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Seeking the Centre presents The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film

ROSLYNN HAYNES

This exciti ng, highly illustrated book reveals the impact of the dese rt, both geographical and m etaphorical, on Australian cul ­ ture. At the hea rt of the book is the profound relationship that Aboriginal Australians have with the desert, and the complex ways in which they have been seen by white peopl e in this context. November 1998 320 pages 50 co lour plates 0 521 57111 1 Hardback $39.95

Global Nation? January 18th - 21st, 1999 Australia and the Politics of Globalisation 1 Oam - 4pm Mon- Wed l$. 1 pm Thurs

Brother Emelian Hall, JOHN WISEMAN St. Joseph's College, HUNTERS HILL Globalisa tion is a contemporary buzzword, and its sup­ posed impacts are ubiquitous, from retrenchments and Secretary - (02) 9247 4651 global warming to television programs and fas t food. Hove you visi1ed our Website? hllo://www.gigo.nel.au/edu/Aquinos T his book provides an accessible ex ploration of the mea nings and implications of globalisation, and argues that there may be alternatives to it. October 1998 216 pages 0 521 59227 5 Hardback $90.00 0 521 59755 2 Paperback $24.95 Art Monthly .·l US TR . ..J. L/.4. Streetlife China

MICHAEL DUTTON IN THE NOVEMBER ISSUE

This imaginative Peter Anderson asks what exactly pi eces about li fe in contemporaty makes a regional gallery? C hina reveals a patchwork picture of the li ves of ordinary people and Two resourceful women artists go north - the rules that govern their dail y existence. There will be no better GaY Hawkes and Fiona Hall introductio n to co ntemporary C hina, and few more stimulating DaYid Hansen examines the cave and accounts of shifts in cultural life. the subterranean in art November 1998 320 pages 84 halftones 5 line diag rams Robert Hollingworth tries out another way 0 521 63141 6 Hardback $95.00 0 521 637 19 8 Paperback $29.95 of looking and seeing - Emily Kngwarreye

Gene Autry has a millennial reflection or two

Out now S-1.50. jim11 good /l()rJ/.:slwps lllld lll'li'Silgl'IIIS. Or plulll <' Ol fJl·IIJ .N 8fJ ji1r y ou r subsrnp!ion Volume 8 Number 9 November 1998

A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology

The young Goethe CoNTENTS said to his n1other, of 26 POETRY son1e fellow-guests, 4 'A Mom ent in Leon' and 'The COMMENT / POETRY Benediction' (p27) by John Kinsella; 'They are agreeable With Morag Fraser, Thomas Shapcott, 'Melancholia' and 'Nightmares' (p40) Peter Steele and Frank Brennan. by Jack Hibberd. enough but if 28 they'd been boolzs 7 CAPITAL LETTER WHEN THE CENTRE DOES NOT HOLD I shouldn't have Jon Greenaway and Jose Ramos-Horta 8 on the failure of East Timor. read then1.' LETTERS 32 Hospitality was not 10 DEMANDING TO SEE SOPHOCLES R.J . Dalziell puts the case for Classics. Goethe's most THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC With Moira Rayner, Ross McMullin, conspicuous quality, Geoff Keele and Frank Fisher. 36 BOOKS but his remark is 11 Hugh Dillon reviews Frank Brennan's Legislating Liberty; Robin Koning on suggestive ... READING IN THE CRACKS Religious Business: Essays on Australian With Belinda Lee, Jane Foulcher (pl2), Aboriginal Spirituality, edited by Judith Watkins (pl4), Dan Madigan (p31), -Peter Steele, 'Owl and Max Charlesworth. Juliette Hughes (p34) and Moira Rayner and James Griffin review cormorant', p4. Jim Davidson (p41 ). a second batch of CUP books on reshaping For the full range of Australia, by Moira Gatens and Alison suggestions in this 13 Mackinnon (eds); Chilla Bulbeck; month's special readers' ARCHIMEDES Nicholas Peterson and Will Sanders (eds). issue, read on. 15 46 SUMMA THEOLOGIAE THEATRE Geoffrey Milne surveys the career 16 of Roger Hodgman. Cover design by Siobhan Jackson, ACUTE AS A BUTTON very much after Jacques Louis Peter Craven on one Australian politician 44 David. Rubber duckie in homage to never accused of being boring. FLASH IN THE PAN Jeffrey Moss (1942-1998). Reviews of the films Elizabeth; Year of Graphics pp5, 10, 20- 2 1, 24- 25, 34, 36, 39, 47 by Siobhan Ja ckson. 20 the Horse: Neil Young and Crazy Horse Cartoon p 13 by Peter Fraser. WHAT LAWYERS DON'T READ Live; What Dream s May Come; Velvet Photographs pp1 6- 17 courtesy Goldmine and A Perfect Murder. John Button and Text Publishing. Moira Rayner on the diminishing Photograph p31 by Dan Madiga n. education of the law masters. 46 Eureka Street magazine WATCHING BRIEF Jesuit Publications 23 PO Box 553 SOMETHING FOR THE JOURNEY Richmond VIC 3 121 47 Tel(03) 9427 73 11 Entering the reading lists with Fax (03) 9428 4450 Gerard Windsor. SPECIFIC LEVITY

V OLUME 8 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 3 COMMENT EUREKA SJAEEr M ORAG FRASER A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology 'Ius MONTH T H E ISS UE is devoted to reading, not as a retreat Publisher from the daily round, but as a way of looking at our routine Daniel Madigan SJ preoccupations with renewed clarity- what Shakespeare called Editor 'washed eyes'. H ence a poem where you usually read prose, Morag Fraser one for the November season. And m any other things. • Assistant edi tor -Morag Fraser Kate Manton Consulting editor Michael McGirr SJ Graphic designer The Letters Siobhan Jackson Production and business manager 'Dear Mater and Dad' he had written. Or Sylvana Scannapiego to his brother, 'Old Salt, how goes it back homel' Editorial and production assistants He wrote with a blunt pencil by candle-light Juliette Hughes, Paul Fyfe SJ, Geraldine or in the Red Shield Hut well away from the Front. Battersby, Chris Jenkins SJ, Scott Howard He tried not to get mud on the small pages, or fin gerprints, Contributing editors or blood. H e invented m emories of Leave in the Old Dart Adelaide: Greg O'Kelly SJ, Perth: Dean Moore full of m eals eaten and jolly girls or som etimes the Cinema Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor or that time in the Gods trying to h ear a play Queensland: Peter Pierce (it was a Comedy but he missed so much ). Three tim es United Kingdom correspondent that particular night returned but he never got it right­ Denis Minns OP the damp and cold through his feet, the smell of steaming wool, the girl herself twisting her two hands ceaselessly- South East Asia correspondent not once did his letters reinvent how it was, Jon Greenaway or even how he wished it to be. In the front line, though, Jesuit Editorial Board what was important was the act of writing, Peter L'Estrange S), Andrew Bullen SJ, of getting it down. 'It' was the affirmation Andrew Hamilton SJ in his head, the thing clung to, the action Peter Steele sr, Bill Uren SJ of language reduced to sign, as if sign s Marketing manager: Rosanne Turner were a certain recipe for memory and wisdom. Advertising representative: Ken Head None of the others in his tiny Signallers' group Subscription manager: Wendy Marlowe wrote letters home. 'Writing toyer Maw agen?' Administration and distribution Once he got it down and sealed it off Kate Matherson, Li sa Crow, Kristen Harrison, it went on a long journey that would alter everything. Nomeneta Schwaiger Patrons When he finally got home, after the War, EurelVictoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3 121 Tel: 03 9427 73 11 Fax: 03 9428 4450 'They kept her alive', his father said, it was the only time c- mai I: [email protected] u he mentioned her agony years. Alone, in his childhood sleep-out http:/ j www .openplanet.com.au/eureka h e opened the first one. It was another person, a child, Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by and he saw through the lies and was ashamed. Daniel Madiga n, 300 Victoria Street, Ri chmond. 'Those letters proved to u s that you still cared' Printed by Doran Printing, 46 Industrial Drive, Braesidc VIC 3 195 . the Old Man said, 'Though each one was a report from the dead, © Jes uit Publications 1998 but we couldn't admit that. They took so long, Unsolicited manuscripts, including poetry and and so much could have happened. We read them fiction, wi ll be returned only if accompani ed by again and again .' And for the first tim e he saw a stamped, self-a ddressed envelope. Requests for how the lies and the cheerful reports hid nothing. permission to reprint material from the magazine should be addressed in writing to: H e was filled with agony. And it was for himself. The cdi tor, Eureka Street magazine, PO Box SS3, Richmond VI C 3 12 1 -Thomas Shapcott

4 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1998 COMMENT: 2

P ETER STEELE

Owl and cormorant

c om

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 5 obviously, deeply cognate with one another, is not London, covered their bookshop during the Blitz not obvious. We give one another clues as to mutual with sandbags but with copies of Mein Kampf. But understanding, but there is no rule as to how the clues looking in, or looking out, as cormorant or as owl, stay­ are to be provided. Champollion found that in order ing alert is good policy. Joseph Joubert said, happily, to read a particular cartouche it was necessary to 'His ink has the colours of the rainbow': but he also follow a lion's gaze: but the lion did not know that, said, 'Because they know all the words, they think and we are part-Champollion, part-lion. they know all the truths.' This is usefully alarming In such circumstances, charity helps. A publisher for a writer, provocatively encouraging fo r a reader. wrote to an author that his work was 'a remarkable And it is an incidental reminder that, as none of us is write, but not an irresistible read', which might have the world 's last word, none of us need have it. • application to various other human performances. Where charity itself seem s to lack plausibility, Peter Steele SJ has a Personal Chair at the University stylishness may still be possible-as when Foyle's, in of Melbourne.

C oMMENT: 3 F RANK BRE NAN The talze on reconciliation

us, but the dfecte of the deb

6 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 Reading the electoral

N OTH>NC COUCD " moKim Beazley has to lose. And Kim Beazley proved himself an able and amiable acquired. In somewhat the same way, John Howard would be campaigner. But he did not win. muddling through had not he, or his party, acquired a new lease of If this is how well Labor can do without policies, imagine how life, and even the odd dose of courage. With or without a goods and it could do if it had som e next time, som eone chortled on election services tax (Howard might well end up being grateful if the Senate night. Well, perhaps- if the policies were winners, but there's no ends up making the CST practically impossiblefor him) a party that guarantee of that. Labor's lack of a policy platform to present to the actually holds power also has considerable capacity to reinvent electorate was not part of a strategy of itself, if it so chooses. exposing itself to as little criticism as Now that the ALP has contracted The advantage Howard has, apart from possible, but a reflection of the fact that it out its policy-setting conference incumbency, i tenacity and a broad ideology has not yet resolved where it wants to go, to choreographers, there will not of government. The m om ent he appears to and how and why it wants to do things. A lose it, a new leader, with drive and an hastily cobbled-together tax policy at least be any debate if the leaderships agenda that will suddenly seem like had the virtue of being more self-funding have anything to do with it. Clintonism in trousers, or Blair complete than the Howard tax plan. But the vacuum with vestments, will take over. He could within could hardly have been more clear. The purely token tax well retrieve votes that went very grudgingly to Labor last month. increases on caviar and executive jets were an example of slogans The disadvantage that Labor would have had in government and dubious anecdotage creating policy proposals of which Pauline is that some of its internal contradictions would soon have becom e Hanson's One Nation might have been proud. apparent, magnified, almost certainly b y the prompt Most of Labor's other policies were hardly more than slogans or re-establishment of the networks that created Hansonism-a far vague expressions of good feelings-indeed just the sort of pap from spent force. produced by the party's national conference at the beginning of the The question is whether the impotence of opposition, and the year. And, so far as there was a call beyond the demonisation of the apparent closeness of the prize-next-time, will inspire a debate that goodsandservices tax, itwas toabroadimageofgeneralcompetence can shape a party ready to take power; or whether the tantalising and proven capacity to run the country-just the sort of image that closeness will create a dem and for unity, for papering over the Howard was able to destroy in 1996. cracks, and such a determination to make no enemies that John Howard should get some credit for sticking hard to his tax 0 it wins no friends. proposals even as there was a clear shift of opinion against them. But his claim to a mandate, in so far as there is one in the NE MJGHT SAY, OF c ouRSE, that the reason why there has not circumstances, comes from the fact that it was Labor's adoption of been this fundamental argument is that Labor had not expected to a campaigning strategy almost entirely focused on opposing the be in a position to have a clear tilt at government and was simply GST that made this, of all elections, almost a one-issue one. Labor unprepared for an election. Or that there was som e strategy in the almost entirely eschewed campaigning on social issues. It failed to one-line anti-GST tactic: that Labor, like Howard in 1993, was best attack the record of Howard in office, whether on integrity or placed by not presenting itself as a target, that m entioning reduced competence issues. If there were categories of the dispossessed who services, or integrity, or unemployment, or the Government's swung back to Labor, it was more from disillusion with Howard's social policy, or an alternative social policy, or republican issues, or performance than from the allure of skilfully crafted Labor policies. Aboriginal affairs raised the risk of evoking Keating, or diffusing the Most of those who felt alienated and dispossessed voted One strength of the case against consumption taxes. Nation first, then for Labor. Labor's primaryvoteroseonlymarginally. Presumably that was what the polling advice said, just as the It was not merely a matter, as implicitly suggested by Mark Liberals, presumably, were told that a tax plan and the spectre of Latham, of carefully devised policies like his draft education Keating were the best arrows in their armoury. policy, being junked by marketing and public relations men. The In their way, perhaps, both did better than they deserved, but in policies which had come to appeal to Latham had no more gone the process they have further excited voter disillusion with politics through party councils and been adopted by the party than the and politicians, and yet again returned the compliment by showing alternative ones tacked together from some impressions gained at their complete contempt for the voters. • focus groups. Unlike the Latham plan, these at least created an impression of a distinction between the policies of the two Jack Waterford is editor of the Canberra Times.

VOLUME 8 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 7 L ETTERS

Eureka Street welcomes letters vote in 'the correct way'. In the vast from its readers. Short letters are majority of villages in th is area, those No indulgence more likely to be published, and in a uthority were openly partisan. all letters may be edited. Letters Many village chiefs seemed to sincerely From Kenneth Hince must he signed, and should believe that to encourage the people After the purgatorial experience of to vote 'correctly' was part of their include a contact phone number enduring Barrie Kosky's opera produc­ role, and that thci r loyalty to their tions, I am inclined to believe what and the wntcr'::. name and address. superiors could be measured by whether Peter Craven had to say about Kosky's If submitting by email, a contact their people voted for 'the govemment'. production of King Lear (Eurdw Street, phone number 1s essential. Address: I was still in the villages during the October 1998). cure ka@jespuh. jes ui t.org.au weeks after the polls. In communes However, let me add with which had voted CPP the threats almighty e mphasis that if Peter ceased. In those which had voted Craven thinks Kosky is a 'great opera 'against the government' the threats director' he knows less about opera increased. This was recorded in the than Kosky knows about King Lear. local office of the United Nations Kenneth Hince Commission for Human Rights. Euroa, VIC A woman leader whom we know well came to seck help from the The polling Cambodian community development team with whom I was working. The fields woman has been an organiser of From Joan Healy RS[ women's health groups in her village I want to respond to Ton Greenaway's and was popularly elected as leader of article on the Cambodian election the Village Development Committee. (Eureka Street, September 1998), in election and counting day, I agreed to She belongs to no political party but particular to his ques tioning of the act as an official observer. My motive her work has helped village people to situation of the outer provinces. I have was to give local people hope that the think independently. After the lived and worked in Battambang truth about these elections would be election the powerful commune leader Province for many years and, since a told to the world. threa tened angrily, many times and in recent a signment there included the The subsequent tragic events in front of listeners, to cut her throat and Phnom Penh cast more light on the eat her liver. He blames her bec

8 EUREKA STREET • N ovE MBER 1998 ,- predecessors or contemporaries. Perhaps some of his virtues outweigh his fa ults. If we are all flawed human New from Cambridge beings, why can't we grow up to accept that Presidents are ju st as human as our parents and us? The World's Religions Richard DeAngelis Second Edition This month, Brighton, SA NINIAN SMART the writer of each letter we publish will receive a pack of From the source In this richly illustrated new edition, postcards featuring religions are described through their '··-·''·''"''" cartoon and graphics, symbols, rituals, followers and art. by Eureka Street regulars, From Chris Curtis, Vice President, References, maps and pictures have been D ean Moore, Siobhan Jackson Victorian DLP 1976-1978 updated and the text thoroughly revised As a professor, James Griffin (Eurel

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 9 The MonQth's Traffic-- a

to explain my committee's decision , Vizard would have us believe, than Horowitz Unconventional expecting a rebuff. To m y surprise, Paddy playing Chopin. He was driven and directed was not only civil, but disarmingly self­ to a single, perfectionist, end. deprecating, even charming. He didn't want He could be vicious in an argument: but E TRICK ('PADDY') O' BRI EN, Associate to discuss his correspondence-'Oh, I write he was kind when, towards the end of our Profes or of Politics at the University of rather strong letters/ was all he would say, Convention, I and other wom en were Western Australia, and one of the wild men 'it clears the air.' He was also, I'd swear, exhausted and disheartened by the decep­ of the Constitutional Convention, died either a bit embarrassed, or shy. Truce was tions, and the Convention's frustration. suddenly of a heart attack in September. He declared. Paddy O'Brien was a complex man, and was walking home alone from a party in By the second clay of the Convention we a passionate one: unsure of his own worth suburban Perth, that Saturday night, that were allies. The crass manipulation of the and so likely to lash out, but willing to he seemed to have enjoyed thoroughly. Convention by the Australian Republican appear ridiculous for his causes, believing Neighbours heard him whistling, not long Movement, the ALP and Coalition voting deeply and single- heartedly in them. When before death must have struck him. blocs, to prevent our even discussing a the Convention ended, we hugged each This is a personal memoir of Paddy republican m odel that let the people elect other. And when the journalist from the O'Brien from one who, for m ore than 20 their head of state, drove the 'fringe dweller' West Australian rang and told m e he had years, was a regular target for his renowned republicans into something like our own died, I wept. broadsides. coalition. Between 28 and 35 of us m et each -Moira Rayner We never actuall y talked in all that m orning, caucu sing during the day, time. This did not prevent his assuming supporting each other's motions and press that I h eld particular views, nor from conferences and applauding our speakers. penning what an embarrassed official Warmth grew. By the end of the first week, described as a 'possibly defamatory and Paddy was standing nearby in the courtyard rather personal' letter addressed to me, care during a twilight drinks function hosted by of the Department of Employment Dick Smith, and when h e couldn't Education, Training and Youth Affairs, after remember what followed: the committee I chaired failed to support 'Let us go then, you and I, his research application. I gather (the When the evening is spread out against Department, wisely, never forwarded the the sky ... ' correspondence) that Paddy thought that with which he was trying to impress jour­ I was a fellow- travelling/political!y correct/ nalist Miranda Devine, I chimed in with: unjust and prejudiced femocrat determined 'Like a patient etherised upon a table;' The swinging to do him a personal injury. and we all laughed, and had another drink. Hence, I felt justified in describing him, After he died I pulled out and re-read the forties to a fellow delegate whose support he had whole of T.S. Eliot's Love Song of[. Alfred 0 NCE UPO ATlME there was a la cklustre sought just before the Constitutional Pwfroclc I can see that yellow sky yet, lick­ conservative government in Canberra. It Convention began in February, as a 'mad ing its tongue into the corners of the evening. had been popular, but not any m ore. The right-winger' and in advising her to be Paddy O'Brien has been called arrogant, disappointed electorate was wondering careful in her dealings with him. but when he gave m e a copy of his book, whether the task of governing Australia at But I was wrong. ConCon changed The Peopl e's Case: Democratic and a challenging time of interna tiona! upheaval everything. Anti-Democratic Ideas in Australia's was beyond it. Paddy had been elected in Western Constitutional Debate, it was with modesty Voters were becoming increasingly Australia on an 'Elect the President' and a self-deprecating rem ark. He detested responsive to critics who described the platform. I, in Victoria, won on the 'Real hi era rchies, and felt victimised by any. He Government as backward-looking and Republic' ticket, committed to genuine was a democrat by instinct, as well as m ean-spirited. The Labor Party had copped constitutional reform to protect individual intellect. There are few of them, and now a hiding at the previous election, but its and citizens' rights. I learned that my old one less. supporters were beginning to hope that the foe and I were to be seated virtually side-by­ He had been called a 'bully' by some, Party, under the leadership of a talented, side on the ' non-aligned' republican who hated him: but I saw Paddy shirt-front widely read and sport-loving Western backbenches of the old House w here the Eddie McGuire at the Convention dinner, Australian MHR (who sometimes had Convention was sited. The prospect was a ft e r h e perceived M cGuire to be trouble retaining his own seatL could give uncomfortable, so, when I came across browbeating a woman delegate, shouting the next election a rea l shake. Paddy, a solitary figure in a battered panama angrily against the 'damned bully'. These hopes had been boosted by a and seersucker jacket, contemplating his He was an intemperate and perhaps dramatic announcement. A well-known, pungent cigarette in the sun outside the unfair critic, including of me: but was no highly re pected individual decided to make welcoming reception, I greeted him. I started more ridiculous, as commentators like Steve an unprecedented resignation from a

10 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 significant public position in order to stand for the ALP at the next election. Further­ The manuscript in my briefcase more, this prominent identity-who had A BOOK 0 1· MANY THINGS been a member of Parliament before, but FrvE KILos? Or six? The manuscript in my briefcase is heavy-no never a Labor candidate for the House of idea yet of its literary weight. Representatives-was prepared to contest I've finished my week at work [as a senior editor of fiction) a Government-held marginal seat. and the weekend is when I do the other part of my job-reading This was tremendously uplifting news manuscripts. It is potentially the most crucial part of my work, for the Opposition party faithful. The media finding that next great novel, whether of the capital L 'literature' trumpeted the announcem ent with gusto variety or the capital R 'racy' read. I love them both. And this reading I do whenever and hailed the newcomer as a front-bench I can, such as now, for instance, while eating breakfast. Don't get me wrong. It has certainty and a leadership prospect in due my full attention, as my cold coffee will attest. course. The Government reacted sourly, Surely I have one of the best jobs in the world. I read manuscripts, I edit prose, and made a concerted effort to dent the I have my eyes opened every day. This week I talked with Mudrooroo about the favourable publicity and discredit the influence of Medea on his latest Master of the Ghost Dreaming story. I offered also, candidate. rather gingerly and conscious of the worlds that separate them, a suggestion that Sound familiar? In fact this narrative describes exactly there were also echoes of Joseph Conrad in his novel. Both Underground and Heart the lead-up to the 1940 federal election, of Darkness have master storytellers leading their listeners-and readers-into the when Labor's leader was John Curtin and dark h earts of their respective civilisations: Marlow into the fetid jungle of the party's glamorous new candidate was imperialism; George into the complex relations of black/white, female/male, real/ Bert Evatt, who resigned as a justice of the imagined. Muddy was more comfortable with Medea. High Court to contest the marginal anti­ And, with Phillip McLaren, a David Unaipon Award-winning author, while Labor seat of Barton. discussing his latest novel Lightning Mine [a heady blend of international industrial The striking parallels between the 1940 espionage and Aboriginal land rights), we talked about Phillip's mob, the Kamilaroi and 1998 elections do not end there. people. My connection to them was growing up, a white kid in the bush, on their In 1940, as in 1998, one issue dominated, land and playing softball on the Kamilaroi sports oval. although not the same one. Tax reform was Some weeks earlier, while frantically trying to get Peter FitzSimons' biography not uppermost in most electors' considera­ of Kim Beazley on the shelves before the election, I spent precious and privileged tions in 1940; one candidate standing that moments on the phone listening to Kim Beazley Senior's recitation of J.K. Ewers' year for the Senate in Victoria as a 'Tax poem 'The Red Road'. Reform' candidate polled only 0.5 per cent This, surely, is also why we read. Not only to be captivated, moved, challenged, of the vote. The dominant question in 1940 or taken out of our routine lives by the story, its characters, its language, but to be was which major party was best equipped given a chance to meet other people and see, for just a moment, their world through to govern during wartime. their eyes. In 1940, as in 1998, the election was a The manuscript in my briefcase? Well, I can't name names, for the author cliff-hanger. Days of vote-counting were might be one of those we reject. Is it the author we reject, or the manuscript? Well, needed before the outcome was known. both in some senses, for anyone who writes knows that there is much of one's The result was a very narrow win to the identity in the lines on the page, more than is represented simply by the name on coalition. the cover sheet, or more than is allowed by some post-structuralist theorists. In 1940, as in 1998, Labor achieved a William Butler Yeats wrote the lines, spoken by one to his lover: 'tread softly large swing and captured a number of because you tread on my dreams', and these words resonate as I read manuscripts additional seats in the state where its new and write my reports. The words that I choose painstakingly to gently reject a glamour candidate was standing. manuscript might well feel like a sledgehammer even to the most seasoned author. In 1940, as in 1998, some ALP identities The manuscript in my briefcase cleared the first hurdle. It is a coltish young doing post-mortem analysis of the election loss wondered whether the party's m~nuscript (weight, approximately 5.2 kilos) which should have the stamina to performance inN ew South Wales, although finish the race. • a distinct improvement on the previous election, could have been better. Belin da Lee is a writer and senior editor at HarperCollinsPublishers. There were, however, differences between the two elections. Does the 1940 precedent serve as any internal problems led to La bar taking office, In 1940 Evatt gained a big swing in guide to what might happen as Australia and Curtin commenced his term as Prime Barton and won the seat easily. moves towards the centenary of Federation, Minister. Many commentators have In 1940 Curtin had to wait for days to the new century and the next election? claimed since that he was the best Australia find out whether he had scraped back in In 1940 the Prime Minister, Robert has ever had. Fremantle, whereas Kim Beazley (whose Menzies, was politically weakened by the Little wonder then that John Howard father succeeded Curtin as MHR for swing against the Government and its near and Kim Beazley share a passionate personal Fremantlein 1945) went to bed on the night defeat. A year after the 1940 election, interest in the movements of Australian of 3 October more secure about his own Menzies was removed as Prime Minister by history. seat than ever before on an election night. his own party. The wartime government's -Ross McMullin

VoLUME 8 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 11 guarantee of a job for life. The social security students. They are trained in cooking, Hope on net is fast eroding, leaving many with no serving, bartending and all other aspects of other option but to live on the streets. the hospitality industry. The students at Bu t while the n umber of beggars in the Hoa Sua, who range from 18 to 28 years of A ,"c";'~ ~,~~"SH:::,;;Id Qu•n«, Old Quarter continues to rise, just a few age, are provided with accommodation, an tourists are drawn on to the streets by the blocks away a remarkable woman named allowance, an d food and clothing bright lights and shopping bargains. This Madam Pham Thi Vy is offering hope to throughout their apprenticeship. 1000-year-old district has become the hundreds of Vietnamese street kids. The Hoa Sua restaurant and attached Vi etnamese capital's main tourist hub, In the past decade Vietnam has opened patisserie are located in a grand French where Westerners haggle with locals over its doors to an increasingnumberofWestern colonial-era building. Customers may dine cheap Soviet watches, pirated CDs, fine tourists. It remains, however, one of the in the serene courtyard, inside the bistro or silk and original art by some of Asia's most world's poorest countries. Conditions are in the silver-service dining room. The prices innovative painters. rough and tourists often find themselves remain the same, but the different areas But the bright lights along Hang Gai, or dining in expensive hotels that cater solely provide the students with the skills to work Silk Street, also reveal the social cost of for expatriates and well-heeled foreign in any type of restaurant. Customers receive Vietnam's move to discard its communist business people. In 1995, the recently retired a free appetiser and select from a menu that w elfare system as it heads towards a Madam Pham Thi Vy set up an affordable blends traditional Vietnamese cooking with Western -s tyle market economy. The Old but high-quality restaurant staffed entirely the cuisine of the former French rulers. The Quarter not only attracts tourists, but also by street kids, orphans, children from single­ bill, including entree, main course, a glass an increasing number of beggars and young parent families, and recently repatriated of wine and dessert, starts at $10 per person. children, who spend long hours trying to refugees who'd spent years in camps around The quality of the food and service is eke out a living by shining shoes or selling the region. outstanding, especially when you remember cheap postcards. Growing numbers of We sit in the cool and leafy courtyard of that it is provided entirely by fo rmer street people, lured by the prospect of greater the Hoa Sua Restaurant and Patisserie, while kids and orphans who, until a few months wealth in the larger cities, are leaving the Madam Pham Thi Vy explains that she ago, often did not know where their next countryside. Once they arrive, many wanted to do something to help h er meal would come from. struggle t o make ends meet. The community and to change the desperate Twenty-year-old Nguyen Trinh Lam is government has shut down many inefficient circumstances of many Vietnamese one of Hoa Sua's m ost recent recruits. Lam state-nm enterprises, ending the communist children. Each year she accepts about 200 says that until three months ago he survived by selling cheap postcards to tourists. 'I like working as a waiter here and I'm also learning English because one day I want to Reading death open my own restaurant,' he says. 'I also get Darwin, 27 September 1998 time to relax with the other students.' Twenty-three-year-old Phuong has been For Phil Price, friend and fellow priest, 1953-1998 training at Hoa Sua for more than a year. 'I liked working in the bakery the best,' she says. 'Even though I had to get up ea rly, I had my afternoons free to do other things. T oDAY, AS YOU WERE LEAVING, I am flying in a warm, salty lake. Hopefully when m y training is over I will I float alone, apart. The anxiety of new people, new places sends me hunting be able to get a job with one of the big hotels for a moment of solitude. I have carried too much baggage from the south, and and maybe travel to other countries.' wounds open. But distance brings perspective, and this new place brings new ways Madam Pham Thi Vy recently opened a of seeing. I am licked by salt. The air is full and ripe. The lake holds the body ca tering service, and students are learning generously at the surface. No movement is needed, no effort required. new skills there too. She says that at the Eyes closed, ears submerged. I hear the whole lake breathe with me. In and moment the students are trained by chefs out. In and out. It's so quiet here. brought in from France, but this year five Eyes open. The sky hugs the lake, breathes with it, into it. I make angel wings Hoa Sua graduates will travel to Paris fo r in the water. Slowly, deliberately, attentively. Up and down. Up and down. Water further training. 'On their return they will floats over skin . Birds fly across the dome of the sky. Wings beating slowly, take over responsibility for training future deliberately, attentively. Air floats over feathers. Higher, a solitary plane. The day genera tions of students,' she says. is ending. After graduating, the budding waiters, Tomorrow, I will hear of your phoenix death. Your last take off. The swift chefs and bartenders are given help to find return to the earth . Then the flames. Your charred and mangled body. The wail of permanent jobs. About 75 per cent find sirens, and children and wife. The stupid waste. I will hear of your death, thousands work within a year. And despite the of miles away, and I will think of this lake. extensive support provided by Madam Ph am Today you are being carried on angels' wings. Slowly, deliberately, attentively. Thi Vy, Hoa Sua is entirely self-sufficient, earning enough to cover its running costs And I will miss you, brother. • and pay for the accommodation and needs of all Hoa Sua students. Jane Foulcher is an Anglican priest. -Geoff Keele

12 EUREKA STREET • N oVEMJJER 1998 Not forgetting

M .c,ou'N~,~~' ~:;,,,J [3 Ootob"l was right: infrastructure disruption ' ... can O N, T'M<-HONOU ::, ,PoA~~::::~: ~ u:~~~~P"""' wn

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 13 heat water, but also demonstrated that we say, security of petrol or water supply. By for civil defence training-a national service could get by without it. Suddenly a little BO contrast, enhancing the social experience that would provide training for all was OK. of temporary independence from any of emergencies, military included. It would The type of social infrastructure thus these infrastructures could give us a encourage application of its principles to generated is called empathy or trust. It too generalised level of community confidence all the present em ergency services, such as is easily taken for granted, and it also fa ils that would be socially transformative. fire brigades, s urf lifesaving clubs, through lack of use- it loses its constitu­ The starting point for such a new way of neighbourhood safe house schemes, first ency. Trust is a sorely needed community organising for emergencies-that is, a social aid and t h e many other voluntary attribute and one we should be loath to play or civil defence system-would be precisely organisations that attempt to pick us up fast and loose with. The political concerns the 'constituency of the occasional crisis'. when our resources fail. A civil defence we associate with the rise of One Nation When crises are far apart, our social and service would not compete with them but neatly underscore the need for trust just as political memories atrophy to the point would dramatically enhance the social our infrastructure crisis was helping to where we do not allocate the resources for context in which they work. Training would re tore it. adequate defence. Consider what would help us understand our communities, their No-one could oppose a call for a more happen to our fire brigades or our ambulance natural resources and the social and cautious initial design for gas supply. But services if they only had to deal with one technical infrastructures upon which they we should not allow Olusel ves to be event per year. are built. Because the expertise would be in frightened into striving vainly for fault-free National service went years ago, and our heads and in our social frameworks, it infrastructures at massive expense. Each while few now want a return to universal could be mobilised anywhere, any time, in marginal improvement to the physical military training, many would agree that it any emergency. robustness of electricity or gas supply is is a good thing to cultivate an understanding If we were organised to deal with break­ likely to cost exponentially more than the of what it takes to keep society going if down we'd all know a lot more about what preceding one and will not help at all with, infrastructure fails. So here is the impetus it takes to run a hi-tech society like our own. Social responsibility would improve. Our technical infrastructures could be built more fl exibly, cheaply, and with much greater openness, enabling simpler repair Turning the page and simpler transformation as inevitable obsolescence overtakes them. It is not Judith Watkins spent a week in October with difficult to imagine the many other spin­ Larrakia and Tiwi women from the Top End, offs such a community-based program at a place called Nungalinya, named after the big would generate: from skilling to export rock-a sacred place- offshore from sales of the very program itself, its detailed Casuarina Beach, Darwin. training procedures, and, inevitably, a new level of locally maintained material I LOVE TO READ. I read books, I read music, I read different situations, I read people. infrastructures. Just ask the Scandinavians Reading is an integral part of my life, and I like to think I'm proficient in it. It who, to some extent, already do it. comes as an enormous shock to be in a situation where my proficiency comes into Curiously, such a national service could question, the paradigm within which I operate needs to be thrown away, and I have also enable a level of privatisation of to begin again. infrastructure hitherto undreamed of­ This was exactly what happened to me at Nungalinya. I had to be prepared to because we would then be able to see to its be a beginner once again, to be open to learning the basic skills of reading. I was monitoring and maintenance at a level reminded, sometimes very bluntly, that readers need to be patient, to use all their simply unavailable at present. Enhanced skills of observation, and that even then they make mistakes. I had to learn about community responsibility could give new new ways of reading language, both spoken and unspoken, new ways of reading meaning to the honest market economist's nature, new ways of reading people and situations, perhaps even new ways of reading dream: consumers with much improved myself. and more generally accessible information And yet, as the weeks go by, and the distance between the present and past about their own (infrastructure) market. experience increases, I find myself wondering whether I was learning new reading A pity such a scheme could not be in place before midnight 3 1.1 2.1999 or 'Y2K'. skills, or rediscovering the importance of reading skills I had come to take for granted. -Frank Fisher During the time at Nungalinya, I was reminded that worthwhile reading is often hard work. It can be risky and challenging. It demands that we take time to listen This month's contributors: Moira Rayner and reflect on what we read. New reading means being prepared to ask questions of is a lawyer and freelance journalist; Ross the text, and of ourselves as readers. N ew reading means allowing the text to speak McMullin is the author of the ALP centenary to us. history, The Light on the Hill; Geoff Keele 'Now we see in a glass darkly'-fragments of text and subtext are running around is a freelance journalist; Frank Fisher is in my mind. The reading, and the waiting and the listening continues, and I am Director of the Graduate School of grateful for the questions and the challenges it poses. • Environmental Science & Centre for Environmental Managem ent at Monash Judith Watkins is a Uniting Church Minister. University.

14 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1998 • 1 a e Colts or canons

while deacons link the local church to the It is appropriate both to ympathise with m woeN C"holi" " ' Doften chor"''"c"eographed like Westerns. Down bishop and to the Bishop of Rome. and to put questions to each position . the street comes Black Hat with his goons. Bagelow clearly writes in opposition to Cardinal Clancy state clearly the Catholic They are m et by White Hat coming out of a clerical church, whose characteristics he teaching on the grounding of ministry in the saloon . A gunfight en su es, with sees as preoccupation with dignity and Christ and the apostles. While this under­ enorm ou s collateral damage, and the control, centralisation, churchiness, mal­ standing, with its associated emphasis on triumph of White Hat. It remains only to distribution of resources, and inflexibility. the importance of ordination, has developed identify the men in the hats. He wants a church for which all take over time, it is so central within the Catholic If we survey the terrain more carefully, responsibility, which is open to the wider tra dition that the revolutionary change h ow ever, and ask what lies in the society, where all co-operatively build up proposed by Bagelow eem inconsisten t protagonists' sights, what goods they defend, the whole church, and where ministry can with Catholic identity. and whether their weaponry is up to the meet changing needs. But Cardinal Clancy's argument does mark, we may sometimes see that they are Like any i m agina ti ve re-creation, not deal with the strong theological case for actually firing past one another, and that Bagelow's blueprint is open to criticism on evolutionary change. Indeed Catholic casualties are caused by friendly fire. A case practical grounds. In architects' drawings, th eology h as yet to respond to th e in point is found in the latest number of children never cry and cars never belch smoke. implications of the clear evidence that in Compass (Winter 1998) which includes a The reality, even in free churches, is always the N ew T estam en t there are diverse letter from Cardinal Clancy in response to more m essy. At St McKillop's the number patterns of ministry, and that the present an earlier article by Len Bagel ow (Compass, of people commissioned is so large, and the fo rms and spiritualities of minis try Summer 1997). This exchange on the future commissionings so fr equent, that its atten­ developed over time. If Cardinal Clancy's of ministry in the Catholic church appears tion may turn out to be even more inwardly response were regarded not only as a true to require the reader simply to take sides. focused than today. Might not, too, the but as a complete response to Bagelow, But that response might be too hasty. energy that comes from life long ministries Catholic theology would risk being Bagelow reacts against the sharp division in the church, be lost to such a church ? associated with a clerical caricature in drawn in Catholic theology between laity Cardinal Clancy's response appeals to which the ideal candidate for ministry is a and clerics. He believes it responsible for Catholic teaching about ministry. He insists young man who practices stretching his destructive ten ions within the church. On that church ministry is grounded in Christ's neck like a Kenyan tribeswoman to fit an the one hand, the restriction of ordination commission to the Apostles. Teaching and ever m ore commanding clerical collar, who to m en and of decision-making to the sacramental and pastoral care in the church isolates himself from his people, busies ordained leaves lay people unable to fulfil derive from the successors to the Apostles. himself with a self-absorbed liturgy, and their responsibilities, and makes many Lay people who help in this work are ignores, dominates or speaks rudely ordained ministers anxious about their role. deputed, and their work is not sacram ental. to such women as he must meet. On the other hand, as lay ministry is The distinction between ordained and increasingly identified with roles in the unordained, therefore, is central to the BAGELOW DESCRIBES attractively an active liturgy, the mission of the church to society church, and attempts to rem edy an y church in which many forms of service are is neglected. malfunction in the church must respect the recognised and in w h ich people and Bagelow's solution is to do away with difference. initiative are valued and empowered the distinction between lay and cleric, The differences between these two without respect to gender or status. It would which he claims to have been developed positions clearly cannot be papered over. be a pity if these proper qualities of ministry late in the early church. He then sketches But it would be a mistake simply to take were seen necessarily to lie outside the the consequences by imagining the shape sides between them . For they derive their Catholic tradition. of ministry in St McKillop's in 2.010. energy from different places. Cardinal In fact, in many local communities that The main differences between the Clancy is concerned for the continuity of function relatively well and ju tly, the pre ent and future church are that in church tradi tion and teaching. In defending theological bottom line enunciated by St McKillop's mini ters will be called by clerical difference, he asserts the claims of Cardin al Clan cy would be ace pt ed their New Testam ent titles and will be church order. Len Bagelow is concerned unreflectively. But people and priests commissioned by the community for short with the psychological and ociological involve themselves in shaping the pastoral periods of service. Ministries, available both implication s of current practice. In strategies and outreach of the parish in to men and women, will be varied, including attacking clerical distinctiveness, his target ways that echo, but are less self-conscious deacons working with youth, the is clericalism- the concentration of power than those commended at St McKillop's .• marginalised and the environment, and in the hands of the priest, the reduction of prophets to church and society. The church t o sacristy and altar, and a Andrew Hamilton sr teaches at the United sacraments are not reserved to the presbyter, spirituality which places clergy over laity. Faculty of Theology, Melbourne.

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 15 R EADING POLITICS Acute as a Button

Peter Craven looks at the life and times of one of those rare politicians who didn't have to wait for 20-20 hindsight to make him a free and frank-very frank-reader of the political scene.

I HN BuTTON w" ' L•bm " n"o' fmm As it Happened, John Button, He puts his money, and his bet with history, 1974- 1993. He rose to becom e the Labor Text Publishing, 1998. however, on the first five years of the Hawke (a nd government) leader in the Upper House ISBN] 875847 49 9, RRI' $34.95 government, though this book is a number and h e was the influ ential and highly of other things besides being a cold-eyed respected Minister for Industry in the ba ck in the '80s, a breakfast show host appraisal of the Rise a nd Fall of the Hawke and Kea ting governments. ask ed him abou t som e comment Paul Australian Labor Party as a gleaming I remember having lunch with one of the Keating had made. 'Oh, the Treasurer is a conservative force in our history. It is also warlords of the Liberal Party some time in man of infinite intellectual flexibility. I'm a portrait of the chronicler, both his early the '80s, at a time when there were bright sure he'll think his way through the mat­ years as an em erging sensibility and his hopes on every side of politics for what the ter.' It was as close as John Button could later achievem ents mixing it with captains Hawke/Keating team might achieve, and com e to a sneer but you kn ew there were of industry and titans of Labor who not I asked him wh at h e thought of his depths beneath the asperity. Keating himself infrequently fo und themselves united in opponents now that they were in power. had no doubts. When asked to gloss he said, their opposition to him. 'Well, I have a lot of respect fo r what John without rancour, 'He's having a go at m e.' In some ways As It Happened would Button is trying to do as Minister for As It Happened makes clear the extent have strong claims to being seen as the Industry. And I have a lot of time for Barry of John Button's scepticism about Keating most vivid account of the Labor Govern­ Jones as the minister for Scientology.' in government and as Treasurer, though mentwe have. Although Button is intent on What John Button was trying to do was Button is too much of a natural for political his own corner of government (a nd in giving to bring Australian m anufacturing kicking chronicling not to appreciate much of the an account of his own track record) h e is a and screaming into a late 20th-century beset glitter of that particular prince of darkness. splendidly droll observer of politicians. If with globalisation and the free mar­ he is not a great caricaturist like Mungo ket, factors he was more sceptical about McCallum, he is a better realist than than some of his fellows but which he any of the journalists of the current accepted as the conditions under which generation and quite a stylist as well. industry must operate. The consensus He has the great advantage of the is that he did a good job and that he insider but h e can also do the voices, represented the governments in which and what they say is often both he served at their m ost flexible and disarming and unspeakable. rational. He cut tariffs, wrangled with BHP without sending th em broke, H EBEGINS by quotingV.S. Naipaul rationalised the automotive industry on the way a politician becom es his within an inch of its life but profile and proceeds to sidestep any nevertheless succeeded in persuading such temptation. The aloof Malcolm Toyota to build a new plant, the single Fraser followed no such formula: he grea test investment in the fi eld for the was one politician w h o had the entire period. compassion to send Button a warm But he was always an agnostic. John note when his son Dave died tragically Button belonged to the dead middle of of a drug overdose. This personal the Labor Party which it would be tragedy shadows this book every so simplistic to describe as simply techno­ often as a reminder of a more real and cratic. For Button any suggestion of heartbreaking world. communism only brought to mind the Childhood is Ballarat, where he is recalcitrant Victorian Left of his early remorselessly belted by his upright days in the Party, but he clearly had his Presbyterian minister father, and own doubts about the mafia men of Geelong College where he enj oys the the New South Wales Right. Once, sport, evades the character-building

16 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 and wears a black tie the day Ben Chifley colourful swagger of a succe sful buccaneer' at the prospect of surrendering the leader­ dies. His father, a good man who rushes to is characteristic: he is m erciless in what he ship to Bob Hawke. He's not like Coriolanus, defend the local Italians when an idiot local memorialises about the giants around him. he tells Button. He's like Macbeth, he will policeman tries to have them interned When he expresses concern about the fate never ask for m ercy. But h e's damned if he's during the war, also dies while John is a of the Timorese, Whitlam says to him, going to give it up for a bastard like Hawke. boarder in Geelong. At the Ballarat funeral 'What are you worried about them for, com­ The dialectical Button gives the standard the Catholic priests line up outside the rade? They're all mulattos.' answer and gives it very well. 'The fact that church as a mark of respect becau se they There is a vignette of a shadow cabinet someone is a bastard ... has never been a cannot enter the church of the heretic. debate about whether the Labor front bench disqualification for leadership of the party.' At university, in Melbourne, the young should fly first class or economy. 'Listen, I'm 1n the m eantime he has gon , with Button's liberalism lead him to launch a a great man and I fl y economy,' Whitlam Michael Duffy, to see whether Hawke will campaign against the initiation ceremonies thunders. Round this table, he says, there is avenge himself on the Haydenites. They at Ormond and he succeeds in having the a collection of pissants who would stay find him poolside, in bathers, basting his more scarifying features abolished. He is pissants no matter h ow much first class body, over and over, with a suntan lotion, intent on a world elsewhere, of course, and they fl ew. like a turkey almost too bea utiful to put in in 195 7 he sets off by ship for the glories of N ot surprisingly, the ever-rational the oven. 'There is not a vindictive bone in Italy. On the boat he gets to know Patrick Button votes for Hayden in his bid for the my body,' the old Silver Bodgie preens. White's partner Manoly La scaris who has a leadership against 'Big Fluff ', as Whitlam They drive off into the unny Saturday dread of Australian suburbia. was known. He also disgraces himself by afternoon laughing in hysteria at the va nity Later, on firm ground, he has an affair consuming n ea rly a n entire bottle of of their new Leader. with the daughter of an earl who talks about But Button has considerable time for getting 'sozzled' and conducts her life in Hawke the Prime Minister and says that A.A. Milne baby talk. Once, in London, history will treat him m ore fairly than while he is staying with an Australian friend, anyone is inclined to at the mom ent. He he discovers that a French girl, somebody's says that he was a master of the politics of girlfriend, has taken an overdose. He carries government and that he knew how to get the comatose body (clad only in knickers) the best out of his cabinet. out into the London street and calls out for an After their victory in the 1983 election, ambulance, knowing he doesn 't have the the heirs apparent are staying at the Lakeside strength to carry her up the stairs again if it Hotel in Canberra. All Button can think of fails to arrive. She survives and has forgotten is that hi on Dave, who had helped him the incident entirely when h e hand out voting cards through all their t"'J'"'1 visits her some time later in Paris. Cointreau andgivinga speech in the Senate years in the wilderness, is not there with which compares a Liberal senator first to an him. He collapses in an uncontrollable fit .1. HE M ELBOURNE John Button returns to army chaplain and then to a pimp in a Cairo of sobbing. Hawke and Hazel arc kind. Only in 1959 seems provincial and dusty by brothel, as if these two were more or less Gareth Evans-lovable as ever-sticks his comparison. He says that the Labor Party cognate. The President of retired service head round the bedroom door and says, leadership of the period was characterised chaplains telegraphs Whitlam and says that 'Still boo-booing, are we?' by anti-Catholicism, incompetence and if he ever wishes to be Prime Minister again Hawke's sense of the via media, his authoritarianism . Young Button schem es he must disassociate himself from the likes attempt to rationalise while adh ering again st these vices of the Left-wing Old Guard. of John Button. 'Comrade, with your back­ (w here possible) to the traditional Labor He is the kind of young Labor intellectual ground,' is all Whitlam can say as he shakes cau ses was close to Button 's instinct. who takes his bearings from the British his head in wonder. Paul Keating, on the other hand, would weeklies and attacks Menzies' cult of the He also falls foul of Reg Withers, the jab his finger in front of Button's chest and 'standard of living' with his own (Robin Boyd­ government leader in the Senate, a man say, 'You've go t to remember, mate, that influenced) idea of 'the quality of life'. He is who has renounced his father's Labor we're here because we're the best.' When the natural ally of people like Dick McGarvie politics but who declares, 'My father would Button would ask him where the fo reign and John Cain and in 1970 he supports tum in his grave at the sight of you parlour investment guidelines were he would say, Whitlam's purge of the Victorian Party. pinks !' Button takes some pleasure in 'They're in my hea d, mate, in my Although he is by this stage a partner at Withers' fa ll fr om grace when Malcolm head.' Maurice Blackburn and has been offered a Fraser banishes him to the back bench seat on the bench of the Arbitration because of his government's famously high BUTTON SAYS THAT H awke thought Commission, politics h as become the standards of rectitude. Button is both Kea ting was an interloper whereas Keating 'dominant virus' of his life. sympathetic and sadistic. It's all a bit like thought Hawke was 'vacuous'. There's He gets into the Senate in time to see that line from T.S. Eliot, he instructs the som ething fitting about the fact that it was the last, dreadful year of the Whitlam roughneck Reg, 'The last temptation is the the innocent intellectual Button who almost government close up. Jim McClelland warns greatest treason/To do the right deed for the brought them to loggerheads over the 1988 him, 'Don't pursue other people's illusions', wrong reason.' 'Who the hell is T.S. Eliot?' Kirribilli agreement which they had kept and he seems to have enjoyed the Balzacian Withers growls. from their colleagues even though they had spectacle of the National Capital. His Literary analogies also com e into play been willing to trade the leadership (the description of Lionel Murphy having 'the when Bill Hayden is staring, in deep denial, succession from Hawke to Kea ting) in the

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 17 presence of two outsiders, Sir Peter Abeles his feelings on Keating, of whom he says it who is appalled at how narrowly his industry and Bill Kelty. was 'the dichotomy between the political and his workers have escaped the scrapheap It reads like a scene from Richard ll I or mobster and the cultivated man which and how tough it's go ing to be to survive. the annals of some totalitarian government created the enigma'. 'You've got to remember,' the Domingo of lost to human memory. Button has been This is a more sophisticated register and Treasurers says, ' the shoe is designed to talking, nearly meaninglessly, to some a more elegant-not to say subtle-set of pinch.' journalist about how the two lords of Labor discrimin

18 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 always a monument to the formidable the sense that any fam ily suffering the pain of process of Au stralian politics abide our exercise of intelligence in the pursuit of poverty diminishes us all, the sense in which question in a host of ways. It is generous to sane government, it is also very rnuch a money is so much less than everything as to fellow politicians fro m Flo Bjelke-Petersen story of government fr om the top down. be inconceivable as a value in itself. to John Hewson and it is both less besotted When a young m anaging director fr om What lies behind the elaborate conceit with politics and more alive to its lunatic N estle com es to Button, earl y on, and asks about the Geelong Football Club is the idea micro-drama than any other book by an him what he is to do, 300 of his workers are of the dignity of being a loser, the ancient Australian politician I know. It is urbane, on strike and the factory is likely to collapse, Australian tolerance of the no-hoper. unfazed, narky and self-o bsessed. Almost Button does not hesitate. Sa ck them all, he says, and close the plant for a month. T his h appen s an d 240 of th e workers are As It Happened mal

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 19 What lawyers don't read

I,e>w AN 'Noumv, ' pwf"' ion, •n Historically, lawyers are specialist The practical component of l egal academic discipline, or a political advocates and legal advisers who are training was still delivered through the philosophy? Whose 'satisfaction ' with exclusively licensed by the courts, not by articles system, but by the end of the 1970s lawyers' performance matters-peers', the executive part of government, to be the the states had begun to set up training public's, clients', courts', or go vernment's? courts' 'offi cers ', their autonomous experts, institutes to provide more rigorous training. It's important to know . The Standing in advocacy, in advising on the law, and By then, all the states had long regulated Committee of Attorneys-General is working assisting the administration of justice. the legal profession by statute. In some, towards agreement on a national schem e In the tradition we inherited from admission to practise was administered by for admitting lawyers to practise. This could England, legal professionals have had a s ta tu tory bodies associated, more by be revolutionary-and the people always m onopoly on the right to appear in the tradition than strict legal necessity, with suffer in revolutions. courts and give lega l advice since 1292. their Supreme Courts. The plan is to progress towards a Since the 15th century, judges have set the But by that time a substantial tradition 'national legal services m arket', an ideal to standards for lawyers' education and of l egal professional a uto nomy h ad which all Australia's legal training, independently of developed, as it had not in Europe, where professional bodies h ave universities and the church­ judges and lawyers' status were largely agreed, in principle. The the most powerful institutions determined by government regulation. This particular proposal, put up by of the times. had led, notoriously, to the corruption of both the lawyers' national Until quite recently, law­ the judicial process and integrity of both representative body, the Law yers' education and training courts and lawyers in Nazi Germany. The Council of Australia, and the has been delivered through law becam e identified with the 'Priestley Committee' (a com­ a system of apprenticeships­ implementation of government policy­ mittee of all Australian Chief ' articles of clerkship' or di scriminatory, secret, retrospective laws Justices), departs significantly 'reading' with a qualified and arbitrary or oppressive procedures­ fro m tradition, though the legal practitioner. This system that could never be described as 'just' or tradition h as lon g been was never perfect. Once the even 'law', in jurisprudential terms. divorced from the reality. monopoly had been created, In Australia we fo llowed the British First, it has been proposed the quality of education offered tradition. In our own parochial version of that control of lawyers' through the Inns of Court Australian federalism, each state regulated admission, and thus of the started to deteriorate. Achieve­ its own legal profession-each Supreme sta ndards of skill a nd m ent became symbolic, the Court determined its own standards for com petence, and so their training pragmatic and oriented lawyers' admission-and each professional education and training, should to the preservation of the status body defended its own against the lawyers pass to a national body. The proposed quo and its crafty contortion to address from 'out of town'. In Western Australia, N ational Appraisal Council for the Legal new, recurring problems- the source of the for example, any would-be applicant for Profession (NAC), would be funded by extraordinarily complex array of 'lega l admission had to prove local residence for another levy on lawyers and on Law Schools. fictions' from which our basic property, at least six m onths. The justifi cation was NAC could force the states to comply with tort and contract law developed. Poor that it would take about that time for news its requirements and meet its standards for training resulted in a diminution of skills, of the applicant's bad reputation or lawyers' training and competencies. The and inconvenience for the courts. So, since malfeasance to filter back, by cam el train, proposal would explicitly give the executive the 19th and early 20th centuries, from'the Eastern States'. Th e rule persisted arm of Commonwealth Government- with universities have increasingly come to into the 1980s, when camel trains were the connivance of the states- effective provide at least the academic part of legal relatively rare. control over the whole of the Australian edu cation and training. Noneth eless, In principle, admission to practise is legal profession. university qualifications have not been still controlled by judges. Over the centuries Does this matter? Well, you might think universally required. Forty years ago, half they have del ega ted the detail to recognised so, if you knew legal history, and if you had of the admitted lawyers in NSW did not professional bodies- the Law Societies and a philosophical view of w hat law is, what have law degrees, though virtually all of the Victoria' s Law Ins titu te, a nd oth er lawyers ought to be and what they should Tasmanian and Western Australian ones educational institutions, and merely receive know and understand. But lawyers don't did. A handful of Law Schools and legal the applicants, duly recognised. In practice, leamlegal history anymore. Most don't bother academics (they have spawned since) all legal education in Australia has largely to undertake the (optional) study of the science taught much the same, generalist, legal fallen into the hands of the universities' of jurisprudence. So let me spell it out. course until the late 1970s. law courses, with practical training delivered

20 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 through professional-based bodies. Increas­ It would seem that lawyers play an When I was 'trained' in income tax law, ingly, these bodies have become subject to important and sometimes unpopular role in during my first year of articles, I was taught government control, through government the family, society, and politics. Practising how to evade tax u sing the precursors to the regulation and government control over lawyers write laws, give advice on how to use, 'bottom of the harbour' schemes that, not the funds for education and training. enforce and avoid them, and form the long after, led many taxpayers, and their It would obviou sly be silly to let state exclusive pool from which judges are lawyers, into law-breaking, fines, legal professional bodies set up parochial appointed. Yale Professors Lasswell and disbarment, and even jail. monopolies whose purpose or effect is McDougal wrote, in 1943, that lawyers are The professional responsibilities of the simply to protect local lawyers from extra­ 'the one indispensable adviser of every lawyer must, surely, include a clear under­ state competition. It seems logical to responsible policy-maker of our standing of the need to work establish reciprocal recognition of legal society. ' Control over what they Lawyers don't with law; to uphold and qualifications. It became necessary to do so learn, and how they exert such improve it, and the courts, in the late 1980s after the High Court influence, is a very significant and the profession. This is struck down as unconstitutional the power. learn legal not inconsistent with putting Queensland profession's favoured What should we train their client's instructions and 'restrictive trade practice' that protected lawyers for? history any interests first. Law has never Queensland lawyers from the If it is to prepare them for been just a business: lawyers intrusions of 'southerners'. practice, what kind of practice? more. Most are a part of the justice and political systems. Lawyers Traditional law courses are don't bother to N ow WE NEED to give attention to what directed at commercial law know how law is made and setting 'national standards' for legal practice practices. Many lawyers government works. They might mean. wouldn't know a corporation if undertake the manipulate and influence I return to my initial point: that legal it presented its bottom to be law. They affect how demo­ education, for more than 700 years, has kicked. Thousands of lawyers {optional) study cratic government works. been essentially practical, to achieve certain deal with the needs and This makes legal training desirable results, in what was a quite rigid problems of ordinary people- of the science of very important: the mix of framework of 'forms of action'-writs buying a house, defending a academic study (usually but commencin g highly specific remedial minor criminal charge, collect­ jurisprudence. not always leading to a law processes-in a government framework of ing debts, sorting out family, degree), and recognised prac­ courts. Of course they developed to meet work or immigration problems. So far as tical training and expertise, must include new challenges, as social and economic business is concerned, lawyers provide a this knowledge. Practical, clinical training systems changed-especially as the feudal service, and it would be happy if their is still provided by firms (where bad habits system of hierarchical relationships and training were simply directed to technical may also be passed on) or, increasingly, by duties deteriorated and was replaced. Now, expertise and commercial efficiency. specialised institutions. The academic side the pace of change is frenetic. Lawyers do No education and training can ever teach is largely provided by universities- but it is much more than litigate and advise. Modem a lawyerall the law there is to know. Twenty­ a very mixed bag. They all now package social and commercial and governmental eight years ago the UK Ormrod Committee their courses to meet very different needs business is complex, multi-layered, and in on Legal Education said that, 'The range of and expectations of students-they now a state of flux. So what training is necessary the subject-m atter of t he law is so great that market to their 'clients'. for lawyers? no system of education and training before There is far more choice in the courses What is a lawyers' role? Ask the short qualification could possibly cover the whole of study, as there was not when I first man with a megaphone and an Irish accent of it, except in an utterly superficial and studied law. This m eans that lawyers do wearing a cotton-wool 'judge's' wig who useless manner. The process of acquiring not, necessarily, share a common core of stands outside Melbourne's central Post professional knowledge and skill is continuous knowledge before they go into practice. Office most days. He tells all who will throughout the lawyer's working life.' Indeed, there are some notable omissions. listen, and som e who would rather not, Law h as b ecome infinitely more The Priestley Committee has recom­ how all lawyers are blood-sucking, complex since. So we should train lawyers mended that a practising lawyer's academic influential, incompetent leeches. There is to learn continually. But learn what? And study should cover 11 areas of knowledge: another, rather like him but without the on what philosophical basis? If corporations criminal law and procedure; tort; contracts; wig, who patrols the Family Court precinct desire to pay no tax, is it a lawyer's business property; equity; company law; adminis­ demanding the exclusion of all lawyers from to bend the law without thought for its trative law; Federal and State constitutional family disputes because they 'foster purpose? If the rule of law underlies law; civil procedure, evidence and, finally, litigation' instead of conciliation. Ask community cohesion, shouldn't a lawyer's professional conduct. But when I completed journalist Evan Whitton, who writes an training include a comprehensive under­ my undergraduate degree in 1969 I had to occasional column in The Australian and standing of the lawyer's double role in pass 'core' subjects that have, inexplicably, relentlessly publicises his book about the serving the public interest as well as now become optional: legal history, dishonesty of the law and lawyers. He even fulfilling the client's desires? cons ti tu tional his tory as well as wrote a diatribe against democracy, based Without a clear understanding of the constitutional law and jurisprudence. on lawyers' 'take-over' of lawmaking-and ethical and social basis of 'law', it would be This choice-and these omissions- perversion of parliament- in the week easy to accept instructions uncritically. This have come about because many law students before the election. has risks for the lawyer and the client. do not intend to practise. About35 per cent

VoLUME 8 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 21 of law graduates either don't practise, or no ethics other than a 'short course' prior to use their qualifications in an array of admission in 'professional responsibility AUSTRALIAN occupation s: in-house employment in and ethics (preliminary)'. corporations; as barristers; in community­ The proposed post-admission practical based or government-funded legal aid legal training would include important eThical services; in government, management, or practical skills: trust accounts, advanced Agribusiness or in highly specialised areas of boutique prac­ professional conduct and ethics in practice, reofforestotion. TRUSTS tice. They wish to choose a targeted course. personal work management, legal writing Mining or recycling. Investors But in so doing, I think they, and their and drafting, interviewing/communication Exploitation or can choose teachers, are at risk of missing the point. techniques, negotiation and dispute sustoinobility. Through the AE Trusts you How can anyone 'study' law without resolution, legal analysis and research and Greenhouse gases con invest your savings appreciating both its history, and its advocacy. Those who wish to take out a full or solar energy. and supe rannuation in intellectual and philosophical basis? How practising certificate must also acquire Armaments or over 70 different can one decide to practise law without a measurable competencies in practice community enterprises, each expertly fundamental appreciation of the ethical management and business practice, legal en terpri se. selected for its unique responsibilities of ala wyer? These are now and business accounting, and one year's combination of earnings, taught in 'short courses', just prior work experience in four areas of transaction­ environmental to admission. based work (e.g. property, wills and probate) sustoinobility ond social and litigation and personal rights-based work responsibility, and earn o A LAWYER must know the law, as a (e.g. criminal law, commercial litigation). compe titive financial discipline- what it is, and how to find out Such training should produce technical return . For full details what it i . competence, but where is the gravitas? A lawyer must know the law, as a In 1976 the then Governor-General, John make o free co li to profession. This includes the historical and Kerr, wrote that: 'I doubt whether Law 1800 021 227 philosophical reasons for their duties to a Schools can provide, except in relation to Jw •est ments in the .\ustralian Etbica/ Trusts can client: to accept work and continue to act general professional ethics, an overall ideology on!r be made through the current prospectus regislered tt •itb the Australian Securilies until dismissed; to communicate and obey for lawyers. In their various ultimate Commission and al'ailaiJ/e p·om the client's instructions; to maintain a interests and specialties they will espouse Australia11 Ethical llll'estmellt Ltd confidence, and meet the duty of care. and develop ideologies which rationalise l nil 66. Ca nberra Business <..e ntre A lawyer must appreciate the fiduciary their respective relationships with the eco­ llradjield Sl. /Jnll"ner M.T .!MI.! relationship with the client, and the ethical nomic system and their selected role in it.' duty not to misuse it; must avoid conflicts Yet no constitutional lawyer is a good of interest whether they be with other lawyer, who does not know constitutional SPIRITUAL clients, other people, or the lawyer's own history, and John Kerr's role in weakening COMPANIONING financial and other interests. A lawyer must constitutional conventions, and bringing FORMATION embrace the duty to be fair and candid, and forward a republican form of government in not to pervert or abuse the lega l system: Australia. High Court Justice Callinan has been Nor is any lawyer a 'real' lawyer, in my A course for those exploring severely criticised by the Federal Court for view, who lacks an understanding of our spiritual compan ioning/ advising a course of litiga tion for strategic legal history; the reasons why lawyers direction and the skills purposes, when he was a QC, knowing that have-and must not lose- their tradition required. there was no hope of success. Is there not a of principled independence; knowing how similar duty not to misuse relatively Common Law and Equity developed, and This is th e fifth yea r this privileged access to the courts, by the lawyers' special role in protecting individua I ec umenica l course is being offered. wealthy? A lawyer must, above all, respect rights and the public interest. It is part of the ongoing program the law, the courts, the judicial process, and In 1909, F.W. Maitlanddelivereda course the office of judges. of lectures on the 'forms of action' from of the Australian Network for These ethical principles are just one small which our litigation remedies are derived. Spiritual Direction. part of the pre-admission competencies All lawyers should read them. He makes it The course comprises a guided proposed both by the 'Priestley' areas of utterly clear why there can be no 'right' 1-cading program fi·o m February to practical legal education and the Australian unless it has a remedy, and why it has June 1909, and a res id ential sc hool Professional Legal Education Council. always been a lawyers' role to develop the at the Melbourn e Angli can Retreat The model proposed by Victorian law to create one. Attorney-General Jan Wade's discussion paper It is instructive to remind ourselves of House in Cheltenham from presently in circulation proposes that the this, at a time when cost is taking justice I to 9 July 1999. responsibility for legal education and train­ beyond the reach of the majority of our Full detai ls arc available fi·om: ing for admission should be vested in a citizens: 'The forms of action we have buried, The R cgistrar Qohn Stuart) statutory body-which is no surprise. It but they still rule us from their graves.' • 398 Nepean Hi ghway posits a university degree, or equivalent, teaching the 'Priestley ll Areas of Knowl­ Moira Rayner is a lawyer and freelance Parkdale VIC 3 195 edge'- no jurisprudence, no lega l history, journalist ([email protected]).

22 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 for the jour ey

tons.' J' A T 7.20 IN THE MORNJ c I let my son out to walk down to the station. I unlock the wrought iron security door and hold it open for him. As h e passes through, bag on his back, tennis racquet in one hand, I put the book into the other. 'Don 't put it down on the seat,' I plead. T here are two sectors to his journey. From Petersham he takes the train on its curving run east towards the sun of Circu Jar Quay. This is the sector for the life of the imagination. For on this line the older rolling stock is used. The rattle that revs up into an unbroken whirr is more pronounced. The badly designed windows are set too low and have the transverse metal bar at eye level, so that vision from the ca rriage is cramped and awkward. I'm always puzzled, som etimes outraged, that such gross ineptitude spoiled travel for a generation of commuters. Bu es of the era have the ame fl aw. These were constructions of the 1970s, my adulthood. I shake my head at it. Any child could have told them. The malign incompetent (I know he can't be both) should be in the history books. His story is just the material for one of those boxed cameos that Norman Davies' Europe has made popular. The eyes of the villainous engineer could be ruled out by the transverse bar to preserve his anonymity. So it's a journey where it's better not to try to look. It runs between eight stations and of these three are underground. You're completely unsighted then in any case. It's better to withdraw into yourself. The senses are assaulted rather than indulged. In Europe, proud care has been taken and expense accepted to make the passage underground as quiet as possible. The loop of the Sydney City Circle line has been left raw and primitive. Perhaps as often as not the turbulence of wheels and chassis diminishes only to the shriek of unoiled brakes. Nobody seem s to be worried about lubricating this passage through the dark. 'Okay,' I say to the traveller, ' just read on the train. Twenty minutes each way, five days a week. You'll get through books at a grea t rate.' I have to admit I've actually checked the bookmark of an afternoon. Once, twice maybe. Yes, he's been advancing consistently, twenty to thirty pages a day. Of course he actually enjoys the stories (they're always stories) and has perfect recall for the details of the narrative. I don' t. I was reading Don De Lillo's Underworld and I told him the story of the first chapter, the retrieval and loss of the baseball that Bobby Thomson hit for a homer. 'Tell me another story from a book,' h e asked at once. But I couldn't. What was the previous novel I'd read? Colum McCann's Songdogs. A nice work but a haze of oscillations, father and son moving in and out of mundanities and mem ories and going nowhere fa st. N othing with the complete spherical beauty of De Lillo's baseball. I shuffled my Dickens, but characters and shards were all that I could seize on. Not the firm lines and locks of interconnection that you need to retell stories from the clas ics with the requisite confidence and maximum effect. He had a cla y in bed with a temperature and I aid, 'I'll read you a story. This is one my Dad liked. He thought 0 . Henry was a great writer.' I started on 'Th e Gift of the Magi'. The rhetorical circumlocutions of the opening were a shock, and made m e baulk, but I hopped on with a mix of adroit skipping and contemporary glossing. The listener was attentive. There was still a page to go when he said, with just the right gasp of surprise, 'He's sold the watch for her present! ' I wasn't sure then whether to finish 0. Henry's version. It's mostly moralising. But I did. Why not see how the guy who thought up the idea rounded it off? See how another time did something? It seemed to m e archaism and gilding of the lily, but heavens knew how the eleven-year-old mind might react to it. I mustn' t truncate the possibilities. Let things work

VOLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 23 through to their organic end. Stories, before. You can say you saw Ben Kingsley Getting a reader up and running is a practical above all. You don't know where the stories and Denis Quilley on stage.' At interval he challenge that hangs over parents' heads. might suddenly lurch. If you know an said, 'This is so boring. This is the most My own mother still points to me and ending, lock it away. If you have one in boring thing I've ever seen. ' That was good. says I don't read enough, at least not widely mind, screen it. Once the ending is known Besides I'd caught him laughing three times. enough. I can't say she's wrong. She points you've st ymied an unknown Oliver on the other hand didn't bore. We to brothers of mine and their more elastic ""{ X T world of possibilities. were still at the stage door, just us and a habits, habits followed under severer handi­ woman from N ebraska, when Humphries caps than I have. One is a psychiatrist who V ~~EN THE BOY was nine I started reading and his e ntourage finally e m erged. soaks himself in European history and Abo­ him Great Expectations. A host of motives Humphries, insisting we open at his photo, riginal sociology and contemporary fiction, were at work here. To force-feed something autographed the program with a seigneurial of the best that had been thought and graciousness. We followed him up the written-if not quite in our time, well, at alleyway into Marlborough Street. least not too long before my grandfather's We didn't go back to Dickens' version. time and he'd passed it on, father to son. No formal discussion or decision. No hints Secondly, boy and man I'd loved it. Dickens dropped. Nothing said at all. The onward was de rigueur, and it was short Dickens. pressure had gone out of the story. It didn't I wanted to do my own rereading in the way rate as a yarn dripping with m ysteries and m ost economical of time. Finally, it's hard early-on hints and m.elodramatic signals, to beat reading to someone who is cuddling not as G. E. did. He knew how it all panned up to you. out. He'd seen Fagin in a suit and a trilby, Great Expectations started well. Plenty he'd seen the Artful Dodger being hugged of excitement, m ystery and funny stuff. by his auntie. What m ore was there to Enough to ride out the Dickensia n know? There's no way I was going to insist ruminations when the boy would say, with on an activity that had no internal compul­ impatient exasperation, 'What was all that sion to it. Well, not in this case. As long as about? I didn't understand anything of what he kept reading. That wasn't negotiable. you just read.' But it didn't turn him off the Reading, I found m yself presuming, is m ain gam e, not a bit. With a clarity I'd an absolute good. I seem to have evolved never got from childhood readings or set this m oral value autonomously. Some text analyses at school and university, I saw people reach it through reaction. They have that G. E. is a sublime opening, a racy ending, had parents who complain about children and a great stagnant slough in between. who never do anything. Instead, the parents Dickens has to kick his heels between moan, 'they spend all day with their faces in sending Pip to London and Magwitch's a book'. Other values are presumed to be reappearance. Nothing goes on between superior-being outside in the fresh air, those events that you'd n eed to include in helping around the house, doing something the Classics Comics version. But we hung constructive like, say, hitting a few nails in, on. I hummed very portentously over that hitting a few balls around. So, in later life, faint fl icker of som ething that tickles Pip's the child regards the flicking over of pages memory when he sees Estella. I got all dark as an activity beyond criticism. and pregnant when Jaggers seized his house­ But I didn't have that perpetual motion keeper Molly by the wrists. It kept the sort of parent. My credo, I suspect, derives thread tangible as we pushed on. m ore nakedly from self-interest. Hom e Then Magwitch comes up the stairs alone all day I'm nagged by the catalogue of " He seized me that dark and stormy night, and the nail­ chores, phone calls, fix-its that must be biting is on. When Pip had seen no shadow attended to. And more are always arriving of another parting (and we had exhausted to take the places of any unlucky enough to the pros and cons of the sad and happy be rubbed out. Yet I read a book. It's my endings), the call was on for a follow-up. profession, I say. Well, part of it, at any rate. Oliver Twist was nominated. The boy called I need to have a defensible position on this, and another is a barrister whose preferred for the reading, the boy nominated. Away a secure base for a pedagogical principle. recreational reading is medical textbooks. we went. Oliver's miseries began. We'd had Reading might be an absolute good but A parent can't just shrug and say reading eleven chapters of them when together we what about newspapers or magazines or is an aptitude or a disposition that you went to see Lionel Bart's Oliver. Ah, comics? For if the first step is to get them to either just have or just don't. That some fractiou day. Barry Humphries was doing read, the second is to have them read the people have ball skills, some have green Fagin. This was the trade-off for Waiting for right things . Sounds a bit vulnerable to a fingers, others are readers. I can't say that. Godot the following night. 'This is history,' touch of postmodernist probing, but you Yet of course there are loads of non-readers. I told him. 'You can tell your grandchildren know what I mea n. This is not a merry, I buy W oman 's Day and TV Week for the the story of how you saw Peter Hall's revival, essayistic dance of words that might or ninety-year-old widow across the road and the man who first staged it forty years might not have some aesthetic charm. she says, 'Thanks for getting me the books.'

24 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1998 There is certainly nothing m ore akin to a listing the labours of H ercules. If I told him the only way to prevent an arthritic mind book in her house. In any case she's given how Fig Tree Bridge got its name, it would on a twenty-year-old. Or a sixty-year-old. up Wom an 's Day now, because, she says, become indelible. But I don't know that I look forward to arguments. I'm not such a 'The Princess has gone'. It was a book, and story. calm seeker after truth that I'm not a bit it had a story. Now the story has finished. Stories have the rhythms that his mind scared of an argument, but that's minor It's all over. The old lady's books in any case works to. Stories in their primitive, perhaps compared to the pleasure of a hom egrown are really only visuals for the permanent, grosser form . The transference of the term arguing machine, and to the wonder that set text of her TV. She's xenophobic, racist, might be a legitimate and pedagogically uch m arvels com e continually into gentle, noble, generous, honest, full of useful m ove, but ' Adventures in Science' or existence. affection, definitely nicer than m ost people, 'The Story of Our Forests' don't start him 'What's it like?' I ask. It is The Three ticking over. But try the Argonauts or the Musketeers. history of a family squabble, and his whole 'It's good, really good.' concentrated system fires. The schoolbag is being unpacked. 'Wait, I'v e no idea w h at this narrative just wait.' He yanks the bookmark, scans attunem ent does to human beings. I can't the page. 'What's ... pensive?' actually imagine them without it- though 'Thoughtful.' I'd claim I've seen it in weaker forms. That 'Wait, just wait. What's ... c.o.q.u.e.t.r. y?' m eans that while I was telling a story I've 'Oh Lord. Kind of flirting. Done by women. seen people who were passive or even I'll show you some time.' inattentive. And, mind you, it was a He drops The Musketeers back in the controlled experiment. Sam e story, ame melee of texts and notes and exercise books. occasion had other listeners enthralled. 'Get stuck into it. You've go t forty Those who don't swing into a narrative minutes each day, to the Quay and fl ow, are they defi cient? Are they likely to t""f'"" back. Yo u'll get a lot read.' be impaired over time? In what way? N ot forward looking? Their lives not moving to .1. HE TRAIN C ORNERS in the tunnel and a pattern of problem and resolution, of breaks out into the Quay . Streeton has a search and discovery, of quiet meditation popular linage, 'Rainy Night Circular Quay'. and h eadlon g advan ce, of different His fi gures lean against the rain, skirts are perspectives taking their turn? Maybe I'm held away from the puddles, whatever m oon setting up the tropes of storytelling as the there is and the hard-driven gas lamps paradigm for the well-lived life? Does the bounce light and shadow across the surface consummate storyteller, the ideal listener of the wateri it i hard, perhaps impossible, turn out to be the effective or even the to distinguish where land ends and harbour virtuous personality? It sounds unlikely. begins. Yet the scene isn't dismal. The Popular lore would have it that the story generous open spaces, the tossing of lights, freak will be the hopeless dream er, the elem ents and human beings tussling victim of fantasy and airy nothings. If that's together but in a pedestrian, hom ely way, the dreary commonsense view, it's also not Circular Quay even at its worst is still easily falsifiable. benign enough. Stories might be fun, but as a line to the At eight in the m orning, on a summer's young, 'reading is so pleasurable' does sound day, it is the birth of the world. Everyone, hedonistic and negligently unpragm atic. It everything is in m otion, and the m ovem ent probably needs to be combined with a is new, it is that of starting. The crowds on : by the chin." dictum like 'reading's the best way to think'. the incoming ferries contract evenly How m any ideas and argum ents that course towards the ga ngways, and file out and spin around in the mind com e from conversa­ away. Commuters and schoolchildren zig­ tion ? Does anyone argue in person with the zag and tack across one another over the sam e lucidity that they do on the page? prom enade, landing and embarking. The How often does their talk include all their ferries race towards the wharves and the and she's not a reader and there's no evidence qualifica tions and second thoughts and water boils with the ca uliflower soup of she ever was. But she's not my tribe and pas ible lines of fu ture development? How their reversed engines. The air thrums I need readers about m e. m any of the great self-education and slowly with their easing out as they turn He's a reader all right, he's a sucker fo r research legends centre on m en and women stern first again and cleave out into the a story, he's wholly attentive to a narrative. going out and getting into conversation ? harbour. The water, busy but not crowded, Unattached facts, without a story, pass him It wasn't what Socrates said in the agora. glitters on every upwash of every wave. by. 'What's this bridge?' I ask as we drive It was how Plato wrote him up that go t the The boy descends fr om the train and over it for the fortieth time in two months. philosophers going. Philosophy is typified swings away to the western seawall. His 'I dunno,' he says almost cheerfully as as a series of footnotes, not as a m em ory of book is back in its bag. The second half of though ignorance is the natural blessed a few ideas tossed around in the Academy, his journey is with Matilda Cruises. The state. Yet he'd get a good pass mark for the salon, the pub. Reading's the best way, blunt catamaran rides confidently at the

V o LUM E 8 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 25 steps. Perhaps ten boys on it, twice that may have been the dregs of the workforce too. 'What did you do on the boat?' asks number of girls. 'What school are the girls? ' One we suspected of insobriety. Another Harry. 'Well we did a lot of the steering, and I ask him. threw knives around the woodwork. But we we had rubber band and pellet fights and on He doesn't know. were little boys from employer, professional the days when we were given a tug we 'Well where do they go?' fa milies, and we had our snobberies. didn't keep warm and dry and we lost hats He doesn 't know that either, nor where Ian O 'Brien , whose fath er owned overboard all the time.' the boat calls, nor what time it leaves the quarries, took his place at the stern, on the 'Is that all?' Quay, nor when it reaches the school raised decking above the rudder. As we 'We had a sort of feud, a friendly one, wharf. H e could be reading his book. But turned from Rose Bay across Point Piper he with the Hunters Hill lot. When they got off he's not. Of course he's not. 'What do you waved to his home, high and white on the at Alexandra Street of an afternoon they do on the boat ?' Vaucluse hill, and he took out a fo lded linen used to pelt us.' 'Play, sometim es.' napkin and unpeeled it, left, right, front, 'What with ?' 'What do you play?' back, and began on his ziggurat of warm 'Seaweed mostly. They'd store it on the 'Cricket.' buttered toast. I could see it was delicious; wharfin the morning. A boy called Sturtevant 'Cricket' On the boat! ' it had m elted to the perfect consistency. Ian was the ringleader. H e went mad one day. 'Ye-es. It's not that small. You haven't O'Brien was fussy about his toast. He gave He must have fo und an old tennis court roller seen it. It's got seats like on planes.' away some of his crusts, others he tossed and he had this thing teetering on the edge 'Yeah, but you don't play cricket on into the wake and the seagulls swooped. of the wharf one morning.' planes either.' I never asked for any. I was never given any. 'Why?' 'Well we do. ' Ian O'Brien looked down from his poop 'Why do you think I That afternoon, the 'Fair enough .' deck and flapped his napkin fr ee of crumbs. m om ent he was off the boat, he made a dash H e had his father's quarries, and a brother, for his roller. Now if he hadn't waited for A DU LTS DROOL AT THE IDEA of tWO a boarder, in his final year at the school, and the other Hunters Hill kids to get off he'd half-hour trips a day, under the Bridge, criss­ h e h ad moral authority. One driver, have succeeded ... ' crossing the western reaches of the Harbour bumpingly, took us straight over a buoy. He 'At what, at what?' and up the Lane Cove River. I did it myself had a red fa ce and moist bloodshot eyes. 'Shut up, I'm telling you. He got the for a year as a boy of eleven . I don't recall 'Very low in the water,' he said, looking handle of the bloody thing and heaved. reading either. The boat was privately hired, back, one hand on the wheel. 'Yes, very low We'd just started to edge out, and the thing and Stannard Brothers gave us what was left in the water,' called Ian O'Brien. 'Only five missed, just.' of their fleet after them ore productive hi rings feet of it showing above the surface. Very 'What would have happened I' of the clay had been arranged. The drivers low in the water.' 'What would have happened! We'd have been sunk. Yo u know how heavy tennis court rollers are. Imagine it landing on the A Moment In Leon wood of one of those little launches. Terrible damage.' Katherine's eating pizza. She's so hungry she 'Would it really have sunk it?' 'I dunno. I reckon.' doesn't ask what's on it. The woman who runs 'What happened to the roller?' the pension is out in the corridor listening for 'It's still at the bottom of the Lane Cove the slightest movement. You know that if you River, I presume.' snap open the door she'll be caught stooping 'What else did Sturtevant do?' at the keyhole. Across the road storks are 'H e was a jumper. He should go down in nesting atop a turret. Down the road the the history books for that.' 'What sort of a jumper.' Damned are being consumed on the facade of 'A long jumper. You must read Flann the cathedral. A young man is daubing the O'Brien. He's got a lovely story about a walls of narrow twisting streets with anti­ sergeant of police who was a long jumper.' fascist graffiti while hams drip from the ceiling 'Yes, yes, but what about Sturtevant?' of shops about the Plaza San Marcelo. The 'Well when the boat came into the bells chime with the quarter hour and I read Riverview wharf, it was a point of honour with him never to wait till it had stopped that further south it's popular to cook rice in and tied up.' vats of blood. As if the life of an un-named 'Was he allowed?' Saint was recorded between the lines I hear 'No, of course not, but I suppose in those som eone call out from deep within the days things just weren't regulated.' building, 'No hay atajo sin trabajo'. N o pain no 'So he got off before it tied up? ' gain. The traffic snarling against peak hour on 'Got off' He jumped. He leaped. He'd watch for the angle the boat was approaching Calle Generalisimo Franco ... the wharf. Then he'd make a beeline to the most advantageous spot. He'd be up on the John Kinsella walkway round the edge or even on the roof

26 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 of the cabin. And he had his bag in his hand. The Benediction A small suitcase, a Globite. He'd watch, he'd concentrate, then he'd sling his bag for Tracy and Katherine out on to the main deck of the wharf. It'd go sliding, screeching along the beams. It was Bendici6n para la nifia am azing the lock held at all, and som etimes it didn't. Books, pens, sandwiches skiing all Though darker than Leon's over the place. But we weren't watching the bag. We didn't take our eyes off Sturtevant. heavily interiored blue 'Cause he'd follow the suitcase. Even if the the cold stone of Oviedo's cathedral boa t was just making a pa at the wharf. could be luminous A m ost prodigious leap. All the effort as he with the warmth of his blessing; just hurled himself across. And it wasn't the sullen child aching to light candles just the distance-and that must have been three or four m etres-but the m om ent he with pesetas as if they were leaped he had to con centrate on the laughing clowns at a fairground. landing because only at king tide could he hope to get on to the open deck of the wharf . At the altar of Saint Teresa There t of the time, all the time really, it we pray together, the child brooding was the steps. He had to see exactl y which heavily. I thank Teresa of Jesus step he was aiming at, he had to be ready to for bringing us together, brace and grab on to the hand rail above for the single face him. And when the tide was low, of course, with which we smile he had to land on the platform at the bottom of the steps, and that was covered in m oss upon her retablo, and the moment he touched he shot forward, for our joy and despair, skidding and accelerating if anything, and if our faith and anger, he wasn't to go out the other side and into her overwhelming patience the water under the wharf he had to clam p as the sky outside struggles his hands on the timber above him and lift with the last vestiges of winter. his fee t and brea k the mom entum. He was mad, quite mad. But he never missed, he John Kinsella never went in. There should be a plaque to him on the wharf. Gary Sturtevan t.' 'Did anyone ever go in ?' five o'clock, and his long socks are still The reading's now down to twenty minutes 'I went in once. Ju st stepping on to the supposed to be up and his tie on, so I wander a day. 'What sorts of things do you talk boat at Rose Bay. I slipped. I hung on, only down to the station to m eet him and about?' went in up to my waist.' shoulder the book-weighted bag and stroll 'Oh nothing special. ' 'Did you ?' with him back up the hill to home. T his day 'Rob seems a nice guy.' 'I did. Yes.' he's crossing the bridge and jouncing down 'He is.' 'Do you think I will?' the stairs, and blow me down, he's not 'Is this his first year at the school too? ' 'No I don't. You've got ga ngplanks and alone. Bugger, I think. 'Yes. ' the rest of it.' ' Hello,' I say, 'what's this? Two We turn in at the corner shop and buy a 'I still could.' Riverview boys? ' The other boy is very fair. Billabong from Akrive. Harry peels off the 'Try not to. Walk straight. Hold on.' 'This is Rob,' says Harry. paper and crumples it and aims it at the bin. 'Hello,' I ay, 'nice to meet you. Do you 'Shot'' We go on up the hill. 'Rob wa T E TRAVEL'S PART of the schooling, I tell live here or are you just visiting?' talking abou t his family and I thought the myself. Rubbing along with people on a 'I live here. Over Crystal Street.' names were funny. He said that's because jou rney together. Life in miniatu re. Bugger, I think again. But I know that's they're Aboriginal. He said he's half Diverting, maybe guiding, one another, not being fair to the boy. We cross to Aboriginal. His Dad's Aboriginal, but his passing the time. Evolving your own stories The White Cockatoo and turn righ t to Mum's not.' as you go. The Canterbury pilgrims. Read accompany Rob a few m etres further. At the 'Really.' That was nothing remarkable on the train, talk and play on the boat, that corner we all say goodbye cheerfully. 'See in the brigh t cosmopolitan playground fling seem a fair balance. As he comes home and you, Rob,' says Harry. We two turn towards of Taverners Hill Infants and Petersham crosses the water and turns west the Palace Street. Public Schools. But on this journey, to this companions fa ll away. He's thrown back on 'Were you talking to Rob in the train?' destination, with this intimacy, this is all his own devices. That's when the book I ask. I'm still hoping, although I know it's new. 'What's the story?' com es into its own. Distract him back over unreasonab le. 'I dunno.' • the last leg. 'Oh yes,' says Harry. 'Rob's usually on It's been such an El Nino summer, and the train.' Gerard Windsor's most recent book is the afternoon is still torrid at daylight saving Damn, I think. I just can't help myself. Heaven Where the Ba chelors Sit.

VoLUME 8 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 27 When the centre does not hold

L ," A 10" •hou t In don" '' th" h" As yet, no group or person has emerged Ten days before the four student activists sprung to mind on many occasions during to take firm control of Indonesia. President were shot outside Jakarta's Triskati past weeks. Three archaeologists, an Habibie, unsure of his position as would-be University on 12 May, triggering the unrest American, a Brit and an Indonesian, successor, looks towards elections scheduled that ended Suharto's rule, there were few stumble upon an undiscovered tomb in for May. General Wirranto, the head of ABRI visible signs of tension in East Timor. Egypt. They enter and the mummy inside (the military), has been concerned with Ironically, the situation was overwhelm­ comes to life. reforming the armed forces and removing ingly p eaceful in Indonesia's most 'Wh ere are you from?' the ancient his rival, Suharto's son -in-law General troublesome province while frustration and Egyptian asks the first two. They tell him of Prabowo, from positions of authority. His resentment were coming to the boil in the their respective countries' position in the oft-stated reluctance to become a political Republic. Perhaps East Timor was watching world. He knows nothing of America's figure and his desire to withdraw ABRI and waiting. During discussions we had in current dominance and the glories of from the prominence it had in Indonesian Jakarta before I arrived on the island, a Britain's former empire. When the last affairs under Suharto may be more than just Timorese academic observed, 'Now the rest archaeologist explains that he comes from lip service. Meanwhile, continued racial, of Indonesia knows what it is like to live in Indonesia, the mummy replies, 'Oh yeah. Is national, and social upheaval bedevil the East Timor.' Suharto still in powerl' confederation of Java and its satellite states. At first impression it is hard to imagine Now that Asia's modern-day Pharaoh is The ties that bind the state are loose in East Timor as anything other than a gone, what is left is a power vacuum and a Indonesia, and the possibility of devolution sub-tropical idyll. Clean, blue water washes country on the brink of more disasters than becomes more real by the day. up on beaches shaded by coconut palms any self-respecting analyst would dare East Timor, as the outer limit of by the coast. The interior is dotted with imagine. The violence of the May riots still Indonesia's expansionist policies, is the rustic Portuguese buildings among echoes through a traumatised community; natural starting point for Indonesia's vegetation that marks the Wallace line­ a kilo of rice has increased in price four-fold reinvention of itself. Is Indonesia ready to the boundary between the tropical flora of since last December; inflation is spiralling. cede greater autonomy to East Timor and South East Asia and the temperate The economy is contracting, and the World on what t e rms l What would an vegetation of the Pacific. Dili has some Bank predicts that 20 million Indonesians independent East Timor m ean for the rest bustle to it but a herd of goats is still likely will have been put out of work by the end of of Indonesia, and could East Timor to appear from n owhere and disrupt this year. possibly run itself? passing traffic.

28 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 Talks are under way between Indonesia and East Timor, but there is disagreement about motives and progress. Jon Greenaway interviewed Jose Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Prize winner, on 9 October.

What progress has been made in the talks! re ponsible, cannot be made to pay, for Indonesia's problems in N othing really ubstantial. They continue on 19 to 21 November. other islands. It is not our problem. We were never part of Indonesia: There were two items on the agenda. One was the autonomy they invaded us. Aceh, West Papua is their problem, so they have to proposal which the Indonesians had offered, but the UN itself had engage the Acehnese and West Papuans in dialogue in order to solve drafted its own proposal for autonomy. The conflict remains the those problems. They will not solve them by attempting to crush same in a sense: the Indonesians are willing to talk about autonomy resistance in East Timor. within Indonesia. The Portuguese, Timorese Opposition and UN position remains opposite: that is autonomy, yes, but without The military has a lot at stake in East Timor, not to mention pride. preconditions, and as long as there is a transition until a referendum Could they resist a negotiated withdrawal from East Timor! is held. The UN position is that the Indonesians should not insist We are prepared to be accommodating, to be flexible so ABRI can get on preconditions to the granting of autonomy, and leave a few years out of East Timor with honour and dignity. They don't have to and then we will see what happens. The Timorese resistance are appear to have been defeated. ABRI and the East Timorese will all talking three to five years. be winners because in the struggle for peace there are no losers. We are not trying to humiliate ABRI but they have to acknowledge that What's the Indonesian attitude to the question of a referendum! East Timor is a political problem, not a military one. It requires They refuse a referendum because they know they will lose it by courage and humility to acknowledge that it was a mistake to have 99.9 per cent. invaded, but it was Suharto who ordered the invasion so ABRI can easily get out of it by blaming Suharto. Do you think there will be any movement towards your position on that! How important in this process is the role played by Bishop Bela and All I can say is that, whether they like it or not, they have not been the church! able to defeat us in 23 years. They are now totally bankrupt and Bishop Belo and the Catholic church as a whole are courageous there is no improvement in sight for many years. I simply do not see people with an enormous sense of honour and dignity. All these how they can hold on to East Timor. years East Timor has been occupied, when the rest of the world abandoned us- including the Vatican- it was the poor, the humble So basically there bas been no change in the Indonesian position East Timorese church that stood with its people. They have a over the last two days! special place in the heart of the East Timorese and they will always No, there has been no change at all. The only difference now is there play a central role in bringing peace, in helping reconciliation are more troops inside East Timor. among Timorese, in building bridges between the East Timorese and Indonesia later on. How does this sit with the public withdrawal of troops from East Timor some weeks ago! The safety of the Indonesian transmigrants in an independent East The Indonesians have lived with lies as part of their daily practice Timor must be a concern for the Indonesians! and they cannot get over this bad habit. The troop pull-out is an It is natural that they would fear an independent East Timor in this ab olute farce. regard, but the East Timorese will have the generosity to extend the hand of friendship to the Indonesian migrants and invite them, Presidential elections are intended for next May. How might encourage them to stay on. It would be very unchristian for us to political developments in fakarta affect the question of East persecute the Indonesian migrants. I personally would feel totally Timor's independence! defeated if ever the people of East Timor turned on the migrants, and I only hope that whoever comes after Habibie, following the next our own collaborators, and exact revenge. A society that is built on elections, has a sense of fairness and justice as well as a real sense anger and revenge is not a healthy one. of the national interest of Indonesia. The longer they stay on, the more costly it is for Indonesia, and the people of East Timor will How could an independent East Timor support itself economically! continue to suffer and to struggle. If there is no change on the We are very touched by the concern of those who think the East ground we are going to escalate the resistance in East Timor. We are Timorese might not be able to survive economically. I can understand going to escalate the international campaign and they need all the their concern. However, look at Indonesia. Has Indonesia survived? international goodwill they can get to help the economy. They are so bankrupt. East Timor has its own natural resources­ oil, natural gas. We can develop agriculture, small industries, It seems to me that there is more at stake here for the Indonesians tourism, fisheries. We might not be another Singapore, but I am sure than just East Timor; that in fact the viability of Indonesia as a that within ten years we can reach the level of Fiji and within 20 to federation is at stake. 25 years be a prosperous small country, and we will be an example The argument put by many people now is that by disengaging from to other small nations. East Timor they would in fact have more time and energy to solve problems in other islands. The East Timorese cannot be held - Jon Greenaway

VoLUME 8 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 29 Three kilometres to the East of Dili, a the elite Indonesian commando force, reason not to concede anything. Jakarta's statue of Jesus stands on a cape, facing back Kopassus. All of this on the few kilometres declaration of East Timor as its 27th towards town. Builtfor the 20th anniversary of road between the hamlet of Fatamaca province, and not as 'occupied territory' (as of East Timor's annexation, it is much like and Bacau. with Israel and the West Bank), will make it the more fam ous image in Bra zil, another of In the six months since the fall of harder for them to argue that East Timor is Portugal's former colonies. Made out of Suharto, Habibie has offered a plan of limited a special case.' bronze, it stands on a globe, the feet just above autonomy of Ea s t Timor within the Van Klink en argues, however, that most East Timor's small outline, hands extended federation. Resistance leaders have been regional elites remain committed to a in ready embrace. But up close the Dili released fro m prison, and supporters can unitary state. However, if the economy is monument gives nothing away, staring back now film interviews with resistance leader still in the doldrums in two or three years towards town with an almost obdurate gaze. Xanana Gusmao inside Cippinang Prison. time, resentment over sending tax to Jakarta When President Suharto celebrated this The University of East Timor has witnessed may shift the public mood too far for them gift to the people in 1996, a helicopter fl ew the largest protests since the massacre at not to follow. Jakarta has always drea ded him past the stations of the Cross to the the Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991. the disintegration of the Republic, and so beginning of the final 27 s teps that On 6 August, Portugal's foreign minister, will do what it can to placate the disgruntled symbolise East Timor's place as the 27th Jaime Gama, and his Indonesian counter­ in order to maintain the union. state of Indonesia. Two years later, the part, Ali Alatas, agreed to try and work out Perhaps East Timor's future depends on forecourt where he landed is beginning to a solution. By the middle of October these whether advocates of unity can be fall into the sea, and the portion negotiations were in a fragile state, but they convinced that concessions may be made that has disappeared is unrepaired. suggest that a self-governing East Timor is to East Timor without the entire union no longer a fanciful notion. fa lling to pieces. Indeed, Van Klinken 0 ccurATION OF East Timor has a longer From 6 to 8 October, the UN hosted suggests that not to do so at this time might history than the 23 years of Indonesian talks on East Timor between representatives precipitate the very anarchy they fear from rule. The declaration of independence in of Portugal and Indonesia. The talks were separatists who may well conclude that 1975, by the Fretilin administration, gave part of the commitment, made at the there is nothing to be ga ined by peaceful East Timor its first taste since the 16th meeting in August, that an agreement on nego tiation. 'The pressure fo r change in century of life without a foreign power. autonomy plans would be reached by the East Timor is now so great that I think This exercise in self-determination, a end of the year. They unveiled their own Jakarta would be wise to start preparing the culmination of events after a coup four proposal for the first time, including the ground by pointing out to Indonesians that months before by another armed group Portuguese and Timorese demand that there East Timor is indeed a special case called the Democratic Union of Timorese, be no preconditions. and a Suharto mistake.' was to last o nly 10 days before the Jose Ramos-Horta, co-recipientofthe 1996 Indonesian military invaded in December. Nobel Peace Prize with Bishop Belo, and BEING PART OF INDONES IA has not been There is an overwhelming sense that the representative of the National Council of without its material benefits for East Timor. real Timor is obscured from view by a series Timorese Resistance, observed the talks and Ninety per cent of the population was of layers, the most recent being the criticised the inflexibility of the Indonesians illiterate prior to 1975 and only 30 km of Indonesian faces in the markets and the (see interview) . He also accused Indonesia of road on the island was paved. Roads and colonial buildings on Dili 's fores hore. bad faith, of conducting a large military schools have been supplied and health care While the attachment to Portugal had a manoeuvre on the weekend prior to the talks has been expanded-95 per cent of the funds profound impact on the island, demonstrated to clean up the remaining 500 or so Falin til that paid for this were drawn from outside in the devotion to Catholicism and Timor's guerrillas under the command of the bearded East Timor. There are criticisms of the cultivated elite's carrying a Portuguese and charismatic Taur Matan Ruak. Reports quality of the infrastructure, but there is no inheritance in their ancestry, language, and out of East Timor have it that, in spi te of doubting its benefits when the alternative names, the two subsequent occupations­ claim s that the numbers of soldiers are is nothing. But, as with the rest of the by the Japanese during World War II and being reduced, there are now 7-8,000 more Republic, East Timor's economy is in a now by the Indonesians-has resulted in troops on the island than in May. Such critical condition. There is little work to be comparatively little cultural exchange. claims suggest that the maintenance of found on the island and what is there is in But it is not just in Dili that one can Indonesian rule over East Timor still has its some way supported by the military witness the presence of others in East Timor. supporters. Not only is control of East Timor presence. Even in the coffee-towns like As you travel through villages nea r the a problem for Jakarta, but in Aceh in West Ermera, which should show signs of profit, northern town of Bacau, an area where Sumatra, Irian Jaya, and even Sulawesi, there people sit in the dust on the side of the there is a more heavy-handed presence of is growing support for separation. Dr Gerry street selling m eagre produce to make ends the Indonesian military because of rebel Van Klinken, editor of Inside Indonesia, m eet. They have never generated their own activity, the signs fill the window of the car suggests that those who would block any industry and economy: it has been imposed like snapshots: a dilapidated building, shaped withdrawal of bureaucracy or army from for centuries. So from where would in an arc and lined with Roman columns, East Timor may be doing so not to keep East enterprise em erge now? that speaks loudly of Latin colonialism; Timor, but to keep the rest of Indonesia. Added to the eco n omic m ala ise, a cave for storing weapons cut into the side 'The possibility that change in East compounded this year by the failure of the of the hill 50 years ago by the Japanese; and Timor will precipitate change elsewhere island's staple corn crop, are the social in between, the patrol of four Timorese has for yea rs been put forward by problems. Locals point to the psychology of soldiers wearing the distinct red beret of conservatives in Jakarta as an important being under siege that has been part of daily

30 EUREKA STREET • N oVEMBER 1998 life for so long. One woman- a prominent dissident who has been imprisoned, interrogated and is now, she says, under On the tiles constant watch-believes that having either C ALL ME CRAZ Y, or perhaps just eccentric, but to comply, resist, avoid or lie creates a I find hours of ent ertainment in trying to certain attitude. decipher the complex and elegant calligraphy 'You become used to the situation and it of a mosque. As the tour groups file by, their becomes almost normal,' she observed. guides eager to get them out of there and into their cousin's carpet shop, I'm getting 'Even Timorese living in other countries a crick in my neck reading every curlicue on the walls and around the domes. In cannot really know what it is we are going those tiles that look deceptively like your bathroom floor the artist has squirrelled through because you lose that understand­ ing when you go.' away a host of patriarchs, prophets and caliphs. People usually give me a wide berth Some have dealt with it by falling into when I'm in reading mode-they just don't know w hat they might expect from the bureaucratic- military envelope, both someone who stares so intently at bathroom tiles for that long. officially and unofficially. Members of the I do it partly for the same reason people do the crossword-the thrill of the hunt Timorese church and others in wide contact for that elusive word, the desire to hone language skills grown dull, the sense of with the community point to the network achievement when the maze has yielded its secret. Every so often there's som ething of informants that supply the military that warms the heart, that softens the stern outlines of religion. Like the Persian command with details on suspects and their couplet over the door leading to the tomb of a great sufi saint. Thousands pass under families. There are so many involved that it each day, tourist and devotee alike, without being able to read it: 'Let this place be the people are losing the capacity to trust a M ecca for lovers. May whoever comes here lacking anything, be h ere made whole.' one another, they say. One recently released Most of it is more familiar or pedestrian than that, but it's still a pleasure to opponent of Indonesian rule described decipher the text and understand it. But could this be the reason all those artisans being constantly watched and attended by toiled there? This writing is surely not meant simply to be read-it's too deliberately guards, having his attempts at finding work obscure for that. Perhaps it's intended to surround us with words from God as a blocked, and being asked by those assigned reminder that God is never silent but continues to reveal and to communicate. What to watch his h ouse to inform on his the fundamentalist forgets (and all my decoding and unravelling runs this risk too) is associates for a fee. The extent of resentment that words of any scripture have m eaning beyond their content. They are words to over the way people have behaved since put us in touch with The Word. It may well be that the appropriate response to the 1975 might only be revealed when it is word of God in stone, silver and ceramic is the wide-eyed 'wow!' of the traveller, or allowed free expression. the pilgrim's sense of awe at the incomprehensible and the sacred. Those exquisite With only one university for 800,000 arabesques are there not to convey information but to alert us to the living word people, and a backward economy, there is continually addressed to us. • very little to occupy people's time. Cheap speed and ecstasy flows into East Timor Dan Madigan sr teaches Islamic Studies and is Eureka Street's publisher. and is consumed hungrily, particularly by young men. One Timorese I spoke with pointed down a street in Bacau and told me military and Falin til in the last six months, society. If economic independence is to be that all the young people milling on the side including a firefight at Easter and the crash achieved, the Timorese will need longer of a road were either high or would soon be of a helicopter carrying the entire regional than the ten clays they had in 1975 in which so. The road ran past an area where a command four months ago, rumoured to be to do it, and a large measure of good will and market- run by settlers from the rest of the work of the resistance fi ghters. The cash from the international community. Indonesia, known as the 'Macassarese'­ recent, ill-timed ABRI offensive mentioned After visiting the Justice and Peace used to be. Two years before, a riot saw two above is said to have been in retaliation. Commission, I wandered across the road to people killed, the stalls burnt to the ground The possibility of a crackdown against the beachfront. To the East the statue of and the Indonesians return from the 'old' to the civil population is not discounted by Christ looms in the distance. Back towards the 'new' town. people in Dili. Bi hop Bela has maintained town, the rusted hulks of landing craft used There is also the political violence-the that the situation remains a tense one and by the Japanese in World Warii jut outfrom long-alleged claims of atrocities. Two years there is concern over the protests that had the shore. One of them has an Indonesian ago, Bishop Belo established a Ju stice and begun in mid-October over the pronounce­ naval patrol boat moored next to it. In its Peace Commission, in an office inside his ment by Governor Soares that any civil shadow young boys are collecting mus els, own compound on Dili's foreshore, to servants who did not support the Indonesian quietly and with purpose. The rains that investiga te reports of such abuses. So far it autonomy ini tia ti ve would be removed from cam e too late to save the corn crop had has documented over 400 cases of rape, their jobs. finally arrived by the beginning of May and torture and physical violence. The Bishop The reconciliation of a damaged and low cloud was advancing from the hills in lends his weight to a select number of cases split community is a task that now shadows the hinterland. The boys look skywards (a small parish of only 1-2,000 people to the the effort of ending Indonesian rule. Jose momentarily as the rain begins to fall, and south of Bacau had seven cases of Ramos-Horta, for one, believes that if East then return to their work. • unexplained deaths and disappearances Timor is granted independence from the between October last year and May). The economically crippled super-state it will Jon Greenaway is Eureka Street's South Bacau area has seen fighting between the develop its own industries and a civil East Asia correspondent.

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 31 READING CLASSICS

R.J. DALZ IELL

Demanding to see Sophocles

M '"' ""'' book-Unod Hudy largely invisible to most policy-makers in music, dancing, craft and (of course) cooking, remains virtually intact, as the few volumes Australian higher education. Times have but the students were often puzzled by the we children have removed to our own book­ changed, and when m y own children express in visibility of what they called' Australian' cases in the six years since his death scarcely enthusiasm for high school Ancient History, culture, by which they meant the Anglo­ make a dent in his collection. I think with some bitterness of the uncertain Celtic culture of those of us who were The rambling Perth house where I grew future that an enduring interest in this neither Aboriginal nor immigrants. Migrant up is itself little changed: it is still my subject would offer them. Education teachers often seem ed to be mother's home. The small red and green The recent closure of the C lassics Anglo-Celtic Australia n s who were volumes of the Loeb editions of Greek and Departments at the University of Tasmania attracted to this kind of work because they Roman authors are as familiar as the honey and at Melbourne University was disturbing did not have a clear sense of their own jar in the shape of a beehive or the backyard evidence of a wanin g institutio n a l cultural identity. jacaranda with a view of the sea from its commitment both to the 'presence of the Because m y own fa mily background had branches. past' and to the impressive track record of been culturally rich, I did not share this My father, Mervyn Austin, a classical Australian classical scholarship. And when uncertainty, although I might not have liked sch olar, was a passionate advocate for his the news broke about threats to the Classics every aspect of m y cultural origins, choosing academic discipline, building up a Department at the Australian N ational to accept some and discard others. successful departm ent over almost 30 years University, I was deeply shocked. The ANU At the risk of some indulgent nostalgia, as professor of Classics at the University of is the university that received me in mid-life, let m e explain the way in which a classical Western Australia. His contribution is and from which I graduated with a PhD, heritage pervaded my childhood. formally commemorated by a lecture after a richly satisfying experience of In a familiar childhood memory I am theatre, a portrait, a memorial lecture, and research in the Humanities. rapidly winding down the car window to a Classics Department that has continued I had imagined that the ANU valued the lessen the reverberation of my father's to flourish. Humanities, judging by the calibre of sonorou s baritone as he passionately In the years since his death I have often academic staff in the English Department declaims a passage from Homer or Virgil. thought about the significance of his where I was based and in other Departments When these recitations took place in the dedication to Classics. Although his where I attended seminars or sought advice. enclosed space of our small station wagon education at Melbourne Grammar School Classics at the ANU is now reduced from a we would beg him to 'turn the volume and his Rhodes Scholarship s uggest department to a program, and staff tenure is down', our hands over our ears, concealing privilege, he did not come from the class no certainty. our pride in a professorial parent so learned that hi s sch oolmate M anning C lark My distress and indignation is not simply and so eccentric. Classical literature for us disparagingly calls 'Yarra-side'. H e grew up nostalgia for the quaint but obsolete was a living oral tradition. The poetic in Moonee Ponds. When he was 13 his own profession of a much-loved parent. My father rhythms of Greek and Latin literature were father died suddenly and only the generosity was not a lamp-lighter, a bell-ringer or an part of the comforting background of hom e: of the surviving partner in their modest real illuminator of manuscripts (although in a we heard them murmured behind the door estate agency kept his mother and her four m etaphorical sense he was all of these). His of the study as our father practised his sons afl oat. academic discipline has current lectures, intoned on the beach when we M y grandparents were not educated importance, value and purchase. were walking the dog, and quoted on any people. Their four boys profited in an occasion that seemed to him remotely extraordinary way from their teachers at I N CONTEMPORARY Australia, which used appropriate. Family dogs had classical school, their own efforts, and from each to be described as increasingly multicultural names: the black Labrador Argus, named other's company at home. but is now more often termed 'pluralist', after the faithful hound of Odysseus who Enthusiasm for the Humanities was immigrant groups are generally clear about recognised his disguised master, wagged passed on to the next generation: two of my their cultural identity as shaped by their his tail and died, an ancient story that still cousins are classical scholars. Following in country of origin, even though their new brings tears to m y eyes. Then there was the family footsteps (but believing that m y culture in traduces tensions, particular! y Juno, an affectionate golden Labrador decisions were sui generis), my own studies for the first generation of the Australian­ inclined to indolence, whose brown eyes began with languages, including Classics, born. When I taught English in the Adult recalled those of Homer's 'ox -eyed goddess'. m oved on to French Studies, and more Migrant Education Program, we teachers I understood the paradox on the shield recently to Australian Literature. It is a rich thought that we w ere building a of Achilles, and knew that my peaceful inheritance, but part of a dimension of multicultural society among the students, exis tence contras t ed with the war Australian cultural history that is, I suspect, with shared customs, demonstrations of experience of m y parents. I knew that

32 EUREKA STREET • N ovEMBER 1998 Poseidon was the god of the ocean, and idealistic view of humanist educational especially Homer, during his years of service although I grew up at home and content in values, but there was something in it that in World War II . It was not t hat h e the sun-drenched West Australian landscape has been lost. aggrandised himself as a Homeric hero, of my childhood, I believed in a continuity A childh ood experience I cannot but rather that h e learnt from Homer between the Indian Ocean at Cottesloe and rem ember but often had told to me was a that bullying superior officers, tedium, the wine-dark sea of the Aegean. One of our three-year-old tantrum in the university atrocities, loneliness, h omesic kn ess, favourite walks beside the Swan River we library. I had accompanied my father to heroism, companionship and loss, were not called Nymphland, because it seemed to us inspect the new books on display as I often unique to 20th-century warfare. mysterious and wonderful, with a magical, did after morning kindergarten on the I'd known the names of the Greek gods invisible, presence. In those days we were campus. The previou s week there had been and their Roman counterparts from an early ignorant of the original Aboriginal habitation a display of classical works. A bust of age, and although I did not 'believe' in of the Perth area, but we did have a Sophocles had impressed me. To my dismay, them- my religion was shaped by Anglican language from our own European Christianity- ! had a rich repertoire tradition to express a numi- of myths and legend to help make nous sense of place. sense of my unfolding life. I also had an insight into human emotions and A S A CHILD in Perth in the 1950s the dimensions of the Western psyche a nd '60s, I thought the beautiful to which the various gods corres­ grounds of the University of Western ponded: power, desire, aggression, Australia were like the park of a tately reason and cunning. Later, Classics hom e that belonged to our family, even presented alternative approaches to though our cramped univers ity life-the Stoic and the Epicurean, bunga low was more like a tenant's the Sceptical and the Platonic. cottage. We would roll down the grassy At school I learnt som ething of banks in front of Winthrop Hall, stare Aboriginal c ulture and legends, at the clock face on the tower until we although little of their history. spotted the giant hand move, chase Aboriginal stori es seemed strange and each other round the cypress pines, differe nt fr om m y classical and bounce across the miniature bridges in biblical stories (a nd were probably the Sunken Garden or collect gumnuts poorly translated ), but I could see by the oval. Beside the university similarities in the role these stories refl ection pool, in twin niches on either played in their culture. As a child side of the pillared 'undercroft' to I had m y own stories, and fe lt no Winthrop Hall, stood two statues in desire to appropriate thei rs, but golden stone, Socrates and Diotima. simply to be aware of them in Although it was often the red and gold their 'otherness' and to respect a carp or the water lilies that claimed my different cosm ology. As an adult attention, these two figures intrigu ed I read Aboriginalli tera tu re and au to- me. Inscribed on the statues are quota­ C. Kpblu , Yo1m g Artist Studying Casts of the Elgin M arbles, biography attentively but I do not tions from Plato's Sym posium. Diotima 1810, H irschsprung{k e Stunlir1g, Cope"hage n wish to appropriate a belief system addresses the other familiarly as 'My that can never be truly my own. It is dear Socrates' and they are conversing odd that the reading public is devour- about the importance of beauty, both the the bust had been rem oved and I stamped ing books of popular m ythology such as beauty of forms and the beauty of minds. my foot, breaking the reverent silence of Pinkola Estes' coll ection in Women Who The figure of Diotima repre ented the the library by demanding loudly 'I want to Run with the Wol ve , and Knutson and presence of women in the academy for me see Sophocles!' I grew up thinking of Homer Suzuki's Wisdom of the Elders, desperate from an early age, and not until I was much and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle, Virgil for stories by which to live, at a time when older did I realise the extent to which my and Cicero as familiar fi gures, rather like the sources of story that are closest to gender would exclude m e. N earby, above our relatives in Melbourne and in England, Western culture are being obscured. It is the archway linking Winthrop Hall with whom I had never met but who had legendary ironic that linguists should be working the original arts building, was a mosaic of status in family storytelling. My father's aga inst time to retard or prevent language other female fi gures who represented, I was stock phrases included 'as old Sophocles loss in dwindling language communities, told, 'the five lamps of learning'- Counsel, used to say' and 'Hom er knew it long ago', while academic institutions are choosing C ourage, Wisdom , Understanding and or rather indignantly, 'don't you remember to accelerate the loss of an academic com­ Knowledge. I was also impres ed by the that passage in Virgil ... ?' It was as if the munity competent in Greek and Latin. university motto 'Seek wisdom'. The classical authors com.m ented on our every­ I grew up to associate scholarship with wis dom of indigenous people w as day life, like affectionate but sententious warmth, enthusiasm and excitem ent rather symbolically represented by a Maori prayer great-uncles whom we ignored most of the than with clinical detachment. My father's inscribed into a stone seat in the Sunken time but occasionally took to heart. study was a haven from which his children Garden, minimal perhaps, but at least there. When I was older I learnt that my father were never excluded, however preoccupied Of course I grew up with an outrageously had derived grea t comfort from the classics, he was with writing and lecture preparation.

V O LUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 33 We had generous access to all his books, as He related his speech-making to the long as we never wrote on the pages. In tradition of classical rhetoric, holding the some senses my father's classical passion position of Public Orator at the University was an eccentricity that we his family of Western Australia for many years. The pretended to control or permit. At special Throughout my childhood, organisations dinners my father was permitted to say a would often con tact my father with a request short Latin grace, with the long one reserved for a Latin motto. H e never charged a for Christmas and Easter. None of hi consultancy fee, and there i no record of loose surviving family, sad to say, have committed his many creative efforts. Motto writing, either of these graces to memory. My I presume, is an obsolete custom now, and mother, who was not academic, often not central to m y claims to poured scorn on this Latin and Greek l i{ T relevance, but I regret its passing. nonsense, and more perceptively, detested Dearest Verity and Zoe, Greek tragedy for the cruelty it confronted. V HE N MY FATHER DIED, letters of V FoR A LONG TIME now your mothers have My father also taught Adult Education condolence from friends, colleagues and done their best to alleviate the deadly courses in classics for years in order to former students expressed not just their promote his subject and to cater for a less sense of loss but their enthusiasm for the dullness of your English curricula by ac

34 EUREKA STREET • NOVEMBER 1998 It would ease my mind greatly to know that you have Distant Voices by John Pilger become well-read women by the time you both reach thirty. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill I have compiled this list to encourage you in independent Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh thought and wide-ranging inter sts, because one way or another Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the all these writers have affected m e deeply as I travel from American West by Dee Brown ignorance to consciousness of ignorance. If you give up a tithe Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford of your television watching, you will have time to read these True Stories by Helen Garner and many more besides in the next 14 and 16 years. Not all of The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer them are novels. Most of these authors have written many other Old Rowley by Denis Wheatley books which would be good for you to read; I'm giving you the The Guinness Book of Records best ones to start with. I love all of these books, except for the Longitude by Dava Sobel 'harmless' ones, which I merely quite like, but still recommend My Place by Sally Morgan to you so that you don't end up thinking that there's something And the poets John Donne, Thomas Wyatt, William gone awfully wrong with the novel at the end of this century. Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Milton, Alexander Pope, That would be a terrible thing. William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Absolute musts: John Keats, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord T ennyson, Emily Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Dransfield, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Les Murray, Judith Wright, A.D. Hope. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (in translation, but And for good light fun, much better than watching a soap: try it as well in the original Middle English, which is Angelique by Sergeanne Colon surprisingly easy to understand.) Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Ulysses by James Joyce (Persevere at first, and you will read it Queen Lucia; Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson many times over.) The Nine Tailors; Murder Must Advertise; Strong Poison; The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers (The best detective David Copperfield; Great Expectations; A Tale Of Two Cities; stories ever.) Bleak House; Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Berry and Co; And Berry Came Too; Adele and Co by Dornford Moby Dick by Herman Melville Yates (appalling politics, but very funny.) All the rest of Jane Austen Almost anything by Faye Weldon The Owl Service by Alan Garner (not a children's book at all. ) Guards! Guards!; Wyrd Sisters; The Colour of Magic by Terry War and Peace; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Pratchett Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky They're A Weird Mob; The Things They Do To You by Nino Macbeth; King Lear; Antony and Cleopatra; Henry IV; Othello Culotta/John O'Grady. (Very funny and historically interesting, by Shakespeare not least because in the latter book, one of the things they did Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert do to you was keep you in the hossie till they'd made you better.) The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson The Titus Groan series by Mervyn Peake My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin Puckoon by Spike Milligan The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead The Clan Of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth The Whiteoak series by Mazo de la Roche My Brother Jack by George Johnson The Shining by Steven King The Bible (the King James is for reading aloud, the New Revised Flashman by George MacDonald Standard Version is for thinking about.) These will do you no harm: The Code of the Woosters; Uncle Fred in the Springtime by Beloved by Toni Morrison P.G. Wodehouse Possession by A.S. Byatt My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber Shame by Salman Rushdie The Odyssey; The Iliad by Homer The Accidental Tourist by Arme Tyler Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy The Jo y Luck Club by Amy Tan A Kind Of Loving by Stan Barstow The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry I, Robot and others by Isaac Asimov The Chosen; My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok 1984, Animal Farm by George Orwell And life is too short to read The Bridges of Madison County, The Divine Comedy by Dante Norman Mailer, Anai:s Nin, the Marquis de Sade, Scott Turow, The Great Gats by by F. Scott Fitzgerald Barbara Taylor Bradford or Ayn Rand or Georges Bataille or And not all non-fiction is a pack of lies: biographies of Princess Diana. Akenfield by Ronald Blythe Your loving Aunt Juliette The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham Smith Juliette Hughes is a vegetarian.

V OLUME 8 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 35 B OOKS

H ucH DILLON & R oBIN K o INC Rights, rites and signs

Legislating Liberty: A Bill of Rights for Au stralia? Frank Bren na n ,,, University of Q ueens land Press, Australia, I

36 EUREKA STREET • N ovEM BER 1998 Brennan finds that Australia, by contrast just to camouflage his purpose. It was almost significant commentators, such as the with America, has managed reasonably well a steal from Woody Allen. Federal Court judge, Murray Wilcox, and to tackle the hard questions-and find I was touched by his obvious compassion former High Court justices, Sir Anthony compromises with which most people can for those suffering on the horns of moral Mason and his own father, Sir Gerard live even if they do not agree with the dilemmas, such as abortion, although Brennan, concerning an Australian Bill of ultimate results- through the political I wondered whether he really needed to feel Rights. No doubt a book should be read on rather than through the legal system alone. compassion for gays. In my experience, gay its own terms, but it seems to m e that it He argues that the vast majority of us people who have come out feel patronised would have been stronger had he done so. have reached a civil accommodation on a by straight people who offe r th eir Second, a book as readable as this naturally number of issues and that the time is ripe to 'compassion '. If they don't feel sorry for inspires a desire to read further on the e ntre nch rights of freedom against themselves why should anyone else feel subject, but it lacks a bibliography. I hope discrimination on the ba is of gender, sexual pain for them? there will be a further edition. • orientation and race in the Constitution. I have two minor criticisms of the book. Other important rights, based on the Inter­ First, nowhere does Brennan engage in any Hugh Dillon is a NSW magistrate. He national Covenant on Civil and Political concerted analysis of the ideas of other declares his long friendship with the author. Rights, should be enshrined in a statute capable of being amended by parliamentary majority, ensuring that the legislators have Religious Business: Essays on Australian Aboriginal the primary and last word on the subject. Spirituality. Edited by M

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 37 then, to find the same inattention to detail Having borne the label 'missionary', and observan ces of Aboriginal religion', which has plagued a number of recent books accepting at least some of the possible claiming this as a sign of their not fully about that community, such as James definitions of the word, I am interested in buying into the missionaries' agenda. Yet Cowan's Two Man Dreaming and Monica the e ngagem ent be tween Aborigin al he has earlier told us of his own observation, Furlong's The Flight of the Kingfisher. In religions and Christianity. The lean index as their pri est, t h at the traditional the present book, the community is still to this collection gives no indication that ceremonies to which he and the nuns named 'Balgo', a name of uncertain origi n this theme recurs throughout the book. were invited 'must be compatible with which travelled with the community from Even such a clear heading as 'Meri am peopl e Christianity', a view based on the good rule the old mission site. When the people and Christianity', a major part of N onie of thumb that well-instructed Aboriginal becam e a self-governing community in the Sharp's essay, is not cross-referenced under people saw no incompatibility. Willis also early '80s, they chose to name the commu­ 'Christianity'. oversimplifies to the point of reductionism nity Wirrumanu (sometimes Wirrimanu ), What we do find under that heading is by downplaying any spiritual motivation the correct Aboriginal name for the present the one essay, by ex-Pallottine missionary, on the part of either the missionaries or site. While the name Balgo remains in Peter Willis, which offers the most sustained those Mirriwung people who converted. common parlance, and in the publicity for treatment of the topic. It is a case study of 'Jesus', for example, is mentioned only once, 'Balgo art', for example, it would be good to his own work among the Mirriwung people and that, significantly, in a quote from an see the people's choice of official name around Kununurra in the late 1960s, and he Aboriginal Christian. But the strength of respected in a collection of this stature. analyses th e dynami cs of Aborigi nal Willis' analysis is its critical challenge to Also, while Susie Bootja Bootja is correctly conversion to Christianity in terms of an those m issionaries who err in the opposite named in the colour plates as N apaltjarri, exchange theory of human interactions. direction by over-spiritualising very she is then referred to as N apangarti in the The 'patrons', in this case the missionaries, complex cross-cultural interactions. essay. Names are always worth getting right, offer goods and services and gain adherents; In 1970, Stanner found it necessary to but particularly kinship 'names' which the 'clients', the Aboriginal people, by argue for the inclusion of' Aboriginal beliefs situate an Aboriginal person in their offering their affiliation, gain important ... within the scholarly scope of comparative relational world, the importance of which allies and a measure of kudos in white religion'. This book verifies his claim that is a refrain throughout the book. It would society. 'the intellectual requirements can be, and also h ave been h elpful to see som e Willis' argument is som etimes hard to long have been, amply satisfied' (p l ). • acknowledgment that two of the artists follow. On the one hand, he makes much of have died since the talk was first given, and thefact that Aboriginal people, on becoming Robin Koning SJ has worked for some years one had died even before it. Christians, continued ' the ceremonies and with the community at Wirrumanu, WA.

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38 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 Re-jig stralia

This month we conclude our series of reviews of books that come out of the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences project on reshaping Australian institutions. The bool

Gender and lmtitutions (Welfare, Work and breadwinner model in economic thought, Since 1992 Jocelynn e Scutt has Citizenship), M oi ra Gat ens and is thought-provoking. So is Cass' analysis published five or more collections of brief, Alison M ackinnon (c ds), 199il. of that model's discriminatory effect on autobiographical 'stories' by Australian Living Feminism: The Impact of the women's access to housi ng and its benefits. women. These are in ights, in their own Women's Movement on Three Baxter's analysis of why men don't, and words, into women's lives; historically Generations of Au~tralian Women, probably won' t ever, s hare dom estic useful and, in femini t term s, a Good Thing. Chill a Bul bcck, 1997. responsibilities is an informative counter­ Women's achievem ents go largely point to Bulbeck's commentary. Bulbeck unrecorded by m asculinist histori ans. Mrs G ATENs/ M ACKINNON's is an edited cites Eva Cox's, 'We want to change the MacArthur developed Australia's merino anthology of feminist research on wom en 's world, not get the men to do half the bloody industry while her feckless husband dined issues in welfare, hou ing and housework; housework,' and remarks drily that 'many at his London Club. The official glory is his. harassm ent, discrimination and affirmative women would settle for half the housework So it goes. action at work, and citizenship. as a good start.' But is writing the record enough? Scutt Bulbeck's is a thoughtful analysis of the The papers on workplace design don't doesn't think so. The Age recently published fu nne of fe minism, following upon a review sa tisfy, partly because, as Gatens admits, her tart opinion piece, pointing out that the of the effect of the women's movement on there is no legal analysis of equal opportu­ most publicly recognisable women in the three generations, derived from interviews nity legisla tion (was a contribution world today are not our many high-achievers with 60 lively women. promised, and not delivered ?). This would in business, politics or academia but wom en The two books benefit from being read have assisted the Bacchi critique of sexual defined by their sexual connections with together, the delight ofBulbeck's lightening harassm ent in the 'chilly atmosphere' of powerful m en: Diana, discarded consort of the labour of reading the Gatens anthology. the University, and Eveline's 'Heavy, Dirty the Prince and serial victim of caddish and There is curate's egg quality in the latter, and Limp' chapter on the preservation of careless playboys: Hillary, betrayed wife of which heightened my disappointment. male advantage at work. Eveline's acerbic the US President, and Monica, his exploited Feminist scholarship would affect public analysis of Dame (no' sister') Leonie Kram er groupie. policy more-surely, feminism's point-if was pleasing. Braithwaite's perception that Scutt's books compile written answers it were accessible. This collection of the Affirmative Action Agen cy h as to her structured questions, by women who academic essays will not be essential reading succeeded because its Act is 'loose, gentle identify as feminist . Bulbeck's is a thought­ for policy-makers, as public policy drifts and weak legi s lation ' seems gently ful analysis of structures-girls' upbringing, into laissez-faire and freedom of contract. misguided. The corporate world has not experi en ces of work, marriage and Thus, Gatens' preface reflects on the embraced diversity. Its AAA reports are differen ce-and women's responses to sexual difference that p ermeates all superfi cial. The sanctions, such as they are, feminism , m ediated through structured institutional settings and the assumption are watered down, and the Act's future is personal interviews with non-white, non­ that 'gendered regulatory norm s intersect uncertain: the report of its recent review middle-class, non-cosm opolitan wom en with, shape, and provide [their[ underpin­ has been suppressed for months. selected because, it is claimed, they are ning'. But Bulbeck begins Living Feminism The last part of Gender and Institutions neglected by feminism. with a tale: a convent frames, and hangs on is the least successful, dealing with citizen­ Where Scutt stands back and allows the its walls, the blood- stained, sheets from ship, population, and an essay by Chilla woman's voice, Bulbeck interacts and aristocratic wedding- nights. One, however, Bulbeck on women, the republic and interprets, lets the subjects doctor their is not stained: before that 'blank page', constitutional reform. O verall, the interview transcripts, ponders those most women pause: 'women's Storie are anthology reads as what it is: a collection of changes; invites them to respond to her written from their bodies'. Her point is academic papers. '( mis) interpretations of their story' in made. I turn, with pleasure, to Bulbeck's own context, and analyses the totality. And so it continues. Gatens' introductory book, Living Feminism, a delightful analysis The stories are unsettling, inspira tiona!, chapter on the masculinist assumptions of women's lives and their changing familiar-Audrey's story of survival as an of the ' rational actor', and the male- structures. Aboriginal woman; Rachel's sacrifice of

V OLUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 39 career for fami ly, a choice she refuses to of discrimination, with 'injustices inflicted Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: rue-and Bulbeck's analysis insightful, on other oppressed groups/ or that younger Changing Conceptions and especially into that uniquely Australian feminists source their individualistic femi­ Possibilities, Nicholas Peterson aml creature, the 'fem ocrat,' and the 'walking nism to Wom en 's Studies. No wonder each Will Sa nders (c ds], I 99R. with the m en' femini sm of indigenous, finds it hard to talk to the other. Muslim and migrant women. But Bulbeck speaks to the heart. The I was struck by her analysis of inter­ contributors to Gender and In titutions have L ,s CO LLECTION of twelve Australian generational feminism. It is not only in the written for feminist scholars. I hope some­ National University conference papers of US that older women tend to link their one translates for the readers of New Idea. recent but no explici t elate, includes feminism, born from personal experience -Moira Rayner contributions from such notable author on indigenous issue as Rowse, Read, Nettheim and Reynolds. The preface says that ' very few indigenous people' participated in the conference. All the Melancholia writers are academic and it is not clear that any is an Aborigine. It is like being in the wrong country Among the questions broached are: How, at the wrong time, without language, in view of profoundly different cultural and without family, friends, maps, historical backgrounds, ca n Aborigines and with sameday grey weather, non-Aborigines be m embers of the same society on equal terms? What would 'a fair nowhere to snooze, and equitable relationship' be in view of a diet of pebbles and chaff. Aborigin es' prior occupancy and brutal It is where corpses walk, dispossession z Can there be tolerable when the very self smells stale. differences in citizens' rights between such different peoplesz If Aborigines were to Early morning is worst, have 'distinctive rights', what would hold the Australian nation and society together? light bleeding into the night, N ecessarily, answers are speculative and, the twenty-four hours before dawn, in view of the recent virulenceofHansonism the room's titanic volume, in Australia, some will seem to some read­ blankets sheets of lead, ers impractical, even utopian. another effervescent day, A lengthy introduction precedes three decapitated on a pillow, sections. The first, 'Historical Conceptions', deals with 'Bureaucratic Constructions of the opening of lids a Lazarus-like feat. Indigenous Identities in New South Wales' and roves from first-fleeter Watkin Tench Give us Pertofran, Tryptanol, Prothiaden. and 'Baneelong' (usuall y 'Bennelong' who, Thank God for Ciba-Geigy, Frosst and Boots. unlike British Tench, does not make the Give us our daily psychotropic pap. Index) to the work of Professor A.P. Elkin Let us confabulate, sizzle, chirrup. (1 891-1979). The others are titled 'Contem­ porary Conceptions' (of citizenship and self­ Let countries be Avalons, Edenic shires, determination) and 'Emerging Possibilities'. let early mornings shimmer undefiled. Also, I dare say, necessarily in post­ Melt that grim simulacrum of wax: modern days, not all the papers m ake for forget that life is a suicide pact. facile reading. In an otherwise informative one on the 1967 referendum, we are told in a 70-word final sentence that erroneous Jack Hibberd histories confuse 'textual and contextual signifiers and clocumen tary with perfonnative functions of language .. . but their meta­ narrative, by analogising the referendum Nightmares with ... significant outcom es, does have a his t orical truth once it h as b een To m e they serve a biological function - recon tex tualised.' their surrealism of disaster and threat, After that, Peter Read's lucid litany of staged on a stage where horror knows no compunction, past controls of Aborigines in 'Whose rehearses us for that ultimate performance: death. Citizensz Whose Country? ' is almost droll in its account of contradi ctions. In 1935 a Jack Hibberd mixed-race Australi an was ejected from <1 hotel for being Aboriginal but, returning

40 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 home to his mission, he was refused entry because he wasn't. When he tried to remove his children, he was told they were Aboriginal and so he couldn't. He went to the next town and was arrested as an Aboriginal vagrant and placed on a reserve. During World War II he was at first not allowed to enlist until he went interstate as a non-Aboriginal. After the war he needed permission to get a passport although he had received exemption from the Aborigines Protection Act. Then as a non-Aboriginal he could not visit his relatives on the reserve but he could not enter the Returned Servicemen's Club. In a cogent paper, 'Post-Colonial Citizenship and Legitimacy', Richard Mulgan endeavours to come to terms with the guilt that conscientious non-Aborigi­ nal people feel about such humiliations and-worse-the killings, dispossession and impoverishment. He has little time for On the cards 'moralising liberals' for whom 'collective CAN BE READ from old postcards. The mass-produced ones from Edwardian guilt, far from being a problem, is more a A LOT times project a strong sense of display. A town will be presented for an admiring badge of honour and a source of self-esteem'. gaze, whether it be its streetscapes or individual public buildings. But there are They 'tend to be tertiary educated, to be attracted to humanistic ideals such as also photographs blown up to postcard size, sometimes produced by professionals, autonomy and justice and to find employ­ sometimes by amateurs. These are maverick, vary hugely in subject matter and ment in the public sector and social services quality, and often come without any identifying mark whatsoever. rather than in economic production'. Such a card is reproduced h ere. All we know-from the typography on the Mulgan wants a constitutional theory back-is that it is Australian. The photograph, not completely in focus (the figures that legitimises both Aboriginal rights and beyond those clustered around the statue are sharper) suggests that it has been general citizenship rights of all Australians. taken by an amateur, perhaps somebody involved in the function being celebrated. While law does not arise from wrong (ex But what was it? And where? When? (The question which gave some intensity to injuria jus non oriturJ it does arise out of the initial reading was, simply: is the card worth the dollar being asked for it?) facts (ex factis jus oriturJ so that well­ The time of the image is the easiest to bring into focus. The card is in black­ established regimes can be legitimate in and-white, not sepia, which suggests that it is after 1910, while the three men spite of unjust origins. The legitimisation holding canes further suggest the 1920s, even later. For just as beards became will emerge, he argues, from just and fashionable after soldiers wore them back from the Crimea, so the profusion of egalitarian con temporary practice. walking wounded after World War I helped to popularise the cane. Dissemination of Mulgan' s argument would The 'where' and the 'what' of the card are more difficult to determine. The reduce some redneck fears that Aboriginal statue is in a park, and if I read the photograph correctly, the commemoration has rights will lead to the loss of even the just taken place. This would explain why the speaker has removed his hat; and suburban backyard. why the two boys to the left, while still, show with hands on hips a growing The final paper, 'Sovereignty', fittingly impatience. But who are the people still coming down the path? The pair of girls belongs to H enry Reynolds, who has in the middle distance seem to have halted, to be taking in the scene rather than championed the Aboriginal cause since the about to become part of it. So perhaps the people, having been to church, are 1967 referendum. He believes that problem promenading in their Sunday best, as some Australians used to do. 'can best be tackled by prising apart the two The cloth caps on two of the men provide perhaps another clue: this could be concepts of state and nation'. Paradoxically, a working-class district. Certainly the body language of the five male principals only the state 'can underwrite and protect is strikingly different, as though they have unusually come together for the cause indigenous nationalism and self-govern­ being celebrated. ment from inimical forces both within My rapid reading then-on buying the card-is that this might be an early Australia and without'. On the whole this collection makes a celebration at the statue commemorating the poet John Shaw Nielson in Footscray challenging symposium. Park, Melbourne. Given that the statue would have gone up after he died in 1942, -James Griffin the costumes seem a little old-fashioned; but working-class dress was often Contributors: Moira Rayner is a lawyer and conservative. The lie of the land seems right for Footscray Park, as it slopes down freelance journalist; James Griffin is towards the Maribyrnong. But one day soon I must go and check. • Professor Emeritus of History, University of Papua New Guinea. Jim Davidson is an historian and a collector of postcards.

V OLUME 8 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 41 gman

L Hm RogO< Hodgm•n pmduction• owing to Geoffrey Rush 's exuberant in 1995, the outstanding A Little Night for the Melbou rne Theatre Company (MTC) Cockl e cl em oy and to Dan Potra's Music last year and the distinctly di sa p­ that I can recall were in 1984, the year after extraordinary design for this sprawling play pointing Into the Woods early this year. As he took over as second Dean of Dram a at on the cramped old Russell St Thea tre stage. always, Hodgm an's choice of collaborators the Victorian College of the Arts and Outside the English re n aissance, has had a lot to do with the success of the accepted an ancillary post as John Sumner's Hodgm a n h as seem ed m ost a t h om e work; Tony Tripp has designed the whole associate director at the MTC. They were with the modern Americans, especially sequence and Jea n McQuarrie has also been poles apart in period and style. One was T ennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. His musical director throughout the extended contemporary British (Caryl Churchill's Top Streetcar Named Desire in 198 7 (with Helen Sondheim project, while certain performers Girls) and the other a classic (A Midsum­ Morse as Blanche Dubois in a towering, have appeared in two or more, with the m er Night's Dream). Fourteen years later­ evocative set by long- term design colleague result that a definite sense of ensemble and 11 years since taking over the helm of Tony Tripp) was almost a great one. His Cat house-style has evolved. the venerable old flags hip from Sumner­ on a Hot Tin Roof three years later was not. A 'semi-permanent loose ensemble of Hodgman has opted to finish his term of The Crucible in 1991 was easily the best of artists' was a long-cherished idea l of the office with similarly disparate works. Hodgman's Arthur Miller productions and MTC under John Sumner, and-although it Leaving aside his mainly managerial one of his m ost powerful productions ever had petered out, rea II y, by the early l 970s­ contribution as Artistic Director, Hodgm an's for the MTC, thanks to fine acting from a Hodgman has certainly done his bes t to principal concentrations of artistic energy huge cast and the timeliness of its revival; re tain su ch vestiges of the ideal as since he bega n have been in six areas: Shake­ it was one of those occasions when all the opportunity has permitted. In practice, this speare and other English renaissance dram a; social and production elem ents seemed to has resulted mainly in ongoing relationships contemporary American drama and music gel. His View From the Bridge (Miller's next with designers (principally Tripp), playwrights thea tre; European drama of the past; old play, produced the following year) also worked (mainly Janis Balodis), musical director MTC staples like Coward, Shaw and Wilde well. His most recent American production, M cQuarrie, veteran lighting design er (so meone has to do them ); occasional forays A.R. Gurney's Sylvia, was thin on content but Jamieson Lewis and certain actors. Among into contemporary English drama and new has been one of the company's bigger successes these have been Peter Carroll, Paul English, and recent Australian drama. of recent years-again, mainly due to the MTC stalwart Frank Gallacher, Rachel T he best of his English classics have contribution of a star actor: Rachel Griffiths, Tammy McCarthy, Lisa McCune, been his first and last Shakespeares, with Griffiths as the eponymous clog. Helen Morse, Bruce Myles, John O'May, some interesting and su ccessful ones in partner Pamela Rabe (a nd her Shakespearean between, most notably the two very popular E YEN MORE PROMINENT in Hodgman's sparring partner Hugo Wea ving), Bruce star vehicles fo r Pamela Rabe and Hugo recent career-and in the diminution of the Spence, Alison Whyte, veteran showbiz Weaving in the Playhouse (The Taming of MTC's massive debt- have been music­ per a nality Bob Hornery and sundry others. the Shrew of 1991 and Much Ado About thea tre pieces by Stephen Sonclheim. There Many of these, in various combinations, Nothing of 1993). His production of John have been fo ur of them, beginning with an have appeared in Hodgman's Shakespeares, Marston's rarely seen Tbe Dutch Courtesan, excellent Sween ey Toddin 1987, withPeter his American drama and music-theatre and also in 1993, is also memorable, not least Carroll as the demon barber. Then Assassins in his European classic productions.

42 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 A Little Night Music was arguably the Australian drama to associate directors or between Aguecheek and Cesario are billiard apogee of Hodgman's career in this respect. has bought it in from (or co-produced it cues pinched from a local pool h all; Olivia's Morse and O'May (pictured right) led an with) other companies. Clearly, the MTC veil becomes a pair of Ray Bans while outstanding cast, which also fea tured Rabe, under Hodgm an has paid no less attention Orsino's palace is a rococo bathhouse from McCune, Ruth Cracknell, Greg Stone and to Australian work than the 'fl agship' average; an older St Kilda. Orsino's retainers are Christen O ' Lea ry. Tripp's design of it's just that h e has never seem ed nightclub bouncers in black (complete with revolves, gauzes and pantomime-style as comfortable doing it himself. ID numbers) while Olivia's Fabian is a cut-outs complem ented the transience of female aerobics trai ner. the piece's themes and m aintained a superb ONTHEN TO HIS SWANSONG : a super­ But the visual gimmicks are sm artly t e mpo . McQuarrie's subtle mus ic modern, set-in-S t Kilda Twelfth Night. integrated into the production and direction kept the whole thing in focus to Hodgman was clearly determined to go out performance style. Shane Bourne's Sir a degree we rarely see on the commercial on a high note, no doubt partly to expunge Toby- a rakish denizen of Fitzroy St all­ musical stage. memories of dark times in his other role as night bars-is a foil for Bruce Spence's Sir Hodgman also brought N ordic administrator: the deficit, the search for a Andrew, a hayseed totally at sea away from conceptions of love and honour to the stage new building, problem s of company identity his up-country National Party seat. In a in three of Ibsen's plays. The best of these and so on. What defines this production daring casting coup, Hodgm an has given was his first, a 1988 production of Hedda above all is Tripp's set (pictured above left ): Peste to the stand-up comic Greg Fleet, Gabler(with Carroll and Morse in the leads) looming over a four-sided revolve, featuring who studies his laconic and gloom y for which he arranged a splendidly actable Luna Park as a vision of Illyria in the grip of observations on life while nursing a seem­ n ew translation himself; those were the Bakhtinia n carnival madness, is an ingly endless hangover at an open-air cafe da ys when artistic directors still had time illuminated sign reading 'JUST FOR FUN'. further up Acland St. Fleet also m akes a to do proper research and preparation. Later As the action grows darker in Acts 4 and 5, very good fist of Gerry Hale's Elizabethan Ibsens (even the well-reviewed Doll's House pastich e songs, although I'd be surprised if with Rachel Griffiths this year) failed for his untrained voice survived the rigours of various reasons to match the Hedda. Else­ a Playhouse season intact. where in the modern European classic It is from this trio, and from Kim Gyngell canon, he essayed a couple of less-assured as the sm armiest smiling Malvolio we've shots at Chekhov. A 1989 Cherry Orchard seen in years, that Hodgm an extracts the got close to the mark (with Robyn N evin, bulk of his knockabout humour. But the Rabe, Morse, English, N eil Fitzpatrick in a women in the play are also stylishly good-looking, Tripp-designed production represented, especially Alison Whyte as a that just missed the play's psychological superbly a mbival ent Viola/ Cesario, centre) whereas last year's Three Sisters Josephine Byrnes as a detached, new-age was a mostly unsatisfa ctory attempt to Olivia and Mandy McElhinney (a real up­ incorporate a large ensemble of m ostly too­ and-coming star) as the conniving Maria young actors into a rather out-dated MTC who sets the comic plot's wheels in m otion house- tyle production. with genuinely vengeful relish. Some of the Like any good artistic director, Hodgm an extras also impress more than they some­ has endeavoured to oblige older subscription times do in MTC productions. A slightly and regional audiences with som e of the underworked Wayne Hope (who only gets enduring favourites of the British thea tre to play twin-brother Sebastian) is one and like Noel Coward's Private Lives and Shaw's letters drop out of the sign, which diminishes Kevin Hopkins (in multiple roles) is another. Heartbreak House way back in 1986. Of the to J_STF_R _UN. Thus when Olivia finally This is as strong and as imaginative an more recent British drama, probably only hears of all the mayhem that has happened ensemble of actors as Hodgm a n h as his co-production with the STC in 1996 of to poor old Malvolio, we have already assembled fo r som e years. David Hare's Skylight rekindled the spotted the em otional signposts. Then, in In the end, Olivia's remark that 'He enthusiasm sparked by his early production the end, the sign lights up again in full and [Malvolio] hath been m ost notoriously of Churchill's Top Girls. we're left with an overall sense that this has abused' is something of an overstatement The most under-represented aspect of been a resolutely jolly and festive Twelfth in this m ostly playful and good-natured Hodgman's contribution to the MTC's Night: 'fun Shakespeare' in the style of production . Similarly, the decorative tradition al repertoire ha s been n ew Nimrod's h eyday in the 1970s or of Glenn revolving stage (o ne of whose sides is an Australian work-with the conspicuous Elston's open-air picnic productions. Acland Street cake shop) evokes the idea of exception of the Ghosts Trilogy and other The ' look' is often param ount in 'cakes and ale' more than the vicious plays by his associate Janis Balodis, a series contemporary 'fun Shakespeare' and so it is 'whirligig of time'. But these are small beginning in 1985. He also deserves full here in some measure. Portraying Malvolio quibbles about a production which surely marks for guts (and perhaps even folly) for nowadays, for example, is a tricky task and achieves what it set out to do: to celebrate selecting Balodis' malign ed Heart for the his famous yellow stockings take the form a long-serving and hard-working artistic Future as the company's SOOth production h ere of a gaudy in-line skating suit; the director's exit in a major key. • in 1989. Apart from those, Hodgman has cross-garters secure his knee pads and his generally farmed out the original imaginative chamber of 'hideous darkness' is a wheelie Geoffrey Milne is head of thea tre and drama and dramaturgical effort of getting up new bin. Elsewhere, the swords for the duel at LaTrobe University.

V O LUME 8 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 43 Mane attraction

Year Of The Horse: Neil Yo ung and Crazy Horse Live, clir. Jim Jarmusch. 1996 was the year of the Horse, and the pivot for Jannusch's splendid documentary, one of the best rock docs since The Kids Are Alright showed The Who's significance to the art. Art is really what YOTH i concerned with, since N eil Young is one of the few who never sold out to the coke-chic Armani­ suited dead souls who run the record companies. In fact, Geffen sued him in the '80s for refu sing to make his new m usic more 'commercial'. Crazy Horse has few parallels fo r longevity and honesty- Va n Morrison, The Grateful Dead when Jerry Garcia was alive, Midnight Oil, AC/DC maybe. Not the Stones. Billy Talbot (Crazy Horse's bass player) may have approximated Keithy in substance- abuse heroism but slick Jagger just never had Young's heart. Jagger got on by being m eaner and more bourgeois than the suits, turning his latter concerts into Mayfair wife-swaps; the Horse has candles and incense like the '70s shagpile loungerooms where the music won us. And they aren't being retro. Jarmusch uses 19 76, 1986 and 1996, giving a fin e sense of form as well as showing Young's evolution from Byronic godlet in to intonation to demonstrate exactly why this baggy-shorted clad. (With black socks and woman could never have settled anywhere leather shoes. Of course!) In 1996 Jarmusch Virgin history except on a throne. Geoffrey Rush plays her shoots in Super 8, which suits the music Svengali court adviser, Walsingham, with and give a seamless quality crucial to the Elizabeth, dir. Shekhar Kapur. 'A director an urbane ruthlessness- slitting a beautiful documentary's primary revelation: that from Bombay takes on Elizabethan England' boy's throat here, eli spa tching Mary of Guise Young and Crazy Horse may have aged, but says the ominous program credit. Well, in her bed there-that is both inexplicable they haven't lost anything important. N ear why not, one feels constrained to say. and convincing. Kathy Burke is a lumpy, the end, Jarmusch does a cut from a 1986 Post-colonial justice etc. Peter Brook had irascible Queen Mary, her teeth as rotten as performance of 'Hurricane' to its 1996 mani­ his way with the Mahabharata. Scorsese is her tragic sectarian politics. In one scene, a festation. Like a blow to the heart, you see into his Buddhist period, and Hollywood's cameo of alienation, Kapur has her crouched how age has greyed and weighed him clown, golden age churned out its quota of parcel in a dank bed-chamber while an attendant but that the silver-elastic tenor is strong as gilt Elizabethan sagas to prove that Gloriana dwarf brushes her h air. There are also ever, even youthful. And in the '90s outro, was just a good midwestern girl at heart and burnings, carnage in Scotland and torture he thunders his guitar in the simple white would have settled down in the kitchen scenes in the tower to focus the mind. strobing and ends with a sacramental offer­ with a brood of kids and Robert Taylor if the So the images are potent, but as a whole ing of one of those ' 70s big candles. The clanged business of running England and the film skates on a thin script and an Horse is still with him. beating the Spanish hadn' t gotten in her impoverished sense of history, running its -Juliette Hughes way. m urder mystery-cum-love story course as Elizabeth looks beautiful. The acting is if by default-for lack of anything richer, or often m emorable. T h e fi lm has some stranger. Odd to conceive of Elizabethan Give us pause moments that detach them elves from all England as a tabula ra sa. It suggests that one's conditioned expectations, to float in the producers' expectation of an audience is What Dreams May Come, clirVincentWard. that space cinema can sometimes clear in that it has never read a book, seen a play, a This is an awful pretty film. Somebody in imagination: moments of dread, of mute film, a portrait, surfed a n interne t Hollywood must have just worked out some indecision or tacit malice. Cate Blanchett encyclopre dia or watched Glenda Jackson nice things to do with animation. One of (above, on the left), as the young Elizabeth, on television. them will enable you to step into a work of has a gallant stride and an occasional -Morag Fraser art and mess around in the oils. You can

44 EUREKA STREET • No vEMBER 1998 even make mud pies from bright coloured perhaps they' re catching-and his But Andrew Davis is no genius, and his paint if you want. This is what happens to flashbacks get a bit mixed up with the films fall well short of the Hitchcock Chris Neilsen (Robin Williams) after he dies. others. And perhaps Haynes caught a few of mark. Neilsen met his wife, Annie (Annabella Ken Russell's flashbacks. Davis' first mistake with A Perfect Sciorra), on a lake in Europe. They marry. Oh, and the music? Fantastic. Brian Ferry Murder was basing it on the play Dial M for They have two children. The children die and Brian Eno collaborated on the sound­ Murder. While Hitchcock's version of this in a car crash. Then Chris, a doctor, also track, which covers old songs as well as play was not his master work, it displayed dies in a car crash. He finds himself in a new compositions 'after the manner of'. a virtuosity and violent confidence that kind of heaven which looks like Monet's Glam rock was characterised by an elephan­ A Perfect Murder lacks. Hitchcock could Disneyland. In fact, Annie is a painter and tine bottom end and fireworks in the top turn a latch-key into an object of fear and Chris has entered one of her landscapes. range but was strangely empty of middle loathing; Davis has to rely on a gun. Meanwhile, back in a dreary place called frequencies. Music has to tell the truth But Hitchcock is dead and not all reality, Annie is taking all the car crashes about itself: the heart was lost. The stage thrillers, or films exploring the darker sides pretty hard. Chris tries to communicate had been suddenly vacated by The Beatles, of our hearts and heads, should be a tribute with her from the painting, but fails. Despite Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix: to his style of film-making. To be fair, one appearances, we are assured many times the '60s youth movement had faltered. would have to say, Davis is no slouch. The that h e i still in reality. Annie is so dumb Hendrix had humped his guitar onstage, film's plot is tight, if a little highly strung, that she doesn't realise this. So she commits or set it on fire when the muse possessed the actors appear keenly directed and New suicide. And goes to hell. From which reality him. The '70s potlatch turned all this duende York is given enough camera time to turn Chris rescues her. into agenda; stardom was endless entitle­ in a character performance of some note. The most inane thing about this film is m ent, a conscious brief to ream possibility Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow and the chance to see sophisticated theological for the watchers' appetites in ways that no Viggo Mortensen mark the points of this concepts such as heaven and hell turned one fragile body could survive (except film's love triangle (pictured below). into toys for people with new software. The perhaps Iggy Pop's). Douglas pulls out his Gordon Gekko most disturbing thing is its underlying -Lucille Hughes performance to which he adds the odd loving assumption that the mind and will can smile and murderous intention. Paltrow is achieve everything. intelligent but flimsy (literally) as the I openly confess that I have never liked Without a hitch bilingual, fur-collared younger wife. And films in which the main character dies in Morte nse n, to his credit, s tylishly the first 20 minutes but refuses to leave A Perfect Murder, dir. Andrew D avis. overcomes the initial hurdle of having to the screen. Waitfor What Dreams to come Perfectly produced and perfectly clever have portray a sensitive, struggling, loft-living out on video and then hope, when you get never been quite my cup of celluloid tea. artist, then settles comfortably into the to your video shop, that somebody has I prefer a few ripples on the surface of more interesting role of con artist. taken it out. And lost it. This is a pretty cinema, the odd ugly person. But I remind This is by no m eans a bad film. It almost awful film. myself that Hitchcock managed his clever had moments of inspired intrigue, and came - Michael McGirr SJ productions full of beautiful people in such close to ending without the appearance of a way that I'd be happy to drink his brand of the dreaded hand gun. But alas, it fell well tea all day. So it is possible (as long as you're short of perfect. A life of Brian a genius) to make the 'perfect', well, perfect. -Siobhan Jackson

Velvet Goldmine, dir. Todd Haynes. Velvet Goldmine explores the life of a mythical rock god, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Hack journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is given a 'Where is he now?' assignment ten year after Slade's 1974 faked on-stage assassination and subsequent disappearance. The film is set in a surprisingly Orwellian 1984, as bleak as the black-and­ white scenes of Slade's pre-Glam childhood. Stuart tracks down Slade's ex-wife (Toni Collette trying to do an Angie Bowie), his first ex-manager (Michael Feast inexplicably doing a Brian Epstein) and his ex-lover (Ewan McGregor supposedly doing an Iggy Pop but really auditioning for Kurt Cobain). As they reminisce, we start to hear music, the scene changes and we are all back in the thick of the early '70s having a great time. Stuart has a few flashbacks of his own-

VoLUME 8 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 45 More than meets the eye

E"'""'YA! M,k, theoonneotwn" more than their arguments de-bunked. He thought I was joking, the US Secretary of State, New Zealand, and told me quite seriously that I read the wrong books. Sydney's Mardi Gras, Rolling Stone Television-at its best-can teach people to read society accurately, magazine, Greek, Celtic and Eastern can strip pretension away as easily as it offers prestige. It is such a myths and girls from 5 (my niece) to 77 powerful medium, and can now be almost totally self-referential­ (my mum). for two generations now there has been no pre-television culture to The link is Xena, played by New look back on. The world is so affected by the way that television Zealand actor Lucy Lawless, wh o reads the world that no public policy or private life is untouched. arrived recently on the cover of Rolling Stone. The series, Xena, The ground being broken now is the ability of the young to take in Warrior Prin cess, is produced in New Zealand for the American and evaluate audio-visual material. So programs such as the brilliant market, and we see it on Channel Ten on Saturday evenings. When South Park, and Xena and even the schlocky soaps, are creating Madeleine Albright was here this year she was asked by a reporter areas for a critique of society in the minds that watch them, because who she'd like to be if she could choose, and she replied 'Xena'. increasingly watching is becoming observation. Albright is the world's most powerful woman, and I'm sure she There are dangers: mindless trendy imitativeness and worrying wants to be Xena not just for the figure and the clothes, but for the desensitisation, but overall I think that one benefit of the televisual way acrobatics and self-assertion solve everything. I bet she just global village has been a rolling back, at least in Western culture, of wishes she could take on Milosevic or N etanyahu with the 'Xena some of our more corrosive prejudices. In Britain in mid-October, touch', a two-fingered pinch on the pressure poin ts of the neck. Valerie Riches, director of the Family and Youth Concern organisation, Fixes up warlords a treat. Get Madeleine working out, Bill, and then said: 'Public tolerance is increasingly being exploited on television.' keep your hands off her or she'll solve your future impeachment She went on to anathematise Neighbours for promoting problems in ways you wouldn't believe. acceptance of single mothers before taking off on her broom. The Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras had a floa t devoted to Xena: the lesbians adore her because she's a beautiful, powerful BUT SHE HAS A rorNT-not just on her hat-and it is that, love woman with a great lea ther costume and the drag queens adore her them or hate them, soaps have presented viewers with daily because she's a very tall, beautiful woman with a great leather invitations to empathise with the unfortunate. Val would obviously costume. Lawless should be pleased with her Rolling Stone cover, love to see a return of the less racy episodes of Leave it to Beaver and because it keeps the tall, dark im age withou t the leather but gives Father Knows Bes t (the latter a real hit in the Vatican ), and a total her wings, sealing her appeal all over the place: wings are a very '90s ban on kissing between unbetrothed couples under 30. Over the 40 thing, ever since publishers discovered you could sell a lot of kitsch or so years of television, however, viewers pres en ted with Prim ula 's related to angels. Claire Danes wore them in Baz Luhrmann's problem pregnancy or Adeline's anguished adultery have abandoned Romeo and Juliet, little girls wear them routinely to birthday their previous im pulses to stone the miscreants to death and have parties, and teenage girls need to be careful that theirs aren't set on even started to sympathise with pantless presidents. It's created fire by a passing joint. problems for Kenneth Starr. In a desperate attempt to make the Xena is a spin-off from the successful series, Hercules, The people of America aware of exactly how naugh ty a Democrat Legendary Journeys. Both programs owe something to the Japanese president can be, the guardian of public m orality has let forth such series Monkey, that was popular abou t ten years ago. It was a a cascade of sexual information on to the screens of the nation that strange concept, religious com edy/adventure, as extraordinary as if self-help groups (we are dealing with America after all) for parents someone had done something like The Amazing Adventures of have been set up to coach them in answering lisping requests fo r St Francis. (Hercules and Xena go to the great pagans for their enlightenment on the meaning of 'oral sex' and the creative uses of spiritual com edy. Only the Monty Python crew were clever enough tobacco products. What the hell, you hear the parents saying, it's to make Christianity funny.) Monkey was to many a revelation only sex-whaddabout the goddam economy? And so Clinton's about Buddhism, and it was not afraid to moralise. But it had almost approval ratings have stayed intact. as many fart jokes as South Park. My family loved it. But, in the sam e week in October, the Electronic Telegraph If you have read any Greek, Celtic or Eastern mythology, Xena reported that researchers from the University of Stirling's Media is full of in-jokes. It's a supermarket cart of references, seam ed Research Institute showed that m en's attitudes to television violence strongly with female self-determination, and very slyly comical. are disturbingly different from wom en's. It seems that in a scene The scriptwriters have all read real books. The titles to the episodes involving a rape fr om the television program Trip Trap, the women give the game away: The Quill is Mightier; Com edy of Eros; were unanimous in rejecting rape under any circumstances, whereas Adventures in the Sin Trade; Ulysses; The Path Not Taken; For many of the men were inclined to justify the rape because the victim Him The Bell Tolls; A Day In The Life; Ten Little Warlords; Girls was perceived as bad. So very strange that they didn't read therapist Just Wanna Have Fun; and my own fa vourite: Fistful of Dinars. as bad. Lady Elspeth Howe, chair of the Broadcasting Standards I had an argument recently with a bloke wh o was very concerned Commission, said that there still weren't enough wom en in that Xena would teach girls that violence solved problems. I tried television, either onscreen or making decisions. I agree with her as to point out to him that no-one had yet refuted adequately Susan long as the decision-m akers aren' t like Dear Valerie, scourge of the Brownmillar's theory that women worldwide are kept in subjection unmarried mother. Just get Xena to fix her up. EeeeeeeeeeeeYA!• ultim ately through the threat of rape, and that perhaps equilibrium could be restored a little through m en perceiving a threa t of getting Juliette Hughes would like to be Xena too.

46 EUREKA STREET • N OVEMBER 1998 Specific Levity Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 68, November 1998

D evised by Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS 1. Former partner with a right to declare? Oh! (7) 5. Sack girls twice? ... (7) 9. . .. Not what a m odel boss would do! Under her they flourished. (9) 10. To repent without first trespassing could m ake one congratulate oneself. (5) 11. Ship, possibly, on the river Nile. (5) 12. Being relaxed, love nap on 11 -across. A combination that is matchless! (9) 14. It is possible to faint through having such a sequence of ideas! (5,2,7) 17. Fruitless search for the gam e? (4-5, 5) 21. At the very sm all level, one in the lab could be descriptive of bacteria. (9) 23. Reg Innes initially was in front. Losing in the end made him annoyed. (5) 24. Seeking perfection, I lay out the tarot. (5) 25. A sort of tiny case D es originally bought through his business enterprise. (9) 26. Som e information Eric applied to the whole class. (7) 27. Fem ale primarily keeps every last shilling fo r her collection of coins. (7) Solution to Crossword no. 67, October 1998 DOWN 1. Preserve the m em ory of M elba? Leading m ember agrees t o the arrangem ent. (6) 2. Love in the nook transforms public official into singer. (7) 3. Sucking up? T hat's fascinating! (9) 4. Souvenir Miro repainted-a reminder (in dead language) for All Souls' Day? (11 ) 5. Form erly accomplished. (3) 6. You can m ake pies a brownish crusty colour. (5) 7. Here the grea test problem s are below the surface. A chilly prospect ! (7) 8. Fa cial lines go up on it. Why, you ask, is this an age-old problem ? (8) 13. Final am ount her properties brought to the country. (11 ) 15. Extra clever, or else ... ? (9) 16. Having a swooning feeling while doing a crawl, perhaps. (8) 18. Som e m ight elect Ernest- it would facilitate public reading. (7) 19. The recovered material is silver with cream round the outside. (7) 20. The perils in the grass during the long summers. (6) 22. He looks am orously at fo rm or leg. (5) 25. Really was written that way! (3) Eureka Street's website is now up and • fUnning Visit us at: http:/fwww.openplanet.com.aufeureka Each month you can fmd out what's in Eureka Street, and read a selection of articles and extracts online. Hop off from Eureka Street to our host site, Openplanet, w here you'll fmd other magazines including the new online magazine Body, Mind & Spirit. Openplanet also lists community events and hosts a number of discussion forums where you can read others' opinions, and join in w ith a comment of your own if the mood takes you. EUREKA STREET Special Book Offer 13fack Pepper

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