One man's • VOICe The Christian Brothers' Foundation for Charitable Works presents the 150th Anniversary Dinner To Celebrate the Foundation of the Christian Brothers
1994 marks th e 150th Anniversary of the death of Christian Brothers of St Patrick's Province, are Edmund Ignatius Rice, the founde r of the Con organising a dinner at Moonee Valley on Thurs gregation of Christian Brothers. From a small day August 11th. group of men in Wate1iord, Ireland the Con gregation has spread to all parts of the world All friends, past students, parents and any -today the Christian Brothers are educa one associated in any way with the brothers tors, missionaries and working with margin is invited to attend. In particular we are look ali sed youth in welfare. ing for groups of past students who may have To celebrate the 150 years since the death of lots contact with friends or old mates to enjoy an Edmund Rice, the Foundation, together with the evening together.
Cost: $50.00 per head all inclusive phone bookings accepted or send cheque For bookings contact: Marguerite Ryan , Executive Officer Tel: (03) 3474111 Treacy Centre, 126 The Avenue Fax: (03) 34731 12 Parkville Victoria 3052
F R_ E E I N c MASTER OF LETTERS IN T H E 0 L 0 c y PEACE Edited by Catherine M owry LaCugna, a theologian recentl y in Australia for the Fe minist Book Fa ir, this exciting coll ection brings together te n of the most STUDIES respected wome n theologians today- Anne E. Carr, Li sa Sowle Cahill, Sandra M. Schneid e rs, Mary BY DISTANCE EDUCATION Cathe rine Hilke rr, Mary E. Hines, Mary Aquin O 'Neiii ,J oann Wo lski The M.Litt. is normally taken externally over two years Conn, Susan A. Ross and in volves three units of coursework and a di ssertation and ! ~ Ii za beth A. o f 20- 25.000 words. External students are required to J ohnson - for a attend the Unive rsity fo r five days each year. Entry compre he nsive and requires a re levant first degree at an above average level accessibl e inrroducrion of performance. Preliminary studies are ava ilable for to each area o f students with other backgrounds. conte mporary rheology from a feminist For th e coming year, the central themes will be: perspecnve. peace, justi ce and deve lopment Catherine M owry LaCugna is al so the peace education au tho r of Cod for U.r: The Trinity and Cbri.rtirm peacemaking and conOict resolution Life. Freeing Theology Enquiries: Geoff Harri s, Coordinato r of Peace The Esse ntial s of T heology =: HarperCollinsReli.~:ious Studies. UNE, Armidale 235 I. Telephone (067) 73 24 14 in Femini st Perspective PO Box J 16 Blackburn Vic J 1JO or 73 278 1. Fax (067) 71 I 076. Applications c lose ISBN 606-+9356 RRP $29.95 Tel: (OJ) 895 8195 Fax: (OJ) 895 8181 September 30. Volume 4 Number 6 August 1994
A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology
CoNTENTS 4 27 COMMENT ARCHIMEDES Frank Brennan on racial vilification; 'Authority is the one Andrew Hamilton on Yasser Arafat in 28 Palestine (pS ); ONE MAN'S VOICE eyed man in the Bede Heather on the new National Coun Morris West contrasts charity and author kingdom of the cil of Churches in Australia (p6); ity in the Church, in the Veech Lecture. Philip Kennedy on the scope of papal blind. It can power (p7). 33 QUIXOTE command us to 9 everything except OBITUARY 34 James Griffin pays tribute to Kevin Kelly. SELECTIVE AMNESIA love and Matthew Ricketson reviews Australia's 10 response to war crimes and criminals. understanding' LETTERS - Morris West, 38 13 THE GOOD LIFE, Part Two the Veech Lecture. CAPITAL LETTER Steven Tudor talks ethics with philoso phers Peter Singer and Rae Langton. See p28. 14 THE POLITICS OF 46 NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH BOOKS IN BRIEF Dewi Anggraeni assesses Indonesian-Aus Pamela Foulkes reviews When Women tralian relations. Michael McGirr inter W ere Priests; Michael McGirr looks at views the former editor of TEMPO (pl6). Shane Malon ey's Stiff (p47}; Andrew Hamilton glances through Father Browne: 17 A Life in Pictures (p47). COUNTERPOINT 48 18 THEATRE YOU JUST WOULDN'T READ Jim Davidson charts the progress of play ABOUT IT wright Louis Nowra, and reviews his Cosi. Alan Gill looks at the history of censor Geoffrey Milne takes the long view of the Cover and photograph p28 by Stuart Bell Shakespeare Company (pS O) . Windsor, co urtesy Morris West. ship in religious press. Cartoons ppiO, 19, 26, by Dean Moore. Graphics ppl4-15 by Liz Dixon. 20 52 Photograph p21 by Jack Waterford. BOUND BY HATRED FLASH IN THE PAN Cartoon p24, 53, by Peter Fraser Photographs pp34-35, 38-39 by Jack Waterford investigates causes and Reviews of the films Manhattan MurdeT Emmanuel Santos. cures in Rwanda. Mystery; Fearless; Mavericl<; The Hud sucker Proxy; The House of the Spirits. 24 THE CASE OF THE 54 VANISHING COURT ON SPEC Eureka Street magazine Moira Rayner documents a loss of democ Jesuit Publications racy in Victoria. 55 PO Box 553 Richmond VIC 3121 SPECIFIC LEVITY T el (03) 9427 73 11 26 Fax (03) 9428 4450 SPORTING LIFE Jon Greenaway mixes his codes. C OMMENT
A magazine of public affairs. the arts F RAN K BRENNAN and theology Publisher Micha el Kell y SJ Ed.itor Thought police and Mon1g Fraser Producti on editor Ray Cassin racial vilification Consulting editor Micha el McGirr SJ
Editorial assistant: Jon Greenaway A umAUA A>OUT CAW • nd mo,.Uty m usu Production assistants: J. Ben Booncn CFC, D .ms" ally caused by calls for the dccriminalisation of conduct that John Doyle SJ, Juliette Hughes, is no longer thought to be publicly harmful, or on which Siobhan Jackson, Chris Jenkins SJ. there is no longer a community consensus about the immo Contributing ed itors rality of the conduct. Whether it be abortion or hom osexual Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ activity between consenting adults, there is room fo r disa Bri sbane: Ian Howells SJ greem ent not only about the m orality of the conduct but Perth: Dea n Moore also about the purposes and limits of the criminal law. Sydn ey: Edmund Campion, Andrew Riemer, Rarely have w e debated the need for the creation of new Gerard Windsor. criminal offences. Our federal politicians arc considering the Europea n correspondent: Damien Simonis de irability of m a king racist violence and racial vili fica tion US corres pondent: T homas H. Stahcl SJ criminal offences punishable by substantial prison terms. Acts of violence are already punishable. The argument Editorial boa rd is that the law ought n ow to be more severe and specific in Peter L'Estrangc SJ (chair), its treatment of attackers who choose their victim on the Margare t Coady, Margaret Coff ey, grounds of race. Irene Moss, as Race Discrimination om Madeline Duckett RSM, Trevor Hales, missioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity om Mari e Joyce, Kev in McDonald, m ission, reported that racist violen ce was on the increase Jane Ke ll. y IB VM, and that grea ter legal sanctions w ere needed to stem the tide. Ruth Pcndavingh, Peter Steele SJ, Bill Urcn SJ Violent physical attacks on persons arc already crimi nal acts. A judge or m agistrate sentencing an off ender is Business manager: Mary Foster a lrea dy entitled to take the a ttacker's m otivation into Adve rtising representative: Tim Stoney account in considering sentence. While being repelled by rac P 4 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 the practicality of the distinction, unless one sort of Serb. Presumably the advocates of this law would es violence is to be judged more ideologically unsound pouse a selective prosecution procedure under which than another, since it is more likely to reported sen one would leave warring minorities to themselves sationally by the media. while making a show trial of the mainstream com Criminal sanctions for racial vilification are even munity m ember who had singled out one racial group. more questionable. Incitement to racial hatred and Such a law could be invoked not only by mem hostility, or hate speech as it is sometimes called, is bers of the persecuted minority, but also against them. conduct by an offender or a group that is likely to Or would a selective prosecution policy preclude that, cause a second person or group to act in an adverse too? Take, for example, last year's sometimes vitriol manner towards a third person or group on the grounds ic Mabo debate. For every elected politician who said of their race, causing that third person or group to that Aborigines had not evolved to the stage of devel fear that violence may be used against them because oping the wheeled cart, there was an Aboriginal leader of their race. Each element-cause, likelihood and fulminating that white public servants were using grounds-would have to be proved beyond reasona word processors as the modern-day equivalent of ble doubt in order to secure a conviction. Advocates strychnine to exterminate his people. For every min of such laws concede that there is little prospect of ing magnate who claimed that Aborigines were stone successful prosecutions- there have only been one or age people with uncivilised ways, there was an two in Canada, for example-and argue instead for Aboriginal leader alleging that white members of the the symbolic value of the law. Liberal Party were like members of the Ku Klux Klan Elliot Johnson QC, of the Royal Commission into crusading fo r blood. In such an atmosphere, even Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, advocated legislative threats of criminal prosecution would have been coun prohibition of racial vilification but expressed strong ter-productive. reservations about its being made a criminal offence. The criminal law is a very blunt instrument for He concluded: 'In this area conciliation and educa reshaping the hearts of racists and clearing the air of tion are likely to be more effective than the making racist sentiment. This proposed interference with civil of martyrs: particularly when it is words, not acts, liberty would do nothing to enhance further the which are in issue.' This approach has also been adopt human rights of the woman wearing the hijab. It ed by the Gibbs Committee on the Reform of would not help in the resolution of inter-ethnic Australian Criminal Law, and by the majority of the conflict. It would do nothing to produce more rea Austra lian Law Reform Commission in their report, soned public discussion about migration or Aborigi Multiculturalism and the Law. nal rights, which are the two key issues relating to Such a law may fulfil a useful purpose in a socie race and which play upon the public's racial fears. It ty that habitually persecu tes members of one ethnic would bring the criminal law and its governors into minority. Bu t in Australia, most vilification is ex disrepute. changed between members of warring minorities At this time, in this part of the world, thought whose relatives are at each others' throats back in the police armed with criminal sanctions are not the home coun try. It would be a brave Director of Public answer. • Prosecu tions who decided to prosecute the Greek ag itator and not the Macedonian organiser. It would be Frank Brennan SJ is a visiting fellow in the Law an unenviable task fo r the police officer, having to Program of the Research School of Social Sciences, decide whether to arrest and charge the Croat or the Australian National University. CoMMENT: 2 ANDREW HAMJLTON Mal E VEN IN A YEAR occuPIED with ineffectual peace tility, here was a gesture of peace-making and perhaps m aking, Yasser Arafat's return to Palestin e has the beginning of reconciliation. When so many are deserved more than momentary attention. marching shoulder to shoulder like lemmings going On the surface, it is like so m an y similar en ter over the cliff, the few who appear to be pushing the prises: to Kigali, to Mogadishu, to Phnom Penh to other way bear significance and hopes beyond their Sarajevo. The m eeting place is fenced off; the guns due. grow silent for a mom ent; the cavalcade of cars com es; But there was som ething m ore significant in Ara the great men leave; and the jackals return to their fa t's journey. For the dispute in which he is a princi pursuits. Prudent observers have learned to be wary. pal player has been of the most intractable kind. In it But Arafat's travels still seem notable, if only the different groups involved call the sam e land their because, at a time of so much fragm entation and has- own. Each has left its distinctive m ark on it, and so VOLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 5 cannot but see and name it differently. Therefore to ers, but players even as we observe. assert its own identity, each group needs to deny the The claim which the State of Israel has upon Pal history and identity of the others. estine, for example, has depended in large degree on The case is not unique: it was true also of the support from the West, which is Christian in its cul Ireland of English rule. The Herberts, for example, tural origins. The moral claim to this support has in turned the farms of Muckross into a garden estate, turn been located in the recurrent persecution of Jews incorporating within it the ruined friary as a folly. within Christian societies, and most horribly, in the For the native Irish, the friary had stood as a signpost post-Christian world of the Holocaust. to their own religious culture, so that the fences and Similarly, Arab antipathy both to Israel and the landscape which now framed it marked the land as West, and the ready denigration which Arabs receive irrevocably alienated. When the land was thus turned in the West, can only be understood in the light of into landscape, it concealed from the later arrivals the the long resentment towards Islam as usurper of the existence of earlier claims, and intensified the Cath Holy Land. This resentment found expression in the olic resentment at their exclusion. That conflict is Crusades. Although the antipathy now finds expres still being played out in Northern Ireland. sion through secular ideologies, its energy is of long In Palestine the conflict is even deeper. Here, not er standing. When Sadclam Hussein, Khomeini and two but three groups have left their mark on the land future disturbers of the peace come to Western atten and have shaped it into different and competing land tion they find their cartoonist long waiting for them. scapes. And for each of them, Palestine has become a Arafat's return to Palestine is a powerful gesture Holy Land. in a larger elrama. If it is to be more than a gesture, it Within the Christian era the Romans destroyed will involve the same land recognising different Jerusalem and its temple, and left the site deserted. claims, and so being a symbol of reconciliation rath Later, army veterans colonised and renamed it, and er than of division. Not unlike our own land after to make it clear which people and whose gods be Mabo. • longed there, surmounted it with a great temple. The landscape showed that this was Roman land. A cen Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United Faculty of tury or so later, Constantine destroyed the temple, Theology, Parkville, Victoria. used the material to build his own Christian basilica, and also constructed churches in the existing shrines. COMMENT: 3 The deserts were shaped into monasteries. This was now not only a Roman but a Christian holy land. B EDE HEATHER How important the landscape was to self-defini tion was shown by the anxiety Christians showed when the apostate emperor Julian proposed to fund Talzing counsel the reconstruction of the Jewish temple. For them a temple would have been as much of a desecration as I RCMAR 6 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 Where the Catholic Church is concerned, this the accepted objectives of the new body and the paltry could be described as part of a second ecumenical wave funding at its disposal to achieve those objectives. The to have swept across the church since the Second churches will need to show the seriousness of their Vatican Council. The first, in the 1960s and '70s, was commitment by more generous contributions. At the characterised by high hopes of reunion, joy in finding National Forum the Uniting Church ran before nerv new friends and enthusiasm for quick results. When ous delegates a proposal to set the funding on a sound the hopes were unrealiscd, a certain coolness towards basis. It deserves consideration. • ccumcnism set in. The second wave is more realistic. It recognises that there arc still serious differences Bede V. Heather is the Roman Catholic Bishop of between the churches, but also solid grounds for them Parramatta. to be together. The 'basis' of the new body is a careful and comprehensive statement of the situation: it COMMENT: 4 speaks of their being on a pilgrimage together. The fri endships are no longer new, but they are deeper. PHlLIP KENNEDY There i a strong sense of a grace and a cross to be shared. This wave has touched many parts of the world Between the Roclz to bring the Catholic Church into national councils. Where Australia is concerned, there is an awareness and a hard place that this is no longer the country that it was in the 1950s and '60s. Today, Australia is highly technolog ical and multicultural, replete with persons who have had tertiary education and been touched strongly by D R,NG TH' eAST 15 MONTHS CathoJ; cs h•vc been the secular ethos. All the churches feel that there is a presented with four noteworth y documents from need for a new kind of ecumenical contact and co Rome. The first was the Catechism of the Catholic operation. Church, which originally appeared in French on 11 For this reason a new name was proposed by the October 1992. What Vatican I (1869-70) never allowed working group, and accepted: the National Council to happen has now transpired, and what Vatican II of Churches in Australia. With it goes a new logo, (1962-65) never considered producing has now been depicting an adventurous ship on a stormy sea, sur published. This new ca techism is som ething of a mounted by a cross around which ga ther the stars of novelty, since it is essentially the product of the the Southern Cross. This newness was also evident Roman Curia rather than the fruit of an ecum enical in the two- day m eeting of the council's National council. Forum on 4-5 July, at which speakers constantly The catechism was fo llowed in August last year stressed that this was a new body, not just the old by an encyclical, The Splendour of Truth, and in ACC with a rather numerous new m ember. The mood January this year the curial Congregation for the Cler was right for change. The old Faith and Order Com gy promulga ted its Directory on the Ministry and Life mission becam e the Commission for Faith and Uni of Priests. In May, the Pope released his apostolic let ty. The Commission for World Christian Action ter On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone. becam e Christian World Service. And the executive, Reactions to all these documents, in Australia which will manage the NCCA during the next two and elsewhere, have been mixed. Enthusiasm has been years, was given a daunting list of new tasks to un tempered by bafflement, reception by hesitation, and dertake. relief by anxiety. The documents themselves, and The objectives of the new body include coming their manner of production, raise two fundamental to know each other better in all respects, 'including questions: one concerning the authority that the areas of spirituality, liturgy, theology, history, underpins them, and another concerning the kind of sociology and culture'. 'Councils of Churches' have theological arguments they use. become the hallmark of the ecumenical movem ent Impelling each of them, obviously, is the author in the 20th century because they give Christians of ity of the present Bishop of Rome, John Paul II. many traditions the opportunity to meet, to share Through them, he clearly in tends to exercise his discipleship, and to pray, study and work together. capacity to instruct the universal church. In different The councils provide an environment for Christians ways, they reflect his vision of the church and it life. to understand and appreciate one another, and thus They also capture the understanding of faith held by to grow in mutual trust. This will be an outcome of many other Christians. the National Council of Churches in Australia, and But a vision of truth, no matter how splendid, is it will make u all ready for what will be the ecumen not the same as truth itself. Each of these documents ical challenge of the next century. amounts to a corrigible attempt to describe aspects This outcome cannot be achieved by prayer and of Christian life and belief at a certain time in history goodwill alone. There is a massive imbalance between and, strictly speaking, none of them can be regarded V OLUME 4 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 7 as a perfect statement of absolute truth. For Christian note went largely unheard. The Belgian theologian, faith, God alone is absolute, supreme, entirely true; Monsignor Gerard Philips, predicted that many diffi 'truth' is an abstract term for the God of life. culties would arise because of the obscurity of the That is why religious faith is so wonderfully sub conciliar documents, and subsequent history has vin versive: it regards nothing except God as completely dicated his judgment. For all 16 texts were compro absorbing and alluring. No religion, no church and mises, sketching new theological visions while no person, let alone any theory, practice, concept or making concessions to preconciliar ones. catechism, can circumscribe the plenitude of God. Compromises often lead to trouble because they This quartet of texts from the Vatican could well stim satisfy no one, and this is what has happened to the ulate individuals, now or in the future, to feel and collegiality doctrine. Of Vatican Il's four constitu reflect about God, the world and its people in any tions, only two were styled 'dogmatic'. And the most number of ways. As human creations, however, they solemn, 'dogmatic' statement of those two constitu can never be accorded incorrigibility or absoluteness, tions is found in article 22 of Lumen Gentium, the since to do so would be to divinise them. constitution on the church. It is here that we find the I do not intend to describe those texts here, nor proclamation of collegiality: the body of bishops, when to illustrate their differences. Instead, I propose to united with the pope, has 'supreme and full authori comment on them as a unity, a symbol of the ty over the universal church'. [F lannery's translation]. manner in which the Holy See now talks Even before this teaching was promulgated, on about Christian faith and practice. 21 November 1964, it had been compromised. Five days earlier, and against the wishes of the majority of L AT MANNER JS MONARCHICAL rather than collegial, voting bishops, Paul VI had added a note to the draft stressing conformity rather than difference, and tak constitution which insisted that the pope could act ing as its model of communication not a dialogue of with full authority on his own, at any time. In theory, friends, but a monologue delivered from on high. In Vatican II's solemn teaching on collegiality had other words, the present pope and his advisers seem brought to an end the 400-year-old Tridentine tradi to expect the people of God to be passively receptive, tion that regarded the church as a pyramidal m onar rather than actively co-operative, in the never-ending chy with the pope as its apex, but Paul's action seemed task of recasting and reinterpreting Christian faith. to fly in the face of Vatican Il's radical shift of In a bewilderingly complex world Pope John Paul emphasis away from the Council of Trent (1545-63). offers for believers' digestion what he regards as cer When Yves Congar was asked how he viewed titudes, rather than eagerly seeking their own expres the net effect of Vatican II, he replied by stating that sions of belief. With regard to the question of whether it ended the Tridentine era fo r the church. That end women may exercise the same roles as m en in the is far from assured today. church, the current incapacity of Catholicism's hier Since Paul VI 's intervention, the doctrine of archy to consult the sense of faith among the baptised collegiality has been eff ectively stymied, and today might one day vie with the acceptance of slavery, the any kind of 'full and supreme authority' exercised by cruelty to infidels, and the vilification of Jews, as one the whole body of bishops is nowhere to be seen. Even of Catholicism 's most regrettable blunders. synods have strictly limited agenda for discussion, and Assuredly, the Pope is perfectly entitled to talk taboo subjects (often, those associated with sex) are and to teach as he pleases. But what of other Chris sidestepped. Roman centralism has again truncated tians and their leaders, who see things otherwise and the notion of universal collegiality. wish to serve the church and the world by offering It must be said, however, that even apart from diverse ideas and possibilities? Can they now speak Paul VI's note, the doctrine of collegiality appears openly and honestly? Can they freely speculate, con shaky within the text of Lumen Gentium itself. For jecture and debate? article 22 also teaches that the Roman pontiff, as head These questions can be put into a more ecclesi of the college of bishops, 'has full, suprem e and astical context simply by asking: what, in 1994, has universal power over the whole church', and it is a happened to Vatican II's doctrine of collegiality? Is logical and functional impossibility for a single faith normally to be expounded by the bishops speak organisation, like the church, to live with two sources ing together, or by one who rules over everybody? Let of full and supreme power. Of two claimants to us turn our thoughts, then, to the Second Vatican absolute authority, one will eventually prove to derive Council, for it is against the backdrop of that event fr om the other. and its teaching on collegiality that any balanced es Does this mean that the Catholic Church has one timate of the present cluster of papal and curial docu supreme power with two modes of operation: the bish m ents is to be achieved. When the council's 16 ops as a collectivity, and the pope as their head? Do documents were published in the mid-1960s, they we have a unified entity with a diversified operation? were read with enthusiasm, for they seemed to be in Let's say yes. But if the pope acts and teaches alone, fo rmed, open, and concerned with human wellbeing. as happens with increasing regularity nowadays, how Amid this concert of praise, however, a discordant is his action collegial and co-operative? In what sense 8 EUREKA STREET • A UGUST 1994 does h e teach as head of the bishops, if he doesn 't Christians into the 21st century. Their lead will come, expound their voices? I hope, from the truth of their faith in Jesus C hrist. After several months of papally-buttressed teach In this light, would that Otto H ermann Pesch's ing (including the Catechism), the question ringing telling words be kept confidently in mind by Catholics in m y ears is this: How can the church avoid the rule today: 'the magisterium is fundamentally not an au of the Pope over, and worse, against the faith of Chris thority with an address in Rome which can be giv tians? How are all the baptised to be given an active en out, nor is it the official duty of som eone in office voice in their prophetic mission to preach Christ cru or a group of those in office, but [it is] an "office" of cified? And how are papal teachings to be reciprocal the whole church. The church as a whole owes the ly related to the sense of faith of all believers? At world a binding testimony of its belief in the gospel: present, these things might well be more apart (or that is its teaching "office".' • separate) than closely intertwined. And n either Philip Kennedy OP teaches at the Yarra Theological compromising nor uncompromising texts will lead Union, Box Hill, Victoria. OBITUARY Kevin Thomas Kelly {1910-1994) ARE NOT A PLACE for COntro debacle promoted rancorous divisions entry on Mannix in the Australian Dic versy. But they don't need to be coy, within the church and injured its tionary of Biography, Vol 10. He had either, and are a suitable place for justi standing in Australian society. met world leaders, he said, such as fication. And they should aim for the Kevin was prominent among those Churchill and Nehm but Mannix was distinctive rather than the more bland who foresaw the disaster that would the grea te t man he had known. aspects of a personality or career. follow from the involvement of ANSCA For the next generation, that opinion So I had a problem in one crucial in politics. He was well versed in dated Kevin, who exemplified so zeal respect with the ennobling words about theoretical litera ture (e.g Ja cqu es ously what Mannix aggressively said he Kevin Kelly at his recent obsequies in St Maritain and later Courtney Murray) wan ted to achieve through Catholic sec Christopher's Cathedral, Canberra. The which sought to reconcile the mission ondary education as soon as he arrived panegyric omitted Kevin's cogent con of the church to a non-confessional po in Australia in 1913. That was a rightful tribution to efforts to define a principled sition in democratic society. While Cath sh are in the fruits of society for Catholic position on church/state issues olics were obliged to influence their Catholics-upward social mobility, if in Australia. societies towards Christian justice and you like. However broad his diplomatic ca virtue ('penetrate the milieu'), Catholic Kevin was the son of a railway fettler reer may have been between 1945, when Action was to eschew party politics, with impeccable Labor credentials, hav the Department of Foreign Affairs was although this was a proper fi eld for the ing been dandled by Jimmy Scullin in in its infancy, and his retirement after 'action of Catholics'. This position, not Ballarat as a child. He had to take re serving in New Caledonia, South Afri ANSCA's, was upheld by the Vatican in sponsibility when young for the upkeep ca, United Nations, India, Argentina (am 1957. of a widowed mother and his younger bassador 1963-6) and Portugal (ambassa Quite early, Kevin foresaw problems siblings. He was dux of De La Salle dor 1971 -4), it would not ofitself demand with the dynamic personality of the first College, Malvern, in 1927 but, after en a memorial in this journal. editor of the Catholic Worker, B.A. San rolling in arts at Melbourne University, That ensues from his roles in such tamaria, whose tenden cy not to consult found he wanted to do law and went activities as the foundation of the his committee about the contents of the back to school part-time to do the pre Campion Society (19 31 ), the Melbourne paper led Kevin to initiate a three-man requisite Latin. He took both degrees Catholic Evidence Guild (1933), The editorial board in October 1937. San while working, through superb applica Catholic W01·ker (1936), the Australian tam.aria left the Worker not long after, to tion in the depths of the depression. National Secretariat of Catholic Action become assistant director of ANSCA. Kevin's orotund style of lecturing, (19 3 7) and the Young Christian Workers The rest of that story has been told when he spoke at the odd Catholic Work (1942). Fluent in French and an indefat before but a few years ago I asked Kevin er dinners in the '60s, was almost blad igable correspondent (and general how it becam e possible that ANSCA der-bursting, and he was a most discur crusader), Kevin introduced Jocist liter entered politics in contradiction to its sive conversationalist. In the Depart ature to Melbourne. own principles. His reply was that, un m ent of Foreign Affairs they still tell the In October it will be 40 years since like Santamaria, most Campions were story- perhaps it's apocryphal- that the existence of the quasi-secret Catho at the war in the early 1940s and unable when the Portugese 'revolution' wa on, lic Social Studies Movement provided to influence ANSCA' s key patron, Arch a cable went to Ambassador Kelly from at least the pretext for the disastrous bishop Mannix-an intriguing case study Canberra: 'Please inform urgently on split in the Australian Labor Party that for testing the role of chance in history. events in Lisbon but don't start at the kept the Liberals in power well beyond Kevin was, nevertheless, a hero-wor Reformation.' But if Kev in's learning their use-by date and enfeebled the shipper of Mannix. He was outraged was not lightly worn, there was no doubt ALP-particularly in Victoria, where the and in his eloquent way said so ing its depth and breadth. RIP. • sectarian 'loony left' gained control. The publicly-by my so-called 'revisionary' -James Griffin VOLUME 4 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 9 LETTERS True religion Eurelw Street welcomes letters often aged, fema les who attack the from its readers. Short letters are Pope for indicating th e church has no more likely to be published, and power to make a woman a priest ig From AI Dnunmond all letters may be edited. Letters nore the fact that our most venerated I've read with interest the debate in must be signed, and should in woman the Blessed Virgin Mary, the yo ur co lumns about the new Cate clude a contact phone number Mother of Christ- true God and true chism. All yo ur correspondents have and the writer's name and address. Man (at the same time) was excluded missed the obvious controversy: the from the Apostles by C hrist and only Catechism uses the word 'God' often, men were confirmed by Christ as his but never referring to Gary Ablett. The apostles to rul e and to hold all offices authors uses the term to lne 10 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 or not Smith has correctly character Religious people arc perhaps ul for whom he worked. He eventually, ised Singer, his criticism is not a sound timately motivated by fear and love of as Mungovern points out, was hound one anyway. God to obey God's commandments. ed out of his own profession. So be set My position, and that of other But what about God's motives? How up his own business whi ch was prov 'non -cognitivists' about ethics who would God decide what to command I ing successful until he was called be trace their ancestry back to Hume, is There is a question here for theolo fore the Pctrov Com mission. The roughly as follows. Science and histo gians: would not no n-cognitivism business then went into a slump and ry tell us what the world is like. Eth about ethics have to apply to God also? the McCarthy boycott left the family ics is concerned with what to do about J.J.C. Smart no place to turn in their own country. it. In the end the difference between Canberra, ACT A job offer came from the People's Re science and ethics is like the difference public of China and the Morris fami between the indicative sentence 'The ly, most unwillingly, beca me political door is shut' and the imperative sen Filed under 'U'. refugees. tence 'Shut the door'. Smith does not Similarly, Fred Rose, renowned like to think that non-cognitivism From Suzanne Edgar, research editor, anthropologist, was removed from his may be true. (Note that non-cognitiv Australian Dictionary of Biography. job as a lecturer and he too was denied ism is not part of ethics but is about I enjoyed the excellent article by Mar a job in his own profession. He was ethics.) Non-cognitivism may indeed garet Simons about David Unaipon offered a job in his profession at Hum strike us as regrettable. Still 'wouldn't (Eurel VOLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 11 rently finding out in the women's or through no fault of their own, and in to be the embodiment of th e criti dination debate. The expression of fe particular, the reluctance of the m edi cisms: 'If God is God and the Gospel m a le sexuality which is related, of cal profession first of all to believe a is true, then to build fortresses and to course, to the death of the father is one client, then to help them do something Ia unch crusades against enemies of of the live issues of this film and of about it. faith arc full y ridiculous enterprises'. our time. That action is well within their Would that these were the on ly Erin White grasp with m odern synthetic opioids. critic isms of the Society. From the Eastwood, NSW Wh y is it that the chroni c pain of can time of Loyola and his generals (1540), cer patients is treated with empath y, through the Renaissance to the present but that of non-cancer chronic pain da y, history, alas, documents sterner Pills 1 n 1 ills patients is not? Dignam ought to be stuff against the Society. For a m om ent seriously concerned about the use of to have sworn absolute allegiance to FTom a correspondent tricyclic anti-depressants with cluon Pope and Coun cil, a m ore rapid fall Congratu lations to Howard Willis for ic pain. ing out from this compact could hard hi s excellent and insightful essay (Eu I was prescribed the 'little red pills' ly have been imagined and invites reka Street, March 1994) on chronic and was on 300 mg m ode within four speculation that Loyola's concept was pain. days and was left on that dose with no flawed. But fl awed or not, the Jesuits I had no intention of contacting medically instigated review for four far exceeded their calling by any judg Willis until I read three words: 'little years. It had no effect on my chronic ment. By 1764, Clement XIV had red pills'. My inquiries confirmed pain, it made me ill and l eventuall y banned the Society after the Catholic something I knew instinctively, that got off it myself over about six months governments of Spain, France, Neth he was referring to the same 'little red and then took 18 months to get over erlands and the Vatican, in that order, pills' I had been prescribed. the effects of this addictive drug. bad earlier outlawed the Society; its It was therefore I read with genu Dignam may be interested to very existence only saved from obli vi inc concern and considerable alarm, know- I have this in writing from the on by the succour of Catherine II of drug's manufacturer- that this drug Russia. Indeed the library shelves cannot be recommended for usc in groan with secul ar and non-secular Ordination of Catholic Women chronic pain because it has not been indictments of the Society; amongst First National Gathering approved for that purpose by the Ther the m ost notable, the Provincial Let apeutic Goods Administration. ters, 1656; the Dreyfus affair, Vichy The drug company spokesman 'did France and the recent hiatus with the HUMAN RITES: not want to listen' when I told him my Vatican. If members of the Society arc WOMEN MINISTRY AND JUSTICE dosage, because th e maximum recom not instructed in these matters, mis mended dose is (on rare occasions) 250 takes will be repeated 12 EUREKA STREET • A UGUST 1994 Gone but not behind us M on LMo' "om will fm,nt The fact that a few players are now transport and education. The probity and ly hope that the two-year jail sentence entirely discredited-one is even in jail competence of politicians is higher in imposed on Brian Burke for diddling ex is no substitute for an inquest. When Canberra than at the state level, and the penses will bring down the curtain on an Brian Burke was at his zenith, for exam institutional checks and balances are unfortunate period in ALP history. ple, he controlled millions in party dona stronger. The best check of all on a politi A terrible tragedy, really. The former tions, and was careful but generous in cian or an over-enthusiastic adviser is the Western Australian Premier and Aust dispensing them, particularly to the NSW fear of getting caught. ralian ambassador to Ireland and the Hoi y right. What power did he buy? He certain The secretary of the Prime Minister's See, a Catholic father of six, had seemed ly affected national party policy through Department, Mike Keating, has in his to be a nice bloke. He was a new-style his interventions in debate-over nation Chris Higgins oration given an interest pragmatist, someone who cut through al Aboriginal land-rights legislation, for ing apologia for economists in public serv the red tape and got things done, but did example. No one was better than Burke at ice. He dismissed the Pusey notion of a not forget his strong Labor roots. He was shouting down any doubters, and no one narrowly trained and anti-social econo a winner who demanded, and got, a win had more loyal mates-in Sydney, in Can mism, insisting that most economic ad ner's say in national policy-making. And berra, in Brisbane and elsewhere. His visers have been realistic and pragmatic he was a possible future Prime Minister, mates were prepared to help monster about intervention, and that they have more appealing than the dour John Cain anyone who stood in the way or asked helped direct greater attention to out in Victoria, the priggish John Bannon in inconvenient questions, and some of those comes and equity, and to transparency of South Australia, or the even more priggish, connections are entirely untainted by information and decision-making. up-and-coming Wayne Goss in Queens anything that went on. But the issues on which economic land. There are always good short-term rca advisers have been reluctant to offer ad It was a big mistake, of course, jump sons for avoiding an inquest. The imme vice, Keating said, have been those con ing into bed with all those vulgar paper diate result of letting things hang out is nected with values. 'This is most ironic entrepreneurs, but Burke's motives had damage to party reputation and electabil for those of us who remember that not so been pure enough . He wanted to get the ity. Yet the longer-term costs can be great long ago a standard criticism of the public state moving again, hoping that smooth er if the party is not seen to have faced up service was that senior officials imposed ing the path for business would kick-start to the problem and to have reformed it their own values with little regard for the some big developments and promote eco self. Not infrequently, this gets recognised objectives of the government. Those crit nomic growth. If only the 1987 stock at the parliamentary level: after all, it was ics called on the Labor Party to change market bust had not cut things from un Labor politicians who, however reluctant that and ensure that the public service derneath the WA government and its cor ly, ordered royal commissions into the was responsive to those suggestions. Now porate friends. And of course, no one debacles of Western Australia, Victoria much the same critics regret a decline in knew then that there was a bit of sleaze in and South Australia. But so far the same the bureaucracy's pretension to act as the all the matiness, a whiff of corruption in recognition has not come from community's conscience, with a special the way money was being used, and that within the party machine. moral responsibility to protect the public some of the actors were lining their own interest. Unfortunately, these critics pockets. We all know better now, don't 0 NE OF THE MORE INTERESTING rela cannot define the public interest so as to we? Those days are behind us, aren't they? tionships that an inquest might explore is provide a useful guide to action.' Perhaps they are. That style of govern that between politicians with strong agen I suspect that the real problem is that ment intervention in the economy has das and can-do public servants. Brian Mike Keating is not looking in the right certainly gone. John Cain paid the price Burke went into office highly suspicious places. There is in fact a bigger literature for the incompetence and bad luck his of the WA bureaucracy (though in fact it on this subject than on areas in which he state had to endure. John Bannon was had a history, under Sir Charles Court, of is so leamed, such as fighting inflation made to pay the price for the mess his enthusiasm for state intervention), so he first, or economic soft landings. The new government had failed to supervise. And brought in bright young things who could responsive bureaucrats, who find it hard WA Labor has had its catharsis, too, with get things done. Victoria saw much the to articulate public interest and believe a royal commission that named names same, although in its case, many of the that it is impertinent to pretend to be and laid bare the dirty deals, and with players were not the opportunists who acting in it, are at the heart of the problem Brian Burke getting his comeuppance. prospered elsewhere, but theorists want of modern government. Old-style public Yet Labor did not do much more than ing to play with the levers. servants are said to have imposed their close the door and tiptoe quickly away. It The past decade has seen great success values, but one wonders whether some of has never asked itself how it and the state for the species in Canberra-a success their successors-not Mike Keating, of were corrupted by WA Inc, and how its unaffected by any post-1980s rethink course-have any values at all. • own checks and balances failed. Nor has but there less damage was done. The pol it come to any real conclusions about the icy areas that are most scarred by their Jack Waterford is deputy editor of Tbe lessons to be learned from the debacle. disasters are probably communications, Canberra Times. VOLUME 4 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 13 THE REGION DEW! A NGGRAENI The politics of neighbourhood watch Australia and the delicate art of Indonesia-watching and political systems. However, not banned by the government. TEMPO only do Australia and Indonesia have and De Til< were closed allegedly for very different cultural and po li tica l editorial reasons, while EdiLor was heritages, but neither knows the oth closed for changing senior personnel er very well. Prime Minister Paul without seeking permission from the Keating has done a great deal toward authorities. These reasons for clo ' rectifying the situation, by encour sure, to Australian readers, would aging and pushing Australian busi sound strange indeed. It should be nesses to look toward Asia, indica t pointed out her that the closures, ing the potentially enormous mar whatever the reasons given by the kets for Australia's exports. Increased government, have been a shock to exports, it seems, is regarded as one Indonesian readers. They were seen of the key answers to the economic as an abrupt reversal of the trend recession in Australia. toward openness that Indonesia had Those who have ventured and enjoyed so far. persisted in their endeavours to TEMPO's 'crime' seemed to be establish trade links with Indonesia its reporting of the purchase of 39 have a lot of success stories to tell, second-hand warships from Germa while others who have stayed ny, handled by the Research and back to wait and sec arc begin Technology Minister, Mr B J Habi ning to tread cautiously onto bie. TEMPO used as a news peg the the relatively new ground. near-sinking of one of those ships in They have been encour the Bay of Biscay, on 3 June. In the aged to try this new cover-story articles it detailed the ground, because in escalation of the costs of the ships the past three from US$13 million to US$1.1 bil years the trend lion, and the subsequent disagree toward openness ment between Mr Habibie and the in Indonesia has been unmistakable. Finance Minister Mr Mar' de This trend had also led to increasing Muhammad. Mr Habibie, who happens to be a T .,," NO OTH'" "''"'0""'" transparency in the poli tica I system. between two neighbours compara- The path, nonetheless, is not smooth close confidant of President Suhar ble to that of Australia and Indone all the way, yet. to, flew into a rage and rejected the sia. In the past it was fra ught with While the Australia Today Indo suggestions that the 39 warships suspicion and misunderstanding, nesia 1994 trade and business fair were worth next to nothing. This accusations and counter-accusa was going on full blast in Jakarta, was closely followed by the presi tions. It is now a relationship based demonstrations and protests on the dent's condemnation, on 9 June, of on a blend of good will and prudence, streets were being quashed by uni the reporting as 'people airing their covering a wide area of trade and formed men. These were not dem views while not knowing the situa commerce, politics and culture. This onstrations and protests against the tion very well, thus fu rther mud would normall y be smooth and fair trade fair. On 21 June three promi dling the situation and setting one ly problem-free if the two nations nent Indonesian publications, TEM official against another'. He also is and their respective peoples shared a PO, the nation's leading news mag sued a threat then, sayin g, 'We won't common culture and similar legal azine, De Tik and Editor, were let them get aw 14 EUREKA STREET • AU GUST 1994 warn them and if that doesn' t stop of this relatively new freedom. Com It was investigative journal them , we will take firm action.' pared to Western m edia, Indonesian ism performed on ice. In How this 'firm action' translated media have been very mild. The TEMPO, the trials of into such drastic measures as revok emphasis of reporting was shifted Xanana Gusmao were ing the li cences of the three maga from the governme nt's stan ce covered from different zines, one can only speculate. What towards that of various non-govern angles, seeking, simul many people do not appreciate is ment positions. Slowly and cautious taneou s] y, opinion s that the magazines have been shut ly the m edia found, or thought they and views of the gov down for good, because their licenc found, th e balance of even ernment officials han es to operate the companies were handedness, reporting the stances of dling them, the gov revoked, not just their licences to both sides. ernment-appointed publish. To allow the companies to In covering the East Timor issues, lawyer, and inde be revived, the government would for example, TEMPO always quoted pendentobservers. have to withdraw its revocation of the government's view as w ell as When recently the licences, which is very unlikely. those opposing the government's. crime escalated After incessant lobbying by various There have also been sensitive sto in Jakarta and a groups, it has been suggested that ries involving internal struggles task force was the Department of Information may which tested the authorities' toler form ed to issue new licences. However, with ance, which were handled crea ti vel y fight it, TEM these the department may also de by reporters, sub-editors and editors. PO assigned mand major changes in the manage In a country like Indonesia, where journalists rial and editorial boards. This would the population of 190 million con to c h eck b e tantamount to establishing sists of so many religious, ethnic and the crime entirely new companies. If licences interest groups, it is natural that the scenes are issued, fi erce and tense negotia authorities hold as their utmost task and in tions will take place. But the the cohesion of the nation. It is worth t ervi ew question is, how much negotiating noting that the majority of the pop the tas k power do the applicants ulation are not used to open debate. force, som e have? It has been conditioned to depend on victims and musyawarah or consensus, to solve perpetrators. EOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, Indonesian problems. This concept is so fluid The resulting m edia have enjoyed relative, but and undefined that in practice, prob a rticles covered measured, freedom. This was of lem-solving depends a great deal on confirmation of the course largely abetted by the open the local mores. And loca l mores are crimes, the ba ck ing of the sky to the electronic me always far fro m open to debate, to grounds of the perpe dia. As Indonesia leased out trans the extent that anyone initiating it trators and the organi ponders on its Palapa satellites, it could be regarded as a crass dissent sation of the task force. rapidly lost control over the flood of cr. The media, therefore, accepted What came across very information fl owing into the coun the limitations imposed on them, in strongly was pathos, as try. At the sam e time, the govern that they were n ot to write well as ruthlessness on the m ent's policies on the increasingly anything on ethnic, religiou s and part of the criminals, also on deregulated economy have brought inter-social group differe n ces. the part of some members of prosperity to the swelling middle Working within these limita the task force. For the impartial class. Ironically, it was this old and tions, journalists and editors have reader, it would have been apparent new middle-class, more educated and had to be alert, cautious, creative, that while some criminals were driv m ore intellectual than ever, who with minds as sharp as razor blades, en to crime, some stayed in it be thirsted for more information and while exercising social responsibili cause it was a relatively easy way to pushed for more transparent govern ty at the sam e time. Once, address get money. It would also have been m ent. The trend toward openness ing an Australian audience, Goena clear that while the task force was did not just begin out of the blue. wan Mohamad, a former editor-in not the best answer to the situation, Some of these Western-educated in chief of TEMPO, likened being a som ething had to be done then and tellectuals eventually obtained im journalist in Indonesia to being a there to protect innocent portant positions in the government surgeon, having to perform surgery people. as well as in the private sector whose after having his/her scalpel confis support the government relies on. ca ted. SOME ISSUES COVERED would have Though still cautious, people began It was in this atmosphere that displeased the president, especially to speak up against policies they the m edia reported the brutal mur if these implied dissatisfaction with regarded as unfair. Even in the Cab der of Marsinah, a union activist, the direction in which the govern inet, ministers carefully disagreed. and its subsequent investigations ment is heading. It was reported, for The media, both print and elec following pressures from various or instance, that a group consisting of tronic, incessantly tested the limits ga nisations, local and international. intellectuals, with the blessing of V oLUME 4 N uMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 15 INTERVIEW the Minister for Defence and Sectlri mcnt has over-reacted on the m edia Up Tempo ty, was forming an association to issue, as well as on the issue of the co mpete with a powerful associa Conference on East Ti mar, in Manila At the Adelaide Festival in March, tion headed by Minister Habibie. recently. T his reflected unfavoura· Michael McGirr spoke to Goenawan Mohamad, The rift between Mr Habibie and the bly on the president, who is seen as the founding editor of TEMPO. Goenawan retired Armed Forces became obvious, and losing his grip on the situation, thus shortly before the magazine's closure. the rea ders would be able to glea n also his sense of judgem ent. that the latter fo und the orga ni sa Prime Minister Paul Kea ting and What has been the role of TEMPO in Indon esia~ tion headed by Mr Habibie was be Foreign Minister Gareth Evans have When we started, we hoped we could improve the coming too powerful for their com been receiving a great dea l of criti quality of the Indonesian language. We came into exist fort. cism internally for their 'softly, soft ence at a time when language was being used increasing The president, being used to hav ly' approach to Indonesia. T hey may ly as a tool of ideological propaganda. It was purely ing everything under his control, not be seen as immediate political political, in the same way that they have developed a must have felt uncomfortable for a achievers in relation to Indonesia, totalitarian language in China. So we wanted to free the considerable length of time, witness but they are no doubt long- term language from that condition and, by freeing the lan ing this rift becoming more public. achievers. Australia has to face the guage, free our ability to think. In Indonesia we have a Until recently, Golkar, the ruling fact that it cannot usc hard-li nc strat tendency to bureaucratise the language. We are famous party, had been dominated by the egies, because it docs not have the for having so many acronyms-an acronym stops the Armed Forces. For example, there wherewithal to threa ten Indonesia. process of thinking. had been little opposition to mili Economic sanctions would hurtAus What l 16 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 Getting the facts in to Gear A CO V O LUME 4 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 17 THE CHURCH ALAN GILL You just -wouldn't read about it Censorship and the Catholic press 0 N 30 MAY PoPE )OliN PAUL the Weel 18 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 zine, once published a brief factual McCabe, rector of St Patrick's For the diocesan press there are report abou t the then Anglican Bish Coll ege, Manly) stated that women 'safe' controversies (Timor, the re op of Canberra and Goulburn being priests were 'inevitable'. publican debate) and 'unsafe' ones charged with a sexual offence. The In a comment to The Sydney (women's ordination, clerical celi fate of the former Catholic Weekly Morning Herald on the Weeldy's let bacy, contraception). Sometimes, an ed itor who did likewise over the con ters' ban, the president of the Cath 'unsafe' controversy becmnes a' safe' viction of a Marist brother is well olic Press Association, Fr Robert one. In the early 1970s The Catholic known. And the presses of Mel Carey, was quoted as saying that Weekly was not allowed to run an bourne's n ow-defunct Advocate religious journals would'lose credi interview with a Fi lipino bishop, were once stopped so that a para bility' if freedom of speech was de Francisco Claver, who opposed Fer graph reporting the drink-driving nied. This view was echoed by a staff dinand Marcos. Later, Claver became conviction of an auxiliary bishop in member of the Weekly, talking in the paper's h ero, as did another the diocese co uld be removed. formally, w ho said he personally opponent of the Marcos regime, Fr At this year's religious press and supported the Pope's line, 'but, ure- Brian Gore. Catholic press conventions, In the past five years the much of the time was devot- Catholic papers published in ed to answering the basic "mE FOOT8ALL tiEREsY TR"'LS Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney questions: What is our pur II I\ and Brisbane have either been pose? And whom do we 'TAK6. HIM A:-.JA'f1 GOAL- UMPIR£- shut down, reduced in format serve? At-lt> MJI.'( bo t> HAV E. 1'\E.R<..'( or frequency of publication, or In Australia, unlike Brit Q-.l \\IS SOUL I undergone a change of editor ain or the United States, very after the incumbent quarrelled few religious publications are with the management overed in private hands. Most are ) itorial (including budgetary) owned by their respective control. The Record, published denominations, and in many in Perth, endured the storm cases they are heavily subsi longer than its eastern-states dised. Their 'owners' expect ~-r~'!.LWA'I'S counterparts but a change of them, not unreasonably, to Rl ~ll"l'! format is now also being con- refl ect the party line, and } sidered for financial reasons. Catholic Church authorities, The paper, though tame on the in particular, regard their Christian Brothers' controver newspapers as teaching or sy raging in its backyard, has gans. been more adventurous on oth The late Bishop Thomas er issues, particularly in its Muldoon once told m e that treatment of overseas news. the 'simple faithful' (a phrase John Lundy, when editor of still heard) thought every line The Catholic Weel VOLUME. 4 NUMil E.R 6 • EUREKA STREET 19 THE WORLD JAC K W ATERFORD Bound by hatred The tribal war in Rwanda has been reported as a unique and remote tragedy. The truth is that the roots of ethnic conflict there are sadly like those of ethnic conflicts elsewhere-including places much closer to Australia. R usuMO Fms WA> ON" 100 Mmes fmm the before the purveyors of Europe's three 'Cs'- Christi bridge across the Kagera River that forms the border anity, Commerce and Civilisation- arrived on the crossing between Tanzania and Rwanda. Perhaps scene, the area was riven by war, slavery and injus 350,000 people have fled across the bridge during the tice. The more numerous Wahutu, short cultivators past few months. The bodies of another 30,000- of the soil, lived alongside the Watutsi, tall ca ttle murdcred m en, women and children- have tumbled herders and warriors. The Tutsi had moved from the down the falls, to be trapped in whirl Ethiopian highlands into central and southern Africa pools, snagged on branches or carried during the 14th century, and in what is now Rwanda down to Lake Victoria, the source of the they becam e tough overlords of the Hutu peasants, as The achievement Nile. their cousins did with similar peoples in Uganda and The traffic across and under the elsewhere. of peace in Rwanda bridge is testimony to the latest agony Six centuries of concubinage and intermarriage, would involve of Africa and the world- ethnic slaugh however, have seen the groups m erge to the extent ter on a scale that defi es the imagina that 'Tutsi' now m ore accurately refers to a higher totally rebuilding tion. Those involved may seem so caste than to a distinct ethnic gro up. More than 60 remote from the experience of comfort- per cent of the Rwandan population is of mixed the country's ably settled people that one wants to file ancestry and cannot clearl y be said, except for reasons it away under 'B' for bizarre, and to think of political advantage, to be either Tutsi or Hutu. As political and that there arc no lessons in it. Yet the a local proverb has it, a Tutsi is a Hutu with lO cattle. perpetrators and the victims are people, European colonists-first the Germans and then social institutions- like us, and those who ignore what is the Belgians, who acquired Rwanda and Burundi as happening in Rwanda may be doom ed part of Germany's reparations after World War ! in effect, a to sec it rcpea t ed closer to home. brought order of a sort. Formal slavery and internecine Rwanda fits into a pattern with Ulster warfare were ended, but the colonists' interest in com recolonisation, and Bosnia, with Azerbaijan and Kurdis- m ercial exploitation meant that they had little inter tan, and eventually, perhaps, with Indo est in real justice. And their racism led them to sec though not by an nesia and Papua N ew Guii1ea as well. the dominant class as the intelligent and educable one, All these states, whether actually and to co-opt it into government service. imperial power. existing like Bosnia or only dreamed For 50 years the colonial police, army, and about like Kurdistan, arc artificial uni bureaucrats were all Tutsi, and a caste system that It would have to ties: either results of, or reactions to, 'na had once possessed some fl exibility becam e set in tion-building' processes that involve the stone. In the late 1950s, even before the Belgians be an effort of suppression of communal and ethnic bolted from the Congo, provoking the catastrophe identities and the dominance of partic- which overtook that country, the long-suffering the international ular elites. To see the conflicts that have Rwandan Hutu rose up against their Tutsi oppressors. co 1n1n unity. marked these places as local outbursts The rising began a pattern of periodic massacres of of irrationality rather than as part of a Tutsi by the Hutu, and of the Hutu blaming all their broader logic is a mistake. problems on the Tutsi. In neighbouring Burundi, Tutsi Rwanda is not quite, as some would have it, dominance continued much longer- there it was simply the consequence of poor colonialism. Long Continued p22 20 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 Who's a Hutu now! In the refugee camps Rwandan children, whether Hutu or Tutsi, play together without distinction. Photo: Jacl< WaterfOl'd. O ERNJC HT, B ENACCO RE.FUCE.E CAMP- few incidents that carried on existing the United Nations High Commission 80,000 humpies of elephant grass and feuds. By contrast with Somalia, where for Refu gees, the World Food Program blue UN tarpaulin, spread across a few refugees were aggressive and ungrateful, and non-government-the Red Cross, thousand acres-became the second big Rwandans were looking forward to a Medeci.ns Sans Frontieres, CARE Inter gest city in Tanzania. Feeding 320,000 normality they have hardly known, if national and Irish Concern. So at the people-half of them children and somewhat glum about when they might level of em ergency relief, the outside adolescents-and providing them with be able to return home. world can be fairly pleased with its re water, sewerage and sanitation has Among them were people who had sponse to Rwanda's agony. stretched re ources to the limit. And been implicated in the massacres But the world's attention span is of maintaining security in an environment Hutus, for exa mple, who fled after the ten short, and next week may be where only weeks before people had RPF had conquered their territory and switched to another disaster. The R wan been hacking each other to dea th is a was clearly loo king for the perpetrators dan refugee camps are going to exist long political nightmare. of the massacres. A sugg stion that they after they lose their initial glamour, and One might think it impossible to en be removed from the ca mp succeeded new problems, such as educating chil ter such an area without becoming pro in uniting Hutus agains t the nwve, dren and providing full health services, foundly depressed. Yet I left the camps though most of the Hutu to whom I will arise. Thirty per cent of the popu with some optimism about both Rwan talked were unequivocal in their con lation carries the HIV vi1 us, and the risk dans and the human condition. I was im demnation of the Hutu governm ent and of the outbreak of any disease, such as pressed by the efficiency among the its militias. There was also talk of Tutsi cholera, is very high in such small spac chaos-the international relief effort revenge squads inside the camp, and of es with so few facilities. And by then, was working well within weeks-and som e Tutsis returning home to take up the thousands of people in the camp will the way in which the Rwandans, far arms with the RPF. need some form of settled activity. from displaying sullenness, apathy or ag Australian aid agencies, especially To elate Benacco has cared for only gression, were getting on with life. CARE, play a major role in the camps. about a third of Rwandan refugees, but Rival tribes were living peacefully They have been responsible for ware its size gets it most of the attention and alongside each other, and the structures housing food and co-ordinating the dis resources. Environmental and security of Rwandan village society had been tribution of about a third of it, for pressure mea ns Benacco must be broken adapted so that most of the work in the providing thousands of pit latrines and up into sm aller camps, which may have camps was being done by the Rwandans sanitation systems and for organising the result of preventing it from nagging themselves. Politics simmered below primary health care. There is a welter the world's conscience. • the surface, but there were remarkably of agencies here, both international- -Jack Waterford VOLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 21 mostly the Tutsi who massacred the Hutu, which only fifth of the size of the official army, which was trained served to heighten the sense of righteousness among and equipped by French soldiers, the rebel force was Rwandan Hutus. much better disciplined and soon began to gain Though Rwanda is a lush country, it is densely ground. Mediation by Rwanda's neighbours resulted populated and most of the population eke out a living in the president accepting a power-sharing agreement, from subsistence agriculture. There is food, but little against bitter opposition from the more militant Hutu cash for clothing or for such trappings of civilisation politicians. The latter included the leaders of the par as guns, radios and cars. Those who aspire to such ty militias-groups of young m en called the inyara things dream of leaving the farm to find work, but hamwe-which outnumber the official army. the country is so badly provided with the basic serv Just who killed the president may never be dis ices required by industry that there is little work for covered, but most fingers point at rival Hutu politi them to do. As in most Third World countries, cians. Officially, the Tutsi were blamed and a couple the cities and the towns are full of yo ung of days after the event inyarahamwe youths went on men trying to live by their wits. drunken rampages in the capital, Kigali- looting, burning and killing anyone suspected of being Tutsi. 'IEIR DISCONTENT MAKES THEM politically manipula The riots quickly became a revolt- moderate Hutu ble, and it is these young men who have been respon politicians were arrested and executed-and then a sible for many of the massacres. The reign of terror cue for genocide. has been so great that villagers have denounced neigh Inyarahamwe were told to deal vigilantly with bours with whom they had always lived in peace, for any Hutu opposition and in the next two months fear that if they did not do so they would be consid hundreds of thousands died and many more fled. With ered unreliable. Out of fear, a man might find himself the RPF continuing to make military gains, the refu denouncing his Tutsi wife's relatives in exchange for gees began to include Hutu who fear retribution if a her life, and some have even tried to prove Tutsi government comes to power. T here are now their loyalty by taking up the clubs, hoes and more Hutu than Tutsi in refugee camps, and although Like the Americans machetes themselves. Tutsi reprisals have not matched the scale of the in Somalia, the Rwanda has never had the political sta pogroms carried out by the Hutu, there is no doubt bility and impartial judicial system that most that such reprisals take place. French have not Australians assume to be the natural order Ultimately I do not suppose it makes a lot of dif of things. Providing such stability-and there ference to the victims, but the massacres have ac found a strategy for by fostering the belief that life and property quired an extra edge of horror from th e kind of are secure and that those who disturb this implements used-machetes, garden hoes and lengths bringing about and security will be dealt with- is the first duty of four-by-two studded with penny nails. Nor has there maintaining peace. of government. In pre-colonial Rwanda, how been anything secretive about them- bodies were ever, a Hutu had no rights at all against a thrown into waterways to incite fear, and even in the They are there to Tutsi and the rights of one Tutsi against an cities people were murdered in full view of outsiders, other depended upon social rank. including 'peacekeeping' soldiers who had been for bury the bodies, Since colonisation, village-level disputes bidden to intervene. Not even the churches have been have sometimes produced fair results, since sanctuaries, and some places set up as sanctuaries literally and community leadership involves a degree of have only proved to be convenient killing grounds. metaphorically ... consensus. But wider politics-including al The steady success of the RPF may have reduced most everything related to the sharing out of the territory within which massacres occur (apart from The massacres are the cash, foreign aid or investment-remains Tutsi acts of revenge), but it has not blunted the Hutu simply a matter of aggrandisement, and no zeal for murdering Tutsi. If anything, it has increased going on behind the one has ever expected otherwise. it- the perpetrators know they can expect little mercy Rwandan Tutsis began filling the refu if the RPF wins the civil war, and so are more intent lines, not between gee camps in neighbouring countries from the on completing their task. them, and at present early 1960s and periodic massacres of Tutsi The world has long known of the genocide in have continued ever since, with occasional Rwanda but has generally reacted with indifference. neither side even complications involving the settling of po Until this year, more had been written in the world's litical scores among the Hutu. Even before press about Rwanda's gorillas and the threat that the wants a cease-fire, the latest bout, which began in April after country's high human birth rate poses to the shooting down of an aircraft carrying the their habitat than about the continuing mas let alone peace. then president, a Hutu, about 500,000 peo sacres there. ple had been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. E VEN IN THE FIRST WEEKS after the president's death, In 1990 a Tutsi-dominated army styling itself the much of the media attention was focused on the plight Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from of whites trapped either by the massacres or the RPF refugee camps in southern Uganda. Though only a advance around the capital. But the pressure for in- 22 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 tervention has mounted. Since the end of the Cold Rwanda's Pol Pots. The achievement of peace in War, the notion has taken hold that the international Rwanda would involve totally rebuilding the coun community should 'do something' about ethnic con try's political and social institution - in effect, a rec flict in places such as Rwanda, Somalia or the former olonisation, though not by an Yugoslavia. But Rwanda's remoteness, plus the bloody imperial power. It would have to be noses that some of the gung-ho interveners have re an effort of the international commu Since the end of the ceived elsewhere, greatly limit what is likely to occur. nity: given the limited resources of After Rwanda gained independence Belgium con other African countries, it is not a Cold War, the notion tinued to provide some aid, but it effectively aban task that could be taken on by Rwan has taken hold that doned its old colony. Rwanda then sought help in da 's neighbours. And, whoever under Paris, and got it. France cannot avoid charges of com takes it, the task may prove easier to the international plicity in what its Hutu clients have clone, but it would shirk than to carry out. There will be a gross oversimplification to think, as some old undoubtedly be accusations of nco co111n1unity should lefties have maintained, that the French are motivat colonialism and fresh imperialism s, ed by commercial interest. and enough moral ambiguities and 'do something' about The Rwandan economy is not worth a cracker: misjudgments to ensure that even ethnic conflict in places the country's mineral resources are slight, its indus the well-intentioned can be trial potential very small, and in the long term pros criticised. such as Rwanda, perity will depend on whether cash crops take the place of the traditional subsistence farming. The B UT IF THE WORLD CANNOT INTERVENE Somalia or the fonnet French stake in Rwanda is based on som ething sim in Rwanda, where the breakdown has pler and in some ways stronger than money: a senti been so profound, can it act to pre Yugoslavia . But mental affinity with Francophone ex-colonies, and a vent similar slaughter elsewhere? Rwanda's remoteness, desire to maintain French influence in the world During the Cold War, some countries through fostering ties with them. managed to keep the lid on ethnic plus the bloody noses After a lot of hand-wringing but little action by violence by ruthless suppression, and the world community, France sent in soldiers to cre in any case tension between the su that some of the gung-ho ate safe areas for the Tutsi. But, because of past French perpowers served to focus attention associations with the Hutu government regim e, the on a wider arena. But tensions in interveners have in tervention is profoundly distrusted by the RPF. And, some of the old Soviet satellites, the received elsewhere, like the Americans in Somalia, the French have not atomisation of what was once Yugo found a strategy for bringing about and maintaining slavia and the upsurge of nationalist greatly lilnit what is peace. They are there to bury the bodies, literally and movements among groups such as the metaphorical! y. Kurds are signs that ethnic rivalries likely to occur. Keeping the combatant armies apart is important had merely been put on hold. but it is not the biggest problem. The massacres are Closer to home, rulers of disparate regions such going on behind the lines, not between them , and at as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea have put enor present neither side even wants a cease-fire, let alone mous energy into nation-building-the attempt to peace. The real task is threefold, and requires a de weld together one people from different groups. Be gree of commitment that has not been shown in in cause these efforts have often been associated with ternational interventions elsewhere the political dominance of one group (in Indonesia, First, basic order needs to be restored so that peo the Javanese), by marked political corruption and by ple can go about their daily lives in physical security. the suppression of civil rights, their long-term effect This is as much a police problem as a military one, may well be to make the fi nal explosions more horri and only when it is resolved can the million or so ble. The rage and alienation of the rasl VmuM£ 4 NuMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 23 The case of the vanishing court L ~ CMANn "0"" wont to " the Australian states. True, thegrea t absolute majorities in both Houses rally objecting to the redevelopment est 'rights' were founded on statutes of Parliament. Since the coalition of a polluted lake in Albert Park, responding to specific political cir has such an unchallengeable m ajor Melbourne for the Australian Grand cumstances- Magna Carta or the ity in each house, legislatively spea k Prix. Even the Victorian Premier, 1689 Bill of Rights, for example ing it is virtually omnipotent. Jeff Kennett, turned up uninvited. but it is judges who have interpreted The Commonwealth Constitu But no one has camped outside Vic and applied these statutes. At cru tion, in contrast, can be changed toria's Parliament H ouse to protest cial times in our history, they have only aft er referendum, passed by a about an illness threa tening liberal protected individual liberties by in majority of voters in a majority of democracy in that state. terpreting statu te law and adapting the states. I reckon that if the con These are the symptoms. With it to contemporary circumstances. straints being placed on the courts out a referendum, without even One of the foundations of our were put to the vote in Victoria, they making a fuss, the Kennett Govern legal system is the protection from wouldn't get up. In all but 8 of the 38 m ent has amended the state's Con arbitrary detention provided by a writ referendums put to the electorate stitution 34 times since the elector of Habeas corpus. Originally this since Federation, Australians have ate swept the coalition into offi ce in was just a way of bringi ng a person said 'Thanks, but no thanks.' We October 1992. On almost every day before a court for va ri ous purposes, tend not to like change, when we're of each parliamentary session, the including giving evidence, but in the asked; and in the present instance Government has m oved to trim the 15th century judges bega n to use it Victorians aren't even being to ld . powers of Victoria's Suprem e Court, to protect peopl e from oppression. It is not easy to challenge a pow hampering it even from listening to Habeas corpus came to its fullest erful government, but som e people the grievances of individuals about fl owering in 1772, when it was used do. When the Kennett Government government policy or the acts of its to fr ee James Sommersett, a N egro decided to close down hundreds of Ministers or public servants. slave who had been brought to Eng Victorian state schools in late 1992, By similarly phrased sections land by his West Indian master: it children and parents at two of them tucked away at the back of four Acts was used as an opportunity to state complained that the effect was dis passed in 1992, 15 Acts last year and that slavery was illegal under Eng criminatory- against boys, in clos 14 so far this year lish common law. ing the only co-educational second the pace has doubled In 1753 the great legal commen ary school in Richmond, and against in the past six tator, Blackstone, referred to the Aboriginal children in closing the months-th e people ' three great and primary rights, of internationally famous program at have lost the power to personal security, personal liberty, N orthlands Second 24 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 Legislation that expressly removes the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Victoria in accordance with the Constitution Act 1975. 1992 (four) Accident Compensation (Work Cover) Act straight in to leg a I proceedings with cute, someone for contempt. Public Sector Management Act out conciliation, thereby risking (In 1993 the DPP was person Victoria Park Land Act hundreds of thousands of dollars in ally criticised by Jeff Kennett State Owned Enterprises Act costs. And the the Education Act because he was reported to be was amended, too. A new provision, considering taking contempt 1993 (15) in what has become all-too-fa miliar proceedings against the Pre Marine (Amendment) Act language, says: 'It is the intention of mier. ) Neither the DPP nor a Casino Control (Amendment Act) this section to alter or vary section member of the public can le Police Regulation (Discipline) Act 85 of the Constitution Act to the gally challenge a 'special de Education (Teachers) Act extent necessary to prevent the cision' by the Attorney-Gen Victorian Plantations Corporation Act Supreme Court (m y emphasis) from: eral to present (or not to Land Titles Validation Act (dealing with c) entertaining any action in which present) a person on indict Aboriginal title) a decision or purported decision of ment. And the releva nt min State Taxation (Further Amendment) Act the minister to discontinue or ister can make a declaration Transport (Amendment) Act continue any state school is sought under the Gaming and Equal Opportunity (Amendment) Act to be challenged, appealed against, Betting Act that a person is Health and Community Services (Further Amendment) Act reviewed, quashed or called in ques (or is not) a fit and proper Tattersalls Consultations (Further Amendment) Act tion on any account; person to be a shareholder in Land (Further Amendment) Act d) entertaining any application for certain ga ming businesses, Gas and Fuel Corporation (Heatane) Gas Act an order in the nature of prohibition, a nd n o body can Teaching Service (Amendment) Act certiorari, or m andamus or for a dec legall y ch all enge Public Sector Managem ent (Amendment) Act laration or injunction or for any oth ""{ i{ T that decision. er relief in respect of a decision or 1994 (14 by 30 June) Land (Further Miscellaneous Matters) Act purported decision of the minister V VHv DOES ALL THIS mat to discontinue or continue any state ter? These statutes do not, Road Safety (Amendment) Act school; after all, prohibit all judicial Children and Young Persons Act e) entertaining any action with re review of all Government de Medical Practice Act spect to the liability of the Crown or cisions. It matters because the Gaming and Betting Act its servants or agents, the state, the rule book about the balance Melbourne Exhibition Centre Act minister or a council constituted of power between the people Office of the Regulator General Act under section 13 to a relevant person and the instruments of gov Public Prosecutions Act within the m eaning of section 21B ernment-which is what a State Trustees (State Owned Corporations) Act on the premises of a state school ... ' constitution amounts to- is Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement Authority Act This provision does not just take being rewritten in a way that Accident Compensation Act away an individual's right to appeal gradually destroys the rule of Catchment and Land Protection Act against or seek judicial review of the law. Land (Revocation of Reservations) Act government's actions. It takes away The basic principles of the Westernpoint (Crib Point Terminal) Act the court's power to entertain any rule of law, which is what action at all-even, for example, if di stinguishes a liberal democracy formed and complacent about the someone believed the minister had from a despotism, are the separation attrition of the rule of law because, acted corruptly. of powers between legislative, exec as other Australians, they have had This kind of Constitutional utive and judicial authority, the in little experience of life without its amendment has been quietly added dependence of judges, and the con protection. Will anyone do anything into more and more new legislation, formity of law and administration to about this? Probably not, or not until removing an individual's right to ask basic principles. The first is m ea nt it is too late. The rule of law is, like the Supreme Court to review unlaw to ensure that total power is never the walls of a fortified town: any ful, illegal, improper, unjust admin concentrated in one place, the sec weaknesses in its defence, however istrative action, in more than 50 ond that judges will not be influ trivial they m ay at first appear, can different statutes. The court can't enced in their decisions by fear of seal its fate. hea r any claim for compensation for politically motivated dismissal, and Jim Jones wrote a b ov ~ his throne land resumed for the Melbourne the third that all law and adminis in the People's Temple, in Guyana, Exhibition Centre, the Swan Hill tration refl ect a 'moral net' of as his version of these words of Sa ntay Pioneer Settlem ent Authority, the sumptions about individual rights ana: 'Those who do not rem ember Westernport (Crib Point Terminal), and freedoms. T he right to become, history are compelled to repeat it.' or a matter taken to the Administra and remain, an individual personal Perhaps a more apt quotation com es tive Appeals Tribunal under th e ity requires that each of us has an from Adlai Stevenson, who said in Catchment and Land Protection A ct. assured legal space of our own, which 1952: 'My definition of a free society Neither the Director of Public we can defend, and where the indi is a . society where it is safe to be Pro ecutions nor anybody el e can vidual and the group meets on an unpopular.' • challenge a decision by the Attorney equal footing. Moira Rayner is a lawyer and free General to prosecute, or not prose- Victorians are woefull y unin- lance journalist. V oLUME 4 N uMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 25 SPORTING LIFE JoN GREENAWAY It's one big happy country, sort of E' G HH-n" T HOU" NO e.oe" the future viability of their codes. stuffed into the M CG that way. cra mmed into the MCG to sec a In an age of million-dollar sports Players will be abl e to score by ga m e of rugby league? Yea h, sure, personalities and worldwide audi kicking a behind or a goal, for 1 point and Ted Whitten was squaring up ences, the backyard no longer serves and 3 points respectively, or scoring opposite Sa m Newman in the front as the sporting nursery. T he next a try for 6 points. Handballing will row. generation of players and spectators be out- I'm sorry, footy fans, but the It makes yo u wonder, doesn't it ? arc looking much further afield for idea of hitting a ball with your fist A brand of football that receives gratification than they have in the when other sports ma kc implements virtually no coverage in the Victorian past. Indeed a recent survey has for that sort of thing is ridiculous, so m edia- it can only be seen on televi shown that the former basketball ge t with the times. In the amalga sion at rude hours of the morning star Michael Jordan is the most pop mated code, you'll only be allowed produces the biggest Melbourne ular sporting figure among Austral to pass bacl 26 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 Townsville seemed to be be yo nd reach going into the final L ETEEN AG E DAUG HTER ofone of Archimedes' frie:ds had trouble sleeping the quarter, after their mid-season other night. It was Save the Koala Day. Like many of her peers, she is import from the Dallas Cowboys, passionately concerned about the environment. And, with a spokesperson from Dale Loggins, showed how quick the Australian Koala Foundation claiming there are on_ly 40,000 of the animals ly he has adapted to the ga me by left, and that wild koalas could be extinct within five years, who can blame her? scoring one try and setting up But such statements, where science is used to justify social or political another for George Dimitri in the standpoints, should be regarded with suspicion. Because, whereas science tries third quarter. to unravel the complexity of the real world, politics often relies on simplifying But Adelaide cam e out of their it. They make uneasy bedfellows. Take koalas, for instance, which make cubicles blazing and from receiv uneasy bedfellows at the best of times. In New South Wales and Queensland ing the kick off, ran in a spectac where there is no legal restraint on the development of private land, and where ul ar try in the Ablett Stand corner prime habitat for koalas is being turned into prime habitat for humans at an after the ball had pa ssed through 3 increasing rate- there may well be cause for concern at the declining numbers pairs of hands. of koalas. One particular worry is the forests near Eden on the NSW south coast, Townsvill e retaliated with a where the oldest known populations of koalas live goal and a behind but then it was But in Victoria and South Australia, the picture is quite different-there are all Adelaide as they methodically problems with too many koalas. In fact, koalas are so numerous in some parts pegged back Townsville's lead of these states, researchers have suggested they be culled for their own h ealth. with slick passing and accurate This is the view of Roger Martin who, while working at Monash University kicking. Frank N g led the charge during the past decade, has built up a detailed picture of koala populations and with four straight goals in eight reproduction. minutes, which included a m er 'In 1971, 12 animals were introduced to Sandy Point, which is part of curial over-the-head snap out of Flinders naval base on Westernport Bay (southeast of Melbourne),' Martin the pack. reports. 'Already more than 1000 koalas h ave been moved out of the area. With Adelaide two points be Several hundred have starved to death. And all the big manna gum.s are dead.' hind and the siren blaring, a Tim According to Martin, the Victorian conservation authorities are faced with Dunstall foot pa ss hit Brett Va n similar problems at Tower Hill, near Warrnambool, and at Snake Island, near de Herst on the chest directly in Yarram in South Gippsland. fro nt of goal. Van de Herst had to In the absence of governm ent fi gures, koala activists have estimated the wait five minutes to take his shot number of koalas in Victoria at between 10,000 and 15,000. But, says Martin, as Townsville fans were cleared many more than that have been moved out of the Westernport region alone in from the fi eld after storming the the past few decades, and koala numbers have never been higher in m ost ground in premature celebrations. forested parts of the state. The 150,000 strong crowd was Not surprisingly, Martin's views are unpopular am ong conservationists. eerily silent as the Australian Along with the panda, koalas are almost the perfect animal for selling environ League rookie of the year stood mental concern. Koalas are big, easy to spot and cuddly, despite occasional over his kick but erupted w hen incontinence. They also have relatively simple and easily defined habitat his wobbly punt fell through the requirements. And they can be shown to be diseased and endangered in areas posts. of Australia close to important tourist centres, such as Sydney and the Gold 'I'm just so proud of the boys,' Coast. said an em otional Ben Elias, the But using such a heaven-sent promotional opportunity requires a simplifi veteran coach of Adelaide, 'they cation of reality. To an anin1.al distributed from Adelaide to north of Towns just stuck at it and carne up with ville, state borders are m eaningless. Koalas in Queensland m ay be under threat the win.' but, as Martin says, 'Anyone in rural Victoria with eyes knows koalas are not An estimated 450,000 inter an endangered species.' He is concerned that the talk of extinction will m ean acted with the ga me on the virtu a loss of credibility for conservationists. al reality head-gear system and But Martin is also both ered by other aspects of the use of the koala as 'a Auslink reported a worldwide political animal'. H e says in his experience and that of his colleague. Dr Kath viewing audience of 500 million, Handyside of the University of Melbourne, the koala is a robust animal. It is a new record for the Packer pay relatively long-lived and has no predators. As long as it has its eucalypts and is TV group. left alone, it will be all right. So, if developers leave the gums alone, they can clear away the bush beneath, without disturbing the koalas. While sweeping Just think about it the next time away equally valuable but less trendy lizards, frogs and marsupial mice, they you take the Sherrin out for a kick, can point to the steadfast koalas to show what care they have taken with the or the Steden to the park for a game environment. of touch. • As with m any other environmental issues, simplifying the real world can lead to an unsatisfactory solution. And in this case, unfortunately, it could be Jon Greenaway plays rugby union, a final solution for animals not as immediately appealing as the koala. • and enjoys patronising Australian Rules and rugby league fans. Tim Thwaites is a freelance journalist and science writer. V OLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 27 THE CHURCH One man's voice This month Eureka Street publishes the text of the Veech Lecture delivered by Morris West on 6 June this year at the State Library of New South Wales. L INVITATION TO Discuss IN A PUBLIC FORUM the future of the Catholic Church was a daunting challenge. You may not be aware that the persona of a well known author published in many languages is in itself a cloak of invisibility. The printed page reveals the thought but conceals the man. A public address is something else. It is an act of prophecy, and prophets are notoriously vulnerable to those whom they address. Even as I stand before you in this place, I hear the echo of Old Testament thunders: 'the people shall stone him with stones, stone him with stones until he dies!' So, whether you agree with my thesis or not, I hope you will give me credit for a certain degree of courage. On the other hand, I would like to remind you that prophecy-the expression of care and concern in the assem bly- is one of the most ancient charismata. It is, I regret to say, one of those which has fallen into disuse, has been rendered suspect and sometimes suppressed within the church. In a canonical sense, I have no patent to teach within the church. In truth however, I am, like all of you, a sharer in the priesthood of believers. I can administer baptism, the sacrament of initiation. I am charged to express Christ and to spread his good news through my own life. If I fail in example-as I often have- if I falsify the message-as, believe me, I have tried never to do, then I am responsible under God. However, this is not the only brief I hold. I am an ageing pil grim, one of the elders who has been a long time on the road. I have experience to share with you. You have the freedom to reject it as a greybeard's babbling but I have the liberty and the right and in this case, I believe, the duty to speak out, to make prophecy in the assembly. Before I go further, let me make in clear terms the affirmation which sustains us all. I believe in the working of the Holy Spirit within the visible and invisible assembly of the People of God. I believe that the Spirit, like the wind, blows where it will and that we act most foolishly when we try to plot or determine the action of the Spirit. I will go further and say that when we-any of us, high or low- in the assembly of the faithful try to set limits on the saving action of the Spirit, Ph oto: Swart Windsor we commit misfeasance as Christians. 28 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 I am sad for what I see happening in the community of which I have been all my life a member. I say th is not in despair but in regret for the good fo lk, old and young, who are being lost to us, who are losing hope and belief in the relevance of the gospel m essage. For that, we their elders are in part to blame. In part, also, those who rule the church are to blame; because they have in many instances chosen authority over charity, because their legalistic approach to hu man life alienates our brothers and sisters and disfigures the familial image of the church. Let me remind you of a passage in the Gospel of StJohn: ' ... The scribes and Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman taken in adultery ... They said to him "Rabbi, this woman was even now taken in adultery. Moses and the law commanded us to stone such a one. What do you say?" Jesus said nothing. He bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. They continued to question him. Then he lifted his head and said to them "He that is among without sin among yo u, let him cast the first stone." And again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. The others hearing this went out one by one, beginning at the eldest. Jesus remained alone with the woman . Then he said to her "Woman, where are those who accuse you?" The woman said "There is no one, Lord." And Jesus said " Neither will I condemn you. Go now and sin no more".' I HAVE A LWAYS T H OUGHT OF THAT as a particularly eerie moment in the gospel narrative. The old fashioned commentary used to be that Jesus wrote the sins of the accusers. That has always seemed to m e to be an unnecessary embellishment as well as an impossibly long catalogue. My own gu ess is that he doodled, scribbled nonsense symbols as an act of contempt for these so clever and so cruel hypocrites. In any case, it is the only record of Jesus ever writing anything. The first scurry of wind blew it away, or perhaps he scuffed it out with his own sandal. Who knows? Men and women of The irony, for m e, is that we who follow him have erected whole mountains of books over his simple teachings. We have written and sometimes forged whole volumes of decretals and goodwill are now in the canons and acts of the Apostolic See and admonitions and anathemas and condemnations of position of having either death and excommunications of whole peoples ... and we have called it-what? - the exercise of the magisterium, the exercise of the power of the keys. I beg leave to quote to you som e lines I to remain silent on wrote in Rome in 1969: 'Ever since the Greeks we have been drunk with language; we have made deeply-held convictions a cage of words and shoved our God inside as boys confine a cricket or a locust to make him sing a private song. And look what great gob-s topping words we use for God's simplicity-hypostasis or to make a public and homousion, a baboon chatter of human ignorance. We burn men for these words. We burn m en .' And, let me remind you, we tortured and burned women, too, for alleged sorcery and witch challenge, not only craft. We did it in the name of the same God we claim to worship, under the same authority against a determination which is exercised in the church today. I confess to you, ladies and gentlem en that the older I get, the more I am haunted by the but against the person contrasts between the two images: the dark m an from Nazareth bowed over the temple pave of a reigning Pontiff ... m ent, scribbling in the dust, and the huge and fearsome array of hierarchies and legislators and inquisitors down the centuries, entrenched behind their m ountains of documents, demanding as I have to raise with you the price of faith obedience to their magistracy. The contrast creates a nigh tmare for many: a the big question as to nightmare of alienation from Christ's own simple summary 'By this shall all m en know that you are my disciples, that you have love one for another.' I tell you now, in the cold light of observable whether the magistracy fact, what I prophesied when I first returned to Australia 12 years ago: we are already a church in schism, a schism of indifference because those who regulate the church have committed them of the church has the selves to a policy of sterile legalism, an historic romanita-'Roman-ness'-instead of a policy of right, for any issue of loving care to inform it and revivify it with the saving Spirit of its master. On this point, let me interpolate, here, a passage written by Archbishop Elias Zoghby, Vice law or discipline, to Patriarch of the Melkite Church, whose intervention in the Second Vatican Council on behalf of deny to the people of the Eastern rites in the church was both powerful and productive. He speaks in this passage of the differences between East and West in the interpretation and administration of marriage laws: 'We God their access to the must admit that there does exist an ecclesiastical tradition of tolerance, clear and venerable like saving word and to the every other tradition of the church which was accepted and practised by many holy fathers of the East and of the West. The East has always followed this tradition of tolerance and has remained channels of grace. faithful to it. The West maintained it for many centuries with the positive approval of many of its bishops, popes and councils and, in fact, never attempted to condemn it in the East after the cessation of its practice in the West.' LoVE HAS BEEN LOST TO us. Res ipsa loquitur-' the facts speak for themselves'. Those among you who are pastors see your congregations declining and the numbers of aspirants, men and women, V O LUME 4 NUMil ER 6 • EUREKA STREET 29 More and more Catholics, men and to vocations in religious life declining also. Those of you who are parents arc troubled because your children seem to find the moral and religious message of the church irrelevant to their needs women, am better or alienating in their lives. I was in Rome during the wonderful, hopeful years of the Second Vatican Council. I wrote for educated than Life magazine the obituary of the man I most admired, the man for whom I felt an extraordinarily some of their pastors. deep and personal aff ection, the good Pope John XXIII. When he died on the very day of the publication of my novel The Shoes of the Fisherman, I wept unasham edly and m y tea rs splashed They know better on the autograph I was signing. Since then, I have seen the progress which was then begun how the world wags ... which I saw and still see as a progress of charity within the church-grind to a halt. I have seen, on the other hand, the processes of alienation quicken and m ore and m ore people standing Catholic newspapers, outside the doors of the church, w hich seem closed against them because the cost of religious programs on re-entry seems beyond their strength and the gra ce beyond their reach. television and radio, I N A VERY STRANGE WAY, ladi es and gentlem en, it seem s to m e that the role of authority within the church has been distorted. The exercise of authority is not and cannot be a elf-d etermining, are distressingly bland self-s ufficing act like the act of creation. The only justifica tion of the magisterium is as a func and correspondingly tion of ministerium, of service to souls who are the subjects and obj ects of salva tion. To use a very ancient and primitive symbol, we are not the makers of fire, we are the carriers of fi re fo r the irrelevant. Pastoral tribe which does not know how to m ake it. On too man y occasions in hi story the keepers of fire reports and the reports have turned into tyrants or cold-hearted conservators of that which they did not ow n. We, the church, whether as a hierarchic institution or as a familial body do not confer the gift of nuncios to Rome are of faith. That is the direct gift of God. We accept the profession of faith. We confe r the sacram ent filtered and coloured. of initiation, but fa ith is not in our gift.We should rem ember that. All those in authority should rem ember that with great respect in all our dealings with one another. That which the fa ithful Who, we ask ourselves find hardest to fo rgive today is the unwillingness of their senior pastors to confront openly with sometimes, who but God them the problem s which they face in the world as it is today. Let us be very clear, ladies and gentlem en: not all the enactments of popes or sacred congrega tions have been or arc good, wise or hears the cry of Lazarus even just. In the church, as in civil life, bad law brings the principle of law into disrepute. Dubious law puts the principle in doubt. Law imposed upon people without explanation, with its processes at the gates~ loaded against them ab initio, is of its very nature an injustice. A law beyond effective appeal is a tyranny. Why do I make so much of this? Because at this moment in this Pontifica te, the church is being governed by two negatives and a positive. The two negatives arc non expedit ('it is not expedient') and non e opportuno ('it is not timely'). The positive is fiat (' let it be cl one thus'). In this kind of regulatory climate, there are no relatives. Everything is absolute. We even have a huge ca techism to which you can refer like a lexicon of good and evil but from which the reasons of the heart seem conspicuously absent. In today's church, papal teaching on birth control is regarded by the m ajority of the fa ithful as at best a directive that is dubious in theology and at worst an arbitrary exercise of the m agiste rium. The question of a celibate clergy falls into the untimely ca tegory. The content and admin istration and the theology behind the marriage laws of the church are all questionable and this, the most critical, the most divisive and the least ju st of all church legislation, is the one which receives the least public attention from authority in Rome. There are many other solutions than those provided in existing canons but they are not being addressed and in som e cases arc being positively impeded by Rom e. In the past m onth, we have had a new fiat. The question of women clergy is closed. T his, in my view, is a profoundly political m ove. Already, scarcely a week after the event, Catholic jour nals in Australia have vetoed all reader correspondence on the matter. So, m en and women of goodwill are now in the position of having either to remain silent on deeply- held convictions or to make a public challenge, not only against a determination but against the person of a reigning Pontiff . I will not make that challenge in this assembly. I will simply remind yo u all that in the context of church history the grea test stain upon our reputation as conservators of the gospel truth has been that it takes us decades and centuries to admit our mistakes, and that it is only God who can repair the damage they have caused. I do, however, have to raise with you the big question as to whether the magistracy of the church has the right, for any issue of law or disci pline, to deny to the people of God their access to the saving word and to the channels of grace. I subm it that we should expect m ore fr om our hierarch y than hoary platitudes abou t the grace of God being sufficient to us all if only we co-operate with it. To m e, an elderly man standing on the 30 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 ridge and looking across the dark valley into eternity, the only answer is a continuous dispensation of love and the tolerances of love. We live at the heart of a dark mystery-a tooth-a nd-claw creation made, we say, by a loving God. Saved, we say, by a crucified redeemer.The visible fact of the matter is that the world for millions is a sad, sorry and a mad place, and Christ himself had to plead the ignorance of those who were crucifying him. I do not deny the principles of authority as a necessary element of the ministry and of support and love which holds any community together. I do warn in the strongest term s that the impru dent or misguided or arbitrary misuse of authority will only increase the present alienation of the Catholic community and of those who are their brothers and sisters in spirit in other commun ions and, indeed, in other religions. In som e strange and frightening fa shion the traffic of communication within our church has for a long time now been on a one-way street from the heights to the plains where the people live. More and more Catholics, men and women, are b tter educated than some of their pastors. They know better how the world wags and how great are the needs of ordinary people. It is they who sustain the charities which still affirm our common humanity but their voices arc not heard. Catholic newspapers, religious program s on television and radio, are distressingly bland and corre pondingly irrelevant. Pa toral reports and the report of nuncios to Rome arc filtered and coloured. Who, we ask ourselves som etimes, who but God hears the cry of Lazarus at the gates? Let m e read you now something which I wrote as far back as 1959, in Th e Devil's Advocate. The Bishop of Valenta is addressing Blai e Meredith: ' " ... the church is a theocracy ruled by a priestly caste of which you and I are members. We have a language of our own- a hieratic lan guage if you like-form al, stylised, admirably adapted to legal and theological definition. Unfor tunately, we also have a rhetoric of our own which like the rhetoric of the politician says much and conveys little. But we are not politicians, we are teachers, teachers of a truth which we claim to be essential to man' salvation . Yet how do we preach it I We talk roundly of faith and hope as if we were making a fetishist's incantation. What is faith? A blind leap into the hands of God. An inspired act of will which is our only answer to the terrible mystery of where we came from and where we are going. What is hopei A child's trust in the hand that will lead it out of the terrors that reach from the dark. We preach love and fidelity as if these were teacup tales, not bodies writhing on a bed and hot words in dark places and souls tormented by loneliness ... We talk to the people every Sunday but our words do not reach them because we have forgo tten our mother tongue." ' And, lest it be thought that m y plea is too personal, m y attitude too subjective, let me recall to you the final article in the Code of Canon Law: In ecclesia suprema lex salus animarum. (In the community of the faithful the suprem e law is the welfare of souls.) We have to ask, and we have the right and the duty to ask, how far, in today's church, that supreme law has been breached We are already a church by expedient policy or by the exaggerated use of authority. Let us never forget the unwritten codicil to the assumption of papal power. That no Pontiff, however much of a reformer he may in schism, a schism of be, will directly countermand or contradict the prescriptions of his predecessors. There will be no indifference because reba bili ta tion of even permissible ideas by the s uccessor to the present Pontiff, whoever he may be. The fear of damage to the teaching and governing authority will those who regulate the override everything. church have committed W ICH BR INGS ME BY A ROUND TURN to the question posed by the subject of this talk. What do I themselves to a policy see as the future of the Catholic Church? In the short term, under the present pontificate, I of sterile legalism, believe that the sam e trends will continue. The schism of indiff erence will spread. The number of candidates for service in religious and priestly life will continue to decline. Expressions of disa an historic romanita greem ent and contention within the body of the faithful will continue. There will be a massive protest by women and a continuing alienation of women from the celibate oligarchy by which 'Roman-ness'-instead the church is presently ruled. We will see more and more examples of two differing phenom ena of a policy of loving care within the church: The first, the emergence of more and more rigorist groups, louder and more emphatic in their professions of allegiance to the ancient ways of the church by which it seems to inform it and revivify that many understand only what happened after the Council of Trent. it with the saving We shall ee other charismatic groups, expressing the enthusiasm of even earlier times in prayer group , in brotherly and sisterly associations within the congregation. But the deep hurt Spirit of its master. and division within the church will still remain within the post-Vatican II generation, who will see the fading of the hopes they had invested in the updating and renewal of the church. They will continue their tillage of whatever part of the vineyard they work in, but some of the heart will be gone from them and they will wear the ills of the church not with the joy of the children of God V o LUME 4 N uMilER 6 • EUREKA STREET 31 So what am I trying to tell you~ but like a penitential hair shirt. Meantime, by the mere fact of shortage of vocations the faithful will be distanced still further from the ministry of the word and of the sacrament. Peter is dead and How then will renewal come, because come it must? Even popes and curial cardinals are Paul is dead and mortal. There are disagreem ents and dissensions in every one of the corridors of power, however much they may be hushed, however softly the dissension is expressed. So, I ask again, how will James the brother renewal come? I have to say what I said at the beginning: I believe in the power of the Spirit. I do not know, I cannot predict, how the Spirit may express itself to renew the life of faith and hope of the Lord. and, most importantly of all, of charity within the community. Their dust is I beli eve, though I cannot prove, that there will come a surge of power from women within the church, m ore and more of whom are highl y trained educators, philosophers and theologians, blown away by m ore and m ore of whom will give challenge to patriarchal mindsets-as St Catherine of Sienna, a the winds of girl in her early 20s, once gave challenge to and hea ped moral reproach upon the delinquent papacy in Avignon. There was a martial vigour in what she urged upon Gregory XI: Siatemi uomo centuries. virile e non timoroso 00 0 'Be for m e a virile man and not a coward.' Were they large I shall not be here to see the renewal, though I hope for it and pray for it and give my testimony on the crying need for it. It is not my wish that the testimony should incite dissension but rather men, little men, that it should lea d to a curative communion between those high and low in the church who are all, in the end, brothers and sisters under the skin. fair or dark~ If each of us were locked in a silent room, deprived of all sensory reference, we should very Who knows~ soon become disoriented and, finally, insane. The person who would probab ly endure longest would be the one who was practised in withdrawal, in m editation, whose life had an outside Who cares~ reference to God. The fact is, you see, that we live only in communion- not only with our present The testimony of but with the past and the future as well. We are haunted by a whole poetry of living, by lullabies half-rem embered and the sounds of train whistles in the night and the scent of lavender in a the Spirit made summer garden. We are haunted by grief, too, and fear and images of childhood terror and the through them macabre dissolutions of age. But I am sure-and this is the nub of m y testimony- that it is in this domain of our inner still endures. m ost daily lives that the Holy Spirit establishes his own communion with us. This is how the gift is given, which we call grace: the sudden illumination, the sharp regret that leads to penitence or forgiveness, the opening of the heart to the risk of love. Authority is irrelevant here. Authority is the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. It can command us to everything except love and understanding 000 So what am I trying to tell you ? Peter is dead and Paul is dead and James the brother of the Lord. Their dust is blown away by the winds of centuries. Were they large men, little m en, fair or dark? Who knows? Who cares7 The testimony of the Spirit made through them still endures oo· 'Though I speak with the tongues of m en and of angels and have not charity, I am becom e like a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. ' • Share your good Will ... The Jesuits are committed to a Christian faith that seeks to build a more just world. To continue their work both here and overseas with: • Youth • Refugees it Aborigines • Prisoners • The Homeless the Jesuits rely on the generous support of donors. You can help sustain these efforts by making a bequest in yo ur Will. For further information contact: Fr Daven Day S.J. 130 Power Street Hawthorn, VIC 3122 Telephone (03) 818 1336 32 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 Star-crossed eavesdroppers /& ,MAK V OLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 33 THE NATION MATTHEW R ICKETSON Selective amnesia INT"' m"M>TH of Wodd W" II, Let's leave Viks on the water time the investigators tracked them Australia began a massive immigra front and come forward to the present down, and the second-largest ca te tion program, taking in 200,000 peo and see what can happen when gov gory consisted of 248 people who pl e from the displaced persons ca mps ernments delay the pursuit of jus were 'not located'. Many of these of Europe. Thousands had been vic tice. In the South Au strali an Supreme suspects had changed their names tims of the wa r, losi ng family, friends Court midway through last year a and gone underground, both for in a nd homes . Hundreds of these 76-year-old pensioner, Ivan Poly nocent and for sinister reasons. refugees were only masquerading as ukhovich, was acquitted of involve By juxtaposing these events, sev victims. They were in fact war m ent in the massacre of Jews in the eral points come into focus. First, a criminals. Ukrainian village of Serniki in 1942. number of war crim inals, probably One of them was Ervin Viks, who, It took the jury less than an hour to running into the hundreds, entered according to evidence later accepted reach their verdi ct after the trial Australia after World War II and set by a war-crimes tribunal in the Sovi judge, Ju stice Cox, warned them in tled here. Second, although people et Union, played a key role in the his summing- up of the difficulties of reported seeing Nazis in Australia as deaths of many thousands of people convicting anyone on evidence about early as 1947, no government took in Estonia. When the Nazis stormed events that took pl ace SO years ago, action until 4 1 yea rs after the war into the Soviet-occupied country in even if the accused had been identi ended. Third, in the end only three 1941, Viks was one of a number of fi ed by witnesses. prosecutions were brought, and aU Estonians who voluntarily joined the Soon after, in July, the president failed. (The third case, agai nst machinery of Hitler's final solution. of the Israeli Supreme Court, Ju stice Mikolay Berezowsky, was dismissed Before the Nazis began re Shamgar, upheld an appeal against at his committal hea ring). trea ting from the Red Army in the 1988 conviction for war crim es Bob Greenwood QC, who headed The alleged war 1944, Viks h eld three senior of 73-year-olcl John Demjanjuk. the Special Investigations Unit be posts: deputy chief of the Spe Shamgar had weighed the testimony tween 1987 and 199 1, and w hose criminals can cial Department in the Tartu of five ageing survivors of the Tre work is well respected, fervently concentration camp; chief of blinka death camp, who had identi believes that it is necessary to bring only be tried if the political police in the fied Demjanjuk as the sadistic gu ard alleged wa r criminals to trial, for Tallinn-Kharyus prefecture; 'Ivan the Terrible', aga inst that of 32 reasons of justice. But even he told they voluntarily and chief of the B-IV Depart Treblinka guards who sai d the guard m e recently that the work of his old ment of the Gestapo-control was really an Ivan Marchenko who unit had been ' ... biologically stuffed. agree to go to led Estonian Security Police. had disappeared in 1943. Shamgar He ordered the arrests of thou said there was reasonable doubt the tribunal. But sands of people, who were put about the survivors' identification into concentration camps. Ac and acquitted Demjanjuk. can you see the cording to a fo rmer guard at Then late last year, the Austral the Tartu ca mp, Hans La at , ian case against another alleged war Klaus Barbie of Viks interrogated prisoners, criminal, Heinrich Wagner, was drew up lists of victims, signed dropped because of his ill-health. the Bosnian War death warrants and personally The body responsible for hunt took part in executions. Laats' ing Nazis in Australia, the Special queuing up to testimony is quoted in Mark Investigations Unit, wound up early Aarons' book, San c tuary this year, and in May its final report buy his air ticket (1989) was tabled in Federal Parliament. Viks was 53 when he and T he 618-page report detailed there to Th e Hague~ his wife of 25 years, Salme, sults of the unit's inquiries into 841 arrived in Australia under the people. Although only three prose DP scheme, on the SS Strath- cutions eventuated, and although all naver on 15 August 1950. He quietly three failed, it wou lei be wrong to sloughed off his Nazi collaborator deduce that no Nazi war criminals skin, building a new life as a wharf entered Australia. The unit's find labourer and ettlingin the working ings were grouped into 11 catego class Sydney suburb of Kabarita. He ric ; the biggest group consisted of was naturalised in 1957. 26 1 people who were dead by the 34 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 If we had held war- crimes trials when I elaborate on that, the sequence of mediate postwar years only 'enem y we should have, it would have been events that led to the present dilem aliens' (Germans and Italians) were a completely different story. The ac ma needs to be recalled. For this I excluded outright, allowing thou cused would have been young- to have drawn on primary source m ate sands of Eastern Europe- middle-aged m en; the witnesses' rial provided by a Sydney historian, ans to slip through. mem ories would have been fr esh, Suzanne Rutland, author of the book, At the time, the ex and the documentary evidence easi Edge of the Diaspora (1988), and on tent to which som e peo The Cold War ly retrieved. ' the work of journalist Mark Aarons, ple in the Nazi-occupied There's the rub, and in all the whose 1986 ABC documentary se countries of Eastern Eu meant that fear thousands of words written for and ries was important in prompting the rop e had volunta rily aga inst war crimes trials it is a point Federal Government to set up an helped in mass executions of comm unis1n largely overlooked. Even m ore rare inquiry into Nazis in Australia. of Jews was not under ly is it as ked why Australia did not After the war the DP camps were stood. Later, when the outweighed the hold trials in the '40s and '50s. Yet hastily set up under the direction of s creening procedure this is a key question, for a United Nations-created body, the changed, Australian offi past crimes of two reasons. International Refugee Organisation, cials primarily used the to dea l with the 7.5 million people Berlin Document Centre fascists, who, ERST, BY NOT ASK ING IT people are uprooted by the war. C ountless to check people, but the able to perform a kind of mental village across Europe had been de centre held material only as Spry sleight of hand; they think that be stroyed by bombing, and thousands about Germans and Aus cause the chances of war criminals had suffered for years in concentra trians. This is one reason acknowledged, being convicted in 1994 are negligi tion camps. There was no home for why most of the people ble, then the issue itself is likewise them to go back to, and many were investiga ted by the Spe were valuable resolved. And that m eans they don't fea rful of the communists in charge cial Investiga tions Unit face a very distasteful episode in the of their hom elands. But am ong these were from Eastern Europe. in the fight nation's history . How is it that peo war victims were m any of their Some m embers of the ple who committed som e of the most oppressors, who also did not want to sel ection t eam w ere against h orrific crimes imaginable, a nd return to their countries where they scornful of the process. In against whom thousands of Austral would be executed fo r war crimes. a 1949 letter, one wrote: commun1sm. ians fought and died, were able to These people simply pretended 'The Australian (Military) enter this country and start a new to be vi ctims of war and in the chaos Mission is a complete life? And why, when this becam e and confusion were able to avoid shambles .. . One selection officer, known to governments, was noth detection. The Au tralian refugee told that we may be letting fascists ing cl one about it? selection team was preoccupied with into the country, says, "Well, what T he secon d reason tur ns on m eeting the nation 's rebuilding does it matter?" One of them asks, George Santaya na's maxim: 'those n eeds and so ch ose immigrants "Are you a Communist or a N azi ?" who cannot remember the past are largely on the grounds of h ealth and gets "no" fo r an answer and is satis condemned to repeat it'. But, before ability to provide labour. In the im- fi ed.' But som e Holocaust survivors knew w hat was happening. At Bon egilla migrant camp they noticed in the showers that som e fe llow cam p m embers bore the SS tattoo under their left armpits or the scars that gave away the tattoo's removal. Worried and outraged, the Jew ish community began assembling dossiers of evidence showing that Nazis had entered the country. It presented the material to the Men zies government over several years, starting in 1950. The then Minister fo r Immigration, Harold Holt, was at An Australian the time sponsoring a German mi Holocaust survivor gration program and did not want to revisits Treblinl 35 ness of the charges if proven correct, eral Parliament that the case brought I must inform you that charges and abhorrence of war crimes into con counter-charges of the nature of those flict with the nation's right to allow in your correspondence are not unu m en who had entered Australi a 'to sual among these (Jewish) people. turn their backs on past bitternesses On investiga tion it is generally found and to make a new life.' In his view, We are looking for the following personne l to join our international Christian service for that the informant is actuated by it was time to 'close the chapter.' blind and handicapped people in the "Third World": religious or na tiona] bias and that Viks was tried in absentia, found ){ Ophthalmologists ){ Eye Nurses the charges made cannot be substan guilty and sentenced to death. (Viks ){ Orthopaedic Surgeons ){ Agriculturalists tia ted. ' actually died of pneumonia in ){ Physiotherapists ){ Rehab. Specialists The Australian Security Intelli Australia 22 years later). The embas ){ Spec . Education Teachers gence Organisation did investiga te sy in Moscow sent another cable, You are specific allegations but, according to recording the Soviets' displeasure at ... wanting to put your Christian conviction into action Suza nne Rutland, ASIO was often Australia's lack of co-operation and ... prepared to accept a challenge, flexible and in good health reluctant to pursue the cases since advised: '1t is obvious that Viks, who ... able to work in a team. ready to learn and willing to accept responsibility. You are able the people under investigation were during the fa scist occupation of ... to wo rk on your own and get things organized considered useful tools in its cam Estonia span taneousl y guided mili ... to motivate and lead peop le paign against possible communist tary executions of innocent Soviet Weare ... an interdenominational wor ld wide fellowship of committed Christian s infiltrators and spies. In 195 1 the citizens, is one of those war crim i dedicated to serving the blind and handicapped in the "Th ird World ". agency's director-general, Colonel nals whose delivery was specified by We offer Spry, commented on a request from the Allied wartime agreements.' . assignments with a sense of fulfilment and according to your skills Yugoslavia for the extradition of war T h e e mbassy cabl e did not and abilities ... a salary corresponding to you r qualifications and position, wh ich is criminals: 'While this m atter appears prompt Barwick to reconsider his based on the public service scale. to be an extension of Yugoslav inter decision. The Attorney-General's ... a 4 year con tract. nal politics, it must be stated these close-the-chapter comments make Interested? two m en represent a body of Yugo good sense for victims of the war, Th en please send us you r c.v. Further information can be obta ined by cal ling 03 817 4566. slavs who cause infinitely less trou but are little short of sophistry ble to this organisation than the great when applied to the likes - CHRISTIAN BLIND MISSION INTERNATIONAL W Mr. Ekkehard Hoehmann P.O. Box 5 Kew 3101 Vic. body of their fellow immigrants. ~ ofViks. They are unceasing in their cam paign against communism and can .1. 0 SUMMARISE, SEVERAL ELEMENTS and do assist ASIO to the limit of combine to explain why both the Christ Campus • Oakleigh , Victoria their ability.' Chifley Labor government and the The Ervin Viks case is a crown Menzies coalition governments al Bachelor of Social Science ing example. The Special Investiga lowed war criminals to enter and (Pastoral Studies) tions Unit's final report says that in settle in Australia. First, they fol February 1961 the Soviet govern lowed the example of the British and An academic qualification in ment had requested Viks' extradi Americans, as articulated by Win tion to face war crimes charges. In ston Churchill who said in 1948 that Pastoral Care the Cold War atmosphere of the time, it was time 'to draw the sponge across Australian Catholic University at Christ Campus many did not accept the Soviet charg the crimes and horrors of the past (Oakleigh , Victoria} o ffers a three-year Ba chelor es at face value but saw them as hard as that may be-and look to o f Socia I Science 1Pa stora I Studies} degree propaga nda to discredit emigres who ward the future.' Second, the screen course for those see king to enhance their had fl ed communism.The Austral ing procedures were inadequate. knowledge and sk ills in pastoral work. ian embassy in Moscow took the Third, the Cold War m eant that fear Designed to produce graduates to work in charges far m ore seriously. It cabled of communism outweighed the past parishes, welfare o rgan isations, government Canberra: 'The Soviet authorities are crimes of fas cists, who, as Spry ac bodies. hospitals and industry as counsellors likely to have amassed a great deal of knowledged, were valuable in the and ca rers for people urgently needing help convincing and probably accurate fight against communism. Many cu rren t students are mature age. reports of what actually occurred, Anyone inclined to fo rget the Enquiries Admissions Officer. since they are painstaking and effi intensity of the Cold War should Tel (03} 563 3649 or mail to cient in this respect.' The then remember that in Britain and the 17 Castlebar Road. Oakleigh Vic. 3166 Attorney-General;Garfield Barwick, United States intelligence agencies o r at Open Day. Sunday 14 August. ignored that warning in favor of ad went further than ASIO and actively Applications By 16 September. to VTAC and vice from his senior bureaucrats and recruited Nazi war criminals to help Christ Campus rejected the extradition request. H e fight con1.munisrn. Klaus Barbie is A Public University Open to A// gave a number of lega l reasons, such only the most fam ous example of as the Australian government's this chilling policy. Readers want refusal to recognise the legitimacy ing to know more this can look at of the Soviet occupation of Estonia. Tom Bower's book, Blind Eye to In March 1961 Barwick told Fed- Mmder (1981), and Christopher NJV952175 12x8 36 EUREKA STREET • A UGUST 1994 PUBLIC LECTURE Simpson 's Blowbaclc America 's nals from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Recruitment of Nazis and i Ls Effects have settled in Australia. on the Cold War (1988). Looking at The Australian government has Presentati on Si sters/Christian the way these events unfolded in the participat ed in United Natio ns Brothers Justice Group postwar years enables us to see that moves to bring war criminals in the they m ay be in danger of being re former Yugoslav republics to trial, Justice and the Kingdom peated today in the republics of the but there is growing concern about A just Church or just a Church? fo rmer Yugoslav federation. These the likelihood of success. At least countries are on the other side of the 5000 atrocities have been documcn t by world, but Australia has strong ties ed by the UN commission appointed with them because of World War II to study war crimes in Bosnia, but Diarmuid O'Murchu and because of the thousands of dis the deputy prosecutor of the UN MSC pl aced Serbs and Croats who migrat war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, ed to Australia after the war. T oday, Graham Blewitt, is frustrated by the Friday 12th August at 7.30pm some of their children have returned way the UN is dragging its feet. (Ble College Hall to their parents' countries, to fight witt went to the Hague from the Presentation College in a war which has been character Special Investiga tions Unit, which 187 Dandenong Road, Windsor ised by a crime euphemistically la he had hea ded after Greenwood left belled ethnic clea nsing. Is the Feder in 1991). It has taken almost 18 Cost: $5.00 al Government doing anything about months to appoint a chief prosecu Fr Dairmuid O ' Murchu is an Iri sh this ? N o, says Greenwood, who is tor to the tribunal. What's m ore, the p syc h o log is t , ex p e ri e n ced in worri ed that they may 'slip through tribunal has no power to arrest those t e a c hin g , p a ri s h wo rk a nd the net', just as the Eastern Europe charged. The alleged war criminals fo rmation . H e is th e a uth o r of an fascists did 50 years ago. can only be tried if they voluntarily nume ro us books, a consulta nt to Any such people could be charged agree to go to the tribunal. But can the National Association. o.f"Christian under the 1978 Crimes (Foreign In you see the Klaus Barbie of the communities a nd Ne t wo rks, in cursions and Recruitment) Act, Bosnian War queuing up to buy his Brit a in , edit o r of Co mmunity which makes it illegal fo r ordinary air ticket to The Hague? magazine and li ves in a community in citizens to go overseas and fight in One reason given for the delay is the poor di stri ct of East London. an armed conflict. But the responsi that war- crimes trials might endan ble investiga ting body, the Austral ger the peace negotiations and, po - ian Federal Police, only acts on a sibly, lead to vicious retributions. reference fr om the Government or But surely it is m orally indefensible PUBLIC LECTURE on evidence provided by a concerned for the lives of the thousands of m en, person. T o date, the federal Attor women and children who have been WOMEN AND THE ney-Gen e ra l, Mi chael La va rch , raped, tortured and murdered to be AUSTRALIAN CHURCH seems unwilling to take action and fo rgotten while peace is negotiated. VICTORIA (WATAC) few in the Australian Serbian and If, as seems possible, the price of C roa tian communities arc willing a peace treaty is the continued fr e Announces a public lecture by to discuss the issue, let alone pro dam of the political and military vide evidence to the police. leaders responsible for war crimes Carolyn Osiek RSCJ Bob Greenwood believes the 1988 committed in Bosnia and its neigh War Crimes Act should be am ended bours, then such a trea ty could well Professor of New Testament Studies to include any atrocity committed prove to be a worthless document. at Catholic Theological Union, in war by an Australian resident, and One of the seeds of the present war Ch icago and Associate Editor not just atrocities committed in li es in World War II, and the bitter of Bible Today Europe during World War II, as the and bloody conflict between the pro present Act provides. [Early drafts of Nazi Ustashegovernment of Croatia, Silent Vo ices, Sacred Li1 •es the legislation did not specify the Tito's partisans, and the Serbian Wo111 en in the Early Church European theatre of war. But there Chetniks. In the aftermath of the were fears that some m embers of war neither were the inten se con Saturday, 27th August Australian forces serving in the flicts between the various ethnic 1.30 pm - 4.30 pm Pacific during World War II could groups resolved, nor were the war West Hall (off Tin All ey), StMary' s have been liable to prosecution .! criminals on all sides brought to jus Coll ege, Swanston Street, Parkville Further, he thinks that it was a mis ti ~. • take to disband the Special Investi Cost: 10.00 (Waged) ga tions Unit, for its expertise could $5.00 (Concession or donation) have been used to investiga te any Matthew Ricketson is a freelance For further information contact: allegations of war criminals enter journalist. He has been following Mary Williams on 87733 15 or ing Australia. N obody knows, for Australian war- crimes investiga instance, whether any war crimi- tions since 1987. Jo McLeay on 3864267 V OLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 37 Sto von Tudo" What ;, you' ba ways, to harming people who are that we ought to do, are to strangers. sic philosophical position in ethics! close to us. That is one respect in And as far as strangers are concerned, In your bool< Practical Ethics you which m y views are universal: they I think it is irrelevant whether they maintained a very consistent utili have an application to people who are 10 m etres away fro m us or 10,000 tarian perspective, or, perhaps, more are starving, in Ethiopia or anywhere, kilom etres, as long as we ca n actual accurately, a universalist interests as much as they do to our local com ly do som ething to change the situ consequentialism. Is that a fair de munity. ation, and we ca n be adequately in scription! And the second, of course, is that formed about what will change the Peter Singer: Yes, that's pretty good. I don't limit our obligations to a situation in a favourable way. I som etimes describe m yself as a particular species. I think that to preference utilitarian, but to empha believe that ethics is limited to one How do you situate yourself with sise interest is reasonable. Ultimate species, our own, is to m ake exactly regard to Raimond Gaita's moral ly I would construe interests as re the sa me broad category of mistake, absolutism, which I understand to ducible to preferences, in a particu not identical in every respect, of involve the belief that each individ lar way, obviously. course, as those who used to say that ual human being is irreplaceably ethics is really basically limited to precious, and that preciousness m You are welllmownfor really mean Europea ns or whites. value is sui generis, that is, not re ing universal when you say univer ducible to any facts that are biolog sal. Could you explain why! On that matter of universalism, you ically described! I really mean universal in a number say there is no relevant moral differ I think that's nonsense basically. I of different senses. One is that I ence attached to spatial distance. think it's almost self-contradictory don't think that our obligations are T hat's roughly right. I don't wa nt to because it talks about human be limited to those who are close to us. deny of course that there are partic ings, but how docs one define hu So I emphasise the fact that we can ular obliga tions that may exist be man beings if not in terms of some do som ething for people who are cause of friendship or a relationship, biological characteristics? What else Photo of starving in far-a way countries-and but I do think that ethi cs extends separates human beings fro m oth Peter Singer by the omission to do that seems to m e well beyond those. Some of our im ersl It certainly isn't something like Emmanuel Santos to be comparably serious, in som e portant obliga tions, and the things to p40 38 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 Steven Tudor: Why do you thin]< Lo new problem s, but also a push demic philosopher! One suspicion applied philosophers have moved from within philosophy to rediscov is that the desire to be engaged with into the public sphere! er a tradition of thinking about public affaiT s is not necessmily a Rae Langton: Well, there are lots of moral issues. desiTe felt as a philosopher but as very complica ted decisions that have Yes, that there's more that m oral someone engaged in public affairs, to be made these days in public pol philosophy and political philosophy m hoping to be o engaged, fm its icy, and philosophers are used to are concerned with than the som e own sal V OLUME 4 N UMilER 6 • EUREKA STREET 39 from p38 falsity and logical consistency, while Experts', in which I criticised moral rationality because we know that moral thinking as such in the public philosophy for not getting involved there are som e humans who lack sphem mquires a much richer criti in practical issu es, and one of the rationality and always will because cal vocabulary that will include philosophers I was criticising, A.J. of some brain damage, for example. tams such as anogant, compassion Ayer, said som ething like, 'Well, And there arc some non-human an ate, sentimental, banal, lucid etc there is no reason to expect a m oral innls who are much m ore rational and these as primary modes of thinl< philosopher to be any wiser than and that goes for autonomy and moral ing well or badly, not simply as anyone else-that's the ro le of the sense and ability to communicate causes of illogical thinking lil 40 EUREKA STREET • AucusT 1994 fro m p39 ing. You can 't be saying that! You the analogy here. A philosopher who there's anything arrogant about this. mentioned furtherance of a career: has personal failings and really good Wouldn't there be something arro there are lots of ways to pursue a ideas should be allowed to have those gant about thinking that one's views career in philosophy. You can pur good ideas taken seriously. I find it in moral philosophy had no implica sue a career in philosophy without very frustrating when people take a tions at all for the outside world ? doing applied ethics at all. And given famou s person-say, Gandhi-and Wh at worse sort of ivory tower m en the traditions of academic freedom then find out all sorts of dubious tality could you get than that ? So I'm within universities you might think things about his personal life (s leep not sure which sid e the arroga nce that philosophers arc go ing to be less ing chaste! y with his nieces, and this should be seen as coming from . tarnished in their m otives than som e kind of thing). This is supposed to body who's coming fro m a pharma upset yo ur whole picture of Gandhi Th ere's the arrogance of remaining ceutical company that has a vested and his principles. But it shouldn't aloof and there's the arrogance of interest. Say more about what the at all, and I think it ought to be the going forth into the world and tell tarnishing effect is! sam e here. ing people wh at to do. Do you think a fem inist criticism If someone is putting forwa rd a con This is a crucial issue. Gaita often might be made of the way in which crete 'applied philosophical' view, uses the Socratic example where some applied philosophers have you want to have the sense that they Socrates calls people to 'be behind sought to go out in to the 'real world' are somehow personally committed their words'. So you ge t characters and wb shoulders, in a spirit of to what they are saying, or, at least, like Thrasymachus in T he Rep ub 'masculine worldliness', with law that they're speal V OLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 41 from p40 Gaita claims specifically that you that particular occasion because of ics, I would have thought, would be 'showed a failure to understand this', the likelihood that it will lead to useful on that kind of committee. It that is, the properly personal nature violent crime. So there are similar certainly doesn't mean that the phi of moral criticism in the public occasions on which speech might be losopher is going to be right all the sphere, in your response to the events restricted in the public arena pre time, or even more often than other in Germany. [Singer's lectures in cisely because it might lead to people on the committee necessari Germany were seriously disrupted.] crimes. But that's not a public-aca ly, about whether the research ought How do you respond to that charge! demic distinction. to or ought not to go ahead. But I On that particular point I am grate would have thought that, even if we ful to you for having shown m e what In How Are We to Livcl you were grant Gaita's assumption here, there Gaita said in his interview, because critical, even dismissive, of most must be some value in having phi I find that remark totally astonish people's understanding of ethics, Does Gaita losophers active in public life on ing, given his ignorance of the situa 'most people have only the vaguest debates that involve substantive tion in Germany. His ignorance is idea of what it might be to lead an think that an moral issues. shown by the fact that he makes ethical life' (p. 7). You were saying some distinction between what's more here than simply most of us anencephalic Would you accept, as Gaita claims, said in the town halls- he says it happen to fail lo be very moral be that criticism in these sorts of tenns, might be legitimate to stop this ca use of the strains of altruism or hwnan being ... the substantive terms of arrogant, and what is said in universities. He whatever. You say that most people's compassionate etc., which you do seems to think that this distinction understanding is so obscured and is n1ore precious grant have some l 42 EUREKA STREET • AU GUST 1994 fro m p41 do a cruel thing like that for the sake he'll just stop when yo u ask him for I wouldn't describe it as inspiration of overall happiness.' When you ap a justificati on for his actions. He'll (in this example) because they're peal to moral intuitions you're very just say, 'I'm sorry, this is just where spclli ng out the implications of what often appealing to a big ragbag of justification stops. To do otherwise you already believe, and they're tell norms that aren 't always cl early spelt would be evil. This is just the way ing you what you ought do given out. But because they're felt to be a the values are. This is the way of life. what you believe. source of ways of evaluating other Yo u ca n't get past the way moral theori es they are clea rly tak of life.' GaiLa makes much of a distinction en to be important. So I really don't bet ween the narrow critical con recognise the picture of moral phi 0 ll VIOUSLY THER E ARE A million cepts characteristic of academic losophy that Gaita wants to present. and one ways of life, and some of philosophical discourse centred them Gaita would agree are abhor around tme, false. and the various Petet Singer didn't recognise it, rent, but I can't see fro m a Wittgen modes of inference and the broader either. He said that you do criticise steinian point of view that you have more substantial critical concepts som eone fo r lacl VOLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 43 from p42 what's valuable in it. So, from that the small minority that don't like pursuit of rnaterial prosperity is their point of view, hanging yourself isn't the situation from dissenting and chief goal-that fact seems to indi a desirable thing in either case, expressing their views against it. I cate that those people haven' t whether you shot a few Indians or don't see any particular great virtue thought very deeply about what it is failed to contribute to Oxfam. In in fifty/fifty divisions. But I do agree to live an ethical life. either case what you ought to do is with John Stuart Mill that if no one say 'Well, I'm going to try to do the is ever going to disagree with some So the ethical life simply mquires best that I can to try and improve the thing it becom es a kind of dead truth, more reflection on what they al position of people in India or wher it is not a living truth. ready do lmow about morality! ever. ' The other difference between And its implications. I think the the situations, I guess, is that if you Gaita is quite bleal< in his views point that I made right at the begin fail to donate to Oxfam you don't about the contemporary state of ning about the distinction between know who has been harmed by this universities, viewing the profession acts and omissions is a case in point. and that obviously makes a psycho alisation and the publication of ac People often don't think about that logical and emotional difference to ademics as undermining the notion very much. They will think about whether we feel remorse or not. But of an academic vocation and the the fact that it would be wrong to I don't really think it makes a differ disinterested pmsuit of tmth. How harm someone, that it would be a ence to the wrongness of what is do you view the situation! terrible wrong if you go to a child and done. Of course I am not saying that Not in that way. I think that the fact make that child blind. But they don't shooting people or not giving to that academics have become more think very much about the fact that Oxfam are exactly on all fours. I've public is all to the good. I think that by giving money to Community Aid said in Pra ctical Ethics why there it improves the connections, the Abroad or UNICEF they could pre are differences between acts and links between the community and vent blindness in children for a rela omissions that we ought to keep a the university. There is no good in a tively modest sacrifice to them grip on. But I do think that one could university being wonderfully aca selves. It is that sort of thinking that well feel remorse for having failed to demic if it has nothing to do with I think we are still a bit con tribute to Ox fa min the a ppropri most of the community. blinkered about. ate circumstances and it would be Professionalisation can be a bit particularly where you know about of a problem. I would agree with 0 N THAT POINT, IN GAITA'S boo]< people who have suffered from it. If that. I would see much more of a (Good and Evil: An Absolute Con you went through a village and found threat to the universities in the pres ception) he has a fairly controver that people have starved or lived in sures that they are now under to be sial example involving yomself. He utter misery for many years and you productive by certain set criteria. does want to draw that distinction tried to find out why and they said This includes teaching, where we between acts and omissions, and 'Well, Oxfam came here with this have to try and get more and more draws it in the context of a discus wonderful project, we were much students to justify our budgets. But sion of remorse. (He believes that happier, the children were healthier, it also includes research, where we remOl'se plays a very significant role we were getting enough to eat but are under a lot of pressure to get in om understanding of what ethics the funds ran out and Oxfam told us government research grants, bee a use is about.) In the example, he says they couldn't go on with it' and you this is a way of showing we arc that someone who goes and shoots a thought 'Gee, during that time what academically competitive, and so we few peasants in India and feels ter was I doing- I was buying myself all change the direction of our research ribleremOl'se about it later on would sorts of luxuries I didn't really need so we can justify spending money. quite rightly or intelligibly feel re and I could have made sure that that (P hilosophers don't really need to morse about it, whereas someone project continued'. I would have spend money at all.) I think that has (in Gaita 's example, it is yomself) thought that remorse would be a had a corrupting effect on who failed to fill in his Oxfam sub perfectly appropriate feeling in that the universities. scription form and then was about context. to hang himself out of remorse would So I'M NOT BLEAK; I think that have greatly misunderstood the sit Gaita questioned the assumption of there are still lots of good things uation. What do you thinl< about the desirability of a community con about universities in Australia. I am that kind of example! sensus on such issues as euthanasia. concerned about some of the direc Remorse is a concept which I don't What is yom view of that! tions they have been going in the really have a great deal of use for I don't have a problem with consen lastfew years, but notfor exactly the unless it is a way of reminding our sus if it is a free consensus in which same reasons Gaita is. • selves that what we have done is dissenting views can be expressed. It wrong and we should try to improve seems to me that, for instance, in the Peter Singer is Deputy Director of upon that. I suppose that's exactly Netherlands now there is a broad the Centre for Human Bioethics and how you would expect a consequen consensus that doctors should be Professor of Philosophy at Monash tialist to understand that notion, but able to assist terminally ill patients University. His books include I think that you can talk about that to die under certain specified condi Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, notion in that way and preserve tions. But there is nothing that stops and How are we to Live! 44 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 from p43 Germ an universities! Gaita suggests From the point of view of the is what policy there should be, given that, though it is im proper for lec business of philosophy, too, I think the fa ct of disagreem ent, which is tures in a university to be stifled, it that is not a good idea. You oughtn't the classic liberal problem . may on occasion be fair for opposi to say certain things are forever out tion to some public speaker to tak e of bounds, at least as far as yo ur But th en the question becomes the fo rm of shouting them down or thoughts are con cerned; because 'Whose agreement or disagreement showering them with tomatoes. Do there are lots of real life problems is relevant here!' In the case, say, of you agree or disagree with that! around- like the problem of wheth deciding whether to let a child with I think in the case of som eone spea k er or not abortion should be permis spina bifid a die, do we only consult ing at a university, as Singer was, sible, to take one of the controver the parents and the doctor involved then normal standards of intellectu sial policy issues. You have to com e in each particular ca se! Or do we try al thought should apply. Universi up with a decision about them one to es tablish a general policy that ties are places where these things get way or the other. You have to either refl ects community opinion! In the debated. People with whom I disa decide that it's going to be permissi case of 'ordinary' murders we would gree very strongly about the pornog ble or not permissible. never let ju st the people concerned raphy issue get up there and say their How are yo u going to come up sort it out among themselves-com bit. We wouldn't agree but we let with a decision unless you think munity consensus is relevant. one another spea k. about all the options? T o say one I think it's a really hard question and option isn't thinkable when half the I don't know the answer. Ought we fear to think evil thoughts! population is wanting the answer Or ought we fear those who seek to isn 't good enough. Yo u have to do Do you think it is good fo r someone tell us that our thoughts are evil! more than say it's unthinkable. You such as Peter Singer to be viewed, as What do you think of Gaita 's claims have to say what's wrong with it. many do, as something of a moral that comemporary applied philoso Yo u have to back up what you want guru! l'm not suggesting that he phy runs the rish of corrupting s tu to say. To say one option sought such status, but imply not dents by encouraging serious con To say it's just evil is not good ing that there are many readers who sideration of evil though ts, such as enough fr om one's own point of view, isn't thinkable atttibute their fundamemal moral that infanticide is permissible un and it's also not good enough if yo u're re-ori entations to his writings. der the same conditions as in the business of trying to persuade when half the Well, somebody could be complete abortion might be! and engage in intellectual exchange. ly re-oriented as a result of reading population is Si nger's book without thereby tak I THIN K THAT THERE A RE tWO things You were aying it' good to be seri ing Singer as their guru. A preacher that he is worried about. O ne is the ous about these issues. You don't wanting the or a real guru says to believe som e thing we m entioned before about thin] V OLUME 4 N UM BER 6 • EUREKA STREET 45 BooKs IN BRIEF: 1 P AMELA F OULKES Women, power and the early church '"omewh" When Women Were Priests: Virgins .: 'Young women, you wea r your Tmisleadinnm'mg. Certainl '"'""'"'y it takes as its Women's Leadership in the Early veils out on the streets, so yo u should starting point the fac t of wom en's lead Church and the Scandal of their wear them in the church, you wear ership in the early years of the Chris Subordination in the Rise of them when you are among strange rs, tian church. We are introduced to a Christianity, Karen )o Torjesen, then wear them among your brothers. number of the more important women Harper Sa n Francisco, I Y93 . I'>HN (De Virginibus Velandis 13) leaders such as Mary Magdalen, Lydia o Oo OGS2Y7 3 1uu' S3S.95. Here the rules of propriety for wom at Philippi, Phoebe, the deacon of en that applied in the public thorough Cenchreae, the teacher Prisca and the ion in a legislative assembly, but she fa res are now transferred to the inner apostle, Junia. It makes it plain that can express it at home.' (The I 46 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 'Self at the hairdresser's', BooKs rN BRIEF: 2 Ph oto by Fr Browne, Dublin 1942. of humour and slight zaniness which Snappy priest you would need to take a photograph of yourself while under anaesthetic on the operating table. T h e crowning s t ory o f Frank 0 VER THE PAST YEAR OR TWO the Browne's life was perhaps his associa Irish Jesuits seem to have struck gold tion with the Titanic. His uncle bought wherever they look ed. They have him <1 ticket for the first two stages of shared it generously. its maiden voyage. Friends off ered to They looked upwards in the dining Father Browne: A Life in Pictures, pay for the third stage to N ew York, room, and the painting they had lived E. E. O'Donnell, SJ, Wolfhound but Frank's provincial ordered him off with for years turned out to be a Carav Press, 1994. ISI\N 0 8632 7 436 6 'that ship'. As he said, it was one of the aggio. After having it cleaned, they A WEEK OR TWO after its publica BooKs rN BRIEF : 3 ruption and the managem ent of a tion, I noticed Shane Maloney's Stiff branch of the party. Apart fro m a cou appearing on a best sell er list between ple of attempts on his life, Murray one boo k ca lled Strip Tease and anoth The company laconically accepts that investiga ting er one called Lasher. But this is not the cl ark side of a m eatworks is not that kind of stiff. Stiff describes a you keep necessarily any m ore politically dan multitude of other sins: the body which gerous than dealing with either Mr Ant is discovered in the fr eezer of the Pacif Stiff, Shane Maloney, Text or the local Turkish social cl ub, having ic Pastoral mea t-packing works, the Publishing, Melbourne 1994, coffee in an Italian cafe in Coburg, luck of one Murray Whelan, the elec ISBN 1875847 006, RRP$ 12.95 taking his son out for a pizza, or coping torate offi cer in Melbourne's northern ical considerations he can't be got rid with his estranged wife. suburbs, who has to investiga te the of. Thus, with a slash of the jowly Despite its penny-dreadful man murder, and the upper lip of Charlene humour which charactersies the novel, ners, Stiff is perceptive and socially Wills, the Industry Minister, who the character of Mr Adam Ant is born. complex. It rests on the hope that some employs him to manage her fortunes Whelan lives with his son, Red, who where between na'ive idealism and com 'on the ground'. reads earnest book s such as Miranda plete cynicism there lies a worthwhile Whelan gets to work one day to find has Two Mummies and Yes, Raoul Is political existence. And it's funny ha a constituent dem anding restitution Different, supplied to him by his moth ha. The ending is set up fo r the return from a tattooist. The constituent has er. On Day One, Whelan puts his head of Murray Whelan, perhaps in a dozen had the name of his girlfriend miss pelt through the roof while he's trying to adventures during which young Red on his chest and his proposed marriage install in ulation bat . Eventually, will grow up, move to the eastern sub is in tatters. Whelan tries to palm him Adam Ant co mes to fi x the roof. urbs and improve his language. • off but the gent say that he's ' Adam In and around Whelan's dom estic fucken-Ant'. For any number of polit- arrangem ents, is fitted murder, cor- -Michael McGirr SJ V OLUME 4 N UMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 47 TALKING POINTS THEATRE: 1 Part-time chaplain required A vacancy has aris en for a part-time, volunteer chap lain at th e Hawthorn campus of Swinburne University ofTechn ology. Both male and female, lay and ordained perso ns may appl y, and te rm s of appointment are negotiable. Contact: the Rev. David Rathgen, Sw in Mozart in a burne Uni ve rsi ty of Techn ology, PO Box 218, Haw thorn, VIC 3122. ' Red Ted'-The Life of E.G . Theodore straitjaclzet In this biograph y pub li shed by Un iversity of Queensland Press, Ross Shakespeare has been the Fitzgerald deta il s the li fe of one of market choice of the 1994 th e Labor movement's most contro ve rsial figures, 'Red Ted' Th eodore theatre season, Queensl and Premi er, Federal Treas but Jim Davidson finds urer, publisher, mining entrepreneur competing riches in Louis and public serva nt. (In Au gust 1992 Nowra 's intersection with Eureka Street pub li shed, fo r th e first tim e, correspondence between The Mozart. odore and john Wren. In th e 1930s and '40s, Th eodore's path seemed to cross that of almost every powerfu l Au strali an .) The New Catechism: Analysis and Commentary 0 ,, ,; THC UNANNOUNCeD epicentre of a large slice of Louis The 12 essays in thi s handbook publ ished by th e Nowra's work. The playwright not Cathol ic In st itute of Sydney together provide a 'user's only admires it, but has expressed guide' to the new Ca techism of the Universa l Church. envy of the way opera can release the Contributors consid er th e Ca techism in a ll its as pects throttle and go straight to a climax histo ri ca l, doctrina l, moral , bib li cal, liturgical and pas of the kind reached in straight plays tora l. Copies ca n be obtained from th e Catholi c Inst i Age, with its isolated little Tasm a only after an act or two. While this tute of Syd ney, ph (02) 977 6066, fax (02) 977 3581. nian community, manifested in the quality may elude translation into group's deem.e d deficient mental drama, opera nonetheless informs h ealth and subsequent incarceration. Nowra's whole aesthetic. T h e Destiny is to some degree predeter tableau-like scenes of Visions, set in mined, beyond individual agen cy; CCI make 19th century Paraguay, almost need categorisation can be wilful and music to knit them together, while capricious. elsewhere-even in The Temple, One of the reasons why Cosi is protecting your based on a Christoph er Skase-type su ch a fine play is that it draws figure- there are occasional explo together these two s trea m s in home and family rations of mood, a certain cruising Nowra's work and resolves them. dithering, that suggest arias without Basically, the idea is that a group of music. It is no coin cidence that the m ental patients are persuaded, by as easy as composer Brian Howard saw this the enthusiasm of a one-time actor, quality in Nowra's work quite early, to put on Mozart's Cosi Fan Tu tte. and made a very successful piece of Th e alarm bells of pretension (a l calling music theatre out of Innel' Voices. ways within ea rs hot of an y Inna Voices also represents the Queensland heeler) rang a little loud 008 011 028 playwright's other preoccupation: er this time: on the surface it looked 'madness' and the isolation it im as t h ough Nowra might be Call 008 011 028 now and find out poses. Nowra has always h ad an in over-indu lging his operat- more about CCI House and terest in what he sees as Th e Cheat ic obsession. Contents and Childrens' ed, the title of an early published Accident Insurance. You 'll find scrapbook of press cuttings about N OT A BIT OF IT. As it becom es the service personal and attentive, them. Their basic humanity is some plain that the production (in order to the rates competitive and making a thing h e has always insisted on; th e get up at all) must first lose its Ital claim easy right from the start. voices such people might hear are For honest protection for your home ian- and then the music-this Cosi m ore than matched by the deranged and family call the Church's own gradually acquires new realities of insurance company - CCI Insurances. Visions of a man sane enough to its own. Despina's magnet is replaced h ead a dictatorial government. In with shock therapy: the arching bod CCI Insurances the end it is all arbitrary. The point ies of the two suitors makes for a Catholic Church Insurances Umited A.C.N. 000 005 210 is most clearly made in Th e Golden telling theatrical effect. Similarly, 324 St . Kilda Road, Melbourne, 3004 48 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 Jerry for much of the time.) The wider events of that time, most no tably the moratoriums, also intrude, as doe the young activist Nick. This enables a certain amount of parallel ism between the themes of the 'bour geois' opera and issues of love and fidelity in contemporary life, but these are relatively undeveloped. Left-wing language has been reduced to Williamsonia n simplistics, while Lewi 's girlfriend scarcely pro vides a feminist perspective. Still, the play had to be focused on the production of Cosi, and in that it succeeds admirably. By the time we get to the benedictory en semble that ends the opera (t he one bit of music allowed) it is hard not to fe el you have journeyed through the making of the piece with the actors. Their imperfect singing over a re cording injects a note of appeal, while the tearing away of one sheet after another, as one character holds up a translation of the words, provides a nice note of functional comedy. It i Having their way an extremely moving moment, vali with Mozart: Barry Otto, in order to satisfy a patient, Gugliel tioning edge is relieved by som e hu dating the play as a variant of Cosi Christopher Gabardi mo and Ferrando appear not as Alba mour. Even the doped-up musician, Fan Tutte. And that, really, is where and Hugh Wayland, nians but as Australians in khaki more off the planet than most, can it should encl. Unfortunately anoth in the great coats-and cardboard scimi after all play a very telling Ride of er scene follows, where each of the Melbourne Theatre tars. the Valkyries on his piano accordi main characters talks to Lewis as Company's production of In the past owra has often on. And there are many touching they come out of the clres ing room. Louis Nowra 's Cosi exhibited a wry, sardonic humour, Its only imperative is an autobio moments, as w hen the woman who Photo: David Park er. but little in his previous work antic has developed an infatuation for the graphical one; it would be better ipates the rich comic vein in Cosi. director suddenly turns round to tell dropped, the best lines being sal Often this lies in the dialogue, par him in all solemnity, 'I dedicate this vaged and reallocated elsewh ere. ticularly the one-liners of the old performance to you '. A number of The Melbourne Theatre Compa actor, Roy: 'Women are God's pun the characters are in fact ny put on an exemplary production ishment for men playing with them transformed by having taken part of thi new play. Barry Otto gave a selves', he says, a line only a mad in it; they are given a new confi consummate performance as Roy, man would utter. Sometimes it lies dence, a new capacity to see the the one- time actor whose enthusi in stage business; but m ore often in world from another point asm carries everybody along; also the jostling intensities of the charac "'{X T of view. notable was Christen O'Leary as ter , comic timing arising from jux Cherry, not least for the way she tapo ing their different obsessions. v vHILE Co I THEN can be located communicated both her infatuation In a way the gestural nature of libret as a further exploration of 'm adness', for Lewis and some awareness of its ti, with their swift changes of m ood it also sits as the second play in hopelessness. But it would be invid and action alternating with trance Nowra's autobiographica l oeuvre ious to go on, for all the performanc like statem ents of feeling, parallels begun with Summer of the Aliens. es were well-judged and memorable. this nicely. So it was a sound in Around 1971, the time the play is Not least, Cosi co nsolidates Louis stinct which led N owra to centre his set, Nowra himself was involved in Nowra's reputation. The ambition piece in a gutted Cosi rather than on putting on Trial by Jury with the has always been there, but now it i a straight play. inmates of a mental hospital. The coming into focus. Whatever One of the rea on why the play yo ung director Lewi in this play i achievements are to come, it is clear works, though, is because ofNowra's clearly a shadow of Louis. (S hadow that Cosi is a play that will last. • evident respect for the chara cters. is the word: he is the least substan None of them is made to appear tial character in the play, and N owra, Jim Davidson teaches humanities ludicrous; not even the rather threa t as if embarrassed by his presence, a t the Victoria University of ening pyromaniac, whose hard ques- backs off by having him nicknamed Technology. V oLUME 4 N uMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 49 Come on down' The wheel of fortune, Bell Shal 50 EUREKA STREET • AU GUST 1994 gimmicks worked: this Hamlet car youthful Romeo and fuliet (directed totting up on a smart yellow person ried a gun, but the climactic duel by Bell) replaced Th e Merchant of al computer the assets he plans to with rapiers in Act 5 was plausibly Venice in the repertoire. (To give an offer as gifts to win th elusive hand set up as a te t of skill wholly in indication of the youth of these pro of Bianca). And by putting together keeping with the spirit of the world ductions, Tammy McCarthy played the company's three greatest assets Hamlet and his opponents inhabit in Ophelia and Romeo's mother!) Bell as director, and Christopher Stol the play. Many commentators saw this lery and Essie Davis as Petruchio Bell's Richard III was interest production as the company's most and Katherina-the decision seem s ing: he directed, and played the king even and satisfying to date. The en to be handsomely vindicated. himself (as a barely hunch-backed semble acting had ga ined strength But alas, Bell can't direct every politician, so that references to hi and depth (Stollery added a remark thing. In a complete turnover of plays 'deformity' and being 'scarce half ably thuggish T ybalt to his other thi year, Macbeth also cam e on for made- up' took on emotional and psy roles, Patrick Dickson excelled as the first time (Hamlet being dropped chological overtones) in a bizarre Friar Laurence, Bell himself- argua aft er three years, Richard IJI after world as much space-age as medic bl y the nation 's most illustrious 'sup two and Romeo and fuliet after just val in appearance. Scott-Mitchell's porting actor'-did the authoritari one) and the fact that it has turned set used a seri es of brooding, move an Prince, Grant Bowler's Mercutio out to be a grave disappointment has able walls towering over streets peo wa a highly polished gem and Vol to be laid at the feet of its director, pled by characters looking as though ska shed modern light on the part of David Fenton, and of company poli they were dressed for som e kind of the Nurse), and the verse was spo cy. Bell clearly must act in a number surreal fancy-dress party. (The cos ken by actors who showed, for the of productions, and clearly he must tume designs were by Sue Field.) first time in many cases, that they also direct some of them . Sometimes The king's armour appeared to be knew what they were saying. Above (as in the Romeo and fuliet) he ca n fashioned from videotape and com all, the very young, very sexy and manage both, but it is asking too puter parts; the Lady Anne (bare very able Romeo and Juliet (Daniel much to expect him to do it all the footed in a long red gown) was a cross La paine and Essie Davis, fresh out of time. He needs a good, permanent between The Wizard of Id and Vogue; acting school) enabled the play to associate director who can share in Jam es Wardlaw (the company clown speak to its young audience with the development of a house style but as Buckingham!) was done up in a great freshness and conviction. And who can also be given a free hand to huge, high-necked multi-coloured didn't they just lap it up! direct productions with the sa me cloak, looking like the frill-necked The Bell Shakespeare Company flair and intelligence that Bell him lizard which is the company's logo, has a strong commitment to youth. self exhibits. while the Citizens in Act 2 were As well as obvious! y selecting young On the strength of The Merchant stylised creatures from the world of people for its main-house produc of Venice, Carol Woodrow looked George Grosz. To complete this tions while on tour, since its incep likely to do the job. (Merchant is still melange of styles, Anna Volska's tion the company bas performed the production which had the clear Queen Margaret looked (a nd was m aster classes for students and vis est directorial and interpretative played) like Dickens' Miss Havi ited 60 to 80 schools a year as part of sense at the first attempt; Hamlet sham. its 'Actors at Work' program. I have good though it became-only go t For all that, it was an impressive no doubt that its performance style there by degrees.) On the strength of production over which Bell strode has also been consciously adopted as Macbeth, (with its heavy-handed like a corrupt colossus. The political a means of appealing to the young: Space Invaders location and mili element of the production (largely the highly colourful and eccentric tary symbolism, its prosaic approach absent from the first version of Ham non-period costuming is part of this, to the language, wooden characteri let) took on considerable force, even but so too is the marked tendency to sation, and its trendy dependence on though Boswell field wa hopelessly extract as much humour as possible gimmicks) David Fenton does not. cluttered. In the futuristic visual from the plays and the characters. Still, despite a rocky four years of circumstances of the production, There was some surprise, then, operation, it is early days yet. Even if Richard's cry for 'a horse' also sound in the decision to wait until this year the company only brings us one win ed a shade odd. In 1992, the BSC to introduce a com edy into the rep ncr each year, it will earn its place in m anaged to complete a five ertoire and, in some quarters, that it Australian theatre. month tour, mostly in commercial should be The Taming of the Shrew. The present Slrrew-Macbeth tour theatres in Brisbane, Sydney, For those slaves to the dreaded polit continues in Canberra (4-20 August), Newcastle, Melbourne ical correctness, the play still poses Perth (25 Augu st-17 September), and Canberra. some problems, but this irreverent Hobart (29 September-S October) and ly knockabout production seems to Launceston (11- 15 October). • EOR THE COMPANY'S 1993 TOUR have bowled over most critics (with (w hich received Federal Government its Vaudeville-night framing, Geoffrey Milne is head of the Theatre funding for the first time, in the Stephen Curtis' consistent, ultra and Drama Department in the School form of a Playing Australia grant of modern costuming, and such delight of Arts a nd Media, La Trobe $90,000), a lively and extrem ely fully tricksy gimmicks as Tranio University. V OLUME 4 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 51 What develops is Woody cs into the chaos after an air crash. It Allen 's slant on the classic seems ridiculous that anyone could whod unni t- that becomes-a have survived this cras h, because film -the- c h a ra c t e rs-the m bits of the plane are spread over kil se lves-are-watching. Their om etres. But it soon becom es clear lives and loves are suddenly that m any arc alive beca use Max thrown into a confusion ca used Klein (Bridges) kept his hea d, and led by their own hand, though they them out of the wreck just before it have n o control over ho w exploded. The fear that Klein over events unfold. Allen's clever com es, or ra ther simply loses during use of cam era and setting blurs the crash, doesn't return; the rest of the division between life and the fi lm deals with the sense of ex art, and hi s poaching of the hilaration that such an experience mirro r scen e fro m Orson provides, and with the difficulty of Welles' Lady from Shanghai sustaining this feeling serves as a poignant climax to The film's other notable perform the film. ance com es from Rosie Perez, who -Jon Greenaway plays Carla, a fellow crash survivor. Like Max, she is no longer able to function normally. But Carla was Crash test travelling with her baby boy, who died on impact, and she is crippled Murder, schmurder Femless, dir. Peter Weir (V illage) . with grief and guilt at not having Hollywood mythology has it that been able to hold him tight enough Manhattan Mmdei Mystei y, dir. the popularity of a Jeff Bridges' fi lm to save him.The central tension of Woody Allen (Hoyts), is a subtle work the fi lm runs between the crazy, but that incorporates the better quali in ternally consisten t world inhabit ties of Allen's fi lm-making: a script Eureka Street eel by Max and Carla, and the con possessed of a hapless, neurotic wit, Film Competition ventional rationality of everything an intricate plot, and disarmingly outside it. Refreshingly, the 'real' They're just like any family on casual perform ances that at tim es world and its inhabitants, including Christmas Eve, except that Dad border on improvisation. Max's fa mily, are neither glorified, is suicidal and talks to angels. Wh en an apartmen t-block neigh nor portrayed as deathly dull. Ulti And that's not so strange, is it? bour of Larry and Carol Lipton m ately the spell is broken when Caption the above still from (Woody Allen Carla, m ostly because of Max's ac and Dianne Keaton) Frank Capra's It's A Wonder dies, her death arouses the suspic tions, returns to the real world. ful Life and we'll award two ions of som e idle but creative New Much of the attraction of Fear tickets, to the film of your less lies in the fact that it is often York literati. For Carol and the choice, for the answer we like very frigh tcning, and keeps the audi divorced and am orous T ed (Alan best. Address entries to: Eureka ence constantly in volved. And it's Alda), it becom es an obsession that Street film competition, PO threate n s t o ruin the Lipton s' almost a serious investiga tion of the Box 553, Richmond, VIC 3 12l. nature of courage, and of the rela m arriage. The winner of May's film com tionship between fear and sanity. Carol believes that the dead wom petition was Lucrezia Migliore, -Catriona Jackson an's husband was her murderer, and of Taranto, Italy, who thought Ted helps in the detective work as that Alain Delon would never part of his plan to win Carol over. forgive Fifi for starching the But proof can't be fo und until Larry collar of his Drizabone. Sharp as ever joins in, hoping to save his apparent ly crumbling m arriage, and a cunning Mavericl<, dir. Richard Donner, (Vi l plan to catch the culprit is devised lage and Hoyts suburbans) The res by the beguiling Marcia (A nj elica urrection of our early TV hero Mav Huston ), whose novel La rry is edit erick in a feature- length film is rol ing. licking good fun with the entire cast The exchanges between these giving every indication that they are fo ur m ain characters m ake engaging enjoying them selves. viewing, particularly wh en Alda and A plot that could have been scrib H uston are on-screen. The strength is directly related to the number of bled on the back of a breakfast m enu of these relationships m anage to sur times he runs his fingers through his proves no handicap. The success of vive a m om entarily di sconcerting hair. By this m easure, Fearless should the film depends on the exuberance shift in direction during the middle have been a box-office smash. of its stars and here Mel Gibson of the film. The film's opening scene plung- (Maverick ), Jodie Foster (Annabelle), 52 EUREKA STREET • A UG UST 1994 and James Garner, the original Mav The film opens with a man (Tim of the supernatural and the spiritual erick, as Marshal Zane Cooper (!) Robbins) clinging to the windowsill to weave their disparate elem ents seem to have a marvellous tin1.e ham of a skyscraper high above the streets together. So, although Bille August ming it up together. of N ew York, steeling himself to obtained Allende's permission to The story is set in the old West of jump. A clock above him is ticking write a screenplay of The House of America, and Maverick the roman away the final seconds before mid the Spirits, one wondered how the tic, poker-playing gentleman is mak night on N ew Year's Eve 1958, and complexities and subtleties of her ing his way across the prairies to he shivers as snow falls around him. narrative might be handled. Would wards the world's first poker cham We are put in mind ofJam es Stewart, this production end up looking like pionship to be played for a half-mil poised to leap from the bridge at the an upmarket Glwstbusters! lion kitty with a required stake of opening of Capra's It's A Wo11d e1ful The story follows the fortunes of $25,000. Maverick has two major Life , and allusion to that film and the Treuba family in a South Amer problems. He is short of the original other Hollywood classics are piled ican republic that, although uniden stake and Evil Forces are conspiring thick all through Hudsucl VOLUM E 4 NUMBER 6 • EUREKA STREET 53 A mid-winter trifecta ~ MONTH ffi A LONG HME ffi televi,ion' Middlemmch collectively described as 'the equal-opportunity trifec and Frontline have come and gone, and The Damnation ta'. In an earlier episode, Harvey asks St Jude to make a of Harvey McHugh is well into its run. Perhaps it's the beautiful blonde colleague fall in love with him; she does, ABC's gesture for the International Year of the Family but-as a petitioner to St Jude should perhaps have ex keeping us home snjffling with serial addiction. pected-the beautiful Mary, in the course of her attempt Frontline is a satire on Australian current-affairs ed seduction of Harvey, reveals that she was called Martin shows, with recognisable characters and storylines rath until her operation. er than just a bunch of more or less demented sketches, In each of these cases the question one is obliged to as most Australian television satire has been to date. Rob ask oneself is: Why ami laughing, and at what? The Mary/ Sitch as the dubiously personable but intellectually chal Martin episode was particularly rich in objects of satire: lenged frontman Mike Moore (is his name a Willesee/ in a kind of scattershot way, it targeted faith (blind and Munro/microphone joke?) is at his best when allowed otherwise), sentimentality, lust, romantic love (blind and by the script to escape out of his over-the-top D-Genera otherwise), constructions of and assumptions about tion mode into a genuine sense of the character, carica beauty and gender, and-by no means least-the audi ture though he be. ence's own complicity in Harvey's appalled reaction to The show has improved since it started, with better the revelations of this hitherto 'desirable', 'beautiful', scripts, fewer local jokes, and more frequent and pointed 'blonde' 'girl'. attacks on the genuinely disgusting aspects of current Against a wider backdrop of corruption-at-the-top affairs journalism: chequebook and foot-in-the-door prac and sci-fi Frankensteinian hanky-panky, Catholicism and tices; fine-tuned editing to rewrite the news in accordance the public service both take a hammering in this series. with financial interests; manipulation of audience fears They are looked at, however, from different angles: the and prejudices. public service is directly attacked as an institution, and Somewhat frighteningly for potential innocent both its practices and policies become targets; the church bystanders, it has also looked at the staggering irrespon is criticised less directly, through the effects it is seen to sibility of journalistic interference with police operations. have on its innocent faithful, as exemplified by Harvey's A recent Frontline episode recalled the 'farmhouse siege' mum. affair involving Nine's Mikes Willesee and Munro in While Harvey McHugh's creator John Misto was cowboy mode on A Cunent Affair, tying up the phone setting a new standard for Australian screenwriting, I was lines to the house. A Current Affair's executive produc looking forward to seeing what outrages Britain's Andrew er, Neil Mooney, was reported in the Age Green Guide Davies would be obliged to perpetrate in order to fit (7/7/94) to have called the Frontline episode 'tacky', to George Eliot's 900-page epic Middlemarch into 360 which one can only reply 'Quite'. As TV viewers get minutes. A cracking pace and a number of adroit steadily more screen-literate, such tactics should become simplifications of plot (and, alas, of character) resulted less acceptable and less effective as more and more peo in a still surprisingly coherent narrative, and some of the ple realise how they work, and in that sense Frontline is translations from page to screen were extremely clever performing an educative community service. and effective. But as satire goes, it's Frontline's bad luck to invite In a move unpopular with lovers of the novel but no comparison with Tl1e Damnation of Harvey McHugh, doubt wholly acceptable to BBC bean-counters, Davies which I think is the best Australian television I've ever translated the emotive content of Middlemarch into its seen. Its complexity, subtlety and blithe anti-realism have late-20th-century equivalent. Dorothea, for example, is ensured disappointing ratings; it's one of those polaris supposed to be a wholly sympathetic character; so her ing shows that develop smallish but dedicated audienc zealous piety-a very 19th-century sort of virtue- is es. The outrage scattered round the letters pages of TV simply missing from the screen version. Another example guides indicated the degree of incomprehension and is the knot of issues around gentility, propriety and sometimes fury it generated in some viewers; one of the honour which makes the Dorothea-Ladislaw get-together reasons for both is that like all first-rate satire it is pro so agonising and interminable in the novel; in the series, foundly unsettling and disturbing, obliging the reader/ these are virtually ignored. viewer continually to re-question and re-examine his or Such things seem necessary for a 'successful' series. her own position through the radical instability of its For purists who want the book and only the book, there point of view. is, after all, the book. But having said that, I really can't The simplest example of what I mean is the charac forgive Davies his opening sequence. The novel's first ter of Harvey's mum-played with astonishingly sus chapter begins with the words 'Miss Brooke', which is tained inspiration and coherence by Monica also the title of Book I. In the TV series, the opening Vaughan- who is presented as being both a game, inno shots are of Dr Tertius Lydgate arriving in and observing cent, exploited, chin-up, hard-done-by battler and an ap the town of Middlemarch. The message at the beginning palling monster of unseeing hypocrisy, parochial of the novel is 'This is a story about a woman.' The credulity and Freudian possessiveness. Another exam message at the beginning of the series is 'This is a story ple is a scene in which three shortlisted candidates for a about a man.' • public-service job- one gay, one disabled, one black-are Kerryn Goldsworthy is a Melbourne writer and teacher. 54 EUREKA STREET • AUGUST 1994 Eurelza Street Cryptic Crossword no. 25, August 1994 Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1 Sad twin with rotten teeth came last in the Class of '20. (9) 6 Sat round in the hope of becoming a holy person - like 12 and 18, for instance. (5) 9 Don't begin to touch me! That hurts, I say' (4) 10 0! Hell-bent on punctuality ' Start class promptly at the signal. (2,3,4) 11 Eerily hunt a ghost in its place of visitation. (5) 13 Dreadful riot abates, being pointless, in the slaughterhouse. (8) 15 Is 12 a m edico? She's learned in the Church. (6) 18 He spent a month in Europe to start with, before settling in Hippo. (9) 20 Measures taken to reach the heights (o r depths). (5) 21 It is an established custom to have silver in circulation. (5) 22 'Do you intend to play the music slightly more slowly?' she asked. 'I don't, Anna' I replied in some confusion. (9) 23 'Out'' Gerard began, observing carefully . (6) 24 Car's side smashed by Troilus' friend. (8) 27 Gives voice to 6-down in youthful da ys. (5) 30 It may be that Peg is about to make pasta. (9) 32 Embrace amorously on the Isthmus? (4) 33 Oddly, even you, I hea r, will come to the rendezvous. (5) 34 Where bus went back, rat sa t uneasily on the underlying layers. (9) DOWN 'Can I squash an atom by rearrangem ent of its elem ents?' asks this great Dominican. (6,7) 2 More than needed but gratefully accepted by the batsman, perhaps. (5) Solution to Crossword no.24, June-July 1994 3 A row without right produces this bind. (3) 4 Before I go between MIT and California, I want to be like a h ermit. (10) 5 Sounds as if 1-down, 12-down and 18 across were wholly perfect. (4) 6 Train ditties-those melodies of student days' (6,5) 7 Take a brea th between articles to express gratification. (3) 8 Could be 12- down's sister. (3) 12 In the presence of the frightful foe, tears avail her not, saintly though she be. (6,2,5) 14 Seated at sea, perhaps, use your senses to appreciate the situation. (5,3,3) 16 Though leaderless and confused, strive to come to the Roman fountain. (5) 17 In a queer dream, blent with a nursery rhyme fantasy, I saw Mary look after 'er little pet. What a tasty dish ! (6,4) 19 Old American General may accede to the petition. (5) 25 Apply within for the train arrange ment. (5) 26 King embroiled with donkey m akes these requests. (4) 28 A fro zen delicacy som e n eurotic eats. (3) 29 Is this animal different? Sounds like it! (3) 3 1 What an uncomfortable temperature! Some wouldn't wish otherwise. (3) EURI:-KA SJR[-EJ subscription form Please send m e Eureka Street: for one year ($45 for 10 issues, or $40 cone. D for two years for pensioners, students and unemployed. ) ($80, or $75 cone.) Name ...... Address ...... Postcode ...... Country ...... Tel...... Date ...... Enc. chq/ money order D Or debit: Bankcard D Visacard D Mastercard Come out .of hibemation: buy a subscription to Eureka Street. If you don't I'll eat you. Card expiry cia te ...... Signature ...... Post orders to: Jesuit Publications, PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121. Payments in Australian currency only. University of Queensland Press / EUAJ:-KA SJRI:-Er Special Book Offer This collection includes a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in which Patrick White describes Dame Edna as 10ne of the few National Institutions which don't make me want to chunder.' Since then, White has become something of a national institution himself, of course, and the latest in UQP's 1Australian Author' series presents him in all his guises. 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