic and working for the CIA, just as one justification for that view. Even with church emanating from Ms Uhr, rather can think about the proposition that its paucity of exploration of the differ­ a universal plea from, and on behalf of the Jews deserved what was done to ence between direct involvem ent and all women to be heard. them in the Holocaust. But that is indifference to which T eichmann Why should there not be a Catholic quite different from eriou ly wonder­ refers, and several other lacks, the Church in which there are no ing whether those propositions are book exist for what it is, not for what exclusions in qualifying to become an true. The concept of the unthinkable it isn't. ordained priest ? is at the intersection of epistemology I agree with Teichmann' incipient I. Goor and logic on the one hand and social questioning of the necessity of this Tamworth, NSW philosophy on the other. book. But would not answer that ques­ A final point. Morris says that tion in the negative with the degree of Robert Manne and I underestimate the vehemence which I see in Teichmann. Which church? virulence of racism. Perhaps. How­ The book disturbed me greatly because ever, I a m sure the publication of of its thesis, its content, and its tyle, From Marie Louise Uhr Wilkinson's cartoon and Wark's article but its right to be written must surely Dominic V. Crain (Le tters, Eureka is not to be explained by the presence stand. Teichmann seems to be saying Street, September 1996) misinterprets of anti-Semites on the staff of Th e that Goldhagen has written the wrong me when he concludes that, because I Australian. Anti-Semites would never book. seek to have women ordained into all have published them. That is why The book he should have written, ministries of the Catholic Church and their publication so interesting. it seem s, would ta ke the ' upper therefore seek to change its present all­ Raimond Gaita echelon' answer to the 'How does male, all-celibate, hi erarchical struc­ St Kilda , VIC genocide happen ?' question and apply ture, I h ave 'n othing but absolute it to one of several other places in the contempt' for the Church. Had I such world where genocide is the norm for contempt I should certainly join the It's right to be political control of a nation . To con­ m any women who can no longer tinue to apply this question to the remain in a church which, in its wrong Holocaust, it appears in Teichmann, commitment to m ale-only language is too painful for German communi­ for God and us and in its refusal to From Rev Dr Kim Miller ties everywhere. consider the inclusion of women in Max Teichmann's review of Daniel Teichmann's final paragraph says ordained ministries, refuses to Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing 'this book is interesting for its basic acknowledge the full humanity of Executioners (July/August 1996) left agenda, and as an object lesson in how women. But I distinguish between the me rather confused. For a while I had not to approach history'. I would have actions of the 'official church' which thought I had read a different book of preferred his sharpness of style to be makes these rulings and the 'catholic the same title. I'm not sure whether have been applied more to his first church' of which I am a part. Teichmann objected more to the con­ item than to his second. The Catholic Church is my tent of Goldhagen's work, or to the Kim Miller spiritual home. I love its communal, style, or to implications which are Wagga Wagga, NSW sacramental, incarnational nature,

V o LUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 9 • Did your which affirms that I am not alone before that wom en's ordination is not prohib­ God, but go to God in community. I love ited by scripture, then the Pontifical Bib­ (Mi2'5o/~ the marvellous, mixed, local parish com­ lical commission, the American Catholic munity with whom I worship, some of Biblical Association and the Ca tholic last year? whom agree with m e, som e of whom Biblical Association of Australia, all of don't. I love its universality, the richness whom have concluded that our scriptures of its saints, known and unknown, the do not preclude the ordination of women, Australian Ethical tangled, human mess and marv el at its must also be accused of such distortion. history, theology, arts and music. T hese Commissions and Associations Equities Trust did! As m embers of the church, we are base their conclusions on 20th century part of the body of Christ, with all our historical-critical biblical exegesis, while Join the unitholders who achieved theologies, all our hopes and dreams, all the Vatican continues to ignore such profit without compromise our strengths and weaknesses. We are scholarship; hence its arguments are through supporting pi uralis t, as we h ave been fr o m the unconvincing a nd di ffi cult to accept. • Low Energy Technologies beginning with our fo ur gospels, o ur Assent cannot be given to any proposi­ • Rare Species Protection churches at Antioch, Corinth and Jeru­ tion unless it be judged true. We await, • Habitat Conservation salem, Jew and gentile, male and female, as we have fo r over 20 years, the • Clean Water slave and free; all part of the people of God. Vati can's response to the arguments of • Recycling I do not equate the Catholic Church today's biblical scholars on the questi on and many more environmentally and with the Vatican, as Dom inic C rain of women's ordination. socially responsible investments. seems to do. T he pope, hierarchy-and Until we see much more persuasive the curia-are part of the church, yes­ arguments than have been presented, I For full details, make a free call but so are we the people, and our fa ith think that I shall be one of the m illions to 1 800 021 227. is, in the end, the faith of the church. So around the world who continue to stay it remains important for me, as ca tholi c, committed to the Catholic Church and In vestments in the Australian Ethicnl Tru sts can only be to argue for what I believe is a more committed to working for change in its made through the currmt prospectus registered with the Australian Securities Commission and available from : ca tholic, more inclusive vision of church, ministries and government. And m y Australian Ethical Investment Ltd and 1 remain convinced that a church Anglican and Uniting Church fr iends Suite 66, Canberra Business Centre with a renewed ordained ministry open support me in this. Bradfield Street, Downer ACT 2602 to all whom God calls, is truly catholi c. Marie Louise Uhr If it 'distorts scri ptural fac ts' to claim Cook, ACT

HOFBAUER CENTRE INC Psychotherapeutic Clinic and Training Institute for Psychotherapists Open House SUNDAY 20 OCTOBER 1996 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm HOFBAUER CENTRE A psychotherapeutic clinic for people experi encing difficulties in their life, either personally or in their relations with others, at th e workplace, in their marri age and fa mily, with their children. A therapist or counsellor will be available on a regular basis and will offer professional help to peopl e of all ways of life, of all ages, of all and no religious views. But the Centre operates in the context of christi an values. Moderate fees to assist peopl e with financial difficulties. COME AND VISIT THE PLACE An opportunity to discuss personal problems with a psychologist/therapist. 93 ALMA ROAD, EAST ST KILDA PHONE: (03) 9529 7861

10 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 VIEWPOINT

BRIAN TOOHEY Rearing the right

12 CHILDREN is not a prerequisite for attractive when the traditional head of the house­ parliamentary membership of the Lyons Forum, but hold typically brings home around $500 a week. it helps if you think other people should. It also helps To make a genuine difference, Howard's family if you can ignore the inherent tensions between the assistance package would need to cost several billion Forum's focus on 'family values' and the Govern­ dollars a year at a time when his economic advisers ment's economic policies. are urging even tougher fiscal discipline. However, Established in 1992 by the Tasmanian Liberal, the biggest gulf between the Lyons Forum and the Chris Miles, the Forum is named in honour of Dame inherent logic of the Howard's free-market economic Enid Lyons, mother of 12, federal parliamentarian agenda involves wages policy. from 1943 until 1951 and member of the Menzies Essentially, the Forum yearns for a return to the Cabinet from 1949 until 1951. As convenor, Miles world of the much-derided Basic Wage in which the sought to bring together federal Coalition politicians Arbitration Commission attempted to determine a who believe in God, the sanctity of marriage and the rate sufficient for a male breadwinner to support a primacy of the family. wife and two children. But those Membership lists are not days are long gone. publicly available. According to As far as the dominant the present Chairman, Kevin economy theory in Canberra is Andrews, around 45 to 50 of the concerned, the family doesn't Coalition's 130 parliamentarians constitute the 'God-ordained belong to the Forum. While some exhibit the moral fervour of the US Christian Right, others are more subdued. All seem aware that membership is no obstacle to career advancement while John Howard is Prime Minister. Howard himself was a member until his workload prevented him from attending meetings. The position of the Treasurer, Peter Costello, is more ambiguous. The Forum report­ edly claims him as a member but his office says he has never attended a meeting. Apart from its opposition to divorce, homosex­ uality and abortion, the Lyons Forum's best known goal is to make it easier for women to stay home and look after children. In this respect, Dame Enid seems honoured more for the fact that she had 12 children than for a demanding career which took her away from home when some of h er offspring could be still regarded as in need of her parental guidance. The Forum has taken the credit for the Budget's $1 billion package of tax breaks for mothers who don't go out to work. But this can only be regarded as an initial step if the Forum is really serious about tilting the financial balance in favour of staying home. Costello's budget speech, for example, highlighted the extra $17 a week which the package would provide for a single-income family with two children, one of whom is under five. Where both children are over five, the benefits amount to $7.70. While undoubtedly welcome, these sums are hardly enough to convince a working mother to forego $400 a week or more from a full-time job. Brian Toohey is a freelance journalist, broadcaster and Even a part-time job on $200 a week is still highly regular columnist for Eureka Street.

VOLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 11 THE N ATION

FRANK B RENNAN The politics of trust

T,M 'wou'N' Aco, 27 Aucun 1996, government's more assimil ationist by the Senate for the conduct of the special carried a headline, 'Howard branded a racist approach which favours dealing with audit which had to be suspended so as not by priest'. I am the priest referred to. Might Aborigines as disadvantaged citizens in need to delay CDEP (work for the dole) payments l assure the Eureka Street reader that lam of temporary welfare assistance rather than for the new financial year, Howard had told not in the habit of gratuitously calling the as indigenous people with a right of self­ the m edia Herron was censured for a mere Prime Minister a racist. But I am happy to determination within the life of the nation. slip of the tongue. The censure had nothing state my strong concerns about this new Having been locked out of government whatever to do with his lamentable wife­ government. for 13 years, the Coalition parties risk beating remark to Senator Collins. The Ten days prior to the A ge headline, the destroying, rather than consolidating, the gravity of the financial situation in remote leadership of Aboriginal Australia was common ground which has been won communities was being parodied by the gathered in Canberra to celebrate the 20th through negotiation with Aborigines and Prime Minister as a m ere slip of the tongue. anniversary of the Fraser Government's land Torres Strait Islanders. I have no problem with the Howard rights legislation. Prime Minister Howard In an exclusive interview with two jour­ government's insistence that there are four was in Adelaide at a Liberal Party confer­ nalists from the A ge, the Prime Minister groupings of Aborigines: the radicals, the ence. Those at the Canberra conference offered general criticism of the Aboriginal moderates, those opposed to ATSIC and the were upset by the sharp budgetary cuts to leadership, and stated other m oderate leadership and those who the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation his concerns that they just want to be treated as ordinary Austral­ and ATSIC, both of which had been were not fully repre­ ian citizens. Given that this country has p ublicised before the release of the Budget. sentative, insuffi ­ been spared the political violence of a In previou s elections, when there was c iently co-operative, Bastion Point, Wounded Knee or Oka, the no suggestion of a Beazley blackhole, the and too close to the Australian government, whatever its Coalition had gone to the polls commit­ Keating government. electoral mandate, needs to be attentive to ted to cutting ATSIC's budget by $100 And this, the clay the voice of the m oderate Aboriginal lead­ million. Prime Minister Howard had after the Governor­ ership. It cannot simply prefer the view of already made gratuitous references to 'the General had made his those wanting assimilation for them selves, Aboriginal industry' and 'thought police'. impassioned plea to even if they be a silent m ajority The ATSIC cuts were announced at the nation for recon­ as this government suggests. the sam e time as the retention of the ciliation in the Lingiari diesel fu el rebate w hich has been more Lecture. I N ALL LIKELIHOOD, John Howard will be corruptly administered than any Aborigi­ Sir William Deane the first Prime Minister since the 1967 nal program, and the appointment of Mr drew lessons tor reconciliation on the 30th referendum not to introduce significant new Hugh Morgan to the board of the Reserve anniversary o f the Wave Hill strike Comm onwealth legislation or policy Bank. Mr Morgan has been the mining concluding that problems relating to health, expanding Aboriginal rights. All Prime industry's harshest critic of the Mabo deci­ unemploym ent, education, water, housing, Ministers since Malcom Fraser have nego­ sion, claiming that the High Court's naive and self esteem 'will only be resolved by a tiated closely and personally with moder­ adventurism was placing at risk the partnership between the nation as a whole ate Aboriginal leaders in formulating new economic future of Australia, our territorial and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy. Though Paul Keating, unlike his integrity and the legitimacy of the High peoples under which the Aborigines and immediate predecessors, did not have Court itself. Torres Strait Islanders play a major active significant relationships with Aborigines Reasonable Aboriginal concerns about role, particularly in the actual supply of prior to his assuming the prime minister­ this trifecta met with John H oward 's health and other services.' The prospect of ship, he did build those relationships response to the South Australian Liberal partnership was looking grim. through storm y times. He ultimately earned Party Conference: 'We are not decimating N o other group of leaders has been so the trust of Aborigines, and they his, d­ Aboriginal funding. We are not threatening slighted by the n ew Prime Minister with espite earlier allegations that his policy the process of reconciliation. We a1e not none of them ever earning his praise by proposals on native title were 'slimy', engaged in any kind of racist pur uit. All of name. Despite the Cabinet's hasty special 'putrid', and ' moral scurvy'. N on e of those criticism s are baseless and exagger­ audit m easures for ATSIC announced after Howard's predecessors n ecessarily ated and completely unfair'. its first m eeting in April, Lois O'Donoghue enhanced their electoral appeal by legisla­ I was not aware of anyone's having and her staff had conducted themselves tive reform in favour of Aboriginal rights. labelled the H oward government's policy loyally. There were no leaks. Staff in remote Though welcoming the government's approach as a 'ra cist pursuit'. The Prime offices worked weekends-and with no announcement on Budget day that it will Minister's use of that dangerous phrase was thanks. spend more on indigenous specific programs an attempt to foreclose criticism of the When Joh n H erron was righ tly censured than Labor did in its last four years, its

12 EUREKA STREET • OcTO BER 1996 budgetary assault on ATSIC and the Coun­ conditions and reservations for the protec­ this difficulty. It is the greatest challenge cil for Aboriginal Reconciliation and the tion of Aboriginal access. facing the current generation of Aboriginal Prime Minister's antipathy to the moderate A proposed amendment would allow a leaders. So I urge more acknowledgment of Aboriginal leadership make its four-year pastoralist to renew a lease for longer terms the efforts of those Aboriginal leaders rep­ future commitment less credible to than the original lease and to vary terms of resenting the spirit of reconciliation and an Aboriginal Australia. Who will this govern­ the lease permitting the pastoralist to engage understanding of the pressures upon them.' ment deal with when it come to designing in non-pastoral activities. If native title In its formal presentation to the national new programs and policies? In the Lingiari were affected by the extension of lease conference marking the 20th anniversary Lecture, Sir William Deane claimed: terms or conditions or by 'permissible of the Commonwealth Parliament's land 'It is now accepted by persons of good­ pastoral lease related acts', the native title rights legislation, CRA, through its Vice will that those Aborigines who desire holder would be entitled to President Paul Wand, separately to pursue and develop their tra­ compensation. expressed regre t to ditional culture and lifestyle within our To legislate in this way before the Aboriginal Australians multi-cultural nation should be encour­ decision in the Wil< case, the govern­ for the failure to prevent aged, assisted and protected in that pursuit ment will have to admit that the legis­ the destruction of and development, and that those who wish lation, in so far as it is necessary, is Aboriginal housing at to be assimilated within the ordinary inconsistent with the Racial Mapoon, Cape York, community should be as sis ted in that wish.' Discrimination Act and to the extent of when bauxite mining For this choice to be guaranteed, the the inconsistency, this later specific commenced there; for Coalition will have to revise its restrictive Commonwealth Act will prevail. having ignored tradi­ approach to self-determination and build Expanding pastoralists' rights, tional owners whose relationships with Aboriginal leaders. therebyinterfering with native title lands were mined in the If the Native Title Act is to be rendered rights even with compensation, while Pilbara, and for the scars more workable, there will have to be more not countenancing any such expansion on the land and the scars trust between the Howard government and of one group's rights to the detriment of on the spirit of the people at the Argyle the Aboriginal represen ta ti ve bodies. another in any other case, is an act diamond mine in the Kimberley. Howard's earlier opposition in 1988 to trea­ of racial discrimination. At the same celebration, Gough Whitlam ties or compacts on the basis that they told Aboriginal Australia that he had been 'must inevitably lead to claims for national A USTRALlA WILL BE the better COUntry in commissioned to put the case for the Sydney land rights' has been overtaken by the High the preparation for the Sydney Olympics Olympics to the African nations. He told Court's decision on native title and the and the centenary of Federation if its legis­ the world of our strong record on indig­ need for all governments to strike the bal­ lation is proven to be non-discriminatory, enous rights, and our claim to be second to ance between land holders and developers. if its Prime Minister can praise its Aborigi­ none in the international protection of hu­ When it comes to workable amendments to nalleaders and not just slam them, and if its man rights. If this government drops the the Native Title Act, all parties will recall Prime Minister can talk with the Aborigi­ bar on either, we will have won the Games that it was Howard's personal challenge to nal leaders in trust and not just refer to on false pretences. John Hewson which precluded Coalition them as an 'industry'. Our laws and policies Shrinking the ATSIC budget, retreating participation in the original amendment will be the better if government builds a from self-determination, legislating in a process in 1993. Some of Senator Minchin's constructive relationship with Aborigines. dis crimina tory way about native title under proposed amend­ Any concerted attempt by government to the cloak of workability, deciding the fate ments for the turn back the clock on land rights or self­ of Aborigines behind locked doors, consti­ benefit of miners determination will be unacceptable what­ tutes a threat to the well-being of all and pastoralists ever its electoral appeal. Au tralians. It also undermines our claim violate the Racial Sharing the country by sharing the to host the friendly games for the youth of Discrimination burdens means equal treatment for the the world, whatever their race. Act and undercut defence forces, the athletes, the miners, the Any contemporary Australian Prime Aboriginal rights big-time farmers, and the dispossessed, Minister must lead the nation in reconcili­ in the name of unemployed Aborigines. The government ation, justice and recognition. As Wenten workability. needs to spare Aborigines special treatment Rubuntja, the chairman of the Central Land The govern­ except when they request it, and not when Council said in 1988, 'We have to work out ment is proposing poll-driven ideology dictates it. a way of sharing this country.' We cannot an expansion of The Howard government might take a do it without Aborigines and Torres Strait pastoralists' leaf from the senior management of the Islanders, Mr Howard. We have to do this rights. If native RTZ-CRA group of companies. Australia's together. It is time for both sides of politics title exists on pastoral leases (and that is a most senior mining executive, Mr Leon to settle the deficit of history rather than matter for determination by the High Court Davis, Chief Operating Officer of RTZ­ risk a blow-out of trust and reconciliation.• in the Wik case), it does not affect CRA, addressing the Australian Business in mortgageability or renewal of leases. A lease Europe Group in Australia, said, 'Our expe­ Frank Brennan SJ is director of Uniya, the can automatically be renewed without need rience of negotiating with Aboriginal com­ Jesuit Social Justice Centre, and Fellow in to negotiate with native title holders, munities has taught us that Aboriginal Law at the Australian National University. provided the lease contains identical terms, leaders face a Herculean task. I understand

V OLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 13 Justice doesn't pay

A "w wcm AGO ' fdend •ppm•chcd me fo< help. She Since 1993, under national competition policy principles, had major workplace problems: victimisation by work col­ the Australian government has given more and more of its leagues which wasn't being dealt with by managers; she had legal work to the private legal profession. Since July 1995, more been assaulted as she walked to the bus-stop after a night shift, than 70 per cent of its legal business has gone to large private anonymous obscene phone calls and police who didn't care law firms. The Federal Attorney General's Department, which and, inevitably, stress-induced psychiatric illness. I couldn't once held a monopoly on government lawyering, has had to find a single lawyer who would-or said they could-act for compete for its work-and it has done so successfully, turning her. Every one had a 'conflict of a tidy profit in 1996. It has become just another legal practice. interest': they either acted for Tel­ The same thing has been happening in the States as well: stra or the government department now, the nation's largest law firms-most of them national she works for, or the Union (she's firms, too-carry out a very significant chunk of all govern­ not a member), or the WorkCover ment legal work. The consequence for individuals, and small insurer. One unusually frank law­ business, and other bodies whose interests are not the same yer said that because they were or even directly antagonistic to government policy, is the loss competing for tenders for govern­ of choice. It is very hard to find a law firm which is not doing ment work they did not want to government, as well as corporate, legal work. be seen to be opposed to govern­ The legal profession has long been divided into plaintiffs' ment at all. It was then I realised and respondents' lawyers-those who act for aggrieved indi­ we've got a problem. viduals and those who specialise in representing insurance Access to good legal advice is companies, employees or employers, with either a corporate essential if we are to retain our or individual client base. The privatisation of government legal faith in 'justice'- Last month the work has taken this further. High Court said, in the Kable case, The Sackville committee, which wrote the Access to Jus­ that the Australia Constitution re- tice report, which is driving the changes to the legal profes­ quires public confidence in an in­ sion, wants lawyers to be more competitive. My tegrated federal judicial system to be maintained. But what experience-supported by other anecdotes I have heard from nonsense it would be to preserve the integrity of State Supreme individuals who want, for example, to sue a premier for defa­ Courts to that end (the Court struck down the NSW govern­ mation, or the National Crime Authority for excess of power ment's 'preventive detention' legislation which would make and can't find a firm-is that in its Supreme Court act 'non-judicially') and not deal with ac­ practice some individuals have cess tolegaladvic~ too. no access to justice because of The High Court has said twice in the last four years that the business preferences and sometimes justice absolutely requires legal representation: if priorities of law firms. Justice you are charged with a serious crime (Dietrich) or if you are a requires the disinterested advice vulnerable child (Re K.). At the same time our Hilmer-inspired of independent counsel, as both push towards a 'national legal services market' and restruc­ the former Chief Justice of the turing of the profession, coupled with cuts to legal aid, have High Court, Sir Anthony cut most people off from it. Mason, and the great Australian Lawyers have a special function in a democratic society: jurist, Sir Owen Dixon, said at people need them to chart its navigable channels, and to assert their retiring and inaugural individual rights against institutional and market abuses of speeches. If barristers are to power. Yet lawyers are also in it for the money, they make 'compete' with solicitors, and their living out of law, and they value some kinds of legal form partnerships and corporate business structures too, even work more than others. A well-o;:ganised legal business gets they will find 'conflicts', because their associates and their much more value from servicing the many needs of a large profit margins will fence them off. corporate or institutional client than an individual, or the thou­ This duty to justice before the pursuit of prestigious and sands of small firms and businesses, with minor or one-off profitable legal work seems to be both disappearing, and needs. Law being business, and businesses being the major unlamented in the current 'market' environment. In 1994 the market for legal services, also means that the larger firms, Trade Practices Commission suggested (and in 1995 the Sack­ who can offer a diversity and range of legal services, are much ville committee agreed) that the same competition and busi­ more likely than small ones to attract corporate work. Herein ness principles should be applied to lawyers as to any other lies the conundrum industry. The laudable objective-cutting cost-will remove

14 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 only one barrier to justice, and advantage only corporate and government business n eeds. The effect, unintended though it may be, appears to be a restraint of trade which indirectly discriminates against Am~~~~~~~n~~~~ffi~~:le~~~~~amined the individuals and small operators. The scene, the world's official arbiter on climate change has now climbed down on one side Trade Practices Act prohibits, in Section of the debate. 45(2) and 450, contracts, arrangements In its most recent scientific assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate or understandings that contain arrange­ Change (IPCC)-a joint initiative of the United Nations and the World Meteorological ments between competitors to restrict Organisation- concludes for the first time that 'the balance of evidence suggests a the supply or acquisition of goods or serv­ discernible human influence on global climate'. The assessment was put together by ices to or from particular people or classes more than 200 contributing scientists from 40 countries. of people. 'The IPCC was not able to make such a statement on human influence in the So who will my friend turn to? A assessments it released in 1990 and 1992,' says Professor David Karoly, the director of the suburban sole practitioner, who may or Co-operative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology based at Monash may not have the skills and experience University. 'Its recent conclusion means that human involvement in climate change is to handle h er case, and certainly won't not just talk any more.' In response the energy industry, like the tobacco industry before it, has gone into a have the resources or capacity of a large state of denial, looking for any chink in the scientific armour through which it can attack. firm to 'carry' her case against delay and Already- in editorials run in Tb e Wall Street Journal, and in the science journal costly obstruction from the well­ Physics Today-scientific friends of the energy industry have accused the chief authors resourced corporate opponents in the of the IPCC assessment of subverting the procedure by which the panel reached its hope of winning her costs from the other conclusion. Some of the American contributors to the assessment have been called side (of course, she has no money )? Cor­ before US government committees and grilled by conservative politicians. porations can claim their legal costs and And along the way, the energy industry has picked up a fellow traveller-the litigation disbursements as a tax deduc­ Australian Government. Following the most recent conference in Geneva of the parties tion or a taxpayer expense, but she can't. to the convention on global warming, Australia was left as one of the few countries Legal aid? That stile across the barbed­ holding out against setting legally-binding targets for reduction in the use of fossil fuels. wire barrier to justice has been chopped, Even the US dropped its traditional opposition. The other countries joining Australia's along with the funds for stand were the OPEC nations (for obvious reasons), Russia (for quirky personal reasons) community law centres. and New Zealand, which argued that it would bear an inequitably high load of the cost of reducing fossil fuel use. L ESACKVlLLE COMMITIEE suggested that Part of the reason for Australia's recalcitrance matches New Zealand's-that is, it it is in the public interest to provide 'legal would cost Australia more to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel than it would countries aid,' which, by allowing the disadvan­ in Europe. But a more pig-headed argument emerged in a letter that the Minister for taged to run their cases, performs a crucial Resources and Energy, Senator Warwick Parer, wrote to the science news weekly, New democratic function: 'it is not just the Scientist: 'Australia is particularly vulnerable to the economic impacts of co-ordinated interests of the wealthy that direct the OECD-wide measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We are the world's largest development of the common law.' Those coal exporter, and we specialise in greenhouse gas-intensive exports such as petroleum funds have dried up, along with the pro­ products, basic metals, chemicals, cereals and livestock.' fession's interest in pro bono legal work. It's like saying-to push the tobacco analogy-we're against banning smoking If the private profession carries out the because we make a lot of money out of selling cigarettes. Unfortunately Prime Minister government's doled-out legal work as John Howard took this same line at the latest South Pacific forum, where most of the well then, without some balancing mech­ island nations live in fear of inundation as a consequence of climate change. He came anism in place, we may expect the sys­ across as having all the moral scruples and sympathy of a rich drug baron. And it seems all so silly, really. Even to the Australian Government, it must be clear tematic exclusion of people and interests that for good reasons or bad, most of the rest of the world is moving towards decreasing with smaller voices, less powerful friends, the use of fossil fuels. So, instead of trying to hinder this trend, with all the impact of a and lighter purses from challenging gov­ mouse grabbing onto an elephant's tail, why shouldn't Australia attempt to guide, by ernment and institutional decisions and taking up the lead? policies, and access to justice. This is, not Just as the South Australian Goverrunent has made a virtue out of that state's to put too great a point on it, dangerous perennial water problems, by trying to sell technological solutions to Asia, perhaps the to the principle of equality before the law; nation as a whole could do the same in the area of efficient use of fossil fuels. We are well it denies access to justice, and ultimate­ placed to develop innovative ways of decreasing dependence on fossil fuels, as well as ly the citizens' foundation of faith in their mechanisms for recovering and redirecting the resources invested in 'greenhouse gas­ government. Law is not a business: it is intensive exports'. the legitimation of our being ruled. • Otherwise Australia is going to end up with the OPEC nations, clustered around an evil-smelling side door of the world economy's head offices, in a small gasping knot of Moira Rayner is a lawyer and freelance those who can't kick their fossil fuel dependence. • journalist. Her e-mail is: [email protected]. Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer.

VOLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 15 ExcuRS IONs

This man • IS no donl

A chance encounter with a cartoon character in Brunswick thrust the resolutely 1nonolingual Shane Maloney onto the stage at a Turkish academic conference.

M YROOM-MATI wouw " ' college pwfe,O<, invitation to the 5th International Turkish Folklore I'd been told. From America. I was looking forward to Congress seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. his arrival. Being an American, he was bound to know The theme of the conference was Nasreddin Hodja. something about air-conditioning. For two days I'd My contribution would be to explain his influence been fiddling with the control knob, failing to con­ on Australian literature. Frankly, I was drawing a very vince the room temperature to drop below thirty-five long kebab indeed. degrees. Either that or sitting on my balcony, fanning My first encounter with Nasreddin Hodja had myself with a tourist map and trying to orient my­ been in the children's section of Brunswick library, self. This was my first time in Turkey and things were in the pages of a book called Watermelons, Walnuts not exactly as I had expected them to be. Not that I and the Wisdom of Allah. Nasreddin Hodja was the had much idea of what to expect. most famous sage of Anatolia, it said. The nifty imam, My room was on the fifth floor of the Ba~kent the sufi wiseacre. A wit and a prankster, the m an with Ogretmenevi Oteli, the Teachers' House Hotel. Spread a thousand funny stories. A household name to gen­ before me was the city of Ankara, baking in the mid­ erations of Turks. A national icon. The very embodi­ summer sun. Downstairs in the lobby, my fellow con­ ment of Turkishness. The representation of ference delegates were checking in. Bulgarian He had exactly what I'd been looking for-a name Nasreddin Hodja, above, folklorists. Azerbaijani ethnographers. Anthropolo­ that was well-known within the Turkish community was bought after much gists from Dages tan. A poet of Ashkhabad. Experts in but unlikely to be recognised outside it. I immediate­ haggling in a Turkish the mythology of the Kumuks and the classification ly co-opted him. H e became the pivotal clue in the bazaar. Shane Maloney of Kyzgyr proverbs. Romanian professors. Sociologists multicultural murder mystery I was writing. I even lost on the deal. Th e from Tartaristan. Macedonian art historians. Uzbek pinched one of his parables. No copyright problem, I cartoon representations musicologists with instrument cases that looked like thought. He'd been dead for 500 years. of Hodja, overleaf, are tapestry golf bags. But nothing about the Hodja is a simple as it from the comic book I'm not a big conference goer. To tell the truth, seems. Two years after he appeared in my book, he which started it all. it's not often I get asked. Perhaps that's why the came back to haunt me.

16 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 UNESCO, in recognition of Turkey's contribu­ the Path of Honour towards Ataturk's tomb. 'The tion to world culture, declared 1996 to be the Inter­ Refah Party controls the city council, so the trees don't national Year of Nasreddin Hodja. To mark the get watered properly'. The pines looked green enough occasion, the Turkish Ministry of Culture organised to me, but I was beginning to appreciate the oblique a conference on the theme of the man and his tales. nature of Turkish political discourse. To which I, as the only Australian writer ever to have Mustafa Kemal's final resting place is austere and mentioned either, was invited. modernistic, a colonnaded box of porous brown stone. Great, I said. Happy to oblige. Nothing like travel Despite the monolithic architecture and the soldiers to broaden the mind. So there I was, late June, sweat­ standing to rigid attention in the forecourt, my fellow ing profusely, staring out at the capital of the Turk­ visitors were conspicuously unawed. Family groups ish Republic and wondering w hat I'd got myself into. picnicked on the lawn. A man posing for a photograph Ankara was once a Hittite town. The Phrygians in front of the 40-tonne black marble sarcophagus held had lived here. The Galatians, the Romans, the Byz­ a can of Coke. antines. But not any more. Not unless they'd taken Atatiirk would probably have preferred to building freeways and driving like horn-honking something a little more sophisticated. A Campari demons. Signs of construction were everywhere. soda, perhaps. Or a glass of raki, for the Father of the Arterial roads had been gouged open by a giant trench Turks was a man who knew how to party. The for the new subway. Natural gas was being installed, museum adjoining his tomb is a testament to the fact, piped in from the Turkic republics that used to be its glass cabinets crammed with gold cigarette cases called Soviet Central Asia. Government buildings and and monogrammed pyjamas. Here was a man who housing estates reached out towards the dusty hills lived his vision to the full. Not only did he fight a that fringed the city. The only landmarks I could iden­ war of independence, abolish the Sultanate and give tify with any certainty were the Atatiirk mausoleum women the vote, he also looked great in a and the Sheraton Hotel. Each, in its own way, a sym­ tuxedo. bol of modernity and secularism. Founding principles of the Republic. Principles now arguably at risk. T..liS WA S NOT MERE AFFECTATION. If Turkey was to I had arrived in Turkey, just my luck, at an his­ be a modern nation, he instructed, it must look the toric moment. part. You can't expect the world to take you seriously The fragile centre-right coalition that had gov­ in a fez. To get women out of the veil, he decreed it erned the country since the beginning of the year had compulsory for prostitutes. He made his personal style collapsed. Tansu <;i ller, the nation's first woman a political tool, a challenge to Turkish manhood. At prime minister, was facing imminent corruption his death -of cirrhosis of the liver-his revolution charges. Unless a new coalition could be formed with­ was victorious and his prestige was unassailable. in days, the nation would be forced to a divisive and But now, 58 years later, other sartorial preferences probably inconclusive election. The key to the solu­ were back on the agenda. The turban, the chador. tion lay with the Islamic Welfare Party, known for That evening we dined in the Citadel, a Roman short a Refah. With 24 per cent of the popular vote, fortress overlooking the city. Esan's husband, a suc­ Refah was the biggest party in parliament. Locked out cessful construction engineer, threaded his car up of governm ent, it was a destablising influence. Let narrow cobbled lanes between crumbling plaster walls in, it might turn Turkey into a religious state. Which to a restaurant that had once been an Ottoman house. the military, as the self-declared guardian of Ataturk's We were joined by Sirma, a journalist at the Turl

V OLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 17 manifestation of a deeper issue. Globalisation is forc­ day with black olives, white cheese and rose-petal jam. ing a re-appraisal of Atatiirk's entire project. 'For the I shared a table with Rauf, Embergin and Tura, moment', she concluded, 'the best we can hope for is academics from Tashkent. Rauf spoke a little Eng­ more uncertainty'. lish. 'You are pedagogue of Turkology?' he asked. I edged the conversation tentatively in the direc­ Promptly at ten, four hundred of us Turkological tion of 'the situation in the south-east'. Frank speech pedagogues filed into the hotel auditorium to await on the subject of the Kurds, I had read, should only the Minister for Culture. The prestige of his office, be attempted by those well trained in the use we implicitly understood, required that he arrive a of highly explosive linguistics. My euphe­ little later than officially scheduled. The occasion was mism proved unnessary, at least in this a formal one and most of us were in suits. One man particular company. It is now possible to wore a shaggy astrakhan hat and a silk robe. This, speak more freely of the situation, I was told. apart from the solid gold teeth of the Azerbaianis and But the violence continues, intractable as the chunky fountain pens of the Germans was the ever. Successive governments had pledged only manifestation of national dress in the 25 coun­ to find a political solution but quickly tries represented. I wondered if I should have run a resorted to military escalation, declaring line of zinc cream down my nose. In due course, the Minister appeared and My room-mate was to give the keynote address, did the honours. After a minute's silence for 'Nasreddin Hodja Through the Ages' ... those who had died in I was just beginning to doze off when the heckling the service of world culture, a youth choir began. Either the academic conference scene was a lot sang a folk song. more lively than I had been led to believe, or Weary's Something about the phrase 'tra-la-la' dissertation was pushing some pretty sensitive buttons seemed to encapsulate in the hairy-hat section of the crowd. the universality of of­ ficial culture. My room-mate that terrorism must be defeated first. Busi­ was to give the keynote address, 'Nasreddin Hodia ness types were constantly proposing eco­ Through the Ages'. Lugubriusly long-faced, he shuf­ nomic development projects and some of these have fled to the podium and laboriously arranged his notes. begun to bear fruit, notably those spinning off from a By then, I had begun to think of him as Weary Ba§gbz. number of large-scale dam projects. But the Kurds re­ Even allowing for the fact that I couldn't understand main desparately poor, caught in a vice between the a word of it, his speech seemed inordinately long. Turkish military and the PKK. I was just beginning to doze off when the heck­ Three musicians approached our table. Men in ling began. Either the academic conference scene was their sixties, with wide ties, two-tone shoes and pot­ a lot more lively than I had been led to believe, or bellies. The violinist wore plate-glass spectacles and Weary's dissertation was pushing some pretty sensi­ a bad rug. The others carried strange instruments, a tive buttons in the hairy-hat section of the crowd. deep-dish banjo and a zitherish thing. They pulled up A rather severe-looking man in a rather severe chairs, lit cigarettes, ordered tea and proposed a pos­ looking suit jumped up and began to shout. Other sible repertoire. The call was for sentimental songs. voices joined in. Weary stopped speaking and took a My companions closed their eyes and sang along. Sad sip of water, the glass trembling in his hand. The ballads of unrequited love, of seeing but not touch­ conference director, the splendidly named Alaaddin ing, of destiny embraced. In mid-set, not wanting to Korkmaz, leapt to his feet. Instead of silencing the exclude the foreigner, the band played an upbeat interjectors, he began to take Professor Ba§gbz to task. instrumental. Something international. Hava Nagila. At which Weary summoned his dignity, folded his Back at the Ba~kent bgretmenevi Oteli, I found papers and stalked off stage. The Minister took the that my Ameri::an room mate had arrived. He was podium and brought the formalities to an abrupt end. stooped and dignified, and I didn't think it was appro­ As we spilled out into the foyer, I cornered a fel­ priate to ask him what he knew about air condition­ low English speaker, a post-doctoral student from ing. For a start, Dr Ilhan Ba§gbz, Professor of Turkish UCLA. 'What was that all about?' Studies at the Bloomington campus of the University 'Politics'. of Indiana, would not have been able to hear me. His And the guy in the dark suit? hearing aids lay on the bedside table, big as mangoes. 'A fascist.' The Congress began the next morning, after Ba§gbz, it was explained, had done his historical breakfast. By then I was getting used to starting the homework. Gone to the sources. The Nasreddin Hodja

18 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 that I knew, the Nasreddin Hodja of Watermelons, The phone rang. The guy on the other end spoke Walnuts and the Wisdom of Allah was only the most fluent Turkish, very quickly. He wanted Professor recent version of the man. A bowdlerised version, Ba~goz, that much I could tell. But he'd got the village cleaned up the moral edification of small children. A idiot instead. He hung up. A stack of message slips travesty of the original. A pale imitation of the were shoved under the door, and none of them were genuine, down-and-dirty, demotic Hodja. The clergy­ for me. The phone started ringing again. Word was baiting, donkey-diddling, democratic Hodja. obviously getting around that Foxy Ba~goz had To illustrate his point, Ba~goz had related a tale recruited Nasreddin Hodja to the anti-fundamentalist from one of the earliest manuscripts. Nasreddin Hodja cause. was riding through a strange town. 'What is that? ' h e Lunch at the 6gretmenevi Oteli was set-menu. enquired, pointing to a minaret. 'Why, that is our Pilaf and m eat, fresh apricots. I sat with the Uzbeks. town's penis', said some clever-dick. 'Really?' said the Emboldened by our conversational breakthrough ear­ Hodja. 'And is there a town arsehole to go lier in the day, Rauf told me all about Tashkent. 'Is with it?' grandioso'. It even has a subway. Either that, or he'd dropped his apricot under the table. B LASPHEMY, CRUDITY, HOMOSEXUALITY. For some, the My linguistic deficiences were compounding by very idea that the national icon's name could be the minute. attached to such a joke was tantamount to treason. The two women across the table were speaking 'I'm a Turk', the man in the sinister suit had shouted. what sounded vaguely like Italian. A language with 'And I refuse to tolerate this filth.' Such a reaction which I am familiar, owing to the amount of coffee I could not have come entirely as a surprise to Profes­ drink. But this didn't quite sound like the Italian they sor Ba~goz. N o longer was he Weary. Now he was Foxy speak at the Covo Sportivo in Lygon Street. Ba~goz , academic agent provocateur. It was Ladino, the language of the Jews who And there I'd been, thinking there was no m ore settled in the Ottoman empire after their expulsion to Nasreddin Hodja than a jolly old fellow with a from Spain back in 1492. Or so said Matilda Coen donkey and a tendency to rather tame one-liners. Lit­ Sarano, an Italian-Israeli of Turkish-Sephardic parent­ tle had I suspected that major ideological forces were age. For all I knew, it might as well have been locked in combat for ownership of his reputation. The Albigensian. Holy Fool was h ot property. We spoke English, sort of. Matilda took Before I could discover more, a young woman in the opportunity to explain her particular an­ a head-scarf and 'wom en's dress' begged my pardon. gle on Nasreddin Hodja. He wasn't really She wondered if she might interview me on my views Turkish, she confided. H e was actually a about the N asreddin Hodja controversy. For televi­ Sicilian folk character of Arabic origin sion . Islamic cable. 'D elighted' I said and fl ed upstairs to my room. The air-conditioning still didn't One of the conference organisers stepped work, but the television did. I chan­ into my path. She had unexpected news. I nel-surfed, looking to see what I had got myself into. Police Rescue, had been selected to chair the afternoon dubbed. A game show. Chat. Current discussion. Unfortunately, simultaneous affairs. Shedding my suit, I sat trans­ not be available. 'But I fixed. translation would We are in the mountains. The don't speak Turkish'. Don't worry, I was told. sky is summery blue. Snow still streaks the high passes but the pas- tures are lush and flecked with wildflowers. Carbines named Joofa. She planned to reveal this fact and rocket launchers stand in stacks. Laid out beside the next day, in the same session as I was scheduled them are half a dozen bodies, dead men in olive drab to speak . H er paper would be delivered in French. trousers. A helicopter hovers, disgorging troops. Would anyone understand her, sh e wondered? Cut to a parade ground. Soldiers stand to atten­ I couldn' t imagine this Sicilian-Arab line going tion. Medals are presented. A politician makes a down too well with the ultra- nationalists. But I has­ speech. N ervous-looking locals are herded before the tened to reasure her about h er choice of language. I'd camera to receive certificates. M ore bodies, the chop­ done French at school and could still comprehend a pering of helicopters. Generals at a press conference. word or two. But not three, I was about to add, when Without the language, I could make no sense of she hit m e with the full Larousse. ' Oui, oui', I the commentary. Just like that business downstairs. murmured, and bolted for the door. N ever mind the nuances, the very facts were escap­ One of the conference organisers stepped into my ing m e. If I was going make anything of this place, I'd path. She had unexpected news. I had been selected n eed to learn Turkish. Fluent Turkish, very quickly. to chair the afternoon discu ssion. Unfortunately,

V oLUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 19 simultaneous translation would not be available. 'But nation been desecrated, PKK slogans had been hoist­ I don't speak Turkish'. Don't worry, I was told. ed in its place. A wave of indignation was reported to How could I not? The room was restive and very be sweeping the country. 41 people had been detained. crowded. The first speaker on the agenda was Foxy Questions were being asked. Among them , how it was Ba§g6z. I scanned the room for severe suits and shaggy possible that the 700 police present in the hall during hats. The professor, to m y relief, was a no-show. His the incident, 200 of them plain-clothesmen, had failed replacement was Dr Ulrich Marzolph of the Univer­ to apprehend the culprit. sity of Gottingen. His paper, Humour and Ideology, By comparison with this firestorm of controversy, would be delivered in English. Foxy Ba§g6z's provocation was small beer, an eight Ulrich was very German. H e was sinewy and paragraph item on page three. 'Nasreddin Hodja called intense, with brush-cut hair and a neck like a wrist. people to be tolerant,' he was quoted as sayin g. He started by defining humour. The audience began Cumhurriet and Milliyet, the up-market broadsheets, to chat among themselves. I wondered if I should call reported at similar length. The other big news was for a bit of shoosh. It seemed like a big ask, even if I'd that Islamic Welfare was edging closer to a deal with known how. My co-chair said nothing. I lowered my Tansu \= iller's True Path party. If Refah leader eyes and doodled on my conference notepad. 'The N ecm ettin Erbekan got the prime ministership, a way Nasreddin phenom enon', declared Dr Ulrich, 'requires might be found around C::iller's corruption indictment. wholistic comprehension'. But m ore a pressing issue than the future of the Twenty minutes in, my co-chair gave the wind­ Turkish state confronted me that morning. up signal. This was a red rag to Ulrich's bull. 'The it was, at last, showtime. unrestricted hero', he seethed, 'clever and nasty at the same time'. The wind-up got m ore insistent. Ulrich MYPAPER WAS FOURTH on the agenda. First WC got more antsy. The veins in his neck throbbed. He'd listened to a 20-minute dissertation in Macedonian­ barely covered humour, he complained, let alone ide­ don't ask what kind. Then one of similar length in ology. But nobody was listening. They had begun to Hungarian. As we pondered the Hodja's influence on yell at each other. Doors flew open. People spilled into Magyar folk practices, my eye was drawn to the title the corridor, gesticulating vehemently. Half the room of the next paper. Power, the Body and Sexual Con­ got up and walked out. My co-chairm an looked cepts in Nasreddin Hodja's Tales by Ms Jennifer anxious. Then he, too, walked out. Petzen of the University of Indiana. How, I wondered, That was good enough for me. I was out of there would Foxy Ba§g6z's enemies cope with all that. like a shot. Only to discover that the session had re­ Fortunately, they were nowhere to be seen. Nor convened on the balcony outside. Everybody was was Foxy. The main game had moved elsewhere. This jovial and relaxed, the air thick with tobacco smoke. session was a side-show, shunted into a hall housing Twenty minutes of German humour without a ciga­ the conference photographic exhibition, portraits of rette. It was more than a Turk could be expected to Yakmet shepherds and Uighur brides. bear. My co-chair offered me a fag. I shook my head. As Ms Petzen took the podium, her compatriot His look said I didn't know what I was missing. from UCLA sidled into the seat beside me. 'Pure post­ If Ankara has a nightlife, I wasn't getting any of structuralist boilerplate,' she murmured. 'Betcha.' it. The Ogretmenevi Oteli was on the outskirts of Jennifer Petzen was young and fair and terribly town, far from the nearest boulevard. Foxy Ba§g6z was innocent-looking. 'The problematisation of gender', off talking to the press. The air-conditioning knob still she began, her keening mid-western accent utterly didn't respond. I stripped to my boxers and watched without mirth. She m oved onto Nasreddin Hodja's the seven o'clock news on ITN. Events in Ankara led testicles. 'The juxtaposition of Rabelaisian bawdiness the European bulletin. with the paradigm of the carnivalesque .. .' The picture showed riot police beating demon­ 'See', hissed UCLA. 'Toldja'. strators. Severely. This was in response to the dese­ After all that, my comparison between Nasreddin cration of a Turkish flag during a conference of Hodja and Dad'n'Dave must have sounded terribly HADEP, a pro-Kurdish political party. We saw the flag, tame. The only one who laughed at my jokes was the cut loose from the ceiling, flutter to the fl oor of what Australian ambassador, David Evan , com e to lend looked like a basketball stadium. We saw bloodied m oral support to my little cultural exchange exercise. heads being shoved into police vans. Then we crossed I got a polite round of applause and a lam inated to Brussels for a m eeting of the European Union. I certificate which I still can't decipher. Then it was flipped stations. The flag was falling everywhere. It Matilda Coen's turn. 'Il y avait un Chretien, un fell all evening, on every channel. It fell before Sale Mussulman, et un [uif. . .' There was a Christian, a of the Century and after the Monday m ovie. Moslem and a Jew .. . It was still falling the next day, in full colour on By the middle of the week, N ecmettin Erbakan the front page of every paper on the news-s tand. Storm was modern Turkey's first-ever Islamicist prime min­ Rages over HADEP Conference, reported the Turk­ ister, Tansu \=iller's charges had been dropped, and I ish Daily N ews. Not only had the emblem of the was wagging it. Hadiye Nugay, the Turkish cultural

20 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 consul in Melbourne, had twice read my fortune in tables arranged around the swimming pool of an the dregs of an upturned coffee cup. Back home, she exclusive sports club. My Uzbek mates had been shop­ predicted that my book would be published. Here in ping and were in fine form. Embergin presented me Ankara, she prophesied that I would discover some with a copy of his paper on the holiday rituals of the unexpected connection with the distant Karakalpaks of the Amu River. I assured him, by past. m eans of gestures, that it would have no trouble fi nd­ ing an Australian publisher. Rauf talked ethno-musi­ I FOUND IT IN A GLASS CASE in the Museum of Anato­ cology. 'I Heard It Thru' the Grapevine,' he confided. lian Civilizations. It was a clay tablet, 5000 years old, Then the Hodja himself appeared, larger than life. the handwriting still as fresh and legible as the day it Not the anti-authoritarian, scatological Nasreddin, of was baked. It spoke to m e, I swear it did, through all course. This was the orthodox, safe-for-the-kiddies the intervening ages. In the beginning was the word, version, all cotton-wool beard, foam rubber turban and it whispered. Keep the faith, baby. Always take notes. rosy red cheeks. As he processed around the pool, On the other hand, m aybe it just said that the annual posing for group photographs, a Janissary band played income figures for the Gilgam esh Grain and Grape martial airs of the Ottoman empire. Company were better than projected. Hard to say. My Foxy Ba§g6z was nowhere in sight, decamped for cuneiform isn't what it used to be. Indiana. A gigantic flag hung down the side of the As we drove back to the Ogretmenevi Oteli, I Ogretmenevi Oteli, almost covering our balcony. The noticed that many of the larger buildings had sprout­ room was too hot for sleep. I got down on my knees ed enormous Turkish flags, some nearly ten stories and began to search. The result was beyond dispute. high. Innumerable smaller flags also flew from the There was a temperature knob but no inlet grille. The balconies of private homes or flapped on the aerials building merely appeared to have an air-condition­ of cars. The red field with its white crescent and star ing system. I'd been tricked by an illusion. was everywhere. The message could not be clearer. If But that what you get when you go pinching a these Kurdish terrorists thought they could insult man's parables. • with impunity the symbol of the unitary state, they need only look around them. Shane Maloney attended the Turkish Folklore The conference was winding down. All that Congress with the assistance of Arts Victoria. His remained was the official dinner. We sat outdoors, at novels Stiff and The Brush-Off are published by Text. WOMEN IN THE CHURCH Submissions invited

As part of a major research proj ect on the Participation of Women in the Catholic Church in Australia, the Bishops, in collaboration with the Australian Catholic University and th e Australian Conference of Leaders of Religio us Institutes, invite interested individu als and groups to make written submissions on the subj ect. It is suggested that submissions address one or more of the fo ll owing questions: • What are the ways in which women participate in the Catholic Church in Australia? • What assistance and support are currently offered to women to participate in. the Church? • What are barriers to women's participation in the Church? • What are some ways in which. women 's participation in the Church can be increased? The sub missions may come from organi sations, groups or individuals who are male or female, yo ung or old, actively invo lved in Church structures or not. They may take the form of letters, lists of points or papers no longer th an te n A4 pages. Altern atively, a submission form may be used. This is obtainable, together with guidelines, from: The Secretariat of the Bishops' Committee for Justice, Development and Peace, Leo XIII House, 19 MacKenzie Street, North Syd ney, NSW 2060. Tel: 02 9956 5800. Fax 02 9956 5782. Submissions should reach th e same address by 1 December 1996.

V OLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 21 ----INScmM'"· MAM LmM KoM.,-NGW

22 EUREKA STREET • O c TOBER 1996 I learnt English in the middle of the streets as a migrant it. He has proved himself to be what he is, even to the enemies. worker because I didn't have the chance to study, as my parents J don't think I would ever have done that after so many couldn't manage to take me to school any more after the years of misery- h e n ever enjoyed the life with his children, Betterment Law was brought in. It was a very critical law which with his family. But when he came out it was like h e was put deprived our parents of land that they were utilising, and the in jail yesterday: I think he is just an extraordinary person. livestock that they had, so they were forced to go back and work in the mines. I was one of the lucky ones in being able to What then is the effect of the Truth and Reconciliation Com­ grow together with my parents, a privilege which my children mission, is that not creating bitterness amongst certain cir­ didn't have. They grew alone because I had to go back to Johan­ cles, particularly the military! nesburg to work after I lost my marriage. I think there h as been a lot that has been revealed that But I did not have the proper documents to go and work ... some of the SADF have been involved in, particularly in regard Coloured and Indians were not affected by Influx Control. Influx to secret armies which were earmarked to assassinate the free­ Control [under the Group Areas Act] was the law which dom fighters-the top ANC people. It's a very tense situation .. . controlled us from coming in and out of the cities to go and work. It must have a few people scared, are you worried about So black people were given one year to go and work, if you any extreme action that might be taken by those people who happened to get som e work. But if you were not able to get work are scaredZ you were not even allowed to step your foot inside those cities. I'm not really worried any more because they have been So I was one of those people and here I had three children to exposed, everybody knows who they are ... support and educate ... the forging of the documents has given I think it is just a shame for the government of then because my children an education, but it was very much against my will. they thought these things would stay secret forever. But now I lived from the identification of not what I am, it was too bitter natural justice is taking its course .. . and it's good to know for m e. who did these things and why they did them to get it all out. That is, I think, another process of reconciliation, because you Could I ask you about the personality cult of Nelson Mandela. can't reconcile with someone you do not know, you cannot In the west he' seen as one of the great figures of the 20th reconcile with somebody if he doesn't say sorry. century. Is there a lot of good will invested in Nelson Mandela because of the extraordinariness of his story and South Afri­ Is there still optimism across the ethnic divides; across rich, ca's situation and will it be difficult for a successor to keep the white, poor, black~ We hear the evidence of crime and corrup­ ball rolling~ tion-is there still optimism amongst the people that there is That's a good question but it is very difficult to answer the opportunity for South Africa to carve out a better future because I am one of the people who are so dependent on him. for itself~ Sometimes I don't even think that he is old enough to retire, People are still optimistic, I'm still optimistic. With the because I always feel that if it were possible to reverse his age violence, with the crime, with the poverty, and the misery to 40 I would do it. H e still has a long way to go and a lot of caused by the previous regime, I still think it will take off with things to do with his wisdom which he is not going to transfer time. to anybody. I can take over, somebody else can take over, but You know people have been locked into a kraal maybe. If nobody will be himself. you keep som ething in a kraal ... and then you forget to lock That dependency on him is causing some undermining for that door do you think that once you go out, they're going to me, for anyone who would be his successor. .. stay? Now the laws are repealed so everybody is a South African. So everybody is moving to see what is happening in those Is there good will amongst Afril

V oLUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 23 II II l 1; \ I ' \ " I I. I. ~:

...... f

OBITUARY JAMES GRIFFIN Bishop Gregory Singkai

.. ~ ... 4' 1935-1996 I 'IJQ· . "1 ~ . P n;.attllt N OTH,NG mn' occumAns inflammatory 'Bougainville Initiative ' document of the ambivalence of Bougainvilleans 1987 which encouraged rebel leader, Francis Ona, to

4 towards Papua New Guinea than make his intransigent demands on Bougainville I . ml' that one of their Catholic clergy Copper Ltd. Even when, in 1989, the new Prime ,,~ '1-'" • could, in 1982, accept appointment Minister, Rabbie Namaliu, produced a generous pack­ ' to the capital see of Port Moresby age of compensation plus equity in the mine for l-" , .. while another, as Bishop of Bougain­ Bougainvilleans, Gregory failed to condemn what had ville, would throw in his lot with become insensate violence. As this escalated, he did the secessionist rebels to the point not suggest to the rebels that God was not behind of accepting, at one stage, the port­ their cause. And he failed to foresee the grip that folio of Education in their treasona­ fanatical cultism would take on many of Ona's \\' t: . f ~: }{ •. ble Interim Government. Both men supporters. A grasp of the time-honoured principles have died in the last three months. of a just war would have alerted him that this civil Archbishop Sir Peter Korongku's appointment in war, which did not even have the consent of most 1982 was deftly diplomatic: a prelate in the capital Bougainvilleans, was morally indefensible. from the nation's secessionist province testified to So Gregory joined the rebel government, only the putative fraternity of its peoples. And the late Sir to find that it was both inchoate and terrorist. Peter lived up to his part. His knighthood capped his Fonner seminarians were to accuse him of being a loyalty. Gregory Singkai, however, owed his mitre not complicit 'murderer'. When he withdrew active just to his integrity and pastoral virtues. support, his cathedral and church buildings were In 1974 when he was consecrated, secessionism razed; cultists despoiled his regalia and at one stage was on the rise in Bougainville and, owing to govern­ tried to install a bogus bishop of their own. Gregory ment intractability, culminated in the first unilateral retreated to the safety of his own clan and village declaration of independence on 1 September 1975, a in Koromina where he had been born in fortnight before national Independence Day. It had 1935. been deemed politic to have a Bougainville-born bishop in the province so that, if it did occur, seces­ E VENTUALLY IN LATE 1994 he was allowed to leave sion would not mean alienation, or even schism [under for the Solomon Islands because of ill-health. He was a 'foreign' pastor), from episcopal authority- and some obviously not in favour in Rome, which counselled 75 per cent of the people were nominally Catholic. him to look to the welfare of his whole flock, not just Gregory Singkai declared for secession in 1975 because secessionists. In late May this year, after a sojourn in he said it was 'the will of the people'. Australia, he was accompanied by the Apostolic More than that, though, Singkai was personally Nuncio to Buka Island, the anti-secessionist district committed. He was incredulous that a God who had of northern Bougainville. On the way through (in his created a distinctively jet-black skin colour and a case) a non-vindictive Port Moresby, he signed a brief glorious homeland in an archipelago (Solomons) and pathetic undertaking to conform. remote from the rest of Papua New Guinea intended After two-and-a-half months' contact with his the people to be absorbed in to a 'foreign nation'. The people, he resumed the full pastoral duties that had more so when this had come abou t only because of been tem porarily referred to his Rabaul metropoli­ the greedy im perialism s of Germ any and Great Brit­ tan-on 16 August to be precise. H owever, as the ain splitting the Solom ons 100 years ago. Moreover, Apostolic Nuncio at Gregory's obsequies put it, God had provided m unificent mineral wealth which 'Evidently God had other plans for Bishop Singkai'. was being exploited for others. H e died at Vunapope hospital near Ra baul on 12 So, in spite of the Accord of 1976 which created September. a sem i-autonomous provincial government under There are obvious m orals to be drawn fro m the w hich Bougainville gen erally prospered, Singkai tragedy of this m an. One might be t o scrap the remained unreconciled to Papua N ew Guinea's inte­ 'baffl egab' that made its way into at least Catholic gra tion and the presence of the gigantic Panguna seminaries in Papua N ew Guinea and persuaded good­ copper mine. He did nothing to discourage several willed people that traditional European approaches disaff ected American priests in the diocese who were to Church-State relations had becom e obsolete. • unrelenting in their criticism of Bougainville's status and the mining operation. He also tacitly approved of James Griffin is Profesor Emeritu s of Hist ory, [then Fr) John M omis's impracticable and University of Papua New Guinea.

24 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 EPU U

S rwa A Lauten .Tutuala

dUb ra • D 1h • S ., ola

~nde Margarita is 28 aria lH:s ~en ih ustralia for two years. She is East Timo& ~ and ha her two children by the allowan&; ~ceive wough dw 0 ;6: R :\ <})oo_e ~he and her husband ran a shop in a small ~!W1m · East Tim •. u they were £r, }\u harassed 1 1 f\W1 that she left for Dili. There the Indop.AS;.i:m ldiers came • de day aria · · 1b nVl-u T ,a t· J beat her husband SClvagely inlront of h~r ana the chil ren. He was taken away, and she dfd>iro h . again. Sb s .sti~1 w

M A>GA>T, ba"d on •ho liv"' of East Timorese asylum eekers and Australia's relations with East some eighteen hundred Portuguese asylum seekers. To understand Timor became linked in acrimonious controversy. The confluence their story, one must recall the history of East Timor and the hurt the asylum seeker . complex factors that have led to this deplorable outcome. In March 1995, a visit made by General Panjaitan in the The salient points are well known. East Timor was a Portuguese interests of closer military co-operation was publicly criticised in colony from the 16th century untill975. In that year Fretilin took Australia. Panjaitan had held high rank in Dili during the massacre power in a counter-coup, and declared the territory an independent of 1991. In April, members of the ALP caucu complained that republic. In December, Indonesia invaded East Timor, and in July many East Timorese who had received touri t visas from the Bali 197 6 declared it annexed to Indonesia. The Indonesian invasion has consulate in 1994 later applied for refugee status. been criticised repeatedly by the United Nations. After a prolonged In June, 18 asylum seekers who arrived by boat were detained resistance, the territory was opened to visitors in 1989, and the and, after a court injunction, were given access to legal advice. Later suffering of its people again became patent in the funeral massacre that month, General Mantiri was nominated as Indonesian ambas­ at Dili in 1991. sador to Australia. The appointment was followed by intense Australian relations with East Timor have remained the subject public protest, especially by members of the Labor Party and of the of controversy. The people of East Timor supported the Australian East Timorese community in Australia. General Mantiri was soldiers heroically during the Pacific War, and some 40,000 died. claimed to have approved the Dili massacre. Early in July, as the Before the Indonesian invasion, Gough Whitlam declared an inde­ judgment on the Timor Gap treaty was handed down by the pendent East Timor unviable and a threat to security. During International Court of Justice, General Mantiri's nomination as Indonesian incursions, Australian journalists were killed, and their ambassador was withdrawn amid Indonesian anger and Australian fate has long remained a cause of tension. This has been renewed by embarrassment. The detained asylum seekers were released into regular reports of the mistreatment of the Portuguese population by the community on bridging visas following expert evidence that the Indonesian forces. they had been tortured. The Indonesian foreign minister, however, But the Australian Government quickly recognised de facto declared that they were not refugees, and that Australia should Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, and when negotiating reject their claims. with Indonesia the exploitation of the seabed between Australia Senator Evans initially replied that determination of refugee and East Timor, gave de iure recognition as well. The resulting status was independent of government, but in October attention treaty was the object of an Portuguese action in the International was drawn to an opinion of the Attorney General's Department Court of Justice. One of the last actions of the Keating Government that the East Timorese were Portuguese nationals, and so entitled was to sign a defence treaty with Indonesia. to seek protection in Portugal. After some hesitation, the Portu­ East Timorese have regularly come to Australia and sought guese Government responded that Portuga l would accept only protection on the grounds that they were persecuted and could not those who sought Portuguese protection. This would make it secure protection from the Government of Indonesia, whose difficult for the Australian govemmen t to deport the East Timorese. nationals they were. Most were given refugee status. At the same time, the processing of East Timorese cases at the 1995 was a critical year because for a few months the arrival of primary level was temporarily frozen.

VOLUME 6 NUMB ER 8 • EUREKA STREET 25 Some members of the Refugee Review Tribunal seem to have survival in Australia are taken together, the result is great psycho­ accepted the Government's argument that the East Timorese are logical stress. This is particularly so for those who have been deeply Portuguese nationals, and on those grounds have refused their depressed and traumatised by their past experience. application for protection. The cases have been appealed and will Thus, independently of the other issues involved, there is an be heard by the Federal Court late in September, 1996. overwhelming case that those who are most vulnerable should be Two rneasures introduced by the Coalition Government elected given continued financial support through the Red Cross, and earlier this year have been fateful for the asylum seekers. It has awarded permanent residence in Australia on humanitarian grounds. instructed the Department of Immigration to process all cases at Their well-being is too precarious to support further disruption. the primary level, and a letter sent to all asylum seekers has asked The events of mid-1995 reveal how the treatment of the East for details of their nationality. As judgments will be made without Timorese has been affected by political considerations. The interview, it can confidently be expected that the majority will be Australian government clearly identified Australia's political and rejected on the sole grounds of their imputed Portuguese nationality. economic interests with the treaty with Indonesia. The visits of The issue of their fear of persecution will be deemed irrelevant and Indonesian military leaders were part of this process. so not even considered. As a result, the the protests directed at Generals Mantiri and Panjaitan, and the humiliating withdrawal of the former's nomination as ambassador, were particu­ Boats seen1 to evoke a deep seated and atavistic anxiety larly disconcerting. The contemporaneous hearing of the Timor Gap case made it clear that profitable about the integrity of our borders, and encourage and cooperative commercial relationships with Indonesia depended on recognition of Indonesian otherwise reasonable ministers and officials sovereignty over East Timor and the mending of fences. to don their cockaded hats and stride the quarterdeck. It was coincidental that attention became simultaneously focused on the East Timorese asy- lum seekers. The complaint that East Timorese At the same time, those rejected at the primary stage will be had too easily been granted tourist visas in Bali, and particularly the deprived of the welfare assistance which they had previously arrival of the single boat in Darwin both touched an underlying received. Their children's education will be precarious, and as their Australian antipathy to refugees. It recalled the response to the work permits expire, the whole family stripped of access to medical Cambodian boat people of six years earlier. Boats seem to evoke a care. Their position will be desperate, because the East Timorese deep seated and atavistic anxiety about the integrity of our borders, community resident in Australia is poor, and voluntary agencies and encourage otherwise reasonable ministers and officials to don arc already stretched beyond their capacity. their cockaded hats and stride the quarterdeck. The majority of the East Timoresc seeking asylum in Australia The publicity given to the asylum seekers and their claim to arc of Chinese descent. Like the Jews in early modern Europe, have fled persecution led the Indonesians to demand that they not Chinese have been disproportionately involved in trade and be considered refugees. The asylum seeker , unpopular at the best shop keeping. They arc an identifiable group, especially vulnerable of times in Australia, provided the raw material for a placatory in times of national crisis. Australian signal to Indonesia. The experience of East Timor has been that of other placcs-El It has been argued that it is necessary to make the East Timorese Salvador, for example, Burma, Chechnya or Cambodia- where an asylum seekers a Portuguese problem, in order to protect the occupying army has imposed its rule on an unwilling population. Australian relationship with Indonesia. In this view, the attribu­ The people regularly tell of rape, torture, being forced to witness tion of Portuguese nationality is a necessary compromise whi ch the beating or killing of family members, humiliation at the hands saves the East Timorese from repatriation, placates Indonesian of baffled and angry soldiers, banishment from living places, arbi­ wrath, and defends long-term Australian interests. Those interests, trary reprisals, and sometimes insult to their religious sensibilities. too, can be more generously construed than as being confined to The East Timorcse have therefore experienced East Timor as a profit-taking and defence. The stability of Indonesia is of vital refugee camp, and suffered trauma routinely. The Indonesian concern to Australia. Furthermore, the capacity of Australia to soldiers, too, have suffered from being forced to operate in a country encourage our neighbours to adopt fuller commitment to demo­ where their presence is without the consent of the people and cratic processes and human rights will rely on her having strong where they meet sullen hostility. Like the people, they are the allies and patrons within the region. It is therefore in everybody's victims of a rule imposed on an unwilling population by the long-term-interests for the relationship between Indonesia Government which they represent. and Australia to be as strong as possible. Those who have sought Portuguese nationality have had to do so in Portugal. They cannot work until they have an identity card, I RESPECT THIS THEORETICAL ARGUMENT and the realistic view of a process which can take over a year. Many live in very difficult moral dilemmas which it supposes. In such conflicts between a circumstances. But very few of the asylum seekers in Australia greater and a lesser good it is notal ways clear what should be done, speak Portuguese or have physical or emotional contact with as controversy about policies as diverse as Clement XIV's suppres­ Portugal. They find the idea of seeking asylum in Portugal as alien sion of the Jesuits, Pius XII's silence about the Jews, Chamberlain's as it would be for an Australian to seck protection in Senegal. appeasement of Hitler, or ASEAN's opening to the Burmese junta When their traumatic experience in East Timor, their fear of testifies. The moral challenge to a foreign policy that advocates being despatched to an alien destination like Portugal, and their silence about abused human dignity, however, is to name what prospect of losing financial and medical support necessary for level of abuse will demand a change of policy: the murder of ten,

26 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 say, a hundred, a thousand or a million? The policy must al o show Thus, Portuguese law sees nationality as an endowment given the fruits of constructive engagement. The imprisonment of Aung by place of birth or by blood. Because it allows multiple nationality, San Suu Kyi's supporters immediately after the placatory approach Portuguese nationality does not lapse when the East Timorese take by ASEAN, for example, does not highly commend such a policy. up Indonesian citizenship. If East Timorese asylum seekers have Whatever of the theoretical position taken here, however, Portuguese nationality, it can be argued that they can avail them­ Australia's interests do not demand the sacrifice of the East selves of the protection of Portugal and may not be entitled to Timorese. They became an issue only after the Australian response protection in Australia, regardless of the experiences which led to their representatives justifiably inflamed Indonesian sensitivi­ them to seek asylum here. ties. They had the right to expect better advice from Australia. When Portuguese municipal law is made the decisive grounds Since Australia had earlier quietly granted refugee status to East for the awarding of refugee status, it can lead to humanly bizarre Timorese in more tranquil times, the hearing of their cases could decisions. A decision made in the Refugee Review Tribunal, for be resumed quietly. Nor would the grant of residence on example, divided a family. The father was denied refugee status, humanitarian grounds create political difficulty. because he was born in Portuguese territory. The mother was awarded it, because she was born outside Portuguese territory. The T HE DECISION TO DENY TH E EAST TIMORESE protection in Australia elder child was denied refugee status because born in 1973; the introduces complex legal issues. The Convention on the Status of younger child was awarded it because born after the law was Refugees defines refugees as those who suffer persecution, are amended in 1981. Mercifully, the then Immigration minister inter­ out ide the country of their nationality, and cannot avail them­ vened to prevent the family being dismembered by this relentle sly selves of its protection. Those judging the East Timorese applica­ sharpened knife of legal logic. tions for refugee status must therefore decide what is their The Federal Court, and most probably the High Court, will now nationality, and whether they can avail themselves of its protection. have to adjudicate whether the asylum seekers are of Portuguese The judges of early cases assumed, as did the Attorney General's nationality, and whether this should exclude them from receiving Department, that the East Timorese were of Indonesian nationality. protection in Australia. For after the incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia East But the deeper question here is not legal. It is whether it is fair Timorese travelled on Indonesian passports, and Australia recog­ and reasonable to impute to people a nationality which they have nised Indonesian sovereignty. not sought and which does not correspond to their experience or to This judgm ent reflected the common-sense judgment that na­ the exigencies of life in the territory in which they have lived, on tionality is attached to one's place of living, and is therefore linked the sole grounds that a nation with which they have no natural to sovereignty. Where a colonial power's sovereignty ceases over a connection declares them to be its nationals. territory, so in practical terms do the inhabitants of the territory I would argue that it is neither fair nor reasonable. It is unrea- lose its nationality, regardless of the domestic law of the previous sovereign power. In East Timor, Portu­ guese sovereignty clearly ceased with the declaration of The moral challenge to a foreign policy that advocates a democratic republic, and even more dramatically with the Indonesian occupation and incorporation of silence about abused human dignity, however, is to name the territory. For the purposes of asylum, they must be treated as Indonesian citizens. what level of abuse will demand a change of policy-the Others have argued that, while Portuguese sover­ eignty and therefore nationality have effectively lapsed in East Timor, the East Timorese do not have Indone­ murder of ten, say, a hundred, a thousand or a million? sian nationality. They should rather be regarded as stateless. This judgm ent is based on the United Nations resolu­ sonable because it postulates a useful but unreal divorce between tion on East Timor which refuse to countenance its absorption nationality and sovereignty. Undoubtedly useful, since it allowed into Indonesia, and which call on Portugal, as the previous colonial the Australian government simultaneously to argue that the Timor power, to carry out its best efforts to secure a free act of self­ Gap treaty was valid because Indonesia had sovereignty over the determination for the people of East Timor. These resolutions territory, and to assert that East Timorese enjoyed Portuguese arguably equate East Timor to a trust or mandated territory whose nationality because of the provisions of Portuguese law. inhabitants cannot receive their nationality from the administer­ In reality, however, sovereignty cannot be divorced so easily ing power. As stateless persons, who cannot avail themselves of the from nationality. Nationality presupposes a natural relationship protection of any nation, they may claim protection in Australia on between the citizen and an organized community. Unless a govern­ a case by case basis. m ent is linked to a community by natural links of race and The third opinion, which has determined the recent treatment proximity, or by having effective government in an area, its attri­ of the East Timorese, is that they have Portuguese nationality, and bution of nationality is a fiction. Thus, while sovereignty is not a so must claim protection from Portugal. This argument separates sufficient condition of nationality, it is a necessary condition of sovereignty from nationality. The former is regulated by interna­ effective nationality. Therefore, to attribute nationality to others tional law, while nationality is regulated by national law. against their will without such links is absurd. The relevant Portuguese law of 1867 entitled anyone born in To use such imputed nationality in order to evade the ordinary Portuguese territory, including its colonial possessions, to responsibilities of protecting refugees is both absurd and unfair. It Portuguese nationality . In a 1981 revision of the law, it becam e is unfair to Portugal because it uses the generous inclusiveness of necessary also for the mother or father to wish to declare them­ the Portugu ese law to saddle it with Australia's burdens. While it selves Portuguese. is reasonable and generous for the Portuguese to make use of a

VoLUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 27 fiction in order to grant protection to trators as self-serving, and on-shore the defenceless, it is unfair and churl­ asylum seekers as rich queue­ ish for Australia, a wealthier nation, jumpers. THE ~ RA I L to use Portugu ese law to make Por­ The budget cuts to asylum-seeker tugal bear the financial responsibil­ assistance appear particularly unfor­ ity for asylum seekers who have no tunate, because officials will come An international, spiritual and cultural Portuguese connection. under pressure to make hurried deci­ movement of Christian women It is also unfair to the asylum sions about refugee status. The seekers because it makes their fate increased funding for refugee deter­ CELEBRATES depend on an abstract fiction. Is the mination only increases this pres­ case morally different from what it sure. The fear of loss of jobs, the 75YEARS IN HOLLAND would be to investigate asy1 um seek­ conventional wisdom of governm ent ers' blood lines, and to exclude those that the claims of on-shore asylum & with traces of Jewish or African blood seekers are unfounded, taken from protection in Australia? together with the expectation of rapid 60YEARS IN AUSTRALIA The coalition government has so turnover, and the hearing of applica­ far been preoccupied with the Budget. tions without interview, will surely THIS YEAR The desire to cut expenditure and reduce the quality of decisions made. encourage economic efficiency have Because neither asylum seekers nor If you would like to be part of led to significant cuts in immigra­ their lawyers will expect a fair hear­ tion and a h ardening of policy ing at this level, they will inevitably OUR NOVEMBER CELEBRATIONS towards family re-integration. look for justice to the Refugee Review P lease write or phone: Refugee policy has also been Tribunal. To deprive them of support affected by this desire for fiscal before they can make this appeal THE GRAIL restraint. The refugee in take has been will be perceived as vindictive and 22 McHatton Street considerably reduced. The on-shore intimidatory. refugee programme, however, has The deprivation of benefits to North Sydney 2060 suffered more acutely, in the belief the East Timorese is especially Ph: (02) 9955 3053 that those who apply for asylum repugnant because they are being within Australia are queue-jumpers rejected on morally indefensible who keep out those in overseas grounds. The deprivation of benefits camps. The support previously paid before the issue has been thoroughly Three Personal Stories through the Red Cross to asylum resolved in the courts can be seen You are invited to hear seekers until their appeals had been only as an attempt to starve them h eard will now be payable only after into submission to unjust policy. a delay of six m onths, and will be The East Timorese asylum seek­ Geraldine Doogue: presenter of restricted to those whose primary ers should be given entry to Aus­ Life Matters on Radio National decisions are in the process of being tralia on humanitarian grounds. This Deirdre Rofe: Ed ucation Co-ordinator decided. Those who appeal to the would recognise the fact that their Refugee Review Tribunal will be exclusion on the basis of an imputed for Loreto Schools and former provincial, without financial support or access Portuguese nationality is dictated Loreto Sisters to medical care. Presumably, it is by Australia's political interests. It Dorothy Lee: Professor of New hoped that this restriction will also recognises their continuing need Testament and ordained minister, encourage them to leave Australia for support. Even if this argument is Uniting Church without troubling the legal system. not accepted, the many who have The budget cuts have been suffered serious trauma in East Timor speak of their Spiritual Journeys accompanied by a distinctive politi­ must surely be given residence. Their cal rhetoric, couched in more intense survival is at stake. o n W ednesday, November 13 terms of family values, but more Finally, even while these deci­ at 7.30 pm restricted in the groups to whom it is sions are made, the asylum seekers in t he Xavi e r Co ll ege Chapel, Barkers Rd , Kew extended. The narrow mainstream should receive support until the court is to be rewarded with tax cuts and cases about their rejection are entry: donation at the door to meet expenses for the night. other benefits. Those outside the concluded. The denial of benefits to Supper will fo ll ow. mainstream- Aborigi nal Austral­ them amounts to intimidation of ians, the unemployed, refugees and the asylum seekers and unfair enquiries: Kate McKenzie others-are penalised. The penalties pressure on Portugal. • Jesuit Provincial Office, PO Box 149, are justified by criticising unlikeable Hawthorn, 3 122 m embers of the group, and so stig­ Andrew Ham ilton SJ has worked Ph (9-5): (03) 98 18 3960 matising the group as a whole. Thus, with the Jesuit Refugee Service on Ph (after hours): (03) 9853 6453 the unemployed are stigm atised as refugee and migration issu es since Fax: (03) 9818 3602 welfare-cheats, aboriginal adminis- the mid '80s.

28 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 IN M EMORIAM R oBERT CROTTY

0 NTH< mNWc of Monday 12August the meticulous scholar who preferred to 1996 Jerome Crowe died suddenly at Holy debate calmly with opponents. His real Cross Retreat, the Passionist student house achievement was in tertiary biblical educa­ in Melbourne. A few weeks earlier he had tion. Never in a hurry to put pen to paper, left Adelaide to fill in for a semester at he wrote a few books, many of them school Yarra Theological Union. He returned from texts and books for the lay reader, which an evening lecture, ate with some of his were exemplars of clarity. He became Presi­ confreres, then, at 11pm, without any prior dent of the Yarra Theological Union in Crowe CP 1928-1996 warning, suffered a heart attack. 1977-1979 and resigned to take over as the Jerome joined the Passionists after leav­ s and required us to keep up our Australian Provincial of the Passionists. ing school in 1945 and was ordained a priest Greek, to study Hebrew (despite antiquated At the completion of this term of office in 1951. Almost immediately he went to Latin textbooks!), to read articles in French he accepted the new challenge offered by Rome where he did a Licentiate in Theol­ and German. the South Australian CAE, which would ogy at the Angelicum University and began On a broader front, Jerome turned a eventually become part of the University of his Licentiate in Scripture at the Biblical quiescent Catholic Adelaide on its head. South Australia. Religion Studies had been Institute. He then went to Jerusalem and The Catholic paper The Southern Cross set up as a disciplinary area in the CAEs in majored in biblical studies and archaeology had long published dreary front-page arti­ Adelaide during the 1970s and the Catholic at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique cles on the opening of school science Education Office had made overtures about Fran«aise. laboratories and toilet blocks. Jerome establishing a parallel strand of study that They were heady days. The Dead Sea submitted articles on the finding and inter­ would prepare teachers who wanted Scrolls had come to light in the 1950s and pretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, on modern employment in the Catholic school system. his professor of archaeology, Roland de trends in biblical interpretation. For the It was Jerome who gave Catholic Studies Vaux, was the first editor-in-chief of the local readership this was a revelation. academic vision and direction while still scrolls and excavator of the presumed Essene The Australian Catholic Record, keeping the content within the ambit of monastery at Qumran. What became known required reading in those days for most Catholicism. as the International Team, entrusted with Australian Catholic clergy, had specialised Jerome was a very human person. If the editing of those scrolls that were not in in casuistic discussion on the minutiae of news spread of sickness or misfortune, he Israeli hands, was mainly based on the Ecole recent Papal Bulls and heated debate over would appear at the hospital bed or family Biblique and what was then known as the obscure liturgical gestures. Jerome, during home. His dry wit was legendary. Palestine Archaeological Museum of which his first year in Adelaide, wrote a series of He never pretended to be modish: he De Vaux was the director. The Ecole articles that examined the theory of Annie knew that he did not speak the language of Biblique was also on the wave of new devel­ Jaubert suggesting that perhaps the events the toddler or even the teenager. opment after the 1943 encyclical Divino of Maundy Thursday including the Last He was never a morning person. In the Afflante Spiritu had emancipated biblical Supper had taken place on the previous days before Mass became interactive he had scholars. Jerome met up with teachers like Tuesday. Archbishop Matthew Beovich, been known to fall asleep saying Mass and Pierre Benoit and Marie-Emile Boismard. never known for his scholarship, was have to call the server up to find out where Their influence was to last all his life. reported to have gone into apoplectic shock. he had reached. He was impractical in many I first met Jerome in Adelaide in January Jerome never was denounced, as far as I ways. One of his plans after retirement 19 57. He was beginning his teaching career. know. In fact, he was not really a controver­ from the University of South Australia was I was a teenager beginning my theological sialist unless he deeply felt for a cause. He to go to the Ukraine and teach in an studies. I was witness to the transforma­ did take to the streets to protest over the impoverished Ukrainian theological semi­ tion that took place as he became part of the South African Rugby tour when nary, despite the fact that it was still in a Passionist theological faculty which had apartheid was at its height. war zone and he knew no Ukrainian. formerly been more interested in practical My brother and I shared a meal with preaching that the subtleties of biblical H E NEVER ACCEPTED Humanae Vitae. Jerome a few weeks ago prior to his depar­ exegesis. When my brother wrote two articles for ture for Melbourne. Over beer and fish, For the first time we young pre-Vatican The Australian which rejected the out­ almost a liturgical menu, we laughed about II students heard not only of the Dead Sea moded theology underlying that encycli­ ongoing episcopal foibles and the idiosyn­ Scrolls but of literary forms, apocalyptic, cal, Jerome stood by him as Knox first crasies of clergy we had known. We told Fonngeschichte, demythologisation and deprived him of priestly faculties and then those old Latin jokes for which there is an new theories of biblical inspiration. We forced him out of Australia. In many ways, ever-diminishing audience. Jerome enjoyed learned that Genesis 1-11 was not to be for good or bad in hindsight, Jerome was a the fare and shared with us the projects he taken literally, that the infancy gospels restraining influence on many younger still had in hand, his plans for the future. were not history but theology, that when clergy who wanted to take more drastic Vale, Jerome. • the gospels called Jesus 'Son of God' they action and storm Raheen in those depress­ did not necessarily imply he was God. ing, post-encyclical days. But overall he Robert Crotty is Associate Professor in With it all Jerome demanded real was not one for controversy. He was instead Education, University of South Australia.

VOLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 29 M Y STORY IS ABOUT TWO MEN, who shared a place, a time and from my perspective, a set of ideas that I have come to call truths. The place they shared was Australia. One came from the other side of the world to become an Australian. The other never left the north-west of Western Australia. One became the keeper of faith for a generation or more of Irish Australians, especially here in Melbourne. The other was the holder of the law for a genera­ tion or more of Yawuru people at Broome, Western Australia. One drew thousands of people to showgrounds to hear his words. The other drew people to sit under the shade of a jigal tree and share his knowledge. One was Daniel Mannix. The other was Paddy Djiagween, my grandfather.

About Daniel Mannix, many facts are known. Books have been written, such as F. Murphy's Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, which appeared in 1948. Debate has raged, history has spoken with many voices. He was a famous- for some infamous-man. Daniel Mannix was born on 4 March, 1864, in Charleville, County Cork, Ireland and died on November 6, 1963 in Melbourne. A Roman Catholic prelate, he became one of Australia's most controversial political figures during the first half of the 20th century. Mannix studied at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, in County Kildare, where he was ordained a priest in 1890 and where he taught philosophy (1891) and theology (1894). From 1903 to 1912 he served as president of the college, coming to Australia and becoming Archbishop of Melbourne in 1917. Mannix's forthright demands for state aid for the education of Roman Catholics in return for their taxes, and his opposition to drafting soldiers for World War I made him the subject of contro­ versy. A zealous supporter of Irish independence, he made an official journey to Rome in 1920 via the United States, where his lengthy speechmaking attracted enthusiastic crowds. His campaign on behalf of the Irish, however, caused the British Government to prevent him from landing in Ireland, where he finally visited in 1925. After World War II, Mannix sought to stop Communist infiltration of the Australian trade unions; he played a controversial part in the dissensions within the Australian Labor Party and

30 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1996 backed the largely right-wing Catholic Democratic Labor Party, which broke away. A promoter of Catholic Action, lay apostolic activity in the temporal society, and of the Catholic social movement, he was responsible for having established 181 schools, including Newman Col­ lege and St. Mary's College at the University of Melbourne, and 108 parishes. These are the facts of the contribution of Daniel Mannix during his lengthy time as Archbishop. I first heard of Archbishop Mannix in 1962, when as a young lad, recently orphaned from both my parents in the one year, I was sent from Katherine in the Northern Territory to Monivae College as a boarder. It was thought to be an option preferable to my being sent to the Garden Point Home for Half-Caste children near Darwin, and was a decision negotiated between my sister and the MSC priests of Darwin and given the seal of approval by the Protector of Native Affairs. Whether it was a wise decision or not, it was a major decision, and shaped my life and especially my ongoing engage­ ment and tussles with Catholicism. The college on the cold Western Plains at Hamilton became my home of sorts for six years. I arrived in Monivae the year before the death of Mannix. The Archbishop was omnipresent and omnipotent. Much closer and more tangible than the Pope, his steely-eyed visage was in every corridor, watching my every move. He might not have known this dark boy from the north, but from his picture, he seemingly knew everything I did. Maybe he would have approved of my atti­ tude to study, and my ability with a football, but perhaps little else. It is difficult from today's fast-driven electronic age, in which personalities flit across our consciousness through their 15 minutes of fame, to capture that presence in the close, very Irish Catholic community in Victoria at the time. It was a bit like someone coming to Geelong and hearing about Ablett. For a boy from the bush, he was the boss, the biggest boss, the stuff of legend and myth, the flag-bearer of the complex identity of a complex people. As I learned about the Irish Catholic Australians, and their history of struggles for emancipation, self-determination, and economic growth through social acceptance and education, I learned about Mannix. I remember the sense of loss at the end of that year when this man that inspired such awe and admiration, as well as fear and hatred in another sector of society, was laid out for public viewing at St Patrick's Cathedral. Many thousands of school children, including the senior boys from Monivae in their blazers, filed past his body to pay their respects and acknowledge their gratitude for his defence of the rights that they and their families were able to freely enjoy as a result of his lifelong efforts. Truly the death of a hero-to the poor, to the unemployed, to the Irish Catholics, to anyone who wasn't born with a silver spoon in their mouth and an estate in their future. I, like many, was somewhat confused about the criticism of him for being Irish Catholic while I understood him to be a very patriotic Australian. His strong and concerted efforts for education so that those not born into wealth might take their place amongst the public servants and the professions was something that made a lot of sense to me. Because at that time education was seen as a bridge for Aboriginal people to cross the chasm between our culture and way of life and that of the non-Aboriginal.

W EN M ANNIX WAS LYING IN STATE AT AGE 99, Paddy Djiagween was probably resting in the shade of his jigal tree. Unlike Mannix, facts about his birth, life and death are not certain, and not yet picked over by scholars. His birth date is debated in Broome, as being either 1880, the year in which Broome was established, or perhaps as late as 1888. When Mannix died my grandfather was a very old man, around 80 years old. Very old, especially given the early mortality of too many Aboriginal men. He was always, it seemed, older than the oldest man in my home community. The death in 1991 of Paddy Djiagween at the age of 111 or 103 passed without much notice in the wider non-Aboriginal community, as seems to be the way when very senior Aboriginal people die. His passing left for me a very deep sense of loss but also a firm conviction that his contribution to Australia and to the promotion of similar values to those of Archbishop Mannix should be told if at all possible. It is what he lived through, what he lived for and how he lived it, that is to our gain and is the story I'm hoping to weave tonight. Patrick Djiagween was born of Aboriginal parents, Jilwa and Wanan, both belonging to the Yawuru people who have traditionally occupied the coastal and hinterlands from Broome south to Wybeena. His proper name was Djagun. The kinship grouping into which he was born was Brungu. His law, the ceremonies and traditions and custom for which he was owner and custodian was that known as Una, Dulurru and Gatrinya. He was baptised a Catholic at Broome around 1900 by Father Nicholas and confirmed by Bishop Gibney in Beagle Bay Mission. He described to Fr. Francis Huegal, a German missionary, some of his early encounters with the emerging Catholic Church

VOLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 31 in Broome and Beagle Bay in the following way: 'They were Christians of Beagle Bay. My father would do any job. He lived in the bush near Broome, camping anywhere around there. There were any amount of Aboriginal people here, a lot more than now. Plenty big corroboree ... 'I was about thirteen when Fr. Nicholas went to Beagle Bay in a boat. He said, "You boys like sugar cane?" He take us to old jetty. We going to Beagle Bay [140 kilo­ metres away] We were in the dormitory plenty boys, only seven half­ castes. School was with Mr. Randle from England. He was our school teacher, boys and girls. After school we went to work in the Garden.' It was not long after this experience in Beagle Bay Mission that he and several others became homesick for their country in Broome. Despite his attempts to return to his country, he and his mates were found in the mangroves and returned to the mission. He also told of how in 1907 when the StJohn of God sisters arrived, led by Mother Antonia O'Brien: 'They came in a small boat. Two men carried her, she bent and kissed the ground. Then I came with a hermit crab. She got frightened.' Asked later by Mary Durack, what he thought when he first saw Mother Antonia in her full white habit, he replied that he thought she was a seagull. No wonder he gave her a hermit crab. The life style at the Mission with the priest and brothers in the earlier period he described this way: 'We went to Mass, all in Latin. We learn to sing. Only the Lord's prayer was in English. On Sunday we go picnic, every one in khaki shirt, big and small. First hymn we learnt, English, Latin, Salve Regina. Easter, we have ceremonies. Plenty people.' What we need to realise from these reports and observations of Paddy Djiagween about his first encounters with not only the Catholic Church but with the non-Aboriginal world of Australia is that it was all happening in the period just before the Australian Constitution was passed in Westminster, prior to the First World War and just before Archbishop Mannix began to condemn the second referendum push in 1917. Worlds were in collision, and events and interests on the far side of the world were powerful enough to have dramatic effect in Broome and in Melbourne. In 1917, Mannix said, 'I warn you to keep conscription out of Australia and not to give a blank cheque on your liberties to any n governrnent'.

r ADDY D)IA GWEE 1S LIBERTIES HAD ALREADY been taken by government. There was no COntemplation by the Federal government that Aborigines should be allowed to vote in the referendum even though Paddy Djiagween had lost a brother overseas as a soldier in 1914. While my grandfather came to know the priests, brothers and nuns of Beagle Bay, the region of his birth was in turmoil, with the forces of pastoralism, pearling, the gold rush and law and order changing the face of his land forever. A few years before his baptism at the turn of the century, a pitched battle was fought at Wincljana Gorge between Jandamarra and a posse of police and pastoralists from Derby. The death, or capture, of Jandamarra was not only the justification used for sweeping raids along the Fitzroy, Margaret, Mary and other major rivers in the Kimberley, indiscriminately killing and terrorising the Aboriginal communities who were living there upon their tribal lands. It was also seen as necessary for the young colony of Western Australia to show it was capable of ruling its natives. There was nothing to be gained for that young colony by making it known to the Home Office of its mistreatment of the Kimberley Aboriginal people. My grandfather was working for his Irish father-in-law, Joseph Fagan, droving cattle for the Duracks to the Port of Wyndham in the early 1920s when a dispute between an Aboriginal man named Lumbia and a white man named Hay led to a punitive expedition out from Oombulgurri or Forrest River, which resulted in the capture of Lumbia, and 20 or 30 others, who were brought to the mission in neckchains. Others came to the mission too, with gunshot wounds and stories of mass killings and cremated bodies, later found by a rare Royal Commission to be true. Two constables found responsible for the death of four of the prisoners while in their custody were tried, acquitted, promoted and transferred. Lumbia was convicted of killing Hay, sent to Fremantlc Gaol for ten years. Rough justice, blind justice, or injustice? The Crown's justice being brought brutally home to the natives of the north. Lumbia had ]{illed Hay because Ha y had violated his wife.

32 EUREKA STREET • OCTOBER 1996 My grandfather saw rights to land being trampled by the hooves of cattle, rights to fair treat­ m ent being strangled by iron neckchains, and rights to life being dispensed with by the muzzle of a gun. He lived that period of history which people now say is so far in the past it should be forgotten . I say it should not be the subject of guilt- a wasted emotion- but should be the subject of honesty, a reminder of what has happened, in order that the thinking behind those events does not have a legitimate place in the present.

L E BRUTALITY OF THE FRONTIER was replaced by a kinder form of brutality, in the guise of high ideals of assimilation, forced social change and relocation of Aboriginals for their benefit, if not by their choice. Many of the settlements and reserves that were set up during the assimilation period just before World War II were established on behalf of the Government to raise beef. The many thou­ sands of head of cattle that were sold to feed the soldiers at the front came from the cheap labour of Aborigines that settlements provided. They were the labour force that fe d the front line, as well as making airstrips and being the Coastwatch . Many who worked in those camps at Moola Boola, Violet Valley and on private lease-holdings often had no house to sleep in, no swag and certainly never became wealthy from the years they laboured. The current Human Rights Commission Inquiry into the Removal of Aboriginal Children will, I hope, touch upon this aspect of the slavery of those who were put into these settlements through the policies and intentions of governments. I hope it will deal not only with the lives of the individuals that suffered under those policies, but also deal with the consequent effect on those who were left behind as well as those who were removed from their land, and put under pressure to distance them selve from their cultural and social ways of life by being forced to adopt new beliefs and new behaviours. In 1914 Paddy Djiagween m arried Grace Elizabeth Fagan-my grandmother-a Djaru woman from Halls Creek, and went to work for his Irish father-in-law in the East Kimberley, not only doing stock work but keeping his books and records in order. He had an ability to travel through the traditional lands of the many groups that still had possession of their country and were bound by their traditional laws, customs and practices. Whites ignored and violated Aboriginal Law and custom without penalty. This was not the case for Aboriginal people, especially one from the salt water, Goolarabulu side of the country. His approach, understanding and respect for protocols was maintained. Paddy Djiagween was bound by these laws and participated in ceremonies honouring his obligations and kinship responsibilities. As well as his responsibilities to Aboriginal law, Paddy Djiagween also carried out responsibil­ ities in the white world, holding a job for many years with the Western Australian Roads Board, prior to the declaration of Broom e as a town. He would go up and down the town on foot, or on bicycle, reading water and electricity m eters. I know his relatives at Halls Creek were very impressed to know that a blackfella could not only ride a horse, but also ride a bicycle. As one of the very few Aboriginal people working in Governm ent circles, he not only could look after his family with a sense of security, but use his influence to ensure that the broader community was also cared for, particularly ensuring that the Yawuru had a cultural reserve near Broome. He was the link between the bureaucracy and the people, creating a place where people could keep their ceremonial obj ects, free of interference from others. Mannix knew that to get change sometimes you had to go to the top. When God was busy, or the Pope unavailable, he could always go to the Premier. Sometimes he would skip the junior ranks of the hierarchy altogether and just talk to the Premier's wife. My grandfather had to wait for his moment to get to the top brass. He waited until the Queen visited Broome in 1963. He shook the white-gloved hand and said to her 'Why can't we have the same rights as the white man?' The Queen promptly agreed and indicated her wish that he be given full rights. My Grandfather went across to the Continental Hotel and demanded a beer. The barmaid was startled and refused, as the consumption of alcohol was forbidden to those without a dog tag of citizenship rights. An aide of the Queen was summoned and confirmed the citizenship rights of the old man. He sipped his beer with a sense of gratitude-due more to the achievem ent than thirst I feel. He was not a big drinker, but the right to drink was a liberty denied by govern­ m ent and statute, and like Mannix, he knew rights had to be struggled for and won. Paddy was a product of his time and his place, and so was Mannix. The crucible of the think­ ing of Mannix can be found in the struggle for Catholic emancipation in British history, in partic­ ular the freedom from discrimination and civil disabilities granted to the Roman Catholics of

V OLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 33 Britain and Ireland in a series of laws during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the Reformation, Roman Catholics in Britain had been harassed by numerous restrictions. In Britain, Roman Catholics could not purchase land, hold civil or military offices or seats in Parlia­ m ent, inherit property, or practise their religion freely without incurring civil penalties. A Roman Catholic in Ireland could not vote in Parliamentary elections and could readily be dispossessed of his land by his nearest Protestant relative. Paddy, had he known this history, would not have been surprised. L EEMANCIPATION AcT OF 1829 admitted Irish and English Roman Catholics to Parliament and to all but a handful of public offices. With the Universities Tests Act of 1871, which opened the univer­ sities to Roman Catholics, Catholic Emancipation in the United Kingdom was virtually complete. This was the context that Mannix and many other Irish Australians carried with them. Mannix saw the value of political mobilisation, public oratory and legislative change being necessary for the achievement of justice and an end to discrimination and the restriction of liberty based on sect or race. In all of it, education was a key element, and the right to a quality education that protected culture and religion was central. Like Aboriginal people, the Irish were treated as a race. Only for Aboriginal people, the treatm ent did not become legislated away in 1871. Instead my grandfather was born into a legislative system that looked at race, at skin colour, as a marker of freedom. Like the Irish centuries before, rny grandfather's people, all over Australia but especially in Western Australia, were denied the Common Law human rights of land ownership, of education, of religious practice, of language, of being able to front a bar and buy a beer with the money from a day's labour. More than 120 years after the Catholic emancipation, we are still await­ ing full and ungrudging recognition of common law rights, such as the right to maintain land owner­ ship and our native title. Mannix recognised this, and saw the truth of it. On Social Justice Sunday in 1940, he is quoted as saying, 'We have come here tonight to talk about social justice, or to listen to others talking about it. I wonder if anyone else in the hall who talked and thought of social justice thought that we owed something in the matter of social justice to the Aborigines of Australia. I believe in social justice, but I believe in it all round. I do know that the Aborigines of Australia would be able to furnish a very strong indictment against the present rulers and inhabitants of Australia and those who have gone before us.' Fifty years later, his words live on in black and white, losing nothing in accuracy, relevance or timing. But my grandfather thought not in terms of indictment or condemnation or of social justice or of emancipation. Those concepts fade into abstraction and disappear like smoke, out of reach. He lived his life and judged a person as a person, trea ting all as equals, and as good people until proven otherwise. There was no bitterness or hatred there, no spark of angry revolution, surly or real. He worked in his community with his people, through his law on his land, to show a way of survival, of adaptation to events he could not control or change. Bending but not breaking. He was always strong in his own position, certain of his authenticity, a lawman who followed his bush law and Catholi­ cism, finding a source of spirituality and a rationale for life in both. Adaptation to change did not mean acquiescence. He did not bow his head before force but looked it in the face, working to find way in which his stories, songs and law could survive, using his authority in law to negotiate constructive resolutions fo r the problems of massive social change, dispossession and dislocation. Much of this was internal, between different social groups moving into places like Broome and Beagle Bay. As a keeper of songs and ritual practice, as an Archbishop in traditional religion, he ensured that people in Broome could share in the ceremonies that travelled through that country, even when their own country was locked away from them by barbed wire and old gates. There are many stories to be told of those efforts that will have to wait till another time. I remember many things about my grandfather, and he taught me much that I am still learning to understand. Much that he said or did, however, was a puzzle to me, as I was too young, headstrong and brazen to understand.There were two key periods in my life when I sought his counsel, and managed to spend enough time with him to absorb some of his wisdom. The first was in the year before I was ordained. I was wrestling spiritually and personally on the threshold of a commitment to Holy Orders. I sought a year's leave, particularly to be with my grandfather and sit and learn from him to think in the country. Later, after a time as a priest in Port Keats, when the community was torn apart by grog­ fuelled riots, I came across to Broome to see him again, depressed and disillusioned, looking for answers to the sense of futility and frustration that was eating at me. I found him sitting in the

34 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 deep shade under the mango trees, a few old dogs at his feet and a billy can of cold sweet tea on a smoking fire near him. Before I got to open my mouth, he looked up and said, 'I knew you were coming. Something you worrying about. Listen now, the wind blows, tide comes in, sun rises, nothing changes, no one can take your land away from you. He's not bigger than you. He can't take the land.' I had nothing to say, and what I thought was important became irrelevant. Those words will always travel with me. They are part of me, of who I am, of how I live my life, and one day, I might fully understand them to the depths of their meaning. They are carved on his tombstone. In researching Mannix, I found this quote from Vincent Buckley: 'Mannix seems to have believed passionately in two principles which most people cannot fo l­ low in their own minds because in practice they contradict each other: the unitary principle that the "right" should be followed with all the resources and all the virtues you have; and the pluralist principle, that people are entitled to follow out the logic of their own initiatives without interference.' That to me was a crystallisation of my grandfather's philosophy in action. He followed the right cause, for his people, for his country, for his law, with all the resources and virtues that he had. He ensured through negotiations for areas of land both with the white system of land tenure and the traditional system of land tenure and native title, that people in that area had the room to follow out the logic of their own initiatives in law without interference. He made sure there was a place where people could keep their sacred objects, and practise their business, their law.Yet he also respected and allowed for the white man's logic, seeking not to interfere but to influence by example and honour, in the hope that one day sense would prevail.

E R THOSE oF us woRKING to spark a spirit of reconciliation and social justice in this country, the lessons of Daniel Mannix and Paddy Djiag­ ween still echo from the grave. We need to pursue with all our resources and virtues the unitary principles of justice, equality, liberty of the 'right'. We also need to commit ourselves to the pluralist principle, that all Aus­ tralians are entitled to follow out the logic of their own initiatives with­ out interference, leading to an acceptance and respect for difference, for self-determination, for our right to be bosses for ourselves. Finding the sweet point of balance between these principles is the challenge of reconciliation for Australia, and for each of us, in our own lives and in our own actions, just as it was for Daniel Mannix and Paddy Djiagween. For Mannix, thought and belief required action. In the present climate those committed to reconciliation and those committed to social justice face some challenges to the unitary and pluralist principles outlined above. In the present specific debate on native title and general debate on Aboriginal Affairs these principles are in tension on a number of fronts. There is a reluctance to recognise the communal, collective basis of Aboriginal society and culture. Instead, there is an insistence, for example, that native title should be reduced to an individual title, able to be sold, pawned or mortgaged in negotiations with other parties. On the same grounds, we are seeing a sustained attack on Aboriginal organisations and their leaders, with the view being expressed that funding should be channelled to the 'lowest common denominator', namely the indi­ vidual or the nuclear family unit. Our challenge and our opportunity is the redefinition of the Australian identity as we go to the anniversary of Federation. We need to understand that the Australian identity is fundamentally tied to the relationship with the indigenous people. We need to stand for the vision of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation,' A united Australia, which respects this land of ours, values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and provides justice and equity for all'. I know where Mannix would have stood if he were alive now. I know where my grandfather, Paddy Djiagween stands. The question is who will be standing with them. •

Patrick Dodson is Chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. He delivered the N ew­ man College Students' Club 1996 Daniel Mannix Memorial Lecture at Melbourne University on 4 September, 1996.

VoLUME 6 NuMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 35 Music

BRUCE WILLIAMS Machines of desire

T ,UNCNTI C>NC '""Nee "'" ,bout Richard Wagner, Tl1e Flying Dutchman, sea of his ego. Yet the text and the music the Australian Opera's Flying Dutchman Australian Opera, Sydney Opera House, offer something more ambiguous and centred on Barrie Kosky. Would he or August-September 1996. dramatically promising than that. wouldn't he? Was this to be another boo­ David Chesworth, The Two Executioners, Senta is attracted to the Dutchman, not and-hiss-attracting, Sydney-hated-it, Mel­ Chamber Made Opera. Malthouse, only because she sees herself in the role of bourne-loved-it, great-for-the-box-office Melbourne, August 1996. redeemer, but because she has heroic aspi­ production, like Nabucco? In the event, brought up young lady who is obsessed rations; she wants to join him in a world of audiences have remained polite, and other with the legend of the storm-tossed wan­ profounder being. If he is a demon, she will critics, in relief or disappointment, seem to derer. This Senta has a terrible time. Not be a saint: either is preferable to Daland's have welcomed a soberer Kosky. This is only is her father ready to sell her to a total world of getting and spending. As in later certainly not an 'irresponsible' or merely stranger, which is Wagner's idea, but she is Wagner, there is the ordinary world and the silly Dutchman, and what it offers is an put to work like a proletarian drudge and world of vision, and the heroic characters interpretation, as distinct from a stunt. not once, but twice, hurled to the ground by are visionaries. (Well, OK, maybe not Even so. Erik, her lover. These are (presumably) Siegfried.) But does this world exist, this The single most consequential element Kosky's ideas. The contemporary iconology finer plane1 To romantic sensibilities, the in the production is the set. In Wagner's of the female victim is freely drawn upon. question, however resolved, is not trivial; three-act version, the one usually played, The chorus gangs up as if to rape her, but the symbolic realm of the sea had a power­ Act I takes place on 'part of the Norwegian doesn't (twice). Senta does a lot of staring ful imaginative hold over many besides coast with steep and rocky cliffs in the out at the audience, wide-eyed, as if on the Wagner. (W .H. Auden's The foreground' and the set must somehow brink of something immeasurable and rather Enchafed Flood is a book about it.) accommodate two sailing ships. Act II is in appalling. a room in Daland's house large enough to At the same time, there seems to be A NOTHER WAY TO APPROACH the matter house a spinning chorus, and Act III throws another insistence on Senta as-ah, the is to listen: the finest passages of the score, the two worlds together, with both ships, dear old phrase-a socially progressive char­ such as the Dutchman's monologue ('Die the exterior of the house, and a cliff from acter. At the end, she refuses to take a dive. Prist ist um') and his scene with Senta later which the heroine can plummet into the Wagner's stage direction reads: in the same act speak, most have thought sea. All this, of course, nowadays, is usually with extraordinary eloqu ence, of these only suggested. In the glow of the rising sun, the transfig­ possibilities. To treat them as a sickly phan­ In Sydney, it is largely absent. Midway ured forms of the Dutchman and Senta, tasy, born of oppression, is to eliminate between stage floor and proscenium, clasped in each other's anns, are seen rising myth and substitute the standard socio­ designer Michael A.R. Anderson hangs a over th e wreck and soaring up into the sky. logical banalities of our time. I don't say it traditional box set, of the kind used in Ibsen can't be questioned or re-interpreted: I object and company-that drawing room, with Kosky's Senta leaps down from the draw­ to its being scorned. piano and potted palm. This one's propor­ ing room to the stage floor and, going fur­ There are several other ideas running tions taper towards the back, which pushes ther than Nora when she leaves her doll's around in this production, sometimes the effect closer to the expressionists. house, out of the fictive frame altogether. It colliding. Piet Mondrian and his theosophi­ Beneath the drawing room is an industrial is a fine coup de theatre, and a fine example cally-influenced designs are drawn upon workshop, represented by old sewing of our current belief that the best thing a for a visual motif and there is some guff in machines which must have been a property character from the past can do is to behave the programme about a 'dynamic conflict' assistant's joy to disinter. When the Dutch­ as if she hadall the advantages of the present. between this and Wagner's world. The flat man makes his fateful en trance in to This way of resolving the conflict, com­ planes of Mondrian are difficult to recon­ Daland's house, a section of the drawing bined with the lurid light and the dry ice cile with the singers' movement, which room floor and wall rends a part, and from and the absence of ships, is to turn the alternated between something akin to then on to the end of the evening, dry ice Dutchman into an option for Senta, an item expressionist distortion and good old oper­ and lurid light stand in for the world of the in her consciousness, a way out of the atic all-purpose knockabout, particularly Other. The room, the factory and what is Spinning Chorus. This is an impoverish­ noticeable inSenta's scenes with Erik. There not the room. ment. Certainly few would want to see a was much heavy-handed over-insistence. The central character is this interpreta­ production today which simply underlined Senta, for example, stared and stared and tion is not the Dutchman, who is deprived the resemblance between the character and stared at a lightbox with the inscrutable of a milieu, and consequently of much his creator, who also required a steady sup­ Mondrian motifs. dramatic substance. It is Senta, the well- ply of maidens to plunge into the infinite The Australian Opera and Ballet

36 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 Orchestra under conductor, Gabor Otvos, round a large space spouting Arrabal's written, it had some herbs: Franco ruled gave a straight account of the score with peculiar blend of the scatological and the Spain, and elements of Catholic culture, plenty of forward momentum. Perhaps it gaseous-metaphysical-shit with syntax. such as the sanctification of the martyred was Otvos, as well, who steered the singers The action of The Two Executioners mother, were ripe for Arrabal's raw, frontal towards the score's lyrical possibilities, and consists of two sadistic rituals, one off- and satire. It is not a question of the world's away from Wagnerian barking and pointing. the other on-stage. A woman denounces having radically improved, and such trian­ In this, they were assisted by a recessive box her husband to two executioners, who gles and quadrilaterals are still played out. set, like a wind-up gramophone hom, which promptly get down to work. In the ante­ It is a question- if you want to get into that produced a clear, warm acoustic for voices. room to the torture-chamber the woman territory-of finding a live connection with The orchestra was less fortunate; the Sydney waits, with her two daughters. One the audience's current experience, includ­ pit reduced the basses' surging scales in the dau g ht e r sides with ing the experiences they want to suppress. overture to a buzz and the timpani thudded mother, t h e As it is, the 'shocking' subject-matter shocks dully. Woe, thrice woe, unto the NSW other no-one; we are there to enjoy, if we can, the Department of Public Works. overt 'theatrical brilliance'. And covertly? Julian Gavin, as the Steersman, and Musing over these two productions, I Elizabeth Whitehouse, as Senta were both began to wonder. How is it that, with one or making their Australian Opera debuts. two exceptions, such as Kosky's own Gavin produced an appropriately young, Nabucco, these 'challenging' and 'radical' fresh sound, and obviously enj oyed treat­ productions are so easily absorbed nowa­ ing his big aria(' Mit Gewitterund Sturm') days by those who, on the face of it, as a parlour ballad. Beats clinging to the ought to be, if not shocked, at least rigging. Elizabeth Whitehouse sang Senta peeved? Several explanations come to with not the least trace of squall. There mind, one of them summed up in the is a German radiance in her voice, but celebrated mot of Mr Vincent its top notes are clear and forward, like Crummles: 'the public craves a novelty'. the Italians'. The combination made for Flicking through my AO program, exemplary Wagner singing. Senta's however, with its ads for Scotch and 'Ballad', cleanly attacked, actu ally luxury cars and high-end audio gear, it sounded like a ballad, and her line in the struck me that perhaps we might seek an great duet unfolded with rhapsodic free­ explanation in an unnoticed congruity dom. She was born to sing the Valkyrie between the audience and those who Sieglinde-in Adelaide, perhaps? currently tweak the texts. 'The Flying Dutchman without a These two productions banish the tran­ riveting portrayal of the protagonist is like scendent, neutralise, so far as possible, the Hamlet without the Prince' says the AO softer and more sociable emotions and program. An overstatem ent, fortunately. present human beings (i n Deleuze and Richard Paul Fink used his strong dark rebels, but by Guattari's phrase) as 'desiring m achines'. voice intelligently, but his production was the end of the Arrabal just sees people in that way, and the uneven, especially in the lower mid-range, play, the m other and production is faithful to the text. Kosky's and under pressure too many notes went h er ally have succeeded in bullying, hu­ interpretation, in omitting the sea and ridi­ sharp: the end of 'Die Prist ist um' brought miliating and manipulating the rebellious culing the ordinary, has the sam e effect. a wincing example. In fairness, another daughter into closing ranks with them Staging is elaborate and inventive: the range interpretation might have better served his against her father. This action is punctu­ of concern narrowly fashionable. singing. Relentlessly, h e was directed into ated with howls of pain from the torture Just so in the theatre of capitalism, in slow-motion 'expressionist' movem ent, chamber, and on a couple of occasions the advertising, the 'presentations', the which at times gave the impression of a mother goes in there, first to taunt her product launches and multimedia displays, man, two of whose thoracic vertebrae have husband, then to rub literal salt and vinegar all the resources of money and power and just collapsed, trying to reach a telephone. into his wounds. Man dies, technology are brought to bear on the In Melbourne the following week I daughter succumbs, blackout. desiring consumer whether what s/h e caught the revival of Chamber Made Opera's desires is a Rolls, a slimmer, younger body The Two Executioners, a prize-winning and C HAMBER M ADE LAVI SH their usual or some custard powder. TV audiences much-vaunted production. David meticulous and inventive theatrical skills have learnt to make an everyday disjunc­ Chesworth 's opera sets an adaptation of a on this scenario, and Chesworth's music tion between form and content, to enjoy play by Fernando Arrabal, who had his vogue (so far as I could ju dge on one hearing) the ads, without reference to what they are in the 60s and 70s with plays like Picnic on effectively articulated both the savagery of supposed to sell. the Battlefield an d The Architect and the the action and the phony lyricism of the Is something like that happening in Emperor of Assyria. (It was the period of three women . 'You m ust see it' said most of what are alleged to be sites of critical Genet and the elevation of the Marquis de m y theatrically-cultivated friends. culture? • Sade.) I recall a production of The Archi­ All right, I give up. What for? The piece tect, at the Pram Factory, in which Jon is psychologically rudimentary, and as one­ Bruce Williams is head of the School of Arts Hawkes and Max Gillies, both naked, ran eyed as The Brady Bunch. When it was and Media at LaTrobe University.

VoLUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 37 BOOKS

PETER CRAVEN Tall tales, but true?

The Conversations at Curlow Creek, David Malouf, C hatto & Windus, 1996. ISllN 0 70 11 65715 RRP $35.00 Night Letters, Robert Dcssaix, Pan Macmillan Austra lia, 1996. ISBN 0 732.9 085 1 5 HRl' $2.9 .95 ITmM' "'"'o""'' " tho Malouf in recent years has shown a m oment to pretend that there is fatal weakness for what might be some kind of new viability in the dubbed eith er the Myth of the non-fiction novel and to suggest that Statuesque Settler or the Australian the novel, that tired old nag, has run Magpie Myth. Call it what you will, its race. the result is High Fake Colonial. He George Steiner has been holding has been writing as though he forth about this lately, in the wake imagines he is Patrick White reborn of V.S. Naipaul's factional (as we to animate the m erely chronicled say in this country) A Way in the iconography of Manning Clark and World, and Sir Vidiadhar has de­ give it a third, novelistic, dimension. clared that making it up is a thing of Such an ambition should not be seen the past as far as he is concerned. as always already ridiculous just The debate is so tired it can sound because its fruits are so consistently like a postmodern pastiche of an rneagre or pompous; but it is an argument, though it is true that in ambition wildly out of kilter with recent years we have seen books Malouf's gifts. like Midnight in the Garden of Good The Conversations at Curlow and Evil which yield almost pre­ Creek is a book about the Irish and a cisely the same narrative satisfac­ book about the bush. The protago­ tion as the novel, and seen such nist, Adair, is a gentleman trooper, exact analogies in terms of artistic realisa­ numa tunst, decided to treat the Changi charged with the duty of h anging one tion as Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army. POW camp and the long shadow it cast over Carney, a bushranger, at dawn the next Although it is an argument which has to the lives of two m en. I twas an epical subject, m orning. Much of the concentration of the be rejected in the light of Proust and Boswell a Patrick White of a subject, and in an book and part of its not inconsiderable, if and all the rest of them, it has a certain extended trea tment David Malouf m ade it fitful, power com es from the fact that the seductive plausibility just at the m om ent, the focus for the drabbest performance of two m en exchange the roles of penitent and and that must have something to do with his career, a novel so lacking in the funda­ confessor as they commune almost mutely whatever is in the air. It's only a couple of m entals of narrative tension and dramatic through the clark night that is to precede the months since Naipaul's ambiguous version projection that it did not even compel death of one of them, but is poignant with of n ovelistic form was pipped at the post for 'fantasy' to the extent where the reader enigma fo r his executioner as well. Adair the Dublin IMPAC award by David Malouf's could tell the central characters apart in the has it in his head that the leader Carney Remembering Babylon, which must have mind's eye. Th e Great World seems to me served, the turbulent Irishman who has led surprised Malouf as much as it did every­ the most singular turkey of Australian him and other renegades into the bush and one else. N ow we have David Malouf's new literature in the last couple of decades but is himself now dead, is his adoptive brother book The Conversations at Curlow Cwek, that didn't stop it gaining a new, and one Fergus, the wild and golden boy he had which appears at almost the sam e moment suspects rather m ore middlebrow, audience loved as a child and who, through his as Robert Dessaix's unclassifiable Night for Malouf. magnetism and the m ystery of his fate had Letters. Reading them together is enough Remembering Babylon was a more occluclecl any possibility of Adair giving to m ake you credit George Steiner and endurable book, with sharply realised himself to his true love (or is she?), Virgilia. imagine that som e new tradition really has moments of poignancy, but it too was from Th e Conversations aL Curlow Creel< is cmn e am ong us. the novelistic them e park; a book about a a deeply cleliberatecl attempt to articulate David Malouf's interna tiona! reputation 'white' Aborigine, full of lame dialogue, the inchoate longing which som eone m ay began to consolidate at almost the time hi torical tushery and extended, imprecise, experience for the twin of his own sex, and that his Australian readers started to wonder lyrical interlude. The Russians and Central in this sense it is in the tradition of all about where h e was headed. In The Great Europeans have a smorgasbord of words for Malouf's work, stretching back beyond An World, David Malouf, our lyricist and this kind of thing. Suffice to say that David Imaginary Life to fohnno. Much of the

38 EU REKA STREET • O c TOBER 1996 Nijinsky's leap

This is just one of the ways But it is what we have done to animals of imitating music. (ourselves included) which has made me mad­ How can we do anything valuable i.e. insane, i.e. in shadow who are tied to meaning~ when I'm out in the sun. I leap, I jump, I stay still on top of the air. Can a musician do thaU And I see it, see him, I am working on vibrating at the top. that masl{ with its shoebrush moustache, And not coming down. that penis in astrakhan-

The men who interview me Ever since that day at this hospital don't believe I have been dancing away from him I am still at the top. They talk to me though I've always known only when I come down. he owned all the music. I am definitely here I've had to learn to dance without music. but I have not come down. Because I am on top Now I dance all the time, I will not leap further. They want me without sets, without ballet-master, to admit I am a dancer. without Chopin and Weber, in my old man's costume, Please, I am not a dancer, my fat body and shrunken legs. I am the man who drives the poleaxe and kills the animals. To be with God you must hear no music. I could exaggerate and say that everything smells of blood. Your beautiful imitations, But if everything did smell of blood believe in them. In the uterus we would eat only vegetables. it is dark, it is a place of pure sound, We are not hardened, of eternal adjacence. Let no light in we are not habituated, and then you can leap. we can love animals. Peter Porter poetry-stained mist of Adair's brooding is constitute his sense of his past, though be peculiarly burdened because he is intent impressionistic in its representation and these are as much a matter of epiphanic on doing things he is not good at. It is like affecting in its poignancy. 'phrasing' as the overriding noche oscura of listening to a light tenor trying to sing What most obviously flaws the book is the present. As with so much even of baritone. One consequence of this is that what gives it its residual dramatic shape, its Malouf's finest writing, we dangle some­ The Conversations at Cur low Creek is full realism. Two men are shut up together the where between a highly adept writing which of the kind of summarising link pieces night before one is to be hanged. The refers rather than presents-a kind of which might grace a 19th century novel but dominant time of the novel is real time. m etawriting which resembles creative what they lead up to are not-generally Adair has questions he desperately wants criticism not in the manner of Proust but speaking-scenes of decisive action or an answer to, yet-as if in fealty to nothing like a miniaturisation of that effect-and realisation. but his creator's lack of confidence with moments of realisation, poignant in their This is one of those novels equipped dialogue-he fumbles them . pathos, that cannot bear the weight of with a vulgarly workable plot which exists Much of the inner action of the book is emotion that is put on them . affectively in the tesserae of its haunting in fact taken up with the flashbacks which David Malouf's fiction seems to m e to moments. The whole of it is drea m-like

V oLUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 39 because it is vague though the part have a kind of extra-literary context. Everyone in might as well be guides across the waters, h alf-comprehended plangency, like the the literary world has known fo r some time psychopomps, call them what you will. lumpish translation of a symboli t poem. that Robert Dessaix is HIV-positive, and Their stories di stract him fro m the mere This sense of irresoluteness infects the this is indeed the donnee of this fictional­ fact of mortality though they are every­ atmospherics of the whole book, its half ised memoir, in which a figure with a point­ where preoccupied with the blood and pain instantiation of a world where the wail of to-point correspondence to the writer learns and sparkle of the quest for love, generally the banshee and the black tracker's sense of that he will contract AIDS, tells his part­ imaged through a female romancer, some­ impending doom are cognate. It works too ner, and then sets off journeying around times a courtesan and always presented in the strangely evoked intimacy of two N orthern Italy. He travels as the young and both 'fabulously' and fabulistically. Some m en who do not touch but who seem obsessed travel, for the sake of it. of these stories come from the mouth of one fortuitously to hold each others' hearts in Professor Eschenbaum, a darkly the palm of their hands. intellectual German who may be thenar­ This is not, for what it's worth, the rator's Doppel-ganger and may be som e long awaited hom o-erotic novel people­ avatar of Aschenbach in Death and Venice. rather vulgarly-imagine David Malouf Somewhere way at the back of Night may one day write. It is a novel about love, Letters there is an intellectual scaffolding perhaps a love deeper than eroticism , that that is dim ly Jungian and certainly has some affinity with that epiphany of agnostically religious though all of this is the children in the apple garden at the end very tricksily and remotely insinuated of Fovr Quartets; but somehow that through a narrative that is both candid archetypal M alouf apparition- most about its spiritual seeking and extrem ely articulate, if most fragile, in An Imaginary The letters he writes home are presum­ skilled in its own co-ordination. Life-is made to consort with a world of ably addressed to his partner, though a Night Letters was edited by Drusilla bread and mud and hangman's rope. slightly arch N abokovian preface says they Modjeska, and is in the tradition of The So Conversations at Curlow Creek is have been edited by one Igor Miazmov, a Orchard (and to a lesser degree Poppy before not quite David Malouf's Kiss of the Spider name in which one smells lower depths, if it) in that it explores the interstices between Woman in the vicinity of the m ys tery of the not Russian puns further out of reach, from fictional and di scursive writing with a bush and the ghost of Patrick White, even if this former student of that literature. marvellous spaciousne sand freedom, yet it does partake of the faiblesse that Night Letter takes theform of a journey never makes the experiment (the experi­ su ch strange couplings might which may b e an analogu e to, or a ence) seem forced or m echani cal. suggest. postmodern shortcut for Dante's cammin­ This returns us, by necessity, to Steiner's and Dante is a con stantly argued-with original suggestion that it is in the fi ctional R OBERT D ESSA IX1S NiGHT L ETTERS might presence the narratoris reading on his way­ treatment of non-fictional material that as well come from nowhere. Dessaix's first but he is coupled with the Sterne of the things are being realised. book, A Mother's Disgrace, was the unusual Sentimental Journey who is one of the This seems to me at once incorrigible autobiography of the man best known as inventors of the modern idea of travel as and nea rly useless as a dictum, but it ap­ the presenter of the ABC's Bool

40 EUREKA STREET • OcTO BER 1996 jewel-like precision, a mmwture of that AIDS by spending most of its time talking wispy, very sophisticated book, never afraid most beguiling of all forms, the 'anatomy'­ about other things, but then returning, in to parade its own naivety. • the book which fits no box but exfoliates its snatches, and with great simplicity, to the own in series. But let's not be too arty about central apprehension of loss. It deserves the Peter Craven wrote the Australian chapter this. Night Letters should be a classic. It readership of everyone who cares about of the Oxford Guide to Contemporary dramatises the plangency of the tragedy of that terrible subject. It is also an errant, Writing, to be published in October.

Books: 2 David McCooey What I Have Chosen I Have Chosen The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Peter Porter, (ed.), Oxford University Press, Australia, 1996. ISBN 0 19 553376 3 RRP $39.95

LEFIRST ANTHOLOGY of modern ,..------, who had established reputations poetry I can rernember having an by the mid-1950s. This meant impression on me was A. excluding Rosemary Dobson but Alvarez's The New Poetry, which not Gwen Harwood (both of whom happened to include work by were born in 1920). Heseltine's Peter Porter. As an anthology, exclusion of Dobson on such a ba­ the force of The New Poetry was, sis is patently absurd, especially as by the early 1980s, well and truly she continues to write, what some spent. Nevertheless, it had an may say is her be t work, today. effect on me, a teenager in Subiaco Porter avoids that kind of beginning to learn how to write ageism (I can't think of another poetry. Anthologies have a way word for it), but nevertheless sways of hanging around in unexpected towards the younger poets; those ways. They may, like angels, be not only writing after the war, but messengers of the divine dressed who were born after it (eight born in tattered clothes-a faded cover, in 1949 alone). This may partially a broken spine. On the other hand, account for the significant omis­ anthologies are yet one more ,______. sions of Douglas Stewart, William example-like the tower of Babel or our home are two recent opposing volumes: Hart-Smith, Harold Stewart and Nan inability to conceive infinity-of our fa llen Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann's McDonald. Porter includes 118 poets, about nature. In the realm of ideal forms, some- Australian Poetry in tbe Twentieth two-thirds of whom are men. With 265 where between anthem and anthropology Century, and John Tranter and Philip Mead's pages of text, there is an average 2.25 pages lies anthology. The Penguin Bool< of Modern Australian of text for each poet. This seems pretty Increasingly, poets have been cho en as Poetry (both 1992). The latter volume' much to be the norm, rather than the excep­ anthologists, and Australia is no exception. most controversial element was the inclu- tion, these days. (Anthologies with titles Tom Shapcott, Rodney Hall, David sian of the complete works of that never- like 12 Poets are rare today, and Les Murray's Campbell, Les Murray and Vincent Buckley born, long-dead fetch, 'Ern Malley' (who got recent Fivefathers is surely predicated on have all been anthologists. Here, one of more pages than his co-Frankensteins, James his reputation and the fact that the work is Australia's best and best-known poets, the McAuley and Harold Stewart). intended for non-Australian readers). expatriate Peter Porter, has been given this But as his blunt introduction shows, Inclusiveness has many positives, but delicate and thankless job. For in an age Porter holds no truck with camps, ideolo- one drawback (possibly the only drawback) suspicious of the hegemonic or the canoni- gies, or parties. This is an anthology is that the individuality, both what is cal, the anthology has become yet one more representative of nothing less or more than singular and what is representative, of a site of competing ideologies. Examples of the anthologist. For Porter, 'Ern Malley's' poet's voice is unlikely to be expressed in the political nature can be seen in Issue 36 poems are excluded only by virtue of their such confines. of PN Review, a response to The Penguin original publication date, since he has taken This becomes all the more pressing an Book of Contemporary British Poetry, or 'modern' to m ean anything after 1945. In issue when the anthologist declares himself Seamus Heaney's broadside poem written this he is more inclusive than, say, Harry to be uninterested in 'historical principles'; in protest at being included (a rare thing) in Heseltine's 1981 Penguin Bool< of Modern that is, in choosing poems considered an anthology of British verse. Closer to Australian Verse, which excluded poets representative of an individual or group, or

V OLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 41 poems recognized by critics or poets or Although a number of anthology pieces are this is the tart, unavoidable agency of death their authors as 'significant' for va rious chosen (such as McAuley' 'Because' and ('Death, you 're more successful than reasons. For Porter, this is the anthologist's John Manifold's 'The Tomb of Lt John America', as John Forbes puts it), and fi nally fatal flaw. Faced with the need to choose, Learmonth, AIF') Porter is true to his stated there are perhaps a couple too many poems 'the anthologist might be tempted to fall aim of not choosing poems simply for his­ featuring cats. All these aspects come back on fame, notoriety, fashion and other torical reasons. With Judith Wright, for together in Porter's own 'The Sadness of indicators not synonymous with instance, it is almost a relief not to have the Creatures'. But surely Porter was chosen n merit', he writes grimly. 'Woman to Man' or 'South of My Days' for this very reason. The anthology is m eant served up again. But then, one must ask, to break up previous notions of what modern £ RTER BELIEVES THAT his refusal to make why 'Because' and not those poems? The Australian verse is through a choice which is, his selection on 'historical grounds' is the significance of poems which have been if not eccentric, then at least highly personal. chief principle which differentiates him important to earlier anthologists, critics One purpose of an anthology- however from the numerous other anthologists of and readers is that they trace out a figure of eccentric-is to make connections; and to modern Australian poetry. But what does Australian poetry in the past, helping us to make connections previously unseen is this mean? 'I have endeavoured to produce define it today. Porter is not a Martian; no probably the primary strength of the an on-the-spot survey of Au tralian poetry matter what he intends he cannot pretend eccentric anthology. Given Australia's 'New over the past fifty years almost as a Martian to not know what has been chosen in the World' status (and all the attendant dialec­ dropped suddenly in the midst of Austral­ past. This may seem facile, but in any case tical imagery of Australia as both Edenic ian society might do' (from 'The Group' to Porter disagrees, and so his anthology must and hellish) there is an emphasis on place Martian poetry in one move?). The consci­ succeed or fai l through the force of his and on the Fall, which produces just such entious Martian, Porter explains, would go editorial personality, the strength of his new connections. The first poem of the to the library and read all the relevant aesthetic judgement. In many cases this anthology, R. D. FitzGerald's 'Eleven Com­ books making his or her (I like that bit, pays off. There are a number of les er­ positions: Roadside', seems a strikingly what about 'its'?) selection on what 'seemed known poems which startle and impress appo ite expression of the settler-Austral­ outstanding'. This metaphor is interesting, this first-time reader, such as Laurence ian's condition. The poem works through a for it highlights Porter's expatriation, his Collinson's 'Night and Day', Alex Skovron's contrast between the pa storal landscape dual insider-outsider statu s. Another para­ 'Sentences', or Lisa Jacobson's 'Flight Path'. without and the interior landscape within: doxical move is Porter's claim that he Porter claims that 'the anthology has chooses what is outstanding 'whether it good millennia! credentials', which i to having said this much I know and regret fitted in with my tastes or not' (p . 7). To me, say he chose poems published in collec­ my loss this is akin to saying 'I chose what was tions as recently as last year. However, whose eye falls short of my love for just good-irrespective of any extrinsic charac­ there are some significant late-bloomings this land, teristics-but did not rely on my taste to that seem to have gone unnoticed. Rosemary too turned within for the small flower in make that choice'. Dobson and Vivia n Smith are bo th the moss In fact, I think Porter's program (not to represented, but their late work (w hich and birds my father all but brought to his have a program) is a sound one, it simply is often strikingly spare and hand . cannot be argued as a pure one. Porter's plangent) is not included. desire to avoid polemics is laudable, though More overt is Lehmann's 'The Spring he is not the first Australian anthologist to T.HE AVOWEDLY M ART IAN anthology Forest' which begins 'Each year we get avoid being parti pris (as he terms Gray and invests heavily in whether or not the alien's further away I from the Spring Forest, I the Lehmann's anthology). Vivian Smith is an per anality will illuminate or dominate original text'. The dualism in both poems example of a passionately non-partisan the choice of poems. To me, numerous relates to the sense of the inescapable anthologist, willing to include poems by poems seem notably Porteresque. For pressure of Australia as a place as well as an poets who (as anthologists) did not include instance (and I am certainly not complain­ idea, no matter how far poets should range his. Porter is certainly not lacking in self­ ing about this) there is an emphasis on wit. in form, content and style. We see this in confidence with regard to hi mission, This is seen (to choose just a handful) in the false innocence of William Grano's willing to include poems that the poets poems by Jennifer Strauss, Barry Humphries, evocative 'The Way We Live Now', which themselves would like to disregard, such as Clive James, William Grono, Laurie Duggan, distils in under thirty lines something of one by Kevin Hart which was excluded Stephen Edgar, and not one but two excellent Perth which remains current: 'Yes, we like from Hart's New and Selected Poems of sestinas by Evan Jones, as well as R. A. it here. I Sometimes the shrewdest of us la t year. Inevitably, I am reminded of Simpson's satirical bash at the form, 'All find the time, I after gardening, before Porter's poem, often taken as his apologia, Friends Together'. This i very fine indeed television, I sipping beer on enclosed veran ­ 'What I Have Written I Have Written'. (though it is a shame that no space was dahs, I to speculate on the future'. We see it Of course, numerous anthologists make found for any of John Clarke's excellent too in the traditional figures of place which the 'quality' claim. Gray and Lehmann in parodies) . The readiness to include expatri­ inform Peter Skrzynecki's 'Wallamumbi', fact make the very same one in their intro­ ates is also welcome, though Humphries' which is one of a number of poems duction. However, the proof of the putting 'A Threnody for Patrick White' must surely concerned with the vast changes engen­ is in the reading. And there is much to be an instance of extrinsic forces coming dered by settlement; from 'Seasons of admire in Porter's collection. Indeed, the into play. In addition, the Porteresque is inheritance and shadows of voices I Haunt most pedestrian thing about this anthol­ seen in the mixing of registers, in the interest its hills like a recurring drea m ' to 'Acres he ogy (q uite properly) is its introduction. in music and in the satirical. Added to all of ploughed became chapters in a book I He

42 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 never wrote'. Imagining Australia as 'the A Threshold For My Son ungazetted paradise', Peter Rose asks us to 'Name me a republic I rousing and ringing You touch the door now, trembling on its hinge I as a coital cry, I whose vivid flora I no colonizing nose has penetrated' ('Imagin­ between vague adolescence and the dark ing the Inappropriate'). In the main, as John exciting world an adult stumbles in. Kinsella, Philip Hodgins and Anthony Law­ (Those are not monsters: they are only gumtrees, rence demonstrate, the pastoral theme in so take it easy.) You are seventeen modern Australia is more often than not anti-pastoral. And here things begin to and nothing is mysterious about that, connect. The convict wind beneath the except that all maturing somehow is door which FitzGerald traces in 'The Wind a journey through an unmapped, shadowy park: at Your Door' (the second poem in the black trees, bird-cries, lugubrious pond anthology) is walled-up in the convict-made but nothing you can firmly recognize. bricks of a colonial house in Andrew Sant's 'Cover-Up'; it is a necessary condition of You do not know what teams you're going to play, being Australian: nor even what the local rules may be, .. .I'll keep them sealed off, not only for but play you must, at times heroically practical purposes and yet on other days just getting by: but also from better society. I think of the having enough of the ball to earn your place. brogue of the Irish and the witty cockney tale-spinners exiled Today I spied an eagle floating slowly in Tasmania along the ridge, taking a bird's-eye-view behind the hugely substantial indifference of luck below; it hung at ease of distance; on the blue air, and yet was governed by and I am walled in, a keen listener amongst a fine-tuned observation of the world; the dumb bricks, with windows wide-open to admit the fresh breeze, the that's the balance to be striven for, sail-raising westerlies. a cool, difficult strategy, defining life at the high, blue behest of happiness.

W HAT THE POEMS in this anthology Walk tall, dear son. show is not simply the worldliness of Aus­ tralian poetry (as if that were ever in real Go straight ahead in joy doubt), but how open windows onto other making the grassy landscape all your own. times and places 'admit the fre h breeze' as well as their own cover-ups. Amid all this, Chris Wallace-Crabbe Australian poets are still keen listeners to their own sealed-off histories 'blasted I by a sized chunks of oeuvre. It is certainly a definitive statement about a national lit­ hell-fire that could bake a million bricks'. shame that no biographical notes (such as erature, or even for a CAT-scan of the an­ One point about editorial principles to those in Susan Lever's Th e Oxford Book of thologist's literary personality, but for one be addressed is the weighting given to each Australian Women's Verse) were included. more sentence with which to make a little poet. Whilst most get two or three pages, Inevitably, one can quibble with Porter's more sense of all the other sentences in the some (as is right) are given more promi­ choice about individual poems; why Chris description of what literature is, or what nence. Despite being reckoned as first Wallace-Crabbe's 'Th e Fall of the West' poetry is, or what Australian poetry is. It is among equals in the introduction, Les rather than 'Puck Disembarks'? Why A. D. a fallen genre, but then its readers are fallen Murray does not get the lion's share in Hope's 'Hay Fever' rather than' Ascent into subjects. And so good anthologies are judged terms of pages. David Malouf is given the Hell'? But if variety is what Porter strives (pa ce Larkin) not so much on being true and most space mostly becau e of the length of for, then that is what he achieves. In any kind, but rather on being not untrue or 'The Crab Feast' (not a poem for those who case, quibbling over individual poems is to unkind. We should be thankful that Peter don't like seafood). Second to that is Peter miss the point about anthologies. We should Porter has undertaken so generously this Ro e. In addition to the generation noted not ask too much of anthologies; no single thankless task. And despite the anthology's above, there are no poems by Vera Newsom, collection can define for us our national insistence on how-we-write-now, perhaps R. F. Brissenden, Diane Fahey, Vicki poetry. Neither are anthologies like there is a young person in the future just Viidikas, Margaret Scott, Geoffrey Dutton, governments, to be elected or thrown out of waiting to read its slightly-foxed pages • 110, John Foulcher, and Peter Kocan. Still, office every few years. We n eed good 118 poets is a considerable number, and one anthologies, just as we need good poets, as David McCooey's Artful Histories: Modern wonders what a reader wholly unfamiliar part of a som etimes-harmonious some­ Australian Autobiography (CUP, 1996) was with Australian poetry (a Martian reader times-discordant commonwealth of letters. recently awarded the NSW Premier's perhaps) would make of all these bight- One does not read anthologies for a Literary Award in literary criticism.

V OLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 43 POETRY

PETER GOLDSWORTHY

1. Glass

Inside my father's shed I notched and snapped a hollow cane of glass. Softened in a yellow flame transparency became opaque: Chemistry a glowing, drooping stall<, syrup at its golden tip.

I bent and stretched and blew without inhaling once, wasting many pipes 3. Water until the molten toffee cooled It turned saltwater into fresh, and hardened into crystal removing taste so utterly shapes, and I had breathed that there was nothing, an apparatus, a still of glass. not even tastelessness, an absence only, lilze the taste of water in the night inside a mouth that's warm and dry and still confused by 2. The Still sleep, or like the taste of glass itself, Ingredients were placed by measure the zero flavour of the vessels inside the blown globe at left-hand end, that we keep our water in, like subjects in a sentence yet to come, that give our water shape. a glass machine whose moving parts were heat and vapour, flowing left to right, Stand and cool, then add the way we think words on a page. a pinch of salt for flavour. I still prefer the drinking water The cooling column that we pipe into our homes, was a waist, that splashes, stereo, a hollow from faucets when we twist narrows, the volume knobs, that faintly an equals hinge tastes of river mud and metal, between two halves like the heavy water of an equation. that we mostly are ourselves inside these baggy, greasy Beyond this bottleneck waterproof wineskins, the sum or minus distillate squeezed out impure and unclear. in pure and simple form, the right-hand side of declaration, arrived at less by magic than by see-through logic: a wand of glass, a method that worked. Or didn't work for reasons that worked.

44 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1996 4. Alcohol Once I thought booze 6. Ether proof of God: The recipe for cooking ether two carbon atoms I've forgotten. One level tablespoon and two common gases, of concentrated nitric acid fermentable from anything at hand. plus heaped teaspoonfuls Why should such simple stuff of poisonous powders. The names are gone; work magic in the mind~ It seemed an obvious gift, from that short night a rain that fell from heaven. I remember only this: (The rain that falls in heaven.) drops of ether gathering at the distal ice-cooled tip Clearer and colder than water, like tears, like even clearer its icy heat, all distillate, filled moonshine, swelling till my veins with pickling spirit, detachment weight, drowned me from the inside out. then falling, falling, gone; vanished into dreamy vapour Surf's up, I said at school. before they hit the bench My drinking friends came round. under which I slept.

5. Bromine Bromine is my favourite 7. Acid element, period. There is a big name acid, Its crimson fumes corrode the corks hydrofluoric, which eats glass. and eat the rubber bungs For my last trick I distilled until the first red-purple drops that high and mighty octane, gather in the cooling column standing just outside the shed, lilze ruby grapes, unpressing in safety goggles made of plastic, backwards out of wine, holding nothing but my breath, in time-lapse, fast-reversed, as fumes swirled in the belly of the flask, like juices then fa lling into water digesting their own stomach, from the glassy neck as heavy and uncrushable Can a sentence, having moved as m ercury, quickcrimson from left to right, move and semi-solid, sealed safely, right to left again, taking back unexplosively, beneath the surface its meaning without trace~ of the clearer lighter fluid. If so, the constant tug of form and content comes to this: style turning on substance, my cut glass snake swallowing its tail, self absorbed, erasing all it ever was.

V oLUME 6 NuMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 45 BooKs: 3

PETER STEELE

Found in the labyrinth

A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, HarperCollins, London 1996. ISB 0 00 255006 7 RRP $45

Two IMAGES. In the first, Christ en- Manguel reminds us in his spry, elegant done his home-made hive proud. counters a woman caught in adultery by and learned volume, the whole writing A History of Reading is divided into people who do not wish her well, or him. affair may have begun in equally pragmatic twenty-two chapters, the first of which is Challenged as to whether they should go by circumstances. Incised, then baked, clay autobiographical, and the last a playful the book and stone her to death, he first could carry the good word about a dozen adumbration of what an in-principle inter­ says nothing and writes on the dusty earth, goats or a rack of wine-jars, and none of this minable Complete History of reading would then checkmates them with a challenge, pointed towards meditation or lyric be like. Some of the chapters h ave then writes in the dust again. In the second, eloquence. unsurprising topics: 'Learning to Read', 'Be­ momentsbeforetheendoftheDivineCom- But Manguel would never have begun ing Read To', 'The Shape of the Book'. Some edy, Dante says that he has seen 'all things his book if clay had the last word. He writes bid for a different attention: 'Reading Shad­ bound in a single book by love/ of which as someone for whom reading has obvi- ows', 'Ordainers of the Universe', 'Stealing crea tion is the scattered leaves.' ously been, in more than one sense, an Books', 'Forbidden Reading'. Dryden, cocky These images might be the terminals engagement-both challenge and reward. as ever, remarked of Chaucer that he was 'a between which all reading runs. The first Wittgenstein thought that a form of Ian- rough diamond; and must be polished ere represents an absolutely private negotia- guage is a form of life, and one 'form' of he shines': Manguel is adept at taking the tion. Preachers and other pious conjectur- language is the life-form of reading- hence rough diamonds of the reading experience ers have guessed at what Christ wrote, but the point of being prepared to do it slowly. and bringing out their shining planes. nobody knows. Writer and reader are iden- A History of Reading has on its jacket a The book shows throughout the work­ tical, there; the matter is arcane, perhaps reproduction of Gustav Adolph Hennig's ing of a strong and interested mind which runic, but still, somehow, formidable. By 'Reading Girl' (c. 1828), and a hundred and can close with its materials in a variety of contrast, Dante's vision, though singular, is sixty-eight years later she is still intent on ways. Here, for instance, are two passages, of the cosmos, and the cosmos in its coher- the book in her hands, her whole figure the first from 'The Shape of the Book,' the ence. He is mediating something not only both serene and braced, a donor and recipi- second from 'The Book of Memory'. public but universal- and better still, ent of meaning. Dante would have under- In the mid-1980s, an interna tiona! group of benign. stood her immediately. North American archeologists excavating Our own reading may eschew the reli- There are plenty of studies of books, the h ugeDakhleh Oasis in the Sahara found, gious, but it will certainly move up and their readers and their readings; indeed, the in the corner of a single-storey addition to down a scale between the two conditions. gigantesque and frequently pathological a fourth-century house, two complete To open a private letter, especially one of discipline of literary studies is, and always books. One was an earl y manuscript of any consequence, is to draw near to the one: has been, just that. Manguel is not much three political essays by the Athenian to imagine oneself a newsreader on televi- interested, h ere at least, in either literary philosopher !socrates; the other was a four­ sion is to approximate the other. We adapt to criticism or literary theory. He is part- year record of the financial transactions of the gradations between these extremes with archaeologist, part-anthropologist, a 'reader' a local estate steward. This accounts boo k varying degrees of skill, some of which is all of reading, whether it is bedded down firmly is the earliest complete exa mple we have of but instinctive, some cued-in by social in an historical moment- Augustine in a a codex, or bound volume, and it is much instruction, some learned, if at all, only gardeninMilan,inAugustAD386;Anthony like our paperbacks except for the fact th at through a lifetime's patience, discipline, and Comstock founding the Society for the Sup- it is made not of paper but of wood. Eac h mustered passion. pression of Vice in New York in 18 72- or is wooden leaf, fiv e by thirteen inches and I tell my students that if they cannot rippling as though timelessly through the one-sixteenth inch thick,is bored with four read slowly they cannot read, and only time ages. No single page of his book would have holes on the left side, to be bound with a will show whether they believe this. About been possible without wide and intelligent cord in eight-leaved ignatures. Since the some tasks, they should of course ignore it, scanning of earlier writings, but very rarely accounts book was used over a span of four as in the reading of street directories or the did I feel that things were being laboured. years, it had to be 'robust, portable, easy to consulting of Hansard, where speed is not An Irish proverb claims, 'A rambling bee use, and durable.' That anonymous read ­ only tolerable but laudable. And as Alberto brings home the honey', and Manguel has er's requirements persist, with slight

46 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 circumstantial variations, and agree with should exist entirely of nouns; a more radi­ in his History, where visible representation mine, sixteen vertiginous centuries later. cal group, who might be called the post­ is met by skilled interpretation. In a deserv­ A text read and remembered becomes, nounalists, proclaim that more apt edly celebrated expression, Seamus Heaney in that redemptive rereading [scil., by heart behaviour still would be to drop language speaks of one's 'gleaning the unsaid off the in Sachsenhausen concentration camp], like entirely and have people simply wave things palpable', and Manguel knows how to do the frozen lake in the poem I memorized so at one another. Swift was fascinated by that kind of gleaning. long ago-as solid as land and capable of linguistic behaviour all his life, whether 'in Perhaps there are as many different ways supporting the reader's crossing, and yet, at the flesh' or in those lingual substitutes, of reading as there are readers: certainly, the same time, its only existence is in the books; and Manguel, a much more serene there are few limits to the ways we can mind, as precarious and fleeting as if its writer than Swift, shares his sense that regard others as readers. Shakespeare's Julius letters were written on water. speaking, writing, book-making and read­ Caesar has reason to say of the Cassius who ing always bear the trace of our curious is conspiring against him, 'He reads much;/ The first of these might find a place in a nature. The chapter entitled 'The Book Fool', He is a great observer, and he looks/ Quite materialist history of writing-except for an expression from Sebastian Brant's splen­ through the deeds of men.' Johnson, the words 'and agree with mine, sixteen did The Ship of Fools, has much to say challenged as to his handling of a particular vertiginous centuries later,' which both about the uses of spectacles-for instance, book, retorts, 'No, Sir, do you read books gather the enterprise into an individual 'By the end of the fifteenth century, eye­ through?' Browning's cynical bishop squares consciousness and give an estimation of glasses were sufficiently familiar to himself towards an interlocutor with, 'You, time which would make no sense in a symbolize not only the prestige of reading for example, clever to a fault,/ The rough materialist account. The second passage but also its abuses'-butas usual Manguel's and ready man that write apace,/ Read some­ has the air of lyric threnody, but the mention angle of regard is that of somebody eager to what seldomer, think perhaps even less.' of Sachsenhausen holds it all down in time know not just what helps us to read, but Manguel has many examples of people much and place, as a nail holds a palm on wood. what makes us run. If, in some display of given to the reading game, whether in Years ago, Manguel wrote The Dictionary various creatures, each had its insignia, and solitude, in the company of a few, or in of Imaginary Places, and the present book the human being had a book, what would public. An example of the last is Dickens, also knows how to lodge the flighty mind in this say of us? who toured as a reader: palpable circumstances, whose own identi­ As it happens, the first three pages in A ties may be appraised in more ways than History of Reading which bear illustra­ The first extensive tour, beginning in one. tions show eighteen portrayals, ancient and Clifton and ending in Brighton, comprised In the third of Gulliver's voyages, he modern, of readers about their business, some eighty readings in more than forty comes across an academy in which there is and Manguel launches his own work with towns. He 'read in warehouses, assembly a group of professors who believe that since brief reflections on each of these. This sets rooms, booksellers, offices, halls, hotels all that exists is made up of things, language a precedent for what happens many times and pump rooms.' ... Dickens had spent at

VoLUME 6 NuMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 47 disk or disc? Sore At Heart alright or all right? Knowing that the name of the god reversed uninterested or disinterested? (none of your glib palindromes) different to, different from or is also the state of heart and loins different than? when jolzes and hope go out the window,

DON'T BE CONFUSED we nevertheless honour this of all GET THE GUIDE equivocating deities because he/she shows how and why THE CAMBRIDGE we once were tempted to break cover

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Peter Porter

least two months working on his delivery friend. But it puzzled him a good deal.' The and gestures ... But, as one of his biogra­ Anatomy of Melancholy must have puzzled phers notes, 'he did not act out the scenes, almost everybody who ever read it, whether but suggest them, evoke them, intimate or not they grasped what it is about; God them. He remained a reader, in other words, knows what Moorhouse could cling to, and not an actor. No mannerisms. No arti­ tossed on its wild seas. fice. No affectations. Somehow he created Of reading in general, I like three of OJ (DINNY) O'HEARN his startling effects by an economy of means Auden's sayings. 'As readers, most of us, to MEMORIAL FELLOWSHIP which was unique to himself, so it is truly some degree, are like those urchins who as if the novels themselves spoke through pencil moustaches on the faces of girls in Applications are invited for this him.' After the reading, he never acknowl­ advertisements'; 'Pleasure is by no means fellowship, avai lable to a writer yet edged the applause. He wou ld bow, leave an infallible critical guide, but it is the least to become estab lished. The the stage and change his clothes, which fallible'; 'There are people who are too successful applicant will have the would be drenched with sweat. intelligent to become authors, but they do opportunity to write for a month at not become critics'. Manguel would, I think, the Australian Centre, the University The always-formidable Hobbes says in agree with each of these, even the third, for of Melbourne, during first or second Leviathan, 'As men abound in copiousness all its contemporary smack of lese-majeste. semester 1997. of language, so they become more wise, or He is not out of touch with the tragic, as is more mad than ordinary.' I fear that he is illustrated by a photograph of the burning Salary will be $30, 130 per right, and something of the same might be of the books in Berlin on the lOth of May, an num pro rata. said of the copiousness of books them­ 1933, that piece of fire-worship which was Applications, including a cu rri cu­ selves: it is a thoroughly superstitious also spiritual self-immolation. But the tone lum vitae, an indication of current notion that the more one has read the more of much of the History is caught in another projects and a sa mple of writing, insightful one will be. Manguel too is aware photo, in which the eighty-year-old Colette should be sent to: that anything so all-too-human as reading is displayed on the 'bed-raft' where she read is likely to have its funny side. He quotes and wrote, this time with a birthday cake Ms Rhyll Nance Samuel Butler's reference to one William which seems to be entirely aflame. Handling The Austral ian Centre Sefton Moorhouse who 'imagined he was time, handling food, and handling light­ 131 Barry Street, Ca rlton, being converted to Christianity by reading not bad, in a history of reading. • VIC 3053 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which Tel (03) 9344 7021 he had got by mistake for Butler's Analogy Peter Steele SJ has a Personal Chair at the Fax (03) 9347 7731 [of Religion} on the recommendation of a University of Melbourne. b Frida 15 November 1996

48 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 BooKs: 4

MARGARET COFFEY Inside outside

Heaven Where The Bachelors Sit, Gerard Windsor, Univer ity of Queensland Press 1996. JSilN 0 7022 29 105 RRP $ 16.95

T,wm I "'GAN<"ding H"' " n Whm getting your teeth into it. The title and the sit that separated Terence Queen of the the Bachelors Sit the bulldozers tore into front cover point to th e oddity, the comedy Desert Stamp from Jean Melbourne Cup my old school. I had not believed it would and the clarity of that jam sandwich. Shrimpton in 1965? (See page 129!) happen and I saw it from the tram: at one It should be said that Heaven Where the There must be a sizea ble readership for end of the block the remnant silhouette of Bachelors Sit is a series of set pieces, some renderings of religious life, made up of ei­ the pretty chapel, and at the other the previously published, brought together as a ther those who shared it or those for whom rubble of the 1960s grant-aided science history. You can read some of them in their it has a fascination. They will find joy in the block, our gateway to the future. I had own right but placed between the same Jesuits. Of course it was a religious life a cut Gerard Windsor' book in my hand: above the ordinary and by the ixti es the blurb at the back claimed ' land­ plosively arcane: with the facts of mark' status. A whole culture was event, character and context before defined, it said, and we would read him Gerard Windsor has the kind of there the story of Australia's strong­ control that makes for wonderfully est tribal identity and its disappear­ accurate placem ent, (I am thinking ance. The kind of book through which here of how he tells about the insou­ to read the evidence of my own eyes. ciance of angels) and the sensibility In the late seventies I heard a to register shade (h ere I have in mind writer, who had had a go at it, say that the images of fellow novices and Irish Australian Catholicism was teachers). I read the early stories, finished as a theme, worked out. I the accounts of years spent among remember thinking it was not true, the Jesuits, from the perspective of there were too many puzzles left someone utterly outside but un­ untried, not the least of which was knowingly at the fringes of all this. the way Ireland displaced Catholi­ A few days after Gerard Windsor cism in influential imagination. So was shifting Archbishop Mannix, I much of what constituted the 'genre' was brought to Raheen to pay was worked out in terms of exigent respects. families and even more exigent sexu ­ I had stricken my children with ality, 'racial' failings and folkloric pieties. I covers and in sequence they have a dynamic, the story of the book doled out serial-like cannot remember coming across anything a sense of a life moving forward, and a each Friday (while we sewed ): the year ended drawn to the challenge and seduction of necessary intersection of the sub-culture before the nun finished it and I understood faith and its working out in the framework with the m ainstream . They trace the well enough it would never be on a library of Irish-Australian Catholicism as the author's schoolboy perception of Jesuit shelf. Now I know it was Claude Lightfoot primary leitmotif. Well, while it might add vocation, his years information, the transi­ by Father Francis Finn SJ, and I in some ways to the above-mentioned puz­ tion to university and secular life and the know what happened. zle, this book sets out to see the lure. fall-out thereaft er. Earlier generations may have harked to The reticence of the telling is softened N EVERTHELESS, IT WAS SO MEW HERE in here the Hound of Heaven's prolix and following in the stretch and especially in the displace­ that I took issue with the blurb writer. It Feet, 'A down Titanic glooms of chasmed m ent to the story of Michael Scott (co­ ocurred to m e that there were problem s fear'. But for the age of consumers Gerard founder of the Blake Prize for religious art) with apprehending Irish Australian iden­ Windsor's image has an artful plain­ of something of the puzzle and ambiguity tity in terms of the tribe. The trouble with spokenness: it emerges out of his experi­ and satisfaction of (human) love. The time­ talking about tribes-and Gerard Windsor ence-at the age of five-of loss (not despair) frame is crucial: Gerard Windsor was at never does-is that it narrows everything and a saving encounter with jam and rough­ school in the fifties, in the Jesuit novitiate down. You miss out on families (Jesuit and crusted bread. Heaven Where the Ba ch­ in the sixties and 'in the world' in the otherwise), you miss out on social class and elors Sit is about sweetness proffered seven ties. T hat makes for entertaining the inventiveness of the upwardly mobile, impossibly, but sweetness that goes on glosses on times m uch talked abou t: was it the way the shopkeeper and professional making a claim despite all the difficulty of a glimpse of the heaven where the bachelors Catholic classes connected themselves to

VOLUME 6 NUM BER 8 • EUREKA STREET 49 BOOKS: 5 MATTHEW R ICKETSON the Jesuit tradition, to norms of behaviour (proper and emotionally curtailed), and to an idea of Ireland reworked to put distance between them and 'old peasant Ireland'. Newsbeating There was of course a demotic perspec­ tive-sensibilities that would never have Granta 53: News, Ian Jack (ed ), 1996 . ISBN 014 0141324 RRP $16.95, been embarrassed by Archbishop Mannix's The Media and Me, by Stuart Littlemore, AB C Books, Sydney, 1996. recollection of snubbing the Duke of 0 7333 033 1 5 RRP $14.95 . Norfolk, that would not have registered a 'sophisticated Irishman' (for lack merely of G RANTA IS AN ODDITY among literary the brand, but the industry itself is used defining fact-was it politics, medicine, magazines. It is popular, it does not actually primarily to serve global corporate goals. Maynooth or the Society?), and that discuss literature, it looks more like a book The opening piece is the one that stands reworked Ireland quite differently. There than a magazine, and it contains as much out, though. It is an extract from a coming were sensibilities not cultivated to the point reportage as it does fiction. Bill Buford res- autobiography by the expatriate Australian, of Latin and Virgil and for which language urrected the small Cambridge University Phillip Knightley, who in 1945 began work- did not divide the world up in quite the neat campus publication in 1979 and his first ing as a copy boy at Consolidated Press, and referential way it did for Jesuits. And if issue sold about 800 copies. Today, world- then owned by Sir Frank Packer, father of the truth be told, probably they were hazy wide sales are close to 100,000. Kerry. Knightley conveys an extraordinary, about who Jesuits were, in real life that is. Under Buford's editorship, Granta vividpictureofhisexperienceinAustralian That is why for me the point of Heaven became known for showcasing works-in- and overseas newsrooms. Where the Bachelors Sit that gives it expanse progress of emerging or high-profile novel- He shows us how journalism operated is not about identity and disappearance. ists like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie at the time, from the serf-like existence of That became clear to m e when I tried to see and for long pieces of reportage such as the copy boys (who not only collected the the book without the last stories, which James Fenton's account of the 1986 people's reporters' laundry but lied to their wives take us beyond the confines of Jesuit life. power revolution in the Philippines. Last about their whereabouts) to the way in (There is a last story which made me think year Buford left and was replaced by Ian which newsrooms are organised and stories about what an eldest daughter would be Jack, a journalist of 30 years who had been parcelled out to reporters. He gives vignettes symbolically driven to bid for at a convent editor of the Independent on Sunday. of famous figures like Packer, Sir Keith auction. Lamps, I'm afraid.) But those final Under Jack, the quarterly magazine's Murdoch, proprietor of the Melbourne Her- stories bring home a point about fit- fit emphasis has, if anything, tilted towards aid, and Ezra Norton, proprietor of Truth. between image and real life, which is really reportage. In a recent interview he said: 'I When Knightley joined the Herald, what failed in the sixties. They offer the actually think the main strength of Granta Murdoch invited him to Canberra to be his idea that you can look for that fit, imagine over the years has become non-fiction. personal secretary for a few days because the jam, down the road in the parish church People remember stories like those by James that was how he got to know all new jour- in 1996 in the company of a nine-year-old Fenton.' He is sufficiently modest not to nalists. Knightley expected Murdoch would hopeful sceptic, and that you can do it Sun­ mention another of these, namely his own pick him up in a Rolls but the magnate day after Sunday, hoping in a God who does surgically precise investigation of the 1988 arrived in a dirty old ute driven by his son, not destroy things that are worth keeping. shooting of three IRA members by SAS Rupert, who kindly offered to show It's a good point, when you see your old soldiers at Gibraltar, for which he was Knightley around Canberra. Norton used to school pulled down and it turns out that the named journalist of the year in England. demand his reporters compile secret files bulldozers were a stratagem, a kind of So the prospect of Granta turning its onanyonehehated(principallyFreemasons, shadow-boxing around building permit regu­ gaze on the news media commands respect Catholics and communists), peppered each lations. It is what developers do when they and a keen sense of anticipation. Readers, clause of each sentence with the all purpose have nothing in mind, neither money nor whether m edia people or simply consumers, adjective 'fucking' and had a violent dislike plans. It makes for a wasteland. • will not be disappointed by this excellent of Frank Packer. The pair once tried to issue. Zoe Heller deftly goes inside an strangle each other at the Rand- Margaret Coffey is an ABC broadcaster and American current affairs program whose K wick racetrack. producer. name, Full Disclosure, announced its early high hopes. Bu t With each fresh pilot, the NIGHTLEY SHOWS WHAT A NASTY, Small- These and other books program slid further toward the terrain of minded place Australia could be. Packer's tabloid talk shows. Patrick Wrigh t looks at Sunday Telegraph ran an annual beach girl are available from the introduction of the armoured tank in competition and whenever the women came World War I, and the distorting effects, in to the office studio the photographers The Jesuit Bookshop, sometim es chilling, som etimes ludicrou s, would take the requisite shots and then of military censorship on early newspaper coerce the girls into pulling down their PO Box 553, reports of their impact. And Fin tan O'Toole swimsuit tops so they could get ' one for the Richmond 3121 contributes a fin ely structured profile of boys in the backroom .' Irish businessman and m edia tycoon, Tony As a cadet, Knightley accompanied ph ((H) 9427 7311, O'Reilly, whose credo is the m arketing con - police on a night patrol and watched as they fax (03) 9428 4450 cept of brands. Not onlyis the publicservice jumped out of the car to give an old drunk elem ent of the news m edia subsumed to a good kicking. He became increasingly

50 EUREKA STREET • OCTOBER 1996 worried about the gap between what he saw Recently Littlemore has been and what ended up in the newspapers. At on the media circuit promoting Truth he literally invented a story about a his book. Interviewed by H.G. Australian train-dwelling pervert to fill a last minu te N elson and 'Rampaging' Roy hole on page one, but then in England when Slaven on their ABC TV program he covered a visiting Australian rugby league Club Buggery, he admitted he Book Revie"' tour, he saw players pick fights in pubs and had written the book in just over the essential magazine pay prostitutes to perform oral sex in front three days, and grinned-the of teammates, but he filed not a only word for it-superciliously. for Australian books word about this. What are readers supposed to make of that? That he is a latter- IN OCTOBER: A FTER GRANTA'S NEWS ISSUE, Stuart day Renaissance m an, dashing Littlemore's m emoir, The Media and Me, off not a sonnet before lunch but 'Envy of the Brush' an essay by David Brooks is a disappointment. The Sydney QC has an entire book in three days? made a significant, often stylish, contribu­ That the whole grubby enter­ Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Thea Astley's tion to improving news media standards prise is som ehow ben ea th him? The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow since his program began in 1989, exposing Littlemore told Roy and H.G. plagiarism, unethical behaviour, conflicts that at one publication a sub- Robert Drewe reviews of interest (for both journalist and proprie­ editor had been assigned to comb Cassandra Pybus' White Rajah t or) and impoverish ed journalistic through The Media and Me imagination. looking for literals and had found Barry Hill reviews Henry Reynolds' There is little doubt that the news media nine. (On page 49, for example, Aboriginal Sovereignty needs a watchdog just as much as the news Littlem ore presumably meant m edia itself should be a watchdog on to describe a factory as Marion Halligan reviews governm ent and other powerful institu­ unprepossessing when he wrote Janette Turner Hospital's Oyster tions. It is fair to say that many journalists 'unpreprocessing' .) Littlemore have shown themselves to be thin-skinned loftily assured them that there NEW SUBSCRIBERS - $44 FOR TEN in their reactions to Littlem ore. Whatever had not been a book printed that ISSUES, WITH A BONUS BOOK flaws there may be in his approach and the was 100 per cent free of errors. Send to: Suite 3, 21 Drummond Place, Carlton 3053 program's m ethod, the news m edia and its True, butwhatisMedia Watch's or phone: (03) 9663 8657 fax: (03) 9663 8658 audience would be worse off without him. m ea t and drink ? Combing e-mail: [email protected] I thought that Littlemore, freed from the through the Illawarra Mercury 15-minuteMedia Watch format, would have and holding their typos up for used a book to work out a comprehensive ridicule on Monday nights. and '70s. No, the disparity lies in the way consideration of the news m edia, with H e complained that reviewers had they write about their lives. Knightley never detailed proposals for overcoming its flaws. focused on him rather than his book. Okay, forgets he is a story teller; Littlem ore never But the first 12 chapters comprise recol­ let's look at the book, even if it appears to lets the reader forget he is an opinion giver. lections of his earlier career as a journalist. have held the author's attention for only It goes back to that deceptively simple Only the final two chapters describe his three days. The blurb touts Littlemore's writer's dictum: show the readers, don't program's operation and an overview of the m em oir as engaging and amusing, but, tell them. Where Knightley's piece exem­ problems besetting the Australian media. whereas Knightley's extract in Granta fairly plifies George Orwell's notion that 'good This i the strongest section of the book. crackles with sharp, illuminating stories prose is like a window pane', Littlem ore The weighting between m em oir and analy­ about journalism, Littlem ore musters only needs a burst of Windex and elbow grease. sis should have been reversed. For example, a handful of m om ents that truly engage or One reviewer has labelled Littlemore Littlemore raises important issues facing amuse-and in five times the space. egocentric, but he told Ro y and H.G. he the news m edia: Could this be because Knightley has rather thought this was unavoidable in an •What are the ethics of journalism? Will more to write about? After all, he is a autobiography. we ever have enforcea ble rights to truthful respected in ves tiga ti ve reporter, dual The word that keeps surfacing in The information, or balance, or fairn ess? winner of the British Press A wards' journal­ Media and Me is 'smartarse'. On at least •What confidence ca n we have in the ist of the year; he is an author, known for four occasions Littlem ore recounts stunts honesty or objectivity of mass media his work on Kim Philby, and his landmark he pulled or one-liners he got off at some­ reporting when it concerns the commer­ study of war correspondents, The First Casu­ body's expense, and comments he has cial activities of its tycoon owners? alty. Littlemore enjoyed some success at always been a smartarse. He keeps bowling •Ha the time not come for legislative the BBC and ABC, particularly on the pio­ it up. Still, I suppose a real smartarse would regulation of the mass media? neering current affairs program, This Day believe it was smart to be a smartarse. I •If not by legislation, how can we make Tonight, but is best known for Media Watch. mean, he'd know better than the rest of us, those media accountable? Knightley's career has been more distin­ wouldn't he1 • He i clearly well-placed to chew these guished, yet this is not the core reason for important questions over, but his answers, the qualitative difference beween their Matthew Ricketson is a senior lecturer in while interesting, are too sketchy to be memoirs. Knightley's account in Granta journalism at Royal Melbourne Institute of really valuable. ends well before his big scoops in the '60s Technology.

VOLUME 6 N UMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 51 BooKs: 6 MAX T EICHMANN Shoclz­ absorbing The Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker: Penguin Vol. 1 Regeneration: 1991: $14.95 Vol. 2 The Eye in the Door: 1993 : $14.95 Vol. 3 The Ghost Road: 1995: $14.95

W RLD WAR I MUST APPEAR tO m ost people as a slowly disin tegrating Gestalt of browning family photographs, deserted cenotaphs, lantern slides and early newsreels. Old graves, strange popular songs, soldier's ditties. And yearly marches and cerem onies which becom e m ore painful as they seem more archaic. Almost everyone in the Britain and Europe of Barker's trilogy would now be dead. There have been newer, larger mass killings since 1918, and the blood is fresher- much fr esher. And Britain, Europe and their peoples are trans­ form ed, totally transform ed during these past 80 years, so we are told; triumphantly, or sadly. Yet when Pat Barker invites us into the Britain of 1917, Verdun, 191 6 and the trenches of France and Belgium, introduces us to her and nightmares. And resented the incomprehension, and the public soldiers, and the people back home, it all seems strangely familiar. and private taboos against saying how it was, and how you f elt and And just as shocking now as when it occurred. Perhaps people don't how meaningless and putrid the whole thing was. change as much as we thought, or feared, or hoped. Maybe this is As Edward Thom as wrote: why our social engineers have called in the geneticists to help. Not that the soldiers didn't entertain illusions and own great Now all roads lea d to France tracts of false consciousness, different from those we clutch to our And heavy is the tread bosoms. But that's Progress. And we can observe the denials, the Of the living; but the dead repressions, the group hallucinations of these poor devils with Returning lightly dance. compassion. Whereas the poignancy of our self deceptions escape us, of necessity: Hopefully the next generations will understand, Pat Barker's quest-or one of them- is to discover how m en can and feel sorry- not judge us too quickly. endure this, and remain sane. (Or, did they, perhaps, quietly, go a In passing-it becomes clear that Barker's soldiers kidded them­ little mad; and did this peculiar, situational form of madness lift, as selves far less than the civilians, and as war dragged on, the gulf the years of peace started to roll in 1 Or not?) between soldier perceptions and the way civvies saw things wid­ These soldiers defended themselves by repression, by close ened. The soldiers looked forward-so much- to coming home on bonding, by taking each day, even each hour as it came- and by a leave. Escaping the trenches, for just a little while, and meeting the laconic, matter-of-fact-manner; so everything hangs out, withou t loved ones, feeling like a human being again. But the soldier prompting, or hyperbole. couldn't say what was in his mind-even if he were articulate. They The main character of the trilogy, the fictional Billy Prior-the wouldn't understand; couldn't. You couldn't tell your wife, your other leading actors were real- writes in his diary: 'We don't girlfriend, your mother what you had seen, quite often what you remember, we don't feel, we don't think-at least not beyond the had done, and might be doing again. They might see you differently confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilised all of a sudden, move away, almost in fear, from this foreign being, standard (but what does that mean now!}, we are objects of horror. who did horrendous things, and lived amid scenes of utter horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.' Heads without bodies, the living without eyes or limbs, bones But even the tough, intelligent super-realist Prior-even his sticking out of trench parapets, walls propped up with corpses, new nerves weren 't always completely steady. He does a spell in the and old, because there was no timber or sandbags. And the never­ Army Psychiatric Hospital for officers, in Craiglockhart, Scotland. ending stench of decaying flesh, and vomit, and blood and urine. The poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were patients there; The rats, gorged with over-eating-and so on. The papers and the Robert Graves appears briefly in the first novel. Their Army churches never mentioned a word of that. And the civvies and loved psychiatrist, W.H. Rivers, was an anthropologist, and Barker weaves ones were similarly tongue-tied; they stuck to trivia, or recycled in his dreams, and recollections of his Melanesian trips, and his the propaganda and patriotic exhortations in which the whole utter absorption in a very differen t system of values and beliefs and country was awash. The soldiers envied the civvies for their behaviour-not at all like the South Sea Islanders of Marga ret security, and longevity, and immunity from fear, and from horror Mead. Of one tribe Rivers gets to know, he ponders: was it right for

52 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1996 the British to stop them head hunting? It was the core of their life­ The drunks, the wife beaters, the bores. Not Merrie England here. their religion. As the ban continued, life ran down, the population The febrile homosexual world in which Prior moves and takes dropped to half, fertility rates to half. They started moving in payment, in between his munitions girl and one-night stands, is groups from island to island, turning up as refugees. So: is eating alive and well on the home front. people wrong? Always wrong? The younger soldiers felt betrayed, I think, by the women. Their Barker moves Rivers in and out of these two worlds- theirs and mothers, sisters, girl friends should have stopped it- talked them ours-both death cultures, devoted to the more or less ritualised out of it-not encouraged them to join up. What is a mother for? murder of the 'other', or the enemy. (Incidentally, you can see And the older men over military age, fathers etc, positively exalted Rivers' ethnographic collections in the Pitt Rivers museum in in it. As did the old bastards of generals, and politicians. In Europe, Oxford; with its rows of shrunken, blackened heads, weapons etc. the Nazis and Fascists offered the young revenge, against all of Primitive, I suppose, like World War I. these, and those who'd kept out and profited, and the left who Rivers' shell-shocked patients all feel shame; feel like failures. mocked their sacrifices. Not entirely surprising. They sense they are running away, from the enemy; but, and more British novelists and some psychiatrists raised these suspicions important, letting their friends, their bonded comrades down. Not of the double whammy-the gender betrayal, and the tribal elders' the Allied victory, or the people at home-sod them- but their revenge against the young males. comrades, their tribe. And many didn't hate the Bache- Lord But meantime, as Prior said, those who still lived to keep Northcliffe and Lloyd George could look after that. But Rivers fighting were in cowed subjection to the ghosts of friends who died. wasn't pushing at an open door- they were afraid to go back and There were ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in face death, or worse. The past horrors were too great to be borne the making. Oscar Wilde did say that man kills the thing he loves: consciously. So, they couldn't speak (Prior), or walk, or see or eat. no doubt, many do, but many more kill those they hate. And hate For example, Burns. He'd been thrown into the air by the so as to kill with a clear conscience. But most men from 1914on kill explosion of a shell and had landed, head first, on a German corpse, those whom they neither love, nor hate, nor even know. World whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost War I was perhaps the first European-wide exercise by killing consciousness, he'd had time to realise that what filled his nose and machines on automatic pilot, which consumed a whole generation. mouth was decomposing flesh. Now, whenever he tried to eat, that While the band played on. taste and smell recurred. Nightly, he relived the experience, and This trilogy is about the Western Front, but recently I fished out from every nightmare he awoke vomiting. He hardly looked like a a book on the Eastern Front. The Brusilov offensive of 1916. human being at all. His suffering was without purpose or dignity, Remember that? A brilliant Russian success-but eventually fail­ and Rivers knew exactly what Burns meant when he said it was a ing through losses, and exhaustion of the troops. Each side lost joke. more than a million men. Chicken feed? Take the German's Sassoon and Owen were homosexuals, Prior a bi-sexual, and as Gorlice Tarnow breakthrough in 1915, which cost the Russians Rivers' psychiatric duels, with Sassoon and especially with Prior, two million casualties. That's better. The Austrians lost 350,000 in continue, during their treatments, he starts to question his own one early battle, while Russian losses at Tannenberg and the deeply-buried sexuality, question its orientation. Bruce Ruxton Masurian Lakes were, and still are everyone's guess. And their might find all this a bit bewildering, especially as Sassoon won the bands played on. MC, and Owen the posthumous award of the same decoration­ And what ever happened to the Russian, Austrian, even Ger­ ' gallantry in capturing an enemy machine gun and inflicting con­ man equivalents of Bums, and Rivers' other patients? Did they siderable losses on the enemy at the battle of Joncourt'. That gentle, somehow make it back home, to resume 'normal life' in society? beautiful poet. Yet they both hated and repudiated the whole thing. 'Society?', I hear Prior ask. So did Prior. So why did they go on? Perhaps they were just put away somewhere, as they were in Prior, the unsentimental loner, who loves only a munitions girl Rivers' hospital. Beyond recall. Wilfred Owen, in the second stanza and, eventually, Rivers, writes in his diary, near the end of the of Mental Cases, wrote: novel: 'I was offered a job at the Ministry of Munitions and I turned it down, and said if I was sent back to France ... I shall sit in a dug­ - These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. out and look back to this afternoon, and I shall think, 'You bloody Memory fingers in their hair of murders, foo l.' Multitudinous murders they once witnessed. 'Well, here I am in what passes for a dug-out. And I look around Wading sloughs of fl esh these helpless wander, me at all these faces and all I can think is: What an utter bloody fool Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter. I would have been not to come back.' Always they must see these things and hear them, It was that which Hitler and Mussolini referred to as the Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles, Comradeship of the Trenches; to Brudershaft and Kameradshaft. It Carnage incomparable, and human squander, goes way beyond a mutual congratulation society, should not be Rucked too thick for these men's extrication. denied or derided, for then it can rise to haunt its society. The war need not have been just, nor did you need to think so at the time. Finally: It is like those who bond to a Party or Church or nation, to which they stick, no matter how wrong they know it is, or futile its -Thus their hands are plucking at each other; endeavours. Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging; Barker uses Prior to introduce us to the women-mainly work­ Snatching after us who smote them, brother, ing class. The prurient, man-hating mothers, and confused semi­ Pawing us who dealt them war and mad ness. oppre sed daughters. The promiscuity, the woeful state of so many • marriages, wives secretly hoping the old man wouldn't come back. Max Teichmann is a freelance writer and reviewer.

VOLUME 6 NUMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 53 Left: (L-R) Tammy McCarthy, Marco Chiappi, Robynn Bourne, Roger Oakley and Kerry Walker in Jerusalem by Michael Gurr. Below: David Tredinnick and Melvin Carroll in Angels in America-Part One by Tony Ku lmer. Photographs by Jeff Busby

P ACm>NC '"' Am-"pooi• lly the performing arts-is in many ways a young people's game. Few of the you ng actors, dancers, circus performers and others whose careers are launched on Australian stages / and screens every year survive for very long scenery in and out of schools and draughty can take in and, even though many fail to in a demanding, cut-throat business in halls week in and week out does not last complete their courses, there are score of which only fourorfive percent are employed forever. Still others form co-operative groups graduates entering the profession every year. at any given time. (mostly with friends they trained with at Some strike it lucky quite quickly. Cate One of the many reasons for this has to drama school) and eke out a precarious Blanchett, for example, graduated from do with the repertoire. A majority of the existence in fringe theatre. Energetic young NIDA in 1992 and was an almost instant characters created by the world's play- companies of this kind abound in every success. She was snapped up in 1993 by the wrights are young people, and work oppor- city; one thinks of Splinters in Canberra, Sydney Theatre Company (fo r Caryl tunities for actors decline as they grow Ambush and Human Voice in Adelaide and Churchill's Top Girls and David Mamet's older; there is a dearth of good parts for of Chameleon or Ranters in Melbourne. Oleanna) and by the Griffin Theatre middle-aged and older women. But again, with very rare exceptions, senior Company (for Timothy Daly's Ka[l

54 EUREKA STREET • 0 TOBER 1996 Caretaker in 1991 before beginning a never get into the papers and who rarely get of Speech and Drama in London, from which substantial relationship with the Sydney to bank a salary cheque drawn on a theatre he graduated in 1985. He decided to return Thea tre Company the following year in company's account. to Australia in 1988 for a holiday in a another Pinter play, The Homecoming. His As David Tredinnick, one of the up-and­ warmer climate-only to land his first acting STC association continued over the next coming young actors to whom I spoke job with Zootango in Hobart in the winter couple of years, with Angels in America recently, told m e: a share of the box-office of 1989! He won his first mainland roles in and Titus Andronicus in 1993 and The in most fringe shows will get you a beer and The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet for the Crucible as well as Sweet Phoebe in 1994 a pizza and not much more. Tredinnick's is Bell Shakespeare Company's inaugural tour and 1995 (opposite Blanchett). In his time one of the classic stories of the self-made in 1991. off from the STC, Moody has appeared in actor who worked his way up from the Chiappi backed up for another Bell tour m ost of the television soap operas and sev- fringe to the mainstream. in 1992 and has been busy in mainstream eral films, and in plays for other H e began ' a slow arts degree' at theatre ever since, although he too has done Sydney theare companies. Melbourne University in 1984, but soon the odd fringe show to keep body, soul and becam e involved with Instant Theatre, a craft together. His perform ance in one of M ELBOURNE-BASED TAMMY McCarthy group of teacher trainees who were m ore Chameleon Theatre's short plays at La was also lucky enough (and good enough ) to interested in performing than teaching. In Mama in 1994 was especially m emorable go straight into mainstream theatre from 1987, he joined Robert Chuter's Performing and he has just moved from a superbly drama school. The year after graduating Arts Projects, a definitive Melbourne fringe differentiated pair of contrasting roles in from the Victorian College of the Arts in theatre company then working at La Mama, Michael Gun's Jerusalem for Playbox to 1990 (prior to which she studied academic to act in productions of new work like The play the hapless Don Antonio in the MTC's drama with distinction at the University of Music of Orpheus and Restoring the Portrait production of The Rover. New England) McCarthy appeared in the of Dorian Gray. Like many of the young breed of actors, Melbourne Theatre Company's production A series of Sam Sejavka plays for P.A.P. Chiappi is not entirely comfortable doing of Katherine Thomson's Diving for Pearls followed (like The Hive, In Angel Gear and screen work; 'it's the apparatus behind the (in the hauntingly memorable role of the Mammothrept, for which he was nominated camera that's so intimidating' he told me. retarded daughter Verge) and Bill Garner's for a Green Room best actor award in 1991 ). Tredinnick agreed; his five weeks recently Sunday Lunch. She has since had several His actual vocational training was thus a spent filming Life, the feature film version further engagements with the MTC (in­ mixture of theatre in education and on-site of a play by Melbourne writer fohn cluding Coward's Private Lives earlier this work-experience by night, while keeping a Brumpton, 'was an absolute joy but a rare year) and a year with the Bell Shakespeare day-job in theRMITbookshop. Tredinnick's experience in that branch of the industry. Company (1993, during which she played big breakthrough cam e in 1993 when he Usually, when you've done your final scene Ophelia and some bit parts on a quasi­ was cast in Neil Armfield's MTC produc­ after a week [as an actor], they want you out national tour). She has also been in all three tion of Angels in America-Part One. 'I felt of there ASAP. They're on such tight sched­ of the remarkably successful series of plays really spoilt', he said of the experience, 'to ules.' He once did a film in which he had to by Michael Gurr for Play box, m ost recently work on such a great play with a great cast stand for ages with a lizard on his shoulder; Jerusalem; and she is about to take over and director in my first professional 'I had no idea why; I was never Helen Buday's role for the MTC regional production.' given a context.' tour of David Hare's Skylight. His success in Angels might have been Like m ost of our sm artest and brightest a surprise to Tredinnick, but it wasn't to his BO TH OF THESE ACTORS vehemently young actors, McCarthy has also had her peers and critics: he won the Green Room affirmed a preference for stage work, espe­ share of TV guest roles, as well as a horrific A ward for Best Actor for his performance as cially new work in which the actor is an appearance in one of the Transport Acci­ Prior Walter that year. Early the following important co-originator (along with the dent Commission's advertisements. How­ year, he got a part in a Playbox play writer and director) in getting the material ever, she has also been canny enough to mix (Disturbing the Dust); this prompted him up on the rehearsal-room floor (as Chiappi her salaried work for the major subsidised to quit his day- job and become a full-time said). Both also acknowledged the invalu­ companies with som e interesting co-opera­ actor. He has scarcely been idle since, able leadership roles provided by their tive fringe theatre productions. These have although he has also cleverly kept his career senior colleagues; 'I stand in awe of [actors included plays by cult playwright Sam rolling along by blending co-op fringe work like] Monica Maughan and Bob Hornery', Sejavka at the Universal (the seam y drug­ with properly-paid work for the major sub­ said Tredinnick. 'You learn so much from culture piece In Angel Gear being one), a sidised companies. His m ost recent part those dudes.' couple of La Mama gigs and Marga ret Kirby's was in Playbox's Strangers in the Night, Both also said that-unlike their coun­ play about the ordainment of Anglican while forthcoming gigs include a return to terparts of my generation, most of whom women priests, My Body, My Blood, at St La Mama and then another MTC show, wanted to play Hamlet before they were too Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne in 1994. Her Dealer's Choice, in November. old and Lear when they were old enough, CV is thus long on variety and on roles upon One of Tredinnick's colleagues in Deal­ preferably abroad-they were happy enough which to hone the skills of her craft. er's Choice will be Marco Chiappi, whose just to 'stay around' and 'keep getting work' However, it hardly needs saying that for career has taken a different path again. on the Australian stage, 'as long as it lasts'.• every Blanchett, McCarthy or Moody­ Australian born, Chiappi migrated to Scot­ those who break into mainstream salaried land with his family when he was a young Geoffrey Milne teaches thea tre and drama work at an early stage of their careers­ boy and after taking his A levels in the U.K., in the School of Arts and Media at LaTrobe there are dozens each year whose names he trained as an actor at the Central School University.

VOLUME 6 NUMB ER 8 • EUREKA STREET 55 and Judd Hirsch played his such an award would bring and so pressure father. Oy veh. Randy Quaid him for his approval, but the search for was a white trash alcoholic truth, which mirrors his search for redemp­ alien-abductee Vietnam vet tion, consumes him, putting his career, living in a mobile home on marriage and well-being into jeopardy. The the fringes of society. Yee ha. truth, in this most American of movies, is In short, all America revealed in a scene by a lake draped in needs, to solve the problems autumnal colours. Balm for a troubled soul. of racial division, family The Gulf War backdrop of thefilm makes breakdown, low morale of Courage Under Fire a tad self-righteous for Vietnan1 veterans etcetera the observer who believes the war, and etcetera and make it feel very recent skirmishes, were not fought for God good and important again, is and liberty alone. Nevertheless it hits the a scapegoat. It's not a new right targets. notion, but lacking original -Jon Greenaway ideas, the scriptwriters have plundered and cheapened many better Let 'em come works-V, Star Wars, Aliens, War of the Galloping gargoyles Worlds and X-Files. And they said Helen Independence Day, dir. Roland Emmerich Demiwhatever's stuff was derivative and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Disney; (cinemas everywhere). There's something morally suss. Strewth. (Hoyts and Village). Before going to this highly ironic about a carefully composed -Juliette Hughes movie I hired the 1939 Charles Laughton shot of gargantuan alien spaceships poised version and watched it with family and over Earth's major cities. Some old spoil­ friends. All the kids, from eight to sixteen, sports might think it's a fairly accurate Straight shooting loved it. 'Why did he say he wished he was evocation of the invasion of diverse cultures made of stone at the end? ' asked eight-year­ by the US juggernaut. And we ain't fighting Courage Under Fire, dir. Edward Zwick old Archie. Discussing that with him was 'em, no sirree. Why the world wants to pay (Hoyts). A sign that this combat movie is one of the bonuses of sharing something as to see American patriotism in masturbatory more than just an hour or two of patriotic good as the Laughton Hunchback: the depth overdrive should be a mystery but isn't: drum-beating came with the American of the cinematography, the political these days Australian children are probably military's withdrawal of logistical support optimism, the incredible beauty of Maureen more familiar with the Statue of Liberty for its filming. Apparently they were dis­ than the Harbour Bridge. gruntled that Courage Under Fire was to EuREKA STREET Independence Day's plot is pretty much portray defence administration and person­ F ILM C OMPETITION your basic ohmygod-the-Russians-are-com­ nel in a less favourable light than the glam­ It's a while since gangster movies were the ing, except that now the Russians are in orised Top Gun or the cartoon-like ID4. new thing. This shot comes from a 1930s mafia-ridden economic rationalist hell, they The core values of the film, however, classic that was one of the first. Name it, don't threaten timorous Yanks any more. are the stuff of GI-Joe legend: valour, hon­ and if yours is thefirst correct entry drawn, So bring on the aliens, looking very much our and- as the film title suggests-moral we'll send you off to the movies. like the demon-king in Fantasia, so that no and physical courage. But along with these The winner of the July/ August compassion might be stimulated by scenes we also have betrayal, self-hatred and denial. competition was Ros Bailey of Chelmer, of them being kicked, shot, or nuked. Yes, The appeal of the film is that the good and QLD who named Cyd Charisse as Fred of course they're extremely naughty: they the upstanding prevail in the end but their Astaire's co-star in The Band Wagon and want to exterminate us so they can just success is not through formulaic victories. Silk Stockings as the other film they move in and take all the resources. (I think They struggle with themselves as much as starred in together. I just heard Chief Seattle turning in his they do their comrades. A special commendation also goes to grave.) Denzel Washington plays Lt Colonel Kim Miller of Wagga Wagga, NSW, who There are gung-ho special effects; no Nathan Serling, a tank-commander who is just had to come up with a caption: expense has been spared on the cyber­ being investigated for destroying one of his 'Idon't carewhatLawrenceHargreaves morphing of reality. The acting is consider­ own during the Gulf War. Shuffled to the says, these tri-plane box-kite hang-glider ably cheaper, although the reputations of Department of Awards and Decorations, he things ain't never going to fly.' Bill Pullman as the WASP boy-king Presi­ is given a routine investigation as a distrac­ dent(Ifullyexpectedhim topullan Armalite tion. He is expected to rubber-stamp a post­ out of a stone) and Will Smith (a sort of humous medal of honour for helicopter African-American Luke Skywalker) have pilot Karen Walden (played by Meg Ryan in been made by this. Smith was required to a strong if distant performance). Maybe it's say sassy street-wise things and be very because this is the first time a woman has cool. Yo. He had a gallant single-mother received the award, but Serling takes a keen girlfriend called Jasmine who was a sensi­ interest in the case when the testimonies of ble, brave-hearted stripper. Woo woo. Jeff those who were involved start to conflict. Goldblum was a Jewish computer genius The brass are desperate for the PR value

56 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1996 O'Hara, the pathos and complexity ... Instead of Pauline Hanson's national to that commonly favoured by Hollywood: Then we saw the Disney one, and my service, we should have days when all and instead of nerdy American teenagers being main problem was keeping the 14-year-old sundry are poured into skin-tight purple transported back a generation to meet their in his seat. 'Mum,' he hissed, 10 minutes jump suits and sent up to the Daintree to parents as nerdy teenagers, we have a into the film, when rows of stone saints hunt down feral pigs. We'd get rid of a pest medireval French knight and his cloddish and the country would feel much servant propelled forward eight centuries better about itself. to meet their descendants. ~ 'A~~F~A4E ~£~~ Of course Billy Zane fills And, because the time travellers are out the phantom's suit a lot confronting the future, not the past, Th e 'n B~ wcfZ.kll'l'f··· better than most. Unfortunately Visitors makes no facile assumption of his acting reminded me of the universal progress; the point is not that ceramic Phantom bust a friend our ancestors might have been as good as of mine likes to consult for ad­ we are if only they had had modern vice. But hey, this is the Ghost technology. Who Walks. And the feel of the Instead, what happens, as in Don movie was an odd mixture of Quixote, is the only thing that can hap­ Raiders of the Lost Ark and pen when honour, hierarchy and dogmatic Pirates of Penzance. Though it faith collide with hypocrisy, levelling and doe n ' t matter because the dogma tic scepticism: a great deal of Phantom can communicate confusion. telepathically with his dog Although Po ire and Clavier are clearly Devil and Hero, his trusty white not Cervantes, they find plenty of steed. Kristy Swanson as Diana poignant humour in that confusion. The Palmer and Catherine Zeta scene in which the knight (Jean Reno) Jones bring some 1990's femi­ and his servant (Clavier himself) try to nine mystique to this 1930's cope with the vagaries of modern plumb­ tale of evil-doers and valiant ing is slapstick good enough to tickle souls. Strange, but then, as the even those who pretend not to like slap­ old jungle saying goes, no one s tick, and the scene in which the knight, began to finger-click to a very bad Broadway argues with the Phantom. sword and shield in hand, is surrounded shuffle, 'let me go home, this is shit.' He'd No matter what you do to the legend of by helmeted French riot police, all bear­ thought he would like to compare the two the Phantom, he keeps shining through­ ing shields and batons, encapsulates the versions, but wa n ' t prepared for especially when kitsch m erchants make film. confrontation with an entertainment com­ night-lights in his likeness. If you believe But best of all is the performance of pany still presumably run by a frozen brain. in the fight of good against Only a dead-head would give Quasimodo evil and all that the Phan­ three cute gargoyle buddies and give one of tom represents, then see them the last line: 'Say, don't you ever mi­ The Phantom. Rumour grate?'-to some pigeons on its shoulder. To has it they'll let you in for a young sensibility that had been stirred by free if you wear your yoga­ the restrained tragedy of the final words of togs to the cinema. Laughton's Quasimodo: 'Why was I not made -Jon Greenaway of stone like thee<' this was blasphemy. My boy, inured to such macho rough-house as Terminator, Predator, Aliens et al, was Gauling shocked right down to his socks when he experienced the full psychic violence of gross The Visitors, dir. Jean­ kitsch. Marie Pain~ (independ­ If what you want is twopence-coloured entL is a kind of Don bathos and Lloyd-Webberisch muzak, go Quixote story, though and see Disney's Hunchback. If your stom­ Poire and screenwriter ach works, however, just stay away. Christian Clavier have -Juliette Hughes embellished plenty of other sources, too. There are some gag routines in The Visitors Valerie Lemercier as the knight's 12th Purple perisher that have a Pythonesque feel, and Holly­ century betrothed and 20th century de­ wood time-travel spoofs of the Ba ck to scendant: she conveys just enough under­ The Phantom, dir. Simon Wincer (Greater the Future type are another obvious in­ stated dignity to make one think that Union). The idea, the very idea of a bloke spiration. But time's arrow (and an ar­ what was best in the knight's world can dressed in purple running around the jungle row, or rather cross bow bolt, is crucial to breathe in our own. ... I love it, and there should be more of it. the plot) here runs in a different direction - Ray Cassin

VoLUME 6 N uMBER 8 • EUREKA STREET 57 WATCHING BRIEF X-tra good

'WffiNOVOR THO S

58 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1996 Eurek a Street Cryptic Crossword no. 47, October 1996

D evised by Joan Now otny IBVM ACROSS 1. Iron you're putting under stress, it seem s. (8) 5. Take taxi back in a United States counter device. (6) 9. In the end, placem ent for church was compulsory. (8) 10. Stratagem in Irish dancing includes star sign . (6) 12. Beware the convoluted spiel drunkards begin with. Get rid of them . (6) 13. With h eart exchange, possible sporting trophy becom es aquarium resident. (8) 15. A picnic lunch would hardly be complete food for the road. (12) 18. Made a resounding com eback. (1 2) 23. Damaged copy isn't providing a general survey of som e of the gospels, fo r instance. (8) 24. For each application read the instructions. (6) 26. This type found in capital iconic sculptures. (6) 27. Installation of bishop with mitre now, possibly reflects traditional nature of the cerem ony-som e would call it hackneyed! (8) 28. English foreigner threatened by immigration authorities can only grimace and depart. (6) 29. Sense an expression of agreem ent in the rowing crew. (8) Solution to Crossword no. 46, September 1996 DOWN 1. Imitation zip fastener som ehow does up! (6) 2. Headless egotistic imp thinks he's being charmingly mischievous! (6) 3. Sliding stones in front of church seem to interest this owl. Listen to its call. (7) 4. Did you hear about the three-toed ostrich ? (4) 6. Inspiration about the original drawing produces a design of som e dimension. (7) 7. You condemn the diet ? At least credit it with one calorie reduction and don't be carping. (8) 8. Felt snubbed even though a Pole illuminated the way. (8) 11 . Resembling a standardised unit, computer m emory goes up about board-gam e on the rise. (7) 14. Goddess found in art! Emissary of the Greek Diana? (7 ) 16. Getting into gear. (8) 17. My life is devoted to saving El, foolish girl, from the m ind-controller. (8) 19. Tearing round to hear the story! Exciting! (7) 20. Lacking 29-across in Gaza? (7) 21. At the sound of the French bell, the sea-creature will appear. (6) 22. In the chosen network the Games were introduced with a fa nfa re. (6) 25 . The Cockney, while he m ay sound breathless, is a fellow of cunning. (4)

THE " The CREED by HEART CREED by HEART Re- l ea rn i n g t h e" N'icen e C r ee d by Tony Kelly CSsR - • I • F /{)rtdo': 'armn nm P~mm Tony Kelly has written a poetic and accessible account of the 0IIIIQIIDID!ttll , ~fllm!IC'lldirt_!llr.l!. itqH--hiiiiiiiiU~rtlll N icene Creed, a classic statment of Christian belief. He shows -~' ]tJIDIC.l;rti~ . Altla Ualllli!Jit,, ua Pnn ~Uimmtr: ~~~~~a um!a, Ot11111k 'Ott, I.Dal.f! ~... that ancient tradition can speak to us today and offer insights into Dtallt[J'IIII~ r nttodt~•­ fanm , rmliDhWl~lii Pmtppf!ll~ the m eaning of faith in the contemporary world. =m~:'J~:C: t::: . nlfleimltu ut dt t3Ptnca .&nm a 1\"Jiru '\'lrpu. rt bclno Dctu I He eloquen tly presents the creed as a felt whole, the way a ot. mnftru r~»~~ 0111 .u u~~ 1l.tia ~~~~ : vmu n Nplll ~~a at. rt n:JIIl"'Uitmti.ld:it Kt1114a! Smpt~ru , nUimdltiiCDdal , favourite poem or song is learned and becomes a permanent and lfdt' ~4 damll PuN. €1 ~ltnKD!U at filii ;!aN lli&;n lliUI fllllltwl : [IJU rt;Ji IIIII mt • . e t il S"pln!IIR _smcta, "'naau rt uudcDtt11. qli a _'Pmr ~ Jrtrdtt.I;OI n111 deep possession. 'Parn n RbO 1m\ ildmllr n trrnp~Amm . qa1 IDtltu 11t per PI'~ - €tiiiWI NRmJ~ OOII!IICUI n ii~Uttbca rat~JW~. :~. Udttn 11111111 ~!liN in~ prmtelllll, n a,rcm · Available from your local Christian bookstore. rtlllfl'tiTIIILIIII ram=ma !C aitMI ; rnmrl a.u rlb. HJIO.

TONY ; KEL LY • CSs R ·- Or con tact •... HarperCollinsReligious on tel 03 9847 9800 EURI:-KA SfRI:-ET & Oxford University Press Special Book Offer The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Peter Porter 1What the poems in this anthology show is not simply the worldliness of Australian poetry (as if that were ever in any doubt), but how open windows onto other times and places "admit the fresh breeze" .. . ' - David McCooey, in this month's Eureka Street.

This month, thanks to OUP, we have six copies of The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, each worth $39.95 . to give away. Just put your name and address on the back of an envelope and send it to Eureka Street October Book Offer, PO Box 553, Richmond, 31 21. Discover Tuscany via the inaugural Eureka Street raffle Find tickets inside this issue Major prize- • A trip for two to Rome, Florence and Venice worth at least $10,000 courtesy of CIT World Travel, specialists in European travel for over 25 years Other prizes include- • $800 worth of interstate travel, by rail or by air • A colour television set • A choice of mobile phone For more information, or for more tickets phone: (03) 9427 7311

ISSN 1036-1758 08

9 771036 175017