Spiritual Companioning Formation A course for those exploring companioning/ direction and the skills required This ecumenical course is offered as part of the ongoing program of the Australian Network for Spiritual Direction. An orchestra drawn from members of the Melbourne It comme nces early in 2002 a nd Symphony, State Orchestra, Victorian College of the applications close 1st November 2001. Arts and Faculty of Music Orchestras. It is a part time, two year program which Conducted by Richard Gill comprises residential schools, a guided reading program in small groups and Sunday 14th October 2001 opportunities for supervision. The successfi.u completion of rhe program leads to possible Melbourne Town Hall accreditation as a spiritual director. FOR BOOKINGS: Tickets $10/15 Full details available from: The Malthouse Box Office, The Registrar (Mr John Sruart) The C.U.B. Malthouse, Southbank 3006 398 Nepean Highway Telephone: (03) 9685 5111 Parkdale VIC 3195

Become a friend of EUREKA STREE I

Enjoy a close association with Eureka Street, help it continue to publish leading articles, and contribute to a writing scholarship for a member of 's indigenous communities. Some of the benefits you'll enjoy as a friend: • Invitations to Eureka Street events where you'll hear stimulating discussions on contemporary and topical issues • Discounts on the price of dozen lots of Sevenhill Wines • Discounts on annual subscriptions to Australian Book Review • Concession prices at all paid Melbourne Writers' Festival, Adelaide Writers' Week or Adelaide Festival of Ideas events.

For further information: visit www.eurekastreet.eom.au/pages/fest.html, call (03) 9427 7311 or email [email protected] <)> O:s: ')> cG EUREKA STREE I5:)> :~ zm~z cO 5:.,., "'"mC "'"' "Vlnc: ~)> m.,.,"".,., :s:::.>: "'"',.,m -V1 oN""i om COMMENT ~)> "' 4 Morag Fra ser Friends & Education ""V1 )> blues z 0

I ""m SNAPS HOT 0 0 6 The French Cardinal, () -< Australian- French pots, and the Mississippi writer.

LETT ERS COVER STORY 8 Geoffrey Freeman and John Hayward 14 Labor in tensive Publisher Andrew Hamilton 51 Jack Waterford's election fil e: Editor Morag Fraser Part One. Ass istant editor Kate Manton Graphic designer Siobhan jackson THE MONTH 'S TRAFF IC General manager Mark Dowell 9 Kathryn O'Connor United notions M arke ting Kirsty Grant BOOKS Advertising representa tive Ken H ead 10 Tim Stoney Performance anxiety Subscription manager Wendy Marlowe 1 1 James Ensor Bank on it 35 Documenting compli city Ed itori al, prod ucti on and ad minist rat ion assistan ts Juliette Hughes, Ben Hider, 12 Mich ael Pu tney In m em oriam, Peter Mares reviews John Martinkus' Susa nnah Buckley, Sandy W aterworth, Archbishop Francis Rush A Dirty Little War and John Paul Fyfe 51, Geraldine Battersby, Birmingham 's 'Appeasing Jakarta'. Ka te Hird, M rs Irene Hunter Contributing editors Adelaide: Greg 37 House divided O'Kelly 51. Perth: Dea n M oore, Syd ney: CO LUMNS Timothy Gaden examines Faithfulness Edmund Campion & Gerard Windsor, Queensland: Peter Pi erce 7 Capita l Letter in Fellowship: Reflections on Denis Minns OP Jacl< Wa terford Selling off the silver Homosexuality and the Church. South East Asia Jon Greenaway Jesuit Editorial Board Peter L'Estrange 51. 11 Summa Theologiae 38 Programm ing chi ldren Andrew Bul len 51. Andrew Hamilton 51 A ndrew Hamilton Try lateral Kids, schools and computers: Pet er Steele 51, Bil l Uren 51 dangerous mix? Rowan Cahill reviews Pa trons Eureka Street gratefully 22 Archimedes The Child and the Machine. acknowledges th e support o f Tim Th waite Hard cell C. and A. Ca rter; the tru stees of the es tat e 39 Fair shares of Miss M. Condon; W .l'. & M.W. Gurry 46 W atching Bri ef Rosemary West reviews Ethical eJ Eureka Street magazine, t55N 1036- 1758, Juliette Hughes Shot through Australia Post Print Post approved Active Shareholding: An Australian pp3491 81/00314, is published ten times a Investor's Guide. year by Eureka Street Magazine Pt y Ltd , 41 Th e th ing not sa id 300 Victoria Street Ri chmond VIC 31 2 I FEATURES PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121 Michael McGirr enj oys Charles Tel : 03 9427 73 11 Fa x: 03 9428 4450 17 Refuge in the law? Waterstreet's Preciou Bodily Fluids emai l: eu reka@jes pub.jes uit .org.au Legislative change is restricting the http://www .eurekastreet.com.au/ and Repeating the Leaving. Res ponsibility for editori al content is power of the courts in refugee cases, accepted by Andrew Hamilton 51, argues Liz Curran. 300 Victoria Street, Richmond Printed by Doran Printing 19 To ou r know ledge THEATRE 46 Industri al Drive, Braes ide VIC 3195. How high is education on 42 Th e grea test of ease © Jes uit Publications 2001 Australia's priority list? Unsolicit ed manu sc ripts w ill be returned Geoffrey Milne runs away to the onl y if accompanied by a stam ped, Madeleine Mattarozzi Laming reports. . se lf-addressed envelope. Reques ts for 23 Fac ing th e other side permission to reprint material from th e magazine should be addressed in writing Moral indignation alone will not to the editor. protect children, argues Moira Rayner. FLASH IN THE PAN This month: 24 Singa pore's wouldabee n democrat 44 Reviews of the films Before Night Cover des ign by Siobhan jackson. What happens when you oppose the Falls; Sexy Beast; Along Came a Cover ph otographs courtesy th e powers that be? Jon Greenaway Canberra Times. Spider; Planet of the Apes and The Photographs p4 (top) and pp 19-2 I investigates the case of J.B. Jeyaretnam. Tailor of Pan ama. by Andrew Stark 30 Free as a bird Cartoon p4 by Peter Fraser Graphics pp9, 12, 23, 30- 3 1, 38, 40-41 Essay by Marl< Mordue. by Siobhan Jackson 32 Life class SPE CIFIC LEVITY Cartoon p1 0 by Dean Moore Photographs pp24-29 by Jon Greenaway Pa ul Strangio on writing biography. 4 7 Joan Nowotny Cryptic crossword COMMENT:l

Friends

'I,TWO MW STROCUNG in the qu'd"ng)c of Sydney University in the image at left (by documen­ tary photographer Andrew Stark) are not in fact Henry Bolte and . But imagine a political world in which such leisured conjunctions were possible. Imagine one where learning and politics were not oppositional by default, where political and ideological tensions led to imaginative compromise, not just a hardening of the intellectual arteries. It would not be today's political Australia that you were imagining. The pre-poll mood in the electorate is sour and the news and analysis from the media magnifies rather than dissipates the prevailing cynicism. Tax and disparagement-that seems to be our lot. Yet when you walk into a suburban school gym packed with citizens who go out on cold winter nights to discuss everything from water conservation to the way our sport is run, the mood is oddly positive-and energetic. People want to discuss social policy, they want a say. They want leadership but they also want participation in the democratic process. They don't believe they are getting that at the moment. There is a lag between national aspiration and political delivery. One of the functions of a magazine like Eureka Street is to provide a forum and a meeting place for such discussion. Since March we have been having regular gatherings, in Melbourne, then in Adelaide, soon in Brisbane and Sydney (Darwin and Perth-we will visit as soon as we can). We have also launched a Friends of Eureka Street (FEST) program, to help us keep body and soul together but also to establish a group of people from all walks of life who can link up to talk to one another about the direction we want this country to take, and then work for the appropriate action or legislation. (See our website, www.eurekastreet.com.au, for details of FEST activities and benefits. Keep an eye out for develop­ ments in both). So please join us in this new venture. Join FEST. Add to the groundswell for lively, civil debate- about values, even about the much-derided vision thing. And in the process enjoy yourselves, as our cartoonist Peter Fraser did (see centre left) when we offered him an honorary gold membership. • -Morag Fraser

4 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 OMMENT:2

Education blues

A USTRAUAN MW

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 5 Anne Dangar is not a household others worldwide, use to collect and file name. Like so many 20th-century Aus­ electronic mail. Every snippet or feature tralian artists, male and female, Dangar you read in this issue of Eurel

6 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 Selling off the silver

L CoMMONWCACTH Dcpa,ment of Finance and Adminis­ an utter fiasco and had cost the taxpayer dearly. Officers of tration is trying to upgrade its image. It doesn't, for example, virtually every agency had warned of the risks, and begged to want to be called DOFA, the inevitable title in the city of be allowed to make decisions based on what was best for them . acronymphomania. It wants to be called Finance. Perhaps the closed down the Department of Adminis­ aversion to DOFA comes from a Cabinet m eeting earlier this trative Services in a fit of pique about suspected leaks on travel year at which Peter Reith said contemptuously, 'DOFA: stands allowance rorts. What was retained went to Finance. At the for Does FA while Fahey's away.' (Finance Minister John Fahey time, DAS was in the process of selling off old government was off sick.) business units. The sales, completed in Finance and Adminis­ Finance, or DOFA, has its problems even when the minister tration, seem ed to operate as a fire sale, with those responsible is not away. The real problem is not the department itself but being paid off as the process developed. This left the govern­ government and the style of thinking which has dominated m ent amazingly exposed to fraud. One officer was recently con­ financial management and public administration over the past victed of liberating nearly $9 million. In court he told lurid few decades. tales of a complete lack of supervision and of officers selling Consider som e of the current crises. The Commonwealth businesses to them selves and then transferring assets to their has sold about $1 billion worth of public buildings during the new operations. In evidence, a psychologist speculated that past five years, having decided that it was not in the property much of what the defendant had told him suggested an active management business. It would rent from the private sector fantasy life. prosecutor commented to the and use the funds thus liberated for more important things, judge that the fantasy was the truth. such as health or paying off government debt. The minister and the department agreed upon a 'hurdle I TwouLD BE IDLE TO BLAME only this agency, or even that set of rate' which would decide whether a building would be retained, ministers. Similar ideas were being tried under the Hawke and or sold and rented back. The hurdle rate was set at a 15 per cent Keating governments, if without quite the zeal that the Howard annual return. According to the Auditor-General, nine or 10 per governm ent brought to the task. They have had full run in state cent would have been about right. At 10 per cent, about 75 per administrations too. Not everything has been a disaster. There cent of the property could be said to be paying its own way. At is nothing wrong with testing n ew system s of delivering 15 per cent, only one per cent was. governm ent goods and services, or necessarily wrong with The general Finance strategy (maximise the sale price, providing them from the private sector. It can be just as forget about the lease conditions) has m eant that in m ost cases, ideological to refuse to contemplate new models. It is when government agencies concerned have been heavily burnt. The ideology and not common sense rules the roost-and when $187 million sale of the Pizza Hut-like Department of Foreign process and accountability take a second place- that one can Affairs and Trade was one of the great snaps: the new owners confidently expect disaster. are about to increase the rent by 38 per cent. Recently, in the ACT, criminal proceedings were completed Queried about the sale, a Finance officer grandly told the in the case involving the supposed implosion of the Canberra Auditor-General that Finance was 'not charged with the role of hospital. It was a job contracted out to the lowest bidder, by an protecting the overall interest of the Commonwealth'. John agency which had jettisoned all of its engineering, and much of Fahey also rejected each of the Auditor's criticisms: the decision its supervisory, expertise. Contrary to expectations, the build­ to sell was government policy; in making the policy the ing did not fall inwards but exploded outwards, in the process government gave the attention it thought necessary to the decapitating a young girl standing amid thousands of spectators interests of the Commonwealth, and the department's job was nearly a kilometre away. It's taken four years to get to nothing simply to implement the decision government had made. by way of charges-almost all involved in the administrative It was hardly the first time that an ideological decision chain of command have moved on to bigger things, many in had seriously damaged Commonwealth interests. Only months private enterprise. An inquiry into the system failure would before, the Auditor had confirmed something most observers only be an academic exercise. It might raise some questions of public administration had known for a while. A government about whether the modern messiahs of government have got it directive, supervised enthusiastically by Finance, that right, but who wants to know that? • departments and agencies outsource their computer and infor­ mation technology requirements to the private sector, had been Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times .

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 7 LETTERS

Eure/..a Street welcomes It is only a few months since Kim Beazley Clu b footy letters from our readers. re-endorsed the Tasmanian Regional Forest Short letters are more likely Agreement of 1997, the deal abolishing to be published, and all It is hard to disagree with Amanda Smith's letters may be edited. Letters woodchip export quotas and unleashing the argument ('The Name of the Game', July/ must be signed, and should logging frenzy which has produced a rate August 2001) that the assertion 'sport is include a contact phone of native vegetation destruction proportion­ business' has limited value when applied number and the writer's ately twice that of Queensland's and great­ to football clubs. Her essay misses the name and address . Send to : er than Brazil's. Tasmania has surpassed the [email protected] or point, however, about where the parallels PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 I 21 entire Southern US to become the world's between sport and business really lie. Smith largest regional producer of hardwood focuses on the wrong place. chips, and now produces (from 0.9 per cent To use her football example, the real Fremantle football clubs. Those entities are of its land area) 80 per cent of Australia's parallels between business and sport are more akin to departments of the enterprise export woodchips. And all at a net loss to found by looking at the AFL itself rather that is the AFL and, as with all departments the Tasmanian taxpayer. than its constituent clubs. It is there that of a corporation, a degree of competition is To confirm that we have not misread the sport-business analogy really stands up. healthy but in the long mn they need each him, Mr Beazley has more recently tried While it's of course tme that the Essen don other. out the logging industry's PR furphy that Football Club is weakened in the long run Geoffrey Freeman the pulpwood plantations springing up on if it succeeds in driving its competitors to Balwyn, VIC former forests are an antidote to global the wall, the goal of the AFL is indeed to warming. vanquish its competitors. That's precisely From the evidence, it appears that why the modern AFL Commission plays a Logging off Labor's environment policy is to utilise far more paternalistic and proprietorial role Nick Bolkus as a good, but unarmed, cop. with its constituent clubs than it did in the It was with impotent rage that I saw Nick It is not prudent to alienate those generous past when the sport was less professional. Bolkus pass the Labor Party off as earnest extractive industries. The AFL is acting as a business enter­ environmentalists ('Promising the World', John Hayward prise will. The AFL would be pleased to July/August 2001). Weegena, TAS dominate, perhaps even destroy, its com­ petitors in other codes of football, such as rugby or soccer, other sports such as basket­ ball, or perhaps even the myriad other www.antiqbook.com Nruunau ®Th non-sport entertainments available to the Olollrgiau,a · 1\,a,aociatiou 'consumer'. In the sport entertainment industry it is the AFL which is the Europe's premier site business unit, not Richmond, Brisbane or for antiquarian and

Our raffle w inners out-of-print books, The Jesuit Publications Raffle was drawn on prints & maps Monday 16 July at our offices in Richmond. Winner of the first prize-$10,000 worth of Guest speakers: eminent travel from Harvest Travel- is Austin Brady Over 3·5 million of Middle Park, Victoria. Austin's parents, academics, scientists, who bought the ticket, are subscribers to titles on all subjects Eureka Street, as is the winner of the fifth prize. Second prize to Mr and Mrs Oswald of lawyers and bioethicists Seaford, Victoria. T hird prize to the Milne Featuring family of Newport Beach, NSW. Fourth prize to Mary Hale of Carnegie, Victoria. Fifth prize 20 Australasian Time and date: 8.30 am-4.30 pm toP. Duff of Kilmore, Victoria. Sa turday 22 September, 2001 antiquarian bookdealers Venue: Kenny Lounge, Newman june 2001 Book O ffer Winners College, 887 Swanston Street, P. Arm strong, Chadstone, VIC; D. Carl, Ringwood, Parkville. VIC; I.F . Fleming, Narrabundah, ACT; G. Forrest, www.antiqbook.com/au/ Fee: $100, includes lunch Carlingford, NSW; R.A. Grant, Donvale, VIC; S.P. lhle in , Camden, NSW; C. & R. Jones, South Inquiries: Ms Ri ta Vik, Newman College Melbourne, VIC ; S. Kerr, Sydney, NSW; A. Knight, Sydney, NSW; K.B. Morgan, Happy Valley, SA; Phone: 03 9347 5577 Fax: 03 9349 2592 M. Murphy, Mulgrave, VIC; K.). Owen, Kew, VIC; e-mail: [email protected] G. Scahi ll, Kirribilli, NSW; C. & E. Thornton-Smith, www.antiqbook.com Balwyn North, VIC.

8 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 $~ THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC

is enough to refer to these groups covertly. since Doi M oi (renovation) in 1986. Prosti­ United notions But the real power of these kind of inter­ tution too has increased since this time, national agreem ents is in the hands of non­ with an influx of foreign businesses and a FAC I G THE FACTS government organisa tions who can hold new thriving sex tourism industry. OF I II V IN VIETNAM them up to donors and governments to HIV emerged as a m ajor problem in legitimise their demands and requests for Vietnam in the 1990s. The government w ARE CRUISING slowly, in a cycJo along funding. It is important to be specific. Not initially took a no-tolerance approach, Pham Ngu Lao Street in Ho Chi Minh City. naming the at-risk groups may contribute jailing drug users and sex workers as a I feel the work of the driver's legs pressing to unhelpful prejudice in public policy. corrective measure against what they the pedals and lurching us forward. He The story of HIV in Vietnam is instruc­ described as 'social evils'. The no-tolerance deftly dodges motorbikes, pushbikes and tive. In Ho Chi Minh City intravenous drug policy drove both drug and sex industries pedestrians. On the right are shiny hotels, use carries an incredibly high risk of HIV. underground. When combined with limited travel agencies and backpacker bar . On the Vietnam currently has an estimated 130,000 public education (relating only to HIV trans­ left, a vacant block surrounded by a high to 180,000 carriers of the virus. Sixty-five mission and its avoidance through fence. Apparently a shopping centre is to be monogamy and m orality) this government built, but nobody knows when. For now it action has had a devastating effect on the is home to the dispossessed and is littered spread of HIV. Condoms were not easily with used syringes. On the corner I notice a accessible. Few drug users had their own boy squatting. H e must be about seven or equipm ent as needles and syringes were eight years old. With his teeth he is holding expensive. Users would visit professional a thick rubber band, pulled tight around his injectors at establishment s known as upper arm. He is concentrating on the needle 'shooting galleries'. A few attempted steri­ which is just about to enter his vein. For a lisation, but mostly this was inadequate. moment, he looks up, then he crumples I wonder how different the HIV epidemic back against a pole. in Vietnam would be if the government had I'll never forget that child. I'll never stop not taken such a tough approach to at-risk wondering how he go t to be in that place at groups. Ignorance and denial is rarely help­ that time, shooting up. I thought of him ful. Official attitudes are now changing. In whenlread about theoutcomeof the recent Ho Chi Minh City a Condom Cafe hands United Nations HIV Summit in N ew York. out condoms and clean needles. The cafe is He is a member of one of three so-called in a public building and is partially govern­ 'vulnerable' groups deleted from the Sum­ m ent-funded. Voluntary rehabilitation mit's final document after pressure from centres are opening up throughout the Muslim countries and the Vatican. Intra­ country. But education is still lacking and venous drug users, prostitutes and men the general public is largely ignorant of the who have sex with m en are not explicitly extent of the epidemic. Frighteningly, the m entioned in what Penny Wensley, Aus­ message coming through to the Australian tralian Ambassador to the UN, described as per cent of these are known to be intrave­ Vietnamese community is that drugs and 'not a perfect text ... a good text-action nous drug users. Thirteen per cent are pros­ HIV are a problem in Vietnam only for orienta ted and practical'. titutes. Gay people are socially and tourists and foreigners. Believing Vietnam The document-Declaration of Com­ politically invisible, so whether the to be the 'cleaner' country, parents are send­ mitment on HIV/AIDS: Global Crisis - rest are part of the homosexual or hetero­ ing their kids there to detox. Some have Global Action-sets out deadlines at three, sexual community is difficult to assess. But shared needles, putting them selves at risk. five and ten years by which certain goals it is clear that Vietnam cannot fight HIV UN secretary Kofi Annan described the must be achieved. The goals relate to setting without also looking at the problems HIV Summit document as a 'clear battle up prevention programs and access to treat­ surrounding drug use and prostitution. plan'. It could be a great deal clearer. The m ent as well as curbing the actual spread of Vietnam's drug problems are seemingly Summit was an opportunity to use 20 years' disease. Women who are raped or who are insurmountable. Supply is almost unlimited worth of experience with the HIV virus to not empowered to make decisions about as Vietnam lies on a major trade route out create a plan for the future. But some lessons safe sex are referred to specifically. And the of the Golden Triangle (that area where from this epidemic are yet to be learned by document suggests that countries protect Laos, Burma and Thailand meet, which is the global community, lessons that are the health of 'those identifiable groups ... thought to supply 60 per cent of the world's slowly filtering through in Vietnam, about which currently have high or increasing heroin). Severe penalties for traffickers and looking honestly at the factors contribut­ rates of HIV infection'. But these groups are tough border controls have had little effect. ing to the spread of the disease and ways to not named. And domestic demand for heroin is increas­ bring about change. And about the impor­ Does this omission matter? The ing because of unemployment, tourism and tance of calling a spade a spade. document is not legally binding. Maybe it the loosening of systems of social control -Kathryn O'Connor

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 9 employs a full-time sports psychologist. It's not that they're not listening but some­ Performance 'It's definitely in its early stages of times it's the way the message is presented.' development ... when I first started I had to General Manager of Football Operations anxiety educate the players on my role,' said Simon at Melbourne Football Club, Danny Lloyd, who has worked full-time as a sports Corcoran, acknowledges that younger ~I'ORT ON THE COUC 11 psychologist at the club for the past two players undergo extensive psychological years. testing to understand their strengths and I HAD MY FIRST encounter with psychology Lloyd, himself a former player and weaknesses, but agrees that the AFL is only in sport when playing football at school. brother of Essendon full-forward Matthew, just starting to discover the benefits of After a poor first half in a pre-season practice describes his role simply. sports psychology. match, our coach decided to single me out 'I'm an opening, or a line of communica­ 'It's gone from a culture where only the for a verbal spray. His invective left me tion between players and the coach. I think out-of-form players went to a sports psycho­ more stunned than inspired and, needless it [the acceptance of sports psychology J logist to where elite, in-form players are to say, I didn't play much better in the really depends on the coach at the club­ using them to maximise their performance. second half. and you really need to understand players. 'They'll go to learn how to deal with a I only understood what he was up to when Everyone reacts differently to different types bad match, or a loss, just as much as to cope he apologised after the game. 'I'll never do of feedback ... there arc some players you with success and maintain good form. 'Every team that leaves Australia has a sports psychologist with them. We can't afford to have a full-time sports psycho­ I KNOW IT'S ASSU~D, logist as some clubs can, but we work closely BUT SOMfTIMES I FEEL. with the Australian Institute of Sport.' Interestingly, the impetus for a greater AS fHOU6H Tiff. WHOLE awareness of 'the individual' in football has WORLD 1~ WA'fCHII\(6- ME, come from junior ranks. David Code has worked closely with many young players AI'JP \/OTIN6 Mf rtiE: coming through the AFL' s undcr-18 WE AK.6SI L-INK! competition, the T AC Cup. He says that the junior program has worked extensively on developing the kids coming through. 'There's a real emphasis on developing the whole person, paying attention to their study and giving them a really balanced approach to football as part of their lives. 'Years ago we would have been thrilled to hear "I only want to play league foot­ ball." Nowadays that sets off alarm bells because it's so competitive and so few kids make it. We have to be careful about setting them up for failure.' that again; I see that's not the way to might have to-for want of a better word­ Lloyd agrees that younger players adapt motivate you.' pamper, but it's about finding out where more easily to the idea of a more psycho­ Thatwasintheearly 1980s, when'sports they're coming from.' logical approach to the ga m e. psychology' was relatively new in Australia Jacqui Louder works part-timeas a sports 'There's much more of an acceptance of outside elite circles, and viewed mainly as psychologist for the Kangaroos. While full it from the younger kids-they're much a way for struggling or fringe athletes to of praise for the confidence that senior more accepting of change. When I started at improve their performance. coach Denis Pagan has shown in her, she Hawthorn some of the senior players came The practice has been around since the also acknowledges there's been resistance up and said, "I'm never going to need your mid-'60s, though it was not until1984 that from some AFL clubs. services." They're the guys I see most now.' sports psychologist, Jim Bond, was 'Denis is fantastic, but I don't get the Former Melbourne Captain Garry Lyon appointed to assist the Australian Olympic impression AFL coaches have anywhere acknowledges that football, despite being team. Nowadays you'll find a sports near the individual understanding of each ultimately a team game, has benefited from psychologist in the coaching entourage of player of some other sports,' she says. trying to understand the best way to develop just about every major national team. But 'Outside the AFL they are much more each individual, but he is sceptical about while many sports have willingly embraced aware of it. I find in football there's some­ the benefits of sports psychology. sports psychology, the AFL has been a bit times not much individual communica­ 'John Northey [former Melbourne coach I slower off the blocks. tion. brought down a sports psychologist for a Jim Brown worked briefly at Mel­ 'We have a couple of players who are while. Some players used him, but I think bourne Football Club under Ron Barassi quite visual in the way they communicate, everyone has to find what motivates them in the early '80s but, n early 20 years later, so if they're getting a lot of information and no-one can tell you how to get the best still only one AFL club, Hawthorn, verbally, they often don't process it as well. out of yourself.'

10 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 Nevertheless Lyon acknowledges attitudes have shifted in the past decade­ particularlywhenit comes to fitness training. 1 a e 'I would have lost a few more years than I did ifi'd always had to train the same way we trained when I first started/ said Lyon. 'There have always been older players who've stayed off the track during the week but the difference these days is that, while Try lateral they might not be out kicking the footy they'll be swimming or on the bike, and not losing fitness. 'It took a while for a lot of the old-school L Acooo MONTH, international Catholic news offers a mixture of the familiar, coaches to get over everyone doing it the unfamiliar and the routinely extraordinary. together. It was difficult having people off The familiar is pressure for centralisation and control of image. So, recently doing different types of training all the the English-speaking bishops have been told how to speak English in the liturgy, time, but it's been of enormous benefit in terms of preparation and realising each American theologians will be expected to have a mandate to teach; the Vatican player has different fitness needs. That's helped amend a United Nations document on AIDS. And a priest, accused of not dissimilar from what's being done by participating in the Rwanda massacres, was shielded from trial. sports psychologists.' The unfamiliar has been public and courteous disagreement between Car­ Does all this sound a bit like molly­ dinals Ratzinger and Kasper about whether the local or universal church is to coddling? Jacqui Louder certainly believes be given priority-a vital question because it underpins the ideology of a the old-fashioned motivational methods centralised church. The exchange reflects broader public debate by bishops about still have a place. But, she says, 'You must other positions on which Rome has a view. find a between telling a coach how The routinely extraordinary is papal travel to Athens, Syria and Kiev, centres to coach and how to get more out of a of an Eastern Christianity from which the Western church is separated. player.' What to make of this mix? It depends on how you place the Pope's travels. 'If a player gets a verbal caning from a If they are part of business as usual in Rome, then you may see the rise of public coach and doesn't play better then I have to trea d a fine line- pointing out that that debate as something radical: the seeds of a more liberal and decentralised church approach may not get the best out of that which will abandon its distinctively counter-cultural positions. individual, even though someone else might I believe that the project of a centralised church is waning; nonetheless its respond to it.' decline does not mark the victory of a liberal church. The Pope's travels offer a Louder believes that the biggest profes­ longer and better perspective. In them an old and frail man spent himself in a sional hurdle she has to overcome is the passionate commitment to church unity and his desire to move beyond ancient fact that the benefits of her work are often patterns of division. He projected the image, not of a ruler taking his rightful intangible. place over a scattered people, but of one church leader visiting other centres. In 'I don't think very many people, let his addresses, he asked pardon for the part played by the Western church in a alone AFL coaches, understand exactly what history of failure and division. a sports psychologist does ... It's difficult His journeys recalled a time when, in the church, there were many centres, because our job is very hard to measure. If a many voices, and many ways; they also showed how much was lost when the player breaks a bone the doctor fixes it, but if I help a player get the best out of himself, centres became isolated from one another. The Western church lost because it's harder to measure.' the cultural role of the Roman church has made it seem that a centralised source The AFL might have won the battle for of authority and power is part of tradition. The sight of a frail Bishop of Rome the hearts of their supporters, but it's only working to build unity of faith and life with other churches offers a better just starting to under tand the untapped impression. potential in the minds of its players. The image of a church with many centres also suggests, in footy speak, -Tim Stoney that to belong to a church is less like playing for the Brisbane Broncos than being a Rugby League guy. We might expect robust exchange of views with our fellow League supporters, and less concern for the image of our own club or for Bank on it the superiority of its gam e plan. Certainly the history of a many-centred church discourages expectation of GLOBAL PROTESTS RECENTLY a more polite church, less committed to truth. Early doctrinal disputes in the RCSURFACED IN HAWAII church featured the use of personal bodyguards and the burning of churches as LMAY, thousands of protesters descended well as urbane discussion. on the plush Honolulu Convention Centre, Truth itself, however, is best sought through robust conversation. • home to this year's Annual General Meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Andrew Hamilton SJ is Eureka Street's publisher.

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 11 The voices of dissent in Hawaii were livelihoods of people, brought about the that the bank send an independent inspec­ many and varied. Pakistani workers pro­ disintegration of local and indigenous com­ tion panel to investigate. tested against ADB-funded dams which have munities, violated ancestral domains, The crux of the ADB's problems is its displaced entire communities. Indigenous undermined sovereign self-determination, failure to recognise human rights as a key Filipino farmers spoke out about agricul­ promoted a sharp rise in inequality, responsibility. Many of the bank's donor tural projects which have pushed them off deepened poverty, and destabilised the countries support the integration of human their land. Others described the impact of environment. rights standards into the projects it funds. hydroelectric dams on river systems, fish But there is resistance from some borrow­ stocks and the livelihoods of poor com­ The petition left no doubt as to the ing countries, in particular those with munities in the Mekong basin. Sri Lankan protesters' demands: questionable human rights records. farmers criticised the privatisation of water, The ADB's reluctance to confront this We, representatives of peoples, indigenous while Thai workers protested against ADB tension leaves it lagging behind other inter­ communities and organisations through loans that require the a bali tion of minimum national institutions. The United Nations the [Asia-Pacific] region, have had enough wages. has explicitly linked human rights and of this destruction in the name of develop­ The ADB is a multilateral development development processes by promoting a ment. We have had enough of an arrogant finance bank like the World Bank, with a rights-based approach to development. institution that is one of the most non­ regional focus on Asia and the Pacific. Its 59 Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently transparent, undemocratic, and unaccount­ member countries include donors such as described this as: Australia, the US and Japan, plus borrowing able organisations in existence. We seek countries including Cambodia, Nepal and genuine dialogue with the ADB, demand­ An approach to development which Sri Lanka. The bank is funded by contribu­ ing that it recognise the error of its ways describes situations not simply in terms of tions from donor countries and money and yield the space to promote alternative human needs, or of developmental require­ borrowed in international markets. The strategies of development that truly serve ments, but in terms of society's obligations the people's interests. to respond to the inalienable rights of individuals, empowers people to demand Australia is a key player in the ADB's justice as a right, not as charity, and gives operations. Since the bank's inception in communities a moral basis from which to 1966, Australian taxpayers have contrib­ claim international assistance when uted more than $1.3 billion through the aid needed. program-making this country the third­ largest donor to the ADB. Australia's 2001 The ADB has no formal obligation to Budget papers reveal a further contribution respect human rights, and thereisnoscrutiny of $112 million this financial year. of the impact of its operations on local Australia also performs a key role in the people. Australia donates colossal sums, bank's governance and day-to-day manage­ but has to rely on the bank's overall ment. Treasurer is an ADB evaluations of its impact and effectiveness. Governor, and Australia holds one of 12 The could exer­ executive directorships on the bank's Board cise more control over its aid dollars by of Directors. Currently occupied by pushing for independent moni taring of ADB ADB grants loans to developing countries ex-Federal Court judge John Lockhart, this operations against international human for large-scale development projects (often directorship gives Australia a permanent rights standards, and for those standards to at interest rates below those of commercial voice in the operations of the bank-though become explicit ADB programming bench­ banks), and assists countries with economic the position represents a broader constitu­ marks. Thus the ADB could uphold, rather restructuring through measures including ency of up to ten member countries. than undercut, basic human rights. the privatisation of government-owned To his credit, Lockhart had the courage -James Ensor enterprises. to meet with some of the ADB's fiercest The ADB has some impressive rhetoric critics in Hawaii. Villagers from Klang Dan, about poverty reduction, but communities a fishing community on the outskirts of In memoriam directly affected by its projects paint a Bangkok, told Lockhart of their fears about different picture. Their concerns have a the ADB-funded Samut Prakarn waste­ ARCHBISHOP FRANCIS RUSH common theme: while claiming to fight water management project currently under 1916 2001 poverty, the ADB has a history of funding construction in Thailand. They are con­ projects that damage the environment and cerned that the project's toxic waste-water A TTHE 1985 SYNOD of Bishops marking undermine the rights of poor people. outfall-into a bay where they have farmed the 20th anniversary of the conclusion of Protesters in Hawaii presented a petition fish for more than a century-will poten­ the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop to the bank's President, Tadao Chino, titled tially endanger the food source and Francis Rush began his allotted speech by 'People's Challenge to the Asian Develop­ livelihoods of 30,000 men and women who saying, 'I speak for the Bishops of Australia ment Bank'. Endorsed by more than 50 rely on coastal fishing. when I thank God for the Second Vatican organisations from across the Asia-Pacific, In response to these concerns, as well as Council.' His death brings to an end a special it reads: allegations of corruption and claims that period in the history of the Australian In the name of development, [the ADB's] the ADB was breaching its own environ­ church as he was the last Australian bishop projects and programs have destroyed the mental policies, Lockhart recommended to have participated in that Council.

12 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 It was the Council above all which theologians and pastors to 'synthesise'. has not succeeded in giving enough men shaped his life and ministry these past 40 I h ave often wondered h ow much the and women a sufficiently clear and inspir­ years. The exceptional intelligence and balance and moderation of Archbishop Rush ing vision of the Church's role in the world commitment which he brought to his work shaped some of the finer statements of his of our time. Too many people, even among as a priest in the Townsville Diocese and friend. They would surely have discussed Catholics, find the Church peripheral to as a bishop in Rockhampton prepared him everything about the Council. Archbishop their concerns. for w hat would be his special ministry of Rush was wary of such attempts at synthe­ translating the teachings and decisions of sis only when they failed to carry forward Archbishop Rush added a handwritten the Second Vatican Council into the life the affinnations which he understood, loved note to the written text of his intervention and mission of the Australian church. and was utterly certain were gifts of the at the Synod which in m any ways sum­ Holy Spirit. marises his own great contribution to the He expressed a concern in 1985 on behalf Australian church: of the Australian bishops about one aspect It has been said already but it cannot be of the encyclical Lumen Gentium (dealing exaggerated: the task of translating the with the church) which he believed was Council's theology of Church into action often somewhat threatened since the has only begun. The great merit of the Council. He continued to express this same Synod will be the encouragement it gives disquiet up until the time h e died. His to those who are anxious to complete the words deserve quoting in full: task. The question of Collegiality and the It would be a great mistake to think that relationship of the local Church to the Archbishop Francis Rush was concerned Universal Church is a major internal about the quality of this 'translation' of the question, which is causing sufficient Council because of some narrow ecclesias­ anxiety and wasting enough energy to tical focus to his life and ministry. Ecclesial distract the Church from what should be his focus certainly was but this was because its major concerns. he was committed to the mission of the From the very first moment of his church in the world today. Even more Pontificate the Holy Father stressed the important for him, and he underlined it in importance of Collegiality. His very first his text, was what he called 'the only encyclical spoke of it at length. ultimate question: "Quis est Christus pro Diversity among the Local Churches and m undo hujus temporis? '" Who is Christ for the principle of subsidiarity argue that local the world of today? This was the only solutions should be found for local prob­ ultimate question because, like St Paul lems, as long as these solutions do not He was a privileged translator because whom he so often quoted, for him only jeopardise the unity of the Local Churches the Council had claimed his mind and heart Christ mattered. with and under the Holy Father. and he n ever doubted that it was God's He was a great bishop and a great friend Bishops and theologians sometimes ge t great gift to the church at the end of the to thousands. He remembered everyone's the impression that their orthodoxy is 20th century. He believed very deeply, as name and, more importantly, who they questioned lightly and that their difficul­ h e said in 1985, that the Holy Spirit were. He loathed pomposity and arrogance ties and industry are not appreciated. This 'undoubtedly' guided the Council. He went and would discontinue reading theologians leads to a loss of trust which only damages on to say, 'If there have been failures, they or commentators who he believed were the Church. have not been the fault of the Council. indulging their egos at the expense of others, ... We see the need for an even more They have emanated from n eglect of the or criticising others or the pre-conciliar refined theology and a m ore effective use of Council or from misinterpretation of its church without respect and even reverence Episcopal Conferences. spirit and teaching.' for those who had gone before and were As Archbishop of Brisbane, he could The second concern nam ed by Arch­ equally men and women of the Spirit. This become very frustrated with those who bishop Rush at the 1985 Synod was was part of a peculiarly Australian style and used the Council to push their own ideolo­ secularisation in Australia, w hich h e spirituality which marked the whole of his gies or ecclesiastical tastes. He believed described as 'one significant phenomenon life and ministry. He was a m entor to many passionately that the teaching of the Council at the base of most of the problem s con­ and will be sorely missed by those like itself contained an abundance of theologi­ fronting the Church since the Second Vati­ myself who found in him a grea t friend, a cal insight and wisdom as yet un explored can Council'. His concern was that the great Australian and a great bishop. by those who felt the need to move beyond world's salvation was being sought in ways -Michael Putney its teaching. At the same time he would only loosely related to the church. As he have agreed with his great friend, Arch­ said: This month's contributors: Kathryn bishop Guilford Young of Hobart, who Gaudium et Spes [the encyclical dealing O'Connor is a freelance writeri Tim Stoney explained to young seminarians like m yself with the church's attitude to the modern i a reporter for N etwork Teni James Ensor on the 25th anniversary of Pius XII Semi­ world] ushered in a transformation in our is Advocacy Manager for Oxfam Commu­ nary, that th e Council gave us a series of attitudes to the world. However, its mes­ nity Aid Abroad (www.caa.org.au)i Michael 'affirm ations' which it would be the task of sage, or the best of our thinking ba sed on it, Putney is Bishop of Townsville.

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STR EET 1 3 ELECTION FILE:PART

JACK WATERFORD Labor intensive

It's not New Labor, but wi II a return ld Labor win the ALP g

L ,.,.,.CCG,OUND h" fin,lly been 'elected, even defined may be the best with which he can travel, if there will be many skirmishes before battle is but, to the ideologues in the , it carries an actually joined. The contest will be over the size of extra risk. The formal issue on which voters are being government and its role in the community. Alter­ invited to make a choice will, if decided against them, natively, it will be about taxes, which is almost, but affect the Coalition as much as it does Labor. Kim not quite, the same thing. Beazley can describe it as an historic decision by the John Howard has done as much as any to define electorate and a mandate for bigger government. Yet the issue. The difference between the parties, he says, he too is taking a risk. On the evidence of the opinion is that the Coalition would return any budgetary polls, he could win anyway, and without the risk of surpluses to the community via tax cuts; Labor instead becoming involved in an auction of tax cuts. His own would spend it. Kim Beazley has not run away. He promises about rolling back some of the goods and rates public investment above private choice. He is services tax, vague as they are, complicate the choice. prepared to use public infrastructure, including The issue hovers between economic and social policy Telstra, to promote social outcomes. He thinks that and, usually, the other side is more clever and more should be spent on health, education and the opportunistic, and he and his side more prone to environment. As Labor has pitched it, there will be stumbling, whenever it gets down to no taxation increases, but there will be unembarrassed financial detail. intervention in the economy to achieve public ends. Knowledge Nation, the centrepiece of his policies, LE'MEAN AND TRICKY' Coalition, after all, has been may not be a program of immediate spending, but on the nose for ages. The CST has settled in, but not stands for the sort of policies an activist government without massive continuing resentment about the will be pushing, as and when it can afford it. extra paperwork, particularly in small business. John John Howard himself would seem to acknowl­ Howard may have spent billions in appea ing partic­ edge the need for a program of public spending to deal ular interest groups and will, no doubt, commit more with demographic change and environmental projects. before the election, but, on the evidence of the polls, He is trying to keep the debate more narrow- positing his doing so has excited great cynicism but relatively his fistful of tax-cut dollars against a Labor Party few votes. Some Labor strategists will no doubt be which has effectively ruled out tax cuts over the next arguing that the record of the Coalition government term. As it happens, on tax cuts, they may not be so should be presented as the only issue. far apart. There has been so much public spending, in If that is their advice, the fact that it is being this financial year and committed over the next two rejected would be cheering news in Labor's own or three, that there is very little prospect of substan­ constituencies, who have been as anxious for a reason tial surpluses in the immediate future. Most of to vote Labor as they have been for an opportunity to Howard's spending, however, has not been in care­ reject the other side. The party has itself stripped fully programmed investment in the future, but in considerable enthusiasm and idealism from its ranks attempting to woo back interest groups which have through its fashion for financial rectitude and for wavered in their allegiance to the Coalition. As this seeming to be embarrassed about litmus social panic spending has pretty much restored the size of issues- instance its policies on Aborigines, refugees, the public sector to what it was before his 'black hole' migration and unemployment. Then there are the cuts, Howard is in no great position to speak of the questions of Beazley's leadership and Labor's size of government. seeming incapacity over six years of to On the evidence of the opinion polls, Labor resolve some of its own contradictions. Now, at last, should win comfortably. The issue Howard has there are choices to be passionate about. There is not,

14 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 if one looks closely, much proposed by way of action Its frontbench is at least as competent as the on the mandate, because Labor promises progress only governm ent's, and is better positioned, in terms of at the rate at which it can afford it, but at least there actual experience in governm ent, than the Coalition are som e signs of good intentions. was in 1996. Only a few, however, will go into port­ It's not New Labor, in the model of Tony Blair, folios with clear ideas of what they want. Labor has though som e will claim it. N ew Labor- in the sense never had so few heavy-hitters. of Thatcherism with a human face, or, as others put Only a few on the frontbench are well known in it, socialism with an inhuman face-has been about the electorate-in some cases this ought to work to in Australia since was elected in 1983. their advantage-and there are the usual numbers of For the past six years, indeed, the unresolved dilemma drones and hacks, if in no greater proportions than in

in the party has been about a transition back to Howard's ministry. Some are, of course, itching to government intervention while retaining creden­ get back to the business of dividing the spoils among tials for economic rectitude. Britain's N ew Labour, their mates via the processes that helped bring Paul in the wilderness through the 1980s, had exactly the Keating down. This time, however, Labor is not as opposite problem. Australian Labor has its Thatcher­ closely tied to interest groups, other than the trade ites and those who are dedicated to market solutions, union movement. So scarred are many of them by the Beazley's lack but Beazley, for all of his failures to resolve internal retributive policies of the Coalition in government, party debates, is firmly pitched on the old Labor side. that it may take longer than usual for them to settle of ego may Indeed, this position is a fundamental part of his into familiar roosts. image of being a decent and avuncular chap, which Normally when a party loses power so emphati­ allow more the Coalition has found so difficult to attack. cally, and when the rejection is as much of its leader The irony is that Labor could be comfortably as it is of the party itself, the period in the wilderness room for others, preparing for government, simply by being prepared produces real soul-searching and substantial structural to fight on the Coalition's terms. Labor has been slow change. is gone-almost irrelevant now, and less to issue clear policies, although the heat is now on. other than as a symbol of what gutsiness is possible­ Recently, it has published a number, but these have but this party remains pretty much untouched by pressure for been vague on details and specific promises, standing exile. Labor made little attempt to get back to its roots, rather as beacons for the direction in which they want or to renew its constituencies. Both the party and the him to be seen to go. system are essentially unchanged. If anything, Though the slow progress with policy has served the power of party bureaucrats, already substantial in to have wins­ a tactical purpose-of keeping the focus on the Keating's time, has increased, and at the expense of government's own agonies rather than on Labor the branch m embership system. Participation at the ultimate itself- it has also masked the party's own internal community level in the activities of the party, and a problem s and inability to make choices. Further, it branch role in the development of policy, are even source of bad has underlined its opportunism and willingness to run m ore marginalised. Policy now comes from market away from battles that are very important to many in research and focus groups, with even the caucus policy. its constituency. largely ignored.

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 15 The party as a whole no longer has its own Some things will have changed. Labor is now in parliament for resolving difficult issues: party office in every state bar -where it is conferences are now entirely choreographed for public odds-on come the state's next election. Organisation­ relations purposes, while matters of principle are ally, Labor cares more about that than being in resolved in the back rooms then presented as splendid, Canberra, because there are more spoils to distribute, if somewhat messy, compromises. Membership of but the fact of being in power, and with still relatively Cabinet and the ministry is still resolved by the party popular state premiers, gives the party access to factional system, which also distributes patronage. election-fighting resources at least equal to the Kim Beazley, a man who has long benefited from Coalition's. The GST is already having a major impact the patronage of the least attractive power-brokers on on Commonwealth-state relations, a fact that ensures the party's right, is more comfortable with, and less that rollback will not be fundamental. Indeed, some likely to exercise any of his own prerogatives over, of the most popular changes will hardly have an impact the system than any of his predecessors in a genera­ on the bottom line at all. Beazley will get a bigger tion. The quid pro quo for him, provided he keeps electoral dividend from paperwork-saving shortcuts only a few factional chiefs happy, is that he is probably for groups such as pharmacists and cafe-bars, who less accountable to his caucus, or to the formal councils operate in a mixed GST and non-GST environment, of the party, than were even Keating or Hawke. In and for charities, than from cuts in any particular area. most things, however, he is so unadventurous, and so One of the major political problems ahead is that comparatively devoid of ego, that the extra the states should now be held far more politically rein will not make much difference. accountable for the way in which they spend the GST revenue, and be less able to blame the federal govern­ B EAZLEY LACKS THE capacity of a Bob Hawke to keep ment for every shortfall in education and health. Yet the outcome in view and to preside over affairs in a there will still be heavy pressure for Commonwealth way that resolves most of the arguments. He may also subvention-whether to equalise facilities in the lack Hawke's antennae for problems in the making. states, or to develop more wide-ranging initiatives that He lacks the sense of excitement and the reckless­ the states neglect or judge to be of secondary impor­ ness of a Paul Keating. Nor does he surround himself tance. At the same time, however, federal Labor faces with ruthless operators who will or can do what new disciplines, particularly if it is too wedded to Beazley will not or cannot do himself. fiscal balances and low interest rates. One of the first Yet he is not without his own leadership disciplines will come before the election, with the qualities. He is a good listener, and his instincts are charter of budget honesty. Beazley, thus far, has deferred sound enough. His lack of ego may allow more room making specific promises until the Treasury and the for others, and less pressure for him to be seen to have Department of Finance prepare current balance wins-the ultimate source of bad policy. He has sheets-only a few weeks before the election. If these, capacity for detachment and can, and will, read a brief. as expected, suggest that the cupboard is nearly bare, He has a very close understanding of government John Howard will not be the only person embarrassed. processes. In government he is less likely than any of Labor's first priority is to win seats in provincial his predecessors to remain attached to policy which areas rather than in the mortgage belts, the latter being is manifestly not working, and will be unconcerned probably more susceptible to Coalition scaremongcr­ about whether or not this makes him appear weak. ing about Labor and interest rates. The primary His avuncular air has the capacity to make him appear constituency is more susceptible to arguments about above politics on some issues. On the other hand, he infrastructure, the quantity and quality of services, needs more capacity to close off an argument, and he nation-building and jobs for our kids, and rather more can be expected to be even more sentimental than likely to be exasperated by the legacy of Coalition Keating or Howard in dumping liabilities. government. The best chances for Labor are in At the last election, Beazley gained a new back­ Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. There are bench. It contained relics of the Keating adminis­ prospects of gains in NSW, but these will probably be tration who could be accused of being the same lot within a more narrow compass. NSW Labor, so returning to the troughs. But the majority of the back­ successful at state level, has been letting down federal bench were fresh to parliament. Most have not yet Labor for years and may well do so again, especially staked their claims to ministerial office. If, this time given that it has an inflated role in the campaigning. about, Beazley wins as handsomely as expected, the But that may be precisely because it has so limited a majority of his backbench will be relative new chums, view of what can be achieved in government. If some of whom will be impatient about waiting around Beazley can win with the opposite argument, perhaps until their turn comes under the factional system. it will be the first sign that he is his own man, Most, of course, will be there because of the factional dispensing with some of those who have never really system, but since that itself is so hidebound by ancient been on message. • disputes, it may prove insufficiently flexible for a new Labor government. Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times.

16 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 LAW:l LIZ C URRAN

• amendments Refuge tn the law?

When leg islation limits the power of the courts, w here do asylum see kers go for justi ce? criticised I NA c"' oc •ow on 24 M• y, the High The w otding of the Convention Court criticised the conduct of proceed- Regarding the Status of Refugees is clear, ings by the Refugee Review Tribunal. The and designed to protect persons who have Court noted that constant interruptions a well-founded fear of persecution and to the refugee applicant gave him little who seek protection. The Minister is opportunity to put his case, thereby currently speculating that the Conven- giving rise to a perception of bias. tion (to which Australia is a signatory) is Our administrative systems are not being interpreted beyond the scope of perfect, hence the importance of court what was envisaged back in 1951. This oversight of administrative decisions- overlooks the fact that the document is particularly in cases of this kind, where now in its 50th year of operation and that •• a wrong decision could lead to the return its great strength has been its fl exibility of a refugee to a dangerous homeland. in a changing world. For Australia to The High Court criticism is timely, mount a call for a rewriting of the Con- home coinciding as it does with renewed vention is to diminish our standing in the attempts by the federal government to international arena. It is also anomalous, restrict the role of the courts in review- given the number of refugees Australia ing applications for protection by asylum takes-small by comparison with our seekers. In addition, there is discussion Western counterparts. within the office of the Minister for The court's role in all this is to apply Immigration about the drafting of a Bill legislation that is passed by the parlia- that prevents a liberal interpretation of ment, having particular regard to the facts media the definition of 'persecution' in the and circumstances of the individual case Convention Regarding the Status of before the court. It is therefore for the Refugees (1951 ). In a media release on court, and not the state, to determine the 10 May, Minister Philip Ruddock is quoted case on the basis of the evidence before as saying that 'courts have becom e too it. The individual circumstances of the generous' in relation to refugee claims. case ought not to be predicated on some The amendments proposed, which imperative dictated by the public service. amount to a constraint over which areas It is this feature of our court system that the court can look at in a claim for refugee guards against abuse of process, keeps a protection, could have serious ramifica- 'check' on the state's powers of coercion tions for asylum seekers. The govern- and guards against the risk of erroneous ment's responses and rhetoric suggest that decisions. it is overlooking the context-including The court is required to apply the law dictatorship, ethnic persecution and abuse in an impartial manner, unhindered by alone of women and children-in the countries political influence or pressure, and never from which a large proportion of these on an ad hoc basis. The court's role is also boat arrivals and others seek refuge. to find a balance between the competing

VOLUME 1 1 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 17 interests of the individual and the state. capacity of an applicant to appeal to the that due process is followed and that the All of these roles are complex. Federal Court has been significantly court, in the exercise of its judicial If the government proposes to circum­ eroded over time by limitations placed powers, should remain unfettered by scribe the court's critical role, then what on the grounds of appeal. The High Court executive intrusions. The abuse of mechanisms are to be put in place to has strongly criticised these limitations. process by some asylum seekers ought ensure impartial and independent consid­ In its 1999 decision in Abebe's case not to become a justification for the eration of these cases? What will guaran­ (Abebe v. The Commonwealth), the court, removal of due process for many others, tee that miscarriages of justice do not although determining that parliament especially when the stakes are so high. occur? Too often the decision-making at was acting within its power, commented In the case of asylum seekers, the a primary level is problematical, making that legislative 'restriction[s] may have reductions in the court's ability to scru­ review imperative, but the quality significant consequences for this Court tinise executive action, although held of that review is also important. because it must inevitably force or at all constitutionally permissible by the High events invite applicants for refugee status Court, may still offend international law. SUBJECT TO THE limitations contained to invoke the constitutionally entrenched (Article 16 of the refugee Convention within the Constitution, the parliament section 75(v) jurisdiction of this Court. requires that refugees be treated as in the Australian political system is sov­ The effect on the business of this court nationals before the courts.) ereign to all other arms of government. is certain to be serious.' Legislative changes can seriously In the case of asylum seekers, section The Executive continues to respond reduce a court's capacity to exercise 51 (xxxvi) of our Constitution gives to court review by moving the goal posts. judicial review in an effective and real power to the Commonwealth in matters In the High Court case of Chu Kheng Lim sense. As the judges stated in Chu Kheng of immigration. v. Minister for Immigration, Local Govern­ Lim v Minister for Immigration, Local If the parliament seeks to pass laws ment and Ethnic Affairs (1992), some Government and Ethnic Affairs: which undermine the rights of a person, members of the court were critical of then there is a limit to the extent to parliament's haste in rushing to legalise It is one thing for the Parliament, within which the judiciary can intervene to detention of some asylum seekers by the limits of legislative power conferred uphold the individual rights of people on placing legislation before parliament the upon it by the Constitution, to grant or our shores. night before the hearing of an application withhold jurisdiction. It is quite a differ­ In the Migration Act 1958 (Common­ in the Federal Court. ent thing for the Parliament to purport to wealth) under section 48l(l)(a), the In another case, Justice Sackville in direct the courts as to the manner and out­ the Federal Court held that a Chinese come of the exercise of their jurisdiction. couple were indeed refugees, as they faced The former falls within the legislative THE AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE FOR persecution as a result of their member­ power which the Constitution, including ies ship of a particular social group. The then Chapter III itself, entrusts to Parliament. Minister for Immigration (after lodging The latter constitutes an impermissible CALL FOR PAPERS an appeal in the Federal Court) hedged intrusion into the judicial power which his bets by drafting a Bill. The Bill, the Chapter III vests exclusively in the courts The Australian Institute for Enneagram Migration Legislation Amendment Bill which it designates. Studies presents (Number 3) 1995 (Commonwealth) pro­ The Jrd Australian Enneagram vided that fertility control practices could Politicians in recent times have often Conference in the Oral Tradition not be used to found a claim of refugee seen the approach of the courts as 'prob­ status. The Bill subsequently became lematic' and 'uncertain'. But to neglect unnecessary as the Full Federal Court liberty and to finesse the protection of Meaning, Dreaming overruled Sackville's decision. human life may also prove problematic. & There are many illustrations of such For the courts to be effective, and to patchwork attempts, through legislative retain public confidence, they must be Emerging Wisdom measures, to close off any avenues that armed with the capacity to be flexible the High Court or Federal Court have enough to deliver justice, particularly in 4, 5 & 6th May, 2002 • Brisbane, Australia found available to claimant refugees who cases which are so distinct and various have established their case. Such a defen­ in their circumstances. To present a paper or workshop at this sive approach by the legislature could Sending asylum seekers back to their exciting, groundbreaking conference lead to injustice. It could also lead to homeland, before allowing them the please contact: more High Court appeals because of the opportunity to establish before the court high risks involved in the return to their that they have a well-founded fear of per­ The Australian Institute for homeland of people likely to be per­ secution, could lead to the loss of human Enneagram Studies secuted there. One may acknowledge the life. Are Australians really giving their GPO Box 3182 Brisbane 4001 Australia importance of parliamentary sovereignty parliament permission to do this? • EMAIL cal [email protected] in a Westminster tradition, while at the TELE PHONE 61+7+38492115 same time arguing that the judiciary has Liz Curran is a Lecturer in Law and Legal a long-recognised responsibility to ensure Studies at La Trobe University.

18 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 ow] edge

We've had change. Now, the word most often used to describe the state of Australian education is 'crisis' . Madeleine Mattarozzi Laming reports.

A MONG TH< ACAmMtcs •nd post­ other applicants for the same job. I know development have also declined as a graduate students I know, only two or because I rang the personnel office and consequence of the abolition of the 150 three under the age of 35 are not looking asked. T he young woman who took my per cent tax rebate. Yet Australian for work overseas. The ones who are call told me that ratios of 150-200 were universities keep encouraging more staying in Australia are staying because normal; sometimes it's even higher. students to undertake postgraduate they are caught in a web of family respon­ This is the reality of Australia's brain research since the amount of money sibility, have elderly parents, a spouse drain-there are just not enough academic universities receive from the Department who is reluctant to move or a child with jobs, in research or teaching, for all those of Education, Training and Youth Affairs special needs that would be difficult to bright young postgraduates. Salaries have (DETYA) depends on the number of post­ meet elsewhere. not kept pace with those in other English­ graduate students they enrol. What we It's not just IT specialists or scientists speaking countries, class sizes are big­ have here is not really just a university who are leaving: it's historians, philo­ ger, the administrative workload has employment problem-it' s an over­ sophers, linguists and experts in a dozen increased and funding for research has production problem of the same kind that fields who cannot find meaningful work declined. led to the fabled European butter moun­ in this country. The last time I applied for At the same time, employment oppor­ tain. Unbalanced policy and inapprop­ a lecturing position, there were around 200 tunities in non-university research and riate subsidies encourage producers to

VOLUME 11 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 19 keep churning out a product that cannot early childhood education. Children who and 1998. But most recent Australian be used in the community at large, but are well prepared for school perform governments have been reluctant about vested interests resist any suggestion that better and are more successful in the long funding education generally, and univer­ funding should be redeployed into more term. Pre-schools also play a vital role in sities in particular, because the sector appropriate areas. In the case of univer­ the early diagnosis of physical and yields comparatively few tangible returns sities this would mean undergraduate learning disabilities, such as deafness or within the short term, certainly not education, which has borne the brunt of information-processing disorders that within the three or so years that any party funding cutbacks. require early intervention and treatment. can count on in government. Long-term Australia's universities are in crisis. Funding for Australian schools is planning has been sacrificed for short­ The term might be contested but the better, just above the OECD average, but term gains. figures speak for themselves. is heavily geared in favour of private Members of the broader community Investment by government in univer­ schools at the expense of public ones. could be forgiven for underestimating sities accumulated in the 1960s and early According to Peter Crimmins, Executive how serious the situation is, or even for 1970s, but has since been allowed to run Officer of the Association of Christian thinking that the universities are in good down and conditions have deteriorated Schools, this translates into Common­ shape. Universities are respected in the accordingly. Between 1990 and 1999 the wealth expenditure of $3.90 per day on community and they continue to be the overall ratio of effective full-time government schools by comparison with preferred destination for an overwhelm­ students to effective full-time staff in $12 per day on non-government schools ing majority of students going on to teaching-related positions rose from 12.8 ('School for $30 a day! Who pays?' Edu­ tertiary education. They even seem to be students to one teacher to 17.8 students. care News, no. 117, August, pp26- 27). working efficiently: they push more In the four years from 1995 to 1999 total The bulk of this money is paid to poor graduates through the system at less cost funding (from fees, charges and govern­ schools, mostly Catholic parochial to government than ever before, some­ ment grants) per student fell by 6.1 per schools and some community schools, thing that probably seems desirable to cent, and that is despite a 75.8 per cent which would not survive without it. many taxpayers. More students, more post­ rise in HECS revenue, a 71.2 per cent rise Until 1999 Commonwealth funding graduates, more for less? Yes- but only if in fee income from international students was paid according to perceived need, and we are prepared to accept a dec­ and a 152.9 per cent increase in domestic the high-fee-paying, asset-rich Category 'l i{ T line in the quality of education. student fees. (For these and subsequent A schools received little or nothing. In statistics, see M. Considine et al., The 2000 the method of making grants to non­ V VHAT ALTERNATIVES are on offer? Comparative Performance of Austtalia government schools (excluding Catholic Would the Australian education system as Knowledge Nation.) schools) was revised. The new funding look any different if the Australian Labor Vocational education and training arrangements use a complicated formula Party's policy Knowledge Nation were in (VET), which was promoted as the known as the Socio-Economic Status place? solution to youth unemployment and to Score that measures parents' capacity to Certainly, in this election year, the the chronic shortage of skilled workers pay fees in order to determine the size of ALP has staked a lot on its commitment only a few years ago, is in an even more the grant. Total grants to non-government to education-and on Knowledge Nation. difficult position. According to Austral­ schools are expected to increase substan­ The document was produced by a task­ ian Bureau of Statistics data, government tially and the increases, on average, will farce of 23 experts, led by former ALP expenditure on VET declined by 17.3 per be largest in the high-fee-paying schools President and polymath Barry Jones, who cent in real terms between 1990-91 and (G. Burke & A. Spaull, 'Centenary holds degrees in Arts, Law and Science 1997-98. Vocational education courses Article-Australian Schools: Participa­ and who has earned a reputation for do not attract the same kind of fees as tion and Funding 1901-2000', Australian writing about the challenges facing university courses, and they are far less Bureau of Statistics, 2001). society as it passes through a past­ attractive to sponsors. With rising costs Participation in the post-compulsory industrial revolution. and declining fees, VET institutions are years of secondary education has slipped Knowledge Nation is policy-making struggling to deliver their courses since 1992. Recent figures show that only at a level of intensity unusual in a party effectively, and some are struggling to 65 per cent of 25-34-year-old Australians in opposition. Certainly Kim Beazley is survive. have upper secondary qualifications com­ using Knowledge Nation to differentiate The rest of the public education pared with an OECD country average of his party from the Coalition. Sources system is not in much better shape. 72 per cent and 88 per cent in the USA. close to Beazley say that few things make Australian children are much less likely Overall, these figures present a picture him angrier than the suggestion that the to attend pre-school than their OECD of a nation that is going backwards in two parties offer voters a choice between counterparts-33.8 per cent compared investment in education. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Knowl­ with an OECD average of 60 per cent. Why? Because for years, educational edge Nation does argue an understand­ Australian government funding is policy has been driven by successive ing of the value of education that is miserly in comparison with that made governments' desire to reduce costs. different from that of the current govern­ available by most European nations. This Investment in education fell by five per ment, but also from the previous Labor is despite the many, many years of cent between 1985 and 1998 with the government's policy. In some respects it research that indicates the importance of sharpest decline occurring between 1996 is a return to old-fashioned Labor policy

20 EUREKA STREET SEPTEMBER 2001 that talked about social justice. As thou sands of children. M alcolm Knowledge Nation states: Fraser, whose Razor Gang slashed funds to public educa tion and higher Our aim must be to ensure that all education in the late '70s, nonetheless children, regardless of their parents' increased funding for the T AFE sec­ wealth, have access to a quality educa­ tor in recognition of the role it played tion and the same chance to achieve in economic development. It was not their fu ll potential. until the 1980s that edu cation This could almost be Kim Beazley became less than a top priority, and Snr, Whitlam's Minister for Educa­ that economic m anagem ent became tion, talking: the measure of good government. It is not easy to gauge how effec­ [Education] is the instrument of every tive Knowledge Nation's recommen­ child's and young person's dignity and dations would be in practice because competence. the document lacks specific detail. The tone of both quotes is a world It does, however, emphasise the away from the 1987 Green Paper that importance of supporting Australian set in motion the extensive process research in universities and non­ of reform eventually described as the university organisations. It recom­ Dawkins Revolution. Then, the m ends that the Commonwealth Green Paper implied that the higher should co-ordinate with the states to education system was important in develop a comprehensive research so far as it would enable the country policy and find ways to assist to deal with new developments and researchers to develop and m arket challenges. Dawkins defended his their work. Since the '50s, when the st ance by repeating the familiar This is the reality of Australia 's brain Menzies government decided not to refrain that the Hawke government continue work on the Blue Streak had been elected to provide sound drain-there are just not enough Rocket, the Australian tendency to financial managem ent. academic jobs, in research or teaching, make the new discoveries in science Knowledge Nation is full of that and technology here and then watch earlier kind of optimism and drive for for all those bright young then1 be developed overseas has equality of opportunity. In its com­ postgraduates. achieved legendary status. And as mitment to 'm aking information with all legends, there is a ground­ available as a public good, outside ing in the real world. The list of commercial exploitation', there are echoes education, training and research. Indeed, Australian inventions earning big money of Chifley's famous speech: Beazley is on record as saying that he for overseas companies goes on and on­ wishes to be remembered as the the black box flight recorder, the orbital I try to think of the Labor m ovement not 'Education Prime Minister'. engine, gene shears technology, to name as putting an extra sixpence in som ebody's This is an ambition that we have not just a few. Knowledge Nation's advent pocket, or m aking som ebody Prime Min­ heard for a number of years. And yet is particularly timely given the recent ister or Premier, but as a movem ent bring­ Australia has, during the last 50 years, release of the OECD's annual report, ing som ething better to the people; better been richly endowed with prime minis­ Education at a Glance, which indicates standards of living, greater happiness to the ters who were former minist ers for how far Australia has slipped. In the mass of the people. We h ave one great education or who took a very strong 1980s, for example, Australia m ade a objective-the light on the hill-which we personal interest in education. Curtin and promising start in developing cyber tech­ aim to reach by working for the betterm ent Chifley were adamant that higher nology, but has failed, over the last few of mankind, not only here but anywhere education was a matter of national inter­ years, to maintain its place. we may give a helping hand. est, too important to be left to the good­ Knowledge Nation also makes specific Knowledge Nation makes 20 recom­ will and uneven resources of the states. mention of support for the humanities m endations about educational reform: Menzies viewed education as a priority and social sciences in a belated recog­ the first of these is that the prime minis­ and commented on more than one occa­ nition that there is more to education ter should take a leading role in advocat­ sion that he regarded receiving the Martin than business studies and information ing Australia as a 'Knowledge N ation' at Report into Australia's universities as the technology. It also commits the next hom e and abroad. finest achievem ent of his years in office. Labor governm ent to boosting funds for One of the first tasks that Beazley has Whitlam brought a new and different pre-schools and introducing a range of set himself, if elected, is to oversee the vision to education when he abolished targeted programs into secondary schools creation of an inventory of Australia's university tuition fees and, even m ore that will raise participation and tackle knowledge resources and to outline a significantly, when he made pre-school disadvantage-something along the lines specific national policy framework in education a reality for hundreds of of the Participation and Equity Program

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 21 (PEP) of the early 1980s. PEP succeeded in raising Australia's school retention fig­ ures to an all-time high. Given the link between an educational'underclass' and persistent, long-term unemployment­ described in detail by Richard Teese in his recent work, Academic Success and Social Power-any program that specifi­ cally targets potential early leavers would be an improvement over the current Hard cell situation. One of the more dismaying sights in recent Australian politics was that of the W ILE THIS COLUMN HAS ADOPTED the great researcher and inventor from Minister for Education, Dr David Kemp, Syracuse, Archimedes, as representing science, there is an argument that another deriding a diagram from Knowledge Ancient Greek would make a better symbol-Pandora. It seems that every new Nation as 'spaghetti and meatballs'. The research finding and each wondrous new piece of technology opens a box full of rather complex diagram-demonstrating complications with which society then has to cope. the way the elements of Knowledge It's not just the pace of science which leaves administrators and legislators Nation would fit together-was a tactical in its wake, but the complexity of the issues thrown up. They don't resolve error, given the adversarial nature of our easily-the good, the bad and everything in between come all mixed together. politics. But reducing debate on a matter of national importance to the level of Genetics is one headache for legislators. As this column was being written, schoolyard invective (in which the media the US House of Representatives had just passed a Bill to prevent human cloning, became a willing accomplice) and mar­ a goal with which the overwhelming majority of scientists would agree. But ginalising education as an electoral issue many fewer would, I suspect, support the American legislation. For the Bill has are more serious errors. It is also a sad been framed in such a way as to block not just the production of cloned babies, reflection on the state of political discus­ but also the creation and use of embryonic cells for research. Such a law seems sion in Australia when the mainstream to be the stuff of nightmares for those involved in one of the brightest areas of media believes that complex policy issues medical research, work on human stem cells. But there may already be ways must be reduced to 10-second soundbites around it. to render them appealing to the public. Human beings develop from a single cell. That original embryonic stem In the 1980s, the renowned Swedish cell has a built-in capacity to become many different cells-nerve, skin, muscle, educator, Torsten Husen, wrote exten­ heart, liver cells. If we learned to control a cell like that, it could be used to sively about the process of educational treat medical conditions ranging from Parkinson's and heart disease to burns reform in his native land. The reform, and and compound fractures. finding a satisfactory model, took almost As cells divide and change into their adult forms, they lose fl exibility. That's 20 years. Husen was quick to point out why stem cell research and treatments depend on cells like those found in that this did not mean all political parties embryos. Not surprisingly, though, using embryonic cells is distasteful to those had agreed about what was necessary­ who think of them as already human. But we can now take embryonic stem quite the opposite in fact. But it did cells and grow them indefinitely as cells, which never grow into embryos. The indicate a level of commitment to existence of these cell lines (which originally came from surplus IVF embryos) education, and a willingness to adopt a may make it possible not to have to create embryos solely for stem cell research. long-term approach to educational reform, Then there are the cells in bone marrow and in hair follicles, and those that has been conspicuously absent in Australia for a very long time. active in wound healing, which retain the capacity throughout adult life to Perhaps the most striking feature of regenerate and change like stem cells. Scientists are already investigating these the Labor Party's policy, Knowledge cells for therapeutic purposes, while others hope to turn back the clock on adult Nation, is that it recognises that educa­ cells and reprogram them as stem cells. Do they thereby become embryonic? tional reform cannot be rushed, that there Unlike nuclear physics or space exploration, genetics research is not are no quick-fix solutions. Knowledge particularly expensive-and thus can be undertaken almost anywhere. If the Nation proposes a ten-year process. American legislation is enacted, most assume that research will carry on Whether Kim Beazley will have the elsewhere. We are already facing the prospect of human cloning in Italy. conviction to see it through remains to Who can police developments such as stem cell research and cloning inter­ beseen. • nationally, and how will they do it? It all makes the headlong rush towards the marketplace and the corporation as the universal arbiter of values more than a Madeleine Mattarozzi Laming is a PhD little frightening. • student in the Department of Education Policy and Management, Faculty of Edu­ Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer. cation at the University of Melbourne.

22 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 LAW:2 MO I RA RAYNER Facing the other side Fronting up to hypocrisy about child abuse.

CHRISTIAN upbringing was But from the outrage that greeted his advertisements that sexualise children. very Old T estament. My Presbyterian satire, you might think that Chris Morris We read popular literature that portrays God was a judge and a despot. My Sunday had committed a greater sin: h e had children as sexually accessible the School Jesus didn' t 'suffer the little 'trivialised', they said, a terrible crime. moment they reach the age of 16. children'. Rather, h e was a vengeful Sexual abuse of children is a great There is a very old process at work in saviour, driving out money-changers crime but it is rarely a strangers' crime. the current furore here in : Chris with a whip. But I do remember, all these It is terrible because it destroys Morris, Channel 4 and the years later, his strange remark that all the fiduciary relationship between Brass Eye program h ave sins can and will be forgiven, except the all children and any adults, and been made scapegoats, sym ­ sin against the Holy Ghost. the younger the child, the greater bolically imbued with the What did it mean? One of my teachers the affront to our notion of sins of the community then gave m e to understand that it was appropriate sexuality. The sex­ driven out into the associated with my habit of 'asking too ual exploitation of children is a wilderness. We are 'puri­ many questions'. I supposed, in the end, grave breach of trust. Children fied', but only symbolically, that the unforgivable sin was the refusal put their hands trustingly into the when we turn out not just to accept an evident and crucial truth. hands of others. That's why the the paedophiles, but those From the continuing fury about CCTV pictures of Thompson and who try to make us reflect paedophilia in both the UK, where I am Venables leading little James upon our response to them now, and in Australia, where I will Bulger to his death are so dread­ and our ambivalence about shortly be again, I believe that we have, ful: innocence- his, and theirs­ , children. in the public mind, another popularly was destroyed. That's why the I did think the Channel unforgivable sin: paedophilia. But is it? audio tape of ten-year-old Lesley 4 satire shocking, not be­ A few weeks ago Britain's Channel 4 Alm Downey pleading to 'Mummy' for cause it trivialised a grave crime but be­ broadcas t a fake documentary about help as she was sexually tormented by cause real children were used as mock paedophilia in the Brass Eye series, made Ian Brady, and Myra Hindley's cold 'victims', and because it missed the cen­ by Chris Morris. I watched it by accident, 'Shut up! ' response, has condemned tral issue about their powerlessness. We but was soon snorting with unwilling Brady and Hindley to perpetual can only sexually engage with children laughter as a range of celebrities made imprisonment. because we are more powerful than they fools of themselves by wearing T-shirts are, because we fail to appreciate both that proclaimed, 'I'm talking nonce sense' E DOPHILJA IS AN unimaginable crime their unique vulnerabilities and their (say it out loud ). They told u s that for most of us: we can't walk in the shoes right to be treated with respect as moral paedophiles share the sam e genetic of a paedophile, though we can imagine equals. makeup as a crab, and then they stabbed ourselves committing almost every other We'll never see the program in Aus­ the offending crustacean. A well-known crime. Paedophiles are, for m ost of us, tralia. We have the sam e mockable crew rap singer claimed that paedophiles are irredeemably 'other'. But there is some­ here as in Britain: shallow politicians, so damnably clever that they can emit thing anomalous here. Our fears about eager celebrities and prune-faced journal­ stupefying drugs through a TV screen to strangers are illogical, deep and false ists, plus our own endless willingness to control children using the internet, and when it comes to paedophilia. Children be titillated by sex and children. It is easy can even'feel' such children through the are at greater risk from their own families for m orals campaigners to make fools of keyboard. and friends. The chance that a deviant them selves. There is a moral purpose All hell broke loose, of course. Minis­ s tranger will abduct our children is in letting them: making people think. ters threatened censorship, litigation and remote: the greater risk comes from But this entails the commission of crackdowns on the public TV channel's among ourselves. And it comes both another unforgivable sin : laughing at the m anagement. Opinion-makers who had directly-children are most often abused self-righteous. We won't do it. But we not seen the program described it as sick, by those they know-and indirectly. We should. • and the celebrities, whose lack of judg­ allow children of 12 or 14 to model adult m ent had been beautifully exposed, sexuality in fashion photography and Moira Rayner, former director of the Lon­ squawked mightily about deception. music. Newspapers condemn paedophilia don Children's Rights Commissioner's Paedophilia has become the great and incite mobs to pursue the innocent, Office, is a freelance journalist and public obsession, the unforgivable sin. while at the same time they accept barrister.

V O LUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 23

S INGAPORE IS A QUIET AND DISCIPLINED SOCIETY perched on an overgrown sandbank at the end of the Malay peninsula. Its highest virtue is efficiency. It has achieved extraordinary prosperity, without benefit of any advantage other than its strategic location on world shipping routes. The city state has been praised for maintaining harmony among Chinese, Malay and Indian while industrialising and lifting itself up from uncertain beginnings in the 1950s. Political stability and good government-pioneered, designed and watched over by the local version of the Colossus of Rhodes, -are cited as the foundations of 's achievement. Its soaring glass towers and its manicured gardens, criss-crossed by paths protected from the tropical sun by shady banyan trees, spell success. Not even an occasional beggar scuffs the cleanliness of its streets and pavements-testament to the achievements of a people, and of a nation that was never meant to be. been democrat

j.B. JEYARETNAM ORso THE Singapore Story goes. The telling seems they would be right, I have failed ... but I believe I have to stop at the entrance of an office building on North been called to do something.' Bridge Road. Four decades old-ancient by Singapore He was speaking early in May. But Jeyaretnam's standards-its dimly lit halls are lined with travel current circumstances do not lend themselves to great agencies and jewellery shops, stuffed into glass-fronted optimism. On 27 May he was replaced as Secretary­ cubicles. On each of the floors, serviced by cantan­ General of the Workers' Party (which he had run since kerou escalators, there are hanging electrical wires, 1971) in what looked very much like a leadership spill. boarded-up doors and broken ceiling tiles. It is an oasis On 18 July he lost an appeal against bankruptcy of sprawl in a desert of order. in Singapore's highest court. As a consequence, Tucked away in a forgotten corridor leading from Jeyaretnam was removed from parliament, reducing a fire exit is the office of J.B. Jeyaretnam, Singapore's the number of opposition MPs to just two out of 8 1. other political icon. At 75, Jeyaretnam is two years Speaking from his sister's house across the causeway younger than Lee Kuan Yew. Both men studied law in the Malaysian province of Johore Baru, he voiced in English universities and both tasted politics for the his disappointment at what he saw as an unjust first time working for Labour candidates in post-war decision. elections in the UK. They share a talent for powerful 'All I want to say now is that my immediate oratory, but that is where their similarities end. Since priority is to pay off this bankruptcy so as to clear the 1959, Lee Kuan Yew, first as Prime Minister then as way for me to participate in the elections next year.' Senior Minister, has built a system that has become (One of the ways J.B .J. hopes to pay off the hundreds the envy of neighbours in the region. J.B. Jeyaretnam, of thousands he owes is by continuing to sell the by his own admission, has spent most of that same collection of his parliamentary speeches and by doing time trying to tear the system down. a little begging. ) Sitting at a desk surrounded by files, sacks of rice Characteristically, Jeyaretnam does not talk of and stacks of a self-published volume of his speeches an end. Earlier in the year he told me, 'I'm not giving to parliament, 'J.B .J.', as he is known in Singaporean up my political career. I sh all be contesting the shorthand, denies that he has failed in his task. And elections, provided I can clear the bank­ he does so with an idealism matching the words from ruptcy. By no means am I finished yet.' the preamble to the American Constitution that are printed on his T-shirt. R QUIEMS FOR JEYARETNAM began flowing two years 'Some people may take the view that I have ago when damages of S$223,000 were awarded against squandered my talent for making money and build­ him in one of a series of defamation suits. The suits ing up a fortune. If that is the object to living then had begun even before Jeyaretnam's 1981 by-election

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 25 victory ended 16 years of domination of parliament Littlemore's observations set off a storm of by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP). protest. Devan Nair, a former cabinet minister who fell But the use of legal action does not in itself foul of Lee Kuan Yew and was 'kicked upstairs'- as explain the almost complete dominance of Singapore he put it- to the Presidency, described Lee as being politics by the People's Action Party for four decades. possessed by a 'caged fury' the day after Jeyaretnam's Nor does the existence of gerrymandering, and a victory. unicameral parliament selected by first-past-the-post 'I will never forget his [Lee's ]last words: "I will ballot. A more likely explanation can be found in the make him crawl on his bended knees, and beg for extraordinary executive attention to detail. In his mercy"', Nair wrote, in an article published in the recently published memoirs, Lee Kuan Yew notes that Sydney Morning Herald. He continued: long hair was banned in the early '70s-they did not 'Jeyaretnam was made of sterner stuff. To want their teenagers 'adopting the hippy look'. He }eyaretnam his eternal credit he never did crawl on remembers and includes this and other pieces of bended knees, or ever begged for mercy.' minute domestic detail in between discussion of his dismisses out of The governing People's Action Party encounters with international leaders and the bas frequently brought defamation action management of national crises. Without such capacity hand the suggestion against opposition politicians. Jeyaretnam for micro-management, Lee and the cohort of has been sued for defamation successfully Western-educated professionals who fo rmed the party that Coh Chok by Lee Kuan Yew more than once before, would not have managed to win the 1959 election Tong's new guard with combined damages of S$780,000 with the support of militant communists, and then, . . awarded against him. His bankruptcy in the decades following, purge them from the party rs openrng up stems from a case brought over an article and go on to shape the island into a model of capitalist published in the Tamil language in the enterprise. Singapore .. . Workers' Party newspaper, The Hammer. One of the other best-selling titles in Singapore Jeyaretnam is not able to read Tamil. None­ at the moment is a book of essays by former Straits 'In parliament theless, he was found to have defamed the Times journalist, Cherian George. Drawing its title, organisers of a PAP-sponsored cultural Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation, from Lee I asked the Minister event who were criticised in the article. Kuan Yew's nomination of the air cooler as the most for Finance to tell Another action was brought by Prime significant invention of the 20th century, it is a Minister Gob Chok Tong after Jeyaretnam calculated work that doles out accolades and black me how much was had addressed a rally held prior to the marks for the government in almost equal measure. January 1997 election with these words: The title of the collection, and its theme, suggest that paid to all the 'Mr Tang Liang Hong has just placed Singapore is as much a concept as it is a physical before me two reports he has made reality- a work in progress. A point made often in its ministers last year in against, you know, Mr Goh Chok Tong pages, and repeated elsewhere, is that the govern­ and his people.' ment's intervention at nearly all levels of society has salaries and Tang Liang Hong is now in self­ left little room for any agenda other than its own. imposed exile in Australia, having had 'In a more developed democracy the opposition allowances. over S$5 million awarded against him by would not be sued for defamation,' argues Sinapan He told me, the courts following allegations he made Samydorai. Samydorai is the director of Think Centre, concerning the purchase of property by the a two-year-old civic group that is tentatively testing "No, you can 't have Lee family. the boundaries of openness under the new-guard Stuart Littlemore, lawyer and former leadership of Goh Chok Tong. The Centre lobbies for that answer."' presenter of ABC's Media Watch, stronger democratic institutions and fr eedom from observed court proceedings in the case excessive government intervention . Samydorai brought against Jeyaretnam by Goh Chok continues: '[As a result] there is not the democratic Tong. He concluded (in a report published by the space as there is elsewhere for opposition parties and International Commission of Jurists) that undue civil society groups to exist.' deference had been paid the Prime Minister by the But the long reach of government has always been presiding judge and was concerned that the judge defended and justified by Lee Kuan Yew. 'I say with­ fo und Jeyaretnam's words defamatory- but not the out the slightest remorse that we would not be here, way the plaintiff argued them. would not have made the economic progress, if we 'It would be unfortunate indeed', Littlemore had not intervened in every personal matter-who wrote, 'if the judge's articulation of a lesser meaning your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, imputation were irregular within the Singapore how you spit, or what language you use,' he argued in judicial system-because it would strongly suggest a 1986 interview with the Economist. And, post-Lee, that the Prime Minister had been given specially there remains in place a range of m easures that ensure favourable treatment to avoid the embarrassment of close government supervision of Singapore's four losing his case.' million residents. Jailing without charge is permissible

26 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 under the Internal Security Act; public gatherings have dissent. As Low began answering questions, one of to pass strict criteria, and the government reserves the delegates milling around made show of kicking a the right to determine when public debate becomes stool and stormed down the stairs. The new Secretary­ too political. There is no Freedom of Information Act General was reluctant to talk about Jeyaretnam, to enable citizens to check on what government is saying his future was in his own hands. At the end of doing in their name. the meeting, however, he did grudgingly admit J.B.J. 's Singaporeans are self-conscious of the image they history with the party and the voters. have abroad-of being the subjects of a long-running experiment in people management and social control. 'Singaporeans do think for them selves, are open­ minded and have voted for the opposition in the past in large numbers,' says a local journalist. 'We are more than just efficient worker bees.' D espite what seems a hegemonic control of the Singapore electorate by the PAP, many believe that it is possible to have a significant opposition presence in parliament- it is just that the opposition parties have blundered their way into inconsequence. At the 199 1 general election, following Lee Kuan Yew's handover to Goh Chok Tong the year before, there was a minor flowering of political diversity. Three seats were won by the Singapore Democratic Party, making it the largest opposition party in parliament. But at the next election in 1997 (the five­ year term is sometimes extended by electoral delay) the party disappeared from parliament, rent asunder by bickering. The PAP vote rebounded to the levels it had reached under Lee. Hardly surprising. With a big WE enough slice of the economic miracle- jobs, consumer goods, substantial savings invested in pension funds HE PEOPLE and ownership of their Housing Development Board flats-why would the people jeopardise their security by voting for a rabble? At the press conference after taking over the Workers' Party leadership in May, Low Thia Khiang, the other MP from the party, returned again and again to the need to attract a younger following and more capable candidates to stand at the election due next year. 'I think the focus now should be on renewal,' said Low during a rare appearance before the government­ owned m edia (he broke off frequently to refer to the unfair treatment his party received in the Singapore press). He also speculated that J.B. Jeyaretnam's legal problems have created a fear among would-be candidates that they will be victimised. 'They are worried about getting involved in opposition politics because there might be repercus­ sions in their job, in their business. [I say] to people 'He has done much for the party. The party has who say they will be victimised by the PAP, "give no intention to kick him out whatsoever ... I think me the evidence and I will ask the minister concerned he has made a contribution to the party in the last 30 in parliament". There have been rumours but so far years and he is a political icon in Singapore whether no-one has given me the evidence.' you like it or not. He is the first man who broke the Low's election in the absence of Jeyaretnam (J.B.J. stranglehold of the PAP.' failed to turn up to the m eeting for reasons neither Think Centre sought and obtained permission to Above: would divulge) was reported as a bloodless coup hold a rally and fund-raiser in support ofJ.B.J. in April, j.B. J yaretn am, against Jeyaretnam. At party h eadquarters-two not because they support his policies, Samydorai is 'Sin ga pore's other white-washed rooms with concrete floors above a quick to stress, but because every opposition member politica l icon.' motorcycle repair shop-there was some evidence of of parliament is vital.

V OLUME 11 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 27 'He is a well-known figure,' Samydorai explains, ~ :.1~1 ;llll~llll.!.1 'and if he loses the chance to sit in parliament and voice opinions it is a loss for many of us who ~ in the believe in democracy and human rights.' ~PADDINGTON JB. TEYARETNAM first came up against Lee Kuan Yew when he was a magistrate in Singapore's subordinate 5 SEPTEMBER court in the 1960s. There he ruled against the govern­ Can we make Christian claims ment on a case of unlawful assembly brought against one of the independent unions that would soon be in an interfaith world subdued and replaced with the PAP-backed National Rabbi Apple, Sr Mary Leahy RSJ Congress. In 1971 he took over the Workers' Party, fo unded by Singapore's first Chief 3 OcTOBER Minister, David Marshall. It has been plain from then Who is my sister's keeper on that Jeyaretnam and Lee Kuan Yew were on a Who is my brother's keeper collision course. 'One time in parliament J.B.J. turned to Lee and Geraldine Doogue, David Leary (Director, said, "do you really hate me that much7'" says a Com e-in Centre, St francis C hurc h , Padding ton) colleague of the embattled opposition figure. 'Lee replied to the effect that it was beneath his contempt ALL WELCOME to hate J.B.J. ' Lee is the pragmatist who does not believe in 7.30- 9.00pm, Bellevue Hotel universal values or ideologies, only in what will materially benefit Singapore. Jeyaretnam is the liberal, 159 Hargrave St, Paddington, NSW firm in his support of individual rights and privileges. 'The law on contempt of court [in Singapore] is , / i""""!J archaic, just as the law on libel is archaic,' Jeyaret­ v~ nam says (while at the same time refusing to be drawn AN INITIATIVE OF CATALYST FOR RENEWAL on the independence of the judiciary). 'The law on libel has developed in Europe and America, where they Denis Freney Memorial say the need to give the people freedom of expression, especially in matters of national interest, outweighs Scholarships- up to $10,000 any damage that may result to public leaders and Applications are invited from people currently engaged officials.' in (or about to commence) a research, writing or cultural Jeyaretnam dismisses out of hand the suggestion project which contributes to the labour and progressiv e that Goh Chok Tong's new guard is opening up movements in Australia. Singapore. The SEARCH Foundation will award scholarships to 'I've said it again and again: it's just a mirage to assist with the costs of such projects, with priority to projects which have good prospects of publication or make people think things are changing when they are other public use, but without access to other funding. really staying the same. It's Lee's fiat that runs this SEARCH is an independent, non-profit foundation country. established to promote social justice, environmental 'In parliament I asked the Minister for Finance sustainability and the development of a more democratic to tell me how much was paid to all the ministers and egalitarian society. Details of its aims and objectives last year in salaries and allowances. He told me, " No, are available on request. you can't have that answer."' Suitably qualified applicants should contact SEARCH for Sinapan Samydorai, on the other hand, thinks detailed application guidelines. there are som e encouraging signs that political debate Applications must be received by is slowly broadening in Singapore. He cites the setting October 16, 2001 up of a government feedback unit, decentralisation Social Education and Research of power, and the symbolic gesture of opening a Concerning Humanity (SEARCH) Foundation speakers' corner in Hong Lim park near the business Rm 610, 3 Smail St, BROADWAY NSW 2007 district. Ph : (02) 9211 4164; Fax: (02) 9211 1407 'I think the new form of politics to come will be www.search.org.au more mainstream ... more liberal. I think the younger generation admire Goh Chok Tong.' SEARCH Samydorai adds, however, that some of the old FOUNDATION ways persist, pointing to the controversy over whether ACN 050 096 976 the government should reveal more about how and where the Government Investment Corporation (GIC)

28 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 200 1 is managing assets worth $140 billion, much of it skateboards and spin them around like tops. They derived from workers' pensions. Lee Kuan Yew, as have no elbow or knee guards, but when they hit the chairman of GIC's board, w ent on television in May concrete hard they are up immediately, chasing their to tell Singapore, in old Confucian style, that they boards before they are crunched under the wheels of should trust those in charge to invest well. passing traffic. Samydorai has been able to follow the activities The skateboarders have no recollection of com­ of GIC, shrouded in secrecy in Singapore, by reading munal riots, the uncertainty of Singapore's inclusion reports in the Australian m edia of Singtel's pursuit of in the Malaysian federation in the 1960s, or of its Cable & Wireless Optus and Singapore Airlines' quest subsequ ent expulsion. They might have h eard that for a stake in Air N ew Zealand. Both Singtel and the British once had a large garrison here but would Singapore Airlines are controlled by GIC funds. The not comprehend the impact of its withdrawal in the fears associated with the Singapore government's early '70s on their tiny nation at a time when South becoming a much larger player in Australian telecom ­ East Asia was riven by war. They take for granted the munications were articulated by an opportunistic economic success of Singapore, despite the fact the Channel Seven h ead, Kerry Stokes, in his submission very water they drink has to be bought from Malay­ to the Foreign Investment Review Board. Stokes sia. They know Lee Kuan Yew as a father figure but warned the Board (which has deferred its decision on would not appreciate the achievement of Lee and his the $17 billion offer for Optus until this month) that successors-or indeed of J.B. Jeyaretnam-in carving it would be dangerous to approve the bid as Singapore out a place for an independent Singapore. was 'an extrem ely intrusive and authoritarian state'. They do know, though, that breaking rules made Channel Seven's opposition is connected to its pay­ by other people is fun. • TV arm, C7, which is n egotiating to extend its contract with the Cable & Wireless Optus pay-TV Jon Greenaway is Eureka Street's South East Asia network. The contract expires at the end of this year. correspondent. Stokes has also alleged that Singtel engages in phone­ tapping for the government. The ever-optimistic Jeyaretnam conceded earlier this year that his political career-at least as it has been up until now-would be over if he were unable to overturn the ruling of bankruptcy in Singapore's Court of Appeal. But in his next breath he spoke of winning a clutch of seats in parliament 'himself' at the next election. 'Parliament will have t o change then; the government can't keep continuing as they have when there have just been one or two opposition m embers.' Sinapan Samydorai believes the next shift in Singapore politics will have to come from a new breed of opposition figure. 'If you look at the Workers' Party, there is a whole history. Then you look at what happen ed to the Democratic Party, the in-fighting, the washing of dirty linen in public. Finally they lost the seats they had. People are put off. They want to see something new.'

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS in Singapore seems to happen with a greater sense of purpose than elsewhere. Blocks of Housing and D evelopment Board flats are all populated with a variety of ethnic groups to prevent gh ettos and racial tension. Ministers are paid hand­ somely so that government can compete with the private sector for talent. Walking through the place one imagines that even the street hawkers selling water near city hall are only allowed there to save lost and thirsty tourists. Yet at a World War I m emorial for British dead, a group of kids are skateboarding up and down its teps. It's just after lunch on a weekday and they flip their

V OLUME 11 NUMBER 7 EUREKA STR EET 29 ESSAY MARK MORDUE

------

------~------==_-=-=- .:~-=--=--=..-=- :---=-

1T'S A CAZY SUMM m SuNDAY, '"d I c'n smell salt - to it, studying the album cover art [by Springett) coming in from the coast, carried ocean-fresh for miles which portrayed Van in some astral, psychedelically by a strong afternoon wind. Eucalypts are outside my cool zone where Vietnam, black power, doves, death window, excited in the bright Australian sun. Maybe and the solar system spun around him. I was it's in the mood of the weather, but I'm feeling mellow immensely curious. and trippy, so I put on a 'new' old CD, Van Morrison's Listening to the record now, I realise that the jazz­ Hard Nose the Highway. touched arrangements were what confused me. I was Morrison's exultant voice and mystic inclinations a naive 15-year-old kid. I had no idea of what jazz was. suit the day's roll and slide. But there's a particularity My favourite songs at this time were mostly pop to playing this music that sets me thinking a little mulch and commercial rock 'n' roll. It was the early more deeply than inside the moment. After spying '70s and bands like Kiss, to m e at least, were as Hard Nose the Highway in a bargain bin at my local underground and avant-garde as you could get! Stuff music store, I did at age 40 what I had failed to do as like Van Morrison, well, the music-like the album a confused 15-year-old so many years ago. I bought it. cover art-seemed to come from another world. My initial contact with this record was at my Listening, I can hear a melodic serenity I some­ local supermarket, where I used to stand at the record how missed then. Morrison's trademark quest for the section looking at one of the girls working at the ecstatic place takes you there, for just a few seconds checkout. It took m e months to work up the courage or minutes, with his equally ecstatic voice. Oddly to ask her out, the first girl I ever asked out in my enough, his ecstasy exists on the difficult line between life, and she said she was busy. The build-up to the yearning and loss, between a wise and worn old adult­ situation was so intense, I had no comeback to her hood and a notion of pure youth unwounded by refusal. I could not even think to ask if she was fr ee know ledge. Morrison would explore these childhood on another day. Instantly defeated, I slunk off as 'lost horizons' again and again in song, notably on 'Got quickly as possible. Such is young love. to Go Back' [on N o Guru, No Method, No Teacher). Over the time I dreamt about this 'love', admiring My purpose here, however, is not to engage in an her from afar, I also had Van Morrison's Hard Nose extended reverie on the music or career of Van the Highway in my paws. I would play it on the small Morrison. No. This isn't an album review. It's just stereo thoughtfully provided for customers at the that discovering this flawed mid-career recording of supermarket. I'd stand at the music section and listen Van Morrison some 25 years later causes me, now, to to it again and again, not quite sure why I liked it or if recall the role that art plays in our lives before we I should buy it. But there I would be a few days later, become overly cultivated by its forms. It's a thought playing it again, trying to understand my attraction that leads m e to consider the great myth and poison

30 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 of our age-niche marketing, and the underlying Run' on a suburban radio station and feeling I could 'truth' it promotes: that popular creative expression break ou t of my industrial suburban world with a d the.media should pursue what people want rather migh ty roar and a big, big car. Seeing The Beatles break than give t m:things they do not understand, or have up on the TV news, and watching them replay foot­ not yet even_ima~ \Hl. age of The Apple rooftop show and knowing they were ThatK.£hi a--nows the opposite of this is indeed a part of something big and sad and wild passing me a curious tlllng:'lou can say that I didn't cross the by as a ten-year-old. Watching Lou Reed strut across line and buy the damned record when I was a kid. But a dark stage in an advertisement for his 'Sally Can't it made its mark, and here I am all this time later Dance Tour' to Australia, the way he looked like a ,._ - appreciating it. dangerous alien, with short-cropped peroxide-yellow - _ ~hilisit.aboo -he nystery of art that hair and mirror sunglasses, an androgynous -_--_ -__ a:p.pe s to us when- -_Q! young? The freaky allure I found fascinating and con­ ---_ -i. --~-_ answer ~- f_e-be twofold. fronting all at once.

M osT OF THESE ART REFERENCES, my art references, are of course pop culture ones. And very much a part of the media I derided earlier. In fact these references made me fall in love with both artistic expression and the media, most particularly through the music that increasingly attracted me. I sought these voices out over the years-and formed myself out of their influence. Ever so slowly. Experimenting, stumbling, in form and image, in taste and passion. But always there was this volatile sense of over-reaching myself. Of going beyond reassurance and the known or accepted. Of taking an interest in First, we recognise something of our­ an art and expression that enlarged my world, rather selves in it. Like a good book, as George Orwell once than confirmed its dimensions. said, it tells us something we already knew, but which This is the child's journey into becoming a man needed articulating, which needed to be said for us to or woman. Today, as our global culture continues to recognise it in ourselves. Second-and this is the deep­ become a processing factory for all desires and aspira­ er, stranger truth-the art somehow inspires in us a tions, are we so moribund, so stupid, so fixed in our feeling of reaching, a suggestion of something just childishness, that we cannot bear the experimental, beyond us that perhaps we don't fully understand, but the ambitious, the unpredictable in our mass-media which we feel we would like to. It's this latter ambi­ age? Have we refined ourselves out of all adventure? tion which is forsaken in the ways the present Are the entrepreneurs so right about what appeals, consumer-driven culture is manipulated. As if what we can cope with, what can succeed? economic rationalism is the only path to understand­ I don't think so. But the spin-masters and ing the wants of a society and its constituent economic rationalists and niche marketers would give individuals, let alone the so-called 'tribes'- you a very different answer: music and books and Similarly, I can ask, why did J.D. Salinger's magazines and artists as packages targeted to appeal Catcher in the Rye inspire me, as it continues to with a tight and closed familiarity that suffocates all inspire generation after generation of people in their possibility of chance, error, ecstasy. Their agenda: to teens? The answer is because it evokes that essential capture the next big thing. But the next thing is bigger mood of apartness which somehow defines puberty, than that, mostly ahead of them all. All these spin­ particularly for bookish teenage boys who feel life's masters can do is copy it, reprocess it, gut it of all pulses a little too strongly. majesty. Kurt Cobain must have felt that, bitterly. So now I feel I have to nod a thank-you to that As for me, I guess I still have faith in those art which awakened me to a world I didn't quite 15-year-olds out there in the suburban malls or driving understand-but which I knew, intuitively, to be a down small-town roads, caught up with love and lust, part of me. colliding with accidents of expression that make it Morrison's Hard Nose the Highway at a super­ through the processing factory of commercial market when I was falling for a girl with green eyes. culture-and carrying the seeds of it on. May they Salinger's Catcher in the Rye when I felt wrong in stay always out of our control and free as birds. • my teenage world. A poster-print of Van Gogh's crows flying over a field of swirling corn, a painting whose Mark Mordue is an Asialink Australia writer-in­ name I still do not know. Neil Young telling every­ residence at the University of Beijing. He is the author body they're just 'pissing in the wind', on his album of Dastgah: Diary of a Hea dtrip, to be published in On the Beach. Hearing Bruce Springsteen's 'Born to November by Allen & Unwin.

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 31 I

L"T DemmeR, while ,c,nning the ncw,p•pc,, prompted me to reflect on the strange, somewhat I came across an in-brief column in the Sunday Age artificial, relationship that exists between the bio­ headed 'Cairns' wife dies'. It continued: 'Gwen Cairns, grapher and the subject. the wife of the former deputy Prime Minister Jim Writing the life history of a living subject is a Cairns, died yesterday after a long battle with lung problematic task. At a fundamental level, the cancer'. relationship between biographer and subject can I had been aware that Gwen Cairns was seriously probably never be one between equals. If a biographer ill, but her death still came as a shock. I was greatly is to have the co-operation of the subject for inter­ saddened because I had come to know Gwen during views, access to records and so on, then necessarily my many visits to the family home to interview Jim­ there is an element of dependency. But at the same the biographical subject of my doctoral thesis. I had time the biographer wields a curious power over the even been invited to the couple's 60th wedding subject: by being engaged in a process of dissecting anniversary celebration in February 1999. News of and holding up to judgment the subject's life. Gwen's death also led me to wonder how Jim would There are other challenges. As a biographer you cope in her absence, as well as causing me to wonder­ are investigating a 'work in progress'. Even when the as I have during his various health scares of recent subject is in his ninth decade, his life can assume a years-how I will feel when Cairns dies. How will peculiar dynamism; there may be no more great I react when this man, who has figured so prominently dramas or feats to document, but there is always Above : jim and Gwen Ca irns. in my life for the best part of a decade, is no longer? introspection and, in some cases, reinterpretation of Photo courtesy Gwen's death triggered some introspection about past deeds. In my dealings with this has Barry Ca irns. where I stand with Cairns and, more generally, been both a blessing and a curse. He has seemed more

32 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 forthcoming in the past few years about issues that Not that he ever placed any barriers in m y way to previously he had kept w ell hidden. The most writing his story. On the contrary, he was a model of dramatic instance was his revelation in mid-1999 that co-operation. He granted m e over a dozen lengthy his mother had contracted syphilis from her husband interviews and never hesitated to give me the (who shortly after abandoned both wife and infant son) authority to access various records relevant to the and that this was a reason for the physical (and biography. And yet, while he was certainly not emotional) barriers she placed between herself and the unfriendly, he was som ehow distant, even aloof. This young Jim. But in recent years Cairns has also come troubled me. I felt it was impossible to break through. forward with versions of events that are inconsistent I was spending so much of my time researching, with what previously he had put on the public record. analysing and writing about Cairns, yet I could not Are these products of a new frankness or a memory establish any sense of personal connection with him. distorted by the passage of the years? It felt surreal. Here was som eone who monopolised A living subject also renders more immediate and my waking thoughts as I struggled to work him out, acute the ethical dilemmas that a biographer faces in yet he remained at ann's length. Indeed, the m ore addressing matters that are of great sensitivity, and I learnt about Cairns the more I feared that at another therefore likely to be very painful, to the subject and level he remained hidden from me. his or her family. In a recent article in Meanjin, I recognised that the remoteness I was encoun­ Cassandra Pybus, a veteran of controversy through tering with Cairns was to a significant extent her study of the Orr case (Gross Moral Turpitude: The symptomatic of a broader pattern in his human Orr Case Reconsidered, 1993) and her biography of relations. Indeed, part of m y quest in the biography James McAuley (The Devil and Jam es McAuley, was to work out why Cairns has lived his life as a 1999), reflected on those dilemmas ('Dogs in the kind of permanent emotional refugee. It was reassur­ Graveyard', Meanjin, vol.59, no.4, 2000). A wounded­ ing, too, that I was not alone in finding him personally sounding Pybus writes of the biographer's respon­ elusive. From the time Cairns began to make a public sibility 'to consider the human frailty of those who name for himself in the early 1960s as a lion of the will be hurt by the secrets of the dead'. It might be Labor Left, through his years at the head of the best, she now thinks, that writers have an 'internal anti-Vietnam War movem ent and later as the monitor-something like a spell check-that can Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam prompt you to ask yourself, what will be the impact government, h e baffled commentators with his of this when it is in th e public domain?' However, inscrutability. Even those close to Cairns struggled for the biographer of a living subject, and especially a to divine the inner man. In 198 1, launching the Paul biographer who has relied on the subject's goodwill, Ormonde biograph y, A Foolish Passionate Man: a potentially disabling 'internal monitor' of another A Biography of Jim Cairns, reflected on form is at work: the day will come when the subject 'a long and warm association' with Cairns during the will peer back into the mirror of their life that you, 16 years they were in parliament together. Tellingly, the biographer, have constructed. The commitment however, Hayden admitted h e had n ever quite to be fearless in investigation and revelation can fathomed Cairns: wither in the face of such sobering knowledge. Jim Cairns is often portrayed as an enigma; a man This problem inevitably leads back to the nature whose soul is powerful, but who is, in the fi nal result, of the relationship the biographer develops with the unknowable by even those closest to him. While I've subject. While seeking co-operation from the subject, always had deep affection for Jim [and] been privileged should you, as biographer, also be careful to ensure to enjoy a warm and productive friendship with him, that there is a businesslike quality to that relation­ I've always found it difficult to know the whole man ship? Certainly if one considers examples of Austral­ and I confess I never did ... the proce~s of knowing ian political biographies where the writer has enjoyed him has been more difficult than with anyone else .. . a pre-existing relationship with their subject-as in, for example, Graham Freudenberg's A Certain It is, of course, for others to judge whether I have Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in Politics (19 77) and John succeeded where others failed to comprehend the Edwards' Keating: The Inside Story (1996)-it seems man. But further issues troubled me as I sifted through that closeness is a double-edged sword: it affords a the minutiae of his life. I worried that I had unearthed rare view but is ultimately constraining. But at the facts about that life of which Cairns was himself sam e time it is not entirely clear whether detachment unaware. For example, by obtaining the 1st AIF record from a subject will enhance or hinder of his father, James John Cairns, I effectively solved understanding. the riddle of why he chose not to return to Australia in 1919 to be reunited with his wife and child. How MYPERSONAL SEARCH for Jim Cairns has been would Jim react to my discovery, particularly as the protracted. When I first approached him with the idea truth was not a palatable one? I fretted, as well, when of a biography several years ago, I was immediately I discovered this sentence in Cairns' 1996 book, struck by how withdrawn, how remote, he seemed. Reshaping the Future: 'It seems that those who write

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 33 about politicians, want to write of warts-and-all, "We have three years to get it right, and we will wanting to believe that they themselves always tell have to get it right in three years' time." the truth and that personal intimate exposure of others Dr Muriel Porter on the "women bishops" debate raises their own status.' Was this directed at me, I wondered? Gwen Cairns was not so subtle. Still smarting at the Ormonde biography, she once pulled me aside to let me know that I would not be forgiven ''Are we real ly doing primary evangeli sm amongst if I wrote anything hurtful about her 'Jimmy'. I was unchurched people, or simply drawing 'switchers' especially concerned about how the family would from other denominations, like people on a desert react to what I had written about Jim's marriage with island all taking in each others' washi ng in order to Gwen and, most sensitive of all, his relation- keep one another in business?" ship with Junie Morosi. Anglican Primate Dr Peter Carnley on reaching the unchurched ER THESE AND many other reasons, I remember being full of apprehension when the time came to give Cairns a copy of my thesis. I rang in advance to tell him that I was coming. He seemed surprised, even The Melbourne Anglican mildly amused, perhaps not believing that I had finally 1998 winner of the Gutenberg Award for Excellence finished. He invited me to come to the house that in Religious Communication afternoon. So off I headed, nerves jangling. When I arrived he greeted me at the door in his typical dead­ Mention this ad for a free sample copy of TMA pan way. I hadn't seen him for over a year and he Phone: (03) 9653 4221 seemed frailer than I remembered. We sat down and or email: [email protected] I handed over the thesis. I could tell he was taken

-- Til e ------aback by its size. While Gwen chatted to me, Jim slowly leafed through, pausing now and then to read a paragraph or two. Unable to bear the suspense, I blurted out that if h e had any criticisms of my inter­ pretation of certain things I would be happy to discuss his concerns. His reply meant a lot to me: 'Paul, I might disagree with what you have written but you will have been entitled to your opinion.' After what seemed an eternity he got to the end. He announced that I should be proud of how much effort I had put into the thesis. I stayed for a cup of coffee and then as SEPTEMBER HIGHLIGHTS I got up to leave, Jim said: 'You'll let me know when you are graduating.' 'Why?' I asked. 'Gwen and I will Pe1jorming Arts come,' he answered and with that crossed the floor and shook my hand. Had I always been craving his Shakespeare in Australi a approval, his imprimatur? I'm not sure, but I went Peter Craven away that day feeling that my search for Cairns was at an end. Who's Afraid of Richard Wagner? It was not over, of course. As I have laboured to Andrew Riemer transform the thesis into manuscript and soon-to-be book, Cairns' complexities have continued to intrigue The Pram Factory: A History and, occasionally, confound me. And I realise that Helen Thomson I would not have it any other way: a life so rich and multi-layered, indeed any life, is not to be neatly Law and Aesthetics - Michael Kirby captured between two covers. In her Meanjin article, Pybus refers to 'writerly sensibility; writers are always John Carroll on Reality Television moving on, using up and discarding the last object of fascination'. I disagree. With Cairns-and I suspect Patrick McCaughey's Art Notes with any biographical subject-there are too many things left unresolved. You can't simply move on and Jeffrey Tate's Diary not look back. •

Subscribe now! $63.50 for ten isues (incl. GST) Paul Strangio is a nomadic academic. His Keeper of Ph: (03) 9429 6700 or E-mail: abr(Q'vicnet.net.au Also available at select bookstores and newsagents the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns will be published by Melbourne University Press in 2002.

34 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 BOOK S: 1 PETER MARES Documenting complicity

A Dirty Little War: An Eyewitness Account of East Timor's Descent into Hell, 1997- 2000, John Martinkus, Random House Australia, 2001. ISBN 1 74051 016 X, RRP $24.95 'Appeasing Jakarta: Australia's Complicity in the East Timor Tragedy', John Bmningham, Quarterly Essay, Issue 2, 2001. ISll 1 86395 386 8, RRP $9.95

I WILL BEG IN WITH a confes- stories they told him. The fab- I sion. When I began reporting ric of his narrative is stitched on Asian and Pacific affairs in together fro m these many small the late 1980s, I was one of vignettes, and together they those journalists who wrote form a coherent whole. A dis- East Timor off. I did not lack tressing picture emerges of a sympathy for the plight of the calculated, ruthless and well- East Timorese people, but I organised plan to terrorise the could not believe that they people of East Timor into sub- would ever break the shackles mission, and if this should fail, imposed on them by Jakarta. to visit massive revenge upon Reporting East Timor was tedi- them. ous. Unless one had the courage It was soon obvious what to sneak across the border from was going on, but conveying West Timor and climb up into this to the world was no easy themountains-andididnot- matter. Like all journalists, then 'news' from East Timor Martinkus was compelled to essentially took the form of report 'both sides' of the story. unsubstantiated accusations 28 May 1999: Juli o Caetano Ximi nes' mother (left) refused to hand over hi s bod y to He went to the press confer­ and predictable denials. Reluc- so ldi ers from the unit who had shot him . Juli o was shot in the head when Indonesian ences organised by the militia tant to get bogged down in such troops opened fire on a religious procession near Baucau. The UN was due to arr ive leaders and their political a fruitless exchange, I argued in Baucau the fo ll ow in g day. Photograph by Dea n Sewe ll , from A Dirty Little War. spokesm en. Confronted by instead that the vast nation of Indonesia dem onstrations. This time I was paying their mendacity, he neverth eless had no should not be seen only through an East attention and at Radio Australia for the choice but to faithfully report barefaced Timor prism-a valid point of view, but first time we found people in Dili who were lies and empty assurances. Official pro- one which was in part an excuse for finding willing to be interviewed over the phone nouncements by the Australian government the whole thing too difficult. and to describe what was going on. and United N ations officials were little My attitude changed with the fall of the Australian journalist John Martinkus better; their failure to condemn Indonesia's Berlin Wall. Before joining the ABC, I had went much further, taking the considerable actions and call a spade a spade (or a gun a lived for two years in West Germany and financial and personal risk of relocating to gun) led diplomacy to the verge of I had taken the solid grey reality of that East Timor to cover the story from the complicity. wall as physical proof of a nation perm a- ground. It was not an easy task. Being the Martinkus was the first journalist to get nently divided. My student friends in only foreign journalist in place gave documentary proof of what Indonesia was Frankfurt, children of the long post-war Martinkus 'exclusive' coverage of dramatic planning, in the form of a leaked m emo boom, had no interest in the East and a events, but he discovered that this could be from the Indon esian government that h ealthy su spicion toward any kind of more of a curse than a blessing. Editors did detailed plans for ' the destruction of nationalism. Beyond the wall was a differ- not always believe his stories because they facilities and other vital objects' should the ent world, one that did not concern them . were not being reported elsewhere. If it was people of East Timor vote to separate from But of course it was politics, not con- not 'on the wires', then how could the the Republic. Still the UN and Australia crete, that kept the wall standing. When it editor know that Martinkus had go t it right? failed to act decisively, failed to condemn collapsed, along with the Stasi regime in Martinkus tells his story with pace and the Indonesian plans publicly, failed to make East Berlin, I realised that change in Jakarta passion. As someone who had watched a fuss and demand the presence of inter- could m ean change in Dili. It was obvious developments unfold from afar, I was national peacekeepers to provide security that Indonesia's N ew Order would not last familiar with major events in his narrative, for the ballot. forever. but knowing the outline of the story in The climax of A Dirty Little War is a When Suharto was finally pushed from advance did n ot make it any less gripping or detailed account of what went on in the office in 1998, brave students in East Timor any less shocking. Martinkus tells the East besieged UN compound in September 1999, immediately became active, organising Timor story with a wealth of detail; the when UN headquarters in N ew York made unprecedented public m eetings and places h e went, the people he met, the ready to evacuate expatriate staff, and

VO LUM E 11 NUMB ER 7 • EUREKA STREET 35 abandon the East Timorese sheltering there m ore than 100 UN staff petitioned UN Birmingham writes: 'How much greater to their fate at the hands of the militia/military: Chief Ian Martin not to leave. When the would that chasm now be if somebody's Posters printed in three langua ges­ final pull-out did come a few days later, trigger finger had twitched that night?' Portuguese, Tetun and Indonesia n­ m ost of the refugees sheltering in the The dangerous stand-off between Battal­ saying the UN would not abandon the compound were airlifted to Darwin. ion 745 and the young Australian soldiers is East Timorese after the ballot still hung After returning to East Timor with the end point of decades of fai led policy. The all around the compound. The East INTERFET (International Force East Timor), usualsuspects-Whitlam, Woolcott, Keating, Evans-appear in Birmingham's account, and he does a good job of synthesising the historical material into a cogent polemic without, generally, sounding self-righteous or demonising the responsible actors. Birmingham's point is that Australia's policy about East Timor resulted not from some moral deficiency, but from intellectual failure. H e shows that there was plenty of alternative advice available before the Indonesian invasion of 1975. Senior officials in defence and foreign affairs warned that Indonesian annexation would become a 'run· ning sore', and recognised that if the Aus­ tralian governm ent backed Indonesia then this would generate such strong domestic opposition that it would ultimately damage relations with Jakarta. As Birmingham notes, this was the true 'realist' view. The prevailing orthodoxy-that good relations Jun e 1998: Fo llowing the fall of Suharto in May, East Timorese demonstrated openly for independence in with Jakarta's generals cam e before all else­ Dili. For the first time since 1975 the demora lised Indonesian military did not respond w ith violence . was the result of wishful thin king: Photograph by Ross Bird, from A Dirty Little War. It is one of the abiding iron ies of the last Timorese had believed the international Martinkus was able to make more sense of quarter-century that the least rea listic and community would not abandon them, and the violence. He reveals the cold logic that in some ways the most romantic view of responded with 98 per cent of all those underpinned the last burst of killing and Indonesian policy held sway in Canberra eligible voting in the ballot ... Now, after burning as Indonesian forces withdrew from ... When framing Australian policy, the all that, the UN was just going to walk East Timor: question should always be asked, what is out and leave them in the middle of a sustainable over the very long term? The destroyed and depopulated city, surrounded When we were finally on our way down the answers will not necessarily provide short· by those who were still looting the place. hills to Cassa, we passed through deserted term comfort, but they might just help villages where the stench of decomposing avoid creating a situation where, once again, Martinkus believes that the Australian corpses was interspersed with the fresh a regime in Jakarta feels justifiably betrayed government supported this decision. H e smell of the tall gra ss and trees. We didn 't by the apparent skittishness of its southern says that during this time, the chief of UN stop to loo k; it had become commonplace­ neighbour. civilian police, Australian Commissioner in even the smallest hamlet or village, Alan Mills, was in regular phone contact you'd find at least one body. That seemed Unfortunately, it seems that neither with Prime Minister John Howard. Accord­ to be the pattern. As they arrived, the Jakarta nor Canberra have learnt much from ing to police officers who were present in troops of militia kill ed at least one person the East Timor experience. With Abdur­ the compound, the Australian view, put to to terrorise the rest into getting on the rahman Wahid sidelined long before his them by Commissioner Mills in a briefing, J trucks and going to Wes t Timor. ignoble removal from office, efforts at was that UN staff who had been attacked dialogue with Indonesia's separatist move­ elsewhere in East Timor 'had put them­ } OHN BtRMJNGHAM opens' Appeasing Jakarta' m ents appear to have been abandoned. As selves in that position by getting caught in with his own description of the violent the Indonesian armed forces employ their crossfire between two hostile groups'. The Indonesian withdrawal, or in particular, East Timor 'militia' tactics in Aceh and myth that the East Timorese were fighting the withdrawal of Battalion 745 and its Irian Jaya, guaranteeing a continued cycle am ong themselves was kept alive to the almost disastrous confrontation with of violence, our leaders prefer to look away very end, even though it was patently Australian peacekeepers. The Australians and to croak out the tired refrain that Aus­ obvious that there was only one aggressor, emerge from Birmingham's recreation of tralia supports the territorial integrity of its that the violence and destruction in East events as h eroes, disciplined and well northern neighbour. • Timor was not a conflict but an attack on trained. By holding their fire and allowing an unarmed civilian population. Battalion 745 to proceed unharmed, they Peter Mares presents A sia Pacific, week­ The evacuation plan was only changed saved the Australia- Indonesia relation­ nights at 8pm on ABC Radio Australia and after the remaining foreign journalists and ship from much more serious damage. As Radio National.

36 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 BOOKS:2 TIMOTHY GADEN the Bulletin earlier this year. It is a rich metaphor, with the potential to enhance our understanding of all human relation­ ships. One wonders, however, whether the House divided metaphor of friendship can carry the bur­ den Dr Carnley places upon it. Is a friend with whom I have covenanted a lifelong Faithfulness in Fellowship: Refl ections on Homosexuality and the Church, and exclusive fidelity and intimacy not The Doctrine Panel of the Anglican Church of Au stralia, something quite different from my other John Garratt Publi hing, 2001. ISBN 1 87593 847 8, RRP $34.95 friends, different not in degree but in kind? The essay on homosexuality and the M ANY PEOPLE LIVING in in non-Anglicans all overthe country'. In these question of ordination by the Most Revd August 1998, as I was, were astonished to aims it succeeds well. There is little in Dr Peter Jensen, the new Archbishop of see footage on the evening news of an theseessaysthatisnewor,withonenotable Sydney, was the only piece submitted too Anglican bishop throwing a wild punch at exception, takes the debate in new creative late for peer review and discussion. That is another bishop. Not once but repeatedly we directions. But each piece presents a solid a great shame. He is the only contributor were treated to news reports of bishops statement of current scholarship. Together, who attempts to answer explicitly the pushing and shoving each other, hurling they constitute a substantial summary of crucial hermeneutical question of why bib­ insults at other bishops, refusing to sit in the historical, scriptural, scientific, ethical lical strictures against homosexuality the same room together and accusing one and theological background to the debate. should continue to be binding when so another, in press releases, of heresy and The entire history of Christian thought many other requirements of the Old and hypocrisy. This was the spectacle of the on the issue is covered in an essay by Dr New Testament (prohibitions against 1998 Conference, an international Muriel Porter, a church historian and touching menstruating women or against gathering of Anglican bishops held every religiouscorrespondentforMelbourne'sAge women teaching in church, for example) ten years to consider important issues fac- newspaper. She situates the debate usefully are routinely ignored. But simply to cite ing the worldwide Anglican Church, and to within a wider context of changing Chris- Article Seven of the Thirty-nine Articles, affirm the unity in diversity which is a tian attitudes to sexuality and heterosexual ignoring the problems he himself notes hallmark of the Anglican Communion. marriage, which serves as a reminder that that this raises, and then baldly to assert The issue which generated this heat the construal of sexuality has a history. again that the condemnation of homo­ was the question of whether practising The scriptural material is covered by sexuality is 'part of the moral law of God' is homosexuals, especially clergy, could be three essays-a general introduction, fol- an entirely inadequate answer. Discussion accepted as equal members of the Christian lowed by essays on the Old Testament and of this point with the other members of the church. The Conference produced a resolu- New Testament texts which bear on homo- panel might have saved him from this, and tion 'rejecting homosexual practice as sexuality. The general essay on biblical produced a more robust foundation for incompatible with Scripture', but this did sexuality by the Revd Dr John Dunnill is intelligent debate. not conclude the debate. In fact it merely excellent. It concludes with the reminder Scott Cowdell situates the homo­ inflamed it, as liberal Anglicans rejected that all expressions of human sexuality sexuality debate within the three-fold the resolution and conservatives continue stand under God's judgment and are criti- authority of scripture, reason and tradition, irregularly to consecrate 'pure' bishops, in cised by Scripture. Heterosexual marriage which constitutes the traditionally rich order to rescue congregations in America itself, Dr Dunnill writes, is not 'the bibli- background of Anglican moral decision­ and elsewhere from their official but way- cal norm': the Old Testament urges its making. Experience was added to this ward liberal leaders. No other issue, not refashioningafterthemodelofthecovenant threesome in 1988 by an earlier Lambeth even the debate about the ordination of love that God desires with Israel, and the Conference, and this aspect of the debate is women, has polarised liberal and conser- New Testament urges celibate devotion in addressed by Graeme Garrett in a sensitive vative groups so sharply within the church, anticipation of the transcendence of sexual essay, which reflects on his personal andneverbeforehastheworldwideAnglican being in God's kingdom. This is an enor- experience of a lesbian relative. Communion been brought so close to formal mously important corrective in a debate in The diversity of views contained within schism. In England, at least, and in some which heterosexual marriages are some- this collection represent at its best the American dioceses, a measure of functional times presented as without sin and the only Anglican conviction that truth is to be schism already exists. arrangement hallowed by God, and extra- sought out in the midst of differing positions. Although they have been spared the marital relationships demonised Some may fear it also represents Anglican worst excesses of the international situation T as being without virtue. theology at its worst, urging in its introduc­ (so far), Australian Anglicans are no tion no change to the church's traditional strangers to the debate, and this book, Faith- E PRIMATE OF THE Anglican Church in disciplines. But then prudence and circum­ fulness in Fellowship, is the result of the Australia, Archbishop Peter Carnley, has spection are also important core Anglican 1998 Australian General Synod's request written a piece exploring the possibilities of virtues, for hetero exual and homosexual for further study of homosexuality and the 'friendship' as a more fruitful metaphor for alike. • issues it raise for the church and its homosexual relationships than 'marriage'. discipline. The ten essays in it are designed This is a new departure in the Australian Timothy Gaden is the vicar of St John's to foster further study and 'widen the debate, and received considerable publicity Anglican Church, Camberwell, and was discussion to include Anglicans and after a precis of the article was published in formerly the Vicar of Battersea, London.

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 37 BOOKS:3 ROWAN CA HILL Programming children

The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk, Ali son Armstrong and Charles Casement, Scribe Publica tions, 2001 . ISRN 0 9080 l 153 9, RRP $30

NSW T""u'" Pete< Eg'" 33 per cent of US schools required major presentedw hi s Budget earlier this year, he building repairs. emphasised spending initiatives on public­ While some schools manage to adjust, school computer technology, particularly by embarking on ambitious and intensive lauding 'e-learning accounts' for every fundraising programs or developing corpo­ public-school student. When pressed for rate links, they are the exception. Beyond details about the workings of the scheme the illusion of a seamless technological and the intended education outcomes, Egan 'level playing field', the reality is marked by professed ignorance, candidly admitting that inequities. Half of US public schools in he was a pen-and-paper man. 1995 were not even adequately wired to Either the Treasurer had not been accept computer and communications briefed, or the details had not been worked technology. out. Perhaps the policy-developers believed It is expensive to provide teachers who a statement of intent would suffice, and can effectively use computer technology in assumed that the details and benefits would the classroom. Armstrong and Casement be obvious, given widespread acceptance of argue that in the US such teachers do not the notion that computer technology is the exist in the number required, and there is biggest boost modern education can get. little to indicate they will. Apple Computer This incident is characteristic of the has found it takes an average of five or six rush during the last two decades to compu­ years for teachers to adapt their teaching terise classrooms and education through­ on the unquestioned acceptance of 'the methods to use computers effectively in out the developed world. There has been blandishments of computer companies and the classroom. According to some estimates, much hype and assertion, but little in the software developers'. As the authors point the cost of appropriate teacher-training sur­ way of analysis and informed public discus­ out, critical and independent research and passes the amount spent on the technology sion. The Child and the Machine: How analysis of computer technology has only itself. Currently only five per cent of the Computers Put Our Children's Educa tion developed in the past few years. total US school technology budget at Risk seeks to redress this imbalance. Introducing computers to schools is not is allocated to teacher training. The Canadian authors, Alison Arm­ simply a matter of bringing the technology strong and Charles Casement, have special and the schools together. The initial intro­ I N THE US, computers are being intro­ interests in educational issues, including duction usually involves a corporate schem e duced to classrooms without due regard for literacy. Their book is based on a deep trawl (involving tax breaks, advertising and the health needs of children. Computers do of British, American and Canadian litera­ consumer loyalty spin-offs), or political have physical effects on their users, and tu rc, a variety of official reports, and articles initiatives, or a blend of both. Thereafter these can be serious and long-term, if not in specialist computer, education, and the problem lies in finding the funding permanent. The list of troubles ranges from medical journals. The bulk of the book needed to maintain and update the technol­ musculoskeletal ailments through to the draws on these specialised journals. The ogy, and the teachers who know how to use potential health hazards of toxic emissions authors deserve congratulations for bring­ it effectively. and electromagnetic fields produced by com­ ing this material into the public arena, The evidence in The Child and the puters and visual display terminals. Few because significant academic and specialist Ma chine indicates that the large, ongoing resources have yet been allocated to study­ material all too often remains isolated in expenditure required to fund school com­ ing the health effects of computer usc on small-circulation refereed preserves, away puter technology invariably results in edu­ children. However, as Armstrong and Ca c­ from public awareness. cation budget cuts elsewhere. In America, ment demonstrate, many school buildings The title of the book is provocative, this has resulted variously in curriculum arc not designed for the usc of computers, with its hint of Luddism. The provocation cuts (with art and humanities programs and tight education budgets arc unable to is deliberate, for Armstrong and Casement particularly at risk), building maintenance provide, for example, appropriate space, arc challenging widely accepted views about and library funding cuts, loss of teacher and ventilation, air-conditioning, furniture and computer technology in schools-views teacher-support jobs, and increased class floor coverings. The upshot is that schools that their research indicates are often based sizes. At the beginning of the millennium, 'have routinely ignored [t h eJ health and

38 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 BOOK S:4 ROSEMARY WEST safety issues surrounding the use of com­ puters'. Anecdotal evidence suggests the same is happening in Australia. There is 30 years' worth of research into the link between improved academic suc­ cess and computers, yet the evidence is inconclusive. As Armstrong and Casement Fair shares explain, the results are mixed and contra­ dictory, though it appears that computer­ Ethical &. Active Shareholding: An Australian Investor's Guide, James Rose, based education suits boys more than girls, Wrightbooks, 2001. ISBN 1 87662 757 3, RRP $22.95 and is beneficial for low -achieving students. Sometimes technology does enhance the education of students more generally, but usually in schools that are well funded and W N )oHN HowARD bo"" th" Au'­ integral to modern Chinese prison-factories where there have been no education trade­ tralia is the world's largest shareholding and sweated labourers and children are offs. Such schools are the exception, not the democracy, he must be joking. integral to the Third World factories to rule. What is generally true is that computer Leave aside consideration of what we which much of our manufacturing industry technology casts the bulk of students may have lost if this means we are under­ has relocated and which help to produce 'alternately in the role of data processors going conversion from a nation of citizens our abundance of cheap consumer goods. and information consumers'. to a nation of shareholders. Leave aside also Few if any of these disempowered Armstrong and Casement are not the manner of this conversion: the sale and workers have rights or indeed any say in opposed to computer technology as an subsequent share market floats of substan­ their wages and conditions. Our educational tool. They are opposed to the tial public assets and utilities, like the shareholding democrats do have nominal current preoccupation with the technology, CommonwealthBankandTelstra, that were rights to control the companies in which and to the funding it attracts at the expense once owned by us all and had been built up they hold equity by voting at Annual of face-to-face teaching, reduced class sizes, for us by provident older generations. General Meetings. But how much influence library stocks, curriculum breadth, finan­ At issue here is this: while more of us do they have in practice? cial aid to students, and the capacity of now may own shares, how much of a say Precious little, to judge by the smooth schools to provide a multiplicity of stimu­ does that give even those of us who are passage of BHP's motion to merge with lating and creative real-life experiences. shareholders? multinational miner Billiton through its The authors contend that children 'need to Democracy, after all, means more than recent AGM, despite significant shareholder live in real time in real space with real just being part of a body politic or a body unrest over the alleged overvaluing of people [and] require a real social context in corporate. Slaves were an integral part of Billiton shares and the potential for control which to learn'. Children need to grasp the domestic economy of US plantations of BHP to move offshore. As shareholder ideas rather than 'a mountain of raw data', on which they were forced to work, as were activist Stephen Mayne said, 'It's a $5 billion and human values m ust be taught by human the Aboriginal and domestic staff who were gift from Australian shareholders to beings; 'a computerised substitute is no paid in fl our, sugar and tobacco on Austral­ Billiton.' substitute at all'. • ia's cattle stations. Solzhenitsyn's political As they marched past the television prisoners were integral to the functioning cameras into the meeting, BHP sharehold­ Rowan Cahill is a freelance writer. of the Gulag Archipelago, prisoners are ers may have felt important, but the

Study your ACUweG Masters in Theology or AUSTRAUAN CATilOUC U NivtRSITY Religious Education online

• Master of Arts (Theological Studies) www.acuweb.com.au • Master of Religious Education • Master of Educational Leadership The Australian Catholic University offers Masters courses that specialise in Theology and Religious Education on the Internet through www.acuweb.com .au with 24 hrs x 7 days a week support. The tuition fees are $750 (Australian dollars) per unit or subject. Australian students living in Australia can study at the discounted cost of AU D$635 per unit or subject. Other courses also available in Education, Nursing and Management

*The university is a member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities and is funded by the Australian Government Po\olered n ext ed

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STR EET 39 overwhelming majority of the votes went uranium mine, Jabiluka, in the Kakadu corporate governance and labour standards management's way. If the shareholders world heritage area against the wishes of is only sketchily reported. This and other would sell the Big Australian, what wouldn't the local Minar Aborigines. He noted the brief references needed to be spelt out at they sell out? influence wielded by some of the large US least in footnotes to satisfy the reader. In Yet the BHP 11.7 per cent protest vote pension funds, like the Californian Pen­ these and other respects, the book would was hailed as a 'significant show of activist sion, Employees and Retirement Scheme have benefited from more stringent editing, corporate governance by Australian insti­ (CalPERS), which developed policies on for instance to make the graphs more legible. tutional investors' by Investor Weekly governance and social issues and voted their Rio Tin to has now taken over North and magazine. The protest vote flushed out company shares along those lines. So Rose since the book's publication, has recom­ vocal opposition from the fund manager decided to turn his efforts to assisting mended withdrawal from Jabiluka (a n event Perpetual while Colonial and AMP hailed by Rose in the Financial Review as Henderson grumbled but voted 'for'. 'the beginnings of a new corporate culture All of which makes James Rose's guide in Australia'). Rio Tinto's chief executive, for ethical and active shareholders timely Leigh Clifford, stated that this was because and useful, for shareholders seem to have of public concern first and the poor world an uphill battle ahead of them and to be market for uranium second. This suggests much in need of the signposts he provides. that the decision might be sheeted back to Rose writes as a crusading optimist, if the efforts of North's ethical investors, but sometimes edging towards naivety. The cynics may doubt the stated order of reasons next 'inevitable stage' for ethical invest­ and point out that Rio Tin to is still mining ment, he says, 'would see it become an uranium in Kakadu's Ranger mine. accepted component in investment Rose could-and to some extent does­ decisions in the new century'. One can only satisfy his readers' curiosity by following applaud his intention and hope he is right. up such developments on his company But when he suggests that street pro­ website, www.integrativestrategies.com.au. tests 'in many cases can be successfully Australian shareholders to exercise similar The website offers a further service to ethical supplanted by an ethical shareholder cam­ influence. investors who, for a $ll 0-a-year fee, can paign', he strains the credibility of all ex­ Australian shareholder numbers have access reports on the ethical performance cept those who deplore any form of peaceful certainly increased, from just over 20 per of 50 of Australia's top companies (in time street protest. However that may include cent of the population in 1997 to about 50 he plans to cover 300) and of four of the most of his target readership: according to a per cent now, but Rose acknowledges that leadingethicalinvestment funds (again with cover note, the book is aimed' at those who Australian shareholder activism lags well plans for more). have plunged or are about to plunge, into behind the US and the UK. In the US, 80 per Ethical eV Active Shareholding deals the share market in the hope of making cent of shares are voted, and in the UK 50 deftly with points that might discourage money, but who understand that share­ per cent are voted. (A share being 'voted' ethical investment, including questions holder values and ethical values need not means that the shareholder participates in about how to define it, and whether it can be mutually exclusive.' the running of the company by voting at the be profitable. The book provides infor­ Ethical investment has a long history, Annual General Meeting.) US citizens are mation on a number of questions that might predating the rise of capitalism by a millen­ legally required to vote their shares but not be raised by investors concerned about the tuum or so. Rose traces it back to an ancient to vote for their governments. In Australia environment, human rights, equal oppor­ Athenian who chose not to invest in the these roles are reversed and only 35 per cent tunity, animal welfare, corporate govern­ silver mines of Laurium because child labour of company shares are voted. British ance, marketing ethics and political was used. Religious groups played an authorities, shocked that only 50 per cent donations. important part in this history, led by the of UK shares were voted, are now consider­ Rose's case-that shareholders can do Quakers in colonial America, who refused ing how to legislate. well by doing good-is convincing enough to invest in tobacco, alcohol or anything While he has high hopes for the cause of that those who want to be either ethical or which used slave labour. Rose reminds us ethical investm ent, Rose leaves potential active are likely to be both by the end of the that the word 'plant', now applied to a place active investors under no illusions about book. After all, this argument should not of manufacture and associated machinery, the difficulties they n1.ay face, including the turn on whether ethical investment can originated in the plantations worked by threat of legal action from irate company supplant street protest (or other political slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries. management. action or public critique) but rather on This book is loaded with good advice whether it can serve as a useful, comple­ JAMES RosE WORKED as an advisor to the and information, though case histories could mentary means of curbing the socially, Australian Democrats until 1998 and left have been fleshed out in more detail. Even economically and environmentally unsus­ in part because he sensed that power was the story of the challenge by North Limited's tainable activities of publicly listed shifting from parliaments to company ethical sharehol ders, assisted by the corporations. If some good can be done by boardrooms. He got involved in ethical Wilderness Society, to the company's plans this means, so be it. • investment through a lawyer friend who to mine uranium at Jabiluka, is told rather was representing the North Ethical Share­ disjointedly in several different sections of Rosemary West is a freelance journalist and holders Group in its opposition to plans by the book. Last year's shareholder campaign a member of the media industry super­ North Limited to open Australia's third to have Rio Tinto adopt more stringent annuation fund JUST Super.

40 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 BOOKS:S

M ICHAEL McGIRR The thing not said Precious Bodily Fluids, Charles Waterstreet, Sceptre, 2001 . ISBN 0 7336 1 324 1, RRP $20. 95 Repea ting the Leaving, Charl es Waterstreet, Sceptre, 2001 . ISBN 0 7336 1 111 7, RRP $20.95 C HARLES WATERSTREET grew up in childhood with such affection . He rem em - the new school year. She cries. The sigh t of Waterstreet's Railway Commercial Hotel, bers the foibles of one aunt who believed 'a her tears is unfa m iliar to Charles and dis- a family business which stood only metres good cliche hits the nail on the head', and turbs him: 'She had never cried in fro nt of from Albury Railway Station. The hotel another who sent him to the chemist for me. Ever. N ot Ever. N ot even in her worst and its clientele provide a wealth of funny her hair dye because she didn't want people times. N ever for herself. Now she was crying stories and Precious Bodily Fluids m akes to think that her blue hair was anything but for m e.' the m ost of them . Albury in the early '60s natural. Precious Bodily Fluids is skilfully Repeating the Leaving shifts the focus. was the fiefdom of Mayor Cleaver Bunton woven around the impending fluoridation It opens with a brief portrait of Charles' who'd held his office for as long as anyone referendum. Its sequel, Repeating the Leav- own experience of m ental illness. He is cared to rem ember. Bunton was steadfas tly ing, is organised around the brief visit of hom eless, loveless, depressed and a patient opposed to the fluoridation of the local President Johnson to Sydney in 1966 when of N orthside Clinic. No matter how funny water supply. Whether fl uoridation was Waterstreet was doing his final year at the memoirs that precede or fo llow that supported by health officials in Sydney or Waverley College. At the time, Waterstreet description, they are coloured by it. At one by communists trying to work their way level, the title of Repeating the Leaving through South East Asia was a fine distinc- refers to what used to be known as the tion. It was an idea that cam e fro m out of Leaving Certificate. But it also refers to town and Bunton organised a referendum Waterstreet's separation from his m other. to give the locals another chance to show was busy pursuing his first serious infatua- She turns up drunk to see him presented their support for him. tion. Georgina George was Greek, and with the prize for being dux of the school The hotel, however, was the fiefdom of oppo ed to the Vietnam War. Waterstreet and urinates in a laneway in fron t of one of Waterstreet's fa ther, a m an who 'cut m ore makes light of himself trying to join a her son's friends. His fa ther spends time corners than Jack Brabham'. Waterstreet protest in a Christian Brothers' driving his wife up and down the Hum e senior was only ever one step ahead of the B school uniform. H igh way t o Kenmore, a psych iatric licensing board. A few bottles in the boot of institution in Goulburn. the police vehicle enabled him to trade on UT THERE IdS a grea t eal m ore to these Just as Charles is set to start university, Sundays. He used bed sheets as tablecloths, m em oirs than light-hearted nostalgia. Like his m other dies. There is om e suggestion despite the unpleasant s tains w hich any vibrant re-creation of the past, they are that she m ay have committed suicide but, appeared between items of crockery, much rooted in the present. For C h arles after many years, Charles fi nds reason to of which had been pilfered over the years Waterstreet, this m eans dealing with a bur- doubt this conclusion. The adult Charles is fr om neighbouring pubs. He chained the den of pain. still dealing with his grief and confusion. cutlery to the tables, and as the chains Charles' mother em ergesgradually from He does so with courage and grace. gradually lost links, his regular boarders, the shadows over the course of these books. The least aff ection a t e part s of many of whose accommodation was paid She is introduced in passing as 'still sick' Waterstreet 's m em oirs deal w ith his fo r by the St Vincent de Paul Society, fo und and needing to stay at h om e while dad takes religious education. In som e ways, he offers they had to put their chins closer and closer the kids to Mass, a ritual fo r which neither a fa miliar account of m em orising the green to their plates and to the stains on the table father nor son have much enthusiasm . Over catechism and attending old-fashioned linen. The publican was a vocal opponent time, the mother's alcoholism and depend- devotions. It m ay be that circumstances of the standard rail gauge. He said that it ence on a variety of pills becomes m ore and had inoculated Waterstreet at a young age would undermine 'states' rights'. It would m ore excruciating: 'mum's drinking was a against the influence of any of the ideas and also undermine his business which thrived family secret confined to a circle of Antarc- spirituality that lay beneath those practices. on the thirst of the numerous rail workers tica but we never spok e of it. It was a given . But it is curious that the very religious who were needed to shunt trains at Albury. The thing not said.' education fo r which many pessimists still But Waterstreet senior presented himself At the end of Precious Bodily Fluids, feel nostalgia provided no resources for as a man of principle. Waterstreet junior Waterstreet describes his final Christmas Waterstreet, either as a boy or an adult, to m ade his pocket m oney by punching the at hom e before going to boarding school. By deal with the uncertainties and tragedies of time clock at the yards for workers who this stage, his mother has 'worn out her his life. He learnt answers to som ebody were in no condition of either mind or body welcom e' at hospitals in Melbourne and is else's questions. They didn't help. • to leave the bar. The boy listened, observed a patient som ewhere in Sydney. His dad and acquired 'aninvaluablesenseofrumour'. works valiantly to make som ething of the Michael McGirr, a fo rmer publisher of It says a lot for Waterstreet that he can occasion. Mrs Waterstreet com es hom e in Eureka Street, is the author of Things Yo u recreate the chaotic h ou seh old of his time to farewell Charles, the eldest, before Get For Free .

V OLUME 11 UMBER 7 • EU REKA STR EET 41 THEATRE GEOFFREY M I LNE The greatest of ease

Circus Oz and Rock ' n' Roll Circus were both in town this july, reminders of the huge and growing popularity of contemporary c ircus and physica l theatre in Australia.

C "'"' Oz (fmmod in 1978) • nd Rock Wall, by contrast, focuses on explor­ 'n' Roll ( 1986) are two of our oldest compa­ ing themes, like the dysfunctional nies, followed by Legs on the Wall and the family in All of Me. Flying Fruit Flies. In the past couple of The growth in the 1990s of so years younger companies like Circus many new companies (not to mention Monoxide, Dislocate, Acrobat and Club competition from the very commer­ Swing (among countless others) have been cially marketed Cirqu e du Soleil) touring Australia, tracked by clones of the increasingly challenged Circus Oz's Canadian-based . suprem acy. Contemporary circus came The groups are diverse. Monoxide is a more and m ore to resemble a special­ low-key outfit, a bit like Circus Oz 15 years ised form of theatre, and Oz has been ago, performing in the open air and on the obliged to rethink its strategies, under ground to families. At the other end of the Mike Finch's artistic direction. The once spectrum, Club Swing does sophisticated cutting-edge larrikins had becom e the stuff about gender and sexuality for adults, conservative elder statesmen. the best of it in the air. In between, Acrobat Oz's 1999 show looked tired, and its are edgy, danger-courting performers with virtually identical tour in 2000 seemed a 'higher-faster-harder' approach in the air to be losing momentum. They weren't and on the floor, and fearsomely loud rock physically tired-the skill level was still music. Their audiences are multi-age. very high- but the structure and ideas What unites such diverse companies is lacked freshness. that they all use the now-familiar appara­ However the 2001 show, Spinning You tuses of contemporary circus. Many were Out, is their best show in years, though imported from China (including the Chinese now aimed squarely at the mass family pole, hoops, plate-spinning, market. It runs about 100 minutes and chair-stack and so on ). there's no interval. And while there are no Others came from Europe­ really new acts or apparatuses, nearly all of including the Russian ring the show has been restructured, redesigned, and the beautiful tissu (two recontextualised and rethought. strips of fabric that are used The opening is certainly new. Onstage a bit like the hanging rope are bits of set but no performers. They known as the web)-but eventually arrive, apologetically 'late', clear many also come from tradi­ away and begin rhythmic fl oor-based tional circus (especially the acrobalance around the edges while a large , slack- and tight-wires). shroud covers the central area. Then the Still others have been invented acrobats move towards the middle, where by local companies or are the now air-inflated shroud flies up to reveal hybrids of old and new tricks, a . Newcomer Felicia like Circus Oz's mad piece in O'Brien seamlessly ascends through the which the bass-player is whisked pyramid and into a pretty good trapeze act. aloft and jerked randomly about; for years. During the 1980s, Circus Michael Ling's long-established tight­ parting company with his instrument, he Oz used circus techniques to create nar­ wire act has been recast as a mini-drama in then feverishly chases it through the heavens. rative (often with a left-wing political bias) which he desperately needs to get to an All these companies use some form of before reverting to straightforward displays outdoor dunny, but his every attempt is circus rig, but I haven't seen them in a tent of skill, danger or just plain fun. Legs on the thwarted, requiring many re-crossings of

42 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 the wire. Finally he blows the dunny walls reversing the trajectory of the show's Brahms' moody Sonata No. 3 Op. 5, this down, and the toilet roll up in the air. All opening. almost seamless act features breath­ this is great fun for the kids. When he arrives at ceiling/floor level, taking acts in the air and on the floor. While A new and cerebral adult act features the rest of the company do the pole act. It's upside-down, for instance, Azaria Universe Anni Davey-who broke her neck perform­ a smashing finish to an excellent show. and Andrew Bright use a blood-red double ing for Circus Oz in 1991-and it is great to Other highlights include Kareena Oates' tissu to provide a 'cloud-swing' for a third see h er back. TV monitors show her close­ dazzling hula hoops; all the work in the air performer. up commenting on ageing performers and by Oates and Davey; anything the diminu­ The act is typical of this intelligent and their failing bodies, in somewhat disparag­ tive Toni Smith does; Mel Fyffe's inventive company. Sonata is marred a bit ing fa shion. Meanwhile, her own onstage Russian Ring act and Suzanne Simpson's by awkward dismounts and some pieces body is raised by the hair and swung about hot violin-playing- not to mention Laurel lack extension, but Rock 'n' Roll is really as if to defy both gravity and age. This is Frank's vibrant new costumes. Spinning breaking new ground, and you wouldn't brilliant, and will doubtless develop greater You Out is about to tour overseas want to miss their work for quids. This fluency and punch. but goes to Sydney in January. show is going to the Equinoxe Festival in Per Westman's plate-spinning act has a Noumea in October; Rock 'n' Roll's next fresh context based on the leopardskin-clad R ocK 'N' Ro LL CtRcus' Sonata for Ten show, Tango, opens at the Brisbane Power­ strongman/drag queen Daryll John's Hands (with new Artistic Director Yaron house in early September. wedding to a unicyclist. When Westman Lifschitz) is very different from its earlier One reason for the su ccess of Australian runs out of plates, the unicycle wheel and work and from Circus Oz. The usual rock physical theatre is that, not being spoken­ even the wedding cake are added-the latter music is replaced by live piano sonatas­ word dependent, it is well suited to the shedding 'cream ' as it spins. Westman, as renowned pianist Tamara Anna Cislowska export market. Australians may like con­ class weakling, and John, as macho bully, and four circus performers make up the temporary circus because, of all art­ team up again later, revitalising an old hands of this cleverly constructed forms, its physicality and risk-taking act with bowling balls. The climax piece, as well as their feet, heads, (not to mention larrikin spirit) come is a high throw in which Westman is brained torsos, buttocks and other body closest to the ideals of sport. as the ball comes down. parts. Circus Oz, the Fruit Flies, Legs on The show finishes with Tim Coldwell's Schumann's bright and brittle the Wall and Rock 'n' Roll have been famous upside-down walk, also given a fresh Piano Sonata No. 1 Op. 11 provides around long enough to allow cross­ twist. He enters his dressing room in civvies the stimulus for a children's party in ertilisation, role-modelling and mentor­ and changes into clown costume, crooning which gifts are exchanged, games are played ship. Trace a line through the CVs of the Sinatra's 'My Way'. Then he notices 'the and the 'children' show off in dark power­ newer companies' performers and you'll old pole from the old pole act we used to do' trips-one-legged performer Andrew Bray's usually find experience in or influence of rising from his perspective but lowering false leg is stolen and h e has to use inspired the older . Pam Creed's circus to the floor from ours. 'I used to climb up floor-based to win it back. training course at Swinburne University is that pole and walk across the ceiling,' he Thirty years later, the same characters destined to perpetuate this w elcome goes on, 'but you don't want to see the old (now in sophisticated 'after-five' dress) phenomenon. • pole act, do you?' ' Oh, yes, w e do! ' w e cry interact in a fluctuating series of personal in panto style, and h e arduously climbs relationships at, on, under and high above a Geoffrey Milne teaches theatre and drama 'up' the pole towards the floor- neatly table set for a dinner party. Backed by at LaTrobe University.

Men of hospitality Living and proclaiming God's hospitable love

As li ved out by StJohn of advocacy and reconciliation Will you dare to accept God's God over five centuries ago, for those marginalised by our invitation to a life dedicated our vocation is to give of sooety. to hospitality? ourselves completely and Our core of hospitality If so please contact: fr eely; to b e a brotherl y compels and urges us to Br. John C legg OH. presence; a sy mbol of hope deepen our relationship with Vocations Director. PO Box BN 1055, for th e world; proclaiming God, ourselves and those Burwood North. NSW 21 34 God's hospitabl e love to with whom we share our Australia. all. li ves, community and T elephone (02) 97-+7 1699 W e are ca ll ed to a m1mstry. FacsinLile (02) 97 44 3262 charism of hospitality and W e are th e: 'Brothers of Email provincial@s tj ohn.com.a u love that promotes healing, StJohn of God.' W ebsite: www.stjohn.com.au

V OLUME 11 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 43 here, my son, is a stylish little numbcri sort of Davey Lynch m eets 'arold Pinter. Know what I mea n? Gary Dove (Ray Wins tone) has escaped London's underworld for the sunshine of the Costa del Sol. Tanned, flabby and content, this former hardman has retired to a villa with his paramour, ex-porn star Dee Dee (Amanda Redman), and adopted the ways of the Spanish. ('Fink I'll 'ave the calamari. What you havin'?') Unfortunately Dove's peaceful idyll is ga tecrasbed by an old pal. Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) is an A-grade nutter who insists that Gary does one last job back home for the 'Prince of the Dark Arts himself', Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). Kingsley-best known for his portrayal of the pacifist Gandhi- is superbly mal­ evolent, and often very funny, as the unpre­ dictable Logan. Dangerous like a child with a cocked gun, the rapid-talking Logan rcfu es to take 'no' for an answer. The part, though studded with obscenity, could only be delivered by an accomplished Shakespear­ ean actor. homosexuals, and those with a prison record Whether he likes it or not, Gary is forced The art of revolution to be boat-lifted out: America's immigra­ to meet his fate. The action switches to the tion strategies are rarely simple.) The Mother Country and Sexy Beast takes on Before Night Falls, dir. Julian Schnabel. cinematography is raw and immediate. You another, even darker, hue. In London it's Not your usual movie, this one. No holo­ come away believing you could walk through night, it's raining and Gary is alone. And in graphic battles, no virtual actors, no dollars the final credits and find your own way an obvious nod to the original London incinerated on set to propitiate the gods of around Havana. What's more, you want to. gangster movie, the star of Performance, box office. Just intelligent directing, plus Schnabel blends archival footage (his James Fox, is cast as the louche banker JavicrBardem's fluid actor's body guiding two directors of photography have exten­ whose actions set the plot in motion. you down a street in Havana (shot in sive documentary experience) with a com­ Despite his MTV credentials, first-time Mexico, but no matter-Bardcm was born plex, loose-jointed narrative held together director Glazer doesn't mind keeping the in Spain) and weaving in and out of the by Bardem's performance and Schnabel's camera still, knows how to compose a shot, complexities of Fidel Castro's revolution. own integrative nous. But this is also great and sustains our attention with grown-up Julian Schnabel, painter-turned-movie­ ensemble film-making. Sean Penn (as Cuco techniques like character and dialogue. He director, records the life of Cuban writer, Sanchez), and Johnny Dcpp (doubling as keeps the jump-cuts to a minimum and Reinaldo Arenas (Bardem, above left) from Bon Bon the drag queen and Victor the plays up the nco-Jacobean antics without his rural birth in 1943 to his AIDS-related sadistic lieutenant) draw no more attention losing his balance. Nice one, Guv. death in New York in 1990. It's in part an than their roles demand. Olivier Martinez -Brett Evans act of homage, Schnabel's genuflection (above right) is moving and understated as before Art, and the Artist as Hero (he made Arenas' friend and heir, Lazaro Gomez it once before, in Basquiat). But that's the Carriles. The script (part-written by the Tangled web only weakness in the film-and a venial real Carriles) is formidable, the soundtrack indulgence, given how much else is erratic and memorable. And then there is Along Came a Spider, dir, Lee Tamahori. examined. Cuba (even when it's Mexico): irrepress­ Films like Along Came a Spider arc proof Before Night Falls iscxpansivc('Iwanted ible, loud, decaying and resurrected. that children need to spend more time a huge depth of field,' says Schnabel), -Morag Fraser outdoors playing with rusty nails and old unexpected and curiously joyful. The tin cans. If they did this, then there'd be revolution pulses past and so does its social less chance of their being kidnapped. aftermath- in memorable faces and Re-minder The kids in Along Came a Spider spend historical sequences intercut with Arenas' most of their schooling perched in front of own remembered and imagined world of Sexy Beast, dir. Jonathan Glazer. If you whiz-bang computers doing higher-order politics, writing and homosexual experi­ were expecting a Cockney Tarantino- all learning and sending photos of lions and ence. (After some years in prison, Arenas rhyming slang, shallow ideas and gratui ­ elephants to each other on the sly. But not was allowed to leave Cuba under the 1980 tous violence-you will find Sexy Beast everyone in this educational facility uses provision that allowed the mentally ill, sadly disappointing. 'Cause what you got technology for good.

44 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 Along Came a Spider is a psychological satire, can hide the shortcomings of this before product placement and perestroika. suspense thriller whose main action takes latest version. It is a hollow film, lacking a But I guess I wasn't counting on the endur­ place around the kidnap of the delightful story that matters, and while it might have ing shade of the panama hat. Thanks to and sassy young daughter of a two-bit been passable at 90 minutes, it sags when director Boorman and author John le Carre, senator, from a posh school in uptown USA. stretched to two hours. it's safe to say the py thriller is not only It's the sort of school where kids have As the lost astronaut, Mark Wahlberg alive but in quite good shape. teaching aides to help them carry their never threatens to take his gear off like Harry Pen del (Geoffrey Rush, below with brains around. The president of Russia sends Charlton did, and indeed seldom changes Leon or Varela) is Panama City's finest tailor. his son there. What was wrong with the his facial expression let alone his clothes. His fitting room is the city's ecular confes­ local Moscow State School? Tim Roth is the vicious human-hating ape, sional, privy both to political scandals and The senator's IT-savvy daughter is Thada. He creates a simian Richard III with to whether Noriega dressed left or right. snaffled by Gary Soneji (Michael Wincott), a distinct neck problem and a capacity to Harry's a mixed bag of cockney ex-con, a kidnapper who would love to make a overact that is almost human. wonderful mother (to his children and his name for himself. Soneji seems to have As Ari, the female ape with a social customers), loving husband, and lying committed the perfect crime. His evil conscience, Helena Bonham Carter looks hound. He's what you might call a highly intentions are even more audacious given incredibly like Michael Jackson with his moral con man. British spy, Andy Osnard that the senator's daughter was constantly nose pressed against a windowpane. Her (Pierce Brosnan-yes, a nice little post-mod guarded by a secret service team lead by dialogue is largely inaudible and her manner nod to Bond), on the other hand, is a moral Jezzie Flannigan (Monica Porter). Jezzie is a of speech su ggests that someone has vacuum. Having been banished to Panama bit of a flake for a secret ervice agent, but neglected to unstitch the mouth-opening for bad behaviour, Osnard decides to make she has perfect skin. in her mask. Despite these problems, how­ this his last official post. Harry's local The film stars Morgan Freeman as Alex ever, she achieves a warmth Cross, a Washington DC police detective (oops, I almost said humanity) and psychologist whose job it is to track that the film otherwise lacks. down Soneji. Alex Cross' pursuit of the Handicapped by confusing kidnapper proves once and for all that in our action and a 'who cares?' story, world, it is unwise to trust even a labrador. the new screenwriters have had Although the frantic pace of Along Came a go at satire with such lines as a Spider means that the storyline is woven 'youth is wasted on the young' together like an old hessian sack, the film (apparently the apes read G.B.S.) does thrill. People do look surprised when and 'God has created all apes in they are blown away. his image.' Apes talk about the The film deals with those eternal perils of having a human teen­ enemies: greed, fame and cash. Alex Cross ager and how 'you can't tell one helps us understand some of the dimen­ human from another'. Spare me! sions of these deep evils with a bit of on­ With that sort of dialogue, Jim the-couch psychobabble. And when the Caney should have been cast as smell of gunpowder finally drifts away, the astronaut and Eddie Murphy Along Came a Spider leaves us with the as Thada. sobering thought that we arc all, in some The famous ending of the original movie knowledge, tall stories and precarious debt ways, damaged people. It's just that some of has been monkeyed with and the new end­ levels make him a perfect recruit for us are more crazy than others. ing suggests the frightening prospect that Osnard's last covert operation. -Paul Sinclair the cash-cow hasn't been completely milked Boorman portrays the British and and a sequel is likely to beat its chest at us American government agencies with shortly. wicked disrespect. Scenes in the Pentagon Not the apex Footnote: At the preview I attended, Control Room play out like hybrid episodes I sat next to an escapee from the Planet. He of The West Wing and South Park while the Planet of the Apes, dir. Tim Burton. In possessed the digital skills to operate his British Embassy staff all behave more or 1968, when Planet of the Apes was first mobile phone during the movie, but lacked less like three-day-old toast. Very enter­ filmed, I left the cinema agog at the monkey the social awareness to know he shouldn't. taining. masks worn by the actors, wondering where Perhaps there's a monkey in all of us? But really the most important thing Linda Harrison got her uplift bra and -Gordon Lewis about this film is Geoffrey Rush. He shapes whether Charlton Heston had been wear­ the character of Harry Pendel right in front ing underpants. Thirty-three years later and of you, every snip of his scissors and mark after a spate of sequels and a TV series, Hats off of his chalk adding another layer. It's director Tim Burton revisits Pierre Boule's theatrical without being stagey-just tale about an astronaut caught in a time The Tailor of Panama, dir. John Boorman. damned near perfect. warp in the future, on a planet where apes Spy films, like westerns, seem to belong to The Tailor of Panama plays merry with rule and humans are no better than slaves. another time. Cattle rustling and spying are the spy genre, resulting in a seriously playful Sadly, no amount of style, high-tech the sorts of thing that happened in the film about porky pies and washed up spies. effects, screaming action and attempted suspicious shade of a black hat, in a time -Siobhan Jackson

VOLUME 11 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 45 Shot through

MYUNccc Fe>N< ON t shot the telly.lt only smpdsed (Thursdays at 9.30pm) clashed with Nine's Footy Show, so very people who didn't know him. As usual his reasons were not as few would have seen it. Written and directed by Cambridge other people's. A scientist, self-taught, one of the last of the history graduate Peter Du Cane, it probed and ranged through great generalist engineers, he felt the time had come to amuse the results of the Atlantic Charter, the bargain Winston and instruct his baby-boomer children, something that the telly Churchill entered into to save his country from defeat by Hitler had, he felt, signally failed to do. in 1941. It was a tad triumphal about the ending of the principles Taking out his old service revolver, he demonstrated for that underpinned colonialism (Bad old British Empire! Down them the principle of implosion. Aunt Margaret, a wonderful boy, down!) and a little too positive about the forces that were housewife, was worried there'd be a terrible mess, but it wasn't keeping Roosevelt out of the war. Joseph Kennedy, US Ambas­ as bad as one might have thought. When you shoot your telly, sador to Britain, had been feeding Washington from the start you'll note this too: the cathode ray tube is a vacuum, so the with ideas of Britain's hopeless position. More background bits don't spray out, they suck in. Hitting the screen with a would have been good here; perhaps there just wasn't time. But sledgehammer will also do it, but you'll be too close to the it would have been useful to show that only three months action to observe the phenomenon fully, and the blunt before, Churchill had finally routed the anti-Semitcs and instrument won't give the elegant result you get from a bullet. fascist sympathisers in his own government, and ousted Throwing it out of an upstairs window is not to be recommended Chamberlain. The phoney war was over, and Churchill came either, because the rest of the telly will smash all over the place to Newfoundland ready to give away his shirt to save us all and you miss the implosion in the general splat. Poor old Keith from the Nazis. It wasn't enough simply to say that Kennedy's Moon never quite understood this, poor chap, being a drummer, Irish background meant that he wasn't very pro-British-old and in the early '70s he littered hotel swimming pools and patios Joe Kennedy was one of the most horrible Nazi sympathisers from Miami to Moscow with the results of failed experiments. around, and would cheerfully have seen the jackboots win. If My TV is safe for the moment because Big Brother is over he was naive to think that Hitler would have then liberated the and I don't own a firearm. And the ABC, despite things like the Irish, then hatred gives us all a paradoxical tendency drowning of Quantum, the ending of Media Watch and the to trust the devil. adoption of that nasty chrome logo that looks like a K-Mart bathroom accessory, has done some things right lately. The new BuT THAT QUIBBLE ASIDE, the series was uncomfortably brilliant. science program, Catalyst, is no replacement for the depth of The two following programs dealt with the tragedies of the Quantum, but is very good at doing science-in-the-news. If there Congo and of Cambodia. If you are inclined to be sensitive, be was a bit of patronising in the mid-August program on the aware, when you catch the repeats, that there are hideous scenes human genome section (talking airily and unspecifically of of mutilated corpses, part of war's appetite in more ways than 'proteins' without giving enough real information) the section one. The curious prevalence of cannibalism in both conflicts revealing that almost 100 per cent of racehorses suffer made me reflect that humans are much closer to the chimpan­ constantly from stomach ulcers hit the target. The simple, zee than the gorilla. But the hopeless face of Patrice Lumumba brutal fact is that horses' stomachs produce acid 16 hours a going to his death will remain as one of those figures of pity day, because the horse should be grazing roughage continually. and terror that sear the memory. Racehorses, pampered, massaged, groomed, are fed twice a day Programs like this remind you why you haven't shot the on concentrated food that goes through quickly, leaving the television yet. The messenger sometimes gives us bad news in poor beasts in agony. Gai Waterhouse deals with the problem a way that reminds us that we're all frail, chaotic beings who by making sure that her horses always have hay to browse. Other survive this strange world and each other for a time by a trainers can't be bothered. Here was science aiming firmly at combination of luck, grace and the occasional good deed. Uncle the middle to lowbrow and getting there. (Catalyst shows on Frank would have regarded that statement as needlessly Thursdays at 8.30pm.) dramatic. After all, he did go out and buy another telly. • In late July the three-part series Playing the Game was a rare and excellent thing. Unfortunately the screening time Juliette Hughes is a freelance reviewer.

46 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 2001 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 96, September 2001 Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM

ACROSS 1. Seasonal delirium, perhaps? (6,5) 7. After unusual fall, left off to run the footy finals. (1,1,1) 9. Harsher headache involved east wind, perhaps. (7) 10. Artists paint a lion, for example, with its cubs-casually arranged. (6) 11. Member of schismatic religious group- a mixed-up scary extra-terrestrial. (7) 12. The umpire is the one in the untidy jacket on the east. (7) 13 . Playing for time to order last fish. (8) 15. A kind of club for the choir. (4) 18. Put down roots and suspend action! (4) 19. We are perhaps told oral promises to pay, for instance, are not acceptable on this highway. (4,4) 21. He provides income, possibly, but at the end, is a debtor himself. (7) 22. Neither list nor rearranged index provides record of this air vent? (7) 24. For starters, did Ian offer Peter Thomas electronic records of this optical m easurement unitl (7) 25 . Spanish painter was sick inside his wall. (7) 26. The sun sets on the N ational Union of Students (1,1,1) Solution to Crossword no. 95, 27 & 23-down. Do feathers fly in this unequal contest undertaken, however, with July/August 2001 pride? (5,6,5) DOWN 1. Complains about the reported volume. (5) 2. The heavens might open on Geelong and old Footscray supporters. (4,4,3,4) 3. At night, perhaps, in a twisting lane, beam of light can be identified. (8) 4. Hurry to change top for some thing warm and comfy-like mink, perhaps. (5) 5. Somehow live with grace on the advice of the Governor General. (9) 6. Brush off the dust from the furniture and give it another polish. (6) 7. Once Britannia ruled the waves, but now another code plays the game. (10,5) 8. Was he the last seer, perhaps, who searched for gold reef? (8) 14. Does farmer bury and germinate seeds in alternate rows so plants may do this? (9) 16. Do they display world's best practice in 7-down? Nods can be seen on all sides! (8) 17. You can keep the confiture. (8) 20. Finally asks what we heard about the alteration. (6) 22. At first N ed adjusts same handles. (5) 23. See 27-across.

------~ ------This subsc ription is: Your Contact Details: Gift to: (Please also fill in your own contact details, left) D New D Renewal D Gift IMrsiMtSsiMs/Mr First Name II Mrs/M,ss/Ms/ Mr First Name

Length of subscription: ~su=rn=am=e~======~~su=m=am=e======~ D One year (1 0 issues for $63, $54 concession for IStreet No. Street Name II Street No. Street Name pensione rs, students and unemployed. In c. GST. ) ~======~ 0 Two years (20 iss ues for $ 11 5, $98 concession. In c. GST. ) ICity/Town/Suburb State Postcode II City/Town/Suburb State Postcode

overseas rates on applica tion: 7 tel +67 3 9427 73 7 7 ~~C~a~ im~e~)~le~ph~o=ne~N~o=.======~F~a~~e~m~.,~~======~~~~ C_a~_,m_e_)_le-ph-o-ne_N_o_. ______F_·~_e_m_a•l ______~ email: [email protected] esuit.org.au

Send to : Payment Details D Visa D Ba nkcard D Mastercard 0 Eureka Street Subscription o l;nclose a y :~~~~~~y::e ;~~:sf~: I I I I II I I I II I I I II I I I I Rep ly Pa id 553 1 ~. ______j. Publications ,------,I Cardholder's name I PO Box 553 D Please debit my credit card for I$ I· Richmond VIC 3121 . ISignature Exp~ry date I (No postage stamp required 0 Please send me di rect debit forms . f if posted in Australia) D Mai ling list: I would like to remove my name from the mai li ng list when it is used for outside advertising. EUREKRSTRE Spirit of Australia Religion in Citizenship & National Life Edited by Brian Howe and Alan Nichols With essays by John Bannon, Winifred Wing Han Lamb, Max Charlesworth, Frank Brennan, Rosemary Owens, Geoffrey Lilburne and Marion Maddox. Australia, since Federation, has prided itself on being a secular society. Yet many of its citizens describe themselves as religious. We have embraced liberal ideas but they have not been lacking in social content: the influence of religion may have been subtle, but it was real. In this ecumenical exploration, nine experienced commentators examine the part religion has played in the life of the nation and the role it might continue to play. Thanks to the Australian Theological Forum, Eureka Street has lditcd n, 10 copies of Spirit of Australia to give away. Just put your name and B n lh•"c I!>. <\Lm \,d,,h address on the back of an envelope and send it to: Eureka Street September 2001 Book Offer, PO Box 553, Richmond, VIC, 3121. (See page 8 for winners of the June 2001 Book Offer.)

Hawkstone Hall is an internati o nal pastoral centre serving the unive rsal Church as a place of spiritual renewal. Staffed by the Redemptorists of the London Province, with a coll aborati,·e tea m, the 3-Month Re n ewal Course is the first choice for many ,·cligiuus, priests, and lay people on sa bbatica l leave. The house is set in extensive parkland in Shropshire, England ; it is a peace- fill ed pl ace. The purpose of th e Hawkstone Renewal Course is to prov id e a sympathetic spa ce for peopl e to redi scO\·e r and renew their lov ing attachment to Jes us of Nazareth. Course dates for 2002: 7 January -11 Marc h 2002 22 April- 18 July 1002 9 September- 5 December 2002 For further details contact: The S~crc t an (ES), lla\\'kstonc Halt , Marchamlc-v Shrc.wsbury SY4 5LG England ' Tel: ++44 1630 6852+2 Fax: ++44 1630 685565 Email : llawkhall @aol. com visit this peace-filled place today at www.hawkstonc-hall.com