Vol. 5 No. 9 November 1995 $5.00
Fighting Memories Jack Waterford on strife at the Memorial Ken Inglis on rival shrines
Great Escapes: Rachel Griffiths in London, Chris McGillion in America and Juliette Hughes in Canberra and the bush
Volume 5 Number 9 EURE:-KA SJRE:i:T November 1995 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and th eology
CoNTENTS
4 30 COMMENT POETRY Seven Sketches by Maslyn Williams. 9 CAPITAL LETTER 32 BOOKS 10 Andrew Hamilton reviews three recent LETTERS books on Australian immigration; Keith Campbell considers The Oxford 12 Companion to Philosophy (p36); IN GOD WE BUST J.J.C. Smart examines The Moral Chris McGillion looks at the implosion Pwblem (p38); Juliette Hughes reviews of America from the inside. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen Vol I and Hildegard of Bingen and 14 Gendered Theology in Ju dea-Christian END OF THE GEORGIAN ERA Tradition (p40); Michael McGirr talks Michael McGirr marks the passing of a to Hugh Lunn, (p42); Bruce Williams Melbourne institution. reviews A Companion to Theatre in Australia (p44); Max T eichrnann looks 15 at Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth COUNTERPOINT (p46); James Griffin reviews To Solitude The m edia's responsibility to society is Consigned: The Journal of William m easured by the code of ethics, says Smith O'BTien (p48). Paul Chadwick. 49 17 THEATRE ARCHIMEDES Geoffrey Milne takes a look at quick changes in W A. 18 WAR AT THE MEMORIAL 51 Ja ck Waterford exarnines the internal C lea r-fe Jl ed forest area. Ph oto FLASH IN THE PAN graph, above left, by Bill T homas ructions at the Australian War Memorial. Reviews of the films The Bridges of Madison County, Clocl
V OLUME 5 N UMilER 9 • EUREKA STREET 3 EURI:-KA STRI:-ET COMMENT A magazine of public affairs, the arts M oRAe FRASER and theology Publisher Michael Kelly SJ Editor Morag Fraser The score Consulting editor Michael McGirr SJ Assistant editor u"m Swm- .s SO NOT ouT thi, month, which pu" "' Jon Greenaway E in Alan Border and Garfield Sobers territory, and looking Production assistants: forward to a Bradman average. Many readers have loyally supported the magazine since Paul Fyfe S], Juliette Hughes, Catriona Jackson, Chris Jenkins SJ, we began this risky publishing venture in 1991, in a recession Paul Ormonde, Tim Stoney, and during the Gulf War, and with publications out of Siobhan Jackson, Dan Disney religious institutions closing more often than they opened. It is with some pleasure, then, that I can report that 1995 Contributing editors has been our most successful year to date. The increase in Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ subscription rates since March has been extraordinary, and Brisbane: Ian Howells SJ newsstand sales also show a marked increase. Perth: Dean Moore Readers might also like to know that articles first Sydney: Edmund Campion, Andrew Riemer, published in EurelVictoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3 121 out Eurelw Street session last year featured Seamus Heaney, Tel: 03 942 7 7311 Fax: 03 9428 4450 talking freely and eloquently, with none of the '60s inhibi Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by tions he also remembered, about God and the mysterious Michael Kelly, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. metres of poetry. Printed by Doran Printing, 46 Industrial Drive, Braes ide VIC 3 195. This year, in the theatre next door, another crowd was © Jesuit Publications 1995 listening to a panel discussion of grunge realism. Afterwards Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and both audiences compared notes, and converging enthusiasms. fiction, wi II be returned only if accompanied by a Eurel 4 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 COMMENT: 2 P ETER STEELE S ,AMu' HCANCY'""""" Rnd fell :~~~~'~ j~~ u~i~~if e we' V O LUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 5 COMMENT: 3 JuLJ ETTE HuGHES Counting the chips I N L983 TH' ALP woN GomNMCNT, wuh the "g Part of the answer lies in the army of conserva nificant assistance of environmental preferences. tive bureaucrats that administers the labyrinthine Electors disapproved of the Fraser Government's sup deals and agreements connected with environment port for the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission's and industry policy. It is common knowledge that plans to dam the Franklin River. In subsequent elec federal environment bureaucrats have long been tions, environmental issues have proved to be of cru anxious to drop the hot potato of forest policy. To cial importance in nudging Labor governments over that end, and others, the Intergovernmental Agree the line in marginal scats. ment on Environment (IGAE) was signed in 1992. But the heady clays of the Franklin dispute are Under this agreement the Commonwealth Govern over a decade away in the past, and with the conflict ment is committed to trying to reach agreement with over forest policy now raging, the relationship be the States on environmental o utcomes. A cynical tween the Labor Government and the environmental reading would interpret this document as the federal lobby is headed for complete break government's attempt to deal with clown unless something approaching recalcitrant states by giving away its a Cabinet volte face is seen. power. The environmental lobby has The overall effect has been the always been a critic of any govern extraordinary sight of a Federal La ment, but there were many in the bor Government administering and Labor Party who took the lobby's indeed facilitating some of the more support for granted. That was until extrem e state Coalition environ the woodchip licensing fiasco late mental policies. Tasmania has been last year. It was seen as axiomatic recently allowed to build a huge new that the Liberal Party was always woodchip mill and, was granted a going to be the bogeyman that could large increase in its export woodchip be used to frighten voters into accept quota. ing the Labor line on environm ent. That, and many other exam They cannot be so comfortable any ples, have caused mistrust in the more, even if they previously felt environmental movement. There able to ignore the Tasmanian expe are many who claim that forest pol rience of 1991 when the Parliamen- icy has been a failure from the start, tary Greens deserted Labor and enabled Ray Groom that minister after minister has been frightened by to govern. the claims of their Sir Humphreys that to do anything Just where does Labor's problem with the envi other than what has been done would be that anathe ronmental lobby lie? The question has mystified many ma of all good politicians: 'courageous'. And that the who previously felt safe with the comfortable prefer portfolio desperately needs another Richardson is no ence arrangements that have frequently saved Labor's longer in doubt. It would indeed stretch the imagina bacon in the past. Why does the Federal Labor tion to conceive of him allowing himself, as did Government persist in its support for the export wood Faulkner, to be the sacrificial lamb in Cabinet during chipping industry, an industry that employs fewer the 1994 woodchip-liccnce tragi-comedy. than 600 people Australia-wide, that by any measure The current quarrel over Deferred Forest Areas is environmentally destructive, uneconomic and illustrates the level to which relations and policy have electorally damaging? And with a union that docs not sunk. The environmental lobby was enraged by the hesitate to embarrass the government. Federal Government's offer, on state advice, of areas There was no su ch hesitancy in restructuring the to be protected from logging. Again there was a bi motor and textile industries. Many thousands of zarre Tasmanian factor: nearly 100,000 hectares of workers lost their jobs as Australia was forced onto button grass and a couple of lakes were included as the level playing fields in these areas. But the native areas there that were declared safe from the loggers. forest logging industry remains sacrosanct and In other states, areas that had already been clearfelled 'Re-growth' in the receives millions of dollars annually from the taxpayer were set aside as protected from logging. forest: photograph to keep it going. Why it continues to receive such The background to this piece of bumbling was by Bill Thomas generous, indeed quixotic, support is the subject of four months of intense negotiation between federal much conjecture. and state forestry bureaucrats, and thousands of small 6 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 deals emerged wherein the states got virtually every thing they asked for. The reluctance to go back on these soft-fought battles was understandable if not acceptable to the environmental lobby. But the federal bureaucrats would argue that they fulfilled their brief under IGAE, that the Commonwealth now has the responsibility to try to reach agreement with the states on environ W vo~~ s=~~H~:.~:~n~~~r :~,~~ogi- mental matters. cal journal, you could quickly pick theological wind shifts. It would seem an act of the greatest hubris for The October number of Pacifica, for example, includes three the Federal Labor Government, then, to assume that overlapping studies of church-governance. The articles, none it can count on the same level of preference support commissioned, landed simultaneously on my desk. from environmental campaigners as before. And the Bruce Kaye, general secretary of the Anglican Church of message of the Queensland, NSW and Canberra elec Australia, describes in detail the formative years of William tions has been clear: wherever environmental groups Grant Broughton, first Bishop of Australia, prior to his arrival campaign against Labor in marginal seats, Labor polls in Sydney in 1829. Broughton was a High Churchman who badly. When they support Labor, Labor usually slips originally supported Newman's refonning zeal in the 1830s, through. but by the 1840s, his 'was a more open religion, with a more At the moment, unless someone in Cabinet can diffused sense of authority, a more open conception of history come up with a solution that is credible to an and theodicy'. environmentally conscious electorate, then the best Meanwhile in Rome, in the same 1840s, Antonio Ros it can hope for is that the environmental lobby will mini-Serbati was publishing The five wounds of the Church. not actively campaign against Labor in the next fed Rosmini's 'wound in the right foot' was 'the nomination of eral election. bishops left in the hands of civil government'. John Hill, The worst-case scenario for Labor would be a former president of the Catholic Institute of Sydney, has direction of preferences to the Coalition parties. Once written a marvellous diagnosis of the present state of this that would have been extremely unlikely, but the gap wound. The appointment of bishops was not always a Ro has been fast closing between Coalition and Labor man privilege. environment policies. Some would argue that the Hill notes the recent changes: Federal Government has already been colluding with .. .from the time of Lateran II (1139), bishops were to be Coalition states in the destruction of Australia's best elected by their cathedral chapters, and this law was re old-growth eucalypt forests by its failure to control spected by popes as recent as Pius V1I, Leo XII and Gregory the native forest logging industry. XV1 ... When the hierarchies were restored in England and The recent leak of Liberal policies included a nod Wales (1850) and the Netherlands (1853), they were from in the direction of protecting old-growth forests. the beginning subject to papal patronage ... When France and Whether the m easures are as 'green' as Labor's remains Portugal renounced patronage, St Pius X began making ap to be seen. The real issue is the electoral impact of pointments there, and so the number of sees under papal such an awakening. Labor strategists have been hoping patronage further increased ... At the death of Leo Xll (1829), to flush out Howard's policies and neutralise them as of 646 ordinaries, 555 were appointed by civil authorities; part of the build-up to the next election. Here they 67 were elected by chapters or their equivalent; ancl24 were have a valuable opportunity if they can persuade Mr appointed by the pope. In 1904, Rome was appointing 700 Keating to assert himself more against the loggers this diocesan bishops ... Whatever the de jure position, de facto time. the Roman Pontiff 'freely appointed' the majority of There are many voters who feel that whatever bishops. the shading of the environmental policies of the Liberals, the hue is essentially the same as Labor's. Such freedom was not always the case. Andrew The perception is fast growing that the environment Hamilton, president of the United Faculty of Theology in would not be served very much worse by a Federal Melbourne, carefully explores the mutuality shown between Coalition Government, because even if there were an Rome and local churches late in the second century. A quar immediate deleterious effect on the environment, as rel had erupted when the Asian church wanted to end the there was in Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's Ameri Easter Fast at Passover, while all others opted for the Sunday ca, it would have the effect of revitalising opposition following the Passover. Victor, Bishop of Rome, excommu to such policies. nicated the Asian churches for heterodoxy, but his decision It does the environment no good, and Labor no was not well received. Many bishops, notably Irenaeus of good, if Labor's environment policies are seen as 'th e Gaul, advised Victor to restore peace. And so he did. • frog in the pot' tactics: everyone cooked slowly, sooth ingly, but just as dead in the water at the end. • John Honner SJ is the Editor-in-chief of Pacifica and lectures in theology and philosophy at the United Faculty of Theology Juliette Hughes is a freelance journalist. in Parkville, Victoria. VOLUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 7 COMMENT: 4 JIM D AVIDSON Quite Whiteley A mR A THm-o" coNmwc t ON A"'CA, with to deconstruct and reconstitute the female form. its wars, impoverishment, famine, AIDS, and the Significantly it is in these paintings that his charac doubtful future facing South Africa, I went along to teristic cobalt blue first appears, just as a squiggle for the Brett Whiteley exhibition. Just what would the one of Christie's ears. overseas participants in that conference have made As the reflective nature of his writings show of this? and he lavished great care on them- Whiteley was For there were- to put it mildly- one or two always seeming to redraw his basic equations, passing significant absences, despite the fashionable play-pow over som e elements to foreground others. His love of er revolution Whiteley got caught up in. Three-dimen the curve, 'the most spiritual of all form s', had gone sional gimmicks were no substitute; more and more underground at the time of the Christie paintings; but one was struck by the waste, by a sense of that capac as tension receded, bombed or blissed out, a preoccu ity for fluid line wilting into nothing pation with female form saw it burst ness. By the time the last room and forth again to produce images of strik the last phase of his life was reached, ing plasticity. the expanses between the nodal By the late eighties a woman read points (ideas) were getting broader and ing on the beach would be transformed broader. into a kind of enormous paper clip, All that eagerness, all that thirst while other nudes would suggest the for life, propelled Whiteley for most floppiness of a dog bouncing around of his career. Near the beginning is a on the settee. Again, while a post portrait of a soup kitchen, where a colonial Matisse, bayin g at the tetchiness in the composition is fine lavender on bordello-like walls, ly balanced by the vacancy and resig Whiteley's earlier interest in Drysdale nation of the seated figures. And then is unobtrusively manifested again, in there is the way that-like Jeffr ey the undulating calm of small craft Smart- Whiteley early on was much taken with the bobbing in water. These 'grey' paintings- actually a stillness and resonance of Drysdale's rural buildings, pale olive dominates-are the most haunting of the and set about translating that to a dun-coloured ur Lavender Bay series. ban setting. Not particularly successfully, it must be More usually, reflectiveness is transformed into said; characteristically Whiteley (being the ch amele a sensual tenderness; sometimes a sense of humour on he was) had to go and paint Sofala, just as Drys bursts through . In his painting of a lyrebird dancing dale had done. Later came abstraction, at which he on its mound, Whiteley tells us on the ca nvas that became a dab hand: the disconsolateness glimpsed this is 'a pointless painting/ needs looking at for a early on here becom es creative tension. long time/ in order to think (a bout it)'. The bit in It was at this point, in the mid-sixties, that brackets prompts an image of Sandy Stone scratching Whiteley went to London. Living in Ladbroke Grove, his head, as well he might, for the painting is a puzzle. it was quite by chance he discovered that Rillington Whiteley had resorted to his common trick of adding Place, the scene of the notorious Christie murders, a three-dimensional element, in this case the feath was not very far away. Whiteley, curious, sought out ers of a lyrebird's tail. people who had known the murderer or his gassed Here, though, they are functional, a necessary and violated victims; and, since he was beginning to counterbalance; for in place of a single hea d-still m ove towards his own version of the doctrine of the there in the background- are three or fo ur additional artist as exemplary sufferer, he decided that Christie ones. The multiple images present the lyrebird, with 'crystallises the life around him .. . he could no m ore its myriad capabilities for mimicry, pottering about control his madness than the world can control its the forest like a stoned songster. It could be the most energies.' Certainly Christie crystallised som ething revealing of Whiteley's self-portraits. • for Whiteley; this is a singularly clear case of the in Detail, above, tensity of art being generated by human extremity. Jim Davidson has thought about lyrebirds deeply. from The tetchincss and the abstraction of the earlier paint The Brett Whiteley exhibition is at the Art Gallery of Brett Whi teley's ings could now, under the influence of Francis Ba con, N ew South Wales untill9 November. It then travels Christi e (1965). be brought into sharper focus. Whiteley was licensed to Darwin, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart. 8 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMil ER 1995 Push to the polls W ,$50 MTI.L>ON, MOST oF rr YOUR owN MONEY, help Virtually non-stop polling-right down to individual you make up your mind at the next election? Politics is be electorate level-means that sudden shifts in perceptions coming higher and higher tech, with the political smarties can be monitored. Messages can be quickly crafted to using more and more clever, expensive techniques to per neutralise bad news or to stress positive points and they can suade you to go their way. be recrafted for local circumstance. Incumbents, particular The political caravans will be entirely hooked up-able ly goverrunent incumbents, have such data bases on the elec to commtmicate across the continent with a single compu tors that the average voter will get three or four personalised ter keystroke-with intelligence apparatuses able to keep letters from the candidate, playing with subtlety at your them right up with what the other side is doing. Polling assumed or known biases. You might be getting a letter will be almost continuous. And despite Paul Keating's stressing how green the candidate is; the person next door expressed distaste for in -depth attitudinal polling (or at least might be getting one stressing that the candidate recognises for having the results leaked) everyone will be doing it. Not the significance of jobs in the timber industry. a little of what they record about you will have found its Do all the new tricks and new technologies matter very way into a political data base so that your real or imagined much? I doubt it. They add a lot of extra information and prejudices can be tickled by focused polling-sometimes, noise to the debate. They can be very useful in befuddling by push polling, where purported sampling is by itself being the political commentators, who are not necessarily as on used to send out a message, sometimes a lying one. top of the moods as they pretend to be. They can sometimes Every morning, campaign committees plotting the day's serve to put politicians under great pressure, even activities will have access to material of a sophistication occasionally to topple them. And, sometimes, they help hitherto unknown to detect how the message is selling, or politicians to focus on the issues which matter for failing to sell. Technology will also permit lightning shifts them. of tactics. And some of the demands of the very same tech nologies mean that good tactics have a better chance of BUT THE VOTERS DO NOT LACK in sophistication either. A working. The requirements of infotainment television and high proportion have strong preconceptions unlikely to be the 20-second grab mean, for example, that if you and your shaken by either hard or soft-selling. Each party spends more team say the one thing all day, it will get the priority hear money keeping likely supporters on side than on wooing ing on the television screens that night, whether or not the the genuine waverers or appealing to those who will not correspondents judge it to be the most important develop buy in any circumstance. The wooable, almost by defini ment. They might get that message across too, but they will tion are fickle: what worked on them today might not be so still run the footage of the parroted slogan. powerful a week or two hence when they are actually enter In the past few years, practically every journalist on the ing the polling booth. Neither the polls nor the political campaign trail acquired a rnobile telephone. If Paul Keating insiders foresaw the significant points of some of the most says something in Sydney which differs from what Kim recent elections-say the by-election in Canberra or the Beazley is saying at the same moment in Perth, he could be Queensland or NSW state elections. being cross-examined about it before the end of the press The campaign offices, moreover, are only a part of the conference. Any embarrassing statements made by any show. Neither Paul Keating nor John Howard is a machine politician can be quickly conveyed or faxed to where it will man. Both are hard men to run simply because they have do most damage. their own appreciation of what works and what doesn't. They During Alexander Downer's political decline the will not follow scripts, but they will follow their instincts. Government's National Media and Liaison Service (known Paul Keating is about to reinforce this with the return as the Animals; the Opposition's unit is known as the Veg of Don Russell-one of the few advisers he has ever had etables) were monitoring exactly what Downer said, and who can stand up to him and tell him when he's being plain faxing to everyone in sight transcripts of previous occasions silly. Whatever discipline Russell brings, he won't be push when he had said something opposite, or the party policy he ing the Prime Minister into following a script devised by was contradicting. It was fatal because the journalists knew rnarketing men. Russell is more likely to direct Keating's he had stumbled before he himself did and before he was natural talents as a flexible and agile polariser. Keating has able to go into damage-control. the capacity to exploit an issue, to package a policy, or to An indexed speech made many years ago by Liberal see the trivial example of a difference in approach-the cost backbencher Bronwyn Bishop on the subject of tobacco of a Goods and Services Tax on a birthday cake, for exam advertising was used to embarrass her immediately she was ple-which epitomises difference. named as shadow health spokesperson; that immediately John Howard is much the same. It will still be the person put her in conflict with groups such as the doctors, and before the machines. • undermined her capacity to establish a relationship with the lobbies. Jack Waterford is the editor of the Canberra Times. VOLUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 9 LETTERS Eureka Street welcom es letters tion, just to nam e a few . Also, the Yes Geraldine from its rea ders. Short letters are meaning attached to 'Church' is un m ore likely to be published, and necessarily narrow; it refers to 'author ity' whereas the 'Church' in essence From Mark 0' Brien all letters may be edited. Letters is the total Faith community whose I was rea ding 'Frankly Geraldine' (Eu must be signed, and should in mission is to try to live, and ultimately reka Street October '95), when an im clude a contact phone number and establish, God's Kingdom now. It does age out of Spiritus Mundi troubled my the writer's nam e and address. not make sense to defin e the C hurch ight, a kind of fla shback to an earlier as those in authority and then bl ame age. The scene: a group of bishops, lis these relatively few people for the fa ct tening; the spea ker, an early m edieval that the world does not measure up to Geraldine (more likely a Gerald then, som e individual's analysis. I suppose) who has first-hand experi The second proposition is a lso ence of the marvels of monarchy or has clearly untrue. The Church has many been busily boning up on the la te clear, tradi tiona! 'signposts' and va l Roman empire; the message, monar I ~ ues that concern things like: racism, chy is the way to go, brothers, and you social justice, euthanasia, abortion, had better get into it if you want to be artificial fertilisation, even consumer releva nt. The m essage is gladly re ism, and so forth . That this is so, is ceived and the church launches itself attested to by the fact that Ms Doogue with enthusiasm and relish into the can only cite, as an example of the monarchical world. Church's ethical failure, the area of Flashforwarcl to the present. A industrial relati ons. better served by atholic Church Inc. group of bishops struggling to shrug off The third proposition fills one with or are we just setting ourselves up for the monarchical model, I istening; the despair. Imagine th e C hurch being run the kind of abuses that occurred dur spea ker, Geraldine, promoting the 10 EUREKA STREET • Nov EMilEH 1995 I suggest that the central question Cal well: I made representations to fo r the Church in regard to its struc the Postm aster-General to the effect ture is not whether or not it meets th at Mr . D obson might be given current needs, but whether or not it is teleph on e faci lities, if t ha t were a vibrant witness to the Gospel in the possible, and a silent number to ena modern world. I£ the Church's struc ble him to carry on the work of the ture no longer appears to derive from industrial groups inside the [Federat t h e teaching of i ts fo under Jesus ed Clerks[ union. Christ, and I would suggest that in Beale: Was that work of national some ways it does not, then it must importance? be re-exam ined in faithfulness to both Cal well: T hat, to me seem ed to be the Christian tradition and contempo w o rk of very great importance. This month, rary human experi ence. But it cannot j Parliam entary Debates, Ho use of comtesy o£ Penguin Books, be simply a restructuring along good Representatives 21 September 1949, the writer of each letter we organisational principles. vol. 204 p. 395). publish will receive I believe that Doogue is correct in Dr James Franklin a copy of her assessme nt that the C hurch's University of New South Wale St Augustin e, City of God . structure must be re-envisioned to fit Penguin Classics, t he times in which w e live. T he RRP $19.95 C hurch, both universally and locally, Outplayed must be a vibrant sign of God's incar nation am ong us in all the strugg les Fwm Mich ael Furtado, Departm en t of and joys of daily human existence. I Education, Universi ty of N ewcastle politics as s tridently as it has gladly join h er and our church The historical links between religion proclaimed its mora l teachings on sex community in conversation as to how and secular culture w h ich Anne uality. we can imagine, develop and construct O'Brien (Lifting the Lid, Eurel V OLUM E 5 N UMllER 9 • EUREKA STREET 11 CHRIS M c GILLION fOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE In God we bust The ECONOMY The ECONOMY Everybody's talkin' about the ECONOMY They say this and that is good for the ECONOMY. Well I don 't give a damn about the ECONOMY We 've still got the same potholes, the same high rents. Hell, the ECONOMY ain't done nothin' for m e. - A cab driver in Nashville, Tennessee. 0 N s,mM"" 29 tho N'w variety. Moreover, local authorities to families with dcpcnd 12 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1995 way to decrease labour costs is to system skewed against blacks. To Church'-the message isn't. It all move production to areas of low most whites, he was a smart operator comes down to loving Jesus and Jesus wages (hence the flight of US opera- who used his colour to beat a murder loving back. Still, in tiny Dora, tions to La tin America). rap. This diff erence of opinion is not Alabama, 200 people listen to that Another way is to cut wages, aboutlegal rights or wrongs bu t about message over and over each Sunday including the social wage- health, opposing worldviews and life and 75 come back for another dose education, public transport, subsi- experiences. It reflects a divide in on Wednesday night prayer meet dised food and housing for the poor. American society-the kind of gulf ings. T he surprise is not that this is that encourages one group to blame With this kind of reach, and that h appening-th e tren d is hardly another for shortage of jobs or uni- kind of vacuousness, the religious pcculiar to the US- but that it is versity places a n d glues their righ t has the ability to bog down failing to encourage any kind of class attention to epiphenomena while national political debate down on politics among Americans in structural adjustment moral issues that response. A goes unquestioned. most other coun One reason can be fo und in the tries rcsol ved Chicl V OLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 13 COMMENT: 5 MICHAEL M cGIRR End of the Georgian era W ,N I WAS muNG, M' CATH" WeNT AWM to $15, but nothing untoward. We were not going to see Melbourne and came back with a gift for mum from Georges' labels on the tables of Dimmeys, M el Georges. Even in Sydney, we knew to stand in awe of bourne's other legendary olde worlde emporium where Melbourne's legendary department store. It didn't all things gaudy and crass are eventually remaindered. m atter that instead of perfume or fashion, dad had On the day Helen Demidenko (as she then was) was bought a set of plastic barbeque plates. They were al awarded her controversial Miles Franklin Award, The ways known as the Georges plates. We had our tea on Hand That Signed the Paper had been marked cl own them for years until mum cashed in several hundred on the Dimmeys' tables to $2.50. No such fate for Lan Choo tea coupons for a Georges' merchandise. On n ew set of crockery. The the final cl ay of trading, a scene on the plates gradually serviceable m en's sports faded but they have ended up jacket was still waiting for surviving Georges itself. In a a buyer at $2495. There blaze of publicity, Georges were some imported plas closed on October 5. tic dominoes in the ch il It's difficult to explain dren's department for $9 a the sudden rush of interest set, but fortunately in once Georges announced homeware there were oth their imminent closure. er dominoes with Picasso Those who attend to the motifs for $99. Meanwhile, minutiae of Melbourne life people lined up to buy knew that the old dowager Georges' packaging, pre had been suffering ill health sumably as mementos or and struggling to keep up even heirlooms. Empty appearances for a long time. cardboard boxes sold for $2, There were whispers last $5 and $10. December that Georges had Melbourne is fu ll of been unable to buy new stories about Georges, Christmas decorations and many of them with a wry had endured the shame of twist. One dedicated com wearing the same outfit two munist, for example, used years in a row. The right always to do her Christmas people were keeping their shopping there. distance. On the last afternoon, The wake was a differ a man in a suit approached ent matter. For the last me outside in Collins St. week, Georges was crowded. He had the look of needing An employee recognised a to talk to someone. He told face in one of the queues and me when he was a toddler, resorted to gallows humour to say he thought they his mother used to put him in a collar and tic and should close more often. It was good for business. Two take him to Georges. 'That was fifty years ago,' he other employees spoke in hushed tones across a said bleakly. crowded lift: A moment later, an American tourist asked what 'It's very sad.' the fuss was about. In a way, those two exchanges 'For more than one reason-' embody Georges' problem. An institution to which 'I know exactly what you mean -' an entire class could formerly relate unselfconsciously Georges wanted to die with dignity. There was had becom e a curiosity. The G rand Prix and the to be no closing sale. Georges deserved mourners, not Casino are not, as the Georges staff might have once jackals. There were a few bargains marked demurely advised, 'quite the thing'- • Photograph by as 'reductions', such as a manual potato masher with Tim Slaney a superbly turned handle marked clown from $25 to Michael McGirr is consulting editor of Eurelw Street. 14 EUREKA STREET • NovEM BER 1995 Craclzing the code Journalists describe society to itself. They seek truth. They convey information, ideas and opinions; a privileged role. They search, disclose, record, question, entertain, sugges t and rem ember. Th ey inform citizens and animate democracy. They give a practical form to free dom of expression. Many journalists worl< in private enterprise, but all have these public responsibilities. They scrutinise power, but also exercise it, and should be accountable. A ccountability engenders trust. Without trust, journalists do not fulfil their public responsibilities. - preamble to the recommended revised Code of Ethic , Australian Journalists' Association section, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance W R
V O LUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 15 Public Life and the Press, who suggests journalism is are used to playing a prominent role in the climax of 'the art of constructing a political present that 'works' events when they become 'the issue of the clay', flare, in the sense that it persuades large numbers of people then fade. Well before any referenda there must be to accept the challenge of public work when there are an accretion of common knowledge of Australia's so many other alternatives, among them drift, despair, constitutional structure and practice. What practical and the false comfort of a privatised existence. contribution could the media make to that? For Rosen, a 'professional' journalist is 'someone I think this year's remembrance of the end of the whose own work is concerned with whether public Second World War carries clues. In supplements and work gets done.' According to this view, journalism special programs, as well as segm ents in regular fare, is: primarily an act of persuasion rather than infor the print and electronic media showed that it can treat mation delivery; which helps to construct 'the present' us like citizens. The coverage generated reflection, rather than merely reflect it; depends on, rather than not just distraction. I found it better than the usual opposes, the work of other civic agencies; and distin formulaic bathos. gui shes 'freedom within politics' from 'freedom from Journalists chronicled for us and future Austral politics', supporting the former against the ians the distilled memories of man y of our older peo latter. ple, undiluted now by self-censorship, and spiked often by the urgency of advancing years. Here was TIEIDEA MAKES ME NERvous. Healthy scepticism perhaps their last chance to tell, because we might seems a better role for journalism than barracking. not ask again in uch a sustained way. Hatreds had Even if he means 'the work of other civic agencies' in cooled, improving clarity. Everyone could find some the largest sense of governance (executive) or justice thing in the coverage that reflected his or her experi (police and courts), it is not hard to imagine Rosen's ence as a m ember of a family in a community, not hopes being translated in practice into mere m edia just a target in a market. advocacy of the current agendas of those agencies So it could be with the republic issue. The Civics under the banner of public journalism. Still, the idea Expert Group recommended the creati on of prestig m erits a discussion that has yet to begin in Austral ious awards for educative media coverage about civics ian journalism circles. (For more see Quill, Novem and citizenship. But the media should not have to be ber 1993; American Journalism Review, September fed public funds in the form of awards or advertising 1994.) campaigns. The privilege to self-regulate demands We need not endorse 1 public journalism{ in order m ore in return. We are justified in pressing for media to adopt the constructive spirit of its advocates. Al contributions of space and airtime, and the invest-
though necessary1 it is too easy to criticise and sa ti m ent of journalistic expertise, in presenting rise the media. Suggesting how it might improve its information in easily accessible forms. contribution to Australian civic life is harder but even n1 ore necessary. A DDITIONS ARE INVITED to the following list of prac In 1994, the Federal Government's Civics Expert tical suggestions (please send them directly to the Group reported widespread public ignorance of basic papers and networks): civic institutions. Such findings have appeared since • Efforts by political reporters to avoid fashionable jar at least 1946. In 1988 the Constitutional Commis gon (for example, 'spin doctor') that can mystify and sion said that only 53 percent of the population knew alienate readers who do not inhabit the politico-media Australia has a written Constitution, and almost 70 world. percent of the 17-to-24-year-olds who were surveyed •Regular publication in newspapers of a glossary of didn1 t know. terms, perhaps next to the TV guide or the weather Such results dent hopes for a genuinely inclusive details. Here the uncertain citizen could check what debate over the next five years about whether Aus a 1reserve power' is, or w hen a habit becomes a con tralia should become a republic and{ if so, what kind vention. and by what steps. Debate assumes shared informa • Publication at regular intervals of 1 at-a-glance' tion. For example, how does a citizen form a view summaries of the competing models of constitutional about appropriate presidential powers if he or she does reform. not understand the present separation of powers? •Brief, accurate televi ion explanations of the basic Neither Keating's minimalist model n or elements of the Constitution could be aired in prime Howard's people's convention m eans anything if dis time and repeated often enough to produce recall with cussion is limited to the elites that create them. Civ out nausea. By all means, use those wonderful com ics in the education system is a necessary but longer puter graphics, but to aid meaning, not just for show. term response. It is inescapable that the m edia will •Reconstruction of seminal mom ents in constitution be vital to whether the republic debate and any refer al history could be produced in a way that values enda are democratic in substance as well as form. meaning over feeling. Insert them into television The work ahead is not glamorous, nor can it be formats in a similar way to the 1 Australia Remembers'· instant. And this is unnatural for journalists, who spots that have appeared this year.
16 EUREKA STREET • NovEMBE R 1995 • Broadcast discu ssions of one particular aspect of the republic issue, hosted by a household name, onill SflN0"' the envimnment '' th" backed by sound research and directed by some 0 " o~!~o]?.~Y.,£ scientists, whether they like it or not, have been thrown into political and social one who trusts the viewer to be able to listen to debate. Recognition of the importance of public opinion was underscored at a the sam e person for m ore than seven seconds. session on biological control of pest animals at the latest Conference of the The issue will not go away and does not have to Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science be 'solved' within one program . Start now with (ANZAAS) held in Newcastle. Much of the discussion centred around social one program every three months and and ethical issues. increase the frequency later. Rabbits are still the most high-profile pest problem in Australia. Current estimates put rabbit numbers in Australia at about 300 million, causing about T HIS CHALLENG E wouLD SEPARATE the journalists A$90 million a year in direct damage to agricultural and pastoral production. from the entertainers in the m edia. The great Rabbits are also a problem in New Zealand, but not as severe as brush-tailed array of skills, of brevity with clarity, that possums. There are now more possums in New Zealand than Australia-70 journalists regularly apply, say, to a Royal marital million of them-and the New Zealand Government spends about NZ$35 spat or a film tar's indiscretion, can equally be million a year on control measures, mainly trapping them or poisoning them applied to this fundamental issue about how we with 1080. Because possums harbour bovine tuberculosis, New Zealand lives in want to govern ourselves. fear of the damage possums could do to its beef and dairy industries. The ABC and SBS are expected to contribute. As myxomatosis loses its grip on Australian rabbit populations, Australian But the prime-time commercial news and current and New Zealand biologists have been working on two possibilities to take its affairs programs and their luminous stars share place. For short to medium term control, researchers at the CSIRO's Australian the responsibility. As they often point out, the Animal Health Laboratories (AAHL) in Geelong have been studying a virus people watch them m ost. which originated in China and devastated rabbit populations in Europe. Since March, the rabbit calici virus has been undergoing testing in quarantined rabbit It is not unprecedented. On20 July 1987, the populations on Wardang Island in Spencer Gulf, South Australia. Ray Martin Midday Show hosted the launch of But all has not gone well. The virus has escaped and has been detected in the report of the Constitutional Commission's several animals on the mainland nearby. Even if it spreads no further, the project advisory committee on individual and democratic has been set back years and lost much in public confidence. Throughout their rights. research, the scientists at AAHL have devoted much time and effort to A deeper issu e requires attention. Media are demonstrating that the virus kills rabbits in a humane manner. The rabbits do n o t mere bystanders to government, but not appear to suffer. That was never considered with the introduction of the intimately related both as suppliers of images to myxoma virus which can blind rabbits and send them mad. the electorate and, crucially, as corporations But it is the long- term strategy that caused the greatest discussion at whose fortunes are affected by government ANZAAS. Researchers in Canberra, at the Co-operative Research Centre for policy. Biological Control of Vertebrate Pest Populations, are working on a strategy to Nothing exemplifies the interrelationships engineer a virus that will cause female rabbits to become immune to rabbit better than the alliance between N ews Corpora sperm and their own eggs. And the New Zealanders are hoping to adapt the tion and Telstra to create the cable pay TV oper scheme to control their possums. ation Foxtel. Most of the m edia seem blind to The scheme has several attractions. Contraception avoids the use of poison, the serious conflict of interest this creates for guns, disease or traps to kill animals. Already in New Zealand there is Government, in particular because privatisation considerable public unease with the 1080 poisoning program against the of Telstra is on the agenda. possums. Also, most of the breeding in rabbit populations is done by a few D oes anybody doubt tha t government dominant animals. If dominant females become sterile, the population struc policies on the vital issues of Australia's prepa ture remains intact and younger females are discouraged from breeding. ration for the Information Age are affected by its In general, animal welfare groups are pleased with the direction of this intimate involvement with the owner of most of research. But they are not so sanguine about another method of fertility control the country's newspapers and a chunk of the being trialled with foxes-the use of drugs to terminate pregnancies. 'Technol ogy should be focused on stopping embryos forming, not on killing young,' said Seven N etwork? animal rights campaigner, Glenys Oogjes. Part of civics consists in developing a m ore Other critics, such as University of Newcastle environmental philosopher sophisticated understanding of the interaction of Glenn Albrecht, believe that using a genetically engineered virus to control m edia and government. Yet m edia, as parties to pests is a dangerous and high cost solution. 'Introducing a new disease may not the relationship, are unlikely to be the ones best work-and it could jump over to other species. To think we can eradicate a equipped to lead this particular aspect of an species without consequence is at best stupid, and at worst arrogant.' education campaign. Non-media organisations Public opinion is often swayed by the perceived severity of the pest problem. will n eed to organise forums and distribute Whereas New Zealanders were unhappy about introducing myxomatosis into materials in which the media participate but do their rabbit populations, there has only ever been minimal outcry in Australia. not control. • On the other hand, a recent New Zealand survey has found that over 70 per cent were quite happy to see possums exterminated by whatever means, although there was a high preference for humane methods such as contraception. • Paul Chadwick is Victorian co-ordinator of the Communications Law Centre. Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer.
V OLUME 5 NUMJlER 9 • EUREKA STREET 17 T HE NATION
JACK W ATERFO RD War at the memorial
M 18 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1995 The management style of neither [Kelson nor McKernan] has ever figured in the top 20 reputed bailiwicks of arbitrary, capricious and intimidating managements in Canberra which has some monsters who still get every sign of official favour. antediluvian approach. Even if one is assured that there was no smoke without fire, the broad allega tion was a little puzzling to seasoned observers of the bureaucracy. Kelson's general reputation was as a straight up and down, perhaps a little old-fashioned, pub lic servant; McKernan may have had some reputation for being a little brusque. But inence for itself: through the 75th anniversary of Ihe the management style of neither has ever figured in Armistice and the 50th anniversaries of World War the top 2.0 reputed bailiwicks of arbitrary, capricious II, through the ceremonies and rituals of the entomb and intimidating managements in Canberra-which ment of the Unknown Soldier and the Australia has some monsters who still get every sign of official Remembers campaign this year. Over the last decade favour. And some of the external indicia suggests that the memorial has gained a new significance for those things could not be that bad. Turnover of middle-to several generations of Australians with no personal senior staff, for example, was very low, and the me experience of the major wars it commemorates: the morial's output, by any standard, high- neither signs turnout of young people to Anzac Day and other of an organisation in chaos or stress. ceremonies these days is higher than ever before. The The Merit Protection and Review Agency has two memorial is many things to different people, but it is primary functions: dealing with appeals against pro as much a treasure house of Australian history and of motion and against penalties for infractions of public the lives and storie of individuals, as it is a service discipline, and hearing and making recommen chapel of the dead. dations about grievances. Both tend to involve clear protagonists and clear areas of disputed ground: the L osE ACHIEVEMENTs--ma ny of which brought him MPRA's role is far more adjudicative than investiga close to the senior ministers and officials-also tive. brought him enemies. There was no secret that he But its enabling Act also permits it to engage in aspired to the top job and there were those who were open-ended inquiries at the direction of the minister determined to see that he did not get it. Kelson, who responsible for public service matters. It was the thought McKernan should succeed him, also became MPRA itself which, having been told informally that a target for those who were drawing up bills of there was trouble at the memorial, persuaded the indictment even before the Merit Protection and minister, Gary Johns, that it would be a good idea to Review Agency began its investigation. The thrust of conduct the first-ever such inquiry; it also drafted the the attack was a claimed bullying and wheedling style letter of reference for him to sign. Oddly, Johns agreed of m anagem ent, alleged favouritisms and to do so without consulting the minister actually re managem ent by reward and punishment, and just sponsible for the memorial, Con Sciacca, Minister for Photograph by enough of the whiff of oppre siveness towards wom Veterans Affairs; at most Sciacca or, more accurately, Emmanuel Santos en on the establishment- most very vaguely put- to one of his staff ers, was merely informed of the deci accentuat e impressions of a fundamentally sion after the event. V OLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 19 On Kelson 's reaching the end of his tenn a year ago Left: Brian ... the me1norial council, wanting to be fair to Kelson McKernan, decided to fill the job temporarily pending Below: a resolution to the affair. McKernan took a leave of Dr Michael McKernan absence to work at the Australian National University. He has now applied for the permanent position, but ... now wears a double handicap: the feeling that things might settle down better with a completely new team, and a festering suspicion that, despite the vehement denials, there might have been fire behind the snwke. The same old Catch 22; damned if you protect yourself and damned if you don 't. The reference referred to alleged workplace har including nega tive feedback, about work performance assment at the memorial, but it did not specify any and behaviour. particular allege1 tions-an MPRA official was later to It soon em erged, however, that the MPRA was concede that there were no specific allegations and working to a quite different definition and that, in the inquiry 'will be a trawling exercise'. It did not any event, it saw its brief as extending to all aspects define what workplace harassment was, and it did not of management style, not only to allegations of limit the inquiry to any particular people, harassm ent. The MPRA ultimately adopted a work or even a period of time. ing definition which said that 'harassment is any type of behe1viour that can be ree1sonably expected to cause I T STARTED WITHOUT INCIDENT. An MPRA officer was a person to feel threatened, uncomfortable or unable deputed to do the inve tigation. The staff were circu to cope with their work environment.' As Justice Finn larised with a letter jointly signed by the MRPA and was to comm ent in the ultimate court case: 'there is Brendan Kelson inviting them to come forward with a well-known aphorism in US tort law-it is not a any grievances; promises were made that there would tort for government to govern. Likewise, it is not be full rights of natural justice and opportunities for workplace harassment for managers to manage. The comment before any findings were made. MPRA's definition appears to have lo t sight of this.' A number of memorial staff busied themselves The progress of the inquiry quickly became one not only making complaints but co-ordinating the of mutual suspicions and paranoia. Though Kelson making of them by others: by season's end about 400 was initially co-operative, he expressed concern to his critical claims had been made by about 70 people minister about the ambit, methods and vagueness of about 20 per cent of the staff. Some involved the same the inquiry. After the trawling had been clone, he and allegations detailed by different people: not all in McKernan were given raw data of the issues and alle volved Kel on or McKernan, and many of the com gations raised against them. Most did not allege har plaints were not of alleged hare1ssment but about what assment as such at all: they included complaints about was claimed to be poor management. Some involved particular management decisions, about alleged fail allegations of incidents of long before, recounted as ures to provide career paths for officers, failures to rumours and not by those said to have been involved. delegate authority, or, in some cases, of bypassing a Some months earlier, Gary Johns and the Public middle manager to speak directly to an underling. Oth Service Commission had issued guidelines on work ers did make complaints of alleged harassment, but place harassment. It had defined it as a form of some, even if arguably harassment were of unbeliev employment discrimination, consisting of offensive, able triviality, and, in some cases, vintage. One com abusive, belittling or threatening behaviour directed plaint of alleged harassment was McKernan's failure at workers as e1 result of real or perceived attributes to show at a public presentation by a junior; another, or differences, having the effect of making the work by a junior officer, was the claim that McKernan had place unpleasant, humiliating or intimidating for the not spoken to her for some months. victims. It was specifically stated th 20 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 method of the inquiry. And, as vague leaks, coming job which has produced that result. It only has itself from the minister's office, began surfacing suggest to blame. ing a hellhole of harassment, including sexual har On Kelson's reaching the end of his term a year assment, at the memorial, Kelson spoke to senior staff ago-still in the heat of litigation and at that stage expressing some concerns about the ambit of the in having to look to his own resources to defend him quiry. This disquiet was also communicated to Den self-the Memorial council, wanting to be fair to nis Ives, then Public Service Commissioner-in whose McKernan, decided to fill the job temporarily pend office McKernan's wife worked, a point seen as being ing a resolution to the affair. McKernan took a leave of great significance by an MRP A which saw every of absence to work at the Australian National Uni action as a sign that the memorial's top management versity. He has now applied for the permanent posi was bent on frustrating the inquiry. An expression of tion, but, for all of his obvious qualifications and his concern about the style of the inquiry at a staff meet supporters, now wears a double handicap: the feeling ing to staff was suggested as a form of intimidatory that things might settle down better with a completely behaviour designed to discourage staff co-operation, new team, and a festering suspicion that, despite the and lurid suggestions were made that managers were vehement denials, there might have been fire behind spying on these making allegations. the smoke. The same old Catch 22; damned if you From now on, each action taken by either side protect yourself and damned if you don't. was interpreted as proof of bad faith by the other. If he fails to get the job, and if those are the rea To concerns expressed by the Memorial's council, sons why, it seems safe to predict that few people of Ann Forward, Director of the MRPA was blunt in talent and energy will be inspired to want to work in accusing it of failing to face up to serious allegations. such a cesspool of internal and external politics with 'There's an entrenched culture in this place, and it's out support from above or below. In the modern dis apparent even around this table', she is reported to posable public service, there's not much due process, have said. loyalty or credit in the bank. • The advice from the Attorney-General's Depart ment was that the inquiry had gone too wide, that it Jack Waterford is the editor of the Canberra Times. was patently without legal authority, that 'workplace harassment appears to have become an issue of rela tive insignificance in the overall inquiry' and that it was not operating with procedural fairness. Shown Theology and Ministry in the Dominican 'fradition this advice, the MRPA rejected it and began pressing for answers to a now somewhat shortened list of alle gations, some still lacking any real detail, and some, You Are the Voice ... as the Attorney-General's Department noted, doing Do you feel called to speak God's word in the world today? Aquinas Institute no more than presenting adverse conclusions in very of Theology provides opportunities for academic. professional. and spiritual general terms without setting out the basis for the growth which will empower you as an effective minister in today's church. conclusion. The MRP A ignored, also, a letter from Aquinas Institute of Theology is an ecumenical environment for women and Dennis Ives reiterating his opinion that workplace har men seeking to enter ministry, grow in their present ministries. or continue assment was as the Government and his commis theological studies. sion had defined it, not as the MRP A had-apart from • Master of Arts in Theology complaining about getting involved, a fac- • Master of Arts in Pastoral Studies • Master of Divinity tor in his own subsequent demise. • Doctor of Ministry in Preaching • Certifi cate in Spiritual Direction HEN THEY COULD NOT GET RESPONSES to their de • Sabbatical programs w • Summer Preaching Institute mands for further particularisation, or any satisfac tion to their demands about limiting the definition Aquinas Institute qf Theology is located on the campus qfSaint Louis University. of harassm ent, Kelson and McKernan decided to take Our students have complete access to the wide range qf educational, recreational, the MRP A to court. The MRP A proceeded to make and cultural opportunities qf the Saint Louis metropolitan area. findings-including dark claims about their lobbying To learn more about the opportunities available to you at Aquinas Institute qf to frustrate the inquiry-and recommendations with Theology, contact Scott L. Hippert, Director qfAdmissions . out hearing their responses. Those are the findings the federal court has now quashed and suppressed. For its own part the MRP A can now claim that whatever was legitimate in the original allegations may now be buried, and that it had a legitimate duty to protect the employees involved. But it was its own s misinterpretation of its role, of its duties under natu ral justice requirements, and of its paranoia about quite legitimate disquiet at the way it went about its 3642 UNDELL BOULEVARD • SAINT LOUIS. MISSOURI 631 08. USA • PHONE 314-977-3869 • FAX 314-977-7225 VOLUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 21 FoREIGN CoRRESPONDENCE R ACHEL GRIFFIT HS London in parts This time I arrive business class at Heathrow, am met by a film representative and a car. My minder checks me in and argues with the hotel while I, still under the effect of the sleeping pills which are the only way I know of coping with long flights, am almost unable to sign my name. I don't recall much of the drive into London on Tuesday. The memory of my arrival nine years ago is much clearer. I will never forget my excitement at spotting the white cliffs of Dover, of coming into London, dumping my bags and walking through the theatre district. At my first London play in 1986, The C ode S OMH,MCS ONe MU ST moeN to a place once visit Breaher, I exhibited all the cliches of theatrical ed to learn how life and self have changed. arousal. I sat on the edge of my seat and watched Derek I am in London. I arrived on Tuesday for a job Jacobi and Juliet Stevenson, clutched my ticket stub, interview with the director of Buttufly Kiss, Michael pored over a borrowed program and projected myself Winterbottom, for his new film Jude the Obscure, furiously on to the Criterion's stage. based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel. I saw a play two nights ago at the same theatre. I first visited London in 1986. According to my It was directed by Harold Pinter. I can't remember its mother, I acquired a rather unspecific accent some name. I fell asleep in half an hour and left at interval. where in second class on the ferry from Calais. Perhaps We walked to the Groucho Club, a private club where the ear was quicker then-or was it that I had no idea the frenzy of media hob-nobbing made a Sydney who I was and so easily wore a new accent like a new Theatre Company opening look like a Romper Room hat? Regardless, it protected me from being identified reunion. as another drunk and randy antipodean backpacker, I failed to notice Johnny Dcpp and Kate Moss amused my mother and no doubt embarrassed Su, my although they were there-and had the frisson I'd travelling companion. failed to have at the theatre, on spying Salman Rush I have just returned from my fourth accent class die in the corner. For the record there was no blonde with the eminent Joan Washington. I am still strug wig although I couldn't see his feet to check for gling to crowd in more dipthongs and relax the sides stilettoes. of my tongue (which arc, apparently, responsible for When I was last in London, I felt Thatcher's pres our hard, flat vowels) in order to perfect my Oxford ence like Big Brother. Not only in her replicas on Above, Rach el shire brogue. I can't help wishing that the 18-ycar Regent Street but in the coldness of the people. It was Griffiths with old, so adept at disguising her Australian roots, had the harshest winter in eighty years. The elderly were Terence Stamp. not mutated into the self-conscious professional actor. encouraged not to get out of bed and the people on Photograph I remember London in '86 as a cold, difficult and benefits hoped the temperature could not rise momen by Tim Cole. extremely classist city. My memories are also tarily above l degree during a 72-hour period, so their Right, the author peppered with romantic experiences, drinking cham heating allowance would not become invalid. The pin in London for the pagne from a frosty bottle in snow-covered Hyde park stripes unflinchingly stepped over the homeless in the first time. with a rather handsome boy from Essex. tube. There was a sense that things had gotten so bad 22 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1995 it was best not to notice. I noticed. the hollow comfort of adult solutions: Order, As I stood in front of a fruit stall, contemplating Discipline, Routine, Simplicity, Control, Sleep. I'd an enormous orange, calculating it to be worth A$4.40, rather have h er Energy, Unlimited Sponge-like I felt the underclass. I wanted to steal it for them, for Capacity To Absorb Information. me, for us. I understood how we were born as a colony. I wonder if that is the essence of growing older, I was just this side of hungry enough not to risk de that we accumulate fears. We grow afraid of losing portation on an overcrowded boat and seven years' our strength, of having experiences faster than we can hard labour, but I understood how my ancestors did. process them, of cracking up. Most of all afraid of There seems to be an optimism in London now. losing what we have: our mind, our m oney, our posi Perhaps it is the end of a hot summer. Perhaps it is tion, our power. Somewhere in mid-life perhaps we m e, measured by my only mild horror on seeing a come face to face with them. The crisis. If we pass we £ 11 2 phone call on my bill. Perhaps you just don't m ay accept the reality that we will lose our power, notice the homeless when you are rich. It is a terrify strength, position. It is inevitable. ing thought. It is cooler today. It is raining softly and it is grey. In 1986 I accepted the indifference of the city It could be Melbourne. It is Sunday. I have sat in a towards m e, unfazed, and enthusiastically embraced cafe and read the Sunday Times. its less expensive pleasures. Now I argue with my It is not som ething she did in London but it is hotel over undelivered faxes, refuse to tip the bad what I do. It has m ore coloured bits and a terrible pro service ... and so the service gets worse. French testing comment on page 2. I am incensed! I I am recognised and so am 'som ebody'- Not only almost feel as if I'm hom e. That is calming. It is an do doors open to private clubs that I didn't know awfully English word to end on, but it is very nice. • existed at eighteen, I am offered international mem bership. In the afternoons I sleep, jet-lagged, while the Rachel Griffiths won the AFI award for best support British Museum and the T ate lie full of unvisited ing actress for her role in Muriel's Wedding. treasures. I ask myself: Am I having a good time? There is an exception I should be going wild, I should be thrilled. What's wrong with m e? At 18 I felt each kilometre I was fr om home as an electron charging through my body. They created a force that liberated m e from everything anyone had ever thought or expected of m e. I was finally free to becom e. I have had moments this week, like at Angels, the famous costumiers, squeezing into an original 19th century corset, in a dressing room in which I imagined Redgrave, Olivier and Gielgud to have unrobed, when I feel the wave of excitement. A moment of naked self-satisfaction: I have become! The question that follows like a bad aftertaste is: what have I becom e1 Instead of celebrating the kilometres from hom e I crowd them into my suit case, I lessen the distance by ringing home. I have becom e afraid. I try to stay sane. I talk to myself. I tell myself that even if I do fall on my face in a spectacular inter national prat-fall or am cut down to short poppy size in a D emidenko-fell-swoop, I am doing what I want to do . I've stored some cash, met wonderful people, been flown around the world a couple of times and had a few fr ee lunches. Yet I am here in the shadow of the 18-year-old. She was the trailblazer, she cov ered more ground and got more for her money. I've looked for her here. I need her fearlessness and her hardy good sense. Coming back to London doesn't make me aware of my age so much as my fragility. It is as if her strength got m e back here but she's abandoned the adult to childhood fears and left me V O LUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 23 TH E C ARO LI NE CHISHOLM SERIES: 10 Monuments to difference Ken Inglis examines enshrined styles of mmembrance in Melbourne and Sydney A T THE ELEVENTH HOUR OF THE ELEVENTH DAY of the eleventh month, weather permitting, a ray of sunlight from the dome of the Shrine of Remembrance touches the word 'Love' in the text Greater Love Hath no Man, carved on the Stone of Remembrance which is set in the pavem ent at the centre of the Sanctuary. Were the architects inspired by those painters of the Annunciation who made a shaft of heavenly light fall on the waiting Mary? The official guidebook does not shrink from a religious reading of the device: 'It is much more than a mathematical contrivance. It symbolises the union of man's ef fort with the Divine plan.' S JXTY YEARS AGO, WHEN THE SHRINE WAS NEW, when all the British empire and most of the world still remembered that the Great War had stopped at that hour in 19 18, and when nobody knew that an even greater war was coming, Melburnians were likelier than in 1995 to shiver at numer ological mystery, to wonder whether som e supernatural power had chosen that time to end the slaughter. N owadays, when 11 November passes almost without notice, we may wonder why the shaft of light was not set for 25 April. The answer is that the Shrine, as someone said in early days, was 'essentially an Armistice Day conception', designed in 1923, when Anzac Day, though a sacred date, was not yet the occasion for either grea t city m arches or for public holidays. The architects and their astronomical advisers had reckoned without da ylight saving, which from 1971 jeopardised the m ystical metaphor until consultants from the Royal Melbourne Insti tute of Technology restored it with mirrors . Technology was also enlisted in 1988 to simulate the ray of light, which now fa lls electronically every half hour while a guide shepherds visitors to watch it move across the Stone and instructs them in the history and significance of the building. Here is an ingenious solution to the problem of what people are to do in a war m emorial, how to express the sense of reverence such a building is intended to engender towards ... towards whom or what I The war dead? All who have go ne to war? The nation? The divine? Differing answers to that question are accommodated by that text on the stone: biblical but Above, Melboume's Shrine of not identified as such, truncated so that readers can finish Jesus' sentence however they choose. l?em embrance. Uncertainty about the Shrine's meaning is evident also in what was said and cl one at its inaugu Photograph by ration on Sunday 11 November 1934.The ceremony of dedication was Protestant enough, like Bill Thomas. those at most war m emorials large and small, to keep Catholics off the platform- though not as Right, Sydney's Anzac Christian as som e clergy would have liked. When the King's son the Duke of Gloucester laid the Memorial. Photograph first wrea th on the Stone, he saici 'To the Glory of God'; but the carved record of hi words leaves by Andrew Stark. out God and has him dedicate the Shrine 'to the glory of service and sacrifice'. 24 EUREKA STREET • N OVEM BER 1995 That language comes from Pericles rather than Jesus. So do the three sentences inscribed on the western wall, facing St Kilda Road and telling everybody-mourners, pilgrims, visitors, tourists, tram travellers-what the Shrine is supposed to mean. First, in the third person archaic, a decla ration that the site is sacred: Let All Men Know That This is Holy Ground. Next, name and purpose: This Shrine Established in the Hearts of Men as on the Solid Earth Commemorates a People's Fortitude and Sacrifice. Finally, a high-dictioned comnund: Ye Therefore That Come After Give Remembrance. These days we might call it a mission statement. The m essage had been drafted by a man of the Australian Imperial Force- the man of the AIF, Sir John Monash, 'broadly accepted', his biographer Geoffrey Serle judges, 'as the greatest living Australian.' To polish the words he had called on Bernard O'Dowd, poet and parliamentary draftsman. Their classical Greek resonance fitted the building perfectly, for the architects had modelled its lowest parts on the Parthenon and its roof on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Monash has chaired the assessors who chose, in 1923, P B Hudson's and JH Wardrop's design for a Victorian National War Memorial to be erected in the Domain, and who agreed with the architects to name it the Shrine of Remembrance.Not everybody in Melbourne liked the design. Keith Murdoch's Herald gave spate to wide-ranging criticisms: the architects had used Greek models unskilfully; they should not have looked back to Greece at all; their Shrine was a tomb, speaking only of death, not victory. 1924 brought to office a state ministry of Labor men who believed that if Victoria was to have any war memorial it should be a hospital. Then came an anti-Labor coalition inclined to prefer at first an arch of victory over St Kilda Road, and before long an Anzac Square with a cenotaph facing Parliament House. A cenotaph of wood and plaster, half-sized copy of Sir Edwin Lutyens' monument in Whitehall, had been installed on the steps of Parliament House for the marchers to salute in 1926. The Country-National government resolved that the Victorian National War Memorial would not be the Shrine but an Anzac Square with permanent cenotaph at the top of Bourke Street. Cleared of buildings, that space would become the ceremonial centre of the city. Melbourne would have that complex today, had Monash not been per suaded by a few wartime comrades in the Melbourne Legacy Club to come out on behalf of the Shrine. For this elite of digger nationalists the Shrine became a test case of the nation's gratitude. They damned the Anzac Square project by identifying it with the politicians whose environs it would beautify, and declared that only the Shrine, set in a landscape of its own, would worthily commemorate the soldiers of Victoria. Monash committed himself to it on the eve of Anzac Day 1927, and that was that. Monash died late in 1931, knowing that the Shrine was assured, having himself organised both its construction and a brilliantly executed public appeal for £160,000 pounds to add to the £100,000 already promised by the state government and the Melbourne City Council. T II~EE MELBOURNES WENT ON DISPLAY late in 1934. The Duke of Gloucester was available to dedicate the Shrine because he had come out for Victoria's centenary celebrations, and the dedication, attended by more than 300,000 people, became an event in that pageant, alongside the London-to-Melbourne air race and other demonstrations of the imperial connection: Rudyard Kipling composed an ode for the occasion. Catholics had their own centennial celebra tion, with its equivalent to the Duke: the papal legate Cardinal MacRory was guest at a eucharistic congress whose opening on 2 December was said to have drawn an even greater crowd than the Shrine. And people on the far left creat ed a counter-festival, the All-Australia Congress Against War, to challenge the triumphalist imperialism of the centenary. They too engaged an imported ce lebrity, the emigre Czech anti-fascist Egan Kisch; but their opening on 10 No vember had to go ahead without him, for the visitor was being held against his will at Port Melbourne on board the Strathaird. Kisch landed on 13 November, illegally, awkwardly and famously, breaking a leg and setting off a political and judicial comedy which he chronicled in a book with the droll title Australian Landfall. VoLUME 5 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 25 Adherents of the Movem ent Against War di stributed leaflets am ong the crowd at the Shrine, characterising it as a vessel of the war spirit, until they were stopped by policem en. Catholics were not officially represented at the Shrine on 11 N ovember because by the rules of their church the cerem ony was a service of Prot estant worship. Archbishop Mannix's personal antagonism to wards the Shrine went beyond both its Protestant rituals and its pagan design: Irish nationality as well as Catholic faith impelled his description of the building as one of the most extravagant expenditures of which Australia had ever been guilty. The firs t of those three Melbournes- Protestant, loyall y imperial- embraced the Shrine; Catholic Mel bourne and left-wing Melbourne long harboured hos tility or a t least unease t ow ards the temple that dominated the city's sou th- ern skyline. ! THINKTHE SHRINE IS THE LAR GEST purely com m em orative monument to participation in the Great War raised anywhere in the world. How come? The presence of Monash is part of the answer: 'a hollow and specious m onument to one man's egotism ', grumbled the Sydney-based, anti-officer Smith's W eel the Shrine; Catholic Sydney The British warship HMS Sussex carried the Duke to Sydney, where he dedica ted the Anzac Melbourne and left Mem orial in Hyde Parle As in Victoria, the m aking of a state war m emorial in N ew South Wales had been long delayed by conflict. wing Melbourne long N ewspaper publisher, Hugh D. Mcintosh, and the RSL had secured another Anzac mem orial for Sydney. Just aft er Armistice D ay 192.4 Mcintosh 's Sunday Tim es published a plea by an RSL harboured hostility or leader, Fred Davison, fo r a cenotaph, in Martin Place, centre of wartime patriotic rallies. When Ja ck Lang became premier next year, Mcintosh persuaded him to find £ 10,000 for the project. at least unease Lang called Mcintosh 'the Barnum of Australia', who 'wanted to be known as the Soldiers' Friend'. towards the temple So did Lang. The eminent Australian expatriate sculptor Sir Bertram Mackennal was commis sioned to design an empty tomb guarded by soldier and sailor. 'And so we dedicate to the Dea d that dominated the the heart of Sydney City', said Fred Davison at the inauguration in 1927. The statues were added in 1929. Monash unveiled them , and the anti-Labor premier, Thomas Bavin, quoted Pericles, city's southern skyline declaring his words 'just as apt for Australia as they were for Athens. ' To Our Glorious Dead, said the inscription in Martin Place, adapting Lutyens' To The Glorious Dead in Whitehall. In Sydney as in Melbourne, 25 April had overtaken 11 N ovember as the primary date for commemoration in the years since the Cenotaph was first imaged. Long before the Anzac Mem o rial was ready, the Cenotaph became the centrepoint for Sydney's Anzac Day ritual: as returned m en marched through Martin Place, their heads turned to the empty tomb with bronze sentinels in salute to dead comrades. In 1928 the m en of the RSL agreed that the Anzac Memorial should be commemorative in character. Fred Davi son said on Anzac Day that the soldiers now opted for 'a shrine of remem brance': Melbourne's term was now in wider currency. The competition for a design was won in Above, The Martin Place 1930 by a young architect named Bruce Dellit. His plan was deliberately unclassical, he explained, Cenotaph. Photograph 'purely contemporary'. By 1930 architects and clients everywhere had begun to absorb the influ by Andrew Stark ence of the International Exhibition of Decoration and Modern Industrial Arts held in Paris in 26 EUREKA STREET • NovEM BER 1995 1925, fro m which the much later term Art Deco derives. Dellit was am ong Australian architects now designing shops, cinem as, hotels and office blocks, plain in de sign and decorated with details fr om outside the classical tradition. They liked to let in the sun through amber glass, 'to outlast', as Dellitt said, 'any drab depression which might arise out of personal The ceremony of grief fo r the fallen': a characteristically modern attitude to death. This design would not confine light to a dedication [at the single ray piercing funereal sem i-darkness. In Melbourne the architecture was shrine] was Protestant everything, the sculp ture by Paul Mon tford-classical fe m ale abstrac enough, like those at tions-rarely noticed. In Sydney, Rayn most war memorials er Hoff's marble and bronze figures were in tegral to the structure. Dellit engaged large and small, to him not only as an admired fellow-artist bu t as a nu n whose personal experience of keep Catholics off the war's horrors was now informing his work. Inside, bronze reliefs on the walls of a Hall of platform-though not Mem ory would depict service m en and wom en resting, and behind each group a March of the as Christian as some Dead. From a balustrade in that Hall the visitor would look down into a Hall of Silence at a naked clergy would have bronze male figure lying on shield and sword, sup porting by m ourning women . Outside, high on the liked. When the King's m arble walls, twenty realisti c statues, portraits of Aus tralians at war; lower down, stone and bronze bas-re son the Duke of liefs; fi nally and spectacularly, dominating the eastern and western elevations, bronze groups symbolising 'Victory af Gloucester laid the ter Sacrifice' and 'Crucifixion of Civilisation'. These last two works remained plaster m odels. In the first wreath on the first, Britannia and a fem ale Australia stood among the dead who had made victory possible. In the second, a naked fe male Stone, he said 'To the Peace hung fro m a cross, su rrounded by the armour, sh ield and helmet of Mars, with dead men and broken weapons at her feet. Glory of God'; but the 'No m ore m ordant denunciation of the criminal insanity of war', carved record of his said an admirer, 'has come fro m all our pulpits'. From m any pulpits, however, the groups them selves were denounced. words leaves out God 'Nude Woman on Anzac Cross. RC Church Attack'. N ext day 'Sculp tor D efends his work. Reply to Protest.' 'Australians Crucified During War'. All Catholic priests and has hiln dedicate who spoke up deplored th e group, and especially the Crucifixion : 'a travesty of the Redemption', said coadjutor Archbishop Sheehan. Protestants were divided. The trustees abandoned both groups, the Shrine 'to the glory ostensibly on grounds of cost. Money was certainly on their mind. Above the m oney in the bank (now £75,000, including of service and interest for all those years ). £ 15,000 was still needed in 1933 to finish the building. The RSL sponsored the sale of Anzac m em orial stars, to embellish the ceiling with stars each representing sacrifice'. a volunteer from N ew South Wales and thus to incorporate an elem en t of honouring m en who returned as well as the dead. (In Melbourne that had been done more explicitly, the nam es of all Victorians who went to the war being recorded in books in glass-topped cases within an 'ambulatory' beyond the Sanctuary. ) A CROWD OF 100,000 PEOPLE-one third the size of Melbourne's-gathered around the Anzac Mem orial and its Lake of Rem embrance on Saturday 24 N ovember 1934 for the inaugural (a nd as usual Catholic-free) ceremony. The building was also smaller than Melbourne's, its makers hav ing had no help from the municipal or state treasury. Twenty thousand returned soldiers had marched into Hyde Park from the Dom ain. Those of them who entered the Anzac Memorial after the cerem ony could look up at the stars representing them selves and down at the sculpture honouring in a manner unlike any other war m em orial in the country their dead comrades and three bereaved wom en . The wom en's prostrate burden, lean and delicate, is a sacrificial victim: not a giver of wounds but a bearer of them, like Saint Sebastian, V OLUME 5 N UMilER 9 • EUREKA STREET 27 the sword and shield on which he lies no longer instruments of war, but elements of support for his limp body. Downstairs, looking side on at the group, visitors were enjoined by an inscription in the floor Let Silent Contemplation be Your Offering as they took in the mother, widow/wife with baby, and lover, stylised in the classical form of caryatids. Dellit and Hoff had wanted a Even without the more instructive inscription: 'They gave Sons, Husbands and Lovers that the Race might live'. The Trustees were still wondering about that message when they ran out of time. Nor did any Crucifixion of mission statement inside or outside the building tell people what it meant. Here, as at other points in the story, Sydney lacked a Monash. Civilisation, Hoff's Would Monash have blessed a building for Melbourne in the modern style, or figures by Hoff? Even without the Crucifixion of Civilisation, Hoff's vision could startle. The writer Frank vision could startle. Dalby Davison, son of Fred, and like his father a soldier in France, had a woman in a story say 'Shocking' and scurry away from the naked warrior in the Hall of Silence after noticing his penis. The writer Frank Dalby 'Even the scrawniness of death had not effaced his beauty', Davison wrote, 'and the artist, scorn ing to profane nature, has moulded him as she had made him.' Davison, son of Fred, The Anzac Memorial was a monument strikingly different from either Sydney's Cenotaph or Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, and it never dislodged an attachment to the Cenotaph and like his father a which was already strong by 1934. soldier in France, had Melbourne and Sydney, 1934-1 995 Established in the hearts of m en, the Shrine declared of itself. Though 'men' in those days was a woman in a story say read to include women, the hearts of some women remained with the temporary cenotaph. In 1933 the War Widows and Widowed Mothers' Association asked the men in charge of Anzac 'Shocking' and scurry commemoration to make the cenotaph permanent: more than the great temple rising over the Domain, said one, 'the cenotaph represented their deceased relatives'. The men were sympathet away from the naked ic enough to install the portable cenotaph in St Kilda Road for the first Anzac Day march to the warrior in the Hall of Shrine; but after that the new monument stood alone. Sydney's Anzac Memorial was never an obligatory destination for Anzac Day marchers. On Silence after noticing Armistice Day, (or Remembrance Day as it became) and other anniversary occasions the empty tomb in Martin Place, not the monument in Hyde Park, received wreaths and rhetoric. The most his penis. 'Even the singular of Anzac rituals, the dawn service, originated at the Cenotaph in 1928 and is still held there; the Anzac Memorial remains closed until after the march. scrawniness of death After the greater war of 1939-1945, the Victorian government and the Melbourne City Coun cil again supplemented a public appeal to create for the Shrine a new forecourt with sculptured had not effaced his figures and eternal flame, dedicated by the Queen before a crowd about the same size as had seen her uncle Gloucester dedicate the original building. In Sydney the trustees of the Anzac Memorial beauty', Davison wrote, dithered for years and added no word or symbol recognising participation and death in World War II. If anybody noticed, they made no fuss. The Anzac Memorial lacked a constituency, <1 public 'and the artist, scorning who cared. As a site for protest-against war in Vietnam, or Indonesian annexation of East Timor, or rape- the monument in Hyde Park was much less likely to be spray-painted than the one in to profane nature, has Martin Place, which stirrers preferred both for its central position and because its desecration would provoke far more outrage. When the Anzac Memorial became severely damaged by moulded hiln as she water, that made hardly any news, while less dangerous seepage at the Shrine provoked had made him.' in the Herald-Sun a marvellously Melburnian front page: 'Shrine Crumbles'. 0 VER TH ED ECADESTHE ANzAc MEMORI ALhas become literally overshadowed by huge commercial neighbours; in Melbourne, regulations protect the Shrine's commanding presence. If you stand in Swanston Street, Keith Dunstan once observed, you see 'citadels of strength at either end-the Shrine and the Carlton Brewery. You might even say that they are the symbols of all culture in Melbourne'. The brewery has gone but the insight has become Melbourne folklore. St Paul's Cathedral, though at the midpoint of the axis, has no part in the image: the culture represented by the churche has been pushed to the margin. At night, floodlights create an unearthly glow to be seen from cars and trams, not only around 25 April and 11 November, but at times of other than Anzac festivity, including one date earlier in November than Remembrance Day. A plaque inside the Shrine records gratitude to the State Electricity Commission for illumination during the carnival for that other part of the culture whose one day of the year is a holiday for the Melbourne Cup. • Ken Inglis is a visiting Fellow in the Research School of Social Science at the Australian National University, and is finishing a book on war memorials in the Australian landscape. 28 EUREKA STREET • NOVEMBER 1995 SPORTING LIFE JoN GREENAWAY One for the toad thanlzs mate W AT ~ VOLUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 29 POETRY MASLYN WILLIAMS Essays in Remembrance 1. Seven Sketches of Evan Owen Evan Owen has a bent leg, The left leg, Bowed like the belly of a cello. It had rained all night until dawn next morning 3. With grey cloud still a ragged fringe Halfway down the mountain, Togeth er they hoe between vegetable rows, So the road to the cemetery was wet Pick berries and early plums for preserving, When they buried his Aunt Emmy And while Evan milks the cow And she so heavy it had tal 30 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 PoETRY MASLYN WiLLIAMS For Evan has a wisdom that sees beyond reason Reminds the boy of clean spring water running ovel' stones And the familiar unity of all that is visible; (Th ey had m et at an eisteddfo d). Peaks, valleys, rivers, creatures, Hymns, prayers and preaching; everything in Welsh Moon and stars, light and dark, And although he has only a smattering of the language And lives within a bigger completeness He understands it all, fo r the praying and preaching In which hi tory, m yth, prophecies Are full of deep and hidden m eaning, and the hymns And apocalyptic visions are all of a piece Made him feel that his wh ole being is overflowing With the business of mixing a bran mash With love and a com fo rting one-ness with these people For the white pig and h er litter. Who seem so eager to look upon the face of their creator That he wonders if the thicl< walls will Always be strong enough to contain their impatience. 5. But as Olwyn said as they went hom e together, 'For us it is easy to believe. Lynn Ogwen in late light, burnished copper and orange, Ea ch da y we wake and see the m ountains all around, The loveliest lake in Wales. Som etimes in sunshine, sometimes in rain; Beyond it, thrusting up from a jumble Sometimes in the oft silence of snow and at other times Of lesser peaks and rock shapes, the pinnacle of Tryfan, When the shrieking of wild winds, and thunder Dignified symbol of defiance. And lightning are enough to make you afraid. There, after a day of n eighbourly hay making We see it all. We feel, and we believe.' Evan speal V o LUME 5 N u MBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 31 BooKs A NDREW HAMILTON Coming into shore British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism. Manipulation, Conflict and Compromise in the Late Nineteenth Century, Luke Trainor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne 1994. ISHN 0 521 43476 9 RRP $29.95 From Italy to Ingham. Italians in North Queensland, William Douglass, Queensland University Press, Bris ban e, 1995. ISil N 0 7022 2635 l RRP $19.95 Redefining Australians. Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity, Ann-Mari Jordens, Hale and Iro n monger, Sydney, 1995. ISBN 0 86806 565 X RRP $24.95 FOR PERCEPTIV E REM ARK S about Australia accepted British leadership colonists saw it as representing a national identity and immigration, and training of its own forces, with continuing threat in the shape of look to the burea ucrat's marginal the result that the culture of the Chinese, Afghan o r Islander notes and not to the bi g public Au s tralian Armed Forces h as immigration. The imaging of Aus- speeches. In 1885, for example, there remained stubbornly British. tralian identity in terms of a white, was much public debate about the The colonial econom y was also male and British archetype united value of an imperial federation. The s haped b y conflicting interes t s groups who were otherwise divided. subject lent itself to high rh etoric. within Au s tralia a nd Britain. The shrill debates that attended With an eye both to practica lity Victoria, a manufacturing centre, for the definition of Australian identity and morality, Lord Blatchford wrote example, preferred tariffs to protect lie on the margins of Trainor's theme, mordantly: its industry, while New South Wal es and he treats them only in passing. wanted a fr ee trade arra ngem ent to They generally reflected the narrow T he notion of an Anglo-Saxon protectitsagri cultural cxports undcr self-interest of groups which saw alli ance will degenerate into an British hegemony. Agriculturalists them selves as threatened by the unsuccessful contriva nce for in Australia generally found common importation of cheap labour. But bullying the rest of the world. ca use with British capital; the while the interests defended were To contend for such an alliance wo rkers from each nation also narrow, the shape of the argu ment on the ground that Anglo-Sax formed common cause on occasion. was broad. It worked confide ntly ons-the great exterminators of But the Depression of the 1890s from an abstract description of aborigines in the temperate showed that Australia was heavily national characteri tics. zo ne- would, when confederat dependent on British investment, Implicit in the argu ment was the ed set a new and exceptional with the result that the form which assumption that nations were deter- example of justice and humanity Federation took had to reassure the minedgenctically, andthatthcmost see ms to m e a so me what creditors. strongly endowed stock would sur- transcendental expectation. Trainor brings o ut well the vivc. Groups, like the Australian influence of these complex set of aboriginals, who were particularl y Luke Trainor, who provides this relationships on the way in which primitive could be expected to die quotation, studies under its imperial Australians cam e to concci ve and out, while those of British stock stood aspect the re lati o nship between give legislative embodiment to their highest on the evolutionary ladder. Australia and G reat Britain in the identity. To define Australian Moreover, because national qualities decades before Federation. His identity in terms of British descent were determined by racial origin, account is convincingly complex, in served the interests of most compct- unrestri cted immigration w hich that he takes full account of the ing groups. It respected the desire of would mix racial stock would i ncv- diverse and confli cting interests the British Government to maintain itably lead to national decadence. which helped shape the Australian a decisive influence on Australian This kind of discourse served to relationship t o Britain after defence and foreign policy, and to define Australians as British and to Federation. protect its foreign investment. Land- give a rationale for the definition. It The British Government, for owners and businessmen believed also coloured the way in which Aus- example, wanted to have the costs of that it protected their relationships tralians conceived of national iden- defence defra yed by the Colonies. with British investors and their tity itself. They were led to sec it in But it wanted also to retain control cui tural standing, in the face of terms of abstract qualities w hi ch over th e composition a nd th e populist threats. Workers recognisccl were shared by individuals within deployment of its forces abroad. The in it a bulwa rk against a plantation the nation . From this perspective, colonies, on the other hand, desired econom y, dep endent on cheap personal qualities, relationshi ps, to maintain the umbrella of security imported labour. This was one of the achievement and experience were offered by the British, but did not latter options for development which not relevant to a person's id entity, want to pay for it. As a compromise, the colo ni es could have taken; many when compared to his or her ra cial 32 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 and national origin. Furthermore, na and then sell them to later arrivals. identity in Queensland had been tional identity was understood to Douglass shows with exemplary modified and enri ched by Italian unite individuals in the nation, and clarity the gap between the complex immigration. T he most significant to distinguish the nation from other reality of Italian immigration and example of such debate would occur non-British nations and from non the often stereotypical reaction to it. when at a national or state level whitegroups within British colonies. There was regular tension between union, political parties or returned The relationships which non-Brit the Italian immigrants and the Aus servicem en's leagu es condemned ish people formed within Australia tralian community, because the new Italian immigration in abstract and and the communities of which they com ers did not fit the stereotypes in general terms, and the resolutions were part, were as irrelevant to na which Au stralian identity w as de- fr! were rejected by the branches in tional identity as the communities fined, and be- cause other area where Italian immigra nts from which they had left behind workers be- 1 i e v e d had a prominent part in town when they came to Australia. th e m - life. T o identify Australians in such In Redefining Austral individualist and abstract terms ians, Ann-Mari Jordens meant that one never had to studies in detail the obser ve their changing immigra tion p ro relationships with the com gramme that fo l munities of which th lowed the Sec- were part, including ond World their communities War. She has of origin. The de based h er bate about imrni s tudy on gration was con the files of demned to reveal the Depart little m ore than the ment of Im interests of those migra t io n , who engaged in it, from w hic h and not to illuminate she argues, most the real changes in the illumina tin gly , w ay in whi ch that the prevailing Australians identified concept of Australian them selves as and with selves threat identity, and the legis the nation. ened by the newcom ers. When eco lative support fo r it, were William Douglass, an nomic or social crises exacerbated modified radically by post indefatiga ble resear-cher into cross this tension, Italian immigration war immigration. cultural contact, studies one aspect was widely attacked. Thus, after The grea t imm igration of Australian immigration in the the Great War, the returned soldiers program grew naturally out of the twentieth century, nam ely the Ital pressed for preference to be given to Australian experience during the ian immigration to the sugar-grow workers of British stock. This call war. After it, the Australian Govern ing areas of N orth Queensland. Ital was endorsed during the Depression. m ent identified two problem s: firs t, ians came to Queensland in large During the initial xenophobia of the if Austra lia was to survive as a large numbers after the plantation econo Second World War, even Italians who ly British society, it needed an effec my, based on Islander labour, was had previous! y been suspect because tive defence capability which could rejected. At the same time central of their anti-Fascist leanings, were be established only with an increased suga r mills were developed, and cre routinely interned. population; secondly, while Austral ated a demand for seasonal labour to In such crises, which were fu elled ia had developed an industrial capac cut the sugar on the farms. Because by the perceived threat to the inter ity sufficient to eliminate the previ conventional wisdom regarded this est of local groups, debate about ous cycles of large-scale unemploy work as physically too demanding immigration was crude, abstract and ment, this could not be fi lled by the fo r those of British stock, Italians based on contradictory stereotypes. existing population . Immigration were introduced. Instead of working As convenience demanded, Italian was seen as the answer to the needs for salaries, as others did, they communities were seen as seedbeds of defence and of the economy. orga nised them selves into gangs of both Fascism and Communism; The paradox of post-war immi which subcontracted fo r the work. Italians were rega rd ed as congenital gra tion was tha t it eroded the The Italians were willing to work ly violent or lazy, as feckless or as understanding of Australian identity long hours, because they hoped to ruthlessly effi cient, as separatist or which it was designed to support. earn enough either to return to Italy as taking over Australian institu The advocates of immigration, who or to buy their own farm s. Since they tions. Such debate perpetuated an conceived Australian identity as had such highly developed skills in abstract understanding of Austral British, demanded that immigrants agriculture, they could improve these ian identity, and prevented recogni would be integrated into this British farms, arrange co-operative finance, tion of how the sense of Australian society. The Government according- V O LUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 33 eff ective integration, of an abstract understanding of Aus however, led it to con tralian identity will have their views sult and to deliver serv summarily dismissed. Furthermore, ices through the various when a previously recognised form e thnic communities of discourse loses its legitimacy, them selves. The effec those who practise it naturall y re tiven ess of this process sent its loss. The resentment will be was shown in the fact compounded if, as can happen, the that only very strong in groups not only claim privilege for terest groups, like the their language, but move to exempt Armed Forces and the it from question or criticism. In this British Medi cal Associ case, one abstract and prescriptive ation [which becam e the la nguage is s impl y replaced by Australian Medical As another. sociation in 1962] could For all the ambiguities of this continue to discriminate process, however, the claim that the in favour of British ori experience of different immigrant gin and qualifications. groups, of women, children and other And even there, self-in distinct groups is to be given prefer ly gave initial preference to British terest was readil y seen as naked. ence over abstract notions of identi immigrants, housed them in better Jordens records relatively little ty is surely valid. conditions than aliens, and did not debate about immigration. Such crit draft them into particular industries icism as she quotes is little more as need dicta ted. But economic than a threnody for a past whose * * * growth depended on a fl exible source underpinnings had been forgotten. of labour. This led the Government Her account, however, may indirect T KEN TOG ETHER, these books sug toseeknon-Britishimmigrants, who ly illuminate current polemic about gest the reasons why discussion of could be directed to work as required. political correctness. She shows how immigration and of Australian iden The internal contradictions of a the responsibility for the welfare of tity is so often unfruitful. It is based simultaneous co mmitment both to minority groups in the community, on a false understanding of national integration into a British society and which was previously invested in identity which, because it ignores to a considerable non-British immi the Government and therefore with features central to identity, loses its gration, m eant that l egislative those of British origin, has increas contact with reality. discrimination in favour of British ingly been entrusted to the groups In popular debate it is assumed migrants- in housing, health bene themselves, including immigrant that national identity can be defin ed fits, and access to citizenship- was communities, women and abori gi by attributing ab tract qualities to soon eroded under the pressure to nals. This administrative practice, national groups, and that these qual integrate all Australian residents in to which is consistent with a less pre ities provide ready criteria to judge a harmonious society. The process scriptive understanding of Austral whether individuals should belong led to the Government making a ian identity, is likely to have a wider to the nation. This was the assump formal distinction between British cultural significance. tion which justifi ed the definition of and Australian citizenship, and pro In Australia, it may have had two Australian identity as British, and posing an understanding of Austral effects. First, groups given responsi the exclusion of non-white immi ian identity which could unite peo bility for the integration of their grants. In the long run, this sharp ple of different cultural origins with members into the community natu definition of Australian identity out forcing them to forget their ori rally expect to provide the language proved unworkable and arbitrary be gins. This broader understanding of by which they will be described in cause it did not correspond to reali citizenship also favoured women, the broader community. They will ty. a boriginals a nd t h e m entally exp ect o th e r gro ups in th e In fact, idei1tity is defin ed by a handicapped, who had also been community to accept them and refer complex set of relation ships by disadvantaged under the previous to them in their own terms. The which people are linked through a legislation. langu age of the group, because wide range of communities. In the One of the most significant fea concrete and anchored in the history case of the Itali ans who came to tures of the immigration program and experience of the community, North Queensland, these groups in was the importance placed by the will be privileged. cluded their ethnic communities, the Government on negotiation wi th The correlative consequence is local town councils and commit groups affected by it. These groups that a more abstract discourse about tees, the local and state employers, included overseas governments, em identity, not anchored in the experi unions and returned servicem en's ployers' bodies, unions and the RSL. ence of the groups to which it refers, groups, churches, the communities To further integration within the will lose the privileged status which which they had left in Italy, and the community, it established Good it enjoyed. Those who refer pejora Italian Government representatives N eighbour Councils. The logic of tively to minority groups on the basis who monitored their welfare in A us- 34 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1995 tra lia. T heir identity a Australians su ggest s tha t they need to be values to be economically illumi was formed through their relation combined. nating, so also mu t discussion of ship to these groups and the rela Where narrowly-based econom the cultural impact of immigration tions between the groups them ic considerations are followed, the take account of economic consider selves. result is oft en short-term gain, but ations. Austra li an debate about im Beca use na tion al identity is long- term economic loss. Thus, the migration has often ignored the spe fo rmed by such complex and subtle plantation economic of Ireland re cific contribution whi ch immigrants sets of relationships, which extend lying on the exploitation of disap have made and the conditions under beyond the nation itself, it is never propriated local labour, or those of which they have worked. T he de sharp edged. Any definition of na the Am ericas which relied on slave bate about the reliability of Italian tional identity is always provision labour, met economic imperatives, immigrants to North Q ueensland, al, and is always blurred at the edges. but at a social cost that has impeded for example, often ignored the fac t Indeed, the sureness of national iden economic development in the long that cane-cutting is a seasonal occu tity may be ga uged by its openness er term. In Australia, the opposition pation, with the result that if no to ambiguity at the margins and to to the usc of Islander labour in other employment could be fo und, those who arc marginal, like asylum Queensland disrupted the sugar in people wo uld naturally seek ernploy seekers. du try in the short term , but cncour- ment elsewhere. Where a nation tries to ex T he history of im cl ude ambiguity, as Australia migration shows also did through the White Aus the need fo r Govern trali a Policy, its sen e of iden ments to encourage the tity is still immature. common good. In fact, The importance of rela w h a t Governm e n ts tionships to a range of com have done, as distinct munities has generally been fro m the rhetoric by accepted in di scussion of Aus which they have oft en tralian identity, but often onl y m ask ed thei r good with reference to Britain. It deeds from electoral ex was assumed that Australians posure, has been help would be the more Australian ful. In times of xeno the closer were their relation phobic national fee ling, ships to their hom e country. Governm ents h ave There was no tension either genera ll y introduced conceptually or legislatively token m easures with between being British and be little real eff ect. In the ing Australian. Specifically post-war peri od, the Au s tralian ide ntity w as Government took an co nstituted by residence and active role, by refl cct insertion in to a i ng on immigra tion, variety of local com- empowering groups of munities. aged the development of an effi cient migrants, by widespread consulta local industry. Amore soundly-based tion, and by removing discriminatory 1N DEBATE ABOUT IMMIGRATION, how economy was built because a princi legislation. This is the proper role of ever, the importance of these rela pled social policy was fo llowed. government, in practical ways to tionships was forgo tten, and Aus The post-war immigration pro counteract the effects of populist tralian identity was defin ed by an gramme al o demonstrates that eco rhetoric. implicit ideal of what it meant to be nomic gains must be accompanied In fact the activity of the Govern British, and this abstract idea l was by respect for human values and by m ent also enabled a more construc then used to identify and to discrim measured government action. The tive discussion of national identity. inate against aliens. increase in immigration provided For it made it evident that national The disadvantage of this style of stable economic growth because it identity is formed by the interaction debate is that it does not attend to was accompanied by Government between groups of people, and not the changing ets of relationship initiatives to ensure that the new simply by the relationship between that define and give a sense of com comers were welcom ed and were individual and society. Whether or munity. integrated into the community. not the debate about the Republic Secondly, popular debate about When short-term gains and section accepts this challenge or reverts to immigration and national identity al inte rests have do mina ted abstract and stereotypical images of as umes that economics, cultural immigration policy and refl ection identity, remains to be seen. • and humanitarian considerations, on Australian identity, long- term and the role of government can be inte rests have been be trayed . Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the isolated from one another. Refl ec While economic discussion of im United Fac ulty o f Theol ogy, tion on the history of immigration migration must consider humane Parkville. VOLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 35 BooKs: 2 KEITH CAMPBELL Entering the lists The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich (ed.), Oxford University Press 1995. ISBN 019 866 132 0 RRP $69.95 N OT ONLY ARE 'Companions' This Companion can also serve There are also substantial entries all the rage, especially with Oxford, as an indispensable source for would- on the philosophy of regions or na - butcompanionstophilosophyarein be Bluffers in Philosophy: Plato's tions.Thisisfine,especiallyforwhat fashion. Blackwells have just issued Cave, Descartes' Cogito, and the Tree will be, for most of the readership, one. English language Companions in the Quad are no longer adequate; exotic territory- Chinese, Indian, to Metaphysics and Ontology have pick up here on the Brain in a Vat, even Soviet philosophy. But the id ea appeared from European presses. Twin Earth, or Cambridge Changes, is carried a little too far. New Zea- Does this represent the publishing and stay in the ga me. land philosophy is at the edge of a houses leading, or following, their Apart from its range and credible entry, but we also get publics, I wonder? What this new- accessibility, the major strengths of Croatian and Serbian (separately of comer offers is what we all expect course). from such works: a great deal of The end matter is particu- readily available and reliable larly praiseworthy. We are information about its sub- ca'' offered maps and charts ject-matter, in this case, of Philosophy as a Philosophy as a w hole. whole, then in more Oxford'sapproachis detail, its various strikingl y different branches. Diagram- from Blackwells' (to matic representa- the re1ief of both par- -' ti ons of the relations ties, no doubt ). Where between the branch- Blackwell's have 30 es of this inchoate in- weighty chapters of con tellectual enterprise can secutive exposition, ranging prove of great value to the across the major fields and newcom er to its exploration. themes of philosophy, Oxford have diagrams are followed by a gone for the quick reference format. the work lie in the full dress Chronological Table pairing notable More a philosophical Dictionary, or treatm ents of significant topics. events in the history of philosophy one-volume Encyclopedia, a vade There are well presented accounts of with contemporary occurrences. mecum, not a fu ll treatment ab ini the major branches of philosophy; This runs to twelve pages: for the tio. epistemology, the philosophy of the chart-minded, to present this as a It's none the worse for that. It social sciences, and so forth. These single lift-out folded sheet, for stick positively encourages dipping and themes are in fact offered in two ing on the study wall, would be a browsing. It can set you right on distinct m anners-there is both a highly attractive addition. those little matters you never quite history of the subject, and a review The philosophy of God, of reli learned, and have been afraid to ask: of its contemporary budget of prob gion, and of theology all get ample what Arrow's voting paradox is, for lems. This strikes me as a well-judged and fair treatment. Paul Edwards' example, or the Prisoner's dilemma, sense of a distinction between two entry on God and the Philosophers is or just w hich of Euclid's theorems is different readers' needs. a noteworthy example. The attitude the pons asinomm. And there is a similarly valuable to philosophy in languages other than On the whole, Honderich and his duality in the treatment of the great English is, on the whole, eirenic. writers have done a splendid job. figures: first a discussion of the The editor has been able to enj oy the The range of topics for which there philosopher-Aquinas, as it m ay services of som e very senior authors, is an entry is vast, the standard high, be-then a discourse on Thomism's notably Tony (now Lord) Quinton, Face in philosophy, if not quite uniformly so, and the career, influence, and current state. who provides a splendid series of above, from left, tone engagingly cheerful. No one The choice of the great figures is a entries on philosophy's trajectory, David Lewis, with a li vely mind can fa il to learn conservative on e. No large-scale institutions, local variations, and David Armstrong, fro m this book-and that certainly canon revision is afoot. I am assum influence, besides much else, and Jean Baudrillard and includes philosophy's professionals. ing that it was editorial tolerance of Ronald Hepburn, authoritative and Iris Murdoch, from Two small scale specimens: w ho authorial loquacity, rather than a lucid on many themes in religion Philosophers, Alcmaeon of Croton was, and why judgment of relative significance, and ethics. Of younger authors, Alan by Steve Pyke. he should be remembered, or why which gives Heidegger a longer entry Lacey and E.J. Lowe caught my eye Hobbes' Leviathan has that title. than Hegel or Bertrand Russell. again and again. 36 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1995 This Companion is also to be that (contrary to a vast body of mid the most part, the editor has chosen commended for an inclusive view of centuryanalyti c doctrinc)' ... where his contributors well, and been well the subject, and of the interests of as close attention to language is es served by them . There are exceptions: likely users. Many a person figures sential in philosophy, the ideas that Burke is damned with off-hand semi here who would be thought of, in all philosophical problems are prob praise, while Wittgenstein is given a these da ys of excessive division of lems in language, or that they can be hagiography. The entry for N ewton intell ectual labour, as primarily sci settled by grammatical analysis, are is, to m y mind, a disgrace the editor entists, or theologians, or political quite different and quite absurd.' should have rejected: its few line figure . This is a work edited and pub give no hint of why N ewton So much for the solid virtues, lished in Britain, though by no means deserves an entry at all. There what of the beguiling ones that make entirely written there. To what ex is no mention of his views of this an enj oyable book to usc? The tent does it display any provincial Spa ce, or Time, or Action at a Some entries have tone is generally cheerful, even light. ism ? Quinton writes on philosophy Distance, no discussion of his We are treated to entries disclosing at Cambridge, Oxford and London. m ethodological pronounce an agreeably literary allusions (to the 'bubbles of Does his entry on Harvard redress m ents, nor of his inventory of philosophy' which sustain drown the balance? Or his explicit conces unsolved problems at the end forthright air: the ing intellectuals, for exa mple), sion that the leading journals are of the Opticks. entries on both tarwater and slime, now published in the United States? This book provides an in discussion of fr om Honderich himself on unlikely Another insularity: the entry on the tellectual feast, and it often philosophical propositions, on Den persecution of philosophers manag presents that wea lth of matter Lyotard, for nett's Philosophical Lexicon, which es to make not a single reference to in attracti vely useable fo rm. makes joke dictionary entries fr om Eastern Europe in the twentieth cen So it is churlish to complain exan1ple, the nam es of philosophers, living tury. that there is not yet m ore, and and deceased, and, from Quinton, More seriously, the continuing profitless to exchange opin concludes: 'What con brio, on the deaths of the philos resistance to metaphysical and sci ions on which marginal fi g ophers. This last strangely om its entific approaches, characteristic of ures should, or should not, this mnounts to, in Empcdocles on Etna, denied his much post-Wittgensteinian philos ha ve received the entree. N ev apotheosis, the story runs, betrayed ophy in Britain, sometimes makes ertheless, no reviewer of this short, is a melange by his sandals bespeaking a mun itself felt. The article on French sort of volume resists the dane departure through drowning in philosophy claims that on both sides temptation to point to omis of Wittgensteinian, the crater lake. of the C hannel the post-Kantian sions. Only once did I find the tone critique of m etaphysics enjoys ncar Of the scientists whose post-structuralist, taking on a jarring flippancy, w here consensual status. The entry on contributions to natural phi the author of the entry holds that Thinking supposes a few casu al arm losophy entitle them to an and kindred ideas marriage is 'to taste "made in hea v chair refl ections on the relation of entry, we have Gassendi and en" or instituted by human socie thought to speech, with the implica Priestley. What a pity we do presented in an ties.' Only one author spoiled his tions for animals, rather than some not have either Boscovich or entries-on pseudo-science and psy genuine cognitive science, will sat Faraday, pioneers of point par oracular style that choanalysis-by an impenetrably isfy the enquirer. The article on the ticle physics and field theory, indirect and polysyllabic style. Language of Thought is superficial nor Maxwell and the electro raises bafflem ent A professional's enj oyment of the and misleading. That on Individual magnetic synthesis. In the work is also enhanced by the decision Properties is thin and out of date. philosophy of law, the great to a high point of to include e ntri es o n living Discussions of Matter would profit Montesqui eu neither has an philosophers. The editor's preface from a more contemporary appreci entry to himself, nor even a principle.' disa rms criticism of the choices, so I ation of physics. m ention in the general histo- say nothing, but note that of the The rather impatient discussion ry of that subject. To my mind, Australians, Anderson, Armstrong, of the Meaning of Life displays the that is the most grievous sin of omis Smart, Frank Ja ckson, and Peter narrowness, the refu sal to m eet the sion to which this admirable com Singer get gu ernseys. There are enquiry, reminiscent of analytic pendium must answer. one or two I would have philosophy a half-century ago. Ordi One last word: in Britain, The added. nary folk rightly expect philosophers Oxford Companion to Philosophy to have something useful to say about of over 1000 pages, sells for £25. SOME ENTR IES HAVE an agreeably what it has been found does, or can, That comes to less than tuppence forthright air: the discu ssion of make life worth living. Sermons on ha'penny a page. Dull would he be of Lyotard, fo r example, concludes: infelicities of expression are not to soul who could not get value for 'What this am ounts to, in short, is a the point. money fro m such a work! The pricing melange of Wittgensteinian, post Most of the entries, it should for Australia translates into seven structuralist, and kindred ideas pre already be clear, are at least ade cents, still a bargain. • sented in an oracular style that rais quate. Many arc more than that. The es bafflement to a high point of prin discussion of Being, for example, is a Keith Campbell is Challis Professor ciple.' And in the entry on Ordinary paradigm of the lucid and enlighten of Philosophy at the University of Language and Philosophy we read ing ideal which many approach. Fo r Sydney. VOLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 37 B OOKS: 3 J.J.C. SMART Getting it right L ,eoo• "AN"'"' on m,u. The Moral Problem, Michael Smith, weighed by the desire to do nothing. ethics, not concerned with the Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1994. The non-cognitivist must reject the abstract or philosophical moralising ISHN Q 63 1 19246 8 RRP $34.95 common sense belief (if it is a that is ca lled normative ethics. Meta common sense belief) that moral ethics is concerned with the logic propose a viable form of naturalism va lu es arc obj ective features of the and methodology of normative in the ethica l sense. world. The problem of reconciling ethics. Moore argued that no naturalist this obj ectivity requirement (a nd Mi chael Smith holds that clarity definition of 'good' or ' ri ght' will do. another requirement which I won't about m eta-ethics is a necessary Thus suppose that (as was cl one in bother with h ere) with th e preliminary to normative ethics. I the nineteenth century) 'good' was practicality req uirement is what think that he is right. Certainly most defined as 'conducive to human Smith ca lls 'The Moral Problem'. scientists need no expertise in meta evolution '. This definition will not Smith ably defendsHume's view that science (p hilosophy of science) to do do because it is still an open or actio ns are expla ined by a good work. This is because the meth contestable question as to whether combination of belief and desire: this odology of science is well understood conduciveness to evolution is good. combinati o n con s titutes the and absorbed into the culture. Ethics Moore concluded that no naturalistic motivating reason for an action. A is much in the position of the renais definition will do and that 'good' m otivating reason is a state of the sance when the rules for scientific stands for a non-natural property. mind of an agent and is explanatory investiga tion were very fluid and This is m ys terious and also leaves of the action in question. Distinct investiga tors such as Galileo and unexplained the oddness of sincerely from motiva ting reasons are Descartes did need to engage in meth saying that something is good and normative reasons. These are the odological thought. So Smith's book yet having no favourable attitude propositions which an agent wi ll give is important not only for meta-ethics toward s it . Nowadays n on as the reasons justifying his but also for normative or practical naturalists tend to be non or her actions. ethics. cognitivists, denying that the uni The central question in m eta verse contains moral facts and SM IT H THINKS THAT CITATION of ethics is that of the so ca lled natural asserting that our u se of moral motivating reasons and of normative istic fallacy. The term was intro sentences is to express attitudes or is reasons can render an acti on intelli duced by G.E. Moore who taught analogous to that of imperatives gible, but in different ways. I would that ethical terms such as 'good' and which do not state fa cts. (' Open the agree, I think, though I do not regard 'right' referred to special ' non door' does not tell you whether the the citation of normative reasons as natural' properties. The issue perhaps door is open or shut.) other than indirectly explanatory. had been better stated by David The non-cognitivist clearly has We can deliberate in a certain way Hume, who held in effect that 'ought' no problem with what Smith calls and guess at another's m otivating cannot be deduced from 'is'. 'the practicality requirem ent'-that reasons by assuming that the other Naturalism in this sense has thus if you assent to a moral judgm ent would have deliberated similarly: I nothing to do with naturalism in you have a tendency to want to act in use myself as a sort of analogue com metaphysics. As Moore recognised accordance with it. Smith agrees with puter. in hi s chapter on m etaphysical the practicality requirement, other Now I think that if the analys is ethics, someone might have a spirit things being equal, but agrees with of ' moral' depended on the use of ual view of the world and yet hold Michael Stocker that someone, normative reasons in the analysis, that 'ought' ca n be deduced from 'is'. because of depression or accidie, then a naturalistic account of obli (Conversely a philosopher might be genuinely might believe that an gation would be beyond us. However a naturalist in the metaphysical sense action is ri ght (not just believed by talk about normative reasons might but not in the ethical sense.) others to be right) and yet have no be naturalistic in the required sense. As it happens Smith is a natural motive to do it. I think that I would This is part of Smith's strategy. Also ist in the m etaphysical sense, but say that such a person must have Smith needs a naturalistic sense of this is irrelevant to the concerns of some tendency to do the action, even (practical) rationality. Given these the book, in which his concern is to though it was overwhelmingly out- two things, his naturalistic accoun t 38 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 of 'ought' is as fo llows: We ought to pretend to others that he or she is not with an agreed expression of attitudes do action A in circumstances C if and an egoist. But the fact that egoism or an agreed system of imperative only if we would desire to do A in C if should be kept secret docs not rule it sentences. We might have simply a we were fully rational. According to out as a possible plan of life. (The oneoutcomenon-cognitivism. Notice Smith, this subjunctive conditional great nineteenth century moral phi- that Smith's obj ective fact is a funny states a naturalistic fact about the losopher Henry Sidgwick had great sort of fact. It is expressed in a sub world. trouble here, because he thought that junctive conditional. So ethics is still Here I have simplified Smith's Sell Love and Benevolence were equal- different from science, and the usual theory by omitting a clause to the ly rational suprem e principles, but worries about the naturalistic fallacy effect that A in C must be of an that the apparent contradiction would may be on the way back, despite appropriate substantive kind, distin- be contingently- though not logical- Smith's ingenuity. guishing moral from non-moral rea- ly-resolved by rewards and punish- It m ay be said that the canons of sons, implicitly defined by various m ents in an after life.) However, leav- scientific rationality ca n be disputed. platitudes about the moral. I have m y ing egoism to one side, one can still It is well known that one cannot doubts about whether these supposed wonder whether the platitudes that convince a determined anti-scientif platitudes area !I really platitudinous. according to Smith defi ne practical ic rat bag, for example a flat earther or And if they were, would a so-called creation scien- this render them factual? A tist. Nevertheless we know non-cognitivist could re- J_,_/ that out in the world there gard them as common ex- ~-., '~, ~ is a spherical earth and that pressions of a ttitucle, or long ago there were dino- commonly accepted imper- . . . . t.;JV:. saurs and pterodactyls and atives. Consider Smith's ourancestorsthefirst mam- cxample of a non-m oral rea- mals. That rat bags deny the son, to drink beer rather platitudes of scientific than wine to relax after rationality does not impugn work because he enjoys the facts in which scientif- beer m ore than wine. I ic rationality with good for- would say that this gives a tune has often led us to moral reason, even though believe. It may be that the one of very little impor- canons of moral rationality tance. Drinking the beer is in which Smith, and you best for his own happiness, and I believe, would be de- which is part of the happi- nied by those who by our ness of all sentient bei ngs. lights are wicked. But arc M oreover even non-utili- there the m oral facts out tarians in ethics will agree there in the world? Smith thatenjoyingmoreleadsto has given us only a sub- relaxing m ore, which leads ju n c ti ve condi tiona!. If to more ability to do good there is a fact to correspond work later. to it (a nd this can be doubt- M ore importa ntly, .1.---A-----1-___;;,.______ed) it is a fact only about Smith uses a number of platitudes rationality would pin cl own options human nature, idealised to the nature corresponding to John Rawls' method in normative ethical theory unique- of perfectly rational beings with per of reflective equilibrium (that is, ly, however long we deliberated and feet empirical knowledge of relevant thinking a bo ut m o ral principles discussed our attitudes and tried to natural facts. where they seem to conflict and al- put them into reflective equilibrium. What if the canons of rationality tering them so they balance out) in How do we know whether one person would lead different rational beings order-in effect-implicitly to define or group of persons might not end up with all relevant empirical knowl practical rationality. I use the word with, say, a Kantian respect for per- edge to two or more different ethical 'practical' here to distinguish m oral sons ethic and another person or group system s? Smith holds that if this were rationality, if it exists, from the two of persons with a utilitarian ethic? Or o there would be no objective moral sorts of rationality allowed by Hume to different compromises between facts. He gives some optimistic rea (so m c of the time), nam ely logical these two positions? sons for hoping that in fact there rationality and inductive (scientific) Suppose, however, that Smith's would be convergence of moral rationality. This reflective equilibri- platitudes and m ethodology would beliefs. My view is that if the pessi um is supposed to obtain between our indeed ultimately constrain us to a mistic outcom e would show that own considered attitudes and also single normative ethics. I do not think there are no objective values, perhaps those of other . The last clause here that this gives ethics the objectivity equally his naturalistic objectivism rules out egoism as a possible m oral- that Smith desires. A non-cognitivist should rather be seen, on the optimis ity. Of course a clever egoist will could argue that we would end up tic view of convergence, as a one- V OLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 39 BooKs: 4 JuuETTE HuGHES outcome non-cognitivism. I would like to stress that if there is no con vergence, this is no reason for mealy mouthed ethical relativism. Even if (say) 'Nazis arc ev il ' is not a state ment of fact but an expression of attitude, it can be and usually is a passionate expression of disagree Dear Abbess m ent in attitude with the Nazis. If we c 40 EUREKA STREET • N OV EMBER 1995 an's frame of reference, as she belongs though it does, as Va n Acker tary frequently lacks insight or even intimately to that culture. himself noted, present problems common sense, pa rticularly in th eir In fact in Germany, Hildegard is even for the textual editor. It trea tment of her letter to St Bernard as much a focus for conservative also ca uses, one must candidl y of Clairva ux. In it she begs his sup Catholicism as she is a fi eld for admit, serious difficulties for the port fo r her work. She is not asking academic inquiry. Sh e is a local reader, since such a classifica for discernment of the spirits behind patron, created so at the behest of tion does not allow for a smoo th her visions; she is completely as the German bishops during World fl ow of themes. sured that they com e fr om God. So it War II . A recent conference there is not, despite the humble posture of opened with a reading of a letter Why Van Acker conceived the the writing, the letter of a soul need from Cardinal Ratzinger, commend hierarchical arrangem ent of letters ingguidance; we sense she has plenty ing her as a 'beacon of light' during is anybody's guess, probably having of that. Hildegard seem s always to the war. She attracts the pious something to do with a desire to do have been surrounded by more cler there is suspicion of scholars, who things in a more authentically m edi ics than you could shake a stick at: a re con sidered too m odern and eval way. (I have com e across this one monk, Volmar, was at her dis scientific in their probings into her attitude to her music, too. D espite posal as an amanuensis fo r most of history-but then Hildegard attracts all the enthusiasm she expresses in their lives, which were very long by all types. her writings concerning harmony medieval standards. N o, the purpose There are theologians who claim and the use of various instruments, of this letter is sophistica ted, di plo her as the prophet of a green new age there are ea rl y- music aficionados matic. It would have been perilous and translate her writings fa ncifully who insist that all of her songs should in those times to have embarked to serve that purpose. There are be done unison and unaccompanied ). upon a prophetic career without a medical practitioners who prescribe But if Baird and Ehrmann admit guernsey fr om the most orthodox of rigorous adherence to her dietary such difficulties, w hy are they per the cleri cal power bloc. advice (peaches, leeks and strawber petua ting them ? It was a m ost She tell s him that she i able to rie are poisonous, fe nnel cures near annoying read, to say the least. And understand the scriptures because of ly everything). There are musicolo if their judgment in accepting Va n the visions given to her by God. She gists who claim to find 'fractals' in Acker's structure instead of initiat info rms him, most importantly, that her musical structures and who pre ing a completely independent ver she has kept these things to herself sumably think that she had these on sion is questionable, their com men- and to Volmar, w hom she praises fo r her mind rather than the nea t his worthiness. She also tells Ber turning of a musical phrase in the nard that she knows that there ear. There were curators who sent are many schisms or heresies and her paintings away for safe-keep asks for his reassurance. The rest ing during World War II . (T o Dres of the letter concerns a vision den. Luckily there were photo about Bernard himself as a m an graphic copies made in the twen 'looking into the sun' unafraid. ties.) And there are historians who T hen she exh orts him to contin forget why people want to read ue in the fight fo r God, an obvious the letters of such a person. reference to th e Second Crusade, The biggest, but by no m eans of which he was a m ajor support the only, disappointment in the er, but also to the work he was Baird and Ehrmann book, then, is charged with by the Pope at that the fac t that the letters are not particular time. arranged in chro nological order. In Ba ird and Ehrm ann's notes The reason is that they are fo l fo llowing the letter there is a ref lowinga scholar, Lieven Va n Ack erence to 'the various schism atic er, who has begun work on a de sects with which the twelfth cen finitive edition of the letters. Van tury was rife'. As an example of Acker decided to arrange the let this, they note that Pope Eugen ters in order of the status of the ius III commissioned Bernard to recipient and published the first 'deal with' Fra nce's numerou s volume (o f an envisaged fo ur) in heretics in 11 47: this is noted Belgium. Baird and Ehrmann's in discretely and is not related by troduction of their English ver them to the business of the letter. sion of this curious piece of work The date of Hildegard's letter is contains a quasi-apology: circa 11 46-7, a short tim e before the Synod of Trier, over which The arrange ment of the letter Eugenius was presiding, and in descending order of impor which was attended by Bernard of tance of th e correspondents has Clairvaux, w ho supported her a certain nea tness about it, al- work there. Her work Scivias V oLUME 5 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 41 ('K now the ways') was read to the loopily speculative. There is areas ity' sometimes, which for me only assembly and she was duly com suring sense of links to the solid raises the question of why they don't manded to continue her work. German tradition through such do it all the time. T he note completely fails to scholars as Mews, who is abl e to Hildegard 's translators fall back connect the dates, to apprehend that contextualise his subj ect simply by on phrases like 'greening power' or she had the political nous to lobby being a poly linguist as well as a pal 'life force' or 'fruitfulness', all of the most influential man of the time: acolinguist. In future, any serious which contain shades of the mean according to Baird and Ehrmann it Hildegard scholar will need flu ent ing of viriditas but not enough. In was a 'happy coincidence' that Pope German just to keep up with devel the absence of anything better we Eugenius 'j ust happen ed to be opments. should use 'viridity' or even viridi presiding' over the synodl And while we arc on the subj ect tas itself and stop all the periphras Constant Mews, in his chapter in of language, there is one other aspect tic nonsense. Hildegard of Bingen and Gendered of the Baird and Ehrmann book that And the world still waits for a Theology in fuda eo-Chris tian grates, although they are by no mea ns properly edited text of the letters of Tradition, i far more informed and alone in this: the translation of the Hildegard, arranged in chronological astute wh en tracing the path of word viriditas. It is a word that does order so as to m ake sense to late 20th powerful contemporary influences not go very easily into English, unless century readers. Perhaps the 900th supporting the work of Hildegard of one counts the rather archaic 'virid anniversary of her birth in three Bingen. ity', which I think should be pressed years' time will see a flowering of This is a small but valuable look into service, if only to give English good scholarship. But it's just as like at one of the threads in her thought. readers the important resonances ly to end up in a m ess of fractals. • It is refreshing to read work about that occur when Hildegard uses it. Hildegard that is neither prissy nor Baird and Ehrmann do usc 'vi rid- Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer. B OOKS: 5 MlcHAEL M cGIRR Boys' own Brisbane Over the Top with Jim Album, Hugh Lunn, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1995. ISBN 0 7022 2563 0 RRP $34.95 0 NE OF T H E FEATURES of mod- landers, a style of architecture redo- from that m oment when he saw it ern Brisbane is the used house lot. lent of another time and place. through a pair of foreign eyes. As yo u join the Pacific Highway, The m ost recent volume of Hugh Lunn is not alone in his hanker- whose congestion weighed so heav- Lunn's m emoirs, Spies Lil 42 EUREKA STREET • NOVEM BER 1995 priest had his ear glued to a transis this is 'Queensland's own Channel tor in the sacristy. 9', but that announcement is itself The book has the kind of enthu the only discernible Queensland con siastic following which has now tent. Head Over Heels tells ofLunn's resulted in the Over The Top With days as a cadet on the Courier Mail Jim Album, a large format collec when the the paper had a parochial tion of photos and memorabilia flavour. More recently, Lunn decid from baby-boom Catholicism. The ed to have Spies Lil< e Us launched in compilation was a slow labour. Goondiwindi because it was one Lunn advertised for material in town in which the local paper was church newsletters. 'We'd drive locally owned. across town to look at stuff. People Lunn speaks a lot about the loss would have cooked sponge cakes of distinctive architecture and the and prepared incredible feasts which ways in which such loss is disguised. I couldn't eat. Then you'd find that The firm which removed Cloudland, you couldn't use their curiosities the nightclub in which many Bris and treasures after all.' Neverthe bane couples became engaged and less, the album which has resulted which figures in his work, use the is a wonderful diversion. elegant dome of the building they Over The Top With Jim had an demolished in their advertisement uncertain beginning. Some people in the Yellow Pages. The shopping thought they were hard done by in village at Toowong was replaced by the book. One of the Christian a concrete and glass skyscraper which Brothers, known as Basher, who took over the name 'Toowong Vil appears in it, rang Lunn to say that lage'. 'Would you believe,' says Lunn, he was portrayed too harshly. 'I am 'that when we go t rid of our trams a victim of your book,' he said. 'You they just burned them in exaggerated how much we gave the the streets.' strap.' According to Lunn, the broth er used an 'old-fashioned phrase' to I T's HARD TO K ow, however, where threaten to come around and 'rock nostalgia ends and escapism begins. your roof', meaning he would throw Another reknowned chronicler of stones onto his roof to terrify any Brisbane boyhoods, David Malouf, body inside. The phrase dates from has said that he grew up in an Aus a time when every roof in Brisbane tralia which believed that everything was made of tin. Fortunately, rela real happened somewhere else and tives of the brother warmed to the history happened while you were book and eventuall y Basher was asleep. won over. Despite the gruelling The past maybe another 'some classroom culture recalled in Over where else'. In the trendy Fortitude The Top With Jim, Lunn is appalled Valley, an old fruit shop has been by th current demonisation of the turned in to an outlet for 'ethical brothers. 'They left me with a great arts'. A young man with blue eyes love of words, of poetry and of writ and freckles stands behind the coun ing in general, and a great ability to ter, his red hair in dreadlocks. The do arithmetic.' store has retained its original fit Over The Top With Jim was tings: a refrigeration unit from the lauched in the old Boomerang 1960s is used to display second-hand Theatre at Annerley, a building that toys from the same period. figures prominently in Lum1's child This time round, they are not hood but which was pulled down being sold to innocents. Hugh Lunn last September. Both the launch finds that as he goes around schools and the demolition were overlooked and recounts some of the advetures by journalists. of Over the Top, he asks children Lunn says that this is unsur who they think had the better child prising when the local m edia is hood and invariably they answer 'you entirely controlled from the south. did'. Neither Lunn nor the kids, of 'Apart from half an hour a day, our course, is really in a position to commercial TV all comes from Syd an wer the question. • ney and Melbourne. So they try to convince you otherwise. The com Michael McGirr SJ is the consulting mercial breaks will always tell you editor of Eureka Street. V OLUME 5 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 43 B OOKS: 6 BRUCE WiLLI AMS Behind the Curtain A Companion to Theatre in Australia, Philip Pa rsons AM with Victoria Chance (e el s), Currency Press, Sydney, 1995. ISBN 0 868 ]9 35 77 1\1\1' $95.00 ow no" ONe "" "w ' " sive articles on theatre in all the co ntinuous field of activity. Until eHncylopae dia? asked Max Charles- major centres, that there arc six states very recently, the history of t he worth in last month's Eureka Street, in Australia-yes, and the Northern performing arts, in Australi a as else speaking directly to my condition as Territory, too. where has tended to separate out the I struggled with this volume: weight, The cont ributors have diverse Drama, which ha s been written up 1.8 kilos; thickness, 4 ems; print, expertise, so that, although the as a series of playwrights, from that sm all. Another question: who is academic presence is strong, we also fl ashi er place, the Theatre. Dram 44 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1995 of vaudeville, m elodrama and farce. Koman, Robert Meldrum, Margaret Melbourne's major companies fr om This is the mom ent of the APG and Cameron , Sa rah Cathcart, Jon 198 1-1 994) is less than one- third the early Nimrod, of Th e Hills Family Finl ays on, Lyndall Jones, Rod length. Towards a general reader, Sh ow and Th e Legend of King Quantock; directors Robert Draffin, this is not companionable behav O'Malley . Then, as a new interna Barrie Kosky, Douglas Horton; com iour. tionalism em erged with a younger panies Whistling in the Theatre, The editing hand has not been firm generation in the 1980s, this moment Chamber Made Opera, Magic Mush enough, especially in the matter of in turn came to be thought unduly room Mime Troupe, Melbourne proportion. It is difficult to see w hy narrow and nationalistic. Out with Writers Theatre. one community theatre company, the larrikins; enter the yuppies. What have these in common? in Narracoorte, S.A. should get sub The new Currency Com panion One is our judgm ent that they 'have stantially more space than another, marks the beginning of a further made a notable contribution to the rather similar one in the western phase, I believe, one in which the thea tre in Australia': the second is suburbs of Melbourne. Examples of the development o f Aus tra li an that they are all identified with Mel puzzling space allocation abound. theatre can be seen as a continuous, bourne theatre. It may be that some Sometimes one has the impression if many-sided story. Even twenty of them are ruled out by such other that the entries passively refl ect the years ago, the critical mass of schol criteria as ' 15 years on the profes depth of scholarship in the particu arship needed for such a project sional stage' (though I doubt it). But lar subject, rather than having been would not have been available. In if the editorial criteria for a determined by a judgm ent as to the these pages, the 19th century is a Companion manage to exclude all of interest and worth of the subject pow erful (ra ther too powe rful ) the above there is som ething wrong itself. counterweight to the m odernist with them, and it is not just But to revert to the intended read m yths of advancement. Here, at last, Sydneycentricity. ership. Many articles here seem to we begin to hear from and about the be original contributions to knowl women, so long shaded and effaced, A RG UMENTS AllOUT WHO'S in and edge, not just reworkings fr om more and about the many playwrights and who's out are inseparable from refer specialised sources. (Often, there will companies wh ose history has been ence books, and this one is (as I have be no 'further reading'.) This is of o bscured by the p artisan , the said) uncommonl y capacious. But course a grea t strength. But the specialised, or the golden-moments the omissions point to a more gener opportunity of publishing this wealth versions. al problem . A Companion (witness of new info rmation has obscured the In its breadth, in the sheer ambi the celebrated Oxford series) does question of who will want to use the tion of the volume, anyone who knew not aim at the comprehensiveness book, and wh y. For specialists and him can detect the shaping hand of proper to an encylopaedia. Yet here intending specialists, it is a paradi se. Philip Parsons. Dr Parsons died (the is this volume, as long as many of My colleagu es in the field a re Preface tells) in 1993, 'seven years the Oxford series, devoting as much immensely enthusiastic, especially aft er laying the foundations of the space to Australi an thea tre as those about the abundant cross-references project, and a few weeks after receiv do to the whole of English Litera which encourage the reader to fo llow ing the last contribution '. Victoria ture, Western Music, or the Mind. out threads and in so doing make Chance saw the project through, What on earth could the Currency new connections. which cannot have been easy. volume possibly exclude? Perhaps, especially at the price, This is the fi rst of three volumes There are too many minnows this book will m ostly be consulted fro m Currency which together will fr om earlier periods in this close in libraries. If so, Currency might cover the whole field of the perform knit m esh, and too much inert info r consider shaping two different sorts ing arts in this country. There are to mation within articles which only of boo k for a second edition (and fo r be a Companion to Australian Film, specialists could possibly require. the Companions to com e). O ne Radio and T elevision a nd a This applies particularly to the cov version, the m ore compendious, Companion to Music and Dance in erage of 19th and early 20th century would aspire to the condition of an Australia . Rivals are unlikely. And matters. The style adopted for many encyclopaedia; the other- say, half that being so, it is all the m ore im of these articles is leisurely, detailed, the present size- would consist of a portant to record one's reservati ons almost at times the m anner of the selection of entries from the larger about the present volume. formal history. volume addressed consistently to an The Prefa ce carefully explains As we approach the present, the enquiring non-specialist. T his is not the criteria for inclusion and exclu entries tend much m ore to refer condescen sion: it is commonsense. sion. It is not a Who's Who, they say, ence-book-condensed. Thus the en Serious musicians don't go to the so there will be omissions. T o decide try on Janet Achurch's tour begins Oxford Companion except fo r a quick som e borderline cases, the editors with a (misleading) generalisation check or reminder; they go to the asked 'Would you expect to find this about modern drama and winds its N ew Grove. One volume cannot do nam e in this book ?' Well, here are way along the itinerary, quoting both jobs. • some individual entries fo r which reviews, even finding space to tell us som e fri ends and I looked in vain: where they played on the way hom e. Bruce Williams is head of the School performers Genevieve Picot, Julie By contrast, the article on Austral of Arts and M edia at La Trobe Forsyth, Peter Cummins, Jacek ian N ouveau Thea tre (ANT), one of University. V OLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 45 BOOKS: 7 M AX TEIC HMANN Hitler's architect Albert Speer : His Battle with Truth, Gitta Sc ren y, London, MacMil lan, 199.'1 . ISBN 0 3.13 645 197 IUU' $39.9.'1 THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT the life and hitherto associated with the crimi- sive into Russia would finish Ger- times of Albert Speer; of Hitler, his nal classes, or else disturbed per- many. After the third interview, court and his war, and the effects sons? Todt's plane mysteri ously crashed, and aftermath of that war. There The author prefaces her book and Speer replaced him. have been, m ethinks, too many with a quote from Vessir T Hooft: Speer demand ed full mobilisa- tom es on Hitler and the Nazis 'People cannot find a place in their tion, as in Britain and Russia, wom- alrea dy; perhaps more than enough consciousness ... their imagination... en into the workforce, the 1.5 mil - on the Holoca ust, and probably quite or finally have the courage to face an lion dom estic servants redirected, enough on Speer. Indeed, Speer wrote unimaginable horror. It is thus pos- and civilian austcri ty. Hitler refused: a bit, in his last great role-the sible to live in a twilight between Kinder, Kiiche and Kirche were too penitent insider. knowing and not knowing.' important, and the public might So any new books should break The Nuremberg judges were think things weregoingbadly. Work- unfamiliar ground-either proffer interested in some of this. They de- crs from occupied countries would fresh analyses and explanations cided that, while not being involved suffice. Thus slave labour was born, of Nazism and its practition- personally in the holocaust and pos- and Speer and Sauckcl were ers, or else, new information sibly ignorant of its basic character R deeply involved. Speer was the which could change our atti- Speer had been closely involved in tudes or judgm ents on matters making and exccu tingpolicics which OSENBERC, TH E C o MMISSIONER fo r NewMan-a of some import. Otherwise they deserved a twcn ty-year senten ce. Eastern Territories, protested at the arc upmarket pot boilers; or Speer maintained, till the end that trea tment of Jews, Slavs and just technocrat, an worse, sponsored by some pres- he had not known about the fate of about everyone by the SS. Three sure group. Sereny's study does Jews and Gypsies, nor the real condi- million Jews were already cl cacl, the organ1ser par succeed, in a wa y, for sh e tells tions of slave labourers. He should remainder were to be killed by the us new things, and raises som e have, and he blam ed himself- poor SS. They should not be killed, but excellence, a quite crucial questions about fellow. But his were sins of omis- put to work. Three million Russian thenatureandpossible ubiqui- sian, not commission. prisoners of war died in six months negotiator of great ty of denial, and hypocrisy, in Speer becam e Hitler's architect beca use of SS maltrea tment. Even humanaffairs: qucstionswhich in his early thirties, via a mutual staunchly anti-communist non - skill and in her hands remain rhetorical. infatuation- erotic but not sexual, Slavs, such as Muslims, were being But Erich Fromm and Robert the author insists- and a shared killed. If this continued, Rosenberg subtlety; a man Ja y Lifton (E. Fromm: The Anat- passion for cold, dcrivati ve but gran- totally dissociated himself from the amy of Destructiveness; Rob- diose structures. Todt's death pitch- whole business. And very large num- uninterested in ertJayLifton: Nazidoctors and forked him into running the econo- bcrs of anti-communist East Euro- the psychologyofgenocide, and m y, building and constructi on, and pca ns had wished to join the Gcr- wealth, desirous with Eric Markuscn: Th e gena- arms production- at 36. A recipe for m ans but been rejected by Hitler, cidal m entality :Nazi halo- disaster ? Instead, Speer did brilliant- and were now being persecuted by of being at the caust and nuclear threat) have ly, despite Hitler's halluci nations, the SS and turned into partisans, or tackled these questions. The the bastarclrics ofHimmlcr, Borman, 'freedom fighters'. Did we want to centre of power, psychoa nalytically oriented and the SS. He kept his hea d and his win this war or not? Rosenberg wrote writers, in my opinion, are reality-sense till the end, and beyond. to Hitler and Himmler to this cf- and determined probably among the few Screny takes us through Hitler's fect- andwassicl clincdforthedura- innovators in this whole war. After their rep ulse before Mos- tion. Speer's deputy, Sa uckcl, sup- that everyone horrendous business. cow, the dreadful winter of 1941-2 ported Rosenberg, and was told to Scrcny keeps asking, was and Hitler's idi oti c declarati on of shut up. should like him, Speer, (one of those who beat war on America, any German victo- Speer said nothing, but insisted the death penalty at Nurem- ry seemed unlikely. Tacit, the great at Nuremberg that he didn't know and respect him ... bcrg)- was he lying, deceiving engineer who built the West Wall about the Jews or the treatment of himself, or suffering fro m one and planned the autobahnen, told the other Ea t Europeans or hi s slave of those varieties of amnesia Hitler in three stormy private con- labourers. Sauckcl and Rosenberg with which we arc becoming vcrsations that the war was unwin- were hanged, and Speer said that he increasingly familiar in contempo- nablc- (this was ea rly 1942). Peace fe lt bad about that. rary political li fe , and whi ch we had must be obtained, another big offcn- Hitler, Himmlcr and the SS want- 46 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMIIER 1995 eel to win the war, but also to kill as important information many Jews, Slavs and other inferiors to impart. Concerning, as they could. Speer and most Ger for example, Allied blun mans just wanted to win the war; ders in the Air War, big genocide was not on their minds, mistakes that shouldn't nor was it widely known. Hitler and be repea ted in any future Co. wouldn't face that they might conflict. have to choose between winning and He specified that he gen ocide, but when the penny did not wish the Rus- dropped, very late, they continued sians to benefit from any the killing and cm elty. They couldn't of this. H e go t two stop: for that was their raison d'etre. private interviews. At Those, like Speer who knew or the trial itself Speer suspected, felt (probably rightly), denounced Nazism and that the horrors were impossible to all its works, and his stop, dangerous to oppose or even to creator and former idol, discuss, so ... best forget it, live your Hitler: to the consterna own life, and try to win the war. tion and contempt of his Ohne mich. co-acc used. But h e What of Speer the man? wasn't hanged. Speer is generally described as Although sentenced undergoing a moral transformation for his role in the foreign in Spa ncl au partly through the help labour program, Speer, of a young French pastor-an ex by harping on his contri Resistance man-and a Rabbi, Robert tionoverthe Jews, whom Geis. Subsequently, he was described h e h adn' t h arm ed, as the most tortured, guilt-s tricken diverted attention from man on ea rth. Maybe. I can't help the Slavs, and the slave seeing him as a consummate ga me labourers, whomhehad. player, a great actor, a m an with And was allowed to get immense self-control and steely away with this reel her nerves, whose very coldness and self ring. After all, Cold War, absorption saved him from many of m ean t falling silent th e contacts which reeked of about the heroism of the savagery, vice and strong sadi stic Russians and the enor feelings. Speer was the New Man-a mous contributions they technocra t, an organiser par made to Allied victory. would have m eant to the human excellence, a negotiator of grea t skill Or the refuge they gave to so condition, is no longer interesting and subtlety; a man uninterested in many Jews, and the terrible suffering as Martin Borman's son has observed. wealth, desirous of being at the c ntre and loss of life of Slavs in general. (he becam e a priest and latterly a of power, and de termined that After all, we might have had to nuke teach er). Even the dis tinctions everyone s hould like him, and them, and what the Russians could between Nazism, Fascism and right respect him. Everything came clown regard as unacceptable clamage wing extremism, and their differing to technique, organisation and order. gi ven the endurance shown against appeals, have been all but erased. He appears remarkably unrefl ective. the Nazis-was the killing of one So Speer and Von Braun becam e Born a little before his time-for the third of their population and two respectable: a hundred thousand of IMF and the Pentagon would have thirds of their industry. So let's not the one hundred and fifty thousand loved him. He was not attracted by feel too sorry for them, or for that identified war criminals 'escaped'. violence, cruelty or persecution matter, the victims of Mao and his And the old mling groups in Italy, but if others were-and they were successors. N ews about the Gulags Iberia and the West were preserved that was their affair. He didn't want and the 40 million Chinese dead was or reinstalled- that is, those who to know about it. He is the only N azi strangely delayed, and even now, is a had supported, or collaborated with leader with whom so many in the m ere footnote to history. As is the the Axis. And many of those who West could identify. He seem s wartime Golgotha of the had fought the tyrants were politi norma !-really. Slavs. cally marginalised, or worse. Speer saw the Cold War coming, So concentrating too long on the even before War's end, and capital I N STEAD THE HOLOCAUST took centre case of Albert Speer might be to take ised on it at his trial, and later, so as stage, where it has remained. Speer a wrong turn. • first to survive, then prosper. Very for one was happy at this. And atten early on in the trial, he requested a tion to the comprehensive evils of Max Teichmann is a Melbourne private interview with the US Pros the Nazi State has declined, just as writer and reviewer. ecutor General's office, for he had what the Thousand Year Reich VOLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 47 BooK s: 8 JAMES GRIFFIN Share your good Will. .. A great de seen t The Jesuits are committed to a Chri stian faith that seeks to build a more just world. To Solitude Consigned: the Tasmanian Journal of William Smith O'Brien 1849-1853, Richard Davis led.), Crossing To continue their work both here and Press, Syd ney,l 995. ISBN 0646 2.2784 X RRP $49.00 overseas with : FTER 140 YEAR S THE DIARY of den and house at Ballingarry, Co. • Youth A William Smith O'Brien (1803- 1864), Tipperary in Ju ly. However , as Dav- • Refugees Van Diem en's Land's most famous i s sple n d idl y says, ' Wh atever • Aborig ines convict, has been published. Perhaps, O'Brien's limitations as a revolu- • Pri soners as his only crime was to take up tionary leader, he was superb in the • The Homeless arm s for self-rule for Ireland, he was role of martyr.' th e Jesuits rely on the generous m ore appropriately a transportee. In October 1848 (not 1849 as on support of donors. The m eticulous editing by Richard p. l 2), O'Brien and three colleagues Davis and his tea m represents a were sentenced to be hanged, drawn You can he lp sustain these efforts by formidabl e pi ece of scholarship. and quartered, a sentence which was making a bequest in your Will . Unlike most other O 'Brien s, commuted to transportation for li fe. William seem s genuinely to have Arriving in Van Diemen 's La nd a been a patrilineal descendan t of Bri - year later, O'Bri en decli ned parole For further information contact: .. ····~····.• . an Boru, Ireland's version of Alfred and a ti cket of leave so as not to Fr Daven Day S.J. the G rea t, who annihilated the Danes inhibit any possible escape. (InS·) 130 Power Street at Clontarf in 101 4 A.D. A later an- Aside from the insigh ts into Y 48 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBE R 1995 THEATRE GEOFFREY MIL NE Go West I'C moN' T e>cv " A ""NN'AC con ve V O LUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 49 negotiations to refurbish this latter venue into a home itiative seen in Perth this year. Titled 'The Season at for the Hole in the Wall and, as it turned out, for the Subiaco', this is a separate subscription season of ten STCWA later on. Like venue managers all over Aus different productions, from nine local companies, of tralia in recent years, the PTT has also become an a mixture of new and extant work (all but one of the active entrepreneur, with a new Programming Unit plays is Australian and half of the season is Western beginning its operation by bringing Cats to Perth in Australian in origin). The companies range from the 1989 and Les Miserables the following year-both into principal adult companies (like Black Swan and Deck its own theatre, 'The Maj '. Chair) and the major Young People' Theatre compa This year, the Perth Theatre Trust has taken a ny, Barking Gecko, to a couple of smaller project com further step in becoming the city's major provider of panies (Theatre West and the last vestiges of the old mainstream theatre with an S-play subscription sea Hole in the Wall) plus a couple of independent groups son, entitled the 'Be Active Perth Theatre Season' and doing one-off projects. Another interesting participant m arketed over the slogan: 'The World's Best Live in this season is the new regional company from the Theatre Comes to Perth'- Its collaborators in this far north, Theatre Kimberley, with a black and white venture are Healthway (WA's answer to Foundation production of Michael Cow's perennial favourite, SA and the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation Away. The initiative for the season came from and, like them, committed to Health messages like Black Swan, while the major sponsor is 'Quit' and 'Be Active', funded through tobacco taxes) (again) Healthway. and Black Swan Theatre Company. The 1995 Perth Theatre Season is based on buy IFANGELA CHAPLIN's PRODUCTION of Diving for Pearls ins: from the Sydney Theatre Company (Arcadia and is any sort of guide, then this kind of programming Dead White MalesL the Melbourne Theatre Compa would seem to provide an excellent alternative to the ny (Summer of the Seventeenth Doll), Sydney's Burn PTT's mainstream season for subscription audiences, ing House Company (That Eye, the Sl 50 EUREKA STREET • NOVEM ilER 1995 with his family leads him to poison Lee's strike them, which, when discovered after the death of his step-mother (Ruth Clocl< ers dir. Spike Lee (independent Sheen), lands him in an institution cinemas). Spike Lee's eighth film is a for the criminally insane. chilling portrait of the crack scene in He is, supposedly, rehabilitated the black ghettos of America. Lee by psychiatrist Dr Zeigler (Anthony strips away the glamour of drugs, in Sher), released and given a job in a the opening credits, by bombarding photographic laboratory. He tries to the viewer with shocking images of go straight but can't resist the temp drug-related murders. tation to poison his workmates. Clock ers revolves around Strike, While the people he comes in a naive 19-year-old crack dealer who contact with exhibit normal human becomes involved with the slaying frailties and traits, his is a cold and of a rival drug dealer, or clocker. His emotionless presence marked only straight-laced brother takes the by the one passion in his life. Since blame for the crime, to save Strike the story is told from Graham's per from a lifetime in prison. What seems spective, the viewer sympathises like an open and shut case for most with him, and the world is coloured disillusioned and openly racist cops by his contempt. Bridging the gap doesn't quite add up for Rocco Klein This film is a spoof, but the direc The Bridges of Madison County, dir. (Harvey Keitel), the streetwise cop tor's flirtation with matters of a more Clint Eastwood (Village cinemas). who still gives a damn. serious nature, through constant ref Based on the mega-bestselling novel Lee succeeds in humanising the erences to fascism, are more distract by Robert James Waller, The Bridges world of crack. He wisely avoids ing than illuminating. This aside, of Madison County is an immensely polemic about either the clockers or The Young Poisoner's Handbool< is satisfying and mature love story. the police. The behaviour of both is worth a look if you're in the mood for The story begins after the death symptomatic of a morally degraded a bit of gallows humour. of Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep). society. -Jon Greenaway Her son and daughter arrive at the Ultimately, Clockers is an indict family hom e to bury her but, while ment of the forces that create the going through her personal effects, social conditions where 13-year-old Connection made they discover that thirty years earlier children carry Uzis and sell crack, she had a passionate four-day affair instead of attending poorly equipped Six Degree of Separation dir. Fred with a man called Robert Kincaid schools. Schepisi (Village and independents). (Clint Eastwood), a photographer Clocl VoLUME 5 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 51 John Guare, to make its intellectual C ustoms Special Agent, David Ku Las Vegas life is, pity the poor girls gristle not only appetising but irre jan (C hazz Palminteri). Kujan be who allow themselves to be victim sistible. lieves Kint holds the key to the iden ised by grungy, as well as expensively Plan Kittredge (Donald Suther tity of a notorious international crim dressed, hustlers. But it's a fairly vac land) and his wife Ouisa (Stockard inal, Keyser Soze. uous look at tawdry experiences. Channing) deal in art. Their Manhat Kint's story begins six weeks ear Elizabeth Berkley gives her limit tan appartment is filled with the lier, when five small-time criminals eel all, as N omi Malone the would-be spoils of successful careers, includ are arrested in N ew York C ity in exotic star. As a statuesque actress, ing a double-sided Kandinsky: one connection with the hijacking of a she is a vigorous dancer. Finally, she side represents control, the other truckload of gu n parts. The fiv e; realises that though she has lost her chaos. One night, while entertain M cManus (S tephen Baldwin), Kea innocence, there is m ore to life and, ing a South African financier, chaos ton (Gabriel Byrne), Hackney (Kevin that despit e everything, she has enters their lives disguised as con Pollak), Fenster (Be nicia Del Toro) 'found herself'. We last see her pro trol. A young black, Paul, arrives on and Kint, join forces for a one-off job. vocatively hitching a ride to LA, their doorstep, having been mugged Ku jan's interrogation is relent where presumably, she will star in in Central Park and his thesis stolen. less. Kint resists- but his tale re Showgirls. -Peter Malone He explains that he goes to Harvard veals the group's activities over the with the Kittredges' two children and previous six weeks which have led identifies himself as the son of Sid him to this poin t. M eanwhile, the Tsk tsk ney Poitier. For a few brief hours he FBI race to compile a sketch of Key thaws the atmosphere of the appart ser Soze from the dying Hunga rian Carrington clir. Christopher Hamp m ent: he cooks dinner and beguiles gangster. ton (G reater Union and independent the gathering with the argument of Rarely will you see a film with a cinem as). British m oviemakers love his thesis; that imagination has more intricate plot than The Usual recreating period, whether in finicky becom e synonymous with style, Suspects. Although the plot is at postmoclern style (Th e Draughts when it ought to be a way of building times complex, any confusion only man's Contract), silly-postmodern bridges between people. adds to the pleasure as the tale un (Orlando), over-the- top outrageous Paul is a con artist. He has pulled winds. T his is a film satisfying in campy-postmocl ern (Edward ll), or the sa m e stunt on friends of the Kit every respect; superbly acted, enter Merchant Ivory scrubbed-up-muse tredges. What fo llows is a kind of taining and enthralling, right to the um-piece-postmoclern (Howard's hunt. At the same time as the Kit encl . -Tim Stoney End, A Room With a View) . And they tredges relate the events of their en are obsessed by the epicene, wheth counter with Paul to a widening se er contemporary or period (The Cry ries of glittering New York social Let's dance ing Game, Orlando, Edward II). Car ga therings, their pursuit of him leads rington, like these others, has mined them to brush against an unfamiliar Showgirls, clir. Paul Verhoeven (Gen this seam yet again. undcrclass. Ouisa discovers that only eral release). The controversy about The romantic twist of Carrington six links in a chain separate any two Showgil"ls in the US is reall y a squall is an allusion to the Shakespearian people on the planet. Her world be in a champagne glass. The US have heroin e, with Emma T hompson com es brittle and finally breaks: 'We recently introduced an NTC classifi (Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington) turn him into an anecdote,' she says cation (those under 17 can't see the doing her usual wonderful job of be in a finely crafted dinner scene, 'But m ovie) and for studios, distributors ing a passionate, lively,witty Eng it was an experience'. She is weary of and exhibitors, this is a commercial lish person agai nst the equally bra relating stories, of being a human horror. vura performance of Jonathan Pryce jukebox, of being a coll age of unac Showgirls is rated NTC and must (Lytton Strachey), floridly bewhisk counted-for brushstrokcs. She leaves be hot. Well...there is a lot of glitzy ered and a touch Byronic. And the the table. She slaps the hand of God. show-nudity and some scenes to give photography is glorious. -Michael McGirr SJ aclclicts a fix . However, as with the But I felt squeamish about the odd version of Anne Rice's Exit to whi ff of pederasty in Strachey's lust Eden, with Paul Mercurio on a sex for the very young Dora Carrington, Coke and smoke therapy island resort earlier this year, thinking she was a boy when he saw it docs show that the studios are her playing football with the lads. I The Usual Suspects, dir. Bryan Sing trying to 'get away with' suggestions thought that there was probably a er (independent cinemas). A peaceful of soft-porn. lot more to Dora Carrington than a night is ripped apart by an explosion T he m ovie itself is not much, hopeless passion for Strachey and I of a ship, rumoured to contai n $9 lm although clircctecl with visual p 52 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMllER 1995 IN M EMORIAM Y ucouw NOT "'" but like Murphy, Two on the Aisle. Ivan Ivan Hutchinson. At Fawkner was pleased at the opportunity to crematorium, Ivan's oldest son, watch and talk about movies and Mark, read mourners a Somerset share his appreciation with the Maugham story, Salvatore, not television audience. It lasted for only honouring his father's love several years during the '70s. It of words and literature, but to also led to his hosting specials highlight the key to the story: each Christmas about holiday there are some people whom one movies and h osting special can describe honestly as 'good'. screenings around Melbourne. Ivan Hutchinson was a good man. The Channel Seven vaults And this was the opinion of must have a large section devot everyone who spoke or wrote ed to the many interviews Ivan about him at his death. The m an did for more than twenty years you watched on the television with stars, writers and directors, was exactly the same man you both local and those arriving to m et in the street, a man who promote their movies. These liked people, respected them and interviews show us urbane and had a regard for them. intelligent encounters. Ivan was buried from St Ivan also became the well Francis' church in the heart of known host of Seven's, The Mid Melbourne, a church that Ivan Ivan Hutchinson 1928-1995 da y Movie which, with the and his wife, Grace, had come to buying and selling of the '80s, cherish for its liturgy, its choir and some stirring hom m eant that his programm es were eventually net ilies. 1500 people attended. It was not a show-business worked interstate. occasion, rather a celebration of a life. However, many But what Ivan did, especially with The Midday colleagues from television and movies were present. Movie and his many written reviews in the Melbourne Ivan was Melbourne's 'Mr Movies' and the city paid Herald-Sun for over twelve years and in TV Week, tribute to him. was invite audiences to enjoy the movies, certainly, But this kind of celebrity was alien to Ivan. While but also to appreciate them. Ivan was, in the best at ease as a public figure, he was more comfortable sense, an educator. He could draw out from people with family and friends. He was often surprised at deeper awareness of the ways movies worked. He the range of people who would stop to speak to him offered information and background; he was able to because they considered they knew him. His daugh highlight features that audiences might not notice; ter, Ruth, remembers him taking of his glasses when he could broaden interests and tastes. they walked through the city together so that he Many reviewers get caught up in clever writing would not see people looking at him. and pushing their particular bias. Ivan was a reviewer But, in the public eye he was. First as a member who 'mediated' the film culture to a wide public with of a dance band and then, from 1960, as a pianist and out lecturing them or talking down to them. And that music arranger. He then became musical director at was a strong contribution to popular Aus Channel 7. tralian culture. He enjoyed playing the piano and the excerpts from old shows in the collage- tributes to him screened T IE IvAN HuTCHJN SON WH OM THE PUBLIC did not see on television show a young man playing with rhythm was a man devoted to his family, to his wife, four and vigour. Some have remarked that it is a pity that children and seven grandchildren, a man who appre he did not write screen music. He did actually write ciated his friends. He was a devout m an but with a a score for a '70s telemovie, Barnaby and Me, but it strong sense of church and its changes over the last was the only one. thirty years. And he was a m an with a strong social And, of course, Ivan enjoyed the m ovies. A justice sense, not a crusader, but a supporter of peo Fitzroy boy, he went to the local movie-houses, The ple and issues that cried for justice. Adelphi and The Regent, in the 30s and 40s, wrote Just before Christmas 1994, Ivan was operated his own reviews for himself and began to build up a on for a brain tumour. The operation and the therapy huge memory store of information but, more, a love were only temporarily succe sful. He will be missed for the moving images and the stories they told. by all who knew him and I feel privileged to have When the Seven managem ent invited him to host been one of his friends. • a review show with his friend and colleague, Jim - Peter Malone M.S.C V OLUME 5 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 53 I Once a jolly gag man < T HE TRIDMPH OF AusTRALIAN T£LEV 54 EUREKA STREET • N oVEMBER 1995 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 38, November 1995 Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1 Try air glue constituents for everyday routine. (10) 6 French pig goes back for the harvest. (4) 9 The gardens are unusual, since four o' the plants look like pine trees. (10) lO Knocks up the box? (4) 12 Maria Callas without top note could hardly produce this. (4) 13 Strive to be extra prudent- or else! (9) 15 'Heard ... are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter'.(Ode on a Grecian Urn) (8) 16 It makes peculiar sense- Eastern ancient sect member is discovered. (6) 18 Sheer bliss, note, in sanctuary! (6) 20 Worried New England couple move location to seek wealth. (8) 23 A mixture of fuel bait you seem to set to ensnare the lovely. (9) 24 If you haven 't got this, you'll hardly do the crossword! (4) 26 Animal on inscription of famous University. (4) 27 Being like an Arctic bear, I give voice to an attitude that is causing division. (10) 28 Hurried to take part in this pedestrian way. (4) 29 Bolster your case by tal king about the street and about N ew Guinea next.( 10) Solution to Crossword no. 37, October 1995 DOWN 1 Can the foundation sway? (4 ) 2 Reporter is a possible gleaner of information that is widespread. (7) 3 The issue about mortality, perhaps, is critical. (4-3-5) 4 The worried reasoner and the concerned thinker are uncommon specimens of humanity, possibly.(4,4) 5 Educated, but sounds tense 1 (6) 7 Salesman on the roof1 What a snake in the grass ' (7 ) 8 In spite of confusion. daughter per se always kept going. (10 ) 11 What the party bra nches might have been doing when Peg lit screen to reveal constituents. (12) 14 In this crazy ship I am bound (mostly) for land as well as sea. (10) 17 Wise man swallows m edicine and produces overflow. (8) 19 Bord er, by himself, partakes of fi sh. (7 ) 21 Uri plunges into common food to provide sustenance. (7) 22 The AFL began off ering Australian tours-and so they were launched. (8) 25 Paradoxically gain Government by not being for it. (4) Subscribe to Readings 8ooifetter- It's Free! News about Readings' events, special offers, the latest books and much more. Complete the form and return to PO Box 1066, Carlton 3053. or fax to (03) 9347 1641. Name: Address: ______Postcode: _____ 338 Lygon St 710 Glenferrie Rd 269 Glenferrie Rd 153 Toorak Rd Carlton 3053 Hawthorn 3122 Malvern 3144 South Yarra 3141 Tel: 9347 6633 Tel : 9819 1917 Tel: 9509 1952 Tel: 9867 1885 ~~~~~~~~~~ V oLUME 5 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 55 EURI:-KA srm:-er & Penguin Boolzs Special Book Offer Home Before Dark by Ruth Park and Rafe Champion Home Before Dark, the story of Australian boxing legend Les Darcy, is the kind of beautifully presented volume that will find its way into a lot of Christmas stockings. Using research-done in the 1950s by D'Arcy Niland (named after the boxer),-Niland's wife, Ruth Park, and his son-in-law, Rafe Champion, have compiled a wonderful account of a young Australian in the years of World War I. Thanks to Penguin Books, we have six copies of Home Before Dark to RUTH PARK & give away, each worth $35. 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