Vol. 2 No. 9 October 1992 $4.00

and where he did

Volume 2 Number 9 I:URI:-KA STRI:-eT October 1992 A m agazine of public affairs, the arts and theology

21 CoNTENTS TOPGUN Michael McGirr reports on gun laws and the calls for capital punishment in the 4 Philippines. COMMENT In this year of elections we are only as good 22 as our choices, says Peter Steele. Andrew DON'T KISS ME, HARDY Hamilton looks at the Columbus quin­ James Griffin concludes his series on the centary, and decides that the past must be Wren-Evatt letters. owned as well as owned up to (pS). 6 25 ORIENTATIONS LETTERS Peter Pierce and Robin Gerster take their pens to Shanghai and Saigon; Emmanuel 7 Santos and Hwa Goh take their cameras to COMMISSIONS AND OMISSIONS Tianjin. ICAC chief Ian Temby Margaret Simons talks to Australia's top speaks for himself: p 7 crime-busters. 34 11 BOOKS AND ARTS Cover photo: A member of Was the oldest part of the Pentateuch CAPITAL LETTER the Tianjing city planning office written by a woman? Kevin Hart reviews in Jei Fang Bei Road, three books by Harold Bloom, who thinks the 'Wall Street' of Tianjin. 12 it was; Robert Murray sizes up Columbus BLINDED BY THE LIGHT and colonialism (p38 ). Cover photo and photos pp25, 29 and 30 Bruce Williams visits the Columbus light­ by Emmanuel Santos; house in Santo Domingo, and wonders who Photo p27 by Hwa Goh; will be enlightened. 40 Photos p12 by Belinda Bain; FLASH IN THE PAN Photo p41 by Bill Thomas; 15 Reviews of the films Patriot Games Cartoons pp6, 36 and 3 7 by Dean Moore; Zentropa, Edward II, and Deadly. ' Graphic p7 by Waldemar Buczynski. ARCHIMEDES Photos pp8 and 9 16 41 courtesy of Th e Age. ULTERIOR MOTIFS TRANSPLANTS AND REJECTIONS Rowan Ireland queries the image, and the 42 Eureka Street magazine self-image, of missionaries in Latin Amer­ THE LAST WORD Jesuit Publications, ica. PO Box 553, Ruth Pendavingh makes a ritual decision. Richmond, VIC 3121. Tel (03 )427 7311 20 43 Fax (03)428 4450 QUIXOTE SPECIFIC LEVITY EURI:-KA srm:-er COMMENT agazine of public affairs, the arts and theolo~y PETER STEELE Publisher Michael Kelly SJ f Editor Choices, choices Morag Fraser Production editor 'EEE TO CHoosE' said the spine of the book. I opened it and Ray Cassin Design consultant flipped through. It was by Milton Friedman, and it helped to John van Loon give a bad name to liberalism. Not today, thanks, Milton; I'm Production assistants choosing elsewhere. I Choose Freedom said another book, read Paul Fyfe SJ, Chris Jenkins SJ when I was a schoolboy. It was about making an exit from Soviet constraints. Apart from that, I remember nothing of it: Contributing editors but its title can still issue a summons. Adelaide: Frances Browne IBVM We are only as good as our choices. Unable to construct Brisbane: Ian Howells SJ ourselves radically, we still go on construing ourselves tell­ Darwin: Margaret Palmer ingly-going for this story rather than that, this policy, these Perth: Dean Moore yearnings, these cessations. We do this in the midst of fear, Sydney: Edmund Campion, Gerard Windsor, bafflement, sloth, and often labyrinthine opportunities. We do Andrew Riemer it because, in the end, 'choice' is not only a noun, but an European correspondent: Damien Simonis adjective. The choosing itself is part of our prize. US correspondent: Michael Harter SJ 'Choose, challenge, jump, poise, nm ... ' wrote Richard Editorial board Wilbur, in a poem about 'Grace'. It sounds boyish, which can Peter L'Estrange SJ [chair), creep back towards being infantile. But Wilbur's poem, cele­ Margaret Coady, Margaret Coffey, brating finesse in its many forms, is really against going off Madeline Duckett RSM, Tom Duggan, half-cocked: for him, expert choice presupposes tensional pre­ Trevor Hales, Christine Martin, dicaments. Choice magazine could hardly have a readership if Kevin McDonald, Joan Nowotny IBVM, we did not find ourselves tugged this way and that amid sup­ Lyn Nossal, Ruth Pendavingh, posed excellences. Peter Steele SJ, Cletus Storey FSC, 'Elegance' can sound like a luxury, but no mathematician Bill Uren SJ will think it merely that; the elegant solution to the problem Business manager: Louise Metres is the one with the fewest loose ends-which is, as etymology Advertising representative: Tim Stoney suggests, the best-chosen one. To live life thoughtfully, not Accounts manager: Bernadette Bacash under beleagurement or automatically, is to develop a certain precision in stepping: not necessarily the delicacy of the high­ Patrons wire walker, but certainly that of the creek-crosser on the Eureka Street gratefully acknowledges the slippery stones. A lot of adults, at least in the 'western' world, support of C.L. Adami; the trustees of the estate of Miss M. Condon; D.M. Cullity; find much of that in life. F.G. Gargan; R.J. and H.M. Gehrig; An adult inevitably, and a Jesuit by choice, I think of these W.P. Gurry; J.F. O'Brien; things often. Ignatius of Loyola prefaces his cardinal visionary A.F. Molyneux; V.J. Peters; document, the Spiritual Exercises, by saying that it is a hand­ Anon.; the Roche family; Anon.; book for the liberation of the heart, so that its readers and Sir Donald and Lady Trescowthick; practisers may choose well. My own view is that if the Jesuits Mr and Mrs Lloyd Williams. have one thing more than another to offer the world, in all circumstances, it is a certain judiciousness, a certain stylish­ Eureka Street magazine, lSSN 1036- 1758, ness, in making free choices. The readiness to go that route is, Australia Post registered publication VAR 91 - 0756, of course, not at any Jesuit-or any other institutional-dicta­ is published eleven times a year tion. Liberty of spirit is divinely offered and humanly chosen, by Eureka Street Magazine Pry Ltd, or it is not there at all. 300 Victoria Street, Richmond, Victoria 3121. 'Existentialism', someone said ironically, 'means that Responsibility for editorial content is accepted by Michael Kelly, 300 Victoria Street, Richmond. nobody can take a bath for you.' Whatever its extravagances, it Printed by Doran Printing, means more than that. It presses the view that our lives need 4 Commercial Road, Highett VIC 3190. not be governed by track-habits and prejudice, by soliciting © jesuit Publications I992 fears and engulfing greeds. It supposes that we are more than The editor welcomes letters and unsolicited manu­ the re idue of the past, more than the condition of the future. scripts, including poetry and fiction. Manuscripts will I am not much of a one for 'isms', but that much I can take. be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self­ Bonne chance at the next election: whether or not the candi­ addressed envelope. Requests for permission to reprint dates need it, you do . • material from the magazine should be addressed in I writing to: The editor, Eureka Street magazine, Peter Steele SJ is reader in English at the University of Mel­ L PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121. bourne.

4 EUREKA STREET • O c TOBER 1992 CoMMENT

ANDREW HAMILTON

C ENTENA" C:E=~~ND cheers for s ~n~ul~~nd not me.ely cele to be edgy affairs nowadays. This Centenaries invite us to brate the wealth and status of the emerges clearly if we compare con- winners. It is right also to insist that temporary celebrations with previous look realistically at people when cultures meet, many values can ones. At the 400th anniversary of of mixed virtue and be lost, and that what emerges is not Columbus' arrival in the Americas, always admirable. for example, red wine and purple wisdom. Even when we In the face of such strong reser- prose flowed unstinted. The grounds vations, it may seem odd that any- for celebration then seemed self- have taken his limitations one would want to celebrate the evident: the discovery of the A.meri- into account, Columbus Columbus quincentenary, let alone cas, the bringing of civilisation and defend its celebration as energetical- Christian faith, the triumph of the was an interesting human ly as many, including Pope John Paul exploratory human spirit. Many Latin and various Roman congregations, American cardinals and bishops even being of considerable have done. Yet their attitude deserves demanded that Columbus be canon- a hearing, if only because at several ised a saint. courage and spirit. It is a points it challenges our contemporary At anniversaries we do not sim- pretty miserable society conventional wisdom. According to ply celebrate the past, however, but this account, centenaries are not only appraise our own society and culture. that can celebrate only celebrations of our own culture and So the celebrations of 1992 differ from times, but times to examine the past those of 100 years ago. Both the prose what is perfect. and to try to enter it on its own terms. and the festivities reflect our more This implies a rare degree of humility recessionary times and our greater parsimony with about the partial character of our own conventional praise. In particular, they mark our more hesitant affir- wisdom. Centenaries also invite us to look realistically mation of our own culture. Whereas 100 years ago at people of mixed virtue and wisdom. Even when we Western culture was seen as a single whole that brought have taken his limitations into account, Columbus was blessing to whatever it touched, now all culture is gen- an interesting human being of considerable courage and erally seen as fragmentary. We are uneasy with large spirit. It is a pretty miserable society that can celebrate abstractions, like 'European' or 'Latin American' culture. only what is perfect. We want to know which European, and which Latin The quincentenary, too, insists that culture is not American culture we are talking about. We distinguish simply something to be preserved, but that it is alive Indian cultures from mestizo, wealthy from poor. and constantly changing in order to adapt to new chal- Moreover, if we hear that European culture was a lenges. From this perspective, to regard native cultures gift, we want to know to whom it was a gift, and who as inevitably crushed by Western culture is a covert form paid for it. We suspect that beneath gifts lie interests. of cultural imperialism. It has been said that canon law So, if Spain or Portugal brought gifts to the Americas, was the Pharisees' revenge on Christianity; in the same we want to know what was their angle or kink. Nor do way, Latin American cultures may be seen as the sub- most people have much confidence in the explicit version of Western culture by the natives. systems of belief that help shape cultures. The collapse The celebration of the quincentenary also impels of communism has fed a more general modem scepti- Christians to ask whether they see Christian faith as a cism about religious faiths, like Christianity and Islam. gift, and whether it is right to preach to those who do The fragmentation of our sense of culture also not believe. While our prevailing culture has many res- expresses itself in a kind of ecological vision, in which ervations about commending religious belie( it has cultures are seen as natural species that should be pre- fewer about commending belief in equality or econom- served. To interfere with them or kill them is regret- ic theory. Is that consistent? Finally the quincentenary table, if not criminal. Within this perspective, the puts sharp questions to Australians about what we make anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas should of immigration, about the propriety of celebrating the not be celebrated, for it was the first germ of an infec- achievements, of, say, Jack Lang or Daniel Mannix, for tion that would lead to the destruction of Aztec, Inca all their limitations, and about the place which religious and other cultures and their mutation into a hybrid faith should have in Australian culture. • culture. It was an ecological disaster. As a reaction to attitudes current 100 years ago, Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United Faculty of this hesitation has much to commend it. It insists, Theology, Parkville, Vic. He spent the first half of 1992 rightly, that we should look at the underside of societies on sabbatical leave at the University of Central America.

V OLUME 2 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 5 L ETTERS

Eureka Street welcomes letters programs for many years, they Mad about from its readers. Short letters are acknowledged thattheir country faced Madonna more likely to be published, and all a major population problem, which letters may be edited. Letters must was impeding development, and that From Clive Keeley be signed, and should include a con­ their governm ent had a duty to slow I've just finished reading Eureka Street tact phone number and the writer's population growth. While preferring vol. 2 no. 8. As a public servant who name and address. natural methods of birth control, will soon feel the cutting edge of eco­ Bishop Claver said that the church nomic rationalism, I found that Jack would not try to impose this view on Waterford's Canberra Letter painted non-Catholics, or on Catholics who an accurate picture of our battered could not agree with it. The bishops bureaucracy. refused abortion as a method of birth Your Quixote columnist's control, and coercive policies. But they thoughts on how to deal with our did call for full information about birth revolting new $5 note were suitably control for all people. republican. An expensive shower Contrary to press reports, the curtain perhaps, but I am sure many Catholic position on population plan­ Australians would enjoy seeing the ning is very close to that of leading face of the foreign potentate covered development economists such as by mould. Professor Michael Todaro of Prince­ I must report, however, that vol. 2 ton, whose Economic Development no. 8 has cost you a reader. My teenage in the Third World is a standard text. daughter regards your film review on Street, September 1992) and Malcolm Some light was shed by a front­ p40 as a libellous attack on Madonna Fraser were misled; so were the Arch­ page report in Sydney's Catholic Louise Veronica Ciccone. She has pas­ bishop of Canterbury, Phillip Adams Weekly (5 August 1992), which quot­ sionately declared that she will never and P.P. McGuinness in The Austral­ ed the first assistant secretary of the read Eureka Street again. ian, and Pamela Bone and Fia Cum­ Canberra office of the Department of Clive Keeley ming in The Age, all of whom gave the Health, Housing and Community Lesmurdie, WA church a caning. Despite weeks of Services, Marie Coleman, who chaired effort to reply to these accusations in one of the sessions in New York. Mrs various papers, I have not succeeded. Coleman, who is not a Catholic, said Those familiar with the Vatican that the media had been fed a line Media misled position will know that the papacy about supposed Vatican intransigence, on Rio summit supports population planning as long as part of the UN population agency's as the freedom of married couples is battle to avoid funding cuts. From Bruce Duncan CSsR respected. (See Development of Peo­ Dr N afis Salik, the executive It seems that the Western press was ples, 37 .) The church recognises that director of the UN Population Fund, 'taken for a ride' by reports that the there is a genuine population problem visited Australian this year and was in many, but certainly not all, coun­ interviewed by the Catholic Weekly tries . (26 August). She denied that the agen­ .. AND \H£ WINI{E.R 15 '" As to methods of family planning, cy's funding was under threat, but /rfe - W11H -rwo von:s_t the church has not changed its teach­ admitted that there had been a differ­ ing·on contraception, but this must be ence of view with the Vatican about understood within the general con­ whether to use the term 'family text of moral theology. Pope Paul VI planning' or 'planning responsible recognised a method that might be family size'. Dr Salik said that faxes seen as 'strict in principle but liberal lobbying against the Vatican had been in practice', and commended his sent from her office, but that the person teaching to Catholics to see what was responsible had been reprimanded. possible in their circumstances. The truth is that population issues It is true that the church was slow were on the agenda at the Rio, and that to recognise that even using the natural a consensus, which included the Vati­ methods of family planning was legit­ can, was reached on these. It is curious imate, but the Vatican Council clearly that the press has so uncritically ac­ supported this more liberal view. The cepted reports of the Vatican holding implications of the doctrine of reli­ ridiculous views-the more so gious freedom have also been applied because, to the best of my knowledge, only slowly. In 1990 the Philippines' these false reports have not been cor­ Vatican had kept the population issue bishops moved to a new position that rected. off the agenda at the Earth Summit in has won wide support. Bruce Duncan CSsR Rio. Not only Michael Breen (Eureka After holding back population Box Hill, Vic.

6 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 THE N ATION

M ARGARET SIMONS

Commissions and omissions

0 NC OF THE FASGNATING THtNGS •bout bn Temby he hoped politicians would conclude 'that standards of QC, cool customer and head of New South Wales' candour are lower than they need be.' Temby's finding controversial Independent Commission Against that Greiner's conduct was corrupt was overturned on Corr-uption (ICAC), is that he claims, with one exception, appeal, but it was already too late for the Premier. In to be unable to remember telling a lie at any time in the the wake of the appeal court's decision, some suggested past 20 years. The exception is that he has lied about that the fight against corruption had gone 'too far'-that matters sexual: 'I don't want to appear precious. The the standards Temby had tried to set were too high. fact is that up until 10 years ago I was not a sexually Although his finding has been overturned, the faithful person and I lied about it. decision of the appeal court does not mean that the issues 'I try very hard to tell the truth. There are some­ raised by Temby's report will go away. Has the com­ times shades of meaning and sometimes one is trou­ munity become less tolerant of cronyism and lies in bled by omissions from statements. Also, our capacity public life, or is it indeed possible to take the fight for for self-delusion is infinite, and I don't have a perfect integrity 'too far'? memory. I make a conscious effort not to tell untruths The '80s was not only the decade of capitalist robber or, indeed, mislead.' barons, it was also a tin1e when the Australian commu­ There is more than just voyeuristic interest in these nity began taking special measures to bust organised confessions. They are significant because of the judg­ crime and corruption. During the past decade Australia ments that Ian Temby made in his report on the role of has had a plethora of royal commissions, and three the then NSW Premier, Nick Greiner, in the Metherell special crime-busting bodies have been set up: the affair. Temby claimed that community ethical stand­ National Crime Authority (NCA) at federal level, the ards of honesty and integrity for public officials had Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) in Queensland, and changed, so that political appointments to the public the Independent Commission Against Corruption in service-' jobs for the boys'-were no longer acceptable. NSW. Some politicians in Western Australia and South This was one of the factors behind his finding that there Australia now argue that ICAC-type bodies were reasonable grounds for Greiner to be sacked. should be set up in those states as well. Temby also found that Greiner and others had lied to the media. 'It is not a criminal offence to lie,' Temby A LL THESE BODIES HAVE BEEN CONTROVERSIAL, and their said, 'and as I was reminded so often during the course existence raises questions about the functioning of of the hearing, the ICAC is not a court of morals.' But Australian democracy. Why are special organisations

V oLUME 2 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 7 body, which in the years since the end of the Fitzgerald inquiry has reformed the state's electoral boundaries and much of its legislative framework. The EARC is the most open stat­ utory body ever set up in Australia, and has also picked up that hot potato dropped by fed­ eral politicians-a bill of rights to safeguard the rights of the individual. How does this sit with Sherman's new job as head of one of the most secretive and potentially intrusive bodies in the country? He says: 'I think civil liberties are important, but there is a delicate balancing act involved here. Look at what's happening in Italy with the Mafia. I don't want to suggest that we have a problem of that scale, but if you want to protect the rule of law you need bodies with special powers to deal with special problems. 'I think that at the end of the day society has to make up its mind whether current mechanisms work with sophisticated organ­ ised crime. If you look back through history You have to have a high amount of faith in normal you will find that most bodies are created to institutions, faith that they will continue, before address a particular problem. Go back more than a century and you wouldn't have an in­ you can set up an ICAC, otherwise it is a recipe for stitutionalised police force. I'm sure that if you went back and looked at the London Times of bloody revolution. - IAN TEMBY 1840 or 1850, whenever the inland revenue was established, you would find those sorts of debates going on in media in those days. ' needed, if the normal checks and balances of the West­ As head of ICAC, Ian Temby sees the trade-off minster system, and the ordinary law-enforcement between liberty and integrity somewhat differently. The agencies, are working effectively? commission does have intrusive powers, but they Comparisons can be misleading, and there are impinge mainly on public officials and government important differences between the three crime busters. bodies, and he believes they fit naturally with the tradi­ The ICAC is concerned only with public officials, has tional checks and balances of the Westminster system. an educative function, and has no power to prosecute. 'The ICAC may be best viewed,' he says, 'as a third leg The CJC is responsible for criminal-law refonn, for crime of an integrity triumvirate, with the other legs being statistics and for research as well as investigations into the Ombudsman, who manages proper administration, corruption. As for the NCA, exactly what its role should and the Auditor-General, who is concerned with finan­ be has been one of the main causes of controversy in cial propriety. The ICAC is concerned with integrity in the years since it was set up. Critics of the authority, general conduct. If you view it like that there's nothing including civil libertarians and some police forces, say very smashing about it. From time to time each of those that it has no function, and should be abolished. bodies, if they are doing their job, will do something Yet there are similarities. All three bodies have which is fairly controversial.' powers similar to those of royal commissions but are Temby believes the establishment of the ICAC was permanent bodies, whereas royal commissions are not, as some believe, a symptom of declining confidence usually set up to address a particular issue. The exist­ in democratic institutions but an expression of faith in ence of the ICAC, CJC and NCA means that in the fight their robustness. 'Although certain things we have done against organised crime and corruption-in the strug­ have been greeted with a certain amount of shouting gle to lift standards of honesty and integrity-the and arm waving,' he says, 'the fundamental institutions community has traded off some of its civil of government have remained unaffected. They have liberties. continued to function effectively. 'You have to have a high amount of faith in normal 'IEHEAD OF THE NATIO NAL CruME AuTHORJTY, Tom institutions, faith that they will continue, before you Sherman, has an undoubted commitment to civil liber­ can set up an ICAC, otherwise it is a recipe for bloody ties. He comes fresh from an extraordinarily successful revolution. I could not see an ICAC-type body operating stint as head of the Queensland Electoral and Adminis­ as it was meant to in Britain, where such matters are trative Review Commission (EARC),the CJC's sister sorted out, if they are at all, between clubbable chaps.

8 EUREKA STREET • O CTOBER 1992 It's very clear that in parts of Asia such an organisation politically charged ground. He says: 'I'm interested in would have an effect which would be destructive.' practical, useful outcomes and you tend not to get those Temby's view sits well with Tony Fitzgerald's jus­ in old matters that others have had a go at. The former tification for setting up the Criminal Justice Commis­ Premier's conduct was always impeccable. Certainly he sion in the wake of his inquiry into corruption in the never suggested I should do over the ALP. He might Queensland police force. The commission, Fitzgerald have had a hope, but I don't think he had an expectation.' said, should be part of the normal democratic process­ Why, then, did Temby put all that credibility at he wanted it to be 'independent, but not autonomous', risk by entering on the Greiner investigation? 'We did part of the machinery of democracy rather nothing until the 13th day after the appointment was than something operating outside it. made, and it was clear that there would be an inquiry of some sort. The cry was corruption. That was the word E ACH OF THE CRIME-BUSTING ORGANJSATIONS reports to that was being used, and we are the anti-corruption body. the parliament that created it through a parliamentary We could hardly leave it to someone else to do. I never committee. The NCA's relationship with its commit­ doubted that if adverse findings had to be made, there tee has been stormy, and in the past the authority has was potential for considerable downside, but once you tried to withhold information from the committee. On reach the point where it's your work and you can't the other hand, committee members have been accused properly leave it to someone else, then you have to do it of placing security at risk by leaking material from con­ regardless of the downside.' fidential briefings. The CJC has found a strong ally in The CJC is in sharp contrast to the ICAC. It has its committee, which has been quick to leap to its been constantly in the headlines, and the controversies defence. This has in tum laid the committee open to in which it has been involved have generated far more allegations that it is too close to the body it is meant to be monitoring. Some critics, including the investi­ I think civil liberties are important, but there is a delicate gative journalist Bob Bottom, say that politicians should not be trusted with balancing act involved here ... at the end of the day society power over bodies that may have to in­ vestigate corruption in government. Yet has to make up its mind whether current mechanisms work what alternative is there? Organisations with intrusive powers over citizens can with sophisticated organised cri1ne. -ToM SHERMAN hardly be allowed to run around unchecked. As Sherman says: 'In a democracy there is no choice. If the elected representatives can't do it, then there's something wrong.'

I F THE ICAC SURVIVES the controversy over the Metherell affair, it will be because it has three years of quiet, worthy and creditable work behind it-work which has significantly contributed to improve­ ments in public administration. In Temby's words: 'Six months ago we were an accepted part of the furniture. We were seen as functioning effectively and we were viewed as an uncontrover­ sial body. The Metherell matter has changed that but I don't think it will change things permanently.' The ICAC's credibility was hard­ won-when its tenure began, the com­ mission was presented with a list of more than 70 matters that the Liberal Govern­ ment wanted investigated. Most were old Labor Party scandals, such as the Love Boat saga and the Enmore conspiracy al­ legations, but Temby made it clear that he had no intention of entering such

V oLUME 2 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 9 Probletn child heat than light. The worst example began earlier this year when the state Police Minister, Terry Mackenroth, T HE MOVE TO SET UP SPECiAL BODIES to fight crime and resigned after it had been found that he used taxpayers' corruption began after a string of royal commissions in money for private expenses. Apparently intent on the late 1970s and early 1980s-Moffitt, Woodward, bringing others down with him, he made a series of Williams, Stewart and Costigan-found organised crime allegations against the Police Commissioner, Noel operating at almost every level of Australian society. Newnham, who had been brought in as an 'honest cop' The National Crime Authority came first in 1984, to reform the force. after the controversial closure of the Costigan royal Mackenroth's allegations proved to be groundless, commission. The staff of that commission were rolled but the ensuing investigation showed up other discrep­ into the authority, which was created by an Act of ancies in Newnham's travel expenses. What followed­ Federal Parliament, supported by the states. another investigation, an appeal, and an investigation The purpose of the NCA has been one of the hot­ into the conduct of the appeal-generated enough heat test subjects of debate, with state and federal police forces to gut Newnham's career, and badly singe all the other claiming that it 'poaches' on their territory. The agents of reform. Almost everyone involved, including authority has also been hobbled by a hostile media, the Premier, Wayne Goss, the CJC chairman, Max which regretted the end to the crusades of the Costigan Bingham, and leading members of the Queensland bar, royal commission. behaved badly. Yet nothing was resolved and now Broadly, the NCA is meant to investigate major or Mackenroth, who in this and other matters has shown 'organised' crime in cooperation with other police forces, himself to be an enemy of the Fitzgerald reforms, is and to collect, analyse and disseminate intelligence expected to rejoin the ministry after the election. about criminal activities. It has a staff of 3 77, including Some people's standards haven't changed. In seconded police, and a budget of $22.5 million. Queensland, apparently, it still helps to be a mate. The authority's longest-serving chairman, Justice Likewise, the National Crime Authority has also Stewart, was criticised for being too secretive and for a had almost nothing but bad publicity, and has looked lack of 'runs on the board', i.e. major prosecutions. Since very much like an organisation in search of a role. Sher­ he left in 1989, the authority has had four chairmen. man defends it thus: 'For the first five years of its life First came Peter Faris QC, who lasted only seven the NCA had a sunset clause. That is not very condu­ months. He resigned on the grounds of ill-health, soon cive to strategic thinking. The imperative was to get after Victorian police found him near a Melbourne runs on the board. When I came along the thing that brothel, carrying a large amount of cash. He was replaced struck me most was the word "national" in the title. by Julian Lecke, as acting chairman, who was in turn We should be concentrating on national problems and replaced by Justice Phillips. we should identify what they are by sharing Phillips announced a change in direction for the and coordinating intelligence.' authority, with more emphasis on the investigation of white-collar crime. This was widely, though wrongly, E NCTION IS THE KEY. The crime-busting bodies that interpreted to mean that the authority was abandoning have survived and prospered are those, like the tradi­ the pursuit of drug dealers. Six months ago Justice tional police forces, whose tasks have been clearly Phillips was replaced by Tom Sherman, who came fresh defined, and which have achieved a balance between from successfully establishing the Queensland Electoral necessary secrecy and public accountability. and Administrative Review Commission. As to whether community standards have changed, Sherman, who has taken on a job many believe to with the CJC still struggling in Queensland, the NCA be 'mission impossible', argues that good work done by searching for credibility and Temby's understanding of the NCA has been neglected by the public, partly be­ the meaning of corruption overturned by an appeal court, cause of excessive secrecy. He intends to be more open it seems that Australians are still far from clear about with the media. the sort of society they want, and how many sacrifices With a bureaucrat's understanding of the impor­ they are prepared to make to achieve it. • tance of function, Sherman plans to use the analysis of intelligence to determine which areas require the co­ Margaret Simons is a regular contributor to Eureka Street ordination and special powers of the NCA. 'Take car stealing for example,' he says. 'The NCA could seek Famine in Somalia/Africa references from states and Commonwealth, and then Dona tions ca n be sent to: have a large group of police investigating the problem in Austra li an Catholic Re lief, GPO Box 9830 in your capital a co-ordinated way, so people engaging in these acti-vi­ city, (cheq ues pa ya ble to 'Appea l fo r Africa'); ties feel the combined heat. Depending on the matter, or to CARE Austra li a, GPO Box 9977 in your capita l city we might involve Customs, Tax, and so on. I don't think (cheques paya ble to 'Famine Re lief Appea l'). that sort of coordination has ever happened.' • CAR E Austra lia also accepts donations by Freephone 008 020 046, -Margaret Simons or at any Commonwealth Ba nk branch.

10 EUREKA STREET • O c TOBER 1992 Perils in the power of one

T o ncNcs STANO IN TH' WAY of an automatic useful Hewson ideas. Essentially, however, it is mark­ Hewson victory at the next election. The first is John edly flexible. Hewson himself, a strangely brittle if driven man, who Hewson has not seen any need to adapt to this is capable of becoming an electoral issue in the same approach-after all, his plan is perfect. And switching way that his rival Paul Keating already is. Will it be a may seem to be a sign of weakness. On the latter point, case of victory going to the less unpopular man? The Keating has developed a successful line of attack on second obstacle is whether a Hewson-led Liberal Party Hewson's dogmatism: Hewson is the 'feral abacus', a can maintain the sort of broad electoral support that it 'paranoid' who wants to set fire to the Australian econ­ needs to win. omy in the belief that economic man will rise from the The two problems come together in the personali­ ashes. ty of John Hewson. Although the ideological tendency The Opposition Leader openly scorns the captains he represents is now the dominant one in Liberal par­ of industry, telling them that have spent too long cud­ liamentary politics, he is not leading the party simply dling up to the government and that it is time to face because he won an argument. He is there because the the chill winds of international competition. Keating, Liberals, who have lost election after election in the past on the other hand, has them onside, expressing doubts decade because of poor leadership, decided on massive about Liberal policies. The doubts do not have to be too change. There are many in the Liberal ranks who have strong, since Hewson can be relied upon to snap at the little time for Hewson or his ideas, but who want victo­ slightest hint of deviation. His inflexibility already has ry and see him as their only chance. many Liberal backbenchers squirming, and some are When the Figbtback! policies were launched, starting to make their reservations public. Hewson marketed them well. The economy was at The Hewson personality is not only interesting in bottom and Labor, tired and out of ideas, was plainly in gladiatorial terms. It raises real questions about how he disarray. Even the ALP's best friends thought that the will perform in government-if he gets there. He is not best rejuvenation treatment would be a term in waiting for bureaucratic advice about how to implement opposition. Hewson, in contrast, seemed to have ideas. his policies. Detailed plans have already been drafted And he was bold enough to take risks. The conventional by committees of true believers, and there is a schedule wisdom then was that to talk openly of a new tax was for the first year of government. suicide; Hewson's willingness to do so seemed refresh­ Kaiser Bill, so the legend goes, became a prisoner of ingly honest. Yet it was not the content of the plan that railway schedules. His general staff had drawn up a war took people's imaginations, so much as the fact that he plan to get men and materiel to the front. It required had a plan at all. mastering every detail of the railway systems in terri­ Since then, Hewson has become messianic about tories through which the armies would have to pass, the plan: it and only it can rescue Australia. Early out­ and then devising complicated timetables so that breaks of sniping from traditional Liberal supporters­ resources could be concentrated in the right place at the the big manufacturers, for example-were sold by right time. For one reason or another, the plan went Hewson as a plus: they meant that voters would not see awry. If Point X was not taken within 10 days, for the party as being in the pocket of the big end of town. example, there would be a bottleneck, meaning the next Hewson has always despised the interest groups, and in objective could not be taken in time, and so on. The an era of extreme cynicism about politics he thinks that general staff did not have the flexibility to adapt their a straighforward 'I'm-being-honest-with-the-electorate plans to cirucumstances. approach' is a selling point. Moreover, the plan has For Prime Minister Hewson, a time will come when become a sacred text, and Hewson is beyond being the program-assuming it has got through the election consulted about it. unscathed-requires a flexibility it has not had before. His troops were warned at the outset that there What if a manu£acturer calls his bluff and closes down a would be false prophets-that some people in the party major factory? Or if there is a sudden exchange-rate crisis would be invited to set up secret caucuses to influence having nothing to do with Australia as such, but with policy. These false prophets would not only be ignored, some adventure by, for example, the Bundesbank? Or if but punished. In the early days this message did not a major insurance company faces collapse because of have to be driven home. Liberal politicians know that CBD land prices? Sooner or later, something will call opposition disunity is usually the only thing that can for the sort of intervention that, by current dogma, is save a government from the price of its incompetence. anathema. In Paul Keating, Labor has a politician with a gen­ In such circumstances Hewson would be a horse ius for taking the fight to the enemy. Voters may loathe without form, one whose style hitherto suggests that him, but he is the best in the business at defining the he lacks the creativity to adapt to circumstances. For issues. Keating has a plan, too, and it appeals precisely Dr Hewson and his brand of true believers, such a crisis because its approach is not ideological. The Keating plan would quickly threaten his style of leadership. • makes some ritualistic bows at ideas with which most people feel comfortable, and borrows some of the more Jack Waterford is deputy editor of The Canberra Times.

V oLUME 2 N u M BER 9 • EUREKA STREET 11 Whatever the economic and political realities, the lighthouse represents a bid for Dominican regional leadership ... In this part of the world, gestures are action.

12 EUREKA STREET • O c TOBER 1992 THE WORLD

B RUCE WILLIAMS

Blinded by the light A monument to folly or a beacon of hope: the Columbus lighthouse in Santo Domingo focuses all the tensions in the European legacy in the Americas.

ON12 Ocro'" 1992 a" val to the Southern em, however, is the prospect of visitors. We sat under a tree, will appear in the skies over the Americas. In Santo the people from the agency and the communications Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, the committee, and discussed these matters. One man asked most powerful lighthouse ever built will blaze its cruci­ what happens if a donor from the United States visits form beam into the sky to mark the quincentenary of and has an accident-trips over and breaks a leg, perhaps. Columbus' landing. Within this vast building illustri­ Will the community be liable for the medical expenses? ous guests from church and state, from the New World I reflected that it was a good thing that the development and the Old, will witness the final interment of the great agency had insurance. Otherwise, it would be hard to admiral's bones. Everyone has something to celebrate, explain that the bill for one broken American leg-as­ and none more so than the republic's president, Joaquin suming a clean break-would equal the combined an­ Balaguer, for whom the opening of the lighthouse will nual income of 20 El Prado families. Another man fulfil a lifetime's ambition. worried that, if there were dancing to welcome the vis­ President Balaguer has committed a very large sum itors, they might be shocked. Here in the Dominican of his people's money to this project. No one knows Republic we dance like this, he said, demonstrating a exactly how much, and Balaguer does not head the kind tight hold. of government from which figures, as such, are available. The Dominican government is not indifferent to The president, unfortunately, will not see the beam the plight of its poor. President Balaguer's administration irradiate the clouds, for he is blind. There is a distinct spent more than it could well afford last financial year, possibility that no one else will see it, either: the first putting up housing developments in urban areas. More time the light was tested, it blew out the entire electri­ than it could afford, that is, given what it was spending cal system of Santo Domingo. on the lighthouse. But there are limits, and there are El Prado, 'The Meadow', is a collection of shanties contradictions. If you ask about El Prado, you will be on the edge of a small, dusty town, two hours from the told it does not exist. After all, it is not on the map. The capital of the Dominican Republic. The shanties are site for the Columbus lighthouse was cleared by bull­ made out of material collected from garbage dumps-a dozing away 50,000 fringe dwellers. Some were re­ few concrete blocks, panels cut from milk tins-held housed. The rest disappeared into other slums, which together by the local wattle-and-daub. There is nothing in Santo Domingo are tucked away in warrens behind so formal as a street, just rock-strewn open space, with the main streets, or on the edge of town. On the parkland one larger area cleared for a baseball pitch. Occasional around the lighthouse stand new sets of townhouses; to labouring, hawking and (illegal) charcoal burning bring get one you need a government job. in what income there is. The labouring rate is US$2 for So, what to make of the lighthouse? Another folly a 10-hour day but it's not on offer every day, or even in the annals of arbitrary rule, another example of how every week. You see men returning from a day's work, not to do it in a developing country? On the face of it, 30 of them jammed together in the tray of a company yes. But there seems to be an unusual degree of whole­ truck. hearted support for the project from those whose per­ An international development agency, on the spectives might be expected to be different. Pope John sponsorship model, has recently begun operations in El Paul will be there to see the light switched on, as will Prado. The local people have formed a communications King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain. Such people committee to consider administrative detail-the ex­ cannot be ignorant of the ironies and the injustice change of mail, when reports are due, and that kind of involved, nor indifferent to the needs of the poor. But thing. What fires the imagination of the committee, there is a great deal at stake, for Columbus' landing is

VoLUME 2 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 13 the junction of many lines of symbolism. Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise makes him Some interpret President Balaguer's lighthouse as like Hitler in a caravel, landing like a virus among the a statesman-like initiative; rather than mindlessly cele­ innocent people of the New World.' This is grossly unfair brating the past, he is making use of it. Along the road to Sale's book, which is largely a dispassionate study of to the airport at Santo Domingo are plaques represent­ images of Columbus. But Hughes goes on to make the ing all the nations of the Caribbean. Whatever the eco- legitimate point that polarising of the kind he gibes at nomic and political realities, the eliminates the true complexity of history. Moreover, if lighthouse represents a bid for Dominican we were to follow only the logic of indignation, it is regional leadership, an assertion of tem­ hard to see that anyone, anywhere, would ever For most of us it is poral and moral priority, and a symbol on have much to celebrate. impossible to live this scale, in a region afflicted by both poverty and tourism, may well be a source INTKE UNITED STATES the Columbus celebrations be­ of pride and admiration. In this part of the gan early this year and have flowed on, city by city, state with the idea that world, gestures are action. by state, with each week bringing news of some fresh the past is nothing For a lot of other people, however, junketing. In Boston a million and a half people- more such Realpolitik counts for nothing than the population of the city-turned out to view the but a record of horror against their belief that the lighthouse is a Tall Ships. The whole fleet came to Newport, Rhode monument to moral outrage. 'Hispaniola', Island, which often plays host to grand events, but in the ... only in the pages of as Columbus knew the island, was no capital, Providence, we had to make do with just one more terra nullius in 1492 than Australia replica of the NiJ1a. People stood on the deck and said 1066 and All That was in 1788 (see Eureka Street, July 1992). how wonderful it was to have sailed halfway round the There were already people living on the world in a little boat like that. could the entire island, and they were wiped out through a The mayor of Providence, Vincent ('Buddy') Cianci combination of maltreatment and disease. jun., is a streetwise gentleman who has been mistaken, history of the The present inhabitants of the Dominican on ceremonial occasions, for a stand-up comedian. Republic are black and mulatto, many of Cianci presides over a city divided in many different Americas since 1492 them descendants of the African slaves the ways, and where views on the quincentenary differ Spaniards brought in when they ran short widely. (His budget committee cut the budget for the be described as of labour. They feel little sense of connec­ festivities in half.) There are growing numbers of His­ tion with the original inhabitants, who panics, including many from the Dominican Republic, A Bad Thing. were known as the Tainos. The historical and there are African-Americans. Politics and business sketch in the official tourist guide steers life are dominated by people of Italian descent, and there the reader in the right direction with block are a lot of others, like the Knights of Columbus, for capitals: 'The island of Hispaniola', it begins, ' ... which whom the quincentenary means an occasion for con­ the native Taino Indians called Babeque or Haiti, siderable splash. But Providence is also home to large was discovered by CHRISTOPHER numbers of displaced and persecuted people, like the COLUMBUS ... ' Hmong from Vietnam. It used to be home to quite a few Native Americans, too. Cianci is aware that the tides of EOR CRITICS OF THE LI GHTHOUSE, Columbus' landing opinion are not favourable to conquistadors just now. symbolises the conquest of all the Americas, North and His solution: tum the quincentenary into a festival South, and the outrage extends to all the victims of co­ of multiculturalism. Celebrate the ideals of diversity lonialism-to the dead, but also to their descendants and mutual dwelling in peace. 'It is fitting,' he said when who still struggle in the countryside, in slums and in unveiling a refurbished statue, 'that today in Elmwood reservations from Tierra del Fuego to Baffinland. In our neighbourhoods reflect the many cultures of a world August the New York Times published a grim survey of that was opened by discovery.' He didn't say anything the plight of Latin America's Indians. Kirkpatrick Sale's about the worlds that were closed. Cianci's strategy, and thoughtful book The Conquest of Paradise, a rich dis­ he isn't the only dignitary using it in the US this year, is cussion of the Columbus legend, adds the environmen­ to shift the debate away from the question of what talist reminder that the conquistadors of the New World happened way back, and to concentrate instead on have an urgent need to learn something from those same whatever is praiseworthy in our present arrangements. Indians about how to dwell with the world. For Sale, it To adulate the past, to revile it, to ignore it in favour is imperative that we rethink the exploitative values of communal self-congratulation-these are the masked by the heroic of the Columbus legend. favoured simplifications. There will be no breaking their Thus the debate, pitched between a conservative hold on those who above all want to be clear and defi­ desire to celebrate the glories of civilisation and the faith, nite. In my mind, Cianci's benign plurality is ruled out and a radical demand for ugly truth to be exposed. by the memory of El Prado. There i a need to remem­ Robert Hughes, in a Time essay, puts it this way: 'For our ber the violence and injustice of the past because it is predecessors (Columbus) was Manifest Destiny in tights, still going on, and not only in the Dominican Republic, whereas a current PC ['politically correct'] book like where it takes the form of neglect, but in the many

14 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 countries where Indians and other minorities are perse­ cuted. Past and present cannot be wrenched apart. At the same time, for most of us it is impossible to live Just genes? with the idea that the past is nothing but a record of horror, Stephen Daedalus' 'nightmare' from which it is INTHE VE ERABLE international science journal Nature, our duty to wake. Nor need we try: only in the pages of virtually all of the 20 or so full-page colour advertise­ 1066 and A ll Th at could the entire history of the ments these days are for various kinds of equipment Americas since 1492 be described as A Bad Thing. that would offer an edge in gene stripping, DNA se­ The problem (as it was in the Australian bicenten­ quencing, and so on. nial year) is partly the equation of 'celebration' with Most telephone directories give you the name you 'having a good time'. Alastair Reid, writing about the are looking for, followed by a number: the code is already Dominican quincentenary in The New Yorker, closes by unscrambled. But imagine a telephone directory that saying: 'About the wrongs of the past we can do noth­ listed the numbers in sequence, fo llowed by the names. ing, but we can at least look at them squarely, and see It would not be very practical, and our first task would them clearly.' be to list all the names in alphabetical sequence and And at the wrongs of the present? It is to be hoped, attach numbers to them. So also in genetic engineering: for example, that Pope John Paul will bring to bear on science is engaged in unscrambling thousands of genetic President Balaguer the sam e kind of suasions used on codes into their special significances. the leader of the Ivory Coast in the matter of the giant There is a gene, for example, that produces the al · cathedral. Even so, it will not be enough if private pha-isoform of the calcium-cadmodulin-dependent negotiations are reported belatedly, in the specialised multifunctional protein kinase II. By removing this gene media, while the public events are proclaimed as an un­ from the DNA of mice, a mutant animal is produced equivocal triumph. What is needed to restore life to the that seems normal except for its ability to cope with meaning of 'New World' is a solemn celebration, one spatial learning tasks. The brains of these mice display that both expresses dismay at the bloody past and other characteristics of memory loss, particularly a responds to the present call from the people of El Prado greatly impaired long-term potentiation of synaptic and all those others who have little to celebrate. To say transmissions. Similar research on other genes helps to Mass on such an occasion is considered essential; to say, build up a picture of how DNA shapes the design, con­ loudly and clearly, how its symbolism should be applied struction, and maintenance of our bodies. is an urgent duty. • Genetic research offers simpler and better ways of treating many serious bodily malfunctions, especially Bruce Williams is senior lecturer in drama at LaTrobe cancers and viruses, perhaps even schizophrenia and University, Victoria. He has been taking sabbatical leave depression. One may fear the commercial exploitation at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. of such discoveries, but that has always been the am­ biguity of scientific research. We should not assume that one can totally under­ stand the whole by understanding the parts. One of the COMMON WEALTH curious results of the research into the mutant mice, FOR THE for example, is that the particular gene under investi­ gation is 'regulatory' rather than 'obligatory'; that is, the CoMMoN GooD whole organism can find ways around particular prob­ lems. Any forces that attempt to break down complex A statement by the organic structures are often compensated for by proc­ Australian Catholic esses taking place within the structure itself. Bishops' Conference. Our purpose, the future towards which we move, may be as important in our evolution as the molecular mechanisms that shape us. Genetic engineering, in so far as it ignores the future The result of a fi ve-year consultative to which we are drawn, may simply entail removing process, th e bish ops' statem ent undesired genes: this is a kind of racial cleansing, a explores the issues of wealth and pov­ censorship of ideas, a power play. The impetus for this erty in Australia and m akes recom ­ wonderful scientific research must surely be our loving m endations fo r a m ore just distribution care for the infinn among us rather than our ambition of wealth. $12.95 to achieve control of our own destiny. The former is an acknowledgement of our weakness and our need for one another, the latter merely another bite on that apple Available from the Jesuit Publications Bookroom , PO Box 553 Richmond VIC 3121 from the tree of wisdom and knowledge, taking us even In clude $3. 00 for postage and handling. further from the paradise of God's dreams. • -John Honner SJ

V oLUME 2 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 15 I T HE C HURCH

Row AN IRELAND Transplants and rejections It is often claimed that missionaries are agents of colonialism. But both defenders and opponents of the view tend to assume that missionaries have been more successful than is in fact the case.

I WANT TO QUESTION AN ATilTUDE towards the role of Catholic missions in the oppression of Amer­ indians since the time of Columbus. This attitude was expressed most dramatically by Amerindians themselves, in an open letter addressed to the Pope on the occasion of his first visit to Peru: 'We, Indians of the Andes and America, have decided ~~~~~~~~~~~~2~!:~~~~~;';~~~~~~ to take advantage of the visit of Pope John Paul II Th f C b . A . Theodor de Bry, Cl th to return his Bible because in 500 years it has given us e arriva 1 o o1 um us w menca. 6 neither love, nor peace, nor justice. Please give it b ac 1< Photo: Missio to our oppressors because they need its moral precepts Christian peoples, to reduce them into slavery and to more than we ... It was the ideological arm of the colo­ seize their lands since they were "unjust possessors of nial assault.' them". The infidel, in the eyes of the Portuguese, had The academic version of this attitude fills out that neither rights of property nor personal rights. The final sentence (itself a sign that a kind of academic salvation of his soul justified the loss of his personal missionary has been successful among some Amerindi­ liberty.' ans). It would go something like this: In the name of This suggests an attempt to give religious legiti­ pacifying the Indians and harnessing their labour power, macy to the suppression of the Indians, rather than Catholic Christianity was successfully imposed on them hegemonic control over the Indians themselves. But key and, with varying degrees of intention on the part of Jesuits working among the Guarani would have none of successive generations of missionaries, became a sort such legitimations, although in their desire to protect of hegemonic ideology. Indians from Crown and colonists they did work hard In other words, Catholic Christianity's myths and to establish a kind of ideological hegemony. models for living became the means through which For these Jesuits, protection implied conversion­ colonial and neo-colonial rule was established over the indeed, one of the principal reasons for protecting the Indians. I shall examine how well this view fits what Indians was to save them from the corrupting influence we know of four phases of Catholic missionary activity of the colonists, as well as from enslavement. Initially in Brazil. the Jesuits seem to have thought that it would be easier to convert Indians than Moors and Jews-the Indians The Jesuits and the Tupi-Guarani, 1549-1767 seemed to have no idols, and little religion of their own. The Portuguese Crown was always less subtle than the In their spirit of thunder, Tupa or Tupana, they seemed Spanish in its attitude to the Indians, and agonised less to have some intuition of God. In their myths they about them. The 16th century historian Joao de Barros seemed to have some knowledge of the Flood; and there probably represented Portuguese attitudes accurately were signs that the ubiquitous St Thomas had passed when he wrote ... 'that the church gave the Portuguese through, leaving vague collective memories to build on. a free hand to make war without provocation on non- [When Portuguese missionaries reached India, they dis-

16 EUREKA STRE ET • O cTOBER 1992 covered a Christian community that claimed to have 1. Allowing that the Jesuit n1.issions might them­ been founded by St Thomas the Apostle.] selves be represented as some sort of colonial assault, But, as well as having to dodge the Indians' sports do we not have to distinguish between various colonial of death-war and cannibalism-the Jesuits encountered assaults that in this case are in conflict with one anotherz several problems. One was the Indians' nomadic way of 2. Given that the Jesuits were, judged by word and life, which, the Jesuits slowly discovered, involved a action, attempting to stave off and contain other colo­ prophetic tradition of belief in an earthly paradise. A nial assaults-and, despite dreadful failures like that start towards conversion would be made, then Indians depicted in the film The Mission, were frequently suc­ would move on and conversion/protection would have cessful during a period of more than 200 years-what to begin all over again. Other problems included the lack basis is there for the case that they represent the ideo­ of a centralised political authority, so that a strategy of logical arm of the assaults of Crown and colonists? Not converting leaders was not possible, the Indians' stub­ much, unless it be maintained that insofar as the Jesu­ born attachment to their shamans, and their exuber­ its did convert the Indians, they weakened them for self­ antly cheerful immorality. defence. This argument cannot be There was another problem, which the Jesuits did sustained, and one reason why it can­ not recognise but which, I would suggest, was the not is suggested by my third question. There was another greatest problem for their project of conversion. This 3. Did the Jesuits succeed in con­ was the identification by the Indians of the Jesuits as verting the Indians to a hegemonic problem, which the maira, or especially powerful shamans. So identified, ideology at all? There are documented the Jesuits were confined within Indian beliefs about cases of Jesuits being frustrated to dis­ Jesuits did not the order of things, and their prospects of winning con­ cover, from time to time, that they and verts curtailed. their myths had been incorporated into recognise but which To deal with the problems they did recognise, the an intact Indian system of beliefs about Jesuits decided that conversion/protection required the world and its inhabitants. A was the greatest subjection of the Indians to colonial authority-mean­ description of Indians and Indian set­ ing subjection to enlightened officers of the Crown, not tlements made 50 years after the dis­ problem for their to local colonists. Under Mem de Sa, the third governor persion of the reductions suggests that of Brazil, who arrived in 1557, the famous 'reductions' descendants of the refugees were both project of conversion ... were set up: Indians were gathered together into Jesuit­ fitting into the subordinate place controlled settlements, curtailing nomadic tendencies. allowed them in colonial society and the identification by The Jesuits then selected political leaders, through maintaining a sort of cosmological in­ whom they policed their version of moral dependence from it. the Indians of the behaviour. 1810 Jesuits as especially EoM THAT TIME TO THE PRESENT, controversy has raged In this year Henry Koster, an English­ about the rights and wrongs, the achievements and dis­ man resident in north-east Brazil for powerful shamans. asters, of the reductions. Defenders of the Jesuits cite most of the years from 1809 until his So identified, they their success in protecting the Indians from enslavement death in 1820, travelled north and, for­ and extermination by the settlers. They point out that tunately for us, recorded his astute ob­ were confined within the Jesuits tried to engage with Indian culture, rather servations in Travels in Brazil. In Ceara than simply to replace it, producing dictionaries of the he visited some Indian villages, in one Indian beliefs about Indian languages and allowing native music and dance of which the vicar 'resided in a building in religious ceremonies. Great care was given to build­ which had formerly belonged to the the order of things. ing Christianity on foundations that the Jesuits believed, Jesuits'. Koster notes what presumably mistakenly, were there in Indian cosmology and lan­ he was told on this occasion, possibly guage. And the defenders of the Jesuits point to the because what he was told accorded with what he later disasters that resulted when, in a peculiar collusion of observed personally in Pernambuco: that surviving In­ Enlightenment statebuilding with colonial covetous­ dian groups maintained a secret Indian religious life and, ness, the Jesuits were expelled in 1767: the Indians were unlike blacks, refused integration into the society and wiped out along most of the east coast of Brazil. culture of their conquerors. Let me quote you some Critics of this view argue that the Jesuits did very passages from this good Anglican gentleman's descrip­ well out of the reductions, which incorporated the In­ tions of these villages. dians into a tightly controlled capitalist enterprise that 'The Indians of these villages, and indeed of all those the Jesuits ran for their own benefit. I am not concerned which I passed through, are Christians; though it is said to adjudicate between these competing views; my that some few of them follow in secret their own hea­ interest is to see whether the Jesuit missions can in fact thenish rites, paying adoration to the maraca, and be characterised as the 'ideological arm of the colonial practising all the customs of their religion. When the assault'. I doubt that they can, and here I present my Roman Catholic religion does take root in them, it of tendentious questions and a few sketches of answers. necessity degenerates into the most abject superstition.

V OLUME 2 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 17 An adherence to superstitious rites, whether of Roman economic and political relations with outsiders. But in Catholic ordination or prescribed by their own faith, all of this, Hahn claims, the Rikbakca had no choice. appears to be the only part of their character in which He sums up his argument thus: they show any constancy. 'In this work of pacification, the missionaries claim 'The Indians are in general a quiet and inoffensive to be the servants of God; I have argued they are the people ... Their lives are certainly not passed in a pleasant servants of industrial society. In seeking to save the souls manner under the eye of a director, by whom they are of Rikbakca and to promote Rikbakca well-being, they imperiously treated; consequently it is not surprising have led the reduction of the Rikbakca population and that they should do all in their power to leave their the restriction of its life-space; Rikbakca have become villages and be free from an immediate superior; but orphans of their past and foster children of a society even when they have escaped the irksome dominion of which wants not them, but resources of the land they the director, they never settle in one place ... [The In­ lived from.' dian's] favourite pursuits are fishing and hunting; a lake Here again is the notion of the missionary as an or rivulet will alone induce him to be stationary for any agent of colonial assault. But all the evidence Hahn length of time. He has a sort of independent feeling, presents on the sequence of events suggests to me that which makes him spurn anything like a although catechesis and conversion came before the wish to deprive him of his own free agen­ destruction of Rikbakca culture, they were accompani­ cy; to the director he submits, because it ments rather than causes of this destruction. Blaming In the new ideology, is out of his power to resist.' the missionaries amounts to arguing post hoc ergo Koster goes on to write about there­ propter hoc. And again, there is not much evidence that Indian societies are markable persistence among the Indians real Catholic christianising took place at all. All the redefined. Their of what he regards as vices and virtues of evidence points to the fact that the frontiersmen and 'the savage life'. His lists of vices, in par­ industrial products have been much more important struggle for survival is ticular, sound much like the lists of Jesuits than the Catholic message itself in subverting the Indi­ two centuries before. an way of life. drawn into a fudaeo- I suggest that Koster's account of Indians and Indian communities in the The Council of the Indigenous Missionary Christian narrative early years of the 19th century amounts -1970s to the present to a testimony that, despite their defeat I came across the Open Letter to Pope John Paul quoted of the journey and pacification in areas of white settle­ above-the most eloquent statement of the line that I ment, the Indians had successfully re­ am questioning-in an article by Dom Pedro Casaldaliga. of liberation, from sisted ideological or cultural domination Dom Pedro is the bishop of a frontier diocese, a mem­ by missionaries. ber of the Council of the Indigenous Missionary (a pas­ the Exodus onward ... Interestingly enough, Koster was toral commission of the Brazilian Bishops' Conference) disposed to believe that conversion to and a protagonist of liberation theology: he cited the the mission to the Catholicism might work to subdue and letter with approval and endorsement. I take issue with control. Running through his Travels him in order to ask, as dramatically as I can, one final Indians becomes there are many comparisons with negroes question of the line: is the Catholic missionary enterprise who, he believes, had been so tamed-'if so uniform that it has had, and still has, the capacity of a mission for men are to exist as slaves, this is doubtless uniform effect, i.e. subversion of any and all Indian ways the religion which is the best adapted to of life? the renewal of persons in a state of subjection' (Koster, Dom Pedro describes the work of the Council of 128). But his stories and descriptions all the Indigenous Missionary as a complete inversion of missionaries! suggest that the Indians were good nei­ the 500-year history of evangelisation that he condemns. ther as slave labour nor as free, precisely Catholic missionary endeavour is now to be profoundly because they had never been successfully anti-colonial, distinguished by what he calls incultura­ ideologically softened for the colonial assault through tion rather than by imposition of a Europeanised and successful conversion. dogmatised Catholic culture that must not be equated with faith in Jesus of the Gospels. It is to be distinguished The Jesuit mission among the Rikbakca, also by 'incarnation in specific time and place, in the 1962-1973 struggles, the hopes and processes of all the people of In his 'Missionaries and frontiersmen as agents of social this great country'. change among the Rikbakca' Robert A. Hahn reviews Two elements of this new ideology are worthy of the apparent destruction of Rikbakca culture and the note. First, the missionary defines himself or herself as successful invasion by whites of their territory, despite living out a Christian vocation through acts of solidari­ the efforts of Jesuit missionaries, following old patterns, ty with Indians in their struggle for land rights and for to protect the Indians by gathering them into a reserve. physical and cultural survival. This solidarity is not He acknowledges some successes on the part of the passive, for the missionary has something to offer: in mission-territorial consolidation, and regularisation of dialogue with indigenous peoples, the missionary par-

18 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 ticipates in a 'conscientisation' of them into a deeper COME AND SOAR understanding of their liberation struggle. Second, Indian societies are redefined. Their strug­ WITH THE EAGLES gle for survival is drawn into a Judaeo-Christian narra­ tive of the journey of liberation, from the Exodus onward. MAKING NEW Those myths and habits of Indians that the Jesuits of the early reductions found so problematic-like the PILOTS OUR nomadic habit at the call of shaman-prophets-are re­ SPECIALTY interpreted so that the mission to the Indians becomes a mission for the renewal of missionaries! The Indians, If you have always wanted in their quests for earthly paradise, the land without to learn to fly, this is the evil, are seen as archetypal seekers after the Kingdom of cheapest, safest and most God on earth. exciting way to do it. This brief outline of the Council's inversions of at Most people can become least some previous Catholic missionary projects does, I think, establish grounds for questioning the uniformi­ so lo pilots at the end of ty of Catholic missionary attitudes. Let me finish with one of our one-week two examples, which suggest that, even at a time when courses. Catholic missions have 'got their act together' in a way Waikerie is the ideal place for a family holiday, situated in not seen since the first Jesuit reductions, there are in­ the heart of South Australia's beautiful Riverland. teresting variations. Accommodation and everything you require is on the aero­ The Little Sisters of Tapirape share the incarna­ drome. tional theology of the Council of the Indigenous Mis­ Send the form below for more information. sionary but exhibit less of its liberationist historicism. They do not approach the Indians through an appropri­ Waikerie Gliding Club ation of their myths but believe that a sort of incama­ PO Box 320, Waikerie SA 5330 tional dialectics will follow from sharing the work of ph (085) 412 644 fax (085) 412 400 daily survival and developing individual friendships. That seems to me a rather profound difference from the Name ...... Council's position, though of the kind we shall get used to as we abandon stereotypes of uniformity and further Address ...... question the myths of Catholic missionary history. The second example departs even further from the practice and vision of the Council. The Salesian mission ES of Sao Marcos, like the Jesuit reductions of old, has suc­ ceeded admirably in securing the physical survival of about 2000 Xavante Indians. The Salesians, most of J PHILIP C HRISTIAN P ERSPECTIVES whom are Italian, are as firmly in control of their Indi­ WOGAMAN ans as ever the Jesuits were; and, with the additional ON P OLITICS power that modern technology gives them, they may by J. Philip Wagaman well embody the myth of the missionary as the ideolog­ 'Philip Wagaman has done a significant ical arm of colonial assault. At the same time, of course, service for the many people who are their very departure from the models provided by the looking for a one-volume comprehen­ Little Sisters and the Council of the Indigenous N Missionary suggests that the myth radically sive approach to Christian social homogenises Catholic missions in Brazil. • ~I ethics.' -Charles E. Curran $28.95 JOURNEY Rowan Ireland is director of the Institute of Latin -with American Studies at LaTrobe University. JOURNEY WITH THE P OOR 1h.·POOR by Peter Philp A journey among the poor of Brazil, El References Salvador and Guatemala 'I cannot say too strongly how important this book Judith Shapiro (1987) 'From Tupa to the land with­ out evil: The Christianisation of Tupi-Guarani cos­ is.' -Terry Lane. $9.95 mology, American ethnologist 14 (1): 126-139. (1981) 'Ideologies of Catholic Missionary Practice Available from the Jesuit Publications Bookroom in a Postcolonial Era', Comparative Studies in PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121 Society and History 23 (1 ): 130-149. Include $3.00 for postage and handling ($4.30 for both books)

V oLUME 2 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 19 A touch of soap-powder Gothic

SHE WALKS INTO THE LAUNDROMAT and casts a disap­ is not absorbed in the book and from time to time she proving eye over the place and its occupants. Including looks up, ready to repel advances from the he-and-she me. Well, I can't blame her for that. I hate laundromats. bores or myself. I glance at the book's cover. It is The Or rather, I hate sitting in laundromats. All that time Portable Nietzsche. This may provide a topic of con­ spent watching one's clothes revolve in the drier, with versation that will confound the he-and-she bores, so I everyone else in the place looking equally oppressed by take a chance. the same tedious exercise. It's even worse than being in 'I wonder whether Nietzsche is really appropriate the queue at a doctor's surgery, stuck next to a hypo­ reading in a laundromat.' chondriac who wants to tell you about his ailments. At 'Why?' least in a doctor's surgery you can hope that the doctor 'Oh, I've always thought that some things are will do something painful to the hypochondriac. beyond soap and water.' In laundromats, a malicious Quixotic imagination The expression on Ms PC's face passes from dis­ offers no consolation. I can't, for example, hope that the taste to contempt. 'I think Nietzsche would be very two racist bores who have been lecturing me about Asian proud of being read in a laundromat', she says, turning immigration for the past half-hour will find that their away again. clothes have been shredded by the washing machine. If Rebuffed. OK, so it was an excruciatingly bad joke that happened, it would keep them here longer. The and she probably thought I was making fun of her. Now lecture, delivered by the woman between bursts of in­ I'm at the mercy of the he-and-she bores again. structing her male companion how to separate the Fortunately, they too have found some reading clothes and allocate them between machines, is about matter. It is a magazine, either People or Th e Picture. , falling quarantine standards. Apparently, the ethnic and the she-bore is reading out bits of it to the he-bore. hordes who frequent laundromats are the bearers of It is an article about The Addams Family-the televi­ hideous communicable diseases. 'You've always got to sion series, not the movie-and the gist of it is that most use the hot-water cycle,' declares the she-bore. 'You can't of the cast have died of cancer. Why this should be sig­ be too careful.' I am not sure whether this unsolicited nificant the article does not appear to explain, but the advice on sartorial hygiene is addressed to me or the he­ he-and-she bores are overjoyed at finding another med­ bore. If the latter, he ignores it too. He is busy trying to ical conspiracy theory. He responds with 'oohs' and force a bent $1 coin into the slot on the washing 'aahs' as she announces each succeeding revelation: 'An' machine. He succeeds only in jamming the slot, and it says Gomez is dead, an' Lurch, an' Uncle Fester!' the machine becomes inoperable. 'Maybe they caught it in a laundromat?' I volun­ After a cursory inspection of the he-and-she bores, teer. He-and-she glare at me. They think I am making I decide that there is probably considerable health risk fun of them, too. They're right. in using a washing machine after them. I also decide that I shrink into the solitude of my seat, wondering if there is little future in making this judgment out loud, the drier will ever get through its cycle. Perhaps it is the and tum my attention to the recent arrival. She has hypnotic effect of the revolving tub and the hum of caught the drift of the she-bores' monologue, and the machinery, or perhaps it is the heady smell of soap odoriferous drift of the he-and-she bores themselves, and powder and the he-and-she bores, but I begin to halluci­ wrinkles her nose. Perhaps she thinks that I endorse nate. The images of Lurch and Fester and Grandma the she-bore's opinions, for she does not return my smile. Addams swarm before my eyes, and as I look across to I think there will be no racist sermons from her, for the where the he-and-she bores are sitting, they appear to cut of the clothes, the cut of the hair, and a battery of be transformed into the ghouls I already believe them stickers adorning the backpack in which she carries her to be. I tum to Ms PC to see if she has noticed, and find washing all broadcast the message 'politically correct'. that she is now a kind of Wednesday Addams clone, The PC young woman, feeling my gaze on her, turns complete with faintly menacing curl of the lip on an aside as she empties the contents of the backpack into a otherwise impassive face. machine. This is laundromat etiquette, an unspoken way The horror passes, and I return to laundromat real­ of declaring 'these are very private things I'm washing ity as the drier with my clothes in it grinds to a halt. As so don't stare.' I don't, of course. But I decide that I will I retrieve them, a man enters the laundromat, checks a break one of my rules and persist with an attempt to still-turning drier and sits down. He too has a book. draw her into conversation. Even the rigidities of the Deciding that bad luck can't really run in threes, even politically correct are preferable to the theories of the in a Gothic laundromat, I glance at the title. he-and-she bores. It is The Poem of the Man-God. I grab my clothes Having discreetly deposited her soiled whatever­ and run. • they-were in a washing machine, Ms PC produces a book from a sidepouch on the backpack and takes a seat. She Ray Cassin is production editor of Eureka Street.

20 EUREKA STREET • O c T O BER 1992 THE REGION

MICHAEL McGIRR 'The problem is that with the right connections and a lot of money to spend, these criminals get a very light sentence,' said Webb. 'Even then, they are allowed sometimes to leave prison with the connivance of the police, and to commit more Top gun crimes.' Webb sees safeguards in the legislation: 'AlliS of our supreme court judges will have to sign the death penalty. On top of which, the L E oouR NEW PRESIDENT of the Philippines, Fidel turtle-paced Filipino justice system is so slow Ramos, has had trouble grabbing the headlines. Not so that I doubt if it could make a mistake.' Webb, his versatile vice-president, Joseph Estrada. On gaining a former basketball star, also wants executions office, Ramos was unsure of what to do with Estrada. to be televised. The Philippines elects its president and vice-president Opposition to the death penalty has been ~ GUN on separate tickets, and Estrada had not been his run­ muted. The Catholic bishops conference is one PRO;. LIFE ning mate. Ramos solved the problem by appointing him of the few groups to have objected, but the bish­ to head the new Presidential Anti-Crime Commission, ops were not unanimous. 'We had a hard time Ullflll . ESPOI-E -.a Of - .. .. GL.II"'...... perhaps hoping that, if nothing can be done about law getting the votes,' said Bishop Cisco Claver, who ,.._ .,.,.. •. ..-L .... ,. ~ _ ,,, •• j · ·· ------~ and order, then at least the job of chief crime buster drafted the bishops' letter of protest. 'This is would be the last anyone ever heard of Estrada. understandable, in a way. The Catholic Church Poster from a Manila cafe But the vice-president, a former film star, has tak­ has a theology of war but not of peace. The death penalty en to the job with relish. No sooner had he been sworn is covered by the just-war theory, which allows the use in than he was down at police headquarters, being of violence as a last resort. The church is only slowly photographed with a prize catch-five soldiers, includ­ accepting the idea that non-violence is at the very heart ing a major, who had been arrested for car stealing. of the gospel. You can defend the reasonableness of Shortly after, he shouldered a gun and joined police as killing in certain circumstances on purely rational they moved in on the alleged assassins of a relative of grounds-I've heard Latin American bishops talking presidential candidate Ramon Mitra. about taking up arms to defend the poor. But I know Estrada says that if necessary he is willing to shoot that when I take such perfect reasoning and put it against criminals himself, and he thinks that others should do the cross of Christ, then I have second thoughts.' the same. He issued a shoot-to-kill order to police Claver believes that the clamour for the death pen­ hunting for the leader of a kidnap-for-ransom gang that alty is 'a class thing, really. The outcry is being heard preys on Chinese-Filipino businessmen. The order was because crimes are being committed against well-known repealed the next day by the Justice Secretary, Franklin and wealthy people.' A professor of sociology at the Drilon, but Estrada continued to win the publicity bat­ University of the Philippines, Rudolph David, echoes tle. Acting out a script he wrote with the help of a this: 'It's tantamount to class legislation. The people moviemaker, he invited reporters to a party at his house, who end up in the electric chair are always the ones saying that he would give a news conference at some from the lower class, who can't afford good lawyers and stage in the proceedings. He also invited two police don't have any strings to pull.' Freddie Webb doesn't officers, Majors Pring and Zarcal, and unknown to them, see this as relevant. If the new law favours the rich, he Nonito Arile, a former police officer and a self-confessed says, then 'it's the system of justice that has got to be member of the notorious Eddie Chang kidnapping gang. corrected.' The cameras started rolling and, on cue, Arile accused Money, however, is the big question in a disinte­ Pring and Zarcal of involvement in the gang. Estrada grating justice system. There are constant allegations ordered the arrest: it was an extraordinary coup de about corruption in a demoralised police force whose theatre, not to mention better-than-average television. officers are officially paid about $US80 a month. What But the Estrada phenomenon is not entirely self­ they really earn is up to them. And President Ramos manufactured. Law and order is a major issue in the wants the death penalty to be imposed for what he calls Philippines-the newspapers report that one Chinese­ 'economic crimes', such as 'sabotage'. This category is Filipino businessman is kidnapped every week in yet to be defined, but it is a reminder that the vulnera­ Manila, and there has been a spate of bloody murders. bility of foreign businessmen is a serious issue for a In response, President Ramos has declared that country desperate to attract overseas investment. restoration of the death penalty-prohibited under the The meaning of economic sabotage is also worth constitution that Cory Aquino introduced in 1987-is pondering as the Philippines debates what honours, if a matter of urgency. 'President Cory wanted a fresh start any, should greet the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos when but it hasn't paid off,' said one of the sponsors of a bill to it returns from a long refrigeration in Hawaii. • reintroduce capital punishment, Senator Freddie Webb. The bill imposes the death penalty for 15 'heinous Michael McGirr SJ, a regular contributor to Eureka crimes', including murder, drug trafficking and some Street, is a student at the Arrupe International Resi­ cases of rape. dence, Manila.

V OLUME 2 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 21 The Nation: 2

Don't kiss me, Hardy 'A Vaudeville of Devils' III

James Griffin concludes his analysis of recently discovered correspondence between fohn Wren, H. V. Evatt and friends.

S oWHA T 'ss"" "' "'"o by the Maurice Blackburn, from fusal to support the banning of the Communist Party. becoming the endorsed candidate for Fitzroy electorate. Evatt treats Wren as a man of profound influence, And in the following year Wren's notable henchman, at least in Victoria and Queensland, and even of residual 'Sugar' Roberts, was temporarily expelled from the par-

22 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1992 ty for his actions against Blackburn. Roberts was him­ when he could have gone with 'Wrenites' and main­ self still being refused endorsement for municipal elec­ stream Labor. tions in 1935, although in the intervening period he had Catholic churchmen were in a favourable position been Collingwood ALP branch president.2 to know about Wren's allegedly evil doings. Patrick Wren was unable to prevent John Cain from Phelan, Bishop of Sale (1912-25), (see ADB, vol.ll) a defeating his family friend, Herbert Cremean, for the scholarly and honourable man, was parish priest in state ALP leadership in the late '30s. The federal elec­ Collingwood from 1896 to 1900, when Wren was on torate of Yarra, which included Richmond, was repre­ the make. Phelan publicly acknowledged Wren as a sented through the 'Wren era' and until the 1955 ALP friend as well as benefactor. Conservative Catholic split by Frank Tudor, James Scullin and S.M. Keon. leaders, such as Dr Nicholas O'Donnell (ADB, vol.ll) Biographies of Tudor (Australian Dictionary of Biogra­ and Dr A Kenny (ADB vol.9), would surely have warned phy vol.l2) and Scullin (see Eureka Street, August 1992) Mannix off association with Wren in 1913 if he had re­ make absurd the notion that they took orders from Wren, ally been in the underworld. O'Donnell was the brother though certainly Scullin and Wren were friends. Wren of Detective-Sergeant Dave O'Donnell, whose house, may have had no more luck influencing these Hardy believes, was bombed on Wren's or- leaders than he did with Jack Lang (ibid). ders. Hardy's research, however, evidently did not lead him to the Gisborne Gazette (2 Hardy is a W HAT IS INDUBITABLE is that he gave money both for April 1926) where the victim exonerates electoral expenses and for personal loans. Letters in this Wren from blame, as he did at the time. 'biographer' regard have come to light from P.J. Kennelly and E.G. There were advisers, however, who Theodore. In this regard, however, we can make an quite reasonably believed that Mannix had when it suits analogy with Wren's relationship to the Collingwood compromised himself by associating with Football Club, which he is generally thought to have Wren. As Calwell said, Wren lived 'by the him, and a almost 'owned'. Richard Stremski's Kill for Colling­ principles of commercial morality'- politi­ wood (1986) shows clearly that Wren was principal cal, too-and that left 'much to be desired.' novelist with a patron from World War I until his death, but he was not (Preface, H. Buggy, The Real fohn Wren, chairman of selectors or backroom 'president'. 1977, xi-xiii). But in general, those who dealt creative writer's Stan Keon's attack on Wren in the Victorian Par­ with Wren admired him as a man of probity. liament in 1948 raises a major problem in interpreting Evatt obviously thought so. Still, there are freedom when Wren's influence and methods. Speaking on a Trotting problems in assessing the relationship of Bill that would affect Wren's interests, Keon said: 'Those Mannix and Wren. Fr William Hackett SJ he wants to take who can be bought will be bought. Those who can be (ADB vol.9) was, at least after World War II, intimidated will be intimidated. Those who have hon­ an intimate of the Wren household as well liberties with our and integrity will be won over by donations to some as Mannix's confidant. In a series of ingen­ charitable cause.' uous letters to his sister in Ireland, which the facts. This statement would seem to support Hardy. Keon he had no reason to think would end up in had won preselection for Richmond in 1945 by over­ the Jesuit archives in Australia, Hackett described Wren corning Wrenite branch-stacking. In 1948, however, he as 'a man of high principle, of deep religious feeling' (2/ had his sights on Scullin's seat, which was expected to 7/51 ); 'somewhat dull, because his main interests are go to Jack Cremean, who was a 'Wrenite', a former money and the power that results' (20/7/51); and 'ex­ secretary to Arthur Cal well, and the brother of Herbert tremely generous' although 'he never gives me money' Cremean. Eventually Keon scuttled Cremean's chanc­ [for the Central Catholic Library]. es: there was more to his diatribe than an attack on cor­ Hackett was shocked by Power Without Glory and ruption. the verdict at Hardy's trial (1951), and Mannix told his The Wren legend made a melodrama of that too. clergy that he 'never had any idea or suspicions that That evening Keon was rung up, by a noted clergyman, Wren had engaged' in any of the dubious activities de­ among others (personal communication Keon-Griffin, scribed in the book (N. Brennan, fohn Wren-Gambler, June 1986), and told not to take his usual walk home pp215-6). But Mannix and Hackett surely discussed the through Fitzroy gardens. However, as Keon said, he at 1948 attack on Wren by the staunch Catholic Actionist, no stage received threats of violence from Wren and did Keon. A person who should be able to throw light on not believe Wren directly responsible even for the Wren's relationship with Mannix and the Movement is bashings that occasionally took place around polling B.A. Santamaria, but so far he has not chosen to do so. booths. Richmond, he said, was 'just a bit tougher' than Finally there is Frank Hardy, and his claims that other places. Keon had more trouble when campaigning Power Without Glory is based on scholarly research. In against Jim Cairns in 1955: windows smashed, dead cats an interview published in The Canberra Times (23 thrown inside, etc. (Copping It Sweet: Shared Memories August 1992), Hardy commented on my article in the of Richmond, 1988). And, incidentally, to complicate August Eureka Street, and on a report of it in The Sun­ neat theories, while Jack Cremean got the Hoddle seat da y Age (2 August 1992). He was reported as saying that in 1949 as a consolation prize, he sacrificed it in 1955 apparently the Jesuits and The Age (sic) were 'out to get'

V OLUME 2 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 23 himself and Manning Clark. Clark's obsequies last year would be naive not to imagine that he paid bribes and were conducted at St Christopher's Catholic Cathedral interfered with witnesses against him. In a tough socie­ in Canberra with the Rev. Dr J. J. Eddy SJ presiding. ty that discriminated against his class he acted in objec­ Hardy claims that Clark used to consult him for tionable ways but they were ways that, judging by his 'facts' on Wren and Henry Lawson (about whom Clark popularity, the workers of Collingwood felt were justi­ is also inaccurate). Moreover, he has returned to anal­ fied. legation which he had previously seemed to recant (Who From the closure of the Johnston St tote in 1906, shot George Kirldand!), that Ellen Wren committed by which time he may have been a millionaire, Wren adultery, had a son by a bricklayer employed at Studley would seem to have been a law-abiding productive sports Hall and was ostracised intramurally by her husband. entrepreneur and businessman with a flair for political Hardy says he has fresh evidence. But even if such evi­ meddling (as, say, Herbert Brookes was among the dence is forthcoming, would it excuse a 'revelation' that conservatives). There is no doubt that he enlisted some in itself had no public benefit, and humiliat­ politicians to look after his interests but there were ed an elderly woman and her family? others, like Frank Brennan, whom he helped without expecting reciprocal favours. The least he was entitled H ARDY, AN INEXHAusnBLE WJNDBAG, has for decades to expect was a presumption of innocence before being cited a theory of 'composite' characterisation in regard believed guilty of Al Capone-type crimes. to Power Without Glory. But in fact, even in the most Power Without Glory and the ill-advised court trivial details the identifications are clear. For example, action taken against Hardy reversed the onus of proof. the distinctive name of Mrs Wren's defunct child is giv­ In 1976 an ABC television series entrenched the en to the allegedly illicit offspring. (For that matter, he ethnosectarian prejudice of the book, and the gave John West's eldest daughter the same married evil of John Wren is now part of folklore. name, Andreas, as Wren's). Hardy is a 'biographer' when it suits him, and a novelist with a creative writer's 0 N THEDA Y BEFORE John and Ellen Wren's last sur­ freedom when he wants to take liberties with the facts. viving offspring died, the Good Weekend magazine (11 After Wren's death, Fr Hackett wrote (19 / 11 /53) to April 1992) ran an article by a hometown pagliaccio, his sister about 'poor Mrs Wren ... She told me many Vince Sorrenti, on local monuments unlisted by the wonderful things about her husband. The priest who National Trust but 'part of the psyche of each city' in married them over 50 years ago said-"You are not Australia. Among them was the Tote Hotel in Colling­ marrying a man, you are marrying a miracle".' Hardly wood, 'steeped in history ... emblematic of the people the words of a wife as ill-treated as Ellen Wren is alleged in its neighbourhood. The "infamous underworld fig­ to have been. ure, John Wren" ... between the wars and beyond .. . used Hardy is insistent that his research on Wren went the Tote as the centre of his activities ... regular drink­ far beyond pub crawls in Richmond and Collingwood ers tell stories about Wren and the secret tunnels under and bar talk with such inner-suburban notables as the road to his SP bookmaking office'! Cornelius Loughnan and 'Sugar' Roberts, the reportage There are four gross errors of fact there but the of which relies on Hardy's memory. I can well believe crowning one (or is it two?) is (are): 'He was a feared that he and his aides visited the Mitchell and Victorian man among the locals of Collingwood, or Carringbush, State libraries and read royal commission reports, par­ as it was then known.' liamentary debates and newspaper files. But what Hardy It is tempting to add to the Wren legend and have will not tell us is what he found in these places that John F. Wren expiring after reading that Good Weekend seems to have eluded scholars e.g. information on the with Henry Ford's dictum, 'History is bunk', on his lips murders and mayhem allegedly masterminded by Wren. or, better still, with the final words of Leoncavallo's One of the most vehement denunciations of Wren clown: 'La commedia efinita!' • during 1901-10 came from a certain Cornelius Crowe (The Inquiry Agent, 1909), whom Hardy may have read. James Griffin is emeritus professor of history at the No less than Detective-Sergeant O'Donnell called University of Papua New Guinea. Crowe 'a half-daft sort of fellow, who nursed a grievance against members of Parliament and all from the Chief The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance with Commissioner downwards. He was continually mak­ research of Mr Geoffrey Browne. ing false and libellous statements which emanated in his own crazy cranium.' (Gisborne Gazette, 2/4/1926). Other material that Hardy did read, from The References Bulletin and The Lone Hand, falls far short of the l. 'John Wren: Machine Boss, Irish Chieftain or indictments of Power Without Glory. Meddling Millionaire?' Labour History, May 1981. Wren was no saint. He made his fortune by break­ 2. D. Rawson, The Organisation of the Australian ing the law. And a stupid law it was, too-the tote has Labor Party 1916-1941, PhD thesis, University of been legal now for decades. To break that law with im­ Melbourne 1954. punity, however, Wren would have needed enforcers. It

24 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 - """'"" . In China. with Peter Pierc , Emmanuef Santos ~ · * and HWa Goh: , ...

In Vietnam With Robin.... Gerster TRAVEL

PETER PIERCE

Bemused in Shanghai

D ... co "'" o'rosm THE SHANCHN H

26 EUREKA STREET • O c TOBER 1992 The destination was Pudong, that is, east of the offered a richer experience of Chinese eclecticism even Tea house toff: Huangpu River. This is an enormous factory and finan­ than the Pudong banner. In the first of them, a concert An actor from Beijing cial development whose 30-metre long banner proclaims began in admonitory fashion with The East is Red, the Opera at a tea house in that the centre is 'Building Shanghai into a foreign­ Maoist anthem adapted from a Shaanxi folk song, before Tianjin. A troupe from oriented, multi-fondontal [sic] modern cosmopolis'. Set the band broke into What a Friend We Have in Jesus. the Opera performs among condemned blocks of flats, market gardens and Everywhere in China the musical accompaniment to at the tea house on beetling hills of black coal, Pudong, by Deng's decree, one's travels was perplexing. At the Hilton brunch on Saturday and Sunday will be the centre of the commercial revitalisation of Easter Sunday, Western-style opera singers performed afternoons. Photo: Hwa Goh Shanghai. Here such 'little economic tigers' of Asia as arias from Handel's Messiah. Perched above the dining Singapore and South Korea will be challenged. And room, they looked down on a hulking papier-mache nearby, city officials hope, a track will be built as the model of the Arc de Triomphe. When, in a French res­ base for the return of horse racing and its attendant taurant in Beijing, the management learned our gambling revenue to China. Already Guangzhou and nationality, the resident harpist played Click Go the ------Shears. In one middle school's excellently equipped language laboratory, advanced stu­ dents of English were being instructed that China bans laughter morning from a tape of The Seekers asking Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Just one of in Tienanmen Squaf! the many solecisms I committed in China was to have remarked that this was a protest song By CATHERINE SAMPSON and PASCALE TROUILLARD in America at the time of the Vietnam War. in Beijing The second of the middle schools was run CHINA has banned laughter by economic reforms is p in the vicinity of Tienanmen tially r esponsible. Once it by a personable and resourceful man whom my where hundreds of possible to buy someone wife identified unerringly as the Oscar Schindler died during pro- with a television set or a vi t w tl of Shanghai. While his well-furnished and spa­ cious school suggested that he had considerable Beijing have staged trial meetings, where Mongolian political pull, he seemed iconoclastic, insisting on the jockeys came south to ride, and betting was prohibited. need to 'break the iron rice bowl' (that is lifelong guar­ The two middle (high) schools which we visited antees of employment), complaining of the pampered are in the crook of the approaches to the bridge. They issue of mandatory one-child families. But which ten-

V o LUME 2 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 27 dency or party line were we hearing? Each voice to which cently asserted in W.J.F. Jenner's incisive study, The one listened in a semi-official setting carried the Tyranny of History. The Roots of China's Crisis (see undertone of political direction. review in forthcoming Eureka Street) . Jenner com­ Nevertheless, this principal had created an oasis in ments on how 'we outsiders are so readily drawn into this part of the city. His school is close to a political this admirably well-invented and restricted past.' Moreover, to the Chinese who uphold its values, 'any other kind of policy seems inferior, if not barbaric, by comparison'. The mental world of China was also one of the subjects of a more popular treatment of its contemporary life. This was the mini-series, televised earlier this year, Children of the Dragon. Adapted by Nicolas Caswell from the novel The A venue of Eternal Peace by a sometime Australian cultural attache in Beijing, Nicholas Jose, the series did not receive its just deserts from reviewers-a pity, because its perception of bu­ reaucratic obduracy, institutionalised deceit, lying and obstruction as signal modes of official Chinese discourse prison. Across the road there is a park which was ap­ was acute, almost in spite of the plot. propriated for the people in 1949, that cut-off date in so Hampered by bad dialogue, Children of the Drag­ much Chinese discourse. But inside the school, the on also risked dramatising the Beijing massacre in the principal tends an English garden of his own planting. late spring of 1989, thereby testing production resources So that we could shake hands and wish them well, he and threatening to swamp the smaller scale dramas in pulled two newly-weds from their car. He runs his street, its foreground. But these problems had their instructive school and students with affable ease. And of course, sides. Will Flynn (Bob Peck), professor of thoracic sur­ like Oscar Schindler, he is also a factory manager. gery at Sydney University, turns up in Beijing to seek Most Chinese middle schools contain communi­ out Professor Han, his scientific mentor. Han is in ties of people who live and work on the premises. They political detention, although the Chinese authorities may be manufacturing track suits, or ballpoint pens, or raise an insidious doubt as to whether he had ever black and white television sets. Dormitories, kitchens existed. Not unreasonably, Flynn is asked the resonant­ and dining hall are provided, together with the services ly vulgar question: 'So tell me Doc, what's a bloke like of a dentist and a barber, although many Chinese wom­ you doing in China?' Near the conclusion of the series, en-apparently objecting to the expenses-clip their hair Dr Monica Scott (Linda Cropper, playing an American), short and wear wigs. A significant percentage of the opines with her countryfolk's perennial blend of opti­ wages of other workers in the school-its teachers­ mism and self-loathing that 'China is everything must be found from the output of the factory. America isn't and I can be of use here.' Finally she fields Oscar, along with others in his position, a query from the professor: 'You'll stay in this country receives a share. after what's happened?' ... 'This is China, Will.' Perhaps unwittingly, Children of the Dragon PoLITICAL OFFICERS UNDERTAKE the surveillance of comprehended the drive towards the comfort of cliche teaching staff, factory workers and-without evident that any foreign experience-and especially one aster- amusement-such interlopers as we were. Some red-neckerchiefed Young Pioneers also evidently relish the power over classmates of their monitors' roles. In a meeting of stu­ Vegetarian panda dents we grieved at how they lived with the consequences of imaginative repression as turns carnivorous well, when a girl constructed for us a glum homily on the need for hard work. Her text A giant panda in Sichuan Province, throat, severing the veins with its southwest China, has devoured doz­ powerful maul. was 'an old Chinese saying' (we'd hear many): ens of goats since January 1991 and 'Don't wait until your hair turns grey.' The panda proceeds to chew the still roams freely in villages there, goat's leg, back and finally its head. The intellectually domineering notion ordi s Workers' After the feast, the panda has a that China is, as its name indicates, the centre of the world, that its systems of thought are ~...... ~~ soluln.dllsleep ...... _. .... ~ .. ! sovereign, is a self-conception at once frightening and beguiling. Its force is exerted on the rifying as that of China-encourages. The cartoon bub­ casual, but attentive traveller, let alone upon those from bles given to the characters were the mystifying coun­ the West who choose or have to live there. The ulti­ terpart of the earnest demystification of China's mately self-destructive quality of this mind-set was re- self-image which was conducted through the narration

28 EUREKA STREET • OcTOBER 1992 of the events at Tienanmen Square. In this aspect of its not to cause them embarrassment or difficulty.' This story, the issue of what one is allowed to believe in fairly summarises what complicated the courtesy with China, as distinct from what impressions and judgments which we were received. And of 1989, as distinct from of one's own are reliable, was the simpler 1949, there was no mention. business of the series. To travel in China is first to plunge into epistemo­ logical uncertainty, to be brought to doubt the simplest 0 N THE THIRD ANNNERSARY of the June massacre, the evidence of one's senses. A cartoon by Qian Rang in the Chinese authorities banned laughter in Tienanmen China Daily (which is edited by an Australian) depicted Square. Traces of the damage done to the urban infra­ two men who halt at a new bridge. Neither will go first. structure by the movement of masses of tanks and troops In the end they wade through the stream and come up in from the outskirts of Beijing to assault the students dripping, ann-in-arm, on the far side. What did the car­ were still palpable in the ruin of roads and bridges, but toon purport? Was it a criticism of rural backwardness; the interdiction of hilarity had the authentic ring of re­ a caution about Chinese engineering? In fact not at all, pression speaking in a language grotesquely inapposite, but we needed a political refugee to explain to us back yet implacable. in Australia that the reference was to a Deng homily on The polite forms of hosts' and translators' talk are political struggle: 'Find the stepping stones before you insidious, as they emphasise-in diplomacy's disingen­ cross the river'. uous idiom-the 'deep' and 'frank' exchanges that are A sculpture in the Forbidden City shows one lion Permanent public service: taking place. Jenner remarks how the Chinese bureauc­ playing with a ball, another with a child. Which is the Con crete ping-pong table racies attempt to charm Westerners by making them mother, which the father? On the correct answer to the in the Peoples' Park, feel'that they have a unique rapport with their Chinese riddle that every guide poses to Western tourists Tianjin. hosts and are under some kind of indefinable obligation depended an understanding of the Chinese traditions of Photo: Emmanuel Santos.

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V OLUM E 2 N UM BER 9 • EUREKA STREET 29 Winter brew: childrearing. The excellent Reeb beer of Shanghai, which Children of the Dragon, and of my reflections after a A boy at a tea house came in dark winter and pale summer varieties, didn't short stay. Country of rumours, it is also a culture of in Food Street, Tianiin, fool us for long as to the means by which it acquired a fa iry tales. They are routinely preferred in the China pours 'dragon tea ', brandname. In a Szechuan restaurant in Beijing, how­ Daily, which sets its face to the West with a fare of bad a traditional winter ever, 'frog family style' looked straight-forward, but news about the rest of the world and good tidings of dessert made of 'shredded snake-headed fishmeat' was a worry, as was China, and which prints letters exhorting students to rice gruel flavoured 'hump's paw'. Was it camel or bear being offered at 220 work harder alongside cautionary tales of teenage, espe­ with sugar beans yuan ($55) a serve, or som e grisly hybrid? cially female, delinquency. Inevitably, this being China, and other sweeteners. At the same time, China provided brutal material there will be pandas. Exploited in acrobatic shows, Ph oto: Emmanuel Santos. in public view that hardly admitted misinterpretation. merchandised around the world as a benign national In railway stations not far from tourist destinations, symbol, treated with the semblance of veneration, pan­ posters illustrated not scenic wonders but crimes. One das can apparently misbehave as well. showed a wrecked train which had been bombed by In mid-April, the China Daily excelled its regular terrorists; the eviscerated corpses of the victims; finally series of beast fables with the tale of a giant panda that the three condemned m en, bearing placards which had abandoned eating bamboo to feed on goats. Two elaborated their sins. paragraphs detailed the manner in which he dismem­ Rumours complement the surfeit of signs and sights bered the hapless animals. Villagers, 'heartsick to lose in China. Where do they originate, and whose interests so many of their goats ... still see the panda as a state do they serve? Is it true that, before staging the 1990 treasure more valuable than their herbs.' In the Yi Asian Games in Beijing, the authorities rounded up national language of the people of this village, the pan­ many street beggars, packed them into trains for a free da is nicknamed 'attractive girl' and they take turns ride 200 kilometres away and then dumped them ? Was looking after it. Blending mystification with coercion, a soccer match interrupted in Shanghai so that a public this tall tale is a patent if unfathomable allegory of the execution could be staged for the edification of the political system in China. And it provokes a bemused, spectators? Engrossing and horrible, are these stories horrified laughter that no edict can quell. • reinforcements of totalitarian state power, or signs of its terminal decay? Peter Pierce, lecturer at the National Centre for Aus­ How 'China' seeks to control one's perceptions of tralian Studies at Monash University, visited China it is a principal theme of The Tyranny of History, earlier this year.

30 EUREKA STREET • 0 CTOilER 1992 T RAVEL: 2

R oBIN G ERSTER

'Here the sharlzs cruise'

I N DOWNTOWN SA>GON STANDS A"' called 'Apoca­ rickshaw boy, Corer thought, was a whispering pimp: lypse Now', its name scrawled in a replica of the title 'Madame fran~ais, missou? Madame metisse? Madame design for Francis Ford Coppola's film. The bar's pres­ annamite? Boy francais?' ence, slightly affronting to travellers who expect the Seductive Saigon still grasps at the visitor, though country to repudiate its popular image in America, the sex scene seems pretty tame by international stand­ suggests a couple of contradictory things about Vietnam ards. The big hotels issue instructions from Saigontour­ today. It indicates the country's readiness to refer to its ist, the official tourist organisation, warning that long military ordeal with ironical good humour, and a 'prostitutes are not allowed', but 'Saigon tea' is still be­ refusal to wallow in the earnest nihilism of the former ing served in the euphemistically-named 'sauna and adversary; but it also proclaims a wanton embrace of massage' centres located in every tourist hotel. The the West. rickshaw drivers, spruikers, street girls and touts, even Vietnam, and especially Saigon-everyone still calls the beggars, are fatalistic and friendly, as arixious to make it Saigon, not Ho Chi Minh City-is cashing in on the your acquaintance as to take your money. Practical help war. 'Here the sharks cruise,' writes Margaret Drabble is appreciated: a promise to pass on letters to relatives in The Gates of Ivory, her novel set in Indochina. In in Richmond or Cabramatta-the cost from Vietnam contrast with the more ascetic and ideologically pure being prohibitive­ Hanoi, Saigon is a frankly mercenary place, notoriously brings responses of vulnerable to foreign influence: in his fictional epic delirious gratitude. Saigon, Anthony Grey speculates that the city could But Saigon re­ REST AURIN derive its name from the Chinese 'Tsai Con', meaning mains a city. that ~. .TUNNELREMAiN~ 'Tribute paid to the West'. But it would be wrong to contrives ingenious ~ ~cUCHI *-~------view Saigon as an aberration. What is happening there, methods to extract actively encouraged by the government in Hanoi, merely money from visitors. LOCAC SPECiAL TiES . . exaggerates a national tendency. Drabble again: 'Hanoi When I was there in is the past, Saigon is the future.' June, a man outside : by THE RiVERSiDE , WITH The city has always had a reputation for rapacity. the Municipal The­ FRESH AiR , NATURAL In All the Wrong Places the English correspondent James atre tried to sell me ' Fenton, who witnessed Saigon's fall to the North Viet­ his pet puppy. It ROMANTiC ATMOSPHERE namese in 1975, wrote of the shameless sauve qui peut would have made that overtook the city in the last days of war. 'The first interesting hand * WELCOME * thing the North Vietnamese and VietCong saw as they luggage. Knocked came into Saigon,' Fenton writes, 'was crowds of looters back, he proceeded Photo: Robin Gerster dragging sacks of rice and cartons of luxury goods. It to wash it lovingly from a bucket by the kerb. In Saigon must have justified their view of the degeneracy of the you might be offered mouldy packs of lewdly decorated city.' The saintly among the NLF, Fenton observes, were playing cards, torches shaped like hand guns, and bot­ soon drawn into the city's web of 'aged corruption'. Years tles of invigorating fermented snake's blood. The Miss earlier another Englishman, Geoffrey Corer, who toured Saigon T-shirts hawked by street vendors have 'Saigon Indochina on a 'pleasure trip' in the 1930s, was similar­ Vietnam' flashed assertively across the back, as if to tell ly appalled by the 'viciousness' of the place. Every the world that the city is a real place, not just the name

VoLUME 2 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 31 of an American musical; the contemporary appropriation Australia's military involvement in Vietnam, a trip there of Vietnam by American popular culture serves tore­ is akin to a pilgrimage. mind one that wars are not only decided on battlefields. In Th e Gates of Ivory Margaret Drabble alludes to At the Museum of American War Crimes, for a Vietnam as 'the legendary country', and indeed the place couple of dollars one can buy the identification labels does possess a mythical quality derived from its cen­ ('dog tags') of dead Gls. Tasteless? No doubt. But per­ trality in cultural and political discourses during the past haps not in a country which suffered and still suffers at 30 years. Read about, hotly debated, but visited by rela­ the hands of a superpower that, by its continuing trade tively few, the very name of the country is integral to embargo, reveals an unwillingness to bury the humili­ the broad cultural mythology surrounding 'the '60s'. ation of military defeat. And in any case, plenty of Thus the American journalist Michael Herr could write American tourists seem eager to buy the tags as on behalf of a generation at the end of his memoir 'poignant' souvenirs. In a country where poverty is en­ Dispatches: 'Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, demic, western tourists are viewed as repositories of we've all been there.' untold wealth and treated as fair game. The intelligent urchins who lurk in Saigon's tourist quarter may be keen A VI SIT CONFIRMS RATHER THAN EXPLOD ES the '60s to get ahead, but most are doomed to flogging postcards fantasy. Saigon is frozen in time, somewhere around on the streets, or worse. An article in the English­ 1965. Pleasantly tree-lined, with more-or-less uniform language Vietnam News reported an alarming increase two-and-three-storey buildings, it is an old-fashioned, in school drop-outs, and concluded that more than 60 'horizontal' city, especially compared with the angles per cent of children under five in the Ho Chi Minh City and verticals of urban extravaganzas like Hong Kong. district-a relatively prosperous region- have 'no chance Its cartography is wonderfully symbolic. Dong Khoi of schooling'. Street was once the Rue Catinat made famous by Gra­ The Vietnamese government hopes that business ham Greene in The Quiet American, and later the in­ investment and tourism will answer the country's socio­ famously raunchy Tu Do Street during the American economic problems, and it is prepared to compromise presence. The street runs from the docks on the river all political doctrine in order to facilitate both. It is often the way up to Notre Dame Cathedral, linking the relat­ said that the Vietnamese love books-Hanoi has an 11th ed goals of commerce and religion that impelled the century Temple of Literature, dedicated to Confucius, French to colonise Vietnam. that honours men of literary accomplishment. But the In the 18th century Saigon grew from a fishing vil­ book displayed most prominently in a leading Saigon lage to a city through a symbiosis of mercantile and bookshop when I was there was a translation of Dale missionary energies. The latter were particularly those Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, of the French Jesuits, who became influential in many printed in Hanoi in 1989. important aspects of Vietnamese culture, including the Saigon is alive witH chain-smoking businessmen, development of the Latin-based script used in the writ­ discussing, plotting, dreaming deals. The air in hotel ten language. Tourist hotels associated with the war lobbies is thick with news of opportunities and 'joint years, such as the Rex and the Caravelle (once owned ventures' like the Norfolk, a modern 'businessman's by the Catholic diocese of Saigon) enfold their guests in hotel' built by the Australian and Vietnamese govern­ a decor of outrageous kitsch that is reminiscent of the ments. Australians are reputedly in the vanguard in this Australian bourgeois 'featurism' of several decades ago. economic opening up of Vietnam: a Korean business­ Away from the big hotels, the traveller is constantly man at the Continental Hotel shook his head ruefully dragged back through time to a point where it almost and told me Australians had the game sewn up. Funny, seems that no war ever took place. This is due to the the door at the Austrade office in Saigon's main boule­ Vietnamese fondness for '60s pop music. When I visited vard, Dong Khoi Street, was locked on the two occa­ the Museum of American War Crimes, an attendant was sions I visited. A hundred metres away, the 'Floating listening intently to the Bee Gees' Spicks and Specks Hotel' is moored in the Saigon River, its rooms off-limits blaring from an antique transistor radio. to Vietnamese. Towed to Vietnam from the Barrier Reef, In the surrounding provinces few signs of the war where it went bust in 1989, this monstrosity is a re­ are visible, apart from an apparent dearth of middle-aged minder of what Australian business 'acumen' sometimes and old men. The southern landscape I travelled through produces. belied the common assumption that the war was envi­ Tourists inject much-prized hard US currency into ronmentally catastrophic for Vietnam. Take the Cu Chi the economy, which is why Saigontourist takes them district, known for the tunnel system used by the Viet round in late-model Toyotas and Renaults, as if they Cong to retain control of a key strategic area within 50 were YIPs. The contemporary western traveller to Viet­ kilometres of Saigon. nam is likely to have a more idealistic notion of his or In the late 1960s Cu Chi was declared a 'free-strike her role in the country. Traditionally, the tourist has zone' by the American military, and became 'the most been as much a pilgrim as a pleasure-seeker, and to an bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally dev­ Australian of my generation, whose moral and political astated area in the history of warfare'. Now, during the attitudes were shaped by the controversy surrounding rainy season at least, the area is paradisiacally tropical,

32 EUREKA STREET • OcTOilE R I 992 and the celebratedvillages of Cu Chi are pictures of And try selling the virtues of Vietnam to some expatri­ Oriental serenity. ate Vietnamese. En route to Saigon I stopped over in The enormous Viet Cong CEM ETERIES that dot Hong Kong, where thousands of Indochinese boat peo­ southern Vietnam, however, are reminders of the hor­ ple remain incarcerated in camps. The South China rors endured. I encountered one such graveyard near the Morning Post had on its front cover a photograph of a village of Long Thanh in Phuoc Tuy province, on the weeping Vietnamese woman at Kai Tak airport, in the way to the resort town of Vung Tau, on the South China process of being forcibly repatriated to her homeland­ Sea. A rubber plantation in Long Thanh was the scene a picture of misery resembling the famous photograph of a battle between Viet Cong and outnumbered of Mrs Petrov at Darwin. Australians in August 1966. Books have been written It's hard, though, not to like and respect the Viet­ about the encounter by Australians anxious to find a namese. A moment in the Bamboo Bar at the Continen­ Vietnamese symbol to rival legendary sites of Austral­ tal, the wonderful hotel where Pyle and Fowler drink in ian heroism, such as The Quiet American Gallipoli and the (the film of the book Kokoda Trail. But at was shown on the in· Long Thanh itself house video when I few seemed to have stayed there) seemed heard of the battle, to distil one's feelings let alone possess a J about the place and sense of the immense I its future. To an significance it held audience of three, a for many of my young female violin­ countrymen. What ist accompanied by a has been promoted as pianist worked her a major military way through a range event to Australians of popular western was, apparently, just melodies, including a another skirmish version of A Whiter to the Vietnamese. Shade of Pale so Tourists disori­ devastating I wished ented by the Viet· I had a tape recorder namese time warp handy. Diligent, dec­ may be refreshed by orous and compe­ comic incongruities tent, the violinist at odds with the grim represented some of picture of the coun­ the things that are try constructed over impressive about the the years. The big Vietnamese. glass doors at the Rex Photo: Robin Gerster It seemed a pity lure the visitor with the words 'Be treated like royal­ that she wasn't playing music from her own culture; ties'. By the tunnel remains at Cu Chi, where attend­ there is a danger that in catering so slavishly to the West, ants praise the valour of the VietCong in prevailing over Vietnam will become like everywhere else.Yet one horribly claustrophobic conditions, an alfresco restau­ suspects that Vietnam hasn't fought so long and hard rant promotes its 'fresh air' and 'natural, romantic at· for its independence to sell it off now to the highest mosphere'. The guides, either those working for bidder. And in any case, the Vietnamese have an uncan­ Saigontourist or those who operate independently at ny ability to process western influences into something places like Cu Chi, seem just as interested in western indigenous and original. The famous Caodai Great culture as in propagating ideology. The guide on a hair­ Temple at Tay Ninh, for instance, described in The raising voyage down the Mekong near My Tho, with Quiet American as 'a Walt Disney fantasia of the East', the monsoon blowing hugely, hadn't heard of provides a marvellous illustration of the Vietnamese Apocalypse Now but had read and enjoyed ability to fuse Oriental and Occidental, as does the faith Gulliver's Travels. it monumentalises. •

I T's EASY FOR A WELL-MEANING, guilt-ridden Western tourist to sentimentalise Vietnam, especially if one has Robin Gerster is the author of Big-noting: The Heroic been insulated from the realities of the country by stay­ Theme in Australian War Writing (1987), which won ing in luxurious hotels. Many people will go there, as The Age Book of the Year Award in 1988, and co-author John Pilger noted of more intrepid travellers to Saigon of Seizures of Youth: 'The Sixties' and Australia (1991 ). in the early '70s, 'to get the stamp in their passport'. He visited Vietnam on a study grant in June 1992.

V oLUME 2 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 33 BooKs

KEVIN HART within The solitude of Harold Bloom

Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, Harold Bloom, Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN 0 674 78027 2 RRP $19.00. TheAmericanReligion:The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, Harold Bloom, Simon and Schuster, 1992. ISBN 0 67167997 X RRP $40.00. The Book of J, Harold Bloom, with David Rosenberg (translator), Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. ISBN 0 67973624 7 RRP $23.00

Ph oto: Mary Price

T,'uNcmN m cm""M, pooplc point by point. Of all contemporary Although Bloom does not call on say, is to educate one's readers! Who­ critics Bloom is the most rude. It is a Schlegel for intellectual support, he ever wants to be educated, let him role he has come to relish. By 'rude' I often looks to Milton's Satan, the educate himself. This is rude: but it mean that he is always antithetical archetype of the Romantic hero, for can't be helped.' So wrote the father of and vigorous, often discordant and encouragement. Why Satan? The German Romanticism, Friedrich Sch­ immoderate, and sometimes wild and opening books of Paradise Lost tell us. legel, in his Critical Fragments of 1797. wrongheaded. When coming into his After losing the battle for supremacy Criticism, for Schlegel, is not a matter first maturity as a writer, he set him­ in heaven and finding himself cast of establishing general rules for evalu­ self against the academic orthodoxies into hell, Satan refuses to repent and ating literature, and the critic has no of his day: the new criticism, and a accept a God who would remain for­ business trying to teach and enforce widespread belief in the infallibility of ever outside him. He elects self­ aesthetic norms: national cultures T.S. Eliot. And now, in a period when reliance or solitude. For Bloom it is a must be left to look after themselves. critics tend to explain literature by its haunting image of the dynamics of The ultimate aim of literature is the historical and political contexts rath­ literary history. The strong poet, he reader's self-cultivation, no more and er than by its formal structures, he teaches, is the one who foreswears no less; and the critic's proper task is remains in fierce opposition to the another's imagination, who quests to respond directly to the text, always status quo. How he names his adver­ ever more inward, risking solipsism, seeking 'the individual ideal of every saries speaks worlds. In the sixties and and who eventually finds the spark of work'. True criticism is an art. 'Poet­ seventies his target was the 'mouldy uncreated divinity far inside. By con­ ry', Schlegel said, 'can only be criticised fig' professors (formalists and moral­ trast, the weak poet yields to what by poetry'. ists), while in the eighties and nineties abides outside the self, finding God in Harold Bloom rarely refers to it has become 'the school of resent­ another's imaginings, whether they German Romanticism, and I cannot ment' (feminists and marxists). Both be embodied in normative religious recall him ever quoting from the groups systematically devalue the self, creeds or in their secular alternatives: Critical Fragments. Yet in several es­ Bloom argues, and for him it is pre­ national culture, political correctness sential respects he follows Schlegel cisely the self that is central to art. and scholarly methodology.

34 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 If Bloom can be brought into focus 2. There is the organic illusion, that a the spiritual. Or one might say that he by comparing him with Schlegel, that poem possesses or creates a kind of seeks the literary. The burden of Ruin focus can be sharpened by contrasting unity. the Sacred Truths is that it makes no him with the same writer. Both critics 3. There is the rhetorical illusion, that difference which word one chooses, prize irony and associate it with free­ a poem possesses or creates a definite for imaginative writing stubbornly dom, yet where Schlegel sees irony as form. resists the categories of sacred and detachment and objectivity, Bloom 4. There is the metaphysical illusion, secular. 'If you wish', he says, 'you can regards it as a drastic swerve from an that a poem possesses or creates insist that all high literature is secu­ overbearing influence, or as the clash m eaning. lar, or, should you desire it so, then all of incommensurate realities. Still All these idols are hollow, Bloom strong poetry is sacred. What I find more important, where the German assures us. A poem's presence is a incoherent is the judgm ent that some longs for a synthesis of poetry and promisei its unity exists in the read­ authentic literary art is more sacred or philosophy, believing that at heart er's good will, and nowhere elsei its more secular than some other. ' This is they are just different forms of reli­ form is merely a metaphori and its a line of argument, attractive to Ro­ gion, the American firmly asserts the m eaning exists only insofar as it sub­ mantics, that has been on independence and absolute stitutes for another poem. In short, the books for two hundred priority of poetry. poems are shifting relationships be­ years, since H erder's America's war tween forces and not stable entities, reflections on the Bible. 0 NE OF THE FINEST LMNG CRITICS of what philosophers call 'aesthetic ob­ But Bloom makes it his against Iraq, English Romanticism, Bloom is him­ jects'. All in all, philosophers are the own, memorably so, both self a Romantic. Poetry for him, as for guilty party in Bloom 's drama, for when commenting on Bloom shrewdly Blake or Shelley, is visionary because their primary categories- being and scriptureandonliterature. it is original and powerful and never knowing-perpetually lead us astray Thus he judges the three observes, was a merely because it uses religious when reading literature which is an greatest writers of our imagery. Since he writes with a high affair of action and desire, of posses­ century, those of the true religious war, ambition, and since he rejects all strict sion and power. highest spiritual authori­ distinctions between poetry and crit­ Nietzschean though he is, Bloom ty, to be Beckett, Freud not Christianity icism (taking creativity rather than has little in common with those who and Kafka. It is as good a genre as his touchstone), he can legit­ see the German as the professor of list as any of the kind, versus Islam but imately desire to be considered a linguistic nihilism . Today we very which are all polemic, and visionary writer himself. Almost more readily form an image of Nietzsche to object that Proust and rather America than his elevation of the self above the reductionist, the one who claimed Tolstoy are not included is ethics, form and history, it is this that God and the self are illusions to miss the point. Bloom versus 'whatever literary ambition that angers his created by grammar. Bloom's would probably be happy antagonists. For the 'mouldy figs' it is Nietzsche, though, is the severe to add them. denies the self's anathema because they conceive crit­ prophet of the will to power, the pas­ One writer he would icism as a secondary and derivative sionate advocate of art, the diagnosti­ not be happy to include, status and activity, something that occurs in the cian of cultural malaise. however, but who certain­ shadow of creativity. And for the His proper place is with Carlyle, ly should be there, is function as the 'school of resentment', who see criti­ Emerson, Freud, Kierkegaard, Ruskin, Heidegger. Like Freud, cism as a species of political interven­ Pater and Wilde-a far more fruitful Heidegger has decisively true standard tion, it is an index of Bloom's elitism conjunction, Bloom thinks, than the shaped twentieth-century and rampant individualism. more fashionable company of Bataille, thinking and writing. His of being and Friedrich Nietzsche gave his Twi­ Deleuze, de Man, Derrida, Foucault, analyses of anxiety, con­ light of the Idols the arresting subtitle Heidegger and Lacan. It is this latter cern and death, and his of value'. 'How to Philosophise with a Hammer'. cluster of thinkers that has prosecut­ broodings on the with­ The hammer was not to be a mallet ed, in ingenious and rigorous ways, drawal of God from our world, give used to wreak havoc on the past, nor the demystification of m eaning. eloquent testimony to the was it to be a judge's gavel. It was to be Scrupulous as it is, this relentless cri­ spiritual agony of our time. handled firmly yet gently, like a tun­ tique has under -spiri tualised criticism, ing fork. His project was 'to sound out impoverishing our imaginations. BLOOM'S REVALUATION OF MODERN idols', to determine whether their ap­ Equally dangerous, though, are those poetry- the slighting of Eliot and parent weight and solidity were real. critics, heirs of Auerbach and Frye, Pound, and the elevation of Stevens All of Bloom's books could be subtitled who have over-spiritualised criticism and Hart Crane-is well-known to 'How to Criticise with a Hammer'. by treating art as a displaced theolog­ students of literature. It has affected a Here he is in Kabbalah and Criticism ical category. Bloom seeks a middle generation of readers who are now (1975) identifying four old idols of the way, being neither seduced by conse­ disposed to see modernism as a blocked academy: quent linguistic analysis nor tempted Romanticism, not as a decisive tum 1. There is the religious illusion, that to believe in literature as a calm, ideal from it. And no one these days is taken a poem possesses or creates a real order. a back to hear him stressing the im por­ presence. One might say, then, that he seeks tance of neither over-sp iritualising nor

V oLUME 2 N uMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 35 under-spiritualising art: we know that call the Jahwist, or J for short. that J is guilty of naive anthropomor­ he sees today's literary academics in On Bloom's reading, J is the most phism, the figuring of God by way of religious terms, as either priests or original storyteller in western history, human attributes. Bloom rejects tllis sacrifices, and that he styles himself a a writer whose narratives are so sub­ tout court. For him J is a supreme Jewish Gnostic. (I will return to this a lime and so uncanny that no one since ironist, an intensely sophisticated has been able to read them with writer who sees life as a clash of adequate critical insight, let alone unmatchable realities. The stories of absorb and transcend them. Of the Fall, Babel, the wrestling match at western writers only Shakespeare Peniel, and all the rest, are narratives, meets J's challenge, and he does terse psychologies of Yahweh, and not so by radicallychangingthenature religious speculations. of representation. Everyone else J's Yahweh is not a representation is contained in that original vision. of the Most High but a literary charac­ And that covers all religious writ­ ter, a wayward trope of the self. Fol­ ers, including those who com­ lowingEmerson and Nietzsche, Bloom pose the New Testament. proposes that all our religious faith is All western religions are founded upon an extended and highly founded on J's stories-or, rather, exuberant metaphor. Bloom is no less founder on them. For J is always exuberant. 'From the standpoint of approached as a religious writer, a normative Judaism, Christianity, and moralist, a theologian, an dis none Islam, J is the most blasphemous writer little later.) I suppose that critics always of these. If we accept any of these that ever lived.' knew, deep down, that one day Bloom characterisations a set of nasty ques­ While Bloom's excursions into would turn to the Hebrew Bible; yet tions appears. 'How can Abram haggle biblical commentary are of consider­ his part in The Book of f has been a with Yahweh? How is Jacob able to able interest to the literary critic, they surprise for literary critics and biblical wrestle a nameless one among the can only dismay the exegete. Where scholars alike. Elohim to a standstill, whether the scholars generally believe J's stories to For literary critics it has been, in angel be Michael, Sammael, or the have been written by members of a some respects, a very welcome sur­ messenger of death?' And more to the community or a tradition, Bloom in­ prise. In the '70s especially, when point, how can we make sense of Yah­ sists that we are dealing with a unique Bloom was developing and illustrat­ weh, the all-powerful deity who sits historical individual, and that this ing his views of poetic influence, it under the terebinth trees at Mamre person was a woman. To find Bloom, seemed that his theory pertained only and devours roast calf and curds, and whose theory of influence many have to post-enlightenment writing. Today who attempts to murder Moses? thought to be centred exclusively on the situation is quite different. We The traditional answer has been male psychology, arguing that the have his introductions to several hun­ dred books of all periods published by Chelsea House (which contain some ItlO YOU'I

BLOOM'S REFLECTIONS ON THE CANO now begin at the beginning, in the lOth centuryBCE. Orthodox Jews and Christian fundamentalists aside, scholars generally agree that the first five books of the Bible, the Penta­ teuch, were not written by Moses but are in fact a patchwork of texts woven together about 400 BCE. The oldest of these texts-now dispersed through Genesis, Exodus and Numbers- was written by an author whom scholars

36 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 entire western tradition begins, and the God outside, Yahweh or the Father, begins strongly, with a female writer is false and perhaps malevolent. Telling it is a wonder in itself. This quest inwards for the true Was J a woman? To say it is histor­ divinity is far from simple or painless. as it is ically unlikely is a grand understate­ It is a passage from knowing to un­ (and was) ment, so we look for the evidence. It is knowing, from reason to thought; and all psychological. To be sure, any con­ it requires a violent and stringent Santamaria's struction of J will be a working negation of every received image of Movement: hypothesis, and Bloom's is as bold as God. Only the elite can hope to defend they come; but hypotheses have to be themselves against the claims of tra­ 50 Years On tested, and this one will be found ditional faiths and save themselves wanting as soon as one moves from from a universe of death. The Atner­ aesthetic and psychological reasoning ican religion is gnostic to the extent to historical and social that each individual believes he or she Assessments of the Movement grounds. communes freely with God in the by historians, political and social innermost self. But it is an attenuated commentators, and participants A T FIRST GLANCE The American gnosticism, one that has long been in its activities. Religion seems to show Bloom pass­ thoroughly democratised. There is no ing from aesthetics to sociology. A great spiritual struggle, no negative With contributions by second glance reveals that he has ex­ way: everyone can find the God with­ Edmund Campion, panded the realm of the aesthetic: he in, everyone can be a mortal god. The John Cotter, Ann Daniel is concerned with America's religious political consequences of the Atneri­ and Gerard Henderson. imagination, its originality and zest. can religion are everywhere apparent. Equally, though, he is troubled by its America's war against Iraq, Bloom dark side: the virulent expansion of shrewdly observes, was a true reli­ Published as the inaugural Eurelw fundamentalism (a sect of 'know­ gious war, not Christianity versus Street Papers, an occasional publi­ nothings', he says), and the sick Islam but rather America versus cation, and available from the Republican faith of the fetus and the 'whatever denies the self's status and Eurelcult to be a poet. • tells us, 'Look for him by taking Address ...... yourself as the starting point. Learn Kevin Hart is associate professor of State ...... Postcode ...... Phone ...... who it is who within you makes every­ critical theory at Monash University. thing his own and says, 'My God, my His most recent collection of poetry is Please detach and sent to: Broth er Terry mind, my thought, my soul, my body'. Peniel (Galvan Arts). OUP has pub­ O 'Sh a nnassy, PO Box 53, SOUTH MEL ­ The God within is the true divinity; lished his critical study, A.D. Hope. BOURNE, VIC. 3205 PH: (03) 699 4973

V o LUME 2 NuMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 37 BooKs: 2

R oBERT MuRRAY A~ E ~ 1 CAE ].,.:~ IV E. ~U l"0.Iffi1 rJ00 ' VA D E S C R I P T 1 0 .

~-\ T IS !lOOK IS A GOOD STARTING POINT ,,~ ~~(~?'" desire for better-tasting food would all for those who want to learn some­ be satisfied, and Portuga l's colonial thing about Columbus and Latin Columbus by Felipe Fernandez­ ambitions would be forestalled. American history, both of which im­ Armesto, OUP, Oxford 1992. As far as we know, it had been so pinge on some of the great issues of ISllN 0 19 285260 4 RRP $16.95 for thousands of years. The Phoeni­ our own past. It is a sensible and cians, the Greeks and the Romans all skilful recreation of the explorer's colonised in this way: if there was times, and, at 194 pages of text, merci­ land for tropical goodies like sugar and peace, a stable government and a fully short. spice, not to mention souls, was close mutually comprehensible language, Fernandez-Armesto presents his to a certainty, and there was a good they negotiated; if not, they just colo­ subject as an extraordinary individu­ chance of gold. nised amid the 'barbarians' anyway. al- a near-genius navigator, vaultingly Columbus at various times con­ And so it was, more or less, in ambitious, obsessive, devious, sidered all these categories, depend­ 1788. Despite the obvious differences, visionary and, towards the end, a little ing partly on whom he was trying to there seem to me to be uncanny re­ cranky. That, of course, sounds like a influence, and he was delighted when, semblances between the sentiments lot of gifted people, but the impor­ late in 1492, he found the islands of of the Mediterranean in Columbus' tance of Columbus' extraordinary ex­ Cuba and Hispaniola (the modern day and those of Britain three centu­ plorations overshadows his personal­ Dominican Republic and Haiti). His ries later. The need to relocate con­ ity. Though the 'Admiral'-a title he first landfall, on 12 October 1492, had victs may have been the main reason extracted for the first trip across the been on a small island in the Bahamas, for the settlement at Sydney, but oth­ Atlantic- would probably not enjoy which has never been satisfactorily erwise the rationale was similar: es­ the observation, his greatness was identified. tablishing a small, trading-type thrust upon him. The subsequent decision to estab­ colony that could also civilise, Chris­ What emerges from this book, and lish a colony was almost a reflex ac­ tianise, and forestall the rival colonial from much other recent writing on tion. There was gold to be bartered for power (in this case the French). the subject, is how inexorable the or otherwise collected, fertile land for From the acorn of Columbus's process of European colonisation was. growing sugar, and naked Indians to colony in Hispaniola, of course, would Five hundred years ago, Portuguese be clothed and Christianised. It is of- grow an oak tree as great and complex sailors had found their way down the ten forgotten- particularly, in this as the empires of Greece and Rome­ coast of Africa and the Spanish had country, in the light of the dispute to a large extent at the expense of colonised the Canary Islands. Mer­ about the doctrine of terra nullius- those whom he was resolved to call chants, kings and bureaucrats in both how naturally the instinct to colonise the 'Indians'. His early experiences countries sensed that there were great came to Europeans. Columbus went with the native inhabitants, while trade opportunities and great prestige back to Hispaniola with a 'first fleet' reasonably well-meaning, established to be won out in the 'ocean sea', and of 17 ships as early as 1493. a pattern that was to endure in three the clergy sensed that there would be It was partly the Italian in him. continents: almost anything that any­ great missions. Iceland and Ireland no Genoa, his birth place, and Venice had body on either side did, whatever their longer seemed to be the frontier of the long had tradingcommunities in Spain intentions, turned out to be wrong. world. and Portugal, and these communities I was struck, reading Columbus, by There was the prospect of finding were his model for Hispaniola. Span­ the similarity between Columbus and more islands like the Canaries, the ish colonists would trade, mine, farm William Dampier. Both were self­ Azores and Madeira; or of finding a and Christianise, using the apparent­ educated visionary adventurers, with short route to Asia, or even to the ly delightful Indians for labour, and a world-view rare in their time and an Antipodes- which were as yet un­ then ship their gold back to Spain. eye for trade opportunities. Dampier known but whose existence had long God, the Columbus family's financial seems a bit nicer personally, and also been suspected. Whatever happened, and social fortunes and the European not as lucky. The Spanish and Dutch

38 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 had already claimed the wet tropics THE AUSTRALIAN A.I.D.S. FUND (VIC. DIV.) INC. that interested him- what is now In­ donesia and the Philippines- while the dry tropics he found in what is now Western Australia famously did not engage his sympathy. Besides, it was many times more distant from AIDS in Australia Europe than Hispaniola, and the late 17th century was the heyday of Euro­ (San Michel, Melbourne) pean colonisation in North and South San M ichel is a unique supported housing initiative th at provides a America. home for people living w ith HIV/AIDS in Victori a involving over 40 If one is looking for an arbitrary volunteers ... a project of The Australian AIDS Fund (Vic. Div.) Inc ... dividing line between medieval and m odern times, it is still hard to go a charity th at's been quietly ca ring for these people since 1986. W ith out beyond the year 1492. Half a millenni­ any government support, we rely on our own fundraising efforts-and um later, we are only beginning to our Eureka Streetreaders-for survival. W e ca n offer tax deductibility for understand the tran sformation that all donations of $2 and above. Columbus' discoveries wrought, in m edieval Europe as well as in the Americas them selves. The clash of cultures, which to men like Columbus at first seemed so easy to remedy, has AIDS in Africa had an outcom e so complex that it still defies human wit and imagina­ (Orphans in Uganda) tion to resolve it. A Cath olic pari sh nea r Kampala, Uganda, has turned to us to help so it Columbus contains many scat­ in turn can offer what it ca n to the nightmare of Afri ca n war-stranded tered references to religion- appro­ orphans w ith AI OS through a sc hool/orphanage/cl inic/se lf-supporting priately so, for these voyages marked farm project. They need food, medicines and building materi als. the beginnings of the rich, and until recently not too controversial, history of Christianity in the Americas. As Fernandez-Armesto tells that history, it is tangential to the main story, presented in a m atter-of-fact way and without any attempt to score points. AIDS in the Americas Fernandez-Armesto, who taught at Oxford for many years, crossed the (A Cry from Mexico) ocean blue himself this year, as visit­ Here, under the banner of O ur Lady of Guadaloupe we seek to continue ing professor at Brown University, to respond to the cry from a community of people infected by the virus Rhode Island. He is general editor of when they sold their blood to a transfusion age ncy! W e help pay the rent Th e Times Atlas of World Explora­ on their vastly overcrowded house-a refuge for men, women and tion, and director-designate of the children. O ur funds are passed th rough the area Bishop to the local Oxford Comparative Colonial History pari sh pri est. Project. He has rejected much of the suspect material that has accrued around Columbus over the centuries, and still found en ough authentic Yes, I'd like to help (tick box of choice) sources to give a lively, convincing portrait of the man. Australia D Africa Americas 0 Among the myths a book such as D this will help to dispel is the notion that Columbus' contemporaries Name ...... believed the earth to be fl at. Few of them in fact thought so, though few Address ...... had any idea of its size, either. Som e thought it was bigger than it is, others ...... Amount$ ...... that it was smaller. Columbus was the first, however, to realise that it is Post to: not a perfect sphere. • The Australian AIDS Fund (Vic. Div.) Inc. PO Box 1347 Robert Murray is a freelance journal­ ist and historian. Frankston VIC 3199

VOLUME 2 N UMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 39 Zentropa, dir. Lars von Trier (inde­ Germans a little kindness, but the pendent cinemas). This film is pitched filmmakers are not. This is an unsym­ at the second person. It begins with an pathetic film in which images of great unseen narrator (Max Von Sydow) suffering sometimes become ridicu­ doing his best to hypnotise you ('At lous amid scenes of farce and melodra­ the count of 10 you will be in Europa') ma. But it looks magnificent, with and, with brutal symmetry, ends with stark blacks and whites enhanced by the same voice passionlessly an­ sumptuous interpolations of colour. nouncing your death(' At the count of Lars von Trier is a talented and 10 you will be dead') In between, this intelligent director but in Zentropa he chilly, cerebral, sometimes dazzling has created a rather uneven film. It is film jerks you one way and then an­ by turns incisive and glib, inventive other as you are made the innocent and banal. And somewhere, somehow, victim of the confusion and terror of it runs off the rails. Germany in 1945. -Damian Cox 'You' are Leo Kessler (Jean -Marc Barr), the typical innocent abroad­ Edward II, dir. Derek Jarman (inde­ Patriot Games, dir. Phillip Noyce young, bland and American. You arrive pendent cinemas). There is no doubt (Greater Union). From the red-on­ in postwar Germany, intending to that this film of Marlowe's Edward II totalitarian-grey credits it is clear that 'show Germany a little kindness for a is both beautiful and superbly control­ Patriot Games is a post-Cold War film change', and land a job as a trainee led. The sets are operatically spare, in search of a villain. So enter the Irish, sleeping car conductor for the Zen­ the lighting magnificent. Steven Wad­ as the Ulster Liberation Army, set to tropa railway company. dington's Edward has just the right 'strike the royals and the ruling classes' Thus begins a series of dismal mis­ mixture of fixity and irresolution in in Whitehall, only to be confounded adventures as you fall for the boss's his love for Gaveston (Andrew Tier­ by the intervention of a hero, some­ nan) . And Tieman is magnificent as time CIA operative Jack Ryan (fault­ Gaveston- the slow-burning rage at lessly played by Harrison Ford). Eureka Street how his homosexuality and class affect In Tom Clancy's airport-lounge Film Competition him is extraordinarily well sustained. best seller from which the film is Tilda Swinton's portrayal of Ed­ adapted, the Irish terrorists are Cro­ Yes, after 50 years Bogart, Berg­ ward's wife, Isabella, is equally effec­ Magnon killers. Noyce, by contrast, man and their fight for love and tive. The intensifying homophobia she allows his film to stray into history glory can be seen again in the new suffers in an enclosed, almost entirely and motive. Why do any of these men print of Casablanca. Tell us who homoerotic world is managed perfect­ kill? 'Rage, pure rage' answers Ryan, they were fighting, i.e who played ly, as is her consequent gradually in one of the film's best scenes. So the archfiend Major Strasser, and growing bi ttemess and dangerousness. 'patriotism' is a only a teaser. For the we'll award two free tickets, to the Despite all this, there is some­ first half at least, the film is about film of your choice, to the first thing ultimately cool about this film. tribalism and revenge. correct entry we receive. Write to: I don't think that the slightly didactic The cast is talented and convinc­ Eureka Street film competition, interpolations- crowds wearing gay­ ing. Patrick Bergin and Sean Bean give PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121. rights T shirts, unnecessarily under­ the Irish side of the story a chill The winner of the August film lining Jarman's message- are the authenticity, and there is the bonus of compe tition problem. In many ways, the produc­ Richard Harris as a Sinn Fein spokes­ was Tim Skin­ tion would work better on the stage, man, his moral! y frayed face a register ner, of Kam ­ where the grandeur of it would be in of every compromise. Versatile David bah, ACT, who relief. The intimacy of cinematic form Threlfall, as the ill-fated Irish interro­ thought that seems to call for something more gator, is wonderful Dracula would direct. Patriot Games falls apart half-way say to the A comparison with Jarman's mar­ through as Noyce goes after adrenalin Caped Crusad­ vellous fi lm of The Tempest is thrills and cutesy American family er: 'Let there be revealing: one of the high points of values. But sec it anyway, if only to no bat blood that film is an incongruous perform­ understand the insidiousness of . between us.' ance of Stormy Weather, which un­ remote-control killing. One scene, in expectedly changes the atmosphere which the CIA wipes out a terrorist daughter, become embroiled with and then vanishes. An equivalent camp in Libya, demonstrates how easy German partisans fighting the Amer­ moment in Edward II is the appear­ it is to degenerate into subhumanity ican occupation, and, in the fi lm's ance of Annie Lennox for a single when the enemy is only a flickering funniest sequence, face the all-im­ song. But here nothing is changed, no amoeba on a video screen. Terrorism portant examination for sleeping-car mood is altered. It is incongruous, but in suits. conductors. homo-geneously so. -Morag Fraser Leo may be concerned to show the And so too with the ending-and

40 EUREKA STREET • O cTOBER 1992 an Edward II whose end chills as little A contributor to Eureka Street as Jarman's is disturbing indeed. describes her book discussion group: - David Braddon-Mitchell 'We were sitting around, giving potted reports of recent feminist or Deadly, dir. Esben Storm (Hoyts). The men-ist [her word, we don't like it any fate of this Australian thriller forces better than 'masculist'] books we have me to break a sacred vow of the film read-The Beauty Myth, Iron fohn, reviewer ... THE POLICE SERGEANT Men: the Darker Continent, etc. This DID IT. last-named title had been under dis­ Deadly ran for only a fortnight in cussion for five minutes or so when a Melbourne, after being woefully woman sitting at the other end of the underpromoted. It's the story of a city room, and looking rather puzzled, cop who is moved to desk duties after leaned forward and asked: 'What's it accidentally shooting a junkie. The called? Men WhoAien'tlncontinent!' cop is told by a superior that all will be forgiven if he goes to an outback town *** and files a routine report on the death in custody of an Aboriginal named Whatever the outcome of the monar­ Who was seen in hot pursuit of John Jimmy-i.e. if he closes the file within chy v. republic debate, it is clear that Halfpenny as the trade union stalwart 24 hours. in the little town of Waikerie, in the left ABC Radio's Melbourne studios The cop sets out to do just that but Riverland of South Australia, the recently? Malcolm Fraser, that's who. is needled into digging deeper by hereditary principle is well-estab­ Did the patrician grazier want to Daphne, an angry, articulate and lished. Ourcorrespondentreports that remonstrate with Brother Halfpenny beautiful Aboriginal woman who the district clerk is a Mr Burgomaster, about their political differences? No, owns the local motel. It turns out that and the man who has just submitted a he wanted 'to touch him for a donation' the wife of the town's police sergeant successful tender for mowing public to CARE's African famine fund. was in love with the dead man and had lawns is called Mr Clip. had a child by him. *** It's a constant disappointment to *** white supremacists everywhere, but Finally, a message from our straight some white women do fall in love The latest spate of feminist and mas­ man. Alex Miller wants to contact with black men. And vice versa. Yet, culist (yes, we know, but what else do anyone who shares his interest in late making sexual jealousy the primary you call them?) books is, no doubt, second/early third century BC motive for a story about black deaths some sort of guide to prevailing atti­ Carthage. Really. You can write to in custody skirts the central point. tudes to gender. But the occasional him care of the editor, Eureka Street, The deaths-in-custody issue is about jibes prompted by such books are what PO Box 553, Richmond, VIC 3121. impersonal, institutionalised racism­ reveal the true savagery of the sex war. We're just letting you know, OK? the prisoners died because they were black, whereas in this film the dead • man could have been white and still been killed by a jealous husband. Esben Storm deserves praise, how­ ever, for making a reasonably enter­ BANK ON BAN 1 tainingfilm about a difficult, unpopu­ lar subject. Jerome Ehlers is fine as the city detective, although he persists in JESUS FOR JESUS FOR wearing a cross between a Drizabone and a trench coat that in real life would have amused a country town for weeks. TENDER LOVING TENDER LOVING Lydia Miller is the stand out as Daphne, John Moore as the deadman's • brother throws off enough anger to INTEREST INTEREST make a blue heeler wince, and Bill Hunter is as loathsome a country publican as you'd never want to meet. Three people were in the cinema -FOREVER! -FOREVERI when I saw Deadly. It is better than .. that, despite the resort to good cop/ bad cop shootout in its finale. -Mark Skulley Photo: Bill Thomas

V OLUME 2 NUMBER 9 • EUREKA STREET 41 THE L AST W ORD

RUTH PEND A VINGH

Rite on

T HERE 1s GOING TO BE A BAPTISM at our questions, that shelved the matter for house-that of our elder son, aged some time. Later we moved to a new eight. The question this raises in most suburb, one where every woman at people's minds is 'Why'? In our case, the shops has kids. Gradually I became the answer is simply that our son and involved in the local parish, where the his schoolmates are preparing for their priest was a man I knew and admired. first Eucharist. But a more pressing We decided to send our son to the local question, in most Catholic minds, will Catholic school. That was a big deci­ be 'Why now? Why didn't you get him sion-it meant I would have to be "done" when he was a baby ?' more Catholic, and my partner sup­ For many Catholics, a baptism is portive. an important, enjoyableformality, part When the question of a baptism of showing off the new baby. An un­ was raised, I found to my surprise that baptised child is not a consideration. I was not pleased. I thought that my For others, it is a ritual engaged in for son would forget about it. He did not. family expectations: 'My mum would I realised that I was embarrassed, kill me if I didn't'. Or a long- term fearing that people might think me a hedging of bets: 'In case we want to get neglectful mother. I confessed my son's him into a Catholic school.' Some of unbaptised state to severalfriends who my son's schoolmates were baptised were unperturbed, which helped. Then at age four for just that reason. I asked the parish priest if it was For still others, a baptism may be possible to have a small family bap­ a way of calming the nerves of new tism- not at the llam Mass on Sun­ parenthood:' Are we doing everything day, where everyone in the parish we're supposed to? What if anything would see me. Of course, was the happens and he's not baptised? ' Do reply. We'll make a nice family one those ancient fears of baby souls lost that everyone can feel happy about. in Limbo still move parents to have Not a test or an obligation but a their children baptised? welcoming-in. When my son was born, I was not Coincidentally, my sister is also closely attached to any church com­ resolving the same dilemma. She has munity. I had some contact with other no affiliation with the church except Please send a free copy of Eureka Catholics, friends and colleagues, but through her son's school, and her guilt Street to: none with a parish. My partner, who has been pump-primed by her parish has no religious affiliation, sees the priest, who grilled her about her be­ Name ...... baptism of babies as entirely pre­ liefs. Fortunately, her son's teacher emptive: 'If it is significant, why do has been kind and welcoming. Each Address ...... they have no say?' On a more emo­ year, the teacher told her, a couple of tional level: 'How can we promise our children are baptised just before their children away like that? ' Of course, as first Eucharist. one of the tribe, there isn't any 'away' I am more focused on the upcom­ ...... Postcode ...... for me. I'm comfortable with the trib­ ing event, on what it means for me, al rituals. But I couldn't say, 'Oh, it's than I am on the actual candidate, our just a ceremony.' As I thought about son. Perhaps this is because, since I My name is ...... it, I found that I did believe a baptism was only three months old at the time would be a definitive step: an entry of my own baptism, it is the first time into the Catholic community. I have ever really felt something about We decided that our son could the sacrament. make up his own mind about it. And I think my partner has a point. • ...... Postcode ...... as his mind was then preoccupied with milk, and subsequently with Ruth Pendavingh is a Melbourne Tel...... climbing, Matchbox cars and asking teacher.

42 EUREKA STREET • OcToBER 1992 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 7, October 1992.

Devised by Joan Nowotny IBVM

ACROSS 1 In favour of modernity! It's said to be what the seer did. (8) 5 Frustrate herein with wartime hostility. (6) 9 The Greek letter used in the code is pi- irregular and intermittent. (8) 10 Loath to read a piece of poetry (6) 12 A snub of no consequence. (6) 13 Charges with the responsibility of making the required test runs somehow. (8) 15 Concoct a sounder stew for this exotic sauce. (5-3-4) 18 At six fifty-one invented story about a malevolent aspersion. (12) 23 The blushing player was the editor (biblical). (8) 24 Pegs on anyhow rather than throw it in. (6) 26 A twinge in the groin I injured at the start. (6) 27 Like a gazelle one leapt wildly. (8) 28 Along the track it has a drink between points. (6) 29 I hear the gifts have made an appearance. (8)

DOWN Solution to Crossword no.6, September 1992 1 I feel most liberated on the no-toll road. (6) 2 Fruit is in the water fall. (6) 3 Competence is displayed, though it sounds like a refusal to ask the way. (7) 4 A way out for former sex-appeal object. (4) 6 In a state of perturbation he'd over-reacted and remained suspended in one place. (7) 7 So a brain confused, or brawn contused, can show a spot that's bruised! (8) 8 After changing the rate, certain riches follow . (8) 11 Being an eccentric, her aunt would dig up what was buried. (7) 14 23loses 500 to become a responder. (7) 16 Anything exaggerated drove one to distraction. (8) 17 Otherwise, club in the G.G. with 50 others for avoiding work? (8) 19 False deed or party intrigue? (7) 20 Anti you or pro us, he madly plays his lyre-for Offenbach? (7) 21 'In states ... , and accents yet unknown' [Julius Caesar] (6) 22 Honour Paul's midnight ride. (6) 25 Go SW in, orNE out, it's a single continuous action. (4)

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