ssay eornpetition

Eureka Street, through the generous sponsorship of Southern Cross Capital Exchange Ltd, is offering a pri ze of $1500 for th e Bes t Ethi cs Essa y for 1998.

Th e topic is unres tri cted: our expectation is si mply that the essay be grounded in an ethical consideration pertinent to our soc iety and times. Questions to do with th e eth ica l inves tment of funds or the ethica l allocation of scarce resources may be one point of departure, but w e look forward to your inventiveness. The essay shou ld be written in a sty le that w il l engage a genera l audience. Length: not exceeding 8000 words. Th e winner will be announ ced and th e essay published in th e Author's name ...... December iss ue of Eureka Street. Address ...... Entries shou ld be unpublished, ori gi nal works, on typed, doub le-spaced hard copy. Clos ing date: 1 O ctober 1998. Telephone ...... Fa x ...... Do not send origi nal manu sc ripts or disks. Em ail add ress ...... Entries should have this fo rm Title of essay ...... attached. Send to ' Ethics Essay', Eureka Street, PO Box 553, Ri chmond VIC 3121. Our competition's sponsor, Southern Cro ss Ca pital Exchange Ltd, is an ethical investment company.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of th e Resurrecti on provides a beauti ful final in September: resting place at Sydney's Rookwood Cemetery. John Bryson reviews John Pilger's Hidden Agendas - - -' Due for completion in September 1998. th e Mausoleum wi ll include: Philip Morrissey on Roberta Sykes' Snake Dreaming • 1720 crypt spaces • 800 niches (fo r An essay by Edward Colless cremated remain s) • 7 fami ly va ults A review of Bernard Smith's (containing 4 to /0 Modernism 's History

T egan Bennett reviews Matthew Condon's The Pillow Fight

lvor lndyk reviews Philip Salom's poetry

Jenny Lee reviews Tim Flannery's Throwim Way Leg

New Subscribers $55 for ten issues plus a free book Ph (03) 9429 6700 or Fax (03) 9429 2288 Volume 8 Number 7 EUREKA SJREEr September 1998 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology

CONTENTS 25 NEEDED: A NEW WAY OF THINKING Frank Fisher unplugs the blockages in our environmental thinking. 4 COMMENT 27 With Morag Fraser, Lincoln Wright and ARCHIMEDES Francis Sullivan. 28 7 THAT HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON CAPITAL LETTER FELLA John Sendy tracks one of Oz Lit's greats 8 around Victoria. LETTERS 32 12 SEAMUS HEANEY: CELEBRATION THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC AND ITS ENEMIES With Jon Greenaway, Peter Pierce Peter Steele on the poet who celebrates and Andrew N ette. against the odds. 15 38 SUMMA THEOLOGIAE BOOKS David McCooey reviews Les Murray's Cover: Alan Oldfield, epic Fredy Neptune; Jon Greenaway at the 'The voyage, first day', 16 footy with Justin Madden and Clinton oil and acrylic CLIPPED AT CLUDEN on canvas and board. Peter Pierce hits the Townsville Cup Walker (p40). Collection of the artist. track running. One of a series of eight paintings on the story of Mary Watson, 39 &41 from the exhibition 17 POETRY Escape Artists, Modernists Three poems by Peter Rose. in the Tropics, HEAPS OF DOCUMENTS curated by Gavin Wilson. Andrew Hamilton discusses a bishop's Slide and permission courtesy controversial new book and even more 42 the Cairns Regional Gallery. controversial Vatican documents. CROSS-TASMAN REFLECTIONS Cover design by Siobhan Jackson Geoffrey Milne goes to the shows 19 in New Zealand. Graphics pp6, 11 by Peter Fraser. Graphics pp12, 16, 17, 19, 20-21, THE CORNER OF RUSSELL STREET 23-24, 25,32-37,47 by Siobhan AND MAYHEM 44 Jackson. Story by Barry Dickins. FLASH IN THE PAN Location photographs pp28, 29, 3 1 by Bill Thomas, Reviews of the films Head On; Artemisia; Graphic p38 from Mike 20 The Opposite of Sex; The X-Files: Golding's woodcut for the cover MOLECULAR WAIT Fight the Future; Dead Letter Office; of Fredy Neptune, design by Dark City and The Intaview. Alex Snellgrove. Damien Broderick essays the Graphic p40 by Elise Crotty. nanotechnological future. 46 Eureka Street magazine Jesuit Publications 23 WATCHING BRIEF PO Box 553 THE STATE WE'RE IN Richmond VIC 3121 T el (03)9427 7311 Visit the brave new world of 47 Fax (03)9428 4450 administrative reform with Moira Rayner. SPECIFIC LEVITY

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 3 C OMMENT EUREKA SJRI:-Er M ORAG FRASER A magazine of public affairs. the arts and theology Publisher Daniel M adigan SJ Editor Art history Morag Fraser Assistant editor Kate Manton lessons Consulting editor Michael McGirr SJ Graphic designer T.,MO NTH'' co'" " ' NT"G toll' ' " in tngumg • nd complex Siobhan Jackson tale about Australia. Some North Queenslanders will be familiar Production and business manager with it. The rest of us, less blessed with coral atolls and myth, Sylvana Scannapiego will have to go in search. The painting, by Sydney artist Alan Oldfield, is part of a Editorial and production assistants series, completed over the decade 1986- 96 and based on the life Juliette Hughes, Paul Fyfe SJ, Geraldine and death of Mary Bea trice Battersby, Chris Jenkins SJ, Scott Howard Watson. As Oldfield's epic Contributing editors rendering suggests, Mrs Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ, Perth: Dean Moore Watson's 19th-century story Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor reaches into myth, but it is Queensland: Peter Pierce also firmly lodged in the United Kingdom correspondent tragic conflicts we are still Denis Minns OP rehearsing 100 years later. Mary Watson, nee Phillips, South East Asia correspondent was born in Cornwall, in Jon Greenaway 1860. She died when sh e was Jesuit Editorial Board still a young woman, of thirst, on a coral atoll near Lizard Island Peter L'Estrange SJ, Andrew Bullen SJ, off the far North Queensland coast. With her died her infant son, Andrew Hamilton SJ Ferrier, and a Chinese manservant, called Ah Sam. T hey had fled Peter Steele SJ, Bill Uren SJ Lizard Island after an attack by Aborigines. The attack seems to Marketing m anager: Rosanne Turner have been provoked by the Watsons' building on land that was Advertising representative: Ken Head a sacred site. Subscription manager: Wendy Marlowe Mary Watson kept a diary of her last days, found w ith her Administration and distribution body and kept now in the Cooktown Library. It is w ritten in the Kate Matherson, Claire Caddy, Lisa C row, unassailable moral shorthand of the desperate. T his is her final Kristen Harrison, N omeneta Schwaiger entry: Patrons October 11 , 1881 Emeka Street gra tefully acknowledges the Still all ali ve. Ferrier very much better this morning. Self feeling support of C. and A. Carter; the very weak. I think it will rain today; clouds very heavy; wind not trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; quite so hard. No ra in. Morning fine weather. Ah Sam preparing W.P. & M.W. Gurry to die, have not seen him since 9th. Ferrier more cheerful. Self not Eureka Street ma gazine, ISSN I 036- 1758 , feeling at all well. Have not seen any boat of any description. No Australia Post Pri nt Post approved pp349181 /00314, water. Nearly dead wi th thirst. is published ten times a yea r by Eureka Street Ma gazin e Pty Ltd, Alan Oldfield fo und a version of Mary Watson's tory when 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121 h e staying in a small sugar town north of Port Douglas in 1985. Tel: 03 9427 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450 Over the next ten years he constructed a visual libretto for her, e-mail: cu [email protected] t.org.a u and for those people-Aboriginal, English, Australian and http:/ fwww .openplanet.com.aufeureka Chinese- with whom she cam e into contact during her brief Responsibility for ed itorial co nten t is accepted by life. Eight of the pCanberra. That same week Michael Leunig drew a cartoon in the fiction, wi ll be returned only if accompanied by Fairfax press which pondered the universality of 'packaging'. ·1 sta mp ed, self-add ressed envelope. Requests for Another Fairfax journalist, Ross Gittins, a self-confessed rmission to reprint material fro m the magaz in e should be addressed in writing to: economics enthusiast, pondered the predominance of economics. The edi to r, Eureka Street m

4 EUREKA ST REET • SEPTEMBER 1998 Mary Watson's story can't be neatly packaged. quarter mile from the Watson's cottage, according to her In Cooktown she met and married Captain R.F. diary( ... Ah Sam found his hat, which is the only proof). Watson, who made his living fishing for sea slugs (little Oldfield has taken potent emblems and built them wonder their French name, beche de mer, is retained). into a visual narrative that traverses the territory of With their Chinese servants, they moved to Lizard Island paradox w e have to contend with still. His bech e de mer and built there. It is not easy to recover intention or pot has the weird resonance of Sidney Nolan's mask for cause. The Aboriginal attack which followed was met Ned Kelly. Metal in landscape. Chinese hats in lizard with white retribution from the mainland. country. Salt water and death by thirst. These are the bare shards. Mary's diaries, with their Australia. • brief reference to 'the natives', don't detail the reasons -Morag Fraser for the attack, or indeed anything about the natives Escape Artists: Modernists in the Tropics can be seen at the except that they are 'the other'. Nor do they reveal much Cairns Regional Gallery until 30 August; then in about the nature of the relationship between English RoclBrisbane City Gallery in November; Mosman Regional years ago. Ah Sam escaped from Lizard Island with Mary, Gallery, NSW, in Janu ary-February 1999; Ballarat Fin e Art in the beche de m er pot they used for boiling the sea Gallery, VIC, in March- May 1999, and the Perc Tu cl

C OMMENT: 2

LINCOLN W RIGHT

1 The Washington machine 0 'CO U "' T H ' ACUANC< With the United S t.te' A clue to the American side is to be found in the is on track,' Ambassador Andrew Peacock wryly remarked cosmopolitan German journalist Josef Joffe, who also works as he stood on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. at Harvard University's Olin Institute of Strategic Studies. In town for the annual Australia- US Ministerial Joffe argues that as the only superpower, the US can talkfest, the thin, well-dressed Peacock looked dignified maintainitsglobal clout by choosing between two strategies. and knowledgeable, and even smiled a little after At the price of grea ter instability, it can adopt the Madeleine Albright's rather limp speech to an audience British Empire's m ethod of controlling powerful nations of Sydney's well-heeled. through balance-of-power tactics. Or it can follow German As the US secret service whisked away the Secretary Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who, when faced with of State- a sort of restrained female Henry Kissinger­ encirclement in a hostile Europe last century, divided Peacock absorbed the cool atmosphere of the Harbour, so his enemies by making them dependent on German very different from the frenetic rush of Washington DC. succour. No longer the pained and faintly absurd would-be In Bismarck's scheme, all European countries except Liberal Prime Minister, Peacock seems to have found his France were tied to Germany as spokes to a hub. The aim m etier as Australia's top man in Washington, as the was to make their relations with Germany more socially prominent Scotch College boy made good at the important than their relations with each other. By eli vi ding centre of world power. potential en emies with favours, this minimised the And quite understandably so: for Peacock's role as the chance of hostile coalitions forming. defender of our faith in the American alliance is not a Australia is a spoke in the hub of American power, as difficult one. Indeed, quite the opposite. The only serious are most Asian nations, including Japan and down the arguments made against the alliance during the AUSMIN track a bit po sibly even China. Our relations with the talks were by disgruntled Americans writing in the US are 1nore important than any other, so that we would opinion pages of Australian newspapers. be very unlikely to join a future coalition of powers to Concerned about the money spent on keeping US undermine US predominance. forces in Asia, their basic point was that a forward And as the AUSMIN talks revealed, our defence presence in Asia was unnecessary; and that nations like establishment receives favours from the US to tay in Australia can pay their own way, with the US acting as touch with the computer-based Revolution in Military a distant balancer in the region. Affairs, as well as ongoing intelligence data. During AUSMIN, there was a sullen dispute over US If the attention lavished on Peacock by American wheat aid to Indonesia, but no Australian stepped forward journalists is a measure of anything, life in Washington with a strategic argument against the alliance, only the is sweet for the last Liberal of John Howard's generation inevitable tactical demands for trade concessions. with anything like charisma. • Why, after the Cold War, does Australia still back the US? And, more importantly, why does the US seem to Lincoln Wright is the economics correspondent at Federal need Australia even more? Parliament for the Canberra Times.

V OLUME 8 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 5 COMMENT: 3

F RANC! SULLIVAN Howard's fundamental test /I," c """N" " m CHm

6 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 Bad precedents

C ONNOffiS«llffi of imny will find two implicit standards that Ian Callinan is judged in other forums: even, Jack Waterford especially delicious things about the possibly, the bar of Parliament. embarrassm ent in which Ian Callinan, Does the case of Ian Callinan matter very much against the once the hope of the side, now finds him elf. The unethical conduct background of tax breaks, election euphoria, One Nation and sales of which he stands accused-and by a Federal Court judge at that­ of Telstra? It might, if only as yet another issue of standards, public is something of which many lawyers are suspected but in which it duty and leadership. is almost impossible to be found out. If John Howard has his way, an election will be fought about When Mr Callinan was a barrister, he was, according to Justice government fiscal rectitude, about claims that not only is the Goldberg of the Federal Court, at the least a witting conniver, economy humming because of his good management but that it possibly even the architect, of a strategy in which a rich man (who will act as a magic pudding providing more services at lower cost, knew he was in the wrong and who knew he did not have a leg to and, of course, about tax breaks for everyone. stand on) decided to use the processes of the court to buy time, Kim Beazley, by contrast, would like the election to be fought perhaps to force from the other party a compromise. In other words, about jobs, Labor's own version of tax cuts, and general issues of the less than that to which he was entitled. Government's credibility. He has ample material based on the Gov­ A statem ent of claim was prepared asserting facts which lawyers ernment's record with which to attack it, but that attack will inevita­ for the client had no reason to believe to be true. A series of bly be blunted by his party's own record of corruption of power. complicating and delaying strategies were devised and carried out. Tax cuts, even with goods and services taxes, might be attractive At various stages, the man frankly proclaimed by the politicians enough in a mere auction for votes. But there are ample signs that who chose him for the High Court as one likely to bring true the electorate would rather be wooed by some vision of the nation, conservative approaches and standards back to the court, wrote even perhaps by some notion of common sacrifice rather than letters showing that he knew what was going on. booty, if the end seemed worthwhile. And if, of course, the politicians So what? som e of his defenders, including the editor of the could be trusted to deliver it. The problem is that politicians on Australian in a cogent editorial, have asked. We know that lawyers both sides are in such odour that neither party is much trusted or do this all the time. Yes, but they do not often get caught at it. The thought to inspire. Voting for Pauline Hanson at least delivers a reason why they don't is that what passes between lawyer and loud raspberry to politicians who do little to inspire any sense of client is privileged, and cannot be disclosed except with the client's community, who hardly ever evoke notions of the common good, consent. who use the public administration and public purse for partisan or The problem for Justice Callinan, and the solicitors who personal purposes, and who have been engaged, with bipartisan instructed him, is that the rich man ultimately went bankrupt, zeal, in stripping the public sector of whatever declining capacity leaving the other person (a nd others) to whistle for his money it has to protect any popular sovereignty. That she is devoid of properly due to him. The irony was that the creditor went to the answers-and very nasty in focusing her politics of blame on receiver in bankruptcy and offered him $1500 for all of the documents Aborigines, migrants and other vulnerable sectors of the associated with the litigation. It was now the receiver's property community-many of her supporters will recognise, possibly more and privilege, and he sold. quickly than her detractors will recognise that mainstream It was a profitable investment. The creditor now has a judgment politics does not have answers that satisfy either. (albeit one under appeal) against the solicitors for abuse of the processes of the court, and there was no more damning evidence 0 NE MIGHT BE CYNlCAL about Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke's against them than the advices emanating from Ian Callinan. records as Prime Ministers, but they were the last in long lines of There is a second irony. During the 1980s, Ian Callinan politicians who recognised that a government's reputation for prosecuted Lionel Murphy, and did so with great skill and integrity was critical for survival. Paul Keating's tribal loyalties professionalism. But he did one unusual thing during the trial undermined his capacity to govern as surely as his habit of shorten tting which caused considerable comment. political processes by making deals with interest groups. Lionel Murphy produced a number of character witnesses to tell John Howard, in opposition, talked an old language of the jury that he was a splendid chap with a wonderful record. fundamental decencies, but in government has never seemed as Character evidence is of little probative value and is usually unconvincing as when he has had to defend his inaction on clear allowed to go by without being cross-examined. But one of the breaches of standards. On this, the prima facie case against Ian character witnesses was Justice Michael Kirby, then a justice of the Callinan is at least as clear as travel rorting, incapacity to understand Industrial Court. Callinan set out to discredit him with some notions of conflict of interest, and the use of the public service as offensive questions suggesting, in effect, that the man owed his if it were held on freehold rather than leasehold. judicial appointment and his fame to patronage from Lionel Murphy Normally, in an election period, the cautious voter would be when Murphy was in government. Implicitly, the jury was being wondering which party is most likely to live up to its rhetoric. told, he would say such nice things about the man who had given Perhaps even asking what rhetoric most inspires the head or the him undeserved jobs. heart. This time around, I'd just be happy with rhetoric, if only as Leave entirely aside any delicious but highly unworthy proof that someone, somewhere, has standards they are bound to speculation about what Justice Kirby, now also on the High Court, fail to reach. • might feel in the unfortunate event that the conduct of Mr Callinan arose there. The real irony is that it might be by just the same Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times.

VoLUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 7 L EITERS

Eureka Street welcom es le tters Christ stood for. We have li vee\ with fro m its readers. Short le tters a re ju st such a betrayal for far too long. Rainbow worriers m ore likely to be publish ed, a nd It is true that the Eucharist all letters m a y be edited . Le tters 'celebrates the unity that underlies our From Michael B. Kelly, spokesperson mus t b e s ig n e d , a nd s h o uld diversity', as Madigan says. However, for Lhe Rainbow Sash movement. at this table we celebrate heterosexual include a contact phon e number A picture, they say, is worth a marriages, wedding anniversaries, thousand words. On Pentecost Sunday and the w ri ter's n am e and address. re ligio us professions, priestly the C hurch was offered a startling If submitting by em a il, a contact ordinations, the lega l profession, the image. T hat day the Archbishop of phon e number is essential. Address: racing fraternity, ethnic cultures and Melbourne publicly refused commun­ eure ka@ jespub.jesuit.org.au football tea ms. Everyone dresses up ion to 50 people who were wea ring and celebrates! Yet gay people must brilliant rainbow-coloured sashes. Old not wear rainbows. No symbols, and young, gay and straight, celibate prayers or processions for us. We must and sexual! y active-all were refused. be anonym ous, lest we disturb the T h e Archbishop then formally ' unity'. The silence and invisibility rebuked them, and the congregation demanded of us

8 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 issue of homosexuality and the Church. May I just fo c us on one very Credit where important issue which he raises in deal­ ing with the activities of the Rainbow credit's due Sash Movement. Madiga n queri es the From Peter Graves propriety of the dem onstration of the Thanks for the good news on where sash at the moment of communion. He som e of our foreign aid is going­ T his m onth, says that this is 'the mom ent in which successfully alleviating rural poverty th e w riter of each letter we we celebrate the unity which under­ among pig farmers in C hina ('Even publish w ill receive a pack of li es our diversity ... around the table Eden Goes to Market', Eureka Street, postcards featuring set fo r us by a loving God' etc. July/August 1998). cartoon s and graphics, Firstly, let m e say that Jesus The timely pioneering work on by Eureka Street regulars, himself felt no such diffidence at the micro-credit by Bangladesh's Grameen first Eucharist. There was, in fact, no Bank is being successfully replicated D ean M oore, Siobh an Jackson genuine unity around that table. Jesus and has resulted in 14 million of our and Tim Metherall. had no hesitation in pointing that out world's poor having access to this in very blunt language to Judas (L uke important form of small loans. Equally place, but so do clear strong actions. 22, 21- 23). important, the founder of the Grameen We have held up a mirror in which the Secondly, Jesus felt no reticence in Bank, Professor Yunus, has been Church must face the ugliness of what making his presence fe lt inside the advising the World Bank since 1995 on it is doing to gay people. Even m ore Temple. similar lending practices now adopted importantly, the Rainbow Sash offers He preached his radical message by that Bank. a 'call to consciousness', as feminist there much to the chagrin of the So important has this financing theologian Carter Heyward com­ religious establishm ent. He was even becom e that an international m ented, 'that things really are as bad more vigorous in dealing with the Micro-credit Summit was h eld in as they seem . The only ethical way to entrepreneurs of the day who were in Washington in February 1997 to spread be a Catholic in that kind of situation that place for their unworthy purposes the good news. Representatives there is to be a resistor. ' This is the painful (Luke 19: 45-46). fr om 137 countries made a commit­ experience of 'Conscientisation', that It is ironic that Madigan should use m ent to extend these small loans to first crucial step on the road to libera­ the analogy of keeping the peace at the 100 million of the poorest of the poor tion. Gay people are waking up and family Christmas dinner. I suspect by 2005. This would en able 500 standing up for ourselves after many that he has never had the experience million people to move out of poverty. centuries of persecution. We refuse to of having his very identity rejected by To its credit, the Australian be ' non-persons', rejecting that fate member of his own family. If he had, Government joined this commitment which liberation theologian Gustavo I suggest that he would never use such and has since increased its financial Gutierrez claims is the wors t an analogy. support by an extra $2 million in 1997/ oppression of all. This 'waking up' is I wonder if Jesus would sit around 98. However, the budget papers on our the only true way forward. at such an occasion drinking a nd foreign aid for 1998/99 do not appear The real question in all this is not politely discussing the weather and the to continue this strong and practical how gay people can dare to upset the football? Eucharistic m eal. It is how our The Eucharist is indeed the fa mily brothers and sisters can continue to eat table. It is entirely appropriate that at this table when we are refused. Yet those family m embers who have been there was anoth er wom an on oppressed and persecuted sh ould, Pentecost Sunday w h o drew m y when they approach that table, give mother aside. Mum had worn the sash some clear sign to the fa m ily that if and was still shaking from the palpable unity aro und tha t table is to be rejection. 'I am so sorry,' she said, 'but genuine, then their pain needs to be I want you to know that when I saw addressed. you rainbow-sash people being refused I do not w ish to hurt D aniel I said to the priest, "Well in that case Madigan's feelings, but may I say to I won't take communion either I"' We him t ha t t hose of us who are must make the journey to jus tice confr onted daily by the wreckage of together. Please, join us. human live caused by the C hurch's Michael B. Kelly teachings and institutional response to Rye, VIC homosexuality will find his attitude a bit precious. I som etimes wonder if this rea lly Table talk is a Church that was founded by one who was a courageous and outspoken From David McKenna dissident and who wa fin ally put to Daniel Madiga n's Comment- 'Telling death by the religious establishment It Straight' (Eureka Street, July/August of the day. 1998) has som e very sensibl e and David McKenna enlightened things to say about the Eas t Kew, VIC

V oLUME 8 N uMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 9 commitment. At 0. 27 per cent of GDP, our mixed Ab original descen t h ave t heir IRELAND foreign aid unfortunately continues to be well Aboriginality recognised by our law and they below the UN target of 0.7 per cent. don't qualify for native title rights under tribal AND AUSTRALIA Our aid needs one clear objective: poverty law and custom. The fact that the Federal Parl­ reduction through sustainable developrnent. iam ent permits perso ns of mixed Aboriginal As your article demonstrated, micro-credit descent to apply as nati ve title claiman ts 1798-1998 could be an important way of successfully simply means that instead of applying their law alleviating rural poverty for hundreds of mil­ and custom, the Parliam ent has applied our law. lions of our world's poor. It's the right kind The argument that tribal law adapts to A conference of the Humanities of foreign aid too- a hand-up, not a hand-out. modern times is spurious. Tribal law is given Research Centre,Australian Peter Graves fr om the spirits; it cannot be changed. The National University, and Campbell, ACT adaptation spoken of may allow the substi tu­ LaTrobe University tion of a gun for a spear in some circumstances but it would not allow for the inclusion of Monday 28 September Title fight non-m embers of the tribe into full member­ - Friday 2 October 1998 ship. Any argument suggesting otherwise is From Fr Brenden T. W alters simply not correct and probably self-serving. A forum of A ustralian and I was surprised to see my name being bandied The only Aboriginal people who have a internatio nal sc ho lars around in an article by Fr Frank Brennan SJ in ri ght to native title to land are those who have coveri ng the Irish-Australian the July edition of the Jesuit m agazine Eurel

10 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 It would be a mi stake for the Catholic The answer is of course obvious and How, as a more specific example, can a bishops to equate Aboriginal social justice and unpalatably so. For if in fact all who say th ey member of a go vernment that recognises Tibet welfare with an Aboriginal political agenda. are following Christ are not necessarily fol­ as part of China enjoy a clear conscience, know­ Whilst it m ay be politically expedient to do lowing Him, then the question must be asked, ing that C hinese rule will eventually result so, it is factually incorrect and not conducive who is? And who would want to raise that in the destruction of the Tibetans as a people to the best interests of all Aboriginal people. question totally, frankly, honestly with them- and the total sinicisation of their country? N evertheless, that is what has happened. elves before God, let alone in the midst of (A process that is being carried out with grea t Those people who have successfully used the an ecumenical assembly? brutality, as our politicians well know.) Catholic social justice organisations to The unfortunate reality is that it all has Think, as another example, of the advance the Aboriginal political cause have become merely symbol. One man is born a situation of the Kurds. Any government that acted beyond their authority. They have taken Catholic so he is a Catholic, another man is recognises, without qualifica tion, the govern­ the Catholic bishops down an inappropriate born a Protestant so he is a Protestant. Is the m ents of Iran , Iraq and Turkey, and so and divisive path. The only proper course of Catholic more righteous than the non­ implicitly recognises their national bounda­ action is for the Catholic bishops officially to Catholic or vice versa? We can all point the ries, is conniving at a situation in which the disassociate themselves from P ' / j Kurds have no country of their Aboriginal politics and to i t'l own, and are condemned to ov:' w f . 1 make it clear that Fr Brennan t ).t 1 l.v~ f"" ale · remain oppressed and rebel- 1 does not speak on behalf of th e "' '-iy..t J W 1' IJ, ~1 V lious minorities in countries Catholic Church . ~ ."' ~ r (" fl-Y whtch do not have respect for Brenden T. Wa lters O"'tJ 1 J ,1s,r017 the rights of minorities. As a Kensington, NSW \..., , \...... , 1.1 , 1 , It' -"? result, there LS no prospect of J 1\i\'...,v- ~ peace 1n that regwn; there r seem to be only two ways in More than ....-• which it could be achieved: symbols ( (] wholesale killing of Kurds so From Greg Mansell altogether or reduce them to a ( Andrew Hamilton writes in totally crushed minority (a nd his article 'The Clas h of Sym­ could yo u call a state achieved bols' (Eu reka Street, June 1998) that way 'peace'?) or redrawing that 'symbols are the lifeblood ~ ~ ~ of national boundaries to give 4 of churches'. What an extra- 5So:o;;; them unity and autonomy. ordinary statement! If I was The latter is probably even thirsty would you give me ~'f!/r more unthinkable in our world water or a picture of a cup? of greed and rivalry then the Unfortunately the secret is ( former. out-the church, at least . Maybe some C hristian according to Andrew, would politician could explain to m e opt for the picture! how their consciences cope Now this may all sound with such facts. facile, but of course it isn't . Talking about national The Catholic Church rightly \'f' boundaries, I wonder how discerns that there are non- \ na tiona! leaders feel about nego tiable stands that it must take on matters finger, but are any of us closer to God? For theirs being in so man y cases creations of of faith. It is therefore quite right to be surely this is the only point of faith. Western colonialism. What could be a m ore concerned that those who share together with The questions raised concerning Kennett obvious, arbitrary and artificial imposition of them in communion are indeed of the same and Clinton pale into insignificance compared colonialism than the line that divides the faith, one body. The real problem however is with the weight of the questions our divisions island of New Guinea into two halves? Do not whether they are collectively one body, raise. leaders like Suharto always just accept them, but whether they are one body in communion When Jesus said 'unless you eat of my I wonder, or do they som etimes think about with Christ. body and drink of my blood you have no life the implica tion: if the boundaries imposed by C hristendom has been splintered asunder in yourself', did He really mean it, or was He Western colonialism are sacrosanct does it not and it would be fo lly, an act of madness, to merely speaking symbolically? follow that Western colonialism must have declare that this fra ctured, divided, rebellious Greg Mansell been right and properl (I guess they are house was indeed Christ's body. If the Second Golden Valley, TAS sacrosanct only when the alternative is Vatican Council is rightly quoted as saying drawing back from them , no t when the that what C hristians have in common is their possibility is of expanding beyond them.) baptism and their following of Christ, then it Lives at risk Finally, to bring a hotch-potch of a letter must be asked was the Council right in saying to a close, I will ask for comm ents on m y this? I am sure you will find in scripture that From Gavan Breen definition of an international diplomat: a per­ we were all baptised into one body. If this is Is it possible for a top politician to save his son who would let a million lives be put at indeed so, and if we are all following Christ (or her) soul ? How, for example, can a person risk rather than openly doubt the word of a as the Council states, then where is there maintain C hristian or other religious leader of a 'friendly country' (or trading partner) . division ? Aren't we united? Why aren't we principles while being a lea ding part of a Gavan Breen all sharing communion? government that condones genocide? Alice Springs, NT

V OLUME 8 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 11 ~ The Mo~h's Traffic

and how it distributed government monies On e wonders h ow widespread this Hun Sen's score and projects. Accusations of vo te-buying attitude m ight have been among other have accompanied the building of schools observers there. JIOG, the main election and hospitals, and, in one case, even the observation body, com priscd of government S ATURDAY, l AucusT was the most demo­ distribution to villagers of bags full of representatives from around the world, gave cratic day that Cambodia had experienced monosodium glutamate. To be fair, if all its cautious seal of approval two days after in a year by most observers' reckoning. governments were restrained from pork­ the election-that i , before the National Over 90 per cent of eligible voters cast their barrelling, every democracy on the face of Election Committee was prepared to ballots in the overdue elections, under the the earth would be without its current indicate which way the count was going. eyes of 500 observers from 35 countries. administration. But then it's unlikely that The American representatives, observing Despite claims of electoral fraud by many of them would demand the return of independently of JIOG, stated on the eve of Funcinpec and the Sam Rainsy party, the water pumps from people who voted against the election that the process was United Nations has accepted that the them, as is rumoured to be the case in some fundamental! y flawed. Yet by the following elections were generally free and fair. Yet Cambodian villages. Tuesday they had experienced a change of questions are still being asked. So arc people The lack of hard evidence of abuses in heart and declared the election to be dubious simply because in their view the Cambodia's outer provinces in the lead-up basically fair. As the opposition's chief wrong person won or because the election to last month's elections is indicative of the concern was with the propriety of the count, was undermined long before the first thi raises serious doubts over the result. Saturday in August? After the event, there seemed to be few Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party people (former Treasurer Ralph Willis being (CPP) was out-polled by the combined vote an exception) prepared to include more than for Prince Ranarridh's Funcinpcc and the the events of polling day in their analysis of Sam Rainsy party. But with only 41 per cent the election process. of the vote nationwide, CPP looks to have It is hard not to have sympathy with the sccured64 of the 122 seats. A change in the view, expressed by Tony Kevin and others, seat allocation formula in June favoured that we do the best we can, as an them greatly. The performance of the international community, to establish free opposition groups was remarkable, and open government but aid must resume considering their restricted access to radio before Cambodia gets any worse. The and television during the campaign, and ascription of the 'free and fair' label by JIOG the fact that the National Election Com­ came with this end in mind. It will also help mittee supervising the poll is stacked with ins ti tu tiona! weakness of Cambodia's smooth the way for Cambodia's entry into Hun Sen cronies. There has also been vio­ fledgling democracy under which principles ASEAN. However, with the administra­ lence and intimidation visited upon oppo­ of justice are compromised by power tion that will emerge-which CPP will sition figures since last year's coup, structures that border on the feudal. control despite failing to secure a two thirds evidenced by the scores of people who came Cambodians are used to doing what they majority-there is no ironclad guarantee to Phnom Penh for protection immediately are told. This has allowed Hun Sen to win that the dollars will help. following the election. an election despite his unpopularity, and But more importantly, this election was The proposition that a culture of fear in permitted an international community tired a missed opportunity to let Cambodians the provinces influenced the result is a hard of trying to fix Cambodia's problems to feel that, after decades of war and oppression, one to dismiss. Hun Sen has an aroma about ignore the question marks and legitimise they had some control over their collective him that has offended the Cambodian nose the result. destiny through peaceful means. It is not so since his time as Vietnam's puppet ruler. There is a view that any result was a much that the opportunity was missed on Yct by claiming the rural vote he managed good result in Cambodia if it provided the polling clay but that it was not there for the to reverse the 71 per cent vote against him stability needed for the delivery of much­ taking in the first place. Perhaps the defining registered in Phnom Penh. needed aid to the people. This certainly moment in the lead-up to the election was Two months after last year's coup, the seems to have played a part in the thinking the visit by Mary Robinson, the UN's High office of the United Nations High Commis­ of Australia's former ambassador to Commissioner for Human Rights, in late sioner for Human Rights released a report Cambodia, Tony Kevin. He led a team of January. Hun Sen put her on the back foot detailing the extra-judicial killings of independent volunteer observers of the immediately by attacking Cambodia's opposition figures. Despite repeated Cambodian election (VOCE). The purpose UN human rights representative, Thomas assurances that the killings would be of the trip was made clear prior to going Hammarberg, for bias and untruthful investigated, Hun Sen has yet to launch an with a communique that outlined the reporting. Instead of repeating demands that inquiry into the allegations of murder and priorities. One of the primary goals of the Hun Sen launch his promised inquiry into harassment. mission was to 'encourage international the extra-judicial killings, Robinson had to The CPP, since it seized control of public opinion to give t h e election spend nearly her entire trip defending the government, has been selective about where appropriate credibility'. UN's reputation.

12 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 Whether through Hun Sen's political this building a wag has pinned an illustrated Access quality acumen, or lack of sufficient international page by a physiotherapist about remedial will, Cambodia has been let down. The exercises for the sportsman or sportswoman. theological power grab of last July has been laundered It is mordantly titled 'Doing a Stretch '. in last month's election. The signs in Jika Ji ka, to which the education -Jon Greenaway white painted pathway next leads one, are wherever you are altogether grimmer, because more boldly jesting. In this 'electronic zoo', with its in Australia Coburg college 'aviary-like yards' (the guidebook's apt description), fi ve prisoners died of Charles Sturt Eow LETIERI NG identifies the pub nearest asphyxiation in 1987 because of a fire that to Pentridge as Brown's Hotel. These days, they had lit themselves in protest against University this brick pile in Melbourne's northern the conditions in Jika Jika. Illuminated by in association with St Mark·s suburbsismorecheerilystyledSummerworld. flickering fluorescent tubes, the cell blocks National Theologica l Centre, On an afternoon of hail, sleet, grim grey fan out like the spokes of a wheel. Each cell Ca nberra and StJo hn's scudding clouds, a temperature in single has a double bunk. Some stained and torn College, Mo rpeth , offers a figures and fallen leaves slippery under foot, mattresses have been l eft, as if for comprehensive range o f the pub's name is choicely incongruous. verisimilitude, together with runners, After a two-hour tour of one of Australia's television sets and innocuous magazines. courses in theology by most renowned prison sites, we repair to Some of the cells sport stickers that read distance educa tio n, including: the warmth of the Summerworld, for an variously: Welcome to Our Smokefree • Bachelor o f Theology Abbot's Stout from the oldest barman still Home/Club/Car. • Graduate Diplo ma in pouring grog in the city. In a large open area of Jika Ji ka, one Pa storal Ca re and Counselling For a short season all who wished could gazes through glass at confiscated items: • Graduate Ce rtifica te in see 'Pentridge Prison Unlocked'. Many sharpened toothbrushes, combs and plastic Church Lea dership and children were brought along by their parents rulers refashioned as weapons; tattoo Mana gement or guardians. Perhaps they were visiting in m achines; resewn tennis balls that had been • Master of Ministry the same spirit as they would the Old thrown over the prison walls with drugs Melbourne Gaol. But while 'D' Division is inside them. Facing Contraband, at the other On ca mpus courses progress still replete with the horrors of 19th-century end of the room, is an exhibit of warders' from BTh through to research penology-heavy wooden doors, narrow equipment: clubs, birches, handcuffs, guns, at PhD level. Courses are cells, cold stone- the maximum security spiked collars. N earby are the remnants of fl exible and suitable fo r those wing called Jika Jika (which opened as a library where some books have been in o rdained ministry as well as recently as 1980) lacks the patina of time preserved: Social Service Made Simple, those wanting to pursue past to obscure or sentimentalise its horrors. Watergate veteran Charles Colson's Born studies as part o f their church Before reaching Jika Jika, tourists go A gain, Scientologist L. Ron Hubbard's and community involvement. through the area in which prisoners received Dianetics, Tess of the D'Urbervilles by The CSU School of Theology their official visits. There are minatory Thomas Hardy, Martin Boyd's A Difficult notices concerning the sharing of needles, Young Man . provides an ecumenical , and the exchange of contraband. Once There are signs of the dead in Pentridge. inclusive approach to granted the privilege of visits, prisoners had The graves of Ronald Ryan and nine others theologica l educa tion . to don green security overalls which were lie in a small, fenced-off gra s enclosure. Applica tio ns and inq uiries: without pockets, and were sealed at the Further on is a plaque to Warder Hodson, neck. Th e sartorial precautions didn't for whose murder-allegedly committed Admiss io ns O ffice impede drug traffic. during his successful escape from the jail in Charl es Stun niversity From the visitors' area one moved to the December 1965- Ryan was executed. He Locked Bag 676 recreation yards. This is a desolate space. was hanged in Pentridge. On the way to the Wagga Wagga NSW 2678 The green baize of the upended pool table ga llows from the point of his escape, one pho ne 02 6933 2121; was slashed long ago. A garden seat lies in encounters unexpectedly sinister sights. o r contact the Aca demic the empty swimming pool. The wind howls The laundry was h oused in the oldest Administrator, Sc hool of through the broken windows of the main remaining building of the prison, which Theology, pho ne 02 6273 1572 recreation block. This is a world of signs, to dates from the 1850s. Evidently, black-painted be vigilantly interpreted. Some interdict drying racks were used to snap many a bone, rebellion. Others subvert authority. N o as prisoners revenged themselves again t Rough Play is permitted by the pool, as if it one another. The tersest and most chilling CHARLES STURT T were in any Australian suburb. At Coburg, of all the graffiti in the jail is here too, U N V E R S y though, Nudity Will Not Be Tolerated At promising only this: 'One Day Noddy'. Any Time. There is, of course, No Smoking, Eleven people were hanged at Pentridge. Eating or Drinking in the Library. Neither First was David Bennett, on 26 September are there any books, in the alcove now 1932, for 'carnally knowing and abusing a labelled Kev's Bottle Shop. On one wall of girl' . The ' Brown-Out Murderer', US

VOLU ME 8 NU MBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 13 serviceman Edward Leonski, was hanged in by ERA. Sitting in the witness box and According to Ja cqui Katona, executive 1942. Three wen t to the ga llows on whispering mostly one-word answers, she officer of Gundjehmi Aboriginal Corpora- 19 February 1951: two m en who had pleaded not guilty to the charge. 'It's Mirrar tion, established in 1995 to look after the murdered an SP bookie in Carlton, and land,' she told the court. 'I have a right togo interes ts of the Mirrar, t h e current Jenn y Lee, who died sitting in a chair bee a use because I'm the traditional owner.' controversy over Jabiluka is part of a long she co uld not stand. Lee was the last woman She is not the only one to have fronted history of attempts by big corporations to to hang in Australia. On 3 February 1967, upto thesmallbrickjailinJabiru, thecompany mine uranium on Mirrar land. Ryan was the last m an. The prison guide town established by ERA in the ea rl y '70s to Explorations for the first mine, Ranger, directs attention to the gully trap, on e floor service the Ranger mine. Over 400 people started in the '70s, without any reference to below the gallows, into which the executed have been arrested in demon strations the Minar or other indigenous people in pri soners' excrement was washed. But, against the proposed mine since the Minar the area. A subseq uent Commonwealth properly, he gives Ryan his famous, ga me established a blockade against it in May. government inquiry into the mine, the Fox las t words: 'God bless you . Make it quick.' The protes t has seen an unprecedented Inquiry, ruled that the land containing both Last s top on the tour-for coffee, coalition be tween Aboriginal and the Ranger and Jabiluka uranium leases souve nirs or Victoria Bitter-is the environmental groups. The Jabiluka mine belonged indisputably to the Mirrar. Pentridge Prison Unlocked Cafe. One then is the first t o take But due to the Ranger mine's perceived escapes with relief on to Sydney Road. advantage of the Coalition A. economic benefits, the inquiry also argued T here has been much of legend, little of Government's easing of · it should be allowed to proceed, and the imaginative literature about Pen tridge. Labor's three-mine p o li cy . ~- · mine was exempted from legislation Garry Disher's crime novel, The Fallout Environmental and anti- . ~ requiringAboriginalconsentforexploration (1997) described the jail as a place 'where nuclear groups claim and mining on Aboriginal land. the world seemed to darken, all light and that, if successful, Jabiluka After years of negotiation, ERA and goodness swallowed up by the bluestone couldprovide thego-ahead ~ Abori ginal elders signed an agreement for walls'. Some of the m en sight-seeing with for up to 20 additional Ranger in November 1978. A second agree- us were evidently revisiting familiar places uranium mines across the I - m ent, for Jabiluka, was concluded between and their associations. What 'Pentridge' country. 'There's a whole v . Aborigines and US mining company m ea ns for a younger generati on that has lot of other uranium mines ~~ Pancontinental in 1982, but put on hold as been deprived of its history by edu ca tional on strea m in Australia,' _ a result of the Labor Government's three- neglect, is more problematic. For the older maintains Peter Garrett, .' mine policy. visitor, or voyeur, this is a site where all is president of the Australian · - ERA, which purchased the Jabiluka lease 'cheerless, dark and deadly', a statem ent in Conservation Foundation (ACF) . 'We are from Pancontinental in 1991 , began con- stone and in stains of the denial of hope. really at the crucial point in deciding struction in June this year after receiving -Peter Pierce whether or not we want a nuclear and radio- state and national government approval to active future in the hinterland of Australia.' push ahead with the mine. Home on 'Jabilu ka is definitely a tes t case,' agrees The Mirrar insist that both the Ranger Eric Miller, who has been involved in the and Jabiluka deals were reached under duress the Ranger anti-uranium m ovem ent since 1978. and deceit on the part of mining company FIRST CLANCE, Yvonne Margarula 'Kakadu is one of our m ost beautiful places. representatives. Among the elders to ink appears an unlikely candidate to be leading It's a World Heritage area. If a company can the deals was Margarula's fath er, Toby the b

14 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 • 1 a e 'There were no benefits from Ranger. The pressure was on Aboriginal people to spend their royalty m oney on providing water, power, roads and road m aintenance. In Australia there is no other community that is required to m ake that choice that C m rr CA~~~:,~R ~~:~~~ i ;m~~~:~~~,:~~l~t~Australian Literature at James Cook Univer­ sity; Andrew Nette is a freelance journalist. Richard Treloar is associate chaplain at Trinity College, Parkville, Melbourne.

V oLUME 8 N uMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 15 SPORTING LrFE

P ETER P IERCE Clipped at Cluden

L"' Mmou'"'' if on ' em• li e< ec,le, Townevillc festivity. In the second race I backed the Zephyr Zip prides itself on being a sports- loving place. N ot only filly Supermarket, trained out of Mackay by Laurie are two of its fo ur state MPs from One Nation, but it Manzelman, who is also a dab hand with pacers. supports both a bas ketball and a Rugby League team . Supermarket saluted, beating colts sired respectively At th e latter's hom e ground, ca nnon fi re, w hip by Bl azing Saddles and Burea ucracy. Top perform ers cracking and a troupe of buckskin-clad teenage all, the three sires of the placegettcrs might be tumblers greet every try by the N orth Queensland bemused at where their progeny end up. Bu t they Cowboys. This season they would wish to have been would admire the times they ran. Townsville must busier. More exotic entertainment also gra ces the city. be one of the fastest tracks in Australia. If the timing My local pub staged a bull-riding contest on a Sunday can be credited, the course records for 1000m, 1200m afternoon when it was too cold for the usual parade and 1400m are a slick 55, 68 and 81 seconds. of wom en in bikinis. It was Townsville where Kostya The entertainment, apart from the racing, was Tszyu had his com eback fi ght and Australia's Davis varied. While risking a dagwood dog, I watched three Cup tie against Uzbekistan was staged. Unfortunate­ slim girls in boots and black body suits popping behind ly, public outrage and doubtful sponsorship led to the stage to don a succession of funny hats which they cancellation of a pro jected Caged Combat Contest at m odelled. Later the same stage groaned as 40 wom en the Convention Centre. clambered aboard in the hope of being judged the most In search of more sedate and traditional sporting fashionable on the fi eld. There was an army band fa re, I took the H ermit Park shuttle bus to the (Lavarack barracks is just down the road) that offered­ racetrack at Cluden, fo r the 11 5th renewal of the am ong other tunes-a rendition of 'Advance Australia Townsville Cup, 'The N orth's Premier Race Day'. Fair'- The racebook helpfully printed the words. In There was plenty of company. A genial crowd of Melbourne, the John Wheeler-trained Maybe Rough 13,000 turned up, the biggest for 20 years. They had staged a form reversal to win the last big jum ps race come from all over North Queensland, as indeed had of the season, the His kens Steeple. And then the horses fo r the Cup, who were trained from places it was time for the Cup. as far flung as Mt Isa and the Gold Coast, the Atherton Tableland and Eagle Fa rm. Cup Day- in the tropical L AS T LI STED EVENT of the Australian racing year, the m id-winter- was unseasonably grey, although there T own sville Cup was first run in 1884, w hen was no rain. Clouds came down to the tops of the low R.F. Kelly's Ellington go t the money. T his time a full hills that ring the course. The journey out along fi eld of 16 presented for the 2 100m -j ourney which Charters Towers and Bowen Roads offered a grisly began at the top of the straight. Coming off a second snapshot of Australian suburbia. A few elegant, high­ in the Rockhampton Cup and a win in the Mackay set Queenslanders struggled for room amid KFCs and Cup, the fa vourite, Chappel Dancer, won easily, but car yards and such places of resort as the Hi Roller connections had to wait half an hour to get their hands and Casino City m otels. Then it was across the broad on the trophy. There had been a rash of pro tests all Ross River, past the abandoned abattoirs and in to over Australia and the T ownsville Cup was no the track. exception, with third against second an d fourth The fi rst horse that I saw was ga lloping boldly against third and second because of a scram ble near fo r the post. Unfortunately it had dumped its jockey, the winning post . All were upheld. When that leading local h oop Ray Warren, and bolted. My adjudication was done, I had time to back the mare Moonee Va lley badge go t m e through the gate, but Lieutenant Austen which took th e Jim Gibbard not into the Members'. That select band can occupy Memorial Cup, then to head back for town, just as the top deck of one of the two fin e old grandstands at the course broadcaster made the immemorial call fo r Cluden. Roaming around them were m en in costumes the parents of a lost boy to collect him and the and wom en dressed as if for Oaks Day at Flemington. dagwoocl cl og settled uneasily within me. • Ch eap champagn e was the beverage of choice, presumably connected loosely to th e no tion of Peter Pierce is Eureka Street's turf correspondent.

16 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 THE CHURCH

ANDREW HAMILTO N Heaps of documents INJu", John Heap,,

V oLUME 8 N uMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 17 of teaching which places Rome, bishops statem ent, and all bish ops are appointed by This difference between the images of and theologians in their correct relations. Rome, the control by Rome of local churches church represented by Heaps and the Roman Similarly, the limiting of Bishops' Confer­ is strong. Wh ere relations are not harmonious, documents suggest that this risk cannot be en ces defines boundaries and hierarchies in such control could be paralysing. Nor does discounted in the Catholic Church. The com­ responsibility for the church. the legislation giving effect to definitive mitted Christians whom Heaps represents The attempt to create a tightly integrated beliefs provide clear checks against Roman are usually inspired by the stories of Jesus church is clearly directed to the weaknesses au thorities treating as definitive any belief in the Gospels. These stories, particularly potential in Heaps' vision of church. But it which they believe-without ge neral sup­ in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, depict is also open to questions. They arise out of port-to be so. In citing as a possible example Jesus as critical of a society based on tight the difficulty and consequences of attempt­ of such beliefs the controversial rejection by boundaries and hierarchies . He cau ses ing to create, by decree, a tightly constructed Leo XIII of Anglican Orders, Cardinal offence by breaking down boundaries. The church. In the 19th century there were Ratzinger's commentary illustrate that this risk, therefore, of a church which is seen to fear is not ungrounded. While impose such structures, is that it will also be Some would argue that one of the the results of the m easures seen to fight against Jesus. Its moral m ay well be constructive, the authority will be compromised. unforeseen results of Humanae Vitae was potential dangers in them to prevent effective parish teaching should not be overlooked. I oo NOT WISH to suggest that these dangers The experience of societies represent the reality of either construction. about sexuality and its uses ... This in which authorities protect Only an unduly harsh critic would draw judgment may be mistaken. But it the basis of identity by this conclusion. Nor do I want to imply that forbidding dissent by officials the church can ever be adequately described illustrates the danger of the Roman also counsels hesitation. For in the sociological categories used here, or church's defending its theoretical right to the result has often been the in any other such categories. spread of disbelief, not the But the questions which I have raised strengthen the unity of the church in acceptance of beliefs and are critical bot h for church and for faith and in its life at the cost of losing symbols. The issue is simply Australian society. In both cases, we ask taken temporarily off the how to remedy the fl aws evident in loosely its practical ability to do so. agenda. Cynicism reigns, as structured societies with a weak sense of those who defe nd the identity, so that we can appeal to a richer many social reasons why the centralisation prevailing ideology are assumed to do so for and more effective shared identity. In civil of the church in the Vatican should have promotion or out of blind loyalty. The result society, shonky stratagem s and proposal been widely welcom ed. It met the need felt is that an often defen sible case is lost by abound. Contracts that exclude informed by many local churches for a firm sense of default. The recent Victorian practice of criticism by insiders, the hardening of iden tity in the midst of hostile societies devising contracts that muzzle teachers and boundaries by scapegoating the unemployed, and intellectual cult ures. health workers illustrates the paradox. Aborigines and immigrants, draconian In the contemporary Western world, Some would argu e th at on e of the sentencing of petty offenders, detaining societies, including churches, are rela ti vel y unforeseen results of Humanae Vitae was asylum seek ers, defining Australia loosely organised. The basis of allegiance to to prevent eff ective parish teaching about effectively in terms of its white population, voluntary organisations is strong personal sexuality and its u ses. It has becom e are all attempts to legislate for identity. commitm ent. In such a context, the attempt impossible to speak persuasive]y because it Similar proposals for trengtheningidentity to recreate legislatively a tightly structured is so difficult to crea te the trust necessary by exclusion will be found among Catholic society based on strong hierarchies is for learning. It is assumed that priests will groups. unlikely to be effective. simply endorse a party line, and that nothing A better strategy m ay be to identify and The experience of societies and com ­ illuminating can be expected from church encourage the relationships within society munities which have made this attempt spokespersons, anyway. This judgment may that carry the seeds of a richer identity and suggests that eventually the capacity of be mistaken. But it illustrates the danger of sustain the symbols of a community. In central authority to strengthen the belief the Roman church 's defending its Australian society, families, local groups, system, ymbols and patterns of life of the theoretical right to strengthen the unity of mall voluntar y agen cies, gra ss root m embers is weakened by the very effort to the church in faith and in its life at the cost co-operatives have all been weakened by do so. Popular apathy or resistance is usually of losing its practical ability to do so. government initiatives. met by further centralisation and by m ore The greatest danger in attempting to In the church, the strategy followed in direct intervention to control the beliefs legislate a tightly structured community, its best moments has been to co-opt the and symbols of the community. As a result however, has been that the most committed local groups concerned to live the Gospel the local officials whose intellige nt m embers of the community are often radically. The case of Francis of Assisi is co-operation is needed to implement the excluded. The fate of true believers in only the m ost notable. The energy of the program become ineff ectual. Stalinist Russia is only the m ost familiar church espoused by Bishop Heaps will then From this perspective, the m easures example. It illustrates the tendency of lead easily to the stronger church identity announced by Rome bear reflection, for at authoritarian ideologies to turn, not on the sought by the Roman documents. • first glance they appear to favour a further liberal enemies of their id eology, but on the centralisation of power. Where a single idealistic and committed who take most Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United bishop can prevent the issuing of a seriously their professed values. Faculty of Theology, Melbourne.

18 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 STORY B ARRY DICKlNS The corner of Russell Street and mayhem gloom " B•pti" 'Town' (as Princes Bridge was titled in the We argued too much to stay together, Wboys at the ,.,always-on-a-lean, """""" white-ant- popular mind). I worked rinsing down and ended up having an almighty blue in riddled church up the road to Salvation guillotines for a North Melbourne printer, Adelaide after a particularly gruelling high ­ where my mum and dad never ventured. In and read N ew and Old Testament literature way stint where I honestly wearied of hav­ a way they were right to stay away because aboard the old red rattler to soothe m y ing shit cast at m e from comfortable and it was perennially sad and also they had to mangled soul. It was the reading of The bored holiday-makers. I couldn't bear being be the most godless people I have m et in my Bible that actually lifted, buoyed m e, above filmed in extremis. Bum out of pants and entire life. They lived so far from Him. the tedium of the everyday. parched tongue hangin' out. I had a modicum Jesu s Christ w as a stiffen ed, stern Long years of philosophical inquiry of dignity. Messiah for All Sorrows. fluttered by and I turned into a hippie. He had a vision of his own murder and There was an old Billy Graham A Christian on e who detected magical was right to have it, for h e was slain by propaganda poster pinned up at the rear of goodness in perfect strangers as though bored boys 17 years later in the Fawkner the particle-board room where we got it was somehow transmitted like a Chopin Gardens. They got him pissed and then, earbashed. Our teachers at the church called prelude. I was a Magic Christian, as lost and foolishly, he told them he had $400 in the that 'Sunday school'. The poster I speak of found as a man in his cups can be. The only bank. They u sed soldering irons on his depicted Christ smiling at multicoloured faith I found was the tragedy in people's body. I see Johnny now only in my waking children ga thered around his legs; those eyes. I knew how to read that. dreams of his insane form of evangelical colours, those hues ranged from giddy I m et a man, not Peter but John, whose guts and folly- wanting to save everyone mauve to a kind of evangelical jade-green. bizarre street courage was an inspiration he saw with his own eyes from an evil 'Jesu s Loves The Children Of The and relief to m e. This was in 1970, when I world. World! ' was typeset in a large font under the was 21, and insane and sane. He earnestly My way to Christ has always been artwork; Jesus looked like my deranged believed h e was a m essenger for Christ through the contemplative and never the geography teacher at Carrum. Jesus, and to that end he preached from his physical. I have been looking long for the It was quite clear to m e at the age of four tattered bible on the corner that God wasn't in the room there. My own of Russell Street and personal dreamt-up God, or his son, was mayhem. We held h ands more like a contented booth announcer at together as we wandered 3A W. He loved his mum and dad and Australia. Everyon e was cheerily fetched home his pay on pay-day. after Freedom , man. He only looked disillusioned when he had Why h e so believed he to fork out his board, which was fixed at ten could help save Australia quid a week . Christ thought that was from Satan was not so much excessive. mysterious as addled. He Sing though w e might, the hymns had been made, he claimed, pounded into my stubborn h ead were to do ' h omo things' in drearier than the artwork silkscreened upon Bendigo while studying his scriptures. His perfect church to house my sorrows and bags of lawn food. There was n ever an eyes had a burnt-out appearance, as though fears. But the trouble is most churches I go opportunity to enquire as to the lyrics' he'd been through a great deal. He was a to are either too go thic or too horrible. meaning. 'I Will Make You Fishers Of Men' damaged boy. There's always been a baffling gloom in the meant tuna casserole to m e. Their hymns We travelled around Victoria, Adelaide churches I have knelt in. Why can't they be gave m e tinnitus. and NSW 'saving' Australians. He used to joyous? The priests invariably underwhelm After the mournful death-threats-got­ hand out little cards with 'Endure' lettered m e and the lessons are about guilt. up-as-songs it was so happy for the kids to upon them in green pencil. Perhaps it worked, I don't need a charismatic church. They 'boing- boing- boing' like rubber balls into and people found they really could endure are much too deafening and upsetting. I the always entertaining truth of sunshine. Satan a lot more than they really should want to go to a church where the spirit is We got bashed by ignorant parents who have to. What I loved about Johnny Pappas uplifted in such a way you'd swear a happy took it upon themselves to carry Christ's was that he had dropped out of his fear. boy was reading the lesson he wrote him­ words into Reservoir, whose foundry hands Life continually betrayed him. But he self, in a fit of joy. Where's the church of were on us too much. We went zingingly had good stuff in him. He was kind and brightness and hope? • into the innocent lanes to reacquaint th oughtful, even w h en we jumped off ourselves with the geraniums and singing bridges together into trains far beneath that Barry Dickins is a playwright, poet and goldfinches of people's yards. carted blinding lime under the coughing commentator. His play 'Remember Ronald When I was 16 I went to work, but still stars, from Whyalla to Broken Hill and back Ryan' won the 1995 Victorian Premier's read the Old Testament on the train to again. Literary Award.

V O LUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EU REKA STREET 19 S CI ENC E/ T ECH NOLOGY Molecular wait We say that the past is another country, but what about the nanotechnological future? Get into it, says Damien Broderick, with passion.

H UMANITv's CLOCK I S the turning of skyscraper, or a skijet, or a tube of lipstick eventually in the oceans and locate such the earth, and the earth's swing around the in Blushing Pink, or a diamond tunnel to atoms one by one, popping them into a bag sun, and usually we don 't feel it in our China. Every atom will be in the right for later collection at the shore. bones until our bones start to ache with old place, as specified by the computer program Such are the prospects of m aterial age. We don't feel the world spin on its axis. driving its assembly, tugged and herded profusion, of inexpensive wealth, in a world Metaphorically, however, its speed has been into place by machines sm aller than a virus suffused by sm art m achines . Bu t for the increasing lately. The world, history itself, and many times sm arter. immediate future, nano-scale assemblers is spinning up. Yo u can alm ost hear the T r u e, you ca n also expect to remain on the drawing boards, awaiting a whine of the engines. m a n u fact u re-t o nanofacture 1- tiny lot of detailed engineering, but arguably Yet usually we don't notice time's rush, dedica ted compu ters th e size of bacteria to ready for the maj or development push that'll either. You need to stand on a high hill and control the hues of your sm art-paint wall, yield the new minting technology.' As good survey the landscape of years and decades, or photovoltaic cells that pave the street as a licence to mint m oney,' clear-eyed watch time's swooping shadow. Do that, and provide your juice at very little extra cynics say today of m edia permits issued by and its pace, the force of the alteration s it cost, or surgical ga dgets that swim into governm ents to radio an d television presses upon us, m ight tea r the brea th out yourchromosomes andrepairthe telom eres. proprietors. Nanotech prom ises to make of your chest. T hese protective caps tend to fr ay each good that m etaphor. Le t 's con sider briefl y jus t on e of time a cell replaces itself, dam age that Guided by their progra m s, na n o- tomorrow's mind-boggling possibilities. degrades the cell's ability to keep track of assemblers are the mint itself. If you had Molecularnanotechnology,or MNT, which its DNA blueprint. It helps bring a n anofacturing system and a I call 'minting', has been onthe news lately, abou t death in all complex 7fJ ltfi.\l{VJ su pply of raw ma t erials, after some surprisin g b reakthrou gh s orga msms. So mm tmg w1ll 'i?tVlJ'V'i there's no obvious reason in miniaturisation. Yo u might recall the certainly h ave eff e cts · ~u why you couldn't mint an nouncem ent of a ch emical sen sor at that minute sca le. But anything not forbidden developed in Australia by Dr Bruce Cornell really, minting is a way by the laws of physics. and his team. It's a kind of sniffer with to rem ake the world at Clothing, food, crea ture working parts at molecular scale, able to our own meso-scale, co mforts, smart under- detect a sugar cube dissolved in Sydney midway between the ground pipes to fetch Harbour. And chemistry professor Michael a tom and the cosm os. you water in the desert Wilson, at Sydney's U niversity of Using d ia m ond- where land prices are Technology, heads several labs working on like materials cobbled dirt-cheap. Once the a nano-scale motor, with working parts in together cheaply, carbon technology matures, you the bill ionths of a metre. atom by carbon atom , we'll could disassemble and Bu t the real secret promise of minting is sit in chairs with a strength - reconstitute garbage and old not that it involves gadgets the size of to-weight ratio SO times betterthan refrigerators in to steak and maglev viruses. Tiny little machines at the scale of steel. If those chairs include smart nano- rapid transit vehicles, all with a minimum atoms are part of the plan, but the correct components, little computers rather like of greenh ouse emission, powered by cheaply way to think about the still -unborn MNT insan ely fast abacuses, then sitting in m inted solar cell s. field is this, according to Dr Ralph Merkle, diamondoid chairs will be a truly sensuous Are we smart enough to design and who works with Dr K. Eric Drexler, pioneer experience, as they mould themselves to buil d nano-assemblers, and keep them under in the minting field: it would be a your best posture. control ? Maybe not. People have been manufacturing technology able to fabricate, Diam ond? Build a ch air out of diamond? known to fear the grey goo catastrophe, w it h m olecular precision , almost any Bu t you'll be able to mint a di am ond, that when assemblers run amokandgobblcdown tructure consistent with physical law, and l egenda ry icon of ineffable beau ty, everything in sight, turning rad io transmit- to do so inexpcnsi vel y. immemorial permanence, and extravagant ters and cute babies in to amorphous sludge. If you have the plans for som ething- costliness, exactly because a diamond is a Luckily, that kind of death by mutated t h e computer design descri bing i ts stablearrangement of oneofthecommonest assembler is fairly easily fo iled, or at least structure-and the laws of ph ysics don't elements in the world. Gold and silver might made va nishingly improbable. (It's harder for bid it, you'll be able to build whatever retain their price, because they can't be to ward off the silly teen hacker, or the you wish .. . using molecular assem blers. In constructed fro m m ore plentiful atoms. demented terrorist .) Bu t all these novelties pri n ciple, minting ca n build you a Even so, n a n o-scavengers will fl oat addtogether. Ea rl y nanotech helpsimprove

20 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 supercomputers, and those help design and us troubled to think what future we were physicist or a car mechanic? I burst into a debug more advanced mints, and so the m aking. And here it is' ' desperate aria about how computing was boot trapping of utopia continues, until It's true. We're already in the future, the future of the world, libraries the one day the world looks around itself and this other country where they do things information nexu s, clearly we were soon notices that everything, pretty n early different!y , this long escalator that's hauling going to have a world-girdling global village everything, has altered. Except, naturally, us upward toward the Spike. For centuries, with satellite links casting byte back and the poetic mysteries of the human heart. landing on the Moon , along with the year forth, and I wanted to be there, plugged in And even the heart is infested by diligent 2000, was one of the two great symbols to the console of this cybernetic cholesterol-scrubbing nanites ... of tomorrow land, pie in the sky, library network. N onsense? Too far off to that Bu ck Rogers stuff. Well, be psychologically relevant the impossibly remote 0 N E O F THE GENTLEMEN nodded his head t o u s ta nda rd-model year 2000, as everyone amiably, and said, 'This is very interesting, humans, still stuck here k eeps telling u s, is now can you tell us m ore about these "satellites", at the end of the 20th an event pencilled into how would they world' Tel tar had been up century? ordinary history. And since 1962, and Intelsat 1 since 1965, but N ot necessarily. here in the futur ~ the news was slow in getting through to the For American math­ roughly three decades bureau cracy. I said with immense ematics professor and have already passed, confidence,'Well, they'd be in geostationary novelist Vernor Vinge, rather more than half orbit-22,500 miles above the equator' it comes down crucially m y lifetime, s ince (I was out by a couple of hundred miles, I'd to the accelerating trends humans first set foot on read it in an Arthur C. Clarke novel when in computer science, trends the Moon. I was a child). He found this interesting, but con verging so m ew here between In the late '60s, ince there saici, 'Don'tyou think it's a bit .. . futuristic? 2030 and 2100 to form a barrier of were no jobs for people who tried to Computers? Information technology? Look, technological novelties blocking the future map the shape of the future (and nothing's how would you fe el about sitting at a counter from u s. Vinge ca lls this barrier a changed since then, in this respect) , stamping out the books every clay ?' technological Singularity. (I prefer the more I thought I might become a librarian. I'd Of course, I cried eagerly, 'I'll do it, I'll graphic name of the Spike.) We can only been looking for one of those 9-to-5 jobs do it1' gues at what lies ahead of us, up you 're not supposed to give up if you 're a I added, 'Is everyone sa tisfi ed with what the Spike's slope. writer, so I was summoned one day to an I've said?' and at this point the dinosaur interview committee of the Public Service crepitated into alertness. She consulted a N Ao-MI TING, for example, might Board. I'd recently been writing about rock document in front of her, and she said, ' Ah, arrive sooner than any of us would dare to 'n' roll for Go-Set, the world's first pop Mr Broderick, ah.' She sniffed. 'As far as hope. A science-trained Brisbane trans­ music newspaper, and this interview was I can see here, you 're not married. Are you humanist named Mitchell Porter recently not in any way like listening, with a sm all married?' offered this bold prediction on the internet, square of blotting paper under the I said, 'N o, no, I'm not married.' although I should point out that others tongue, to Jim Morrison and the 'Arh , hmmm. Are you found it wildly optimistic: 'I expect the first Doors sin g 'Break on engaged?' assemblers within five years. I would now Through ' or 'Light M y I thought, Thi is very add to that, that I think most of the Fire'. This was not the strange. Isn't 'engaged' fo reseeable uses of nanotech (that don't future, or even the what girls do? Then require astronomical quantities of matter) present. Surely this was I realised that since it will be possible within two years of the the past, and I was involved a male and a fabrication of assemblers.' trapped in it. female, if the fe male H e amplified this: 'Once we h ave I was seated before was e ngaged then assemblers, we can build new designs very an authoritative com ­ probably the male was quickly-thus accelerating the construction mittee of grey-suited also engaged. So I said, stage in the design -and-test cycle. Further­ old fogies and on e 'No, I'm sorry, I'm not m ore, those who are trying to design, say, a woman, the archetypal engaged.' new type of nanosystem will be able to use Lady Librarian. I hadn' t But she wasn't fi nished the internet of fi ve years' time as a known they existed outside of with me. She saw deeper than collaborative m edium. I doubt that we can bad American movies, but there she that. She said, 'Have you got any imagine very clearly ju st what possibilities was, mouth pursed, hair in the traditional plans to become engaged? ' will exist, but we have every rea on to bun. She didn't say anything during the I looked back at her with eyes like believe they will be awesom e.' inquisition, and appeared to be asleep. poached eggs and said, ' I see what you 're The Spike' Why didn't anyone warn us? The men asked m e plenty, starting with doing here! You're applying a rule applicable Well, they did, of course, but nobody the standard inquiries-did I have a record to young wom en, who might secretly be was listening. Consider this wonderfully of petty pilfering ... One of them noticed pregnant, and would therefore zip off short! y resonant phrase from H. G. Wells, from his that I'd expressed an a vocational interest in after they've entered the tenure and total 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes: 'We science. Why would som eone like that want security of employm ent in the Public were making the future, and hardly any of to be a librarian, rather than a nuclear Service, and thus receive all manner of

V oLUME 8 N uMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 21 ill-gotten ancillary benefits.' She looked or imposed abo ut cy bo rg fan tasy. back stonily. 'Bu t the fac t is,' I said in my Verisimilitude was unsurpassed. Each m ost reassuring tones, 'I am not planning character I encou ntered in the endless cast . "" to be engaged, and I am not pregnant, and of my sleeping universe was rich with . I'm not going to become pregnan t.' cl ensi ty, beyond the resource of a Murasaki, mTilE l'\: 1\'ERSITI'Of MELBOURNE Even so, I didn't get th e job. I was forced a Shakespeare, a Dostoievski. It was to write about th e fu ture instead, even as so lipsism tuned bracingly to my supine the future becam e the present and then needs. D J (DINNY) O'HEARN started slipping into the past, as m en's and I un de rstood its add iction and its horror: MEMORIAL FELLOWSHIP wom en 's roles changed drasticall y and for T he hun t is done and bellies are fu ll. In the the better, as every library in the land set up flickering firelight the tribe lean forward to App lications are in vited for thi s fe ll owship, its computer system, an d the internet spread hear and tell their boasts. The old ones ava il abl e to a write r yet to become its vast electronic tendrils through the global sing, at last, the sagas of their once and estab li shed. The successfu l app li ca nt w il l village that reall y was happening after all. future hero es. In the Dreamtanks, at the have the opportunity to write for a mo nth at th e Austra lia n Centre, Un ive rsity of Although I've always lived in the future, apotheosis of art, the old ones live and sing Melbourn e, during fir st or second semes ter I am always surprised when it actually forever ... 1999. happens. N evertheless, it's difficult for m e Incidenta lly, the En cyclopedia of to grasp how truly strange the fu ture seem s Science Fi ction credits m e with coining the Salary will be $35,990 per ann um pro rata. to m ost other people. It's almost impossible term 'virtual reality' in that novel, written App lica ti o ns (4 copi es), inc luding a curri culum vitae, an indicatio n of current for m e to understand the usual response to m ore than 20 years ago. projects, and a sa mpl e of writing, should the technology-shaped futu re, which is When Rory Barnes and I wrote Valencies be sent to: typically a blen d of dread, denial, scorn and in the late '70s, a novel eventually pu blished Ms Rh yll Nance boredom. by the University of Queensland Press, Au stra li an Centre Twenty-five years before the Apollo I proposed a m ethod of predictive sociology, University of Melbourne Moon landing was 1944, the height of the an ironic variation on Isaac Asimov's 131 Barry Street, Ca rlton, Vi c 3053 war against Hitler, the year I was born, and ' psych ohis t ory ' (i n his cel ebra t e d by Friday 16 October 1998 everyone (so I' m told ) brayed like jackasses Foundation series) . My invention, I now Enquiries: te l (03) 93 44 7021; when people like Isaac Asimov and Arthur see, quite spookily resembles a cu rrent h ot email: r.nance@a rts.u nime lb. edu.au Clarke told them humans would shortly be tool of Complexity Theory: a mathem atical flying into space. I got the sam e reaction m ethodology called a 'genetic algorithm '. from a teacher when I w as in fou rth grade, I called it 'data farming'. It's not clear fro m I WANT TO INVEST WITH CONFIDENCE and that w as a m ere three years before the book whe ther it happen s in the Sputnik and seven before Yuri Gagarin simulated Darwinian space of a com pu ter AUSTRALIAN rocketed in to orbit. memory or inside actual vats swarming T wen ty-fi ve years prior to the year 2000, with engineered DNA. Both kinds are now e-thical by comparison, was 1975. T he personal being used in labs to solve otherwise Ag ribusine ss or computer revolution had not yet booted up. intractable calculations. reafforestotion . TRUSTS In 1975 the mirthful equivalent of landing Genetic algorithms. We published that Min ing or recycling . Investors on the M oon would have been cyberspace novel in 1983. The Spike lay up ahead, and virtual reality, if the scoffers had even perhaps 60 years distant. I would be a century Exploitati on or can choose thought of such far-fetched novelties. If old by then, if I lived so long. I suppose susto inobility. Throu gh the AE Tru sts you you'd believe that nonsen se, sir, you 'd som ewhere deep in m y knowledge of the Gr ee nhouse gases con invest your savings believe anything! That w as the year I m ailed future I felt it rushing at m e like a wall of or solar energy. and superannuation in off to the United States a novel called The shadow, or maybe a wall of brilliant light. Armaments or over 70 different Ju das Mandala, eventually published in I don' t m ention these fairly minor community enterprise s, each expertly 1982. Here's a fragm ent, set in the remote escapades to dazzle you with my ingenuity enterprise. se lected for its unique world of 6039, when most of the world's and pow erful access to the future. On the combination of earnings, rem aining humans drift in dream s written contrary- all I did was filch elem ents fro m environmental fo r them by advanced cybernetic organism s the public domain and weave them together sustoinability and social or cyborgs . M y 20th century lesbian in ways that seem ed vaguely plausible. It's respon sibility, and earn a narrator, who's been bushwhacked into the proof that we can discern the shape of competitive financial future, is trapped in just such a simulation : things further up the curve of the Spike. return. For full details For the first time, I understood the over­ The Spike, you see, isn't really som e wh elming lure of addiction, the honeys of incredible Apocalypse hovering dim ly in make a free call to transcendental art. I understood how it the rem ote future. It is the curving gradient 1800 021 227 could be that the Dream vats of the cy borgs which we already climb, clay after day, into lnl'estments in tbe tlnstralian Etbical Trusts can contained the majority of the wo rld's living an ever-more exotic future. Start getting onll' be made tbrongb tbe cnrrent prospeclus human beings, their brains afire on a ready for it. • registered ll'itb tbe i\ustrnlian Sewrities Co mm ission c111d Cll'ailablefrom: junkie's junket of total fantasies. Australian Ethical/nvestmellf Ltd For being on line to Dream circuits was Damien Broderick is a novelist and writer I 111it 66. Ca nberra Bnsi11 ess Ce ntre the ultimate art. There was nothing paltry about science. Bradfield 51. Doll'ner ACT .!60.!

22 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 The state we're in

corporatising and contracting 'out' even were applied when, in the 1970s, Australian havoe proclaimedm"'''"" a raft 20 of '""' measures gomnmon" designed fundamental government services such as Social Security Appeals Tribunals required to make them more 'democratic' and water, power and public transport to the adverse medical reports to be disclosed to accountable. commercial sector. The not-for-profit 'third' unsuccessful applicants for invalid We have become familiar with laws sector competes for government funding to pensions. Both the Department and the promising 'freedom of information'; codes provide community services, in exchange medical profession argued that disclosure of conduct for ministers and public servants; for contracts requiring confidence and would make for guarded, and less useful, statutory 'ombudsmen' or commissioners, threats to their funds if they criticise record-keeping. Natural justice won out: so standing apart from the administrative government policy. did unguarded record-keeping. institution ; regimes for reviewing Third is the proliferation of government If it manages to slip through, you ensure administrative decisions. We have come to corporations, and partnerships between that it is linked administratively, and in expect (and be disappointed in) legal aid. government and private profit-making funding cycles, to the agency to be reviewed; Our governments have signed and enshrined interests, whose activities are protected under-funded, or funded for two years (when in tern a tiona! treaties agreeing to protect from public scrutiny by 'commercial-in- the 'baby' full of promise has become a de­ civil, political, industrial and human rights manding toddler) then require it to rationalise in our laws and practices. We show every and cut-back; through public sector 'reform', sign of being a progressive nation. force it to restructure every 18 months (this The old ways were for an age when keeps the new infant on its toes.) 'freedom' was 'freedom from' governm en­ 2. Keep it a secret tal interference and all that was required If you don't tell people that there are was a bit of distance. The 'old' bulwarks systems, or how to use them, they will against authoritarianism-Parliamentary wither away and you can restructure or scrutiny, and the courts, and fear of the abolish them. This ruse can take months to mob- were enough. They were not enough be discovered, and by then it's too late! for the intrusions of modern government. confidence' con tracts and exemptions from 3. Create complexity. The state has been quietly reinventing ombudsman, FOI and other public review. This is very popular. You can leave it to itself. Government is no longer public This is generally accompanied by every state or territory to create their own administration, but a market-place for goods deregulation, or self-regulation by bench­ adminis tra ti ve remedies, specialist and services, a network of contracts and marks or standards. tribunals, equal opportunity and industrial elite competition. This is the result of a What we have then is a change in commissions, and costs regimes. This number of factors. government's dominant paradigm, from the means Australian citizens' rights depend First is the introduction of a manage­ 'public interest' to sornething very like doing on where they happen to live. ment culture into our public service­ business. The shift also challenges the basic As government becomes managerial payment and performance by' resul ts'-and assumptions of our 'accountability' and commercially oriented it seems the loss of an independent public sector. In mechanisms: assuring public information, 'sensible' to create 'no go' zones for com­ this new culture senior public servants do explanations, and access to independent mercial enterprise, or 'cabinet documents'­ not have tenure: lucrative short-term review. On a business model, government increasingly broadly defined-and 'internal contracts are m eant to compensate for their service standards are set by market working papers.' It is a good technique to political susceptibility. We even expect new mechanisms, the Corporations Law and instruct the parliamentary drafter to set up governments to ' distniss' their predecessors' market forces, not individual rights and categories or exceptions into which an Heads of Department. The practice was freedoms and the public interest. The result assiduous official might be able to fit what introduced by Labor. It is now a norm: is a passive, consumer-oriented 'citizen', she or he does not wish to release or explain. when Queensland's new Labor Premier whose 'rights' are his purchasing power. 4. Give it bacl< to the lawyers offered its choice of Department Heads five­ There are seven well-tried ways for If you have had a specialist tribunal, put year contracts, Opposition leader Borbidge governments to murder the new accounta­ it back into the Department completely announced that when he next had the power bility mechanisms. (but promise to be 'fair') or collapse it into he would introduce retrospective 'term of 1. Cripple it at birth. a super tribunal run by a judge or two, or put government' appointments laws. When an idealistic new government ges­ it back into the mainstream courts. This is Second is the deliberate separation of tates a bright idea, such as FOI, their bureau­ what has happened to the Human Rights government policy-making from service­ crats slip quietly into the maternity ward. and Equal Opportunity Commission. delivery structures; and changes in the way Most bureaucracies resisted FOI from Allow legal challenges. Gradually services are delivered. There is a distinct, the inception, arguing that 'efficiency' introduce pleadings, affidavits, and jurisdic­ bi-lateral preference for pri v a tising, required confidentiality. Similar arguments tional arguments. Require investigation and

V O LUME 8 NUMllER 7 • EUREKA STREET 23 conciliation to be according to 'natural 7. Narrow the laws and limit the way standards meet Australia's international justice' principles. Real courts understand the comts may interpret them. obligations': the new Act's is, 'assisting in the injustice to corporations of having to Judges are inherently inclined to giving effect to Australia's obligations in an swer complaints from equal opportunity interpret legislation carefully. If they are relation to labour standards.' commissioners. Ev eryone can afford a encouraged to do so narrowly and lose sight The result is to narrow the focus of la wyer, according to the prevailing wisdom. of its objectives, it will lose its intended 'human rights' in industrial law, taking In case they can, cut back viciously on legal purpose. into account local values, not universal aid for administrative review. One counter-mechanism is their use principles, and driving it by the needs of the 5. Introduce user-pa ys, or up the costs of international human rights treaties to business. of using the system. interpre t ambiguou s laws, fill gaps, In a globalised economy, this shift This turns the citizen into a consumer, and de termin e ' fair' decision-making matters . The courts have shown us how to and a good thing too. The power to buy and processes. This is part of a respectable do it, by a narrow interpretation. In 1997 sell is the power to choose. Make them pay Common Law tradition. It is logical: the High Court decided that former Qantas for access to information. The expense of governments are presumed to intend to be pilot, Mr Christie, who was dismissed providing documents or seeking review of a bound by their agreements. It is ethical: because he turned 60 (apparently unlawful decision to withhold it is a very eff ective Justice Brennan, in Mabo, referring to the age discrimination) nonetheless lawfully barrier to public access. So is the In ternational Covenant on Civil lost his job, because an international introduction of costs-follow-the-event and Political Rights, remarked that aviation Convention allowed oth er rules in 'tribunals'. international law was a 'legitimate and countries to exclude 'old' pilots fro m their Cut out legal aid for the 'luxury' of important' influence on the common law's airspace. Mr Christie could not fulfil the administrative review or asserting equal 'inherent requirem ents' of being an inter­ opportunity claims. If this deters an national pilot. Qantas had establish ed individual (who cannot write off her legal operational requirem ents based on the expen ses as a business expen se) from discriminatory assumptions of oth er pursuing a grievan ce, then she could not nations. As Justice Michael Kirby pointed have h ad faith in her own case. Market out, in dissent, this has serious implications forces working at their best. development, 'especially when inter­ for Australian ci vii values. If your company 6. Weaken independent decision-mal

24 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 ENVlRONMENT Needed: a new way of thinking Frank Fisher unpacks the contradictions at the heart of much of our current economic and environn1ental planning. C ONSIDER THE imaginary hea dline program for graduate engineers entering It is not strictly necessary to expend all from last year's Kyoto climate conference: the dairy industry in 1998 (a dvertisem ent, this energy just to get people around fast. It Greenhouse Conference Meltdown- November 1997). is expended to fulfil a swag of social available decision-making frameworks 5. A doctor representing the AMA rails demands which m anufacturers rightly discarded as inadequate. righteously against cigarettes then climbs perceive we want as we drive. These range UNESCO assumes renew role. into his comfortably polluting 'Beam er' to from rapid acceleration through air- Not very likely. commute the few kilometres hom e (The conditioning to armouring. Further, while Itiseasy to howthatweare notdealing Age, 9 November 1997). used primarily for driver-only urba n with many of the big problem s facing 6 . Social researcher Hugh Mackay commuting, m ostvehiclesarealso design ed humanity at present, but, to make matters suggests that the well-heeled 'do the world to be multi-purpose: for example, to worse, the intellectual structures available a favour: avoid the housework'. The sup- transport the family to the beach with a to make sense of issues such as Greenhouse posed favour is job creation thro ugh boat behind. are not adequate to the task. They simply do 'outsourcing' of housework (25 October 1997). Make no mistake, even this and safety not allow us to look at them broadly enough . Explanations itself are social, not engineering, demands. Let me illustrate with a selection of related 1. To publish its excellent special issue, If, for instance, we did not believe we had to problems, drawn from press contributions 'Our Precious Planet', Time had to find own a car to access it, we could hire the at the time of the Kyo to conference, to sponsorship. Its spon sor is Toyota and the vehicle appropriate to our needs when we highlight contradictions at their cores. The ads draw attention to the company's n eeded it. And safety? Perhaps the safest contradictions indicate an inadequacy in considerable efforts to produce 'greener' car in the world is the 60-year-old, 4litre/ thinking which in turn gives rise to the cars. Hidden behind these ads however, are 100km Citroen 2CV, so flimsy it was problem s. Once the inadequacy is demon- a number of m assive contradictions that outlawed in Sweden (home of Volvo) strated, we are in a better position to inevitably undermine the good work of both because inside it has no framework solid overcome it and offer a general direction for Toyota and Time. For example: enough to attach seatbelts. It occupies the reshaping of institutions. It takes huge amounts of energy: a) to insurance categories with premiums below 1. Time magazine supported by Toyota, research, design, make, maintain and dis- those of other cars because it is driven care- produced a special issu e enti tied ' Our assemble cars for recycling; b) to providefor fully. Its drivers know their vulnerability Precious Planet: Why saving the environ- the road and other infrastructures for cars and drive accordingly, in spite of the ment will be the next century's biggest (including a share of environmental and engineering. The engineering is, incidentally, challenge' (November 1997). health infrastructures); c) to research, design, quite good and its East German equivalent, 2. The Uranium Information Centre tells etcetera all this supporting infrastructure. the Trabant, easily outran Mercedes on a us that 'Nuclear energy still has a role . . . Indeed, this energy constitutes far more recent animal avoidance test. every thousand kilowatt h ours [of energy per average car than will ever be Massive investment in machinery and electricity] generated by nuclear energy generated from the fuel it uses in its road infrastructure produces a certain fl exibility saves about a tonne of carbon dioxide life. Further, saying that 'Water [is] the only and inertia in society. This happens with emission compared with coal' (letter in Th e emission from the power source of the all large, hard (m echanical) or soft (e.g. Age, 3 November 1997). future' namely fu el cells, is correct, at best, administrative) systems. Investments in 3. Engineers Australia maintains that only if we ignore all the contextual machinery, training, administration and in 'cheap, grid-competitive photovoltaic power expenditures of the other polluting energies non-quantifiable such as employm ent is within reach' (October 1997). and materials needed to bring the fuel cells satisfaction and status generate extensive 4. M elbourne Univers ity (Gilbert and their fuels to us. Which is not to deny social inflexibility. Investors must cover Chandler College) is offering an orientation the bright future for fuel cells. their outlays by making their investments

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 25 pay for themselves in their own terms. 3. Photovoltaic electricity also comes ment will be swallowed by automation. That is, by doing what they were designed to us with an initial energy expenditure Moreover it involves a raft of environmental for. large by comparison with that generated by consequences, not least increased 'busy-ness' Diversification hardly helps: a $500 the existing world output from these cells. on the roads. Monash University geographer million engine production line cannot be Unlike nuclear power however, photo­ Kevin O'Connor's point that outsourcing made to pay fori tself by making solar panels. voltaic cells do have the potential to deliver of 'many formerly in-house tasks to private Extensive diversification would be needed nett energy ... eventually-that is they have operators, whose workers travel from com­ to cope with the capital annihilation the potential to work off the energy debt pany to company increasing congestion on involved. Even a world famous bicycle­ their development and production incur. roads' can easily be extended to the parts maker such as Shimano could hardly Nevertheless, the energy debt is consider­ outsourcing of domestic chores. They might afford 20 pages of advertising in Time on its able. Initial estimates indicate that it will increase business opportunities but they own, simply because the much smaller value be years still before we move into the black also increase traffic. The outsourcing habit of it products would not generate or need of a nett contribution to overall available also invades yet another part of home (our such a budget. Small, as Schumacher pointed electricity. Nor do solar electricities (hydro, 'Haven in a Heartless World' as Christopher out 25 years ago, indeed has its virtues. photovoltaics and wind) com e to us Lasch put it) converting it into just another When we do develop more fuel-efficient pollution fre e. Hydro has notorious natural area of production in the overall cars, they will simply maintain or depress environmental consequences, and to reach '"1' patterns of consumer society. further the already low price of fuel and so industrial society outputlevels, photovoltaics encourage continued wasteful use. and wind will have numerous production .1. HESE ARE contradictions that need to be and use consequences, teased out. There are others that are more including noise, blatant. Here is one clutch, all reported in Cigarettes are vilified while still aesthetic impact and the press within the space of that same even meteorological Kyoto conference week: being smoked actively or passively disturbances as we plant • rich Americans are now installing broadacres to l MW+ 'secure' bunkers to hide from each other; in a society that not only accepts wind turbines. meanwhile 4. Dairy products • mobile phones sold to help keep their/ but idolises a much grosser might be fun but they our loved ones 'safe' are now suspected of are also are' metafoods'­ causing their own health effects and our polluter: the commuter car. that is they are produced N a tiona! Health & Medical Research Council essentially from other is now calling for $4 million worth of re­ foods. They are certainly search to clarify these concerns; meanwhile In the end, a transport equipment nutrition-added foods, but w hen mass­ • the marketing of 'off-the-rack clothes manufacturer such as Toyota cannot stay produced as staple foods for humans, they that protect office workers from electro­ in business if required suddenly to start also cause a raft of nutritional, social (animal magnetic radiation emitted by computer producing wind turbines or even n on­ exploitation and cultural conflict factors screens, televisions, microwaves and mobile material products such as environmental for example) and environmental problems. phones' is being canvassed in Japan-except and social care. There is of course no market The environmental problems are associ­ that keeping a mobile in a pocket in such a demand (i.e. political will and social infra­ ated with the water, land and additives suit would render it (cr ... ) immobile; structure) to enable such transformations used to produce them in comparison with meanwhile at present, and even if there were, there is say, the equivalent soy products. • a new very fast-growing industry is too much inertia in our political economy Afficionados of milk products may object developing to counter hacker-generated to enable rapid social change of this scale. to the proposal of soy products as alterna­ viruses that 'compromise the immunity' of 2. Nuclear power is probably an tives, but that is a separate issue and an microprocessors; m eanwhile, your daily oxymoron. If one were able to add up the argument for another day. It is, however, paper will keep you posted with more. energy costs associated with the research, interesting to note a con tradiction in The contradictions in this latter group development, construction, maintenance, academic values: university course are straightforward. Not so straightforward decommissioning, and safe storage and providers are routinely blocked from dealing is the contradiction inherent in the monitoring of (for thousands of years) wastes with the environmental consequences of persistence of these and a myriad similar associated with nuclear power stations and mass milk production. contradictions. This invisible mother of their fuels (enriched uranium or similar), 5. Cigarettes are vilified while still being contradictions, or contradiction underlying we would probably find that more energy is smoked actively or passively in a society other contradictions, has the sam e basis as required by the nuclear power system itself that not only accepts but idolises a much the first six. All are currently unavoidable than it yields in electricity. Even excluding grosser polluter: the commuter car. While because they are outcomes of the way such vast energy costs as those associated two wrongs don' t make a right, th e society organises thinking about itself and with the Chernobyl disaster and its contradiction (norrnally never even therefore of how it manages itself. aftermath, the energy cost of the military recognised, let alone acted upon) helps Explicitly, the contradictions are defences associated with the world's exist­ undermine the concern over cigarettes. unavoidable and obscured because virtually ing fission power infrastructure would 6. Buying in home h elp as a form of no-one has the training to spot them, that doubtless be equivalent to the output from employment creation is a holding action is, the intellectual tools are unavailable. a sizeable nuclear power station. for, sooner rather than later, such employ- Consequently, there are no social (political,

26 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 legal, economic) m echanism to enable the activities m entioned to be analysed or scrutinised in the way outlined here, and therefore no mechanisms that would enable corrective action to be taken to the social Good news is no news structures that make these activities the I RE's NO DOUBT THAT N oAH knew how to work the publicity machine. The story of the necessary outcom es of other actions. So we man who rode out the devastating flo d in his ark crops up in a host of ancient m ove in circles, trying to correct the civilisations- albeit with some of the names changed. activities and not the structure responsible And the image of Noah ticking off a list of animals two-by-two is so pervasive, that fo r them . Archimedes suspects most people believe such a list exists-that som ewhere on Earth More worrying still is the fact that there is a Golden Book in which the names of all species are inscribed. N ot so. Despite the publicly raising the existen ce of these fact that hundreds of species are becoming extinct each year, there is no definitive list of general, pathology-inducing structures has the estimated 1.5 million named species, and even this number represents less than a hitherto been seen as subversive, or worse, quarter of all species. seditious. Therefore, attempts to do so have Things are about to change, however, with the advent of the Global Biological been suppressed. The activities outlined Information Facility (GBIF), a US$300 million project to make the biological information are in the main contradictory in their own stored in the world's museums and research institutions available to all via the Worlcl terms. They depend for their viability on Wide Web. GBIF was the central recommendation of a summary report recently endorsed partial understandings. Moreover, there is by the Megascience Forum of the OECD (an influential body responsible for handling no socially legitimate institution that would scientific projects too big for any one nation to tackle). Details of GBIF proposal were consistently enable them to be brought revealed at the first world conference on Biological Informatics held in Canberra in July. under an accepted intellectual (l et alone The plan is to compile a definitive electronic list of species- a 'Catalogue of Life'. The regulatory) infrastructure that would expose name of each species would lead directly to a description, information on where the type the problem s that are generated by acting specimen is stored, key references in the scientific literature, and directions as to where on such partial insights. The Australian the organism is found. The catalogue would also act as a gateway to further information Science & Technology Council is, to my on genetics, biochemistry, physiology, ecology, habitat, medical and agricultural signifi­ knowledge, all but dead, and parliamentary cance- in fact, to any other scientific data relevant to the species. committees only rarely rise to this level of But GBIF is not just some egghead plan to back up esoteric research. Its promoters regard complex consideration. it as essential to conservation of the Earth's diversity of species, a practical way that rich Finally, we cannot claim that we have nations-which hold most of the world's museum specimens and biological information not been warned. In this century articulate but are home to relatively few of the Earth's species-can provide practical resources to assist voices such as Alfred North Whitehead in the poorer nations, who are responsible for managing a much greater variety of organisms. Science eJ the Modern World (1926) and 'Most countries do not even know what biodiversity they have,' says Dr Jim Edwards C.S. Lewis in The A bolition of Ma n (1 943) of the US National Science Foundation, who chaired the working group which prepared have tried to put the concerns I raise. More the report recommending GBIF. 'And without that information they can't mobilise their recently E.F. Schumacher (of 'Small is scientific resources effectively to conserve biodiversity.' Beautiful' fam e), in his last book A Guide Such repatriation of information is already happening. Most of the type specimens of fo r the Perplexed (19 76), sought to draw the birds of Mexico, and the accompanying basic descriptive and ecological data, for attention to the notion of adequacy-in our instance, are sitting in museums in the US, Canada and Europe. The World Bank is funding approach to life-itself. His concern arose a project to transfer that data to Mexico. The relevant Mexican authorities are using the from the endless repetition of the agonies information to plan conservation areas to secure the future of their birds. associated with innovations such as the so­ Closer to home, Australian biologists are using data from the natural habitat of the called Green Revolution through which Cane Toad in Latin America to seek out natural enemies and other constraints on its specialised, high-yield cereals are imposed population growth and spread. upon poor ocieties in ignorance of the In fact, it turns out that Australia is at the forefront of biological informatics, the new social contexts in which their traditional field at the heart of GBIF which employs computers to link, manage, analyse and present cereals were grown. biological information. According to Dr Ebbe Nielsen, the director of the Australian For long-term survival, a way of National Insect Collection and organiser of the Canberra conference, if Australia handle organising societies and their wealth has to things right, it could well end up selling informatics software and technology worldwide. be found that re-establishes the parallel While some might argue that it's a desperate response occasioned by dramatic cuts in value of that which cannot be counted or spending on con ervation, most governments in Australia are heavily involved in biologi­ regulated and gives it parallel political cal informatics. They are developing electronic inventories of their biological resources, ascendancy. For that to happen, a more as well as descriptions and keys for identifying species, and software tools for pulling profound understanding must be cultivated together, analysing and displaying information to assist conservation planning and manage­ and its cultivation in turn, rendered socially ment. The programs to do all these things will constitute an important part of GBIF. desirable. Though the cost of GBIF will be considerable, in general, GBIF is a good news story. Herein lies the new job for UNESCO.• Perhaps that is why the huge enterprise of bringing together all the world's biological knowledge has had little or no publicity- unlike Noah, who had the good fortune to Frank Fisher is director of the Graduate preside over a disaster. • School of Environmental Science at Monash University. Tim Thwaites is a freelance scientific writer.

VoLUME 8 NuMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 27 That Henry Handel Richardson fella

T AC KING H enry H andel but so did the earlier fiction, Richardson around Victoria The Getting of Wisdom and brough t both rewards and The Fortunes of Richard worries. Long drives, corres­ Mahony. From childhood she pondence, phone calls, inter­ had an extraordinary capacity views, helpful librarians and to 'make up', and like so many local historians and lots of books, gave pleasure and successful writers she used the people and places she excitemen t. Yet there cam e, too, a stark realisa tion knew as a basis for characterisation. that large sales of books about cooking, sport, The tears fl owed freely, long ago, as I finished gardening, celebrities, travel and how to do things, The Fortunes of Rich ard Mahony for the first time, cannot hide the overwhelming public ignorance of our immediately believing it to be one of the grea test vital literary heritage. It wasn't nice to learn that lots Australian novels. So it was a labour of love to pursue of university gradua tes, booksellers, readers and other Ethel Fl orence Richardson and her family around the thoughtful folk, know little or nothing of literary Victorian countryside. figures like Henry Handel Richardson, a writer largely The search began in Buninyong a few miles from neglected and unread despite the plaques adorning Ballarat where the Richardson Australian stmy begins. buildings in East Melbourne, Koroit, C hiltern, Buninyo ng is a pretty lit tle place with fine old Hawthorn and Maldon. In Maldon, where the author's buildings, lovely oaks and conifers, a restful Botanical name is prominent, men som etimes as k at the Tourist Gardens for which the ubiquitous Ferdinand von Info rmation Cen tre: 'Who was that Henry H andel Mueller supplied seeds. There is an atmosphere of Above: the Maldon Richardson £ella?' gentle quietness unusual in these times. The Uniting Post Office Then, some who knew of Richardson startled m e Church has attrac tive interconnected gables and a to which the by their hostility and vehem ence towards her, so long huge front precinct filled with m ajestic oaks and wide Richardson family was transferred aft er publication of her books and her death. She had lawns. European trees dominate, the eucalypts having in 1880. a king-size capacity to infuriate. H er portrayals of been cut out long ago. To see eucalypts one has to Below: the Post characters and places oft en irritated and outraged look up to the Mount Buninyong summit or onto the Office's memorial those who believed she slandered their forebears or surrounding hills and ridges w hich attractively plaque to H.H.R . unfavourably described their town or school. encircle the town. Photographs by Fir t published SO years ago, her au tobiographical When Dr Walter Lindesay Ri chardson, on whose Bill Thomas. Myself When Young produced much of the indignation life The Fortunes of Richard Mahony was based,

28 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 arrived in Australia in 1852 he hurried to Buninyong waiting men, waiting as it turned out for a three­ bearing a letter of introduction to Thomas Sheppard course 11.30 meal, ranged through all age groups; one who had settled there in the 1840s. Sheppard owned or two resembled derelicts, most were clean and tidy a brewery situated on the town's small reservoir and a couple appeared quite natty. known as the Gong. Chairman of the Buninyong The Welfare Officer, Kath Simpkin, courteous Council, a JP and President of the Horticultural and helpful, was aware of the house's literary Society, he was a big figure in the town. connections. A framed print of Fred McCubbin's Richard on stayed with the Sheppards for many 'Down on His Luck' appropriately hung above her desk. months. The Sheppard home still stands solidly Her phone rang several times within a few minutes. adjacent to the bluestone brewery, a large single Kath Simpkin showed me the room she believed toried brick home with ample verandahs adorned by Richardson used as his surgery. The house is of brick wrought ironwork. with a blues tone base. From the front gate, Warrenheip Apparently Richardson earned the Sheppards' looks stark and exciting even though six miles away. displeasure by not immediately setting up a m edical Lake W endouree (Yuille's Swamp as it was in practice. He opted instead to open a general store on Richardson's time) is a ten-minute walk the Ballarat goldfields. They asserted afterwards that down the street. he was a drunkard suffering from dip omania and described him as being shiftless and a bounder. A s A GIRL, Ethel Richardson saw the house while However, Dorothy Green and others have rather on a holiday in Ballarat. In 191 2, w hen she was convincingly disputed these allegations. 42 years old, she saw it again on a research visit to Walter Richardson's tent-s tore was established Australia. Apart from those visits she studied at Mount Pleasant in 1854 just along from the present documents relating to Ballarat history, read much popular tourist complex at Sovereign Hill. correspondence and talked to people who had experi­ He maintained his Mount Pleasant store after his enced life there. So well did she absorb early Ballarat marriage to Mary Bailey, as the fictional Mahony did history that Weston Bate, who with his wife, Mary Turnham. As business declined wrote Lucl

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 29 their marriage. Her first years were lived in Balaclava She assum ed her duties in the bluestone Koroit w here her sister, Lil, was born. Post Office in September 1878 and lived with her Walter Richardson had prospered by investments. daughters in the little h ouse at tached. Ettie's On a second overseas family trip in the early 1870s impressions of Koroit were not flattering. The eight disastrous news came about his business affairs, year old thought it 'mean and ugly', like the house, requiring an immediate return to Australia to salvage while she saw the surrounding countryside as fl at and what he could of his finances and face the necessity treeless. Her mother's prejudice against State schools of returning to medical practice in necessitated her each day going to the Rectory of the order to support his family. Anglican Church were the Vicar's wife tutored her In 1874 he bought land and and two stepchildren. This was the family of the Rev. built a two-storey house and sur­ C.L.H. Rupp. The Rectory still stands in Queen Street gery in Burwood Road, Hawthorn. In directly behind the Anglican Church, a homely­ the 1960s and 1970s my home was looking old weatherboard place with eye-catching just round the corner from this site chimneys and bow windows. occupied then by the Glenferrie Ethel wrote of the Rupp family in quite unflat­ Hotel where I used to go for the tering terms in Myself When Young, alleging the occasional bottle or jar, quite una­ daughter was beaten savagely by her father on one ware of its historical significance. occasion and intimating that the children and their Walter Richardson walked the stepmother hated each other. These allegations were streets of Hawthorn attending his strongly and convincingly refuted by the Rupp 'chil­ patients, but deteriorating health dren' nearly 70 years after the Richardsons left Koroit, and financial concerns sapped his following publication of Myself When Young. The strength and confidence which in daughter, Florence Monypenny, while denying the turn unsettled the five-year-old accusations in a letter to Nettie Palmer, praised Ettie Ettie. as 'rather a wonder child', emphasising her abilities The Hawthorn house was to write stores and poems and referring to the piano rented out in 1876 when Richardson prowess displayed by her and Lil at concerts. Florence took over a country practice at Chil­ Monypenny and her brother also refer to Ethel tern. There, Ettie first experienced Richardson's failure to mention the beauty and special the Australian bush. A lifetime later, features of the district, in particular Tower HilL in Myself When Young, she wrote Yet who could blame Ethel for having adverse about Chiltern: ' ... for the first time, I saw and smelt memories of Koroit? She was only eight or nine. Her Above: wattles in bloom. It was an unforgettable experience. father came to live there in February 1879, a complete Henry Handel To this day, I have only to catch a whiff of mimosa in a physical and mental wreck; he died in August. Her Richardson, dingy London street, and I am once more a small girl, formative years brimmed with anxiety, fear and circa 1921. sitting on a fallen tree under the bluest of skies, with embarrassment. all around me these golden, almost stupefy­ Rev. Rupp officiated at Richardson's funeral on ingly sweet masses of blossom.' the lower slopes of Tower Hill on the Warrnambool side. Driving from Koroit today, and following the B uT THE HEALTH and economic difficulties of her route of the funeral procession, one sees the ocean father grew apace and the family moved to Queens­ waves still tumbling on our southern shore. Without cliff in 1877. The house they lived in still stands at trees or shrubs the cemetery remains starkly grim, 26 M ercer Street. The piano and the beach occupied bleak and windswept. On each of my several visits much of the children's time and books and reading there I have been struck with the accuracy and power began to loom large for Ettie, whose father took of the depiction of the cene in the penultimate advantage of the daily return trips available on the paragraph of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony : paddlesteamer and the steamship to visit Melbourne bookshops in order to satisfy his own voracious A quarter of a mile off, behind a sandy ridge, the reading habits and to supply his precocious daughter surf, driving in from the Bight, breaks and booms with suitable fare. eternally on the barren shore. Thence, too, come the However, Richardson's mental health declined fierce winds which, in stormy weather, hurl them­ so badly that he had to abandon medical duties and selves over the land, where not a tree, not a bush, nor the children were often publicly embarrassed by his even a fence stands to break their force. Or to limit antics in the streets of the town. Mary Richardson the outlook. On all sides the eye can range, unhin­ had no choice but to send her husband to Melbourne dered, to where the vast ea rth meets the infinitely for treatment and institutionalisation. She then had vaster sky. And under blazing summer suns, or when only a very tiny income. Through an old family friend, a full moon floods the ni ght, no shadow falls on the Henry Cuthbert, the Victorian Postmaster-General, sun-baked or moon-blanched plains, but those cast she was appointed as postmistress at Koroit. by the few little stones set up in human remembrance.

30 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 Mary Richardson was transferred to Maldon early caustic characterisation of the Shepherd family in The in 1880, from a bluestone Post Office to a red brick Getting of Wisdom upon the Greens-husband, wife one, but with more responsibility and a higher salary. and sister. Maldon became home for the Richardsons from 1880 What a talented lot they were. Jack Stretch until January 1887. During this time Ethel's five years became Bishop of Newcastle, known for his human as a boarder at the Presbyterian Ladies College in and liberal attitudes. Arthur Green was a considerable Melbourne, though academically successful, were not scholar, later Bishop of Grafton and Armidale in NSW always happy. However, she always looked back on and then Bishop of Ballarat. --=r.-.:'1~~~...,=-:"!"~..,.,...1'!"""'~~:-'T'"..... ~..,. ~..., Maldon with fondness, as her comments in Myself Florence Green founded a When Young testify: number of schools includ­ ing the Girls' High School Compared with Koroit, Maldon seemed and indeed in Geelong, the forerunner was a lovely spot. For one thing trees abounded. Even of The Hermitage. Ethel's the main street was lined with great gums, and almost sister, Lil, an active suffra­ every house had a garden, in springtime a profusion gette in England, married of white and coloured blossoms. Blue ranges banked the 'new' educationist the horizon, and to the rear of the little town rose A.S. NeilL She h elped its own particular hill-old, boulder-strewn Mount found Summerhill School, Tarrengower-an hour's stiff climb up a trickling to which she devoted gully, and a landmark in the district for miles a large part of her life. around.

Little is left of the Post Office garden which so I N JANUARY 1887, Mary Richardson left Maldon to Above: the attracted Ethel Richardson. However, an oak, two old become postmistress of Richmond South Post Office gadabout HHR. almonds, a peppercorn and some creepers are probably in Swan Street. Ethel and Lil attended PLC as day girls. in her Armstrong­ remnants from her time. But the Swan Street job and residence did not appeal Siddeley, 1927. Diagonally across from the Post Office is the old to her. She resigned from the service, sold the Calder home visited often by the Richardsons for Hawthorn house and took her daughters to Europe. parties, games and musical evenings. A little up High The girls returned to Australia only for the six-week Street is the Holy Trinity Church which perhaps had trip in 1912. more significance in Ethel's young life. Externally Ethel Richardson declared once that a writer had lovely but magnificent within, this Anglican Church usually gathered sufficient material by the age of ten. has a superb wooden scissor-beam ceiling and fine pipe Her 18 years in Australia gave her an abundance. H er organ, the decorations on which are over 100 years horrifying childhood experience of seeing her father old. Rev. Jack Stretch became the minister there in gradually lose his faculties and her difficult times at 1882. Ethel heard him preach .~ PLC gave her a sense of the there and became infatuated "W'l tragic and of alienation. She with the good-looking, person­ -~ knew wealth yet she experi­ able and articulate you ng enced frugality. This unusual minister. She was 13. A lifetime ---~ background together with her later she wrote in Myself When intelligence and her ability to Young: 'I fell in love, 'make up' enabled her to become desperately, hopelessly in love, one of our greatest writers. with a man fifteen years my Dorothy Green put it so well: senior ... ' Much has been made ... to know Th e Fortun es of of this childhood in fa tua tion Richard Mahony ... is one of the but Stretch left Maldon in 1885 most elem entary and obvious and married shortly afterwards. duties of Australian culture ... Stretch's successor at the Left: the But to read it is not only a duty, Holy Trinity Church was the Richmond South but an unforgettable experience Rev. Arthur Green who came to Post Office in Swan of the profundities that sustain Street, where Maldon with his wife and his the simplicities of existence, an Mary Richardson sister, Florence. The Green experience that shakes and then became postmistress family were known to the strengthens the reader who in 1887. Unhappy in Richardsons. Arthur Green had yields himself to it, and which the position, she been the incumbent at StPeter's endows the common dust with resigned and took in East Melbourne near the a tragic grandeur. her daughters to Presbyterian Ladies College. It • Europe. seems most likely that Ethel, John Sendy lives and writes in Photograph by some 25 years later, based her North Central Victoria. Bill Thomas.

V oLUME 8 N uMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 31 Ess AY

P ETER STEELE

L s IS HOW CELEBRATION CAN co, when things are well in hand:

The Rain Stick for Beth and Rand

Upend the rain stick and what happens next T hen subtle little wets off grass and daisies; Is a music that you never would have kn own Then glitter-dri zzle, almos t-breaths of air. To I is ten for. In a cactus stalk Upend the sti ck again . Wh at happens next

Downpo ur, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash Is undiminished for hav ing happened once, Come fl ow ing through. You stand there li ke a pipe Twice, ten, a thousa nd times before. Being played by water, you shake it aga in lightly Who cares if all the music that transpires

And di minuendo runs through all its scales Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus? Like a gu tter stopping trickling. And now here co mes Yo u are li ke a rich man entering heaven A sprinkle of drops out of the fres hened leaves, T hro ugh the ea r of a rai nd ro p. Li sten now again.

-'The Rain Stick', The Spirit Le1rel

A newcom er to Heaney's work might notice a handful of things about this poem , including the following. It traffi cs in the elem ents, as by instinct- rain, breaths of air, earth's grass and daisies, the sunned cactus - and goes the rounds of them , touching base with the given for its own sake; whatever is to be made of them will be in part of their own m aking. Then there is fluidity, whether in the music invoked fro m fi rst to las t, in the summoning narrative, or in the range of aspira tions and vindications­ things heigh tened by a poet who has always had the blood of Orpheus in him. And there is the bid for, the salute to, plenitude: 'a music you never would have known/To listen for'; the experience undimin­ ished fo r all its earlier frequency; that rich m an go t, surprisingly, into the final opulence. In the Gospel story, at the prodigal's return, 'they began to celebrat e', making a m eal of it with the fatted calf. One of Heaney's prime inclinations is to offer a bread, at once world and word, as best taken with the wine of exhilaration-a wine which seem s to come from water itself when water is well regarded. Celebrations commonl y m ake use of emblematic obj ects-w edding ring and veil, m aturity's key­ and Heaney is a great one fo r these. T he rain stick here is of a piece with the harvest bow, the blackberries, or the palmed stone which are at the centre of various other poem s. Any su ch thing might, in other contem porary hands, com e to stand for dismay, as if every golden thread must at best lead us only into darkness and its minotaur: but although Hean ey's whole poetical fortunes migh t be symbolised in terms of his assaying and scrutinising such obj ects, his basic disposition is to hope for good of them . Joseph Joubert, in his splendidly independent Notebooks, writes at one point, 'Our arms are canes of fles h with which the soul reaches and touches', and, at another,' A diamond lost in the lawn is only a stone for the caterpillar who crawls along it, bu t for us it is a source of radiant scintillations. It is a star. It is a m eteor. ' T his might be ca lled Heaney's lingua franca, though it is so only if we notice the elem ents of probing-what Shakespeare calls 'tenting'-and of revisionary attention in Joubert's phrases. T he heart can be done good only if the mind com es good, it would seem.

32 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 Two of Heaney's favourite words are 'acoustic' and 'vigilant'. Either, in isolation, might be inadequate to celebration and its occasions. 'Acoustic' can look only to sound's m odalities, to choices from the tongu e's and the ear's repertoire, to manner- to the sheerly aesthetic: 'vigilant' can on occasion serve only the m enaced self or community, can bear on peril and its averting. Bu t in ensemble, they may stand for a more complex keying of the imagination, one in which account is taken of in timate, shifting, and only partly comprehended relationships between the fertile and the lethal. In the round, the celebrations at least of adults typically accommodate both good acoustics and appropriate vigilance. A sacral example of this is a priest's 'celebrating' the Eucharist or Mass, where the ceremony is impossible without allusion both to emblems of life and joy- bread, wine, light, water and so forth, and the 'secret harmonies' for In cultural milieux in which these stand-and to a tale of betrayal, desertion, and judicial murder at the hands of an army of occupation. The example is drastic: but more commonplace occasions-any day's countless weddings, which those ancient ceremonies of initiation, m arkings of professional competency, solacing of the bereft-all make room both for intuited significance and for required endeavour. Celebration is a kind of agora of the transcendentals, h eart, a locale of audition, insight and transaction . unity, truth and G oon THING T HAT IT IS, indeed indispensabl for any amply h uman life, celebration has various enemies. I think here not of the people Brendan Behan used to call 'the begrudgers' in every generation, goodness, are and presumably every culture: but of dispositions to which anyone may be subject, and cultural demeanours to which anyone m ay consent. One of these is outright cynicism, in the face of which automatically celebration simply withers. To Heaney's 'Upend the rain stick ... Listen now again', and to all comparable invitations, cynicism says every time, 'ohne mich' (not m e!) . discounted, Still, I believe that one thing which has made H eaney's work, prose as well as poetry, engaging in both senses of that word is his instinctive readiness to make provision for th e voice of the cynic in his own beauty has a harder work. Very few, if any, of his poem s are purely lyrical: usually, to use another of his words, they are 'badged' with the insignia of grief, misgiving, subversion. So, in 'The Rain Stick', his 'Who cares1 ' is an time still in invitation to continued enchantment, but 'the fa ll of grit or dry seeds through a cactus' is still vigilance's concession to sensed implausibility: and the bold gaiety of the last couple of lines still enjoins a new urging its cause: exertion . Even in the m odest circumstances of this poem, there is som ething of a call to arm s to be heard. We are on som ewhat different ground in another of Heaney's shorter poems,' A Daylight Art', which but poets cannot is dedicated to N orman MacCaig.

On the day he was to take the poison But hardly Socrates. Until, that is, always be attending Socrates told his friends he had been writing: he tells his friends the dream had kept recurring putting Aesop's fables into verse. all his life, repeating one instruction: to intellectual

And this was not because Socrates loved wisdom Pra ctise th e art, which art until that moment pathology, and and advocated the examined life. he always took to mean philosophy. The reason was that he had had a dream. Happy the man, therefore, with a natural gift must sometimes Caesar, now, or Herod or Constantine for practising the right one from the start- get right on with or any number of Shakespearean kings poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless; bursting at the end like dams whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass making the things where original panoramas lie submerged like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye. which have to rise again before the death scenes­ which at least - 'A Daylight Art', Th e Haw Lantern you can believe in their believing dreams. insinuate excellences 'Through the ear of a raindrop', 'through the rod's eye or the nib's eye'-the confirming, concluding gesture is one thing which links the poems, and there are other occasions on which H eaney rehearses the decried by the trope, taken of course from Christ's characterisa tion of improbable, beneficent accomplishm ent. I take it here as a reminder of something critical to all of this poet's aspirations to celebration, namely the dogmatic. coming to cases, or to put it a little differently, the declining of the abstract. It is not that Heaney, especially in his prose, eschews generalisation, or the handsom e rhetoric which wears aphoristic formulation as a sort of tabard. In fact, he does that kind of thing exceptionally well: the mewed voice may loft at any m om ent, and does so often. But he commonly writes as though the particular and its constraints are insight's be t warrant. Joubert called Plato 'the Rabelais of abstractions', which may be an important part of justice to the philosophers' philosopher. It implies, surely, singularity of mind, immense command of individual occasions, relish, and non-stop drama. The fa ct that the whole original Platonic affair com es to us couched as drama is far from incidental, signalling as it does the truth that we really have insight on no other terms. H eaney, who clearly finds thinking relishable, contemplates the great philosopher's mentor and m essianic figure as someone who, approaching that most particular of all points, the death-m om ent,

VOLUME 8 N uMil ER 7 • EUREKA STREET 33 At the beginning of takes his stand on a new-found art, which requires verse's precision in the framing of Aesop's fables. Heaney has the account of Socrates' last hours from Plato's Phaedo. Good translations of the origin al offer, A Midsum1ner variously, that his dream enj oined on him that he should 'work at music, and compose it', or that he 'make art and practise it'. There is nothing enigmatic in the contrast, given Plato's view of the musical as ubiquitous; Night's Dream, and the convergence of the two formulations would be altogether congenial to Heaney, who often writes in counterpoint to existing staves, and who bids for a 'music of what happens' even in the face of m elody's violation. But he is not ca joled, not seduced, by life's orchestral insinuations so that he neglects to put Duke Theseus, these to the test of the particular. It was, after all, the then-Britannic agents, Edmund Spenser and John Davies, who wrote with sumptuous fluidity of cosmic harmonies, unalarmed the while by the shedding planning wedding of Irish blood. Perhaps H eaney also remembers Elizabeth's terse injunction, 'Hang the harpers wherever found', but he is not someone easily beguiled by musics native or foreign. Entertaining gratefully the example celebrations, says of shapers, pipers and haunters, he is also a Platonic scrutiniser, a holder of things, item by item, up to the light. 'A Daylight Art' is dedicated to one of Scotland's veteran poets, a man whose work has undergo ne a that 'The pale number of significant transformations. The poem may be more than casually complimentary, implying both that MacCaig kept faith with early intuitions and that he had som ething of a socratic readiness to companion is not for go wherever, appropriately, he was drawn. At all events, the bent of' A Daylight Art' is to celebrate a quality which H eaney elsewhere identifies in Wordsworth's 'Resolution and Independence'-a being 'philo­ our pomps', that sophic in its retrieval of the stance of wisdom out of the experience of wonder'. (Heaney, in Introduction to The Essential Wordswol'th, H opewell, NL Ecco Press, 1988). This, no doubt, is 'a natural gift', but it pale co1npanion has-like fishing-to be exerci eel case by case: the 'deep-sunk panoramas' have to be played-up, played­ through, 'artlessly' as it m

To deliver farther on. This time the lode Our coa l ca me from was silk-black, so th e as hes Will be the silkiest white. The Mag hcrafelt (Via Toomcbridge) bus goes by. The half-s tripped lorry With its emptied, fo lded coal-bags moves my mother: The tasty ways of a lc

And films no less! The conceit of a coalman .. . She goes bac k in and gets out the black lea d And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother, All busin ess round her stove, half-wiping ashes With a ba ckhand fr om her cheek as the bolted lorry Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt

And the last delivery. Oh, Maghcra fe lt' Oh, drea m of reel plush and a city coa lman As time fastforwards and a different lorry Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a pa yload That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes ... After th at happened, I'd a vision of my mother,

34 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 A revenant on the bench where I would meet her In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt, Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes. Death walked out past her like a du st-faced coalman Refolding body-bags, plying his load Empty upon empty, in a flurry

Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry Was it now? Young Agnew's or that other, Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt ... So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman. Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of du t that was Magherafelt, Then reappear from your lorry as my mother's Dreamboat coalman film ed in silk-white ashes. -'Two Lorries', The Spirit Level

INHIS N oBEL LECTURE, Heaney remarks on what he, and others, have seen as a decisive shift in his priorities as a poet. He remarks that, when thinking of the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face Heaney has been of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art. badgered from left Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, and from right knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effort, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repea t the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for a meagre hea t. Forgetting faith, straining towards concerning his polity, good works. Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolute , among which must be counted the suffici ency of that which is absolutely imagined. T hen finally and happily, and not in obedience to the and it is improbable dolorous circumstances of my native place but in despite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous ... that he has yet said (Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, London, Faber, 1996) 'Two Lorries', surely, is a poem which is driven by this newer intent. The break between earlier and all his say, in verse later endeavours is not absolute-few things in poetry are of that kind-but the ground has shifted somewhat. 'Two Lorries' is scarved in formality to a degree not often welcomed in the earlier poetry, even or otherwise, on the given Heaney's liking for the sonnet. Still, the sestina is loosened somewhat, is servant and not master of the questing imagination. It is part of the poem's affair to celebrate lee-way in human choosing as in matter. What is clear human remembering, and some relaxedness is relevant to both of these. Thinking of the business of celebration, I want to say that it does aspire to conjunction s, to harmonies, is that the presence and to the prizing of beauty. In cultural milieux in which those ancient transcendentals, unity, truth and goodness, are autom atically discounted, beauty has a harder time still in urging its cause: but poets cannot of intimidation, of always be attending to intellectual pathology, and must sometimes get right on with making the things which at least insinuate excellences decried by the dogmatic. And there is a m ore important point, so far terror in fact, is no as this poem is concerned. Intimidation, demoralisation, and above all terror, 'blow things apart'. All those many years ago, in Yea ts' nightmare vision of wars to come-a vision founded in part by m emories small part of his of what h ad already been- it was said that 'the centre cannot hold .. . mere anarchy is loosed upon the world'. Political terrorism aims to dissever, to atomise and disband; and in varying degrees, so do various other forces-intimately personal ones, domestic ones, societal ones-to which anyone may be exposed, matter. even in the most tranquil-seeming of circumstances. O ne strikingly significant thing about 'Two Lorries' is that, in the harmonies of its development, it re-concerts a world which terroristic explosion tries to dis-concert. I should, perhaps, point out that H eaney is quite without illusion as to the power of art-does not expect too much of it, and does not ask too little of it. Some of his readers have shied at the line which he has used more than once, and which he had from Yeats, who had it from Coventry Patmore-'The end of art is peace.' Heaney, interviewed, has made it plain that he knows all too w ell that art's coherings are always lodged in history's incoherences. (I som etimes wonder whether those who salute the majestic serenity of Dante's 'In His will is our peace' always notice that the pilgrim poet who hears the blessed say this is to be re-consigned to the bloody parishes of Italy: but it is not a point to escape Heaney.) The last lines of the N obel Lecture put his position clearly:

VOLUME 8 NUMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 35 Poetic form is both the ship and the

Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood On the bricklayer's knuckles, like the damson stain That seeped through hi s packed lunch. A full hod stood Aga inst the mortared wall, his big bright trowel In his left hand (fo r once) was pointed down As he marvelled at hi s ri ght, held high and raw: King of the castle, scaffold-stepper, shown Bl eeding to the world. Wound that I saw In glutinous colour fifty years ago­ Damson as om en, weird, a dream to read- Is weeping with the held-at-arm 's length dead From everywhere and nowhere, here and now. * Over and over, the slur, the scrape and mix As he trowelled and retrowellcd and laid down Courses of glum m ortar. Then the bricks Ji ggled and settled, tacked and tapped in line. I loved especially the trowel's shine, Its edge and apex always coming clean And brightening itself by mucking in. It looked light but felt heavy as a weapon, Yet when he lifted it there was no stra in. It was all point and skim and float and glisten Until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking Like a cult blade that had to be kept hidden. * Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of bl ood Are crowding up th e ladder, all unhealed, And some of them still ri gged in bloody gea r. Drive them bac k to the doorstep or the road Where they lay in their own bl ood once, in the hot Nausea and last gasp of dear life. Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off Like Odysseus in Hades la shing out With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat Of the sacrificial lamb.

36 EUREKA STREET • S EPTEMBER 1998 But not like him­ Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board­ Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home, The smell of damsons simmering in a pot, Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunl ight. -'Damson', The Spirit Level

If anyone can be said to have title to the word 'dam son', it must be the Hopkins of 'dappled-with­ damson west'. Heaney writes of some of Hopkins' lines that 'despite the gleam and deliquescence and intense sufficiency of the verbal art, they are still intent on telling a truth independent of themselves'. Such words could be applied with justice to much of Heaney's own writing, earlier and later: and they have a special appropriateness when one thinks about celebration and things inimical to it. For if celebration can be subverted by cynicism, by abstraction, and by intimidation, it is also helpless in the face of narcissism. Celebration, I take it, is an act of solidarity: the dancers in its ring face outwards. Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, speaks with regret of individuals' being jailed within themselves, and invokes poetry's ability to 'teach the free man how to praise'; Brodsky, at the end of his 40th birthday poem, 'May 24, 1980', proclaims that ' ... until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,/ only gratitude will be gushing from it.' Neither of these two was unalert to the jungle element in public reality, and neither without temptation to live in a mirrored room: but the governing disposition in their verse is to go on making common cause with 'the others'. Those others are primarily other persons, but the reach can be more ample, as is suggested in the title of Paul Shepard's book, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. And since our understanding of anything is permeable to our understanding of anything else, the salute to one can become a salute to all­ as happens, for instance, in Smart's' A Song for David', where the stars in their courses move in concert with 'quick peculiar quince'. This is one of Heaney's veins, alert though he constantly is to violence and violation, on both of which he has written intently. 'Damson' is a poem which, in a thoroughly open-eyed way, tries to do justice to that world of the palpable which preceded each of us, and will perhaps succeed I should, perhaps, all of us, but which we make our own, and most our own when we are open-handed about it all. Celebration, in practice, is almost inconceivable without the evocation and deployment of memories. These may be assayed, sometimes to test them for spuriousness, but also to determine their yield, their point out that plenitude. In Heaney's poem, the small, purple, tart plum is 'Damson as omen, weird, a dream to read', retrieved from fifty years back, and scrutinised for significance. And so is the bricklayer-'King of the Heaney is quite castle', as in a children's game, 'scaffold-stepper', as in an heroic poem, 'shown/Bleeding to the world', as in countless representations of Christ's and Pilate's 'Ecce homo!' He, like the damson, is at one with without illusion as 'the held-at-arm's-length dead', with all that may be questionable about such a fending-of£. It can, after all, be excess of significance in things remembered that prompts their being put behind us, but our being to the power of art­ so brisk with them can leave us attenuated-preserved, yes, but deprived too. As the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that Heaney is glad to see the bricklayer not as larger than life, does not expect too but as more full of life than a glancing attention might suppose. And if the trowel is 'brightening itself by mucking in', so is the bricklayer-once again, a state of affairs remarkably like the one celebrated, much of it, and does repeatedly, by Hopkins. Yet for all his proficiency, the workman has wounded himself-one of the insignia of all our tribe. In that, he cannot be held at arm's length, is still our omen. Damson's purple can not ask too little of stand for all the ways in which we are imperial, from walking erect to being master builders to commanding the language in which such things can be said, but it can also stand for the blood which, it. Some of his whenever inspected, shows both vitality and vulnerability. Heaney's own language, then, is 'brightening itself by mucking in', and this is a large part of its warrant for the reader. readers have shied at A ND THEN THERE ARE THOSE OTHER GHOSTS-disconcerting presences, these. In his poem 'Ghosts, Places, the line which he Stories, Questions' (whose title might encompass all of Heaney's work), Vincent Buckley writes, 'Heatless and demanding presences,/ I will endure you; but you shall not be my gods./ Arcadia cannot give you fl esh; has used more than heaven cannot make you more than spies of hell'. They might have been words for Heaney's poem, but only provisionally, since the Odyssean bricklayer is called upon to differ from any Homeric 'sacker of once, and which he cities' and to give them what is wished for the dead in another tradition-' refreshment, light and peace'. It is a sanguine conclusion, but if one asks how that particular band of ghosts came to be there at all, had from Yeats, who the answer must surely be that, here as elsewhere, Heaney wants to come to terms with an unbidden world. A psyche engaged only by the familiar and the congenial can easily stay, as it were, fifty years had it from Coventry younger than its chronological age-can practice the infant strut of ideology or the preening of self­ absorption. But to be met by such archons of otherness as the ghosts crowding up the ladder is to be tested for ability, and readiness, to grow. And to persist, come what may, in a demeanour of hospitality, itself Patmore- 'The end sends a man, not a boy, home. • of art is peace.' Peter Steele SJ has a Personal Chair at the University of Melbourne.

VOLUME 8 NUMB ER 7 • EUREKA STREET 37 BooKs D AviD M cComv Speaking in tons

Fredy Neptune, Lcs Murray, Duffy & Snellgrove, 1998 . JSB I 875989 30 7, RRP $24.95

L ES MURRAY' s new long poem plunges could go a long way towards that goal. It Zeppelin, punches a lot of thugs and you into a strange world, large and plentiful, really does deserve to be a popular success. saves a few people in need of saving. He where nothing stays the same for long: This readable quality partly comes from has an amusing ability to bump into events tumble out in <1 kind of eternal Murray's style, but also from the work's historical figures : yarning with Banjo present. Initially this might seem almost cracking pace. There is so much that Paterson in Egypt, not-quite interviewing mad, certainly eccentric: comforting generic happens, in so many exotic locations, T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia ), and amusingly rulesseemabandonedforsheeroriginality. and with so much action. It's as if (if not believably) being chatted up by But Fredy N eptune quickly beguiles, its Murray has rewritten the Boys' Own Marlene Dietrich. eponymous narratoracquiring that 'strange adventure as 'larrikin culture' (to pinch a This tendency to intersect with 'big' power of speech' of phrase from C hris history makes Fredy Neptune an interest- Co leridge's Ancient Wallace-C rabb e). ing comparison with Forrest Gump. Like Mariner: give this book Murray' ripping yarn Harvey and Rain Man, Forrest Gump is a a little time and it will turns out to be a Trojan most-American work in its use of the myth transfix you. horse of the mind: of innocence. If Gump represents an T his itself is an you'll find numinous American everyman, then his lack of moral achievement, and so is soldiersmessingaround culpability i both his unlikely strength the size (w rite 200 lines in your head long after and weaknes . History becomes destiny, of verse yourself to you've put the book successbecomesaccidentalandnottainted glimpse the Herculean down. by the bloody hands of rea l-life capitalism. task of writing the Theworkcentreson Murray's working Forre t Gump is 10,000 lines of Fredy Friedrich Boettcher, a intriguingly different in that, while similarly Nepwne) . The work's German-speaking 'disabled', Freddy is certainly not stupid, characteristics are so Australian (b. 1895), and he never succeeds materially(hedoesn't pronounced that the and his experiences in buy the Australian equivalent, if there ever critical commonplaces the first, very dark, half were one, of shares in Apple). Indeed, he is that have been used to of our century. His most Australian in his desire to remain at praise Murray's earlier background disallows the sidelines, even when he has a front seat poetry (his capacious him to take sides in the to the 20th century. He survives, but he imagination; his poetic Great War, but his does not enter the fray on any authority's and linguistic facility; troubles really begin say-so (unlike Vietnam-vet Gump). In hisprodigaluseofideas) when he witnesses the addition, while he tries not to cau e seem premature. burning of a group of suffering, he is never innocent enough to Murray has long Turkish women by believe that he succeeds, even (as we shall bemoaned poetry's soldiers. This event, see) when trying to ameliorate suffering. status in the republic of letters (something and a brush with leprosy, brings about a Where Forrest Gump is a character who like an anachronistic ea rldom with numbness, leaving the barest outline of pretends to be devoid of ideology, Friedrich academics for courtiers). Part of this his bodily self. Freddy then leads a Boettcher actively opposes ideology. minority status comes from the loss of the peripatetic life, som e times a sailor, Freddy's strength obviously casts him narrative mode. For a hundred years, 'poetry' sometimes a worker, sometimes neither. as the hero-figure, but his literary function has signified lyri c poetry, despite the We find him in the Middle East; Prohibition- is notably manifold. He is the picaro (the modernists' guilty desire for the epic mode. and Depression-America; Nazi Germany roguish fi gure, not averse to lightly dodgy Murray's previous efforts to return poetry (with a brief sojourn to the USSR ); and dealings when required) in this picaresque, to the common reader have proved less South East Asia during the next War. Added with its episodic structure. He is also a than critical! y successful, whether through to these are interludes, not all bucolic, in trickster figure: he has a tendency to change using narrative (The Boys who Stole the Australia. his form, can speak more than one language, Fun eral) or reviving the ' middle style' found Through his la ck of sensation (j ust one and holds arcane knowledge. When he in 19th-century newspaper (Dog Fox Field). irony in a sensationalist work) Freddy descends into the underworld to find his With Fredy Neptune, Murray illustrates dev lops superhuman strength, since he father (in dream) he becomes a classical how to write a long narrative poem that is cannot feel pain. As well as being a worker- hero, an Aeneas or Odysseus. This latter eminently readable and full of ideas and philosopher, he becom es a strong man, joins figure is an obvious antecedent when Freddy intelligence. One poem cannot return poetry a circus (where he's called Fredy N eptune), is the sailor cunningly, but slowly, trying to to the readerly mainstream, but this one is an extra in Hollywood, crews for a get home to his wife, who is one of the

38 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 work's few rounded characters, and son ('I'd In Your Story go h om e and get old, beach ed in responsibility' ). Dietrich sees his physical after Edward Albee condition as standing for the unconscious in the split subject. He is sometimes phantasmal, som etimes a classic Australian This obliquity is almost shining, take our lines away, dispossessed. pioneer. His condition is even, enigmati­ those eyes of a different colour. In a park, day perpetrates its farce, cally, seen as 'a story of law that you're In your story we are all triptychs, merchants, selling palmery, carrying I fo r all places'. dynasties of pearly selves, glide backwards in their noble tans. The plot is intensely episodic, but a needing so many acts to intermit The children are gathering autumn. shape does become observable, particularly a flawed heart, the loping silence. They do not understand yet- as the aspects after the war that initially Cloudage, suspended or real, the falconer ignores their plight. seem almost comic (like Sir Peter, the ushers rancour, vindication. Your character would identify Queensland crook who forces Freddy to go Across orchestras, promenades, with this sorrow, this realized joy. to America) become grimmer, until we are immortals step onto a terrace, The soliloquy at the end baffles back into war again, and Freddy finally admire the infinite, humanized greenery. old perplexities; we ease them makes it home. The vast array of episodes What curious lives they must lead with our random gait. Like Spartans seen through Freddy's eyes som etimes in their tumid, adulterous valleys; of some consummate struggle, martyrs produce that strange sen e of the platform spontaneity the gods, endamaged, lack. brandish china and speakers, veer moving rather than the train; that is, as if New perspectives, severely raked, northward, skyward, rearward, anyways. history moves through Freddy, rather than the other way around. This is not realism, Peter Rose but neither, thank goodness, is it magic realism (despite one or two incidents) . ideology is the antithesis of heroism (a nd is Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes Thing happen, but they do so through a not, certainly, its source). Wars go on, m en of Richard Ma hony with its great sweep of fund of humour, m em orable imagery continue to fi ght one other, police remain time book-ended by images of the Australian ('Laura's mother held m e out on the end of free to harass the unemployed and the land 'consuming' m en. her questions I as if after I left she'd have to different, rega rdless of heroism or bravery. Indeed, Freddy is probably unique in fumiga te her voice'), and strangely gnomic If Australia is relatively fr ee of these Australian literature in his lightness; he moments ('I've forgiven the old girl abhorrences it is not through any e sential almost fl oats off the ground like the n since, without noticing, as you do'). diffe rence: 'If Rus ians could do it, my own Zeppelin he worked on. He is not burdened folk could. There or here. I lf Turks could, by a heaviness that fo rces the male character L oBABLY THE MOST notable feature of all so could both m y own. I'd always known to either submit, die, or leave. Instead, his th action is its violence. This is a very that I since the burning wom en.' lack of sensation seems to be a rather m ore violent poem (on both a 'macro-' and 'micro­ In a sense, however, this lack of large­ daring m etaphor. It is hard not to see some­ his torical' level ). But no m atter h ow scale eff ect emphasises the importance of thing biographical in the condition, keeping indebted to the masculinist fantasies of the acting on a human scale, which is an in mind Murray's comments in 1996 about adventure story, this work is not in thrall to individual scale. As Murray writes in 'A his depression. But m ore generally, the them. Certainly, we cheer when Freddy Working Forest', communiti es preserve m etaphor of Freddy's body, divided against crushes a Nazi's hand over his gun, or when their history not through pattern or ideology, itself, is an interesting m etaphor for 'the he keeps fi ghts 'fair', but Murray doesn't 'but with the living quiddity of each person, Australian experience' (if we can speak so simply peddle stylised violence for cheap each being, each thing'. grandly). em o tion alis m . Freddy is n ' t always The violen ce of the poem is also This sense of division as a na tional trait successful and some peopl e die awful deaths. concern ed with its representation. Any is m os t o bviou s in th e potentially And, more significantly, despite Freddy's thoughtful writer must at som e point scandalous character, Sa m, who is both a heroic actions, the world is simply too big wonder how much stylised violence is Jew and an Aborigi ne. Freddy asks: 'How do a place for his deeds to really change complici t with actual violence. Australian youknowsomuch, Sam! -Weare studious anything. Som etimes they m ake things history (Twain's 'beautiful lies') has long people.- I We Jews or we blackfellows!­ worse. The Jew whom he pro tects from been drawn to violence: in war, the convict Both.-First you're one, then the other.- I Nazi thugs points this out: 'You have k illed past, bushrangers, sport, and the landscape And I always will be. Surely you would me young man ... Run now or you will die as a form of stylised violence paradoxically lmow about division!' To which Freddy too'. When Freddy suggests that the man beyond the aesthe tic dom ain. These answers, 'No. The world's divided'. This fl ee, he points out the ever-growing circles historical fea tures occur repeatedly in sense of division is m ost strikingly healed of effect that Freddy's actions could cause: Australian literature: think of Robert Drewe's in what could only be seen as the Australian 'he looked an old man's look I like up through dandified N ed Kelly, with his tweeds and (male) as everym an: deep water. That would expose my fa mily I magenta cravat, in Our Sunshine; or Patrick and students to m y punishment, he said'. White's pi cking away at the scab of artistic There's a common-human level yo u ca n Freddy's exploits, while undoubtedly creativity as a sublimation of violence; or strike with any people heroic, occur in a context sufficiently like Thomas Keneally's use of stylised violence if you don't impose on them, or scare the world for them to have little real eff ect: as part of a grand drama of self. And lest we them, or so und strange. the poem illustrates again and again how think this is altogether a male thing, there On their own ground wo rks be t, and

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 39 with legs bent if they're men. whole heart. The work's climax is intensely to Northrop Frye (who revived the term) It's nea r impossible not to play up to the m oving: specifically Christian but also 'extroverted and intellectual'. T h ese other sex generally, and immensely, humane. This features are present here. Indeed, the but if yo u can not, they sometimes fo rget poem is Murray's most humane vision of internal and sexual worlds are somewhat yours, for minutes: the world despite its intense pes imism lacking in the work, but this lack is part of you can be just human, sharing. Even regarding human behaviour. the poem 's con cerns. Fredy Neptune is mad folk and toffs If, as Helen Vendler puts it, a poem is a immensely rich: no pun is too painful, no and others who have trouble getting off problem secreting its own resolutions, then knowledge too arcane, no unlikelihood too stage ca n be soothed the problem about stylised violence may be unlikely. It presents many of Murray's into it. Outside this, things all slope solved by the poem 's own being. If Freddy's concerns in a form far m ore pa latable than toward war. condition suggests the condition of the elsewhere. We cannot, surely, ignore the artist, shocked by the image ry of violence, poem's immensely difficult purpose: to be This is comic, for sure, but the last then the solution is a theological one: a a heroic poem for an unheroic age; a comedy sentence tells us to take it seriously. condition of prayer. And with the represen­ for a tragic world; a search for 'benign' There are certain Murrayisms through ­ tation of choice that prayer involves nationalism in the shadow of nationalism's ou t the work with regard to ideology, and ('begga rs must be choosers' is an enigmatic worst phase. Previously, despite Murray's Australian history, especially. He even has phrase that Freddy must come to under­ desire to speak to the common reader he one of his characters quote from that stand) we m ay also see through one of the h as (at least to my eye) often been (sometimes-horrible) study in division, grea test myths of our violent century: that disconcertingly diffic ult. H ere he Subhuman Redneck Poems: 'Sex is a Nazi, ' violence is stylish. synthesises his desire for accessibility with say Artur Gunst (first met in Hollywood, Fredy Neptune is that strange non-form, his difficult, fecund intelligence. Murray then seen doing well in the Third Reich) to the an a tomy, with its encyclopedic has written a kind of masterpiece. • justify n ot 'paddling I aga inst the natural interests, seeking to capture the world's flow of blood and shit'. The stanza about variety, immensity, while aware of that D avid McCooey lectures in literary studies the common-human level, and having a project's impossibility. It is also, according at Deakin University, Geelong. Nazi quote an earlier Murray poem, are no doubt part of Murray's own strange baiting BooKs: 2 of the world (especially academia, where cultural relativists would refute a view of JoN GREENAWAY universal humanity defined by a white male) . Murray's right-wingery is that kind High flyers and criers of anti-ideol ogi cal ideology that is radically suspicious of the institutional. It Harry: The Words and Wi sdom of Ju stin Madden, Justin Madden, Pan MacMi llan, was Murray after all who wrote that 'all 1998, ISBN 0 330 35852 9, RRP $19.95; Real Footballers Don't Cry, Justin Madden, academies are police academies', the full Pan Macmillan, 1998, ISBN 0330 36091 4, RRP $22.95; A Football Life, Clinton nastiness of which appears in the present Walker, Pan Macmillan, 1998, ISBN 0 330 36081 7, RRP $19.95 context, with the poem's description of the rise of Nazi Germ an y as the Police Revolution. Murray is habitually garrulous (only last year h e referred to Universities as IN'"" )u" bottom ­ by blowing a fiv e-goal lead 'humiliation mills'), but what is significant feeders Carlton sprang the in the fi nal term but the about this work is that the poetry seem s to surprise of the round by others clown the road are dispel Murray's need to work in such a vein. defea ting Adelaide in Ad­ always ugly and distas teful Fredy Neptune is a notably sympathetic elaide by four points. More no matter how they fare. work (unlike Subhuman Redneck Poems, rem arkable than the reversal People relish h ating or Th e Boys with its anti-feminism ). of the form that had seen Carlton. Maybe it is the This humanity com es through Freddy's them vying for the wooden patrician air about the club­ care for others. The work is immensely spoon was the reaction of the image they seem to Christian. For this reason the poem's many Melbournians who portray that success is their violence acts as a kind of conscience for the found themselves enjoying birthright. This has been artistic act: 'How good's yo ur poem ? I Can a Carlton win. For football's personified in recent times it make them alive again after dancing in legion of fans who love to by the c h ain-smokin g the kerosene? I I Can it help Sam swim into hate, a successful Adelaide arrogance of club pre ident Heaven <' turned out to be a bigger John Elliott, yet even the T his calls to m ind a comment in troll than a downtrodden hardest hea rts opened up to Murray's essay 'Embodiment and Incarna­ Carlton . them following t h eir t ion': ' The conscien ce resembles a The lovely thing about the hate one desperate win against last year's premiers. permanent poem of ourselves that we carry reserves for another football team is that it Previously, in more profitable times, the within ourselves'. Like the Ancient Mariner, is more constant than the loveforthefavoured only redeeming feature of the Carlton foot­ Freddy is afflicted until he can pray with a team . Your side will always break your heart ball club for other teams' fans was one

40 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 Justin 'Harry' Madden. Even maniacal (He does, however, give a highly The Melancholy God Collingwood supporters who regard Carlton amusing account in the latter with the same affection a mongoose saves of the two books of the time he No protection in a chic space, for a cobra would soften at the mention of and a couple of team-mates reality stark for a blue proscenium, his name. appeared before a magistrate in music formidable in its royal box, In his two books, Harry: The Words and Hawaii for writing their initials angled view and tanglement of wire. Wisdom of Ju stin Madden and Real in wet cemen t.) The other is Behind the players, behind memory Footballers Don't Cry he credits this pheno­ his pragmatism- a pragmatism m enon to the fact that he was more human that saw him bargain with the and its exiguous props, Botticelli's than other footballers. He never possessed AFL for a better deal for players beauty stares in her scallop, the ethereal skills of Gary Ablett or the during his time as president survives calamities of rhetoric, intuition of Paul Kellyi he was m erely a of the Players' Association and the hollow in the audience 208-Cln dinosaur lumbering around the also made him look o n equally ineloquent. The blood ground managing to put in his fair share football as a job. His starry-eyed is false, the mind a very opal. every week. The beer-gu tted fan in the days ended when he realised Comedy is blither for its blackness, stands could m ore easily dream about that the drea m of playing for ritual humiliations in a cage, m aking it in league footy with him as a the side he barracked for as a the clown's careering spite. reference. When asked in 1995 how he felt kid, Essendon, was Peter Rose about notching up 300 league matches, he 'l i{ T over after 45 games. replied that he regarded it as an indictment of the game. v vH ERE MADDEN is quite ruthless in When he gets the wind up in such I remember a few years ago I was driving demystifying the religion of Australian passages he seems to enjoy the thrill of with a mate up Elgin Street in Carlton on my Rules Football, Clinton Walker in writing about sport outside the narrow way to cricket training in Parkville. As we A Football Life gives it all back as any good parameters of back-page reporting. T hen he topped the rise near the Clyde Hotel, Ju stin footy fan should. What he offers is essen­ approaches the suppleness of Gideon Haigh Madden was waiting for a break in the tially an autobiography as written through on cricket and the sense of romance Martin traffic. He was on his way to pre-season football- the story of the many teams his Flanagan always seems to conjure from the training at Princes Park, loading his huge father played for in Melbourne and country ordinary with his observations of football frame on to one of those small collapsible Victoria and the story of his own years as a on and off the ground. bikes suitable for circus clowns. He was junior footballer. It's an ambitious effort Walker is also brave. He freely admits wearing a shirt and tie and suit pants neatly which falls down a little where he tries to that he completely forsook his beloved St tucked into long black socks, squinting back document a history separate from his own Ki lda for the Sodom and Gomorrah boys, at the peak-hour traffic with an over-sized experience. These passages lack the the Sydney Swans, during the 1980s. Not bowl-helmet atop his crown. 'Who's that liveliness he displays when talking about only is he open about his complete lack of goose?' my friend asked before we both the difficult relationship with his father as taste but also admits that he passed over a erupted in hysterics, not quite believing the fi ltered through football and how growing much more sustainable option of supporting answer. up is m easured by achievements on the Brisbane, where he played his footy and Two things distinguish Justin Madden's fi eld. spent most of his teenage years. He also writing from that of other form er football He hints that the arrogance he displayed dismisses Rugby League as a pestilence greats. One is a wit that does not rely as a callow youth could be traced back to (a nd Rugby Union as well I would guess, entirely on player shenanigans during end­ the young boy who in the terraces fell in given the parochialism of the pure Aussie of-season footy trips, but instead satirises love with St Kilda, the glamour team of the Rules fan who cannot differentiate the whims and insanities of modern football. '60s. For Walker the team seem ed to have a between two games that are as far apart as message, told best by the brash the poles). baby boomer and 'N ew Austral­ Perhaps the problem Rugby League has Delphi, 1976 ian', Carl Ditterich: is that it is not well-served by poets. Thom as Kenea lly tried with his biography of Manly Of all the intersections My mother adored him for his great, Des Hasler, but failed. Maybe if some­ and what is possible, animal sexuality as much as any­ one had stood up in the late '80s and early blue-grey centuries thing. Even my father, who clearly '90s and had written about it in a way that cliff-hanging like perfidy, disavowed his apparent lack of took it to other places then the glue might hawks in a nerved haughtiness, discipline, co uldn' t deny his have been there to stop greed and selfishness this is neatest, glamorous, excitement, or effectiveness. To from tea ring the ga m e apart. hovers, timeless deliberant, me, he was just a big blond god. If only the Australian Rugby League He was a true Aryan superman. plugged for Mr Curly instead of Tina Turner resisting every nuance of And that was the thing about as their great promoter. I wonder if Michael breeze, cool now, buffeting St Kilda in the early '60s: they Leunig is a League fan? • those aliens on the stage, were very exciting at a time when wingless at opposing ends. most everyone else seemed con­ Jon Greenaway is Eureka Street's South Peter Rose tent to mark time, or else didn't East Asia correspondent, a Richmond know how to move forward . supporter and sometime rugby union player.

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 41 THEATRE Cross- Tasman reflections Geoffrey Milne goes to the theatre in New Zealand

I """'w m wly July to the New companies often tackle Zealand city of Hamilton for what proved the less commercial but to be an excellent Australasian Drama more serious na tiona! Studies Association Conference at the and interna tiona! reper­ University of Waikato, but there was an toire in productions added bonus. As luck would have it, Bill that receive as much Peterson (the h e rculean con ference critical attention as convenor) had also laid on a very impressive Patrick White's The Ham Funeral did in cross between a son g-cycle and an Festival of New Zealand Theatre to satisfy Adelaide back in 196 1. The best amateur agitational propaga nda street theatre piece the cravings of conferees who needed a companies in most major cities, likewise, with a mixed cast of Maori and Pakeha theatre fix by night. command the sam e attention as, say, actors. The material covers the various Land N ew Zealand, with a population of Brisbane Arts Theatre. Indigenous people Acts fro m 1841- 1967, the introduction of barely 3.5 million people and with no city make up a vastly greater proportion of the Christianity to the Maori, the Matakite bigger than Adelaide, can only sustain a population of Ao Te Aroa than they do here. Land March of 1975 to Wellington and the very small theatre 'industry' as such , but Consequently 'Maori' theatre (by indig­ sometime violent clashes which followed. the wider theatre culture is interesting. enous and Pakeha writers) also has a very Seeming! y minor events (like a dispute over There are no 'flag-ship' state thea tre strong presence. the 15th hole of a Hamilton golf course, companies as we know them in Australia, The inaugural FUEL Festival of New constructed on the site of an 'urupa' or for example, although there are national Zealand Thea tre assembled most of these sacred burial ground) are placed in the wider opera and ballet companies and a couple of strands. The NZ Ballet and the NZ Opera context of land rights generally. As one of broadly mainstream, professional theatre were not there and neither were Circa the Pakeha judges to whom the songs are companies supported by Creative N ew Theatre, Downstage Thea tre or BATS (NZ's sung remarks: under the land act of 1953, Zealand (NZ's version of the Australia more prominent ' m ainstrea m ' theatre land not actually occupied or properly used Council) plus some commercial entre­ groups), but the best of the local amateurs could be taken by the public trustee. In the preneurs. The national capital, Wellington, were on show, as were productions from event, the Court granted the Maori litigants is the principal site of professional theatre, most of the rest of NZ's alternative theatre ownership of their tradi tiona! site ... but but New Zealand is an even more spectrum. Taki Rua in Wellington (arguably forebade them the use of it. 'regionally' organised nation than Australia the leading indigenous company) couldn't William Dart's music bristles with the and there is a wide range of theatrical bring a production but its leading playwright kind of irony (a nd humour) inherent in the activity in cities like C h ris t church, Hone Kouka gave an inspiring historical facts. T h ere are Gilbert & Dunedin, Palmers ton North and the keynote address at the Conference. Sullivan-style patter-songs, songs reminis­ country's largest city, Auckland. cent of those of Brecht and Eisler and others Co-operative, semi-professional theatre M v FESTIVAL highlight was Songs to using traditional Maori melodies. The (m ost of it 'alternative' or 'oppositional') is the fudges, a 1980 'song-play' by the prolific simple, imaginative production was by the quite strong, although not many such alternative playwright Mervyn Thompson, co-operative Free Theatre from companies have lasted very long. University with music by William Dart. This is a Christchurch. Director Cherie Hart has thea tre is as prominent-and taken as documentary chronicle of N ew Zealand staged the play in traverse form, with the seriou ly-as it was in Australia in the history from the Treaty of Waitangi to the audience on opposite sides of a street-like 1960s, and pro-am ' town -and-gown' present da y, told from the margins as a acting space, suggestive of the road (o r

42 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 journey) traversed by both parties in the tempo (let's ay moderato), Huber's piece is but under-developed remake of the Faust pursuit of the reconciliation hinted at in Butoh malta len to. Here, a young woman, legend couched in a contemporary context. the play's final song. The staging enhanced naked from the waist up and powdered The ageing-hippy Faust figure (played by the notion of judgm ent inherent in the white all over, is revealed squatting at the Red Mole co-founder Alan Brunton) is a play. On one level, the songs of the title are base of a cruciform layout of books, 'wannabe' rock star lured into his contract sung ostensibly to Pakeha judges grouped burdened by the weight of a huge book on with the devil by a talk-radio hostess (played at one end of the space; but the judges' her shoulders. She gradually rises, plucks by the other, still impressive, co-founder, ongs (a nd those of the military supporting the offending tome (the complete works of Sally Rodwell) but the piece gains nothing them ) are judged by the indigenous Shakespeare) from h er back and fr om the modernisa tion or from the liberal characters opposite them and ultimately triumphantly holds it aloft. She then moves inclusion of excerpts from som e of the by the audience ranged on both sides of the up the trunk of the cross and takes an company's other recent shows, shorn as action. opened book to its proper place at the right; they are of their original and informing But the traverse staging also adopts the she then shakes a couple of times and contexts. The young Russian-spea king s tyle of Marae theatre (increasingly finally raises two h alf-open ed slim m embers of the collective don't do much practised since the late 1970s) which in volumes from knee-height to another for the piece either. turn follow the traditional practice of triumphant overhead position. And that's I might have caught Red Mole on an off public debate in a clear space between two it. The whole piece took an excruciating night, or in a new 'team-building' phase, blocks of listeners. Songs to the Judges is a 45 minutes to execute, but Helen Colston's but-on the evidence of The Navigators­ reminder of the continuing struggle between disciplined mastery of the style made it there certainly is rebuilding to be done. opposing cultures and of the extent to which very engrossing and strangely N onetheless (and bearing in mind that reconciliation can be advanced by inter­ beautiful to watch. I didn't have time to ca tch several other cultural theatre productions such as these. shows, like a deconstruction of the Robinson Intercultural performance of a very A T THE OPPOSITE end of the Spectrum Crusoe legend in the form of a 'Lapsarian different kind was also prevalent in the was Social Climbers, by the prolific Roger Mass' and an intriguing drama entitled New Festival, especially in the influence of the Hall in a production by Hamilton's lea ding Zealand Lamb) I thou ght FUEL a JapaneseButoh dance form on local culture. amateur reative Theatre Company. Hall pronounced success. Let's hope it can be A case in point is Lo'Omatua (Th e Ancient is som ething of a cross between David repeated. • Mother), by Lemi Ponifasio & MAU, a Williamson and Alan Ayckbourn and he is performance troupe from Auckland. best-known in Australia for plays of social Geoffrey Milne is head of thea tre and drama Ponifasio is a Western Samoan who has comment cou ch ed in formulaically at LaTrobe University. studied Butoh in Japan and his piece was entertaining structures likeFlexitime (about very skilled in its execution, gorgeously lit office workers) and Middle Age Spread and extrem ely beautiful to watch; his (about marital conflict). Hildegard of exploration of Polynesian fo lk legends in Social Climbers takes five well­ Bingen Butoh-s tyle dream -form is about as differentiated female high school teachers cross-cultural as you can get. (a nd, reluctantly, the art-school daughter of 900th Anniversary Concerts Lo'Omatua opens with a white­ one of them) on a vacation mountain climb. 24 & 26 September, 30 O cto ber powdered, semi-naked authority-figure On their first night out, they are marooned 27 t ovember, 18 December (Ponifasio himself) sounding a wake-up call in their log-cabin by torrential rains and a for his people (or the spirits of his past) on washed-away bridge and their enforced Hildegard of Bingen a conch shell. Slowly, three similarly attired incarceration dislodges many skeletons (and 1098-1179 male fi gures-artfully refl ected in the clever one-line gags) from the collective Viriditas p rforms mirror-surface of a shiny dance-floor­ closet of an embattled contemporary school the 900th Annive rsa ry Se ri es appear as if from nowhere to enact a ritual staff-room. It is easy to see why this highly A concert se ri es dedica ted from the past. They are followed by a solo engaging and entertaining play has enj oyed to prese nting all of Hildega rd 's piece on a high platform to the left in which long sell-out seasons all over NZ since its music during J 998 the ancient mother of the title invokes the premiere at Dunedin's Fortune Thea tre in 24 Se ptember 'The Crowned Branch· enactment of further ritual action below. 1995-and why the City of Hamilton (as a 26 Se r temher 'Eccles ia th e Beloved · Meanwhile, a huge pearl shell glistens major sponsor) insisted on its inclusion in 8pm at St Ignatius' Church, overhead, alternating from phosphorescent the inaugural national Theatre Festival. 326 Church Street Ri chmond, VIC green to red or gold, depending upon the All fes tivals have their disappointments, Tickets $20 or $ :1 5 concess ion Enq uires 03 9482 2686 mood of the separate sections which follow but it was all the more di appointing that each other in an almost hypnotic succession. this one's should com e from the legendary Lo'Omatua is one of the mo t effective Red Mole, NZ's oldest alternative theatre Butoh-inspired performance piece I have collective. Based in Wellington, Red Mole seen since Chapel of Change's The De cent has been continuously active at hom e and in Melbourne in 1996. abroad since 197 4, including a long stint in Not to be outdone, Richard Huber from the US and a briefer one in the Netherlands the University of Dunedin in Otago during the 1980s. The current show, entitled presented a solo Butoh piece entitled Th e The Navigators-Historia von Dr Ray Bool

VOLUM E 8 NUM BER 7 • EUREKA STREET 43 and determination. However, bea utiful costumes and memorable photography, in Art the deep contrasts and fl esh tones of the Baroque tradition, are not enough to prevent house the film foundering on its own structure. Artemisia, dir. Agnes -Gordon Lewis Merle t. The self­ portrait of 17th -cen ­ Light laughs tury Italian arti t Artemisia Gentileschi The Opposite of Sex, dir. Don Roos. It's a hangs in Hampton funny old thing, the hit movie. While Court Palace as part of watching the first 15 minutes of The the Royal Collection. Opposite of Sex, I kept thinking, why is this The painting, showing a is not a mainstream movie event? This handsome woman with should be the next big thing. It is funny, s trong features, is sexy, dark, blah, blah, blah: all the things superb, consistent with that by and large make hit films. And then, her reputation as the all of a sudden, you know why. The film first grea t female loses its way. painter. On reflection, The Opposite of Sex has great, even seeing that painting told me more about brilliant, mom ents and hilarious one-liners. Artemisia than French director Agnes The acting is wonderful: Christina Ricci, Heads I lose Mer let's film about two years in the artist's playing out one of the many configurations late teens. of the disaffected teenager, is spot on, and Head On, dir. Ana Kokkinos. Ba sed on Artemisia (Valentina Cervi) is a student Lisa Kudrow (Friends) is a revelation as a Christos Tsiolkas' novel Loaded, Head On in a convent school and the daughter of dour and deeply cranky school teacher. is a confronting version of what it's like to Orazio (Michel Serrault), a fam ous Italian There is a feast of action, events and stereo­ be yo ung, gay, male and Greek in suburban painter. The discovery of several drawings types; there's birth and death, love and Melbourne. The film opens at a wedding, a of nudes results in religious outrage but hate, kindness and cruelty, generosity and Greek community ritual, at which Ari paternal admiration . T aken from the blackm ail-something, indeed, for every­ (Alex Dimitriades, above) is a groomsman. convent, Artemisia begins to paint and draw one. But as in that old parable about the He is clearly out of place. From the begin­ as h er fath er's assistant, som etimes father, the son and the donkey, you can't ning, Ari is pushed to the edge. But because completing impressive works to which he please everyone all the time, and somehow, the story is told through his eyes, the puts his signature. in an attempt to do so, the film lurches off community is also pushed to the edge. In Artemisia's talent and h er father's into a stran ge indifference halfway other words, this is a fi lm in which every support ga in her admission as a private through- although, rather symm etrically, character is marginal in some sense. This pupil of noted painter Agostino Tassi (Miki the last bit of the fi lm is a good as the first. does n ot mean the film is som ehow Manojlovic) and in the ensuing months sh e And the last line is worth practically the incomplete: it i a superbly crafted portrayal becomes her teacher's lover. Her father whole film. of a fractured world. discovers the affair and in outrage demands I had a good laugh in The Opposite of Ari is 19. Everything in his life is brittle. that the perceived offence against him be Sex, despite its occasional clunkiness. Watch His disorientation is evident in painful redressed. The final portion of the film is for the graveside scene- it's especially good. scenes of drug use and desperate sex. It is devoted to what is loosely described as a -Annelise Bal samo most poignant in his inability t o rape trial although the lines between crime negotiate relationships with people who and civil rights are blurred by contemporary could be close to him but whom he custom. X misses the spot encounters only through the miasma of Here, the film begins to stall. A snapshot his own insecurities. of a life in progress, with six lines of text The X-Files: Fight the Future, dir. Rob Head On incorporates black and white covering 35 years, leaves a feeling of unful­ Bowman. T here are many who say that this footage of Ari's parents as young Australian filment. The fate of her lover is dismissed in movie is aimed at X-File fa ns, the ones Greeks. His fat h er, Dimitri (Ton y fo ur lines. I felt that I bad witnessed part who are up with the series and its teasing Nikolakopoulos) used to attend demonstra­ one of a mini-series, with the hoped-for self-awareness as America the Great Secret tions about Cyprus and marched under the development of ArteiTlisia's character never Society, riddled with powerful cabals and banner of the Communist Party. He believed achieved. their conspiracies that may or may not in things. Ari has inherited som e of his Rather than letting history speak for involve extra- terrestri al civilisations. The father's worst attributes: he can be as itself, fl eshing out known events, Merlet trouble is that the series has gone on for too authoritarian as the old man in controlling has chosen to embellish history, distracting long, and this has deeply affected the film. his sister, Alex (A ndrea Mandalis). But Ari and detracting from a story of personal At its best, in the first three seasons, the has no broader view of the world than the triumph which surely needed no help. series was an important reflection on back fence of an alley. The cast is firs t class and Cervi America itself, delivered with a wry -Michael McGirr SJ captures Artemisia 's innocent enthusiasm self-conscious sophistication that recalled

44 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 the best English efforts such as Edge of shares with a group of feckless friends. Darkness. Dead Letter Office is a gentle, hopeful, The film recycles the alien/black ops quiet pleasure. Many questions conspiracy that the series is playing around -Michael McGirr SJ with as it limps into its sixth season, The Interview, dir. Craig Monahan. It begins hampered by a conspiracy that is no longer with a billowing lace curtain-visual trope mysterious and a determination not to allow Deco city of Australian cinema. Only this curtain the URST (unresolved sexual tension) doesn't keep the bush sun and dust off between the two stars, Mulder (David Darl< City. dir. Alex Proyas. In a crumbling Sybylla's Edwardian complexion (remember Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) deco city full of potholes and puddles, jazz the opening scene of My Brilliant Career?) to take its natural course. The series' creator, clubs and beaded curtains, style and fear are Instead it plays across a pile of old Chris Carter, is said to be resolved that the combined to create a compelling sci-fi newspapers stacked up against the windows show will not go the way of Moonlighting. thriller, full of genuine gloom and menacing of an omin ously grand, decaying city The result, in the later episodes as in the imagination. interior. Balanced on top of the newsprint film, is a constant hovering around genuine John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes to plinth is a goldfish bowl-fish out of their dramatic concerns-constant teasing, never discover a woman's body, covered in bloody depth as usual. The room is blue-black; so fulfilment, denouement or resolution. The spirals, beside a hotel bed he doesn't is the piano score (original music by David film is said to be a lead into the sixth series, remember sleeping in. Wanted for a series Hirschfelder). A man is slumped in a chair. but seems to have suffered a damaging of gruesome murders, John finds himself on He looks as though he's been done with an falling-off of imagination: borrowings from the run from the law but in pursuit of his ink wash as well. It's a classic opening Alien, in particular, abound quite true identity. Besides the law, close on sequence, disorienting, lyrical and extra­ shamelessly. Such a pity. John's heels are The Strangers-tall bald ordinarily tense. Shades of Rear Window. -Juliette Hughes scary guys in high-collared coats, with the Then the police break in. They kill the power to alter reality by will alone. Do they quiet but not the tension. The man is floored, hold the key to John's identity or the keys humiliated, abused and dragged off to head­ Return to sender to this darkest of dark cities? quarters to be subjected to 'the interview'. With constantly shifting realities and And that is about all that any film re­ Dead Letter Office, dir. John Ruane. Alice fairy-tal e plot twisting, Darl< City viewer who is not an utter cad can tell you. Walsh (Miranda Otto) spent her childhood confidently negotiates its own highly Sorry. This one is too good to give away. attending ballet classes and sending letters developed style. The cast bring both clarity But I can say that the casting, ci nema­ to her absent father. The letters were always and direction, performing in perfect sync tography, editing, acting and directing are returned 'not known at this address'. As an with the film's mad and rainy atmosphere. deft and powerful. The double act of Hugo adult, she gets a job at the dead letter office, William Hurt is exacting as the meticulous Weaving as the suspect (Eddie Rodney the place where homeless mail ends up, in Inspector Frank Bumstead and Rufus Sewell Fleming) and Tony Martin as the interrogator an attempt to find all the mail from her has devastating appeal a the meandering (Det Sgt John Steele) is a gift to cinema­ father which never reached her. Instead she lost soul. Kiefer Sutherland lends an appro­ both actors insinuate themselves into your finds Frank Lopez (George DelHoyo), her priate degree of humour to his limping Dr. nervous system. Martin has a lethal still­ uptight boss, as well as three eccentric co­ Schreber, and Jennifer Connelly smoulders ness far more frightening than any screen workers. Frank is from Chile. The home in through her role in beautifully tailored suits. violence-no catharsis from his perform­ which he has settled on the fringe of suburbia Twisted riddles of identity and perfectly ance. And Weaving, whose face is so malle­ is vacant and colourless. But as Frank's dressed sets make Dark City rich and able it seems to have detachable parts, shifts story gradually unfolds, we discover that constantly entertaining. from craven to maniacal with a muscular his children were killed before he left his -Siobhan Jackson twitch. Both actors are given every break by country. Like Alice, he used to dance. He Monahan and by Richard Bell's art direc­ begins to reattach himself to the expatriate tion-the film is an austere feast. EUREKA STREET community which shares his heartache. Much of the high polish derives from it Slowly, surely, Deb Cox's delightful FILM crew's experience in the impressive sub screenplay brings together the man who COMPETITION genre of the Australian television crime haslosthischildrenand the woman who has Just name two actors show. The cast has covered the range­ lost her father. from this month's from Homicide to Wildside. But Monahan Anybody familiar with Death in crop of reviews, has pushed local realism by grafting on an Brunswick will enjoy seeing John Ruane matching them with element that will inevitably be called once again working at the height of his the nam e of the TV Kafkaesque. And there my reluctant reser­ powers. He makes a world of small detail: a show in which they vations start. The Interview is a very good pigeon hole, a pillar box, the way an star together. The winner will receive a fi lm indeed and will be variously inter­ obsessive unpacks his lunch. The locations copy of the indispensable l998Halliwell's preted (I walked out of the dark straight Filmgoer's Companion, to help you cheat on which the film is shot open up acres of on the next quiz. Send entries to: into passionate, mutually exclusive nuance without so much as a word being Eureka Street September Film accounts). Ideally that would mean the spoken. This is not only true of Frank's Competition script had mystery at its heart. I suspect it house on the edge of nowhere, but also of PO Box 553, Richmond VlC 3 121. has something more like incoherence. the rambling beachside weatherboard Alice -Morag Fra ser

V oLUME 8 N uMBER 7 • EUREKA STREET 45 Watch what they say L TDANCtRous subvcrsive, my be worth, RDF's Against Nature achieves a level of untruth, 16-year-old son, was not paying much ranging from mere distortion to outright lies, that is attention to Media Watch on 3 August. breathtaking. The porkies are so outrageous in fact that it would But when Anne Fulwood was shown take half of this magazine to deal thoroughly with all of them. excoriating a pair of teenagers for their This is the power of audio-visual input-when this medium is participation in the secondary students' used fa lsely, a stream of infected impressions, each one of which day of protest against racism, he sat would take many words to unpack, gushes into the passive eye up and took a bit of notice. His and ear. The only defence is to vaccinate the mind with truth, comments were salty and unprintable and that is available only to the informed. I take comfort from and concerned the flexibility of truth the fact that most young impressionable minds were watching when put into the power of journalism that pushes a barrow Beverley Hills 90210 at the time. rather than attempting to find out the reality. He had been Against Nature's narration asserted, in passing as though a participant in the Melbourne rally, but hadn't made much of it were a truism, that countries which value animal rights highly a song and dance about it, had simply gone there with many of put a correspondingly low value on human rights. Ask your his classmates because he felt it was the right thing to do. average 'roo or duck shooter what he thinks on the Wik issue Fulwood allowed a One Nation spokesperson uninterrupted and One Nation and I think you'll get an instant refutation airtime to warn us all about Communism manipulating the of that argument. We were also informed that dirty air in minds of our youth who 'should have been at school'. And the pre-industrial times caused typhus and TB! Various two teenagers (real menaces to society they were, a girl with spokespersons claimed that all environmental considerations long hair and a lad in a black beanie with a badge on it) were a were specious, that World-Bank-funded dam builders were lot meeker than my son as they sat there under the Fulwood motivated by altruistic desires to bring clean water and fulminations. He kept arguing with the telly, a habit he has electricity to the Third World. Global warming is a myth inherited from my late father through me, although we won't thought up by green spoilsports to stop brave and kind fossil reach his granddad's rhetorical heights until we've learned to fuel companies from making life better for the peasants. (Tell accompany ourselves with a walking stick banged on the floor. that to Nigeria after Shell had its way there for a decade.) 'What Arguing with the telly is very satisfying sometimes, particularly is the use of all this biodiversity?' demanded one Wilfred if those in the room object to what you're saying, because then Beckerman. (It permits some strange organisms to survive, Mr B, you can always say that TV hasn't killed the art of conversation. despite their being no use at all to humanity. Perhaps I'm happy to report that Richard Ackland awarded Reptile of you should be grateful.) the Week to Fulwood for that piece of work, although I think that I ought to point out that to date no snake, lizard, turtle or W ILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT of credibility, I find it appalling dinosaur has yet been found to bend the truth in the way of the that the commentary so far on Jana Wendt's Uncensored series hairless ape, scourge of itself and all other species. has been so myopic, so pusillanimous. The ABC has, in Our species does strange things to truth, or reality, Uncensored, something that it can sell all over the world. The whatever they may be. Because whatever they may be, they do interviews with Toni Morrison, Germaine Greer and Markus exist. Eliot says that 'human kind cannot bear very much Wolf alone would be an achievement. How many interviewers reality'. So much easier then, to cop out with Pilate, asking would leave in an interchange that charges them with 'What is truth?', which is just another cool, proud way of saying unconscious racist arrogance? Wendt was visibly crestfallen at that there's no such thing. And recently, after 1: watching Morrison's steely comment but left it uncensored. And how Against Nature on the ABC and 2: reading the reviews of Jana many interviewers of Greer resist the temptation to flirt with Wendt's Uncensored series of interviews, I'm wondering at how her, to contend their small personalities against her? Wendt some people can get things so wrong-notably the makers was calm, restrained. She knew not to try to be the star of this of Against Nature and the mainly unfavourable reviewers of particular show, and drew from Greer one of the most forth­ Wendt's series. coming and loveable interviews I have ever seen-most male To deal with Against Nature first, it seems strange that reviewers seemed instead to want us to be voyeurs at a the ABC should have screened a program so bankrupt of any femocratic mudwrestle. With Wolf, she was predatory and solid scientific knowledge over two weeks without creating a relentless. Did you ever stop to think about the regime you were chance for refutation from the scientific community. Other supporting! Did you put Alois Estermmm to spy in the Vatican! 'controversial' programs have often in the past been followed Wolf was gentle, even a little patronising at the start. By by a forum. Was it too expensive to produce a decent line-up of the end the air of patronage was gone. His eyes shifted around scientists? The ABC has a responsibility to its audience to like Bob Hawke's as he sought from the walls and the ceiling provide more than a cable-style buy-up of overseas dreck. the mot juste to throw Wendt off track, and never succeeded in The dreck in question is produced by Martin Durkin of doing so. I hope the ABC repeats Uncensored soon and at a RDF, a London-based production house that has made (I gather more friendly timespot. To throw her against the shtick and from a glance at the titles in its documentary catalogue on the pizzazz of The Panel was just plain bad programming. • internet) numerous documentaries on eve1ything from baldness to Gaddafi's female bodyguards. Whatever its other efforts may Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.

46 EUREKA STREET • SEPTEMBER 1998 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 66, September 1998

Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1. One forever seeking new tunes? (5 ,3,5 ) 9. Top the fruit for everyone. (4) 10. Having somehow learnt tidy pen-craft, the girl's name appeared thus when the form was filled in. (6, 7) 11. Almost twelve? Time to have a nap! (4) 13. Rose-taken from the garden? (3,3,2,3) 15. She always comes before night. (3) 16. 'A seat for every lad' said the president. ( 11 ) 18. Where does most of the rain fall in Spain? (2,3,6) 20. One change for new prefix. (3) 22. Possibly imperil Ryan in the initiatory session. (11) 23. East won cup back. West blushed a pinkish purple! (4) 26 . What the weather did when the drought broke-terrible banker cut side levees. (6,7) 27. Hails the prayers in the rosary. (4) 28. When sh e saw a strange water python eat without a napkin, she took steps to seek a cure for her delusions. (4,2,7) DOWN 1. What if Angel could get it by trickery? (7) Solution to Crossword no. 65, July/August 1998 2. Measure deed intended, we hear, for promulgation of edict. (9) 3. Robber tells what he did, describing his victim contemptuously as som e sort of crawler that h e displayed. (4,2,5) 4. Is it a miracle, this unlikely occurrence? Prove I bent Mabel some­ how to believe it! (10 ,5) 5. Though regarded as irresponsible, see Bert, reformed, fit big bible into his suitcase. (15) 6. Express distress in fine edition . (4) 7. Pop has love for the skirting-board? (4) 8. Change stockings when wearing footwear. (4) 12. There's nothing in this craze, Rob thought. (4) 14. Decorate group in the front gallery. (5,6) 17. Compote of red bananas bishop extracted when he went to the sports stadium with the greyish -yellow floor. (4,5) 19. Misuse of part of speech- not acceptable. (3-1) 21. A long wandering tale! (7) 23. Participate in drama with som e latitude! (4) 24. The company displayed unseemly boastfulness! (4) 25. Some letters suggest relaxation to the audience. (4)

------~ ------EUREKA SJAEEr Subscription D one year (10 issues for $54 or D two years (20 issues for D New subscription $49 concession for pensioners, $99, or $89 concession) OR customer code if students and unemployed) Overseas rates on application. D Renewal avai/ab(e Name ...... Address ...... To subscribe, please State ...... Postcode ...... Tel ...... Date ...... return this form to: 'Eureka Street' D Cheque/ money order payable to Jesuit Publications Reply Paid 553 PO Box 553 D Visa D Bankcard D Mastercard Expiry date ...... RICHMOND VIC 3121 AUSTRALIA (no postage stamp Card No: I I I I II I I I II I I I II I I I I required if posted in Australia) Name on credit card ...... Signature ...... u p Special Book Offer

LEGISLATING LIBERTY by Frank Brennan

Australia will soon be a republic and faces a rare opportunity for constitutional change. Australia does not have a bill of rights. Do we need one? Could we cope with one? Is there a better way to guarantee liberty for all persons? Is it too simplistic to say that Australia should simply follow the United States? Frank Brennan went to the United States believing we should. He returned convinced otherwise.

T hanks to U niversity of Queensland Press, Eureka Street has 15 copies of Legislating Liberty to give away, each worth $29.95. Just put your name and address on the back of an envelope and send it to: Eureka Street September Book Offer, PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121.

Ewa Czajor Memorial Award presents Women Directors' Art Monthly Symposium /lSTRif_/1 Exploring Issues of Leadership and Mentoring IN THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE Saturday 19 & Sunday 20 September 1998 at the Victorian College of the Arts. Christine I.e\\ is on the art of Tom (iihhons For further information contact and (),1\ id Dobn on \ a/Ill-<" tiS Of>i<"ti Symposium Co-ordinator, Elisabeth Jones on (03) 9534 0590 Joamu \lemklssohn !,!:ets enthusiLynda Gibson, of \hori!,!:inal art, !,!:OHTnment polic~ and chan!,!:in!,!: Sue lngleton, Honker man from Circus Oz \\orld attitudes culminatin!,!:, tin· \ustr.11ia, in the and Women's C ircus and music. l%3 \irrkab Bark Petition Sunday 27 September 1998, 7.30pm at the Merlyn Theatre, I ),1, id l.s,nf>lio/1

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