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"Some fem inists have given up on the Bible because they think it's totally patriarchal, totally androcentric. I'm not among them." UNITED FACULTYOFTHEOLOGY US feminist theologian Dr Phyllis Trible Parkvill e, Melbourne Established in 1969 www.uft. unimelb.eclu.au "Women as bi shops, women as priest , laypeople as celebrants of the Eucharist, the blessing of same-sex relationships ... all of these are items that the media hype ... Compris ing but I wonder if [these issues] are of more urgency than the sadness of a world at ffi j ES UITTHEO L OG I CAL COLLEGE war with itself? " ffi TRI N ITY CoLLEGE THEOLOGI CAL ScHOOL ffi TH E THEOLOGICAL 1-IALL O F THE UNITING Lay Canon James Rosenthal, Director of C HURC H 1 AusTRALIA ( VICTOR I AN SYNOD) Communications for the Anglican Communion
The Melbourne Anglican Day, Evenin9, Intensive I Weekend units available. 1998 winner of the Gutenberg Award for Excellence in Religious Communi cation Further information: Mention this ad for a free sample copy of TMA Phone : (o3) 9347 noo Phone: (03) 9653 4221 E-mail: uft@ uft. unimelb. eclu .au or email: tma@melbourn e.anglican.com.au <> 0::;: ' > co:s:)> EUREKA STREE ImN ;::;z zm cO:s:.,., ;::;C "'"'ooC on n> d~ ~30 ; T ROUGH ALL THL wHm noi'e of w.c 'ound ~ ings it has been hard to keep an eye or mind on other things. But signs come. A September letter from a friend in New York tells about an 8am New-Orleans-style jazz funeral procession for the vibes player Lionel Hampton: Behind a white horse-drawn hearse, Wynton Marsalis played trumpet, leading the Lincoln Centre jazz band. They cakewalked from the Cotton Club in Carlton up to Riverside Church with about 100 mourners behind. Johnny Cochrane and several such dudes led the mourners. It was a great experience and set up a sa d week on a positive note. Late on September ll. A poet emails to ask if we are glad the day is over. We are, for complex reasons. Relief. Satiation. Fear confounded for a while. And then comes something by another poet-this time it's Juan Garrido Salgado's 'September ll, 1973': Santiago, Chile, September 11, 1973 Wa s a dark spring Of terror, flam es and fumes Two iets Flew lil In thi s tenth anniversary yea r of Mabo, Made in the USA. join us fo r ce lebration . There is much talk here in Australia about anti Enqu iries: Kirsty Grant, (03 ) 9427 73 11 Americanism. Much talk, indeed, in the US (Ameri cans are their own best, most stringent critics). Most 4 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 of it comes out of the need for clear lines of allegiance, over' that Dorothy Porter so values, and that all of for the comfort of certainty and none of the clumsi us need. ness or mess of the world as it is. But Salgado's canto is one with Wynton Marsalis' trumpet blast for Lionel Hampton- a bowing before death and an antiphonal This is a year of anniversaries, and what gathers assertion of the glory of life. Made anywhere. around them. Back home, another poet sends a riff of defiance, Andrew Hamilton and John N. Collins write 'After Bruegel': this month about the Second Vatican Council and the ripples that still spread from it. Collins looks par Let m e join the frilled and fl ying ticularly at the nature of ministry, at the priesthood, Damned the diaconate, and the role of women in the Catholic Church. Andrew Hamilton speculates about ways and live vivid of remembering such an event without reducing its as a wet dog. influence to a series of opposing agendas. Tony Kevin marks another anniversary-of the That's Dorothy Porter, Australian, tenacious about deaths of the 353 m en, women and children who life. were on board the unseaworthy asylum-seeker boat I saw her recently talking on a stage with the that now goes by the curiously anonymous name Colombian journalist and novelist, Laura Restrepo. of SIEV X. The story of those people is being slowly In the 1980s Restrepo was part of a Colombian peace filled out in Senate Committee hearings, but is far negotiating team. For her efforts she was forced into from fully told yet. exile in Mexico for five years. But she has returned From the other side of the Indian Ocean, Peter now to Colombia, to the city of Bogota, and lives Browne reports from Nairobi on life for people dis there with the brio of one whose lot it is to feel, and placed by African wars and living in hope of a second be, at home. Lucky. So many have a different lot, as chance. These people are not statistics. Restrepo is the first to acknowledge. On a more domestic note, Moira Rayner exam For her part, Dorothy Porter, footloose Australian, ines the paid maternity leave debate. was entranced by the dangerous energies of Colombian Next month Peter Browne (back in Australia) culture, and drawn by the tension of its play between will be guest editor of Eureka Street, concentrating life and death. But she has other moods, as in this his attentions, and the magazine's, on the way non poem, called 'A Walk in Kensington Gardens': government organisations work and what place they have in Australian and international politics and Solitude is where writers society. -Morag Fraser chatter best a soothing static Eureka Street at the ambulatory, admit it, happy ticking over St Ignatius, Norwood 'The Environmental Challenge' lil and all my living Tuesday 8 October 2002, 7.30pm and all my dead run up my arms With responses by Ms Angela Hazebroek, member lil OCTOBER 2002 EU REK A STRE ET 5 has been replaced with arm-twisting,' said by unsafe water.' In many cou ntries, water one delegate. Man y observers still fi nd it has been diverted to large dams and water hard to believe that a worldwide confer ways owned and operated by private cor ence that was supposed to be about global porations. recovery and reconstruction should be so Private interests and pricing mecha dominated by the rules of trade. nisms exclude poorer communities from Slow-go On the positive side, there are at least receiving their share of the water. The zone some targets and timetables on important rationale behind privatisation is the issues such as sanitation, fisheries, dan belief that the private sector can manage 'The snail is moving fo rward, but pain gerous chemica ls and reducing the loss resources more efficiently and that the fully slowly,' said a scientific adviser to of biodiversity. And Germany is to host a pricing system serves as the safety valve the German government at the Johan conference on renewable energy in Bonn that will control unlimited usc. Poorer nesburg World Summit on Sustainable in 2003. households do not figure in this argu Development (WSSD). Why so slow? In Many countries came around at last ment, and water is now even scarcer than the following Snapshots, some of the to signing the Kyoto Protocol on Cli before. Jesuit delegates there give their reactions mate Change. Three of the world's largest to the sometimes frustrating and mys countries- Canada, China and Russia tifying processes involved in hammer announced their ratification in different ing out agreements for future survival. ways, leaving Australia and the US as the Final WSSD transcripts can be found at only hold-outs. www.un.org/events/wssd where they'll be While the Civil Society Forum and posted for several months. many NGOs are disappointed at their inability to sway the negotiations, there What's is renewed conviction that many small groups, regional coalitions and interna \ tional networks are determined to keep At Nasrec, the sports and exposition com \ 1 going without waiting for governments. plex between Johannesburg and Soweto, And at the end, a colour photo on two Israelis and three Palestinians began the fro nt page of the Johannesburg Star eli cussing the Middle East peace process. Trade featured Brian MacGarry SJ (Zimbabwe) Their exchange was of such quality and restriction against the background of a domed tent intensity that a small crowd gathered to depicting the globe as seen from space, listen. When it was over, a Kenyan woman 'We cannot serve two masters, the WSSD with those familiar white swirl s of cloud spoke up: 'The Israelis, like the Palestin and the WTO.' against blue sea and green land. MacGarry ians, all need peace. Let's be men and What was happening at Johannesburg? is lighting his pipe with an ordinary m ag women of peace.' The WSSD process was largely swamped nifying glass. He represents organisations Nasrec was the NCO Global Forum's by existing World Trade Organisation that are 'pro-debt relief and organic farm venue. It was full of booths and displays of agreem ents-specificall y the ones reached ing', says the caption, 'but not the anti every kind. Wandering around it was like at the last WTO summit held in Doha, smoking lobby'. surfing the internet: an unlimited range Qatar in 2001-and was even being ham of ideas, urgencies, languages and faces. pered by future ones. Thus, an agreement There was rich variety, but also a sense of on eradicating poverty and protecting the fragmentation, even of disorientation. It environment (i.e. Johannesburg) had to was almost too apposite, too neat, that the conform to the pre-established rules of the title banner of the Jesuit booth was 'Find trading system (i.e. Doha). The clauses on ing God in all things'. trade, finance and globalisation repeatedly • One delega te found himself labouring make all initiatives towards sustainable Th e w et ' to explain to a journalist of the official development conditional on WTO agree and the dry ~ China News Agency what Jesuits are ments. Apparently the major powers did and why they were at the WSSD. Dur not want to come to the next WTO round Water was a big item on the agenda at ing all this briclge- builcling, an activist of with their hands already tied by any agree Johannesburg. Once traditionally avail the banned Falun Gong movement drew ments made in Johannesburg. able to the poor, water is becoming a near, distributing pamphlets. Meanwhile, So if the NGOs seemed disorien huge problem in many poor communities, as two Chinese en vironmentalists were tated- ancl indeed some walked out- it with 40 per cent of the world's population visiting the booth, a Tibetan ecologist was because they did not expect to be lacking sufficient water. 'More than one approached. They found some common bullclozecl in the way they were. N egotia billion people are without safe drinking ground on environmental issues and, ti on usually means that both parties give water,' said Kofi An nan, UN Secretary leaving the Jesuit place of encounter, up a short-term benefit in order to attain General. 'And more than three million went off together to visit the Free Tibet greater benefits later. 'In here, dialogue people di e each year from diseases caused booth . & EUR EKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 Howard the gambler A Bm OCTOBER 2002 EU REKA STR EET 7 LETTERS Lurl'h.l SlrPel wckorne'> round his neck than that he should lead In good voice letter'> trorn our rt•J cler'>. Short astray a single one of these little ones. k•ller'> ,Jrt' more I ikcly to Ill' Watch yourselves'' After reading Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's publi.,hed, .1nd all lellcr; m.l)' panel speech at the recent Catalyst for be ed ited . I ell e r ~ mu '> t lw I find those two statements quite clear, Renewal Vatican II forum in Sydney (pub signt•d, and ; hould inl ludt• ,1 every bit as clear in their context as the lished in Eureka Street, September 2002), contac t phone numlw r ,md woman taken in adultery. Why then for the we are writing to thank him for speaking tlw w riter's namt' ,md dddrt>ss . Send to: past 30 years or so are we so paralysed with out. As lay people we often find our frus eurekd«'jespub. jt'suil.org.au or fear to mention this? Or for that matter any tration level rising. This has been going 1'0 Box 5S .l , Rithmoncl VIC l l2 1 of the other tough things that Jesus said? on ever since the Council showed us what Have we totally convinced ourselves that the church could be like. The past 22 years the people, and not just the politicians He said nothing that might be offensive have been e pecially disa ppointing, as we alone, can decide this vital issue. to our coll ectively delicate feelings, so we seem to be gradually grinding back to the Reg Wilding skirt away and use only what doesn 't upset 'old days'. Wollongong, NSW our peace of mind and gives us a reason to We are getting old now and reform still feign love and compassion ? What we can seems as far off as ever. We feel that the surely judge is a person's actions and if war church is ready for change but the Vatican On discernment ranted he should answer for them to the and many bishops are still dithering about religious, judicial and social authorities. in the secrecy of a museum atmosphere In the wake of the recent paedophile scan With these words of Jesus in mind, only somewhere in outer space. dals affecting all Christian denominations, God knows all the secrets of the human To have an Australian bishop speak out it has been disconcerting to read in letters heart. He, and He alone, is the judge of and treat us laity as adults is heartening. to Catholic journals, and even hear from it. God needs no help from arrogant man, We are able to think, pray and protest but the pulpit, oblique references to 'not cast even of the well-meaning variety. we need a voice and we need leadership. ing the first stone', etc., and that we should Maureen Federico Patrick and Lois O'Shea exercise unconditional compassion and Frankston, VIC Virginia, QLD love towards these offenders, so that we are practising 'true' Christianity. I feel that we have totally lost the plot Private means History's hints here. There is a marked difference between committing a sin between two consenting What oracle has decreed that the rest of Confronted with growing disquiet about adults (adultery) to w hich Jesus was refer Telstra must be sold into private owner their support for George Bush 's war plans, ring when He made that famous remark, ship, and that country services are the key our government leaders have promised a and the references on leading others to this? debate in parliament before any of us is astray-one in Matthew and one in Luke Haven't we always had the advantage of sent to fight in the war against the Iraqi which were about children in particular. the long distances of country telecommu people. But wars are not fought by politi Matthew's gospel (18:5-7) reads: nications being subsidised from the public cian , so any arm ed involvement by Aus purse? Why not continue thisl Anyone who welcomes a little child like this tralians should surely be decided by those Didn't our founders establish the core in my name welcomes me. But anyone who who would have to do the fighting. public institutions of schools, hospitals, is an obstacle to bring down one of these lit Our 191 4-18 war years have given us a roads, railways, airports and communica tl e ones who have faith in me would be bet powerful precedent for this, when two ref tions because each of us couldn't possibly ter drowned in the depths of the sea with a erenda on the issue of conscription were provide them individually? grea t millstone round his neck. Alas for the defea ted. The majority of the people ques But the oracles now claim that private world that there should be such obstacles' tioned the validity for us of that awful war. ownership is more efficient than public Obstacles indeed there must be, but alas for So today we must demand justifiable but look at One. Tel or HIH, or at Enron and the man who provides them! and agreed reasons before any of us is sent WorldCom, or at European privatised tele to kill and die anywhere, least of all Iraq. Luke's gospel (17: 1-3) reads: communication companies falling over. Let's never forget the horrors that He said to hi s disciples, 'Obstacles are sure And look at what the privately owned ensued when we were dragged agai nst our to come, but alas for the one who provides banks have done to country people. The orig will into the American war against the them ! It would be better for him to be inal people-owned Commonwealth Bank poor Vietnamese people. thrown into the sea with a millstone put loaned money for government development So, now, our involvement in Bush's purposes (such as the trans-continental rail manic drive to World War III must be )uly-Augusl 2002 Book O ffe r Winners way) at interest rates of one per cent. opposed, as is happening now worldwide, D. Banks, Clcvclancl, QLD; M. Chadcly, Carlton North, We'd be wise to be on guard against VIC; S. Connell y, 51 Marys, NSW; M. Dennison, Rockdale, being conned on this Tclstra issue. When and within America itself. NSW; R. Fairbairn, Elwood, VIC: J. Groenewegcn. North So let's strengthen the people's debate Rycle, NSW; Z.V. O 'Sullivan, Daglish, WA; D. Punil l, the farm or the business is lost, that's it 1 about it all now, not after the killing has Swanbourn c, WA; P. Sheehan, Ca mberwell, VI ; Ken O'Hara begun, with a nationwide referendum, so B. Wraith, Woden, ACT Gerringong, NSW B EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 THE MONTH'S TRAFFIC Seeing themselves as free in conscience were contrasted with the knee drill in Long divisions and independent, they could not abide caucus. The secret caucus room where AUSTRALIA'S SCCTAR IAN H ISTOR I[S the Labor pledge and its control of an indi decisions were made outside the light of vidual's vote. This, they thought, is what day conjured up the secret recesses of th e the Reformation had been about. As Prot Vatican. s ECTARIANISM IS stili sexy. Otherwise estants, they could not belong to a party why would 100 people turn out to the that coerced their freedom of conscience. There was more to it than this, of Sydney Institute on a winter evening a So they found more congenial ground else course, and in a 20-minute talk Judith few weeks ago, to hear two historians talk where. She argued: allowed time for many nuances. I fo und about sectarianism 90 years ago? her most teasing piece of information that Australian Liberals' central values It wasn't always so. When Michael was about the 1933 census, which showed and stories drew on Protestant values and Hogan published The Sectarian Strand, that apart from the very top and the very stories, that their virtues were Protestant in 1987, it was the first book to look at bottom of the ladder, Catholics and Prot virtues, and that there was an easy slip the overall phenomenon of sectarianism estants were fairly evenly spread across page between the vices of the Labor Party, in Australian history. Everyone knew it the socio-economic levels. If this is so, it and the vices of Protestantism's hi toric had been a factor in our history, but people upsets the more-or-less generalisations we enemy, the Roman Catholic Church. shied off it; it was so smelly, so offensive, arc used to: Catholics-poor-Labor; Prot so confronting. I remember working on Brett was good on the rhetoric her poli estant-unpoor-Libcral. The Rock [when I was writing Rocl OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 9 evening. Judith Brett had a good one from ethic.' The work ethic, that central dogma not your average weekend. Instead of the memoirs of Sir John Cramer, Menzies' of Protestant economic culture, was being bushwalking and gardening or movies first Catholic minister. Whenever Cramer eulogised by a Catholic! Would close anal and shopping, I'm attending a conference entered a room, Menzies would jest, 'Be ysis of the five New South Wales leaders organised by Pax Christi Australia (Christ careful, boys, here comes the papist.' produce similar evidence' Perhaps Judith ian, predominantly Catholic) and the Bud Then I remembered the story in Blanche Brett will follow this up. dhist Peace Fellowship (Buddhist, largely D'Alpuget's life of Sir Richard Kirby: when Sometimes the best questions are Zen) at Sydney's University of Techno Menzies found out Kirby was a Protestant, slowest to start. Someone asked whether logy (UTS) to mark the first anniversary of he told him, 'If I'd known that, Dick, you current anti-Muslim sentiment was com what has come to be known as 'the Tampa would have got your knighthood a lot parable to what Brett and Kildea had been incident'. earlier; I thought you were a left-footer.' talking about; they answered no, the Mus In the foyer a small group is quietly Menzies' jocular anti-popery didn't dis lim population was too small. Maybe. If I creating a mandala on the floor. Tradition turb us, it was part of the give-and-take of were writing a book about sectarianism ally a mandala is constructed from different living in a pluralist society. today, I'd want to include the difficulties coloured sand, but this one is made out of One interjection really got me think Buddhist temples have in getting building what we eat: rice, flour, lentils, pasta, salt, ing. Someone said that the last five Lib- permissions, or the noise limitations put beans. In the centre is a ship. It is slow, care ful, meditative work. I'm sitting as comfortably as you can 5£EMS Lll I 0 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 the astonished captain from landing the boat's passengers on Christmas Island at that time part of Australia, but since excised for such purposes-and called in the navy to protect us from this invasion. And it did not go unnoticed, especially abroad. Eileen Pittaway, the Director of archimedes the Refugee Research Centre at the Uni versity of NSW, recalled her embarrass ment at that moment. That day she was attending an international conference of non-government organisations in Geneva, Mouthing off where politicians and human rights work ers were discussing how to deal humanely with the problem of people-flows around B uRIED IN THE VI CTORIAN GOVERNMENT's recent announcement of infra the world. Suddenly she found her structure grants was $3.5 million to help establish a $20.5 million Centre for self deferred to, with some sarcasm, as Oral Health Sciences. We're talking about mouth, teeth and gums, the health of 'Miss Australia', an expert in draconian which many of us seem to have forgotten. solutions. Dental health seems to occupy a lower level of priority than our internal Now it's history. Before Tampa, we health, our eyes, or even hair care, except when teeth remind us of their ex didn't really know how many detention istence with excruciating pain. Dental coverage is an 'extra' in m ost h ealth camps there were in Australia, nor in insurance packages. Even more so since fluoridation. Unlike their father, which states they were located, nor how Archimedes' children have grown up cavity-free-and it's not that they eat less many men, women and children were in sugar, or clean their teeth more assiduously. So why is Victoria going to spend them, nor who ran them. Did we ever give so much money on dental research? a thought to the conditions within such One answer is that it makes sense financially. Despite the low profile, Aus places? We barely knew the difference tralia still spends about $2.6 billion a year on dental services. And that is prob between an asylum seeker and a refu gee. ably an underestimate of the true cost of dental disease, because m any people We didn't know the difference between the do not seek treatment for problems with their teeth. onshore and offshore program, nor the num bers all ocated to each. We were honestly, N ot only that, but worldwide the oral health industry is huge. It turns genuinely and disastrously pig-ignorant. A over A$23 billion in toothpaste alone. The University of Melbourne's School of year later, we can have no such excuse. (For Dental Science, for instance, recently developed a compound called Recaldent, those who do not know, and would like to, which has already been included in $200 million worth of products selling in the Refugee Council of Australia's web site the US, Japan and Europe. Recaldent strengthens teeth against decay and is de has many facts and figures, together with rived from casein, a milk protein, using a process licensed exclusively to Aus links to other informative websites. Go to tralian company Bonlac Foods Ltd. The School of Dental Science is a key player www.refugeecouncil.org.au .) in setting up the new Centre for Oral Health Sciences. There are statistics. Despite our gov But there's a better reason than commerce. A growing body of evidence ernment's best attempts to keep us ill now implicates dental disease in more serious health conditions, such as heart informed, there are a number of people who disease, diabetes and premature births. It turns out that our mouths, perhaps not only know what is happening, but are not surprisingly, are in the front line of the war against infectious disease. willing to warn us of where we are headed. The bacterial film or plaque that grows over teeth and gums harbours Here are just a few facts, at random, but all many nasty micro-organisms and is resistant to antibiotics, says Professor Eric completely verifiable: Reynolds of the School of Dental Science. Bits of plaque can break off and are • Only one in 200 refugees around the world swallowed, which in turn can lead to infection in the digestive system, even will find placement in a host country. diabetes. And, when decay sets in, disease-causing bacteria can enter the blood • 353 people died when the Suspected Ille stream through bleeding gums. gal Entry Vessel (SIEV) X sank on 19 Octo 'The new centre will take a three-pronged approach to improving dental ber last year, in international waters under health/ Reynolds says. 'It will conduct oral health surveys, to determine who Australian surveillance. is at risk. Then it will study the genes and proteins involved in dental disease to • By creative accounting, the government establish the link between the human hosts and microbial pathogens, and to gain managed to reduce our refugee intake information on how oral disease is connected to other conditions. Finally it will when it came to power in 1996. Although develop treatments, conducting major clinical trials in the process.' the quota appears more or less unchanged Indu stry is interested. The School of Dental Science is already receiving at around 12,000 per year since then, there millions of dollars in funding from pharmaceutical and health-care companies is now a further reduction in real figures worldwide. It clearly pays to look after your teeth. • when you combine the UNHCR-identified refugees with those similarly identified Tim Thwaites is a freelance science writer. O CTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 11 by Indonesia and as part of the 'Pacific solution'. 1 a e • At the beginning of August this year, there were 150 children detained without trial on Nauru alone. • Only ten per cent of asylum seekers in detention camps even get an interview with the Refugee Tribunal. And so forth. One looks to cold hard facts to cool the overheated head, but it A telling point is hard to stay cool after seeing videos of detained children, shaking and tearful; after hearing a clinical psychiatrist, who B EFORE BEAN COUNTERS BEGAN to be made editors, the relationship between attends patients in Woomcra and Port Heel newspaper editors and proprietors was famously tense. Editors had to deal with land, admit that it is impossible to treat proprietors who wanted some stories run and who were furiou s that others, psychiatric illnesses in detention because particularly those contrary to their interests, had not been spiked. Others of us detention conditions arc so profoundly observed from on high the fight between freedom of speech and mogul power. toxic to mental health; after hearing Anyone involved in publishing, however, knows that this tension is detainee Farshid Khcirollahpoor describe universal. When a group of any colour produces a publication, it expects that the cruel mind games played by the guards what it values and what it believes will be represented in it. And all organisa when one or two lucky inmates are granted tions-churches no less than mogul-led corporations-are uneasy when con visas. Even Villawoocl, considered the most trary material appears in their publications. 'civilised' of our detention centres because This is the more so in times of public debate when people wish to influ of its proximity to Sydney and its conse ence what happens. A group committed to reform Australian refugee policy, quent exposure to scrutiny, is compared unfavourably to Long Bay by the Venerable for example, will try to explain its position and encourage its own members to Tejadhammo, a Buddhist monk and long become actively involved. It would naturally resent its own publications being time prison visitor. It reminded him, he used to advocate arguments in favour of prolonged detention- that would seem said, of the jails he had visited in Thailand. to be disloyal or divisive. A released detainee confirms that Austral So why does discouragement of discussion matter? It would be easy to say ia's prisons are 'like paradise' compared that such discouragement involves the suppression of free speech by arbitrary with the detention camps. power. But that's a bit too easy, for in any plural society, there are many places So what do we take away from two clays in which you can express your opinions. Perhaps more important is the effect of very solid review of where we are now? that the restriction of free discussion has on the group itself. It is precisely when We know that, as a country, we are breach a group is committed to defend and commend a large and demanding truth that ing a number of UN treaties that we have it cannot afford to discourage free discussion among its members. And particu signed and ratified, treaties relating to the larly on matters that affect public policy. rights of the child, to the rights of refugees, The reason is that truth needs exercise, and the natural gymnasium for possibly even relating to torture. As an truth is free conversation. When truth is merely expounded, when opposed international citizen, we are keeping bad positions are represented only in order to be refuted, and when discussion is company, stuck out there on a limb with prohibited, the truth is reduced to slogans and prejudices. From there it is a China, Burma, Rwanda and all the other short step to see issues simply in terms of power and loyalty, with the result flagrant vio lators. No amount of govern that people lose confidence that the truth they defend is reasonable. Ultimately, mental bluster about 'flawed reports' and their position is eroded. And if the position is indeed true, that is sad. 'not being dictated to by bureaucrats in It is therefore the proper business of magazines to promote conversation. Geneva' can disguise this fact. This task, which is always difficult within committed groups like churches, is On a national humanitarian level, there easier in publications that have no direct allegiance to single institutions. seemed to be a wistful reliance on what For that reason, the success of Dialogue (www.dialogueaustralasia.org), a are held to be Australian characteristics of magazine of religious and values education, sponsored by a number of inde 'fa ir go' and justice, a feeling that if people pendent schools, is encouraging. In the May edition, the writers treated mar really knew what went on behind the razor riage from a number of perspectives, outlining issues and arguments calmly and wire and understood the illegality of our clearly, and explaining differences. In addition, Dialogue records news items of current actions, they would not condone them. Sadly, our history does not support ethical interest. Written mainly for teachers and senior students, it provides this optimism. I think most people are moral education at its best, encouraging an ethical perspective on public issues. ostriches and refuse to believe what they The truth s at which its readers arrive will be strongly held because they are don't want to know. considered and are arrived at in open conversation. • Nonetheless, the least and most we can Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. do is to keep on setting straight the record, 12 EU REKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 to cut through the fo g of specious rheto manipulation-aft er September 11. When a bereft of any ethical compunction about ric to the heart of the matter. We might TV network sought the responses of Amer remaining neutral on the front line. Ger stop talking about mandatory detention ican tourists at tourist sites in London, one aldo hopes to take his theatre of the absurd and talk, more accurately, about deten woman told the camera-not the inter to Iraq for the autumn season. tion without trial. We might remind people viewer- that 'you have to understand how At the Edinburgh book festival, the dis that it is not illegal to enter a country to terrible this has been for us'. putatious Harold Pinter argued that Ger seek asylum without a visa. We will need Asking artists and writers to avoid aldo shouldn't be given the chance. Pinter to lobby our backbenchers, some of whom a generation-defining event is like tell- reiterated his claim that Blair and Clinton are believed to hold private doubts about ·ought to be tried for crimes against human current policy. It will be necessary to bring ity in an international court for bombing more cases to the court becau e, despite Serbia. He also suggested that Blair would all its efforts to limit the powers of the be hypocritical if he supported an Ameri judiciary, the government is constitution can foray into Iraq. Pinter asked how Blair, ally bound by its decisions. a committed Christian, could justify an At the end of the conference we each action that would result in the dea th of so place a yellow flower round the periphery many innocents. of the immaculately completed mandala. Some of the treatment of September 11 Now it is white for peace and gold for hope. was crass and not particularly artful, but We form a circle and walk slowly round it all of it was important because the subject three times, join hands, make a wish. It's a matter is something of more than ordinary sombre conclusion to a sombre conference. significance-far too significant in fact to But the mandala at least represents light in be hijacked by politicians and op-ed pages. dark times. -Caroline Lurie Across the courtyard from the comics, a pocket-sized lecture hall was the venue for Nothing to Declare, a one-woman show Comic attack about the search for 'crisis chic' at the border of a war-torn country. How much COMEDY ' '> R[SPONSE ing historians to forget the 19th century. about the life that is lived in countries TO GLOBAl TERROR So September 11 and the war on terror like Afghanistan can we really know, this was everywhere. In a downstairs bar of archly written piece asks, if our greatest E sTIVAL TIME I N Edinburgh is a phantas the Edinburgh University Student Union, personal crisis in the last year was the spill magoria of thea tre, street performers, liter Ray Parker, a short, angry comedian from ing of red wine on a designer sofa? ature and pageantry that flitters across the Leeds, stopped his show when heckled by a As Jerry Springer noted in an interview stony face of 'auld reekie' to the delight of member of the audience over a joke about after a surprise appearance in Edinburgh, all except grumps who complain about the Arabs and flight training. 'I'm a comic, it's freedom of expression brings the good with traffic and being chested by a loud Ameri what I do!' he shouted repeatedly as he and the bad. -Jon Greenaway can leafleting for a rap version of A Com most of the audience debated what was edy of Errors on Princes Street. That, plus and was not appropriate comment. The This month's contributors: Edmund Cam the aural and visual assault of bagpipes and one laugh amid the fraught exchange cam e pion is a contributing editor of Eureka bongo drums played in concert by a greasy when two people claimed to have been in Street; Caroline Lurie is a freelance writer; locked, kilted highlander and a hairshirt New York when the planes hit and Parker Jon Greenaway is a freelance writer living wearing Rasta. Over 300 venues-from a asked, in not quite polite terms, if he was in London ([email protected]). maximum-capacity concert hall to a con interrupting a reunion. verted storage room above a delicatessen At the International Television Festi play host to the biggest celebration of the val, schlock-TV-presenter-turned-war -cor arts on the planet. respondent, Geraldo Rivera, was similarly Yet in the lead-up to this year's per unrepentant defending his unconventional formances the variety and scope of the coverage of the war on terror. For Ger available offerings was ignored by the Edin aldo-notorious for parading 'freaks' on his burgh m edia in the argument over whether talk show and for highlights like having his To advertise 1n a show by a cross-dressing country-and nose broken on set during a brawl with a western singer called Tina C. should be neo-Nazi, or asking Charles Manson to banned. It was not the high heels and stub step outside for a fight during an interview EUREKA ble, or the fact she couldn't hold a note if conducted inside Manson's prison in San it was strapped to her with six-inch cable, Pedro-September 11 is a spectacle, not an STREEI that had the watchdogs of public propriety issue. This is the Rivera who took the Fox contact Kirsty Grant barking. It was her subject matter: songs, N ews cameras with him into Afghanistan with titles such as 'Kl eenex to the World', as he set out to hunt down and kill Osama phone (03) 9427 731 1 sa tirising the outpouring of grief-and its bin Laden. He went armed with a pistol but OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 13 The story of SIEV X ON19 OcTOB 14 EUREKA STRE ET OCTOBER 2002 The community owes a huge debt to explained to her. She was questioned Department of Immigration and Multi the patient, persistent interroga tions by closely by senators on 30 July 2002 as to cultural and Indigenous Affa irs (DIMIA) four senators in particular: Peter Cook, how her Taskforce reconciled an intel witnesses on 11 July 2002 declined to give John Faulkner, Jacinta Collins and Andrew ligence report recorded in its minutes on such information, both on the grounds Bartlett. We also are indebted to Senator 23 October 2001 , saying that the boat was that it was classified intelligence and that George Brandis for his contribution to likely to have sunk in international waters, to do so could jeopardise possible upcom public transparency, in pressing fo r pre with the Prime Minister's emphatic tate ing legal proceedings against the alleged viously classified information about the ments on 23 and 24 October 2001 that it people smuggler Abu Quessai. scale and methods of Operation Relex to sank in Indonesian waters. If some Australian authorities knew be made public. His initiative in April- to Why is there till so much official by 18 October 2001 of the departure from have the ADF table details of 12 naval evasion and inconsistency about where Bandar Lampung on that day of a small, interceptions-began a healthy process the boat left from and where and when it overcrowded vessel carrying nearly 400 of public revelation of remarkable facts sank? The media and survivor accounts people, why did such a report not trigger about Australian intelligence gathering, since 24 October 2001 have presented a a SOLAS precautionary air search of the disruption activity, air surveillance and fairly clear picture on these crucial mat area of the Indian Ocean nearest to Sunda naval interception, hitherto ters. The voyage chronology and sink Strait? That area is in the north-west quar concealed from the public. ing loca tion is retrospectively confirmed ter of the Operation Relex air surveillance in the Halton Taskfo rce minutes of 23 zone. M OST OF WHAT W E know about the October 2001 . Is the system trying to This question about the SOLAS ill-fated voyage of SIEV X co mes from Don hide something important here about the requirem ent is at the heart of the issue. Greenlees' detailed and well-based account receipt and handling of earlier intelligence But senators were unable to question in The Australian of 24 October 2001. on SIEV X? the ADF's Northern Command about its SIEV X left from Bandar Lampung During May, the Senate Committee cru cial decisions not to order a SOLAS in southern Sumatra before dawn on 18 learned much about intelligence reporting oriented air surveillance for SIEV X on October 2001. It was grossly overloaded- to Canberra on the departure of SIEV X. 19 or 20 October 2001. Authors of the 397 people on a 19-metre boat. The over Initial claims in official testimony in documents sent in by Senator Hill on 4 loading took place under armed duress by April 2002- that nobody knew anything July 2002 have not been exa mined in pub uniformed policemen. The engines fa iled much about SIEV X until they saw news lic hearings of the Committee. Initially once the boat got out into the Indian of its sinking on 23 October 2001-were promised testimony from Admiral Ray Ocean on 19 October 2001. Greenlees undercut by testimony from Coastwatch don Gates, who had reviewed all the intel says it sank soon after, at around 2pm, Head, Rear Admiral Mark Bonser, on 22 ligence and has now replaced Admiral som e 50 kilometres south of the western May 2002. Added to this was the (possibly Smith as Chief of Navy, was blocked by tip of Java. Survivors spent 22 hours in the accidental) release, in early June 2002, of Senator Hill, despite repeated Committee water before being picked up by an Indo detailed summary minutes of the People requests fo r Admiral Gates to appear. nesian fishing boat at midday on 20 Octo Smuggling Taskforce. The challenge now before the Senate ber 2001 , and taken to Jakarta, where they Senators thereby ascertained that there Committee-which has done a heroic arrived on 22 October 2001. had been six Australian Federal Police job to date-is to account fully for the This chronology and sinking location (AFP) reports from Indonesia on SIEV X failures involved in SIEV X. The fall were broadly corroborated by survivor between 14 and 22 October 2001. They back would be to attribute the tragedy to accounts and by co-ordinates given to learned also that SIEV X was discussed in administrative failures, shortcomings in the Jakarta harbourmaster by the fisher the Taskforce in at least six daily meet communications and divided command men who picked up the 44 survivors. ings, starting on 18 October 2001. structures. This general location is supported by Sen On 22 May 2002, official Senate testi What remains to be seen is how par ate Committee testimony, which puts m ony began to refer to many conflicting liament, our political parties, national SIEV X's sinking location in an area south reports on SIEV X. It was claimed that media, and we the people of Austra lia of the western tip of Java-well into inter nothing could be said conclusively at all will respond to the highly disturbing national waters and well within Opera about when the vessel had left, or from truths that have already emerged about tion Relex's air surveillance area. where, or even if it existed. The nature SIEV X. • Mr Howard still sticks to his original of evidence shifted dramatically, from claim that SIEV X sank in Indonesian claims of zero inform ation to claims of Tony Kevin is a fo rmer diplomat and now waters. Senator Hill has claimed variously an excess of conflicting information-all freelance writer and commentator. that we don't know where it sank, or that offered as explanation for why no SOLAS it sank in or near Sunda Strait-that is, action over SIEV X was ever undertaken This is an edited version of a speech in Indonesian waters. Jane Halton, who by Operation Relex. delivered at 'The Tampa: One Year On' headed the People Smuggling Taskforce Senators were then faced with an infor conference held at the University of in the Department of Prime Minister and mation black hole. Teclmology, Sydney, on 24 August 2002. Cabinet, says that the difference between There has been no testimony on For more detail see the SIEV X website, territorial seas and Indonesia's nomi the content of AFP reports sent down www.sievx.com , or view the three SBS nal search-and-rescue zone was never to Canberra regarding SIEV X. AFP and Dateline features on SIEV X. OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STR EET 15 FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE AN TH ONY HAM Trouble 1n• Belfast A Sunday drive ca n prove a serious business. L JOURNEY BY mod hom Dublin to Belfast should take no more than two hours. It takes us four. On a gloomy Sun day afternoon in July, it feels more than ever like a journey between two differ en t worlds. Dublin is the capital of the self-consciously confident Celtic Tiger, the economic success story of Europe. Belfast, capital of Ireland's northern prov inces and part of an officially United King dom, is modern Europe's city of enduring conflict. We cross the border somewhere north of Drogheda. Under the Good Friday accords, which were supposed to bring an end to the Troubles, the border post is unmarked but remains a physical pres ence. High on a hilltop overlooking the road is an unmanned military observation post. Next to it stands a communications tower. Towns we pass are republican and loyalist in turn. British flags fly defiantly in one town, flags fro m the Republic of A republ ican mural in Fall s Road, Be lfast. Ireland in the next, marking out a prov in a village late at night, uncertain of shop is open . There are very few people. ince still divided into separate communi whether its sympathies were loyalist or We drive around, looking for a coffee shop ties. Relative peace has silenced most of republican, and very aware that his accent where we can take stock, justify to each the guns, but it hasn't made redundant betrayed his origins. They were taken in other the long journey here. I am guiltily these banners of identity. a car to house after house in the dead of aware that I am drawn here by a perverse I am travelling with Michael and Claire, night to meet hardbitten foot soldiers of voyeurism: I just wanted to see Belfast, see two long-standing Dublin Irish friends. the republican m ovement. 'Patrick, here, the place that in my childhood resonated They are nervous because we are travel has done time for the cause. ' 'Padraic has with danger. I suspect that each of us is ling in a car with number plates from the killed for the ca use.' He has been to Bel- here for a variation of the same reason. Republic of Ireland. It is true that we see fast since, but has never forgotten the sin In the few areas where som ething is no other cars with plates from the repub ister lessons of that night. open, Michael and Claire are unwilling to lican south on the road into Belfast. But On the road into Belfast, occasional park, unsure of the loyalties of each neigh privately I wonder whether they are being Israeli flags fl y alongside those of Great bourhood, aware that our car announces a little paranoid. News from the north has Britain. It is the new badge of solidarity, our loyalties to everyone. I wonder again been promising-so many tentative signs the loyalist Irish finding a connection whether our fears are overblown. of progress towards peace. No-one quite between two embattled communities at Weeks later, I read the following report knows what the future will bring, but risk of terrorism. Republican houses have in the Daily Telegraph : no-one wants a return to the past. also taken to fl ying the Palestinian flag in I also wonder whether Michael's view recognition of the mutual suffering felt by Two Australians who wanted to end an is coloured by his history with the Trou a people under colonial occupation. Irish tour with a trip to Londonderry bles. A decade before, at their height, In Belfast itself, we follow signs to the experienced Ulster's violence first hand he travelled to Northern Ireland with a city centre. It is Sunday afternoon and the when they were bombarded with rocks. friend. They found themselves marooned streets are empty, as if abandoned. Not a Judy O'Connor and her daughter Jackie 16 EUREKA STRE ET OCTO BER 2002 had unwittingly parked their rented car, cause-memorials to Hunger Strikers, Orangemen to march through republican which had Irish Republic number plates, portraits of Margaret Thatcher with blood districts, in revenge-killings-are fuelled next to the staunchly republican Bogside dripping from vampire-like fangs, hooded by the same hatred that fuelled the long area. But when they returned they found representations of IRA fighters with decades of the Troubles. All that has the car had been vandalised and after the Kalashnikovs, angry denunciations of the changed on the streets is that new limits police arrived a crowd of youths advanced Royal Ulster Constabulary. have been imposed on the public tolerance on them hurling stones. They escaped in We stop and ask directions. The man, of violence. an armoured police vehicle. instantly suspicious, points unsmiling and Northern Ireland is locked, Kosovo then fixes his gaze upon us until we are like, in an uneasy limbo. Having secured a But I do not yet know this. out of sight. One cemetery is overlooked relatively peaceful present, no-one knows Finally, in the tranquil streets near the by an equally dark, equally windowless quite what to do next. But the heady days university, Michael and Claire consider it fortress. Its tower is covered with video of hope are gone. I wonder whether, with safe to park. There are a few more people surveillance cameras, one of which turns out a viable long-term strategy, Northern on the streets here and a string of bars and slowly, following us into the cemetery. It Ireland will again descend into violence. cafes. Michael asks a waitress where we was here that republican funerals turned Michael is visibly agitated. He knows, can see some of the murals, the painted into public demonstrations, where a loyal and I now believe him, that his accent and facades of buildings where angry commu ist activist threw a bomb during one such his car could single him out for special nities have given vent to their hatred. She funeral, killing several mourners, where treatment. tells him that there are some republican a loyalist spy was torn limb from limb in Later, when we exit the car park, a fur murals north of where we are, but it is too retaliation during another. The cemetery tive, frightened attendant looks quickly dangerous to go there. We wouldn't know is deserted. at our plates and warns, 'Whatever you the way, and a single wrong turn could see We return to the city centre and park do, don't turn right. They're burning cars us deep into loyalist territory. She assures in the refurbished Hotel Europa, once and shops along Sandy Row. They did the us that with our car, that is not something Europe's most bombed hotel. To reach same last night.' we should consider. She sug the car park, we have to detour around We thank her for her advice and career gests Falls Road. behind the hotel, past the offices of the left in a screech of tyres. The start of Ulster Unionist Party, over a rise and Sandy Row, marked by the menacing w DRIVE WEST OF the City centre. then hard left at the building-high mural, mural we had seen in daylight, is just 20 Most of the streets are still relatively which announces that 'You are now enter metres away. As we swerve away, I catch deserted but the Irish flags and signs in ing Loyalist Sandy Row Heartland.' It is a glimpse of an armoured police car jud Gaelic tell us that we are in the heart of signed by the 'Ulster Freedom Fighters'. In dering to a halt. A door is thrown open, republican Belfast. Just west of Falls Road case we miss the point, a larger-than-life a policeman bursts out. Then they disap stands a brooding building, formerly a representation of a hooded gunman points pear from view. police station of the Royal Ulster Con his Kalashnikov in the air. I don't think Michael breathes until stabulary. Now abandoned and daubed By now, I realise how I have misinter we have left Belfast. None of us relaxes with graffiti, it remains forbidding, a forti preted the signs of hope that I've read from until we have crossed the border into the fied bunker of hatred- painted black, no afar. News of large-scale casualties might Republic. We drive through the dark and window , rolls of barbed wire which no have disappeared from the m edia, but here in silence. one has thought to dismantle. Further up there are such visible, unhealed scars. We are in Dublin in less than two the street, an armoured police car patrols, The vicious turf wars-reflected in hours. • like a small tank. battles over the right of Catholic school Back along Falls Road, the streets are children to go to school through Protes Anthony Ham is Eureka Street's roving lined with the murals of the republican tant areas, in battles over the right of the correspondent. powered by n ext e d Master of Arts (Theology)* Master of Religious Education Master of Educational Leadership *With new units such as Christian Spirituality and Theology of the Human Person The Australian Catholic University offers Masters courses that specialise in Theology and Religious Education on the Internet through ACUweb with 24 hours x 7 days a week support. The tuition fees per unit are $875.00 (Australian domestic discount of $635.00). www.acuweb.com.au Other courses are also available in Education, Nursing and Management. OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 17 Meaning streets N MENCLATURE .s MORE dmm.tic in Emope. Wh.r were absolutely right. The square ignored me entirely. Not a I mean is the way you can arrive in a town or village and find flicker. Conversely, on the huge Westin Hotel facade above, a yourself walking along the Avenida of the Hopelessly Incom curtain twitched and from a top-floor window sunlight flashed petent Brutal Revolution of XIV September towards the Piazza inanely. Don't you worry: the Westin knew I was walking of a Thousand Split Shzlls at one end of which is your pensiio past and took note. But from the square there emanated a and the Church of Our Lady of the Garrotted and Extruded. passivity that would have made the Sphinx look This village would have to be som ehow straddling the borders hyperactive. of Portugal, Italy and Spain to achieve that particular mix of naming, but you know what I m ean. L E TROUBLE rs THAT THE ECCDC bureaucrats don't seem In Australia, with a very few honourable exceptions, we to realise the profundity and wide ranging significance of their have no equivalent. Our British heritage-which gave us lan discovery. What they should be doing is flooding that square guage, common law, Shakespeare, the Westminster system with a team of experts-psychologists, geologists, anthropolo (honoured by Australian politicians more in the breach than gists, podiatrists (well, why not l), historians and so on-whose the observance, to adapt the aforesaid Shakespeare)-did not job would be to isolate and uncover the peculiar quality that bequeath such sturdy naming. On the contrary, we are inun makes the square function as a 'passive space' that people sim dated with monsoons of Victorias, Elizabeths, Georges, Princes, ply 'walk by'. Admittedly, the unaccustomed if not unprec Queens, William s and other faded shreds of Empire, royalty and edented sight of the square crowded with active, intent people remittance. Where is the Pla za of the Constitutional Coup of would constitute a dangerous shock for Melburnians (the last XI November? Where is the Betrayal of the Yes Vote Square? person seen in the square-a tourist from Queensland who The Holy Church of Our Lady of the Lost Republic? And where inadvertently used it as a short cut to the Westin- is receiving the broad and triumphant Boulevard of the No-to-Conscription counselling), but the risk would be worth taking. Referendums z If the Melbourne city square's secret as a successfully These thoughts were engendered by contemplation of Mel passive site that people simply pass by could be extrapolated bourne's City Square, which is known, curiously enough, as to, say, the Big Brother house wherever it next bobs up, waves the City Square, and is to be found next to the Westin Hotel. of passivity would sweep the nation and no-one would care The Westin looks som ething like the Ark would have looked if who was doing what to whom in that m ansion of inarticulate Noah had had more time and God had tossed him a few more m ediocrity, to the great benefit of television and the polity positives-as we say these days-instead of gnomic instruc generally. tions, threats, and a catastrophic weather forecast. Bereft of Or, what if the square's secret quality could be somehow genuine individuality in itself, the Westin might have derived endowed upon individuals? How much better would life be, for a certain cachet fro m the City Square over which it loom s like example, if Alexander Downer could be imbued with 'intrinsic a castle above its moat and whose share of morning sunlight it value as an open space'; or Mark Latham be passively walked routinely blocks. But the City Square, alas, is not able to lend by? enchantment to any view because it is officially a failure and Meanwhile, the City Square guards its potent secret and will soon undergo yet another metamorphosis. Will it becom e yearns no doubt for a grittier name. What can lie at the heart the Plaza of the Unspeakable Failme of Burke and Wills? Prob of our national failure at nomenclature? Why do we com e up ably not. with names like Telstra Dome in slavish mimicry of Americaz Yet, all is not lost for the square if only members of the Mel Why was it that, contemplating statehood som e years ago, the bourne City Council's Environment, Community and Cultural then Northern Territory government, in a paroxysm of brain Development Committee (ECCDC) are able to recognise when storming, settled for 'The State of the Northern Territory'/ Can they are on to something big. According to a report in the Mel it be that beneath all our clinging to royal monikers and British bourne Age, the ECCDC recently defended the square, pointing place names (Kensington, Queenstown, King's Cross, Grampi out that it 'has intrinsic value as an open space-with or without ans, etc., etc.) there lies a subconscious denial of our own his activity. As a passive space to walk by, it is working well.' tory because not all of it would make for comfortable remind When I read that description, I immediately strolled up into ers on street signs and squares and buildings? It's a puzzle. the vicinity of the City Square and, being careful to approach Anyway, I'm off. I'm meeting a friend in the Avenue of the casually and with a deeply uninterested mien, I walked along Myall Creek Ma ssacre. • one perimeter of the characteristically empty expanse, scarcely giving it a glance. And sure enough, the ECCDC philosophers Brian Matthews is a writer and academic. 18 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 THE AT ION:2 MELISSA LU CAS HENKO U ncivi I wars Confli ct ca n take many forms. In Austra lia, we are stil l dealing with the aftermath of an undeclared war aga inst Indigenous people. A BORIGINAL PEOPLE often don't saw, as an outsider, that day in that camp, without much aspiration for Western edu- operate in a very linear fashion, so I'm was an idyllic scene. If I was a Napranum cation. Previously these Aboriginal kids going to come at this topic in a rather cir- woman, I thought, I would never want to attended the small and under-resourced cular way. A couple of months ago I was leave this place. N apranum school. up in north Queensland, working with a But Margaret lives not in Napranum, When I was up in Weipa, I was told that young Aboriginal writer of Cape York. I'll but in the white township, Weipa. Her hus- som e of the white parents had recently call her Margaret. band is one of a small handful of Aborigi- convened a town meeting about this I fle w in to Weipa on one of those tiny nal men who work fo r the bauxite mine. change. These white mothers and fa thers planes you fly around the bush in. About half the other people on the plane were miners, who-while remaining civil consumed a lot of beer on the one-hour flight fro m Cairns. We fl ew in low over huge red mining slashes in the otherwise khaki-coloured landscape. When I got into town, the lawns of the miners' houses were surprisingly green and lush. Weipa has a large air-conditioned supermar ket, and several shops selling electronic goods and fishing gear. It has a prosperous, though isolated feel. Walking the streets, I fe lt I could easily have been in a suburb of Townsville or Darwin. The next day Marga ret, the local writer, took me to the Aboriginal settle Margaret told m e that her husband had had taken up a petition, asking the school, m ent, Napranum, to m eet her family and had to fight very strongly to get access to quite simply, to exclude the Napranum in particular her elderly grandmother. I a modest besser-block company house in kids fro m the school. This was in the inter- went expecting to find the 'normal' rem ote Weipa. He took his fight to the head office ests, they said, of 'protecting our kids and Aboriginal community-smashed houses, thousands of kilometres away in Brisbane our town'. When pressed about their fears, burnt-out cars, dozens of starving dogs after the mine manager-a brown-skinned they m entioned nits. No doubt the same roaming around. We eventually fo und the Asian man, incidentally-reportedly told sentim ents were expressed in Little Rock. old lady sitting in a camp by the shore with him that the houses in Weipa were not The openness of this racist senti a group of other Aboriginal people. suitable for 'his kind'. The most interest- m ent surprised m e, but it didn't shock It was a warm dry-season day with a ing story that was reported to m e, though, m e. Overt racism is part of the everyday cool breeze blowing off the water, which was that many of the N apranum kids had experience of many Aboriginal people. was an astonishing azure blue. I saw one recently started going to school in Weipa What surprised m e more was to hear dog, and no rubbish. The group had put with the white town kids. Margaret report the actions of one of the four or five single beds in the shade of a From being an almost entirely white white teachers at this town meeting. This large mango tree, built a fireplace, and school last year, the restructured Weipa teacher stood up after li stening to the were staying there indefinitely. The old school now has a large minority of very white parents. lady was paying these people a social visit. black Aboriginal pupils whose first lan 'How dare you come in here and ask They quietly chatted among themselves. guage is normally N apranum Kriol, a us to do such a thing,' she said. And she Occasionally som eone would get up and language English-speakers would strug was shaking in fury. 'How dare you peo fish, or go off collecting bush foods. For all gle to understand. These kids come fro m ple think that the resources of this school the problem s that remote communities homes-or from camps-without standard are only fo r white children and not fo r have with violence and poverty, what I English, without books and normally Aboriginal children .' And she told these OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STR EET 19 parents, who were outraged at the idea of is meant for them. It is time to do what war, against people we have never met sharing 'their' town, 'their' school with New Zealand and Canada have done long and will never m eet, in the interests of black people, to get out of her sight. Mar ago. It's time to acknowledge our history, other people-Americans-we are never garet's three da ughters, and her nieces and it is time to end the war, it is time for a likely to meet. Maybe in the realpolitik nephews, now attend the Weipa sch ool treaty between Aboriginal and non-Abo it makes som e sort of sense for Australia along with dozens of other Wik and Alg rigi nal people. Then we can finally all get to line up with the USA in these global nith children. These kids have a better on with being Australians-we can have a conflicts, and maybe it doesn't. With the prospect of getting a good education; they different relationship with each other, and limited and partial and biased information have improved prospects of escaping their a different conversation based if not yet on we have to go on, it is impossible really to parents' poverty; they have a trust, then at least on mutual respect. know. Such ignorance inclines me not to little more to hope for. My second point is how little we war, but to caution. I certainly wouldn't know of the reality of other people's be sending m y son to kill other brown peo W AT HAS ALL THI S got to do With lives. If I only read the Courier Mail or ple in a foreign desert on the basis of the war, you askl I would make the follow The Australian, I would assume that arguments I've heard so far. ing three points. First, Margaret's husband life in Napranum, or Kowanyama, or My final point turns on the role played struggled mightily to get a house for his Aurukun, was a misery of domestic by the white teacher. It takes extraordi family. He can't take for granted the fact violence, pack rape, and endless alcohol nary bravery to stand up against racism in that, as a mine-worker, he will be eligible abuse. N ow all those things are present a small remote town, and yet this woman for company housing. He, and Margaret, in Napranum- don't misunderstand me. stood up and she spoke out, and she won. and their three kids struggle daily against Violence and abuse, especially the sexual She found after the meeting that the the insults, small and large, of being Indig abuse and rape of kids, are huge issues in m ajority of white parents in Weipa agreed enous in Australia. Margaret's extended all Aboriginal communities, remote and with her, and that they too wanted the family live in poverty-picturesque pov urban, including my own. But alongside Aboriginal kids in their school, but had erty perhaps, but poverty nonetheless. these terrors are many Aboriginal people been afraid to speak up. The racist fear What is poverty/ Someone once said that living good, peaceful lives. Our commu that this brave teacher faced and fou ght in the fed don't understand the hungry. But nities contain m ore people who don't Weipa is the sam e racist fear that drowned this story might help us understand. I drink than alcoholics; m ore responsible 353 souls off the north Australian coast was told while I was there that a new parents than neglectful or abusive ones. last October; it is the same racist fear economic practice has evolved in N orth I was struck in Napranum by the differ that has som e of the world's most desper Queensland. Sometim e in the past four or ence between what is regularly reported ate kids locked in Australian detention five years, the Victims of Crim e Organi as the life of people in the so-called 'war centres watching their parents sew their sation pressured governments to provide zone' of remote Aboriginal Australia, and lips together. It is the same racist fear compensation for wom en and m en who what was apparently the case on that that helps build support for wars which have been battered by violent family day in N apranum. It reminded me of the we don't fight ourselves, but watch on TV members. So a new industry has sprung importance of witnessing for yourself the from thousands of kilometres away. up in Cape York-the deliberate battering situation on the ground, before assuming I don't want to be involved in a foreign of friends and spouses for the compensa you know other people's lives. It under war that I don't understand. I'm already tion money, which is then shared among lined very strongly for me how damaging involved in the aftermath of a messy extended families. This money buys food well-intentioned outsiders can be, when undeclared war on m y people here, in and petrol and pays bills in a community we presume to speak for others, when we Australia. My family and friends live in where a mining company takes millions of assume that we l 20 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 Refu gees mi x with stallholders outside the United Nations High Commiss ioner for Refu gees compound in Nairobi. E ARLY ON THE moming of 17 Apdl the attackers were among the other 180 Rights Watch, which was highly critical this year a Rwandan woman and her two or more people housed at the centre, the of the long delay in processing the fa m children- boys, aged 9 and 10- were police eventually arrested two Rwandan ily for resettlement. 'This case highlights attacked in their room at a refugee accom men who, it was reported, claimed to be the current failure of the UNHCR in modation centre in the suburbs of Nairobi. deserters from the Rwandan army. Nairobi to provide speedy resettlement The family had been in the Kenyan capital It wasn't until a week after the attack for refugees whose lives are at risk,' said for 11 months and were close to leaving for that the incident was recounted in the the organisation's refugee policy director, resettlement in Australia. Both the boys international media. The early reports Rachael Reilly. According to Reilly, the were killed 'with a single deft knife slash highlighted the fac t that the woman was process should have moved much more to their necks', according to Agence France a close relative of the former Rwandan quickly, given the wom an's background Presse; their mother, who survived the president, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu and her experience in Uga nda. attack, received multiple stab wounds. politician whose death was the pretext for Nairobi isn't necessarily the safest Although the first report in the Ken the genocidal campaign against Tutsis and place for people fleeing persecution in yan Daily Nation described the attack as moderate Hutus in 1994. Two (or three, Rwanda. The two sides in the 1994 geno a 'fight', the evidence that emerged over according to som e reports) children from cide are still settling old scores across the next few days suggests that the sleep the woman's first marriage had been killed eastern Africa, and there has been at least ing children were sedated in some way, in Rwanda, and she had fled to Uganda one fatal attack in recent years in Nairobi. then stabbed. Their mother was woken with the two younger boys in 2000. When But it appears that the UNHCR didn't rec by two attackers who held her down it was clear they were not safe there, she ognise the potential danger to the family. while they attempted to kill her. Police was transferred to Nairobi by the UNHCR Although the local newspapers described from the nearby Kilimani station say they (the United Nations High Commissioner the facility where the attack occurred as found no evidence of a break-in; a kitchen for Refugees) in May last year. 'a refugee centre', the international news knife from the centre, believed to have The interest of the international press reports called it a 'safe house' or, in one been used in the attack, was found two was stimulated by a statement from the case, a 'special protection facility for high days lat r. Acting on the assumption that N ew York- based organisation, Human ri k refugees'- If it was a safe house, then it OCTOBER 2002 EU REKA STRE ET 21 is puzzling that the men, who had admit days in Nairobi looking at prospects for a process. Nine people, including three Ken ted to links with the present government branch office. But the setting-a plain, pre yans, were charged with fraud. in Rwanda, were placed in the same facil fabricated office reached through a maze of Since Calle-Norer'la arrived, nearly all ity as a woman related to the president corridors and temporary walkways at the the division's staff have been replaced or of the former regime. If it wasn't a safe UNHCR compound-isn't quite right, and redeployed. But the shake-up has disrupted house, then that too is evidence that the Calle-Norefla's animation as he discusses operations; work on routine resettlement UNHCR didn't recognise, or at least act his work doesn't fit the image either. 'My cases was suspended last year, and even on, the potential danger. son was shocked when he first came in now only 'urgent' and 'em ergency' cases The one report about the incident in here,' he says as we walk across a make are being processed. It's been reported the Australian media was published in shift ramp from one part of the complex to that the backlog of cases fr om the period The Age on 25 April 2002. The article another. 'He said, "Papa, Papa, this looks of reorganisation still hasn't been cleared. quoted a spokesman for Immigration like a prison, not an office'"' Meanwhile, demand for the UNHCR's Minister Philip Ruddock, who denied that Fifteen minutes by car from the centre services has remained in tense. Australia had dragged its feet in dealing of Nairobi, the UNHCR's Nairobi branch Something of an oasis in a region con vulsed by war within and between coun tries, Kenya has attracted refugees and asylum seekers from countries through out north-eastern Africa. According to the best estimates, around 148,000 Somalis, 70,000 Sudanese, 20,000 Ethiopians, 6000 Ugandans and 7000 other refugees-some thing like a quarter of a million people are living in Kenya. Most of them are in two refugee camps near the border, and most of the rest are in Nairobi. The Kenyan government makes life difficult for refugees and for the UNHCR. It requires that all refugees are confined to the camps unless the UNHCR makes a formal determination that they would Eva Maina from the Refugee Consorti um of Kenya. be in danger there. Most of the refugees in Nairobi are therefore regarded as illegal with the UNHCR's request for resettle is in a busy part of town, fronting a noisy and, according to Human Rights Watch, m ent. He added- with only slight exag arterial road opposite the Westlands shop are harassed by police and forced to pay geration- that Australia is one of 'only a ping mall. Across the road, a car park full bribes to avoid arrest. Living conditions handful of countries' resettling refugees of battered taxis is standing by for custom are squalid, and even refugees approved from that region. ers; the drivers are smoking and chatting by the UNHCR have had their documents From Australia's point of view, the together and look as if they've settled in ignored or destroyed by police. According attack on the Rwandan family raises for a long wait. Like the central city, this to Human Rights Watch's refugee policy important questions. A woman and her part of Nairobi is crowded and run down. fellow, Alison Parker, who was in Nairobi two children, waiting in the 'queue' Through the louvred office windows, the when the attack at the refugee centre took to come to Australia, are attacked and sound of traffic is constant. place, there is persuasive evidence that the children killed. Despite the appar Calle-Norei'la has been running the politically motivated attacks-sometimes ent urgency of their case, it had already protection division of the UNHCR's Nai by security agents from other countries taken 11 months for them to reach this robi office-the division that tries to find are an ongoing problem for a significant stage in the approval process. And, while long-term solutions for refugees-since number of refugees. this shocking crime took place, around November 2000. He arrived just after a Since 1991, in breach of its obliga tions 250,000 refugees from surrounding UN taskforce began investigating alle under the 1951 Refugee Convention, the countries-for m any of whom resettle gations that staff in the office had been Kenyan government has refused to proc m ent outside eastern Africa is the only accepting bribes to expedite refugee appli ess any refugees itself. In some cases refu safe, long- term option- were waiting cations. Calle-Norefla's job was to begin gees have been returned to their country in Kenya for the chance at one of the rebuilding the protection division ahead of origin despite evidence that their lives relatively few places in the resettlement of the results of the investigation. are in danger. And perhaps most signifi 'queue' offered by a small group The investigation eventually revealed cantly of all, the government won't allow of countries. that refugees had been charged US$25 any refugees to settle permanently in simply to get in the front gate of the Kenya. This deprives the UNHCR of one 'ILL, DARK AND immaculately dressed, UNHCR compound and up to US$200 of the three options it has when attempt Sergio Calle-Norefla could easily be taken for an initial interview, with some pay ing to find a 'durable solution' for indi for a European banker spending a few ing thousands of dollars by the end of the vidual refugees. 22 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 The two remaining options for the UNHCR are to return refugees to their Lottery or queue? hom eland or resettle them in a third coun try. Where it's feasible and safe, repatria 0 UTSTDE THE UNHCR OFFICE in the late afternoon, there is a stream of peak-hour tion is in many ways the m ost desirable traffic. Although it's winter, the air is warm and dusty as people queue for crowded, option-providing conditions in the hom e battered old buses. Beside the main road is a market selling food, clothes and fabric, country are safe and stable. But the politi and it's here that I meet three young men who are living nearby while they wait for cal landscape in the countries around an appointment at the UNHCR. Kenya isn't encouraging. 'Somalia is still These men depend on charities for food and sympathetic locals for a place to in chaos. Sudan is still in chaos,' says sleep. Each has a quite different story to tell about why he left his home country and Calle-Norei1a. 'The persecution going on how he came to be in Nairobi. One of them, a Ugandan, tells me how his father, a in Ethiopia doesn't open opportunities for member of the political opposition, was jailed in 2000. repatriation. The old cases have already 'They took my father's documents and then they took m y brother on top of that. gone back to Uganda but we have new And then, from there, I managed for myself. ' His mother, a businesswoman, had died cases; m ost of them are members of the in 1996, so he was living alone near the international airport at Entebbe. opposition who are certainly not going to 'I was getting assistance from some other friends. There was a certain man who be able to go at this point.' Some refugees was a teacher, he was the best friend of my father, so he was the one guiding me. And have been able to return to Burundi, but then recently he was knocked by a vehicle, just an accident, so I became stranded. I Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of don't know where to go. And then on top of that those people, they were still coming Congo (formerly Zaire) have been at war there to ask me for m y father's documents. So I decided to come to this UNHCR to until very recently, with no guarantee that see if they could give me assistance for m y better future- that's just my aim of com their peace agreement will stick. ing here. Which leaves resettlement. And that's 'I came here by a bus, and the transport was given to me by some friends of mine where the 'queue'-which has been such who we had been studying together. It's 21,000 Ugandan shillings. I've now stayed an important image in the Australian here six-and-a-half months.' The young man first applied for an appointment at the government's attacks on boat UNHCR in May this year; his first appointment was for 27 August, just a few days rr people-comes into the picture. after we met. Although the political situation in Uganda has improved significantly in recent L ERWAN DAN woman and her two years, it is a one-party state and the government-still at war with rebel movements children were waiting in that 'queue'. The in the north and west of the country- has a low tolerance for dissent. This young family was classified as an urgent case, man will need to convince the UNHCR that he has a well-founded fear of persecu but it appears the UNHCR didn't realise tion if he returns to Uganda. If he succeeds, he'll probably be told to go to one of the they faced any immediate danger. 'You camps near Kenya's border, where refugees can't work and-according to a staff m em must remember,' says Calle-Norefta, 'that ber of the International Organisation for Migration-the food being issued to camp the wife and daughter of President Hab residents at the moment 'is not enough to live on', and health problems, including yarimana are moving around in the streets malaria, are rife. of Belgium with no problems.' But he con Or the young Ugandan might succeed in convincing the UNHCR that he has cedes that the family had been attacked an urgent case for resettlem ent. In which case he'll join the wait for the relatively more than once in Uganda, and for that small number of places being offered by a dozen Western countries and a handful of reason had been shifted to Nairobi. others. -Peter Browne It's at this point in the story that things becom e complicated. The accommoda staff. No-one I spoke to questioned Calle A$14.3 million to A$7.3 million in the tion centre is run on behalf of the UNHCR Noreft a's competence or his dedication to May 2002 Federal Budget.) The problem by GOAL, an Irish aid agency. Under an the job; one non-government aid worker for Africa is that a significant proportion agreement with the UNHCR, no-one at described him as among 'the best' of the of the UNHCR's incom e is earm arked, by GOAL would talk to me about the case, UNHCR people she'd met during a long donor governments, for specific countries so I couldn't ask them whether they were career working in the field, and says he or regions. The imbalance between fund alerted to any potential danger. After my is one of the few senior UNHCR staff to ing commitments and need is so great that m eeting with GOAL was cancelled by meet and talk to refugees. the average spending per refugee in Africa their deputy director, I tried-without Any UNHCR office operating in Africa has been estimated at less than a third the success-to get an answer to this question faces an underlying resource problem. amount spent per refugee in Europe. from the UNHCR. Internationally, the organisation operates Whatever the reason for the failure What information I do have, though, in a state of constant financial uncertainty. at the Nairobi office, the warning was suggests that GOAL staff were not m ade In June the head of the UNHCR, Ruud not made to GOAL and, meanwhile, the aware of any threat to the family. This Lubbers, estim ated that, of the US$748 protection division was taking too long to failure on the part of the UNHCR could million in fresh funding the organisation process the application for resettlement. well be a symptom of the stress the needs during 2002, there is a shortfall of 'The case took a bit longer than it branch is operating under fo llowing the US$99 million. (Australia's core contri usually takes,' Calle-Norena acknowl corruption inquiry and the clean-out of bution to the UNHCR was reduced from edges. 'But they don't take much less O CTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 23 time either. Let's say an urgent case takes ticular-is the first barrier for those many study theology between three and six months and a nor refugees for whom repatriation is impos mal case takes one to two years. This case sible and local integration ruled out by the was submitted, upon her arrival, in May Kenyan governm ent. But does the existing a t home 2001, but for various reasons-people on process guarantee that the limited place quality distance education leave, this and that-the formal submis that are available go to the neediest? sion from the UNHCR to the Australian 'Hit and miss' is how Lena Bar High Commission was not effectively ENROLLING NOW rett, policy and advocacy officer in the made until August.' (The Australian gov Nairobi office of the Jesuit Refugee ernment says that the case wasn't brought Service, describes the process by which Courses to the attention of our High Commis refugees eventually qualify for resettle t> B.Th, M.Th, Ph.D sion until November.) Then, according ment. In her office in Lavington, another t> Yo uth Ministry to Calle-Norefia, there was a delay in suburb of Nairobi, she describes to me t> Religion, Philosophy & Ethics (RE) obtaining extra information requested by how the lengthy approval process can t> Theology & Social Policy Australia, including a clearance for the lead to immense suffering for individuals woman from the International Court of regardless of whether, as in the case of t> Master of Ministry Justice fo r Rwanda. 'In November, yes, the Rwandan family, there is a politically t> Spiritu ality & Ageing the case was-in its content-sorted out, motivated threat. Women in particular t> Counselling and it went to the High Commission until are extremely vulnerable to violence t> Church Leadership & Management ... January, February, March ... until April, and exploitation, and in some cases that when they decided, which is normal: means they are never able to complete the three months for them to decide approval process. on what we call an urgent case.' Although the UNHCR does treat 'women at risk' as a priority group, and C ENTRAL TO THE Australian gov several countries (including Australia) ernment's case against the boatloads of have established a similar priority in asylum seekers that have arrived in Aus their own selection process, the resettle tralia in recent years is the argument that ment countries put barriers in the way of these people have been taking places away specific groups of refugees. Anyone with from needier refugees waiting patiently in a connection with a rebel group, says Bar camps in countries like Kenya. Yet even rett, will find it very difficult to get a place the Immigration Department's figures in any of the major resettlement countries, Student Services suggest that there's something wrong with even if they were forcibly recruited. that argument. In 2001-2002, according to At the Refugee Consortium of Kenya, t> Youth Allowance & Austudy the department's website, 33.2 per cent of set up in 1998 in response to the increas t> HECS-based courses Australia's offshore humanitarian visas ingly complex refugee situation in Kenya, f' PELS (Postgraduate Education went to people born in Africa and 32.1 per Eva Maina echoes Barrett's comments. Loans Scheme) cent to people born in Europe-far from a There is, she says, 'quite a gap between 1> Latest online support true refl ection of relative numbers or need how things should be and how they are' ~ DE Library faci lities on those two continents. in the processing system. Because of the But, as the Minister's spokesman backlog of cases, a person arriving in Nai remarked in response to the attack in Nai robi in January, for example, will often not CHARLES STURT robi, at least Australia is taking refugees be given an appointment at the UNHCR UNIVERSITY from that region. We are one of only eight until May, and even then it might be countries-the others are the US, Canada, postponed for up to another two months. Sweden, Norway, Finland, New Zealand In the meantime they will be housed in and Denmark-which take most of the one of the camps-where the UNHCR is estimated 100,000 refugees resettled each struggling to feed refugees adequately and year. Another eight or nine countries where there's the risk of violence from take up to a couple of thousand refugees political enemies- or, illegally, in Nairobi School of Theology between them. The United Kingdom, or other Kenyan cities and towns. Once the former colonial power in Kenya and through the UNHCR's procedures, they'll Contact several neighbouring countries, takes no come up against the backlog of cases at Damian Palmer refugees directly from the region; Africans the embassies and high commissions of E-mail: [email protected] (or anyone else for that matter) must make the resettlement countries-a backlog Phone: 02 6273 1572 their way to the UK to seek refugee status that's grown significantly since September Visit our web site there. 11 led to a slowdown in US approvals. http://www.csu .edu .au/faculty/arts/theology/ So the sheer shortage of resettlement To illustrate the difficulties faced places-and places for Africans in par- by specific groups of refugees, Maina 24 EU REKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 describes the situation of refugees from dice Australians' access to health care or refugees, he doesn't m ention the fact that the Dem ocratic Republic of Congo community services'-a potentially large a significant group- people with health (DRC)- offi cially there are about 2000 of group of needy refugees. problems-is excluded by our guidelines . them- living in Kenya. Up until a few Although the guidelines don't say He certainly doesn't refer to the UNHCR's weeks ago, the government of the DRC so, Calle-Noreii. a says that Australia perception that unaccompanied minors was effectively at war with two neigh is reluctant to accept unaccompanied aren't welcome. Nor does he make it bouring countries, Uganda and Rwanda, minors as well- or at least through clear that conditions in countries like which were each backing rival rebel N airobi. 'That's a delicate point,' Kenya can prevent refugees with strong movem ents. To get to N airobi by the most he says, 'because we have a lot of cases fro m successfully negotiating the direct ro ute, refugees from the DRC pass unaccompanied children and Australia UNHCR's procedures and then finding a through Uganda and Rwanda. But when says, "For us it's very costly, we don't resettlement country to respond to their they seek refugee status they will often have the infrastructure."' According to need. be asked why they didn't stay in Uganda Philip Ruddock, though, that's not the Using the 'neediest' as a weapon or Rwanda, because they are the first case. 'During 2001- 2002 there were 74 against boat people avoids facing up to this countries they passed through. 'Because unaccompanied minors granted visas reality. It avoids admitting that Australia's Uganda and Rwanda are heavily involved worldwide. Since 1 July 2002, [the resettlement program is significantly less in the fighting in the DRC, these are not Australian High Commission in] N airobi generous now-our refugee/humanitarian options fo r them,' says Maina. 'They com e h as granted 10 visas,' h e said in a written program is down fro m 20,000 per year in to Kenya because Kenya is the only coun response to my question on this point. the early 1980s to 12,000 this year- than try around them that's not involved in the When Mr Ruddock says that the boat it has been in the past. And, by focus war. But fo r a number of them the prin people are taking the place of the neediest ing on the victims, it avoids the obvious ciple of "fi rst country of asylum" point that we should be pressur has been used to disqualify them ing other Western countries to from being recognised as refugees -' institute orderly resettlement A large community of people program s and increase rather than who have fl ed the DRC are living reduce their support for the in the slum area of Kabiria, not UNHCR. far fro m the consortium's office, faced with a catch-22 situation. A FTER THE ATTACK at the They've been told, they say, that GOAL facility in Nairobi, the they're not refugees because they Rwandan woman was taken to a di dn't take advan tage of the first city hospital. Calle-N oreii.a visited country of asylum. Maina says, her there early that morning when, 'And yet when they say to the he says, she still wasn't aware that authorities, OK, since you've her sons had died in the attack. rejected me can you repatri After seeing her he asked police ate me, they're told, "There's to make sure that samples of the war in the DRC, so yo u children's nightclothes were kept can't go back home."' for analysis; to his surprise he later fo und out that this had not been L asE ARE JUST some of the bar done. riers fa cing those refugees for whom A few days later she was shifted resettlement is the only long-term to a guarded convent, where she solution . Sergio Calle-Noreii.a out was looked after by nuns while lines for me a few others. Anyone the police investiga tion proceeded. suffering from HIV /AIDS will be N ow classified as an emergency rejected out of hand by m ost reset case, her approval for travel had tlem ent countries, as will people com e through from the Australian with other potentially expensive High Commission . At around the health problem s. 'At this stage,' time the two Rwandan suspects he says, 'the United States and were released from custody, she Canada have accepted people who left Kenya fo r Australia. No fur are HIV-positive, but the rest of the ther arrests have been made. • countries don't. ' According to Aus tralia's guidelines, applicants will Peter Browne works at the be refused 'if they have a medical Institute for Social Research at condition which is likely to result Swinburne University and is edi in a significant cost to health care Using the ' neediest' as a wea pon aga inst boa t people avo ids fac ing up tor of Australian Policy Online and community services or preju- to the rea lity of the resett lement process. (www.apo.org.au). OCTOBER 2002 EU REKA STREET 25 THE NATION:3 M O IR A RAYN ER Motherhood values Th e debate has started, but how likely is it that Au stralia w i II endorse paid maternity leave? locally unacceptable- she offers it ination Commissioner Pru Goward only for completeness. The only visited Perth to consult on her assumption Goward does m ake paid maternity leave discussion a case for is that paid m aternity paper, the Acting Commissioner leave would probably be a Good for Equal Opportunity for Western Thing. Australia-m oi-went along. Her options are about who pays. As a well-educated statu There could be a flat-rate govern tory officer I was aware that Ms m en t paym ent to women in the Goward 's predecessor, Susan Hal workforce, which employers could lida y, had documented widespread top up. Or government-f unded discrimination against pregnant universal paym ents to all wom en wom en employees in a 1999 report, who have babies whether or not whose recommenda tions had never they have ever worked. Or social been addressed by the Common security-related payments ou t of a wealth. Those recommendations 'maternity leave fund', created by a were meant to m ake it easier for levy on employers or out of a kind businesses to sort out the muddle of contributory superannuation of anti-discrimination, industrial scheme. relations and occupational health N one of the options is favoured. and safety laws in place across All have been rejected by the gov Australia's eight jurisdictions. T he mud Goward's discussion paper (Va luing Par ernment-from Senator Nick Minchin dle m ade m anaging pregnancy at work enth ood: Options for Maternity Leave) ('not the taxpayer') through Minister 'confu sing' both for the wom en and their is being read through an ideological lens Tony Abbott (' not employers') to Senator employers, said Halliday. Indeed. as often as through pragmatic spectacles. Amanda Vanstone (just 'no' ). After all, At the first Goward consultation, It has also been entirely misread by som e pregnancy's a personal choice, isn't it? the local representative of the Austral business organisations who expect (a nd Well, no, it isn't. Wo men have babies ian Chamber of Commerce and Industry thus 'find') a secret fe minist plot to m ake unless they cannot, decide not to, or are (ACCI) repeatedly expressed the view sm all business and employers pay fo r sexually inactive. T hat's wh y they are that wom en employees who got pregnant tomorrow's workforce and pensions. disadvantaged in public life . Motherhood should simply resign. It was less trouble Paying mums of young babies because isn't valued. It's not even counted in the and less expensive to replace them per they have young babies or even to have GDP. m anently than to hold their jobs open fo r them is not a new idea. It was a 'welfare Why is paid m aternity leave being return aft er even unpaid m aternity leave. state' option after World War II . It had considered now ? There are m any reasons, When I summarised his view thus (he even been popular in 1930s Germany not all admirable. Maternity leave might agreed such was his position ) a small busi (m others of m ore than ten children go t improve the fertility ra te, it's thought. ness organisation representative becam e 'm other m edals'). Australia has progres Australian wom en are having fewer babies agitated and said that was a very 'em o sively m ade it unlawful to discriminate each year ( 1. 7 per woman and diminishing tional' thing to say. I explained I had been against wom en (a nd only wom en get preg annually), not enough to replace the cur an employer advocate fo r eight years, and nant) since 1977. rent population, and we need to maintain that was what the ACCI representative Though Goward does off er five options the population for economic purposes. agreed he m eant. Who was 'em otional' for paid maternity leave, she m akes it Goward says that the reason for the low here7 clear that they are only options, and that birth rate appears to be fi nancial. T he m other-and-baby icon is an em o the 'employer-funded option' (paying Assuming that 'barefoot and pregnant' tional one (poor Joseph: always look direct to your particular staff, or a levy on is not what we really want, women hav ing on ). Unfo rtunately this has m eant all employers) is internationally as well as ing babies need to be financially secure. 26 EUREKA STR EET OCTO BER 2002 Modern women cannot now, if they Japan, the UK, Sweden, Thailand, India, ever could, rely on their partner to sup Singapore, Mongolia and Hong Kong does port them financially for life. Women reveal an international trend, which, for <[sn~lh~ ·~ia. i . ~. ~ titut ~.~:· ": '• bear not only the children, but often the some, is the best argument against it. financial cost of staying home from work Employment-related paym ents do 'dis summer school after childbirth. Unpaid m aternity leave criminate' against mothers not in the January 15- 21, 2003 is available under som e awards and in paid workforce (and who are, by and large, (weekend excluded) some sectors (for example, government). already poor). Paid maternity leave will Flexible working arrangements are largely reward high flyers-many of whom have "Faith, Marriage and discretionary, though refusal may be dis already got an entitlem ent to at least criminatory in some cases. Women still some such leave in their employm ent con Divorce" take on the caring work and find it hard tracts or conditions of work. (A universal Professor Michael Lawler, to balance their fa mily responsibilities scheme would at least be more equita Creighton Un iversity, Oma ha, Nebraska and their work demands. Many go to less ble.) Paid maternity leave might, as John A married theologian and internationally known demanding jobs and part-time work to do Howard has suggested, increase discrimi author and lecturer, Prof. Lawler both teaches this. Some employers help them along: on nation against women. Pru Goward told at and is Director of the Center for Marriage and Family at Creighton University. His most recent the Women, Management and Employ 30 July the Federal Court fo und that Orica publication is "Marriage and the Catholic Church. moved, for no obj ectively sustainable ment Relations Conference in Sydney on Disputed Questions." 12002) reason, a young, highly skilled mother 27 July that she had been told that small Marriage and divorce are hot issues to a 'significantly inferior job' when she businesses were using 'paid maternity for Catholics today. As Australian returned from maternity leave. It may leave' as a reason for not hiring women. If be that her supervisor reflected the com so-and it sounds like rhetoric to me-it Catholics, participants will explore pany's apparently punitive ethos when, is unlawful and they should be sued. questions such as the permanence having learned that she was pregnant, It is true that no maternity leave and sacramental nature of marriage, he yelled that he would 'never employ a scheme can be simple. As Catherine the ways faith and love contribute woman again' because she was the third Hakim has pointed out in Work-Lifestyle to its life-giving dimension, and to need maternity leave. The Court is Choices in the 21st Century (which both how we as Church should care for being asked to compensate the worker Howard and Goward have read) about 15- divorced and remarried persons in for nearly a quarter of a million dollars for 20 per cent of women are home-centred, our community. loss of earnings, superannuation contribu about the same percentage career-centred, The course may be credited towards tions, bonus and company car, child-care and all the others are 'in the middle'. One a Ba chelor's or Mas ter's degree or expenses, and pain and suffering. size never fits all. But women having undertaken on an audit basis. Most women don't earn such sums. babies must be supported, just as parents APPLICATIONS CLOSE And unless a work sector is female-domi should be helped to manage family and 6 DECEMBER 2002 nated, family-friendly working conditions work balance. are a rarity. (Female dominance does make For m e, it is an issue of children's rights. new in 2003 a difference-a major clothing manufac Every child is entitled to a family life and turer whose workforce is nearly 70 per to the best possible quality of life and Master of Arts degrees will be offered cent women has just decided to give 13 opportunity to develop their full poten in eight different disciplines: weeks' paid maternity leave to all staff tial. Yet while all agree that work-family >I< Biblical Studies >I< Christian Ethic s employed for two continuous years, just balance is a Good Thing, the responses to >I< Christian Spirituality to keep their skills and loyalty.) Some the paid maternity leave scouting paper >I< Church History attitudes are disgracefully sexist. For three are mixed. State governments approve in >I< Pastoral Ca re and Counselling years, one Victorian government depart principle (WA's Geoff Gallop) but perhaps >I< Philosophica l studie s m ent has defended and appealed against not in practice (Victoria's Schou case). The >I< Theological Studies >I< Theology for Catholic Educators several Tribunal findings that it discrimi feds (Minchin/Ab bo tt/Vanstone/Howard) nated against Deborah Schou when, for no say we should crack down on divorce Applications are invited from anyone good reason, it would not let her work part and encourage mun1.s to stay at home, who has completed any three year undergraduate degree or its equivalent. time as a Hansard reporter, via a modem, with maternity leave if it doesn't cost us from home after the birth of her anything. And some (but by no means all) "Reading the Spiritual Classics", baby. employer organisations, such as the Aus a se rie s of adult education seminars tralian Chamber of Commerce and Indus planned for 2003. EmMATERNITY leave is only one part try, just don't want it 'in my backyard'. of what needs to be a sustained assault on I look forward to a heart-wrenching all enquiries and bookings: such attitudes. But it would certainly be a solution of staggering genius from Our Catholic Institute of Sydney start. It would be a moral beginning. Leader. Perhaps a Mother Medal division 99 Albert Road , Strathfield , 2135 Tel: 02 9752 9500 Fa x: 02 9746 6022 What are the arguments against paid of the Australia Day awards? • email: [email protected] .au maternity leave? Well, the fact that it is www.cis.catholic.edu.au already provided in Canada, New Zealand, Moira Rayner is a barrister and writer. OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 27 T HE LAW Courting danger What's an ouster cl ause, and w hy does it matter? Cheryl Saunders arg ues that a recent development in migration law casts a long shadow over anyone subject to a federal government decision. TECURReNT rwsmN ove< 28 EURE KA STREET OCTOBER 2002 clear from the legislation itself is contrary to other The effect of this approach is to distort the words constitutional principles-namely, the transparency of the Migration Act. Most obviously, the ouster of acts of parliament, and the accountability of gov clause does not mean what it says. Even worse, at ernments and parliaments for the rules they pre least some of the limits placed by the statute on the scribe. As Justice French of the Federal Court puts it, power given to the executive do not mean what they in his judgment in NAAV v. Minister for Immigration say, either. It is not unusual for principles of statutory and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (2002): 'In interpretation to modify or augment the words of a a representative democracy those who are subject to statute. But this is different, for at least two reasons. the law, those who invoke it and those who apply First, the modification of the statute is unusually it are entitled to expect that it means what it says.' ('NAAV' is a random set of letters assigned to the asy lum seeker in this case.) The ouster provision in the Migration Act-that is, that certain migration decisions 'must not be chal lenged, appealed against, reviewed, quashed or called in question in any court'-does not contravene the Constitution. That is so because a particular line of judicial doctrine suggests that such a provision need not be taken to mean what it says. The logic, such dramatic and amounts to a redraft. Second, princi as it is, is as follows. The provision cannot be inter ples of statutory interpretation generally favour indi preted as ousting the jurisdiction of the High Court, vidualliberty and the maintenance of constitutional because that would be unconstitutional. On the other checks and balances. The Hickman principle, in its hand, parliament has chosen to insert the provision application to the High Court, has the in the statute and the Court should, if it can, give it opposite effect. some effect. This can be done by the Court's treating the provision as an expression of parliament's inten So WHY HAS THE Hickman doctrine survived for tion about the scope of the power conferred on the almost 50 years? The short answer is that it has been government by the statute. The broader, more flex applied and endorsed, by the High Court and by other ible, less restricted the executive power, the smaller courts, thus providing a body of precedent on which the opportunity for review by the courts. the Minister relied when including the ouster clause This doctrine is generally attributed to the Hick in the Migration Act. However, this short answer man case (R v. Hickman; ex parte Fox and Clinton begs the question: why have the courts themselves (1945)), which was decided shortly after World War allowed Hickman to develop this authority? II. In Hickman, the High Court was dealing with the The explanation appears to be two-fold. First, legality of action taken by a Local Reference Board. the Hickman doctrine has sometimes proved quite The Board was established under coal industry leg useful as a tool to discourage litigious nit-picking. islation that also included an ouster clause, writ Some of the cases in which the High Court has ten in terms almost identical to the one now in the invoked it have involved challenges to decisions of Migration Act. The Court found that the action was industrial relations tribunals, against the background invalid, and to that extent the ouster clause had no of a prickly relationship between federal arbitration effect. In coming to this conclusion, however, one bodies and the federal courts. Second, the Hickman of the justices, Justice Dixon, rationalised the pres approach has provided an expedient way of control ence of the ouster clause as an aid to interpretation ling the scope of clauses ousting the jurisdiction of of the statute. In a formulation that subsequently state courts or federal courts other than the High proved influential, he suggested that, thus construed, Court. The jurisdictions of these courts, unlike the an ouster clause would preclude Court review of a High Court, lack constitutional protection and can government decision unless the decision was uncon be ousted with relative ease. Rather than giving an stitutional, was not made in good faith, was not 'rea ouster clause full effect in relation to these courts, sonably capable of reference' to the power conferred Hickman enables such a clause to be defused to a on the executive by the statute, or did not 'relate to degree, by treating it as a statement about the scope the subject-matter of the legislation'. Chief Justice of the executive's power. Black of the Federal Court applied this formulation Even with these 'positive' effects of the Hick recently in the NAAV litigation. He accepted that the man doctrine, we are still left with legislation that Migration Act's ouster clause expressed 'the Parlia does not mean what it says. In these circumstances, ment's intention that the Minister's satisfaction is to however, the cost is balanced by the preservation of be taken to exist even if the Minister (or the delegate) some remnants of judicial review. has identified a wrong issue, asked a wrong ques Not surprisingly, there has been a spate of chal tion, ignored relevant material or relied on irrelevant lenges to the validity of this new use of an ouster material'. clause in the Migration Act. These challenges have OCTOBER 2002 EU REKA STRE ET 29 exposed the full potential of an ouster clause for effec m en t, through parliam ent, can restrict recourse to tively limiting judicial review. Five such challenges the High Court in all areas of fed eral decision-mak were drawn together by the Full Court of the Federal ing-including taxation, social security, aviation Court in NAAV. This sam e litigation was accom licensing, broadcasting, nursing-home approvals, cor panied by a highly publicised (if indirect) exchange porations and secu rities regulation, and competition between the Minister for Immigration, Philip Rud policy. If, as a result of these cases, Hickman-type dock, and Chief Justice Black. In the face of a string clauses are held to mea n that governments need not of High Court precedents, the Federal Court in NAAV act fairly and may act in an arbitrary fashion, the con regarded itself as constrained by Hickman, although clusion has general appli cation. differences in analysis and outcome on the part of Of course, even without Hickman, it is possi the five justices involved exposed the uncertainty ble for parliament to pass legislation stating that the about exactly what HiclGnan means. Meanwhile, government need not give people affected by a deci in early September, argument took place in the High sion the opportunity to respond to allegations against Court itself in a group of migration cases, including them, and that the government may act arbitrarily or whimsically in particular circumstances. But the par liament can be held accountable for such legislation and it is more embarrassing to enact. It is also likely to attract greater attention on the way through par liament than legislation that imposes limits on gov ernm ent power but that also includes an apparently technical statement dealing with the juris- diction of the courts. the appeal in NAAV. Potentially, this could bring the A ND T H ERE rs A final irony: the ouster clause issue of the validity and effect of such clauses to a in the Migration Act, with its potentially corrosive head at last. consequences, may be less effective in achieving its The High Court may, however, use this oppor goals than the governm ent hopes. Two justices in tunity simply to clarify the meaning of the Hickman NAAV, Ju stice Wilcox and Justice French, state that doctrine and in particular the types of errors that will the apparent rationale of the legislation is to decrease be reviewed by the courts despite the presence of an the numbers of applica tions for review of migration ouster clause. At first glance, there is much to favour decisions and thus to decrease the cost of litiga tion this result: judicial precedent; the government's to the Immigration Department. But both justices stated expectations; the convenience of Hickman as express doubt about w hether the legislation will a way of keeping minor problem s out of the courts; have this effect . Their doubt is based partly on the the potential of Hickman for diminishing the effect increase in litigation fo llowing the earlier attempt to of ouster clauses in state legislation. But constitu restrict recourse to the courts, and partly on the fa ct tional principle suggests otherwise. A section in a that the inherent uncertainty of the Hickman prin statute that ousts the jurisdiction of the High Court ciple leaves desperate applicants with som e apparent is directly inconsistent with the Constitution. It is room for hope. hard to see why the Court should go to such lengths Unusually, both justices note other measures to save it, particularly when, in doing so, the Court that might be equally or more effective. First, they fa lls foul of further, fundamental principles on which suggest that better information might be supplied the Australian constitutional system is based. to unsuccessful refugee applicants about the nature And in any event, there are other ways of deal of judicial review, and by extension their relatively ing with the problems that Hickman has been used limited prospects of success. Second, they suggest the to address. The courts are well able to distinguish introduction of a two-s tage judicial process in migra between minor and other illegalities without the tion and refugee cases to allow those with no pros complica tion of Hickman. They are able to dis pects of success to be eliminated after consideration courage inappropriate litigation, as the outcome in of the relevant documents, without a hearing. Re McBain; ex parte Australian Catholic Bishops These options, and other alternatives, have the Confaence showed, albeit in som ewhat extreme potential to discourage litigation that has no pros circumstances. They have other interpretative tools pect of success, and would be m ore consistent with to draw the teeth of ouster clauses, which have been what we claim as our constitutional standards. Has put to good effect elsewhere in the common-law the government's hostili ty to the courts prevented it world. fr om identify ing alternative solutions? • Those inclined to dismiss these issues as m erely another skirmish over migration policy and of no Cheryl Saunders is Professor of Constitutional Law interest to them: take note. The outcome of these at the University of Melbourne and Director of the cases will determine the extent to which a govern- Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies. 30 EU REKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 Sir William Deane's stance on Aboriginal issues was compassionate and conci li atory. It was also confusi ng, argues Duncan Campbell. M OST Ausn OCTO BER 2002 EU RE KA STREET 31 with judge and jury. We have, for example, Self-determination has long been a seeking to come to Australia. However, discarded the death penalty. mirage, and misunderstood in Aboriginal the refugees created by Australia in their Moral prescription in political affairs Australia. In 1985, at a conference of the own land and di splaced in it for 200 years is an infection that ought to be resisted International Indigenous Administrators have a prior claim on our attention. by democrats because experience teaches at Uluru, I argued to Charles Perkins and To echo Frank Brennan (in an interview that it is a warning sign of impending a number of his colleagues among Maori, on ABC Radio National, 6 April 2002) we intolerance and worse. Hawaiian, and North American Indian haven't yet found the 'recipe' for recon Sir William may have inadvertently representatives, that self-determination ciliation. Reconciliation is a process, not started us on a slippery slope. With star gives no guarantee of self-government, let a one-off gesture. A critical factor, in fact tling alacrity, segments of our electorate alone independence. UN-sponsored plebi a catalytic one, must be the introduction have moved from accepting a ceremonial scites can also sanction assimilation, as of Indigenous legi lators, to participate head of state (holding certain discretionary happened in the Cocos Islands. particularly at the fed eral level. Just look reserve powers and appointed privately by Current debate about Aboriginal pol at the impact on John Howard of Senator the Prime Minister) to insisting that the icy is often misleadingly characterised as Aden Ridgeway's arrival in parliament: office-holder have a track record of com occurring between the assimilationists the Prime Minister was drawn promptly mitment to complex contemporary moral (the Howard government) and those seek into dialogue and negotiation. and ethical standards. The assault on Dr ing Indigenous policy based on supposed As a transitional measure, the Coali Peter Hollingworth in this new political self-determination principles and good tion and the ALP could agree to place environment suggests that public opinion governance. The result is an unreal polari Indigenous candidates in safe positions is not only digesting the Deane model, sation into opposing camps of assimilation on their senate tickets in, say, two states. but beginning to take for granted that and separation. The badge of separation The immediate effect would be to provide popular appointment and dismissal have would be a treaty, bringing in its train the five Indigenous senators (including Ridge already arrived in advance of an elected prospect of unlimited litigation. The first way). It can safely be assumed that, across presidency. If present trends continue, remedy should be to acknowledge that party lines, they would soon force a new the criterion for tenure of office will be a self-determination ceased to be an option and broadly representative national Indig media verdict based on compliance with before federation, and the same therefore enous affairs agenda on the government some populist and non-constitutional applies to any constitutional notions of and opposition. Ridgeway's position in the moral norms. Whether the Hollingworth Aboriginal nationhood, self-governing sta Democrats suggests how much influence appointment, ill-considered or otherwi e, tus or treaty-making authority. could be brought to bear. retards or reverses this process Here are two recommendations that Simultaneously, there could be a remains to be seen. might help all Australians to chart a new constitutional study of a nationwide course together. Indigenous electoral roll, to provide an M EANWHILE, THE search for alterna First, erect a permanent monument in alternative to Aborigines and Torres Strait tive Aboriginal policy must move away the Constitution to the fact that the First Islanders voting from the general roll. The from Yarralumla. It must also discard self Australians were deprived of their right to study could also advise on the numbers determination as a point of reference. self-determination. This would be an all of Indigenous parliamentary members Indigenous Australians were dispos embracing Mabo move. It would recognise who might be elected nationally based sessed and, in the spirit of Mabo, it is prob that the invading settlers violated other on the size of the Indigenous roll. Such a ably fair to say they were disenfranchised. rights and systems besides land rights and study would find numerous variants and They are the last indigenous people in the tenure. Second, compensate in the Con options-and undoubtedly objections and former British Empire, now the Common stitution for that deprivation by confer obstacles. wealth, to be denied the right of self-deter ring on Indigenous peoples, in perpetuity, It could, however, mean setting out on mination-that is, denied the right under protected representation in the national a new path. We could restore to the First international supervision to an unfet legislative process. In other words, let Australians an assured say in the manage tered choice between independence, or recognition, and some restoration, of their ment of their land, provide constitutional self-government in free association with unrealised political rights be the founda compensation for the deprivation of the an independent state, or absorption into tion of reconciliation. Allow their voices right of self-determination, and clear such a state. Self-determination, properly to be heard routinely as federal parlia away the angst about assimilation and understood, is not an ongoing process but ment, step by step, enacts the ways in apartheid. Nor would it be the 'ameliora a finite procedural stage. which we are reconciled. We would have tive discrimination' earlier contemplated Peoples colonised by the British in no difficulty, were there to be a national by distinguished constitu tiona! lawyers Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and some apology, in confirming that the Prime like Professor Geoffrey Sawer. Rather, it Pacific Islands have had their acts of self Minister of the day should make it. And would mean bestowing a legitimate right determination. That leaves the Maoris, who surely the first parliamentary representa in place of one stolen. Could 'No recon signed an historic treaty and have special tives elected from Aboriginal and Torres ciliation without representation!' become representative privileges, and the Canadian Strait Islander communities would be the a rallying cry? 8 Indians, who have collectively rationalised most appropriate recipients. their positions- both well ahead of any We spend, as we should, much thought Duncan Campbell is a freelance commen comparable outcomes in Australia. on the human and legal rights of refugees tator and former diplomat. 32 EU REKA STREET OCTO BER 2002 TH EO LOGY:1 JO H N N. COL LI NS Taking orders It's time to take a fres h look at the nature of ministry. E RTY Y OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 33 As well, and unavoidably in the con was feminism pure and simple that forged text of modern ecumenism, what goes on a new resolution. The organisations them in one church profoundly and increasingly selves are normally of a national char affects understandings in another. With acter, but smaller groups operate, and out doubt the most significant illustra an international umbrella organisation tion of cross-pollination of this kind is is also in place. You can see the range in the divisive issue of the ordination of and style of the groups on the women, particularly as the issue works its website www. womenpriests.org. SHAPING CHANGE way through pre-Reformation churches. Roman Catholics with irons in this fire I NTERESTINGLY, a significant part of the A Conference on Women, look most closely, naturally, to the way Anglican strategy has not been broadly the Diaconate and this issue was developed in the Anglican applied in the campaign by Roman Catho communion. Although the agenda there lic lobbyists. The Anglicans set up a first Priestly Ordination contains a deal of unfinished and untidy target in the ordination of women dea in the Catholic Church business, the Church of England itself cons. In many Roman Catholic circles, legislated for women to be ordained dea however, especially proactive English cons (in 1985) and priests (in 1992). As speaking ones, the diaconate holds lit 22 to 2&+ November 2002 this process got under way, Pope Paul tle appeal. In those countries where the Jane Franklin Hall, VI promptly informed the Archbishop of male permanent diaconate is prominent an independent college of the Canterbury in their correspondence of (pre-eminently this means the United 1975 that ordaining women priests would States, where over 11,000 permanent male Un iversity of Tasmania, Hobart. introduce 'an element of grave difficulty' deacons have been ordained, although to dialogue between the two churches. geographically they are spread unevenly) Speakers: Just how grave this was to be becam e clear the prevailing image of the deacon is of in John Paul II's Apostolic Letter of May a liturgical assistant. The image is inade Dr John Wijngaards, a campaigner 1994, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. This short quate and inaccurate: deacons, in fact, are for women's ordination document taught 'definitively' that even required to offer and develop a specialist (www.womenpriests.org) the church does not have the authority to area of social service, although for almost Dr Kim Power and Dr John N. Collins, ordain women to the priesthood. all of them this is a part-time and unpaid Australian theologians who will speak In Catholic circles, this declaration contribution. Members of the congrega on the Dia conate old and new brought an abrupt end to long-standing tions, however, are mainly aware of dea Reverend Val Graydon, Anglican priest public debates about the theological pos cons in their midst when they see them and Gen. Sec. Tasmanian Council of sibility of women priests. Indeed, the vestmented and distributing communion Churches declaration proscribed discussion of the during Sunday Mass. Angelika Fromm, leader of the Wom en's question, and bishops were required to In Australia, which has only some 50 Diaconate Group in Germany do nothing that might foster women's deacons across a handful of dioceses, the Soline Vatinel, co-founder of Brothers aspirations for ordination. For years these deacon has a low profile in local parish And Sisters In Christ (BASIC, an aspirations had been ardently expressed, life. This is largely because professional lay Irish mouement committed to the especially in response to the Declaration pastoral roles were already in place-filled ordination of women in the church), of the Congregation for the Doctrine of mostly by women-before some bishops will open the Conference. the Faith of 1976 'that the Church .. . does moved to introduce the permanent diaco not consider herself authorised to admit nate. In the eyes of most women, accord Cost: $200, includes accom modation, women to priestly ordination' (the phrase ingly, ordination to diaconate appears to be mea ls and conference dinner; $120 without taken up 20 years later by John Paul II). an irrelevancy. What's more, they mostly accommodation; or $50 per day. Theologians who favoured the ordination reject what ordination as deacons appears of women, as well as lobbyists of the cause, to imply-converting pastorally active Contact/enquiries: felt particularly aggrieved by this decision women into minor and subservient mem Ann Ryan, 'fl20 Channel Hig- hway, in the light of the prior advice to the Con bers of a clerical caste. Flowerpot, Tasmania, 705'-t. gregation by the Pontifical Biblical Com The picture has been very different for Ema il: aryan@s outhcom.com.au mission that on biblical grounds it saw no women of other cultural groups. In partic or, [email protected] obstacle to the ordination of women. ular, Germany, which is the home of the Phone: (03) 6292 165'-t. Not unexpectedly, movements for the modern diaconate, has had a vibrant move ordination of women emerged. In places, ment for women deacons since the 1950s, or, OCW Inc. PO Bo x E'f18, these movements owed much to similar supported by male and female theologians King-ston ACT 260'-t. earlier movements in the Anglican com and sponsored by some bishops. Even ear web: www.oc w.webcentral.com .a u munion, which had been so effective in lier, in the 1930s, Edith Stein (the Polish giving the issue a public profile and in the philosopher who became a Carmelite nun Shaping Change Conference is organised by 'conscientisation' of enormous numbers and was executed as a Jew in Auschwitz) Ordination of Catholic Women (OCW In c.) Australia of women and m en. For many others it argued the case independently. And after 34 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 the brilliantly orchestrated campaign for in Stuttgart in 1997 provided over 400 With her scholarship out of the road, he male permanent deacons, to which Karl pages of theological and historical studies. launches into the main argument based on Rahner lent his weight in the lead-up Published shortly afterwards, Dorothea the essential differences between woman to the Second Vatican Council, women Reininger's magisterial study, Wom en 's and man. The clinching argument, how seized the opportunity created by what Diaconate in the On e Church (Dialw nat ever, is that the sacrament of orders-at men had achieved at the Council and der Frau in der Einen Kirche, 1999) whatever hierarchical level- is intrinsi advocated their own cause with increas mounted a comprehensive argument, with cally orientated to priesthood, an orienta ing confi dence. a foreword by the president of the German tion that puts that sacrament out of the The case of the German wom en was, Bishops' Conference, Bishop (now Cardi reach of women. In regard to the diaconate however, simpler to argue because of the nal) Karl Lehmann. this is indeed an odd position to advance, type of diaconate that the German men In light of such a powerfully devel especially as the Second Vatican Council had described and promoted. Although oping momentum, it is puzzling to see cited the ancient dictum that deacons are the Second Vatican Council was to lay recent shifts in official thinking on the ordained 'not unto the priesthood, but down a broad platform for a diaconate 'of question of women deacons. In September unto the ministry' (Lum en Gentium 29). the liturgy, of the Gospel and of works of 2001 Cardinal Ratzinger, who is himself Over recent years, theology of the charity' (Lumen Gentium 29), what the on record as seeing no theological bar diaconate has been attracting considerable German founding group had envisaged rier to the ordination of women deacons, attention, m ost of it directed at establish and worked for was a diaconate of works ing new understanding of the order. In the of charity, expended especially on areas Roman Catholic context, in addition to beyond the normal reach of traditional the German colloquium alluded to above, pastoral activity. Bin Amt fii r Frauen in der Kirche (1 997) The group had an inspiring leader in and Reininger's major study, Diakonat the late Hannes Kram er. Collaborating der Frau (1 999), there are: Phyllis Zaga with his wife and other female friends, no's Holy Saturday (2000 ), which elabo he supported efforts for the inclusion of issued a N otification requiring the closure rates an argument for wom en deacons; a wom en in the kind of diaconate he and of courses designed to prepare wom en fo r major Belgian colloquium, Diaconat XXIe his peers were practising. Since its defin the diaconate. Such courses, it was noted, Siecle (1997); and John Wijngaards' No ing function was service to the needy, aroused 'hopes which are lacking a solid Women in Holy Ord ers~ Th e Women Dea women and their supporters could easily doctrinal foundation '. cons of the Early Ch urch (due N ovember develop theological justification for their If this has an ominous ring to it for 2002). In the Orthodox context we have inclusion in a diaconate of that kind. advocates of women deacons, recent leaks Kyriaki Karidoyanes FitzGerald's Women Although initiation into it would m ean from the International Theological Com Deacons in the Orthodox Church ( 1999), wom en receiving the sacrament of orders, mission are even more dismaying. The which follows the heroic initiatives of as deacons of service they would not be Commission is a large international body Elisabeth Behr-Sigel in the 1980s. encroaching upon the fi eld of sacramental of theologians which prepares briefings for In the Anglican context, there is last ministry exclusive to male members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the year's report to the General Synod, For the hierarchy. Faith on m atters relevant to its concerns. Su ch a Time as This. On the ecumenical Support was widespread. In 1969, the In 2001 it was asked to prepare a study on front: the Hanover Report of the Angli International Diaconate Centre was estab the diaconate. The outcom e is confi den can- Lutheran International Commission, lished in Freiburg im Breisgau (of latter tial. Nonetheless, m ore than one m ember The Diaconate as an Ecumenical Oppor years located in Rottenburg) . The centre appears to have flagged the way opinion is tunity (1996); the imminent third volume has sponsored international seminars on developing. Significant are the comments of the Anglo-N ordic Diaconal Research the issue, and its journal, Diaconia Christi, of Gerhard Muller (professor in the Catho Pro ject (1999-2002); and my own Deacons continues to publish studies by respected lic faculty of theology in Munich), who and the Ch urch (due October 2002). N ot theologians. Prominent among these has has publicly indicated that, on theological all of this is in perfect harmony, but it been Professor Peter Hunermann, who has grounds, the sacrament of orders is beyond could at least be said to be open-ended. also been associated in similar endeavours the sphere of women. Roman Catholic women should take elsewhere with Herbert Vorgrimmler and Muller had previously rehearsed the heart at the opening of many windows Yves Congar. From the 1970s onwards, sev theological grounds of his argument in upon possibilities fo r them to enrich the eral German and Swiss synods formulated two small books of 1999 which, in 2000, life of their church through being called sympathetic recommendations. Bishops he brought together in a revised single to the sacrament of orders. That certainly like Cardinal Hoffner of Cologne encour volume called Priesthood and the Diaco is the direction in which this sampling of aged wom en to take the initiative in pro nate: The Recipient of the Sacrament of the literature is pointing. But open win moting their cause or, like Bishop Walter Orders fro m the Perspectives of Crea dows work two ways. You can go in or you Kasper (now the Cardinal Secretary of a tion Theology and Christology. Included ca n go out. • Vatican congregation), undertook to pro in his presentation of tight systematic mote their cause in Rome. theology and of a looser reading of bibli John N. Collins is a N ew Testam ent The published papers of the First Inter cal and patristic material is a dismissive scholar with a special interest in issues national Congress for Women's Diaconate critique of Dorothea Reininger's volume. of ministry. OCTO BER 2002 EUREKA STREET 35 THEOLOGY:2 ANDREW H AM ILTON Forty years away But never forgotten. The Second Vatican Council resounds through the life of the church, still disturbing, still animating. W HNCABOUT •nni'e""i" can enlivened by the Council, and found in it defend the tradition of a fai thful church be an invitation to boredom. Because a revolutionary program for living in a lib and those who wish to pervert it. This anniversari es mark distance as well as erated and attractive church. When they form of remembering is also a game for summon m em ory, their recorders often celebrate the anniversary of the Council , insiders and offers little to those who are try to close the distance by portentous they focus on its agenda, w hich they view not partisans. ness. So it is well to ask first what kind as an emancipation from 'the meagre, Significant events can al o be remem of anniversary we are dealing with, and stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and bered because their documentation shapes why it should be remembered. Or so ran statute'. And because those concerned institutions. The anniversary of Austral the admonition from friends when I began with agendas quickly turn their atten ian federation offers a useful example. to write about the Second Vatican Council tion to those who control the agenda, the Like other celebrations of the kind, it on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Council and its aftermath naturally com e produced much discursive comment on There are, of course, as many anniver to be seen as a struggle between conserva the significance and the limitations of the saries as there are events. And each year tives and liberals. This is the participants' Australian Constitution. But it aroused m ore are added. It is, for example, 48 years way of celebrating the anniversary of the little excitem ent. At the heart of this kind since Footscray won its first and only VFL Council: as an event which animated the of celebration lies painstaking scholarship prem iership. For m e it was a significant survivors. But as in the celebration of bat that investigates the historical context event: I supported Melbourne, the defeated tles, the survivors grow older and dimin of the Constitution and its influence on team, and this was the first Grand Final I ish, and those who com e later are little Australian development. The Coun attended. Not a happy occasion, and made interested in the celebration. cil, too, left a collection of docum ents, worse by a garrulous Footscray supporter Wordsworth's m emories of the Revolu around whose interpretation and histori determined to anniversarise the event in tion were complex. He returned to France cal context a large body of scholarship has florid and bad prose even as it was hap in 1792, when he confronted the Revolu grown. This work goes on all the time; it pening. Forty-eight years on, it remains an tion's murderous side and his own terrors. is merely popularised by anniversaries, event unique of its kind whose narration He wrote of Paris as he saw it from his and finds a market during them. Com will interest those who were involved in upper ro01n: m emorations that focus on this aspect of it, but no-one else. Most anniversaries, anniversaries are usually heavy and didac The place, all hushed and silent as it was, including that of the Second Vatican tic. The distance between texts and peo Appeared unfit for the repose of night, Council, are generally told as stories for ple is so evident that it readily provokes Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam . participants. solemnity. For many, however, the anniversary For some, the Vatican Council brings But beyond mere noting of an occa of the Council has more in common with m emories of a dangerous event whose sion, beyond partisan response and beyond Wordsworth's reminiscences of his first consequences left the church 'as defence documentation, there may be another way visit to revolutionary France in 1790: less as a wood where tigers roam'. They of remembering Vatican II. It may be cel believe that even though it did not intend ebrated as a cultural event that revealed Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, it, the Council led to a pathological theory how much the world had changed, and But to be young was very Heaven! 0 times, and practice in the church . As a result of that continues to influence further In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways the Council, they would argue, the Catho change. Australian events like Gallipoli Of custom, law and statute, took at once lic Church has been betrayed either by its or even the response to the Bea tles when The attraction of a country in romance' participants or by its interpreters. Those they first came to Australia were of the Wordsworth could not dissociate of this mind will m ark the anniversary same kind. Gallipoli etched war and the the Revolution from his own youth and of the Council as a cautionary tale. Like martial virtues into Australian identity, from his surmise that the world could be those who look back to it as a liberat and, by the loss of so many young men, changed for the better. Man y whose reli ing event, their focus is on the Council's shaped the national life. T he Beatles gious formation preceded the Council will agenda, and on those who struggle to con showed that young Australians form a resonate with his nostalgia. They were trol it. They set in opposition those who group and a market distinctively different 36 EUREKA STR EET OCTOBER 2002 from their elders, one ripe for recognition Father.' A generation ago, such language force to the individual confession of sins, and exploitation. about the tabernacle would have been also marks a reaction to what has been It may be as such a cultural event that felt to be irreverent. Tabernacles, sacred done. But nothing suggests that this genie Vatican II is more worth noting-an event vessels, and consecrated breads were can be put back in the bottle, because which introduced ideas and processes uniquely privileged places of God's pres most Catholics have not experienced that are still at work and that continue to ence, before which one walked and talked loss but a change of pattern. Individual influence the directions of further change circumspectly. Priests and religious, com confession, visits to churches and rituals within the Catholic Church. mitted to a life of holiness, might be at that encourage a sense of transcendence Events that reveal large change are home there. But everyone would walk will retain a place, particularly for young often domestic and apparently trivial. The reverently in churches, particularly when adults who discover them afresh, but they sight of farm after farm ploughed by age receiving the sacraments of con will never regain the importance they had ing men on tractors, for example, might fession and Communion. in a church where the individual's inner indicate the depopulation of the country relationship to God was privileged over side and the stress felt in rural communi 'IE FORM OF reverence have changed. the communal and everyday facets of that ties. Visible church events are inherently Churches are not uniquely privileged relationship. domestic and local, but can be equally places of God's presence, and even in If as a result of the Council, the every telling. Take, for example, a funeral in a churches God is sought and found in ordi day has been taken into the divine in suburban church. The parish priest asked nary human relationships as well as in Catholic life, God has also been under one of the women in the church if there silence. As a result, reverence is expressed stood to be m ore urgently interested in the were enough consecrated breads in the everyday. Boundaries between sanctuary tabernacle to ensure that the large con and public buildings have changed. This gregation could receive Communion. She difference needs to be carefully delineated. took the key, checked the tabernacle, and The older church was just as interested in reported back, 'She's chockers, Father.' politics, but the point of engagement was An everyday and undramatic event, but closer to the centre. The feature of the one whose ordinariness shows how greatly post- Vatican II church is the priority given and irreversibly everyday relations and to the joys, sorrows, struggles and oppres expectations have changed. A generation sions of ordinary people. This change of or two ago, no priest would have sent a lay focus has been lethal in many countries, person to inspect the tabernacle. This was where numbers of catechists, community the most sacred of places, and reserved to leaders and religious have been murdered. priests to inspect and to handle. That lay Their crime: to defend the dignity of ordi people, including women, could be asked nary people. to attend to it indicates changed patterns In Australia, as in other Western socie of relationship between clergy and laity. ties, the change is reflected in the natural Before the Council, the preferred image association that young Catholics in partic of the church was that of a hierarchical ular see between faith and social justice. society. The Council documents gave The path to an adult faith often passes precedence to the more democratic image less by mandatory quiet, and more in through working on soup vans, tutoring of the People of God. The more eq ual rela moments of heightened awareness. The asylum seekers, accompanying young tionships between laity and clergy sug language of address to God is more collo people in juvenile justice institutions and gested by this image have been generally quial, and more attuned to the rhythms of periods of more extended voluntary work. accepted as normal. Clerical dress, the daily life. These directions are embodied Reflection on belief fo llows such commit assumption of clerical authority by right, in the adoption of vernacular languages in ments. and the defence of clerical spheres of influ the liturgy. But they are also seen in the What Vatican II did eludes capture in ence have becom e the exception, not the popularity of communal services of rec agendas. The world youth celebration, norm. While these directions have been onciliation which emphasise the ordinary recently held in Toronto, saw a frail old resisted, those who wish to restore older rituals of shared life. Individual confession man arousing the enthusiasm and affec patterns have to carve out the territory of sins, with its emphasis on the individu tion of a huge gathering of young people. they wish to defend. When they move on, al's relationship to God in the solitude of Yet Pope John Paul II's concerns were the newer patterns of relationship are qui the heart, is much less used. not the concerns of many of the young; etly and quickly resumed. Furthermore, These are sea changes which many his vision of the church differed in m any the sharing by clergy with laity of roles have felt as loss. Some have complained respects from their vision. But both the and work which were previously confined about them, lamenting a felt loss of mys happiness of the meeting and the differ to priests will continue to shape the ways tery in the Mass which they associate ences between the protagonists represent in which Catholics imagine the church. with a broader loss of transcendence. The the continuing working of the Council. • The second set of relationships proscription of the third rite, which m eans involved in this story are evoked by the that communal celebrations of reconcili Andrew Hamilton SJ teaches at the United woman's colloquial reply, 'She's chockers, ation cannot be seen to have equivalent Faculty of Theology, Melbourne. OCTOBER 2002 EUR EKA STREET 37 [ HEsHORrLIS] Black Chicks Talking, Leah Purcell. Hodder does it mean to be an Australian writer when you're sitting at your Headline Australia, 2002. I SBN 0 773 61070 6, desk? What about when you 're trying to publish overseas? The RRP $29.95 feminist perspective is striking: Modjeska thinks both within and Leah Purcell's second book boldly goes where beyond her generation. no-one has dared go before: inside the lives and But you'll have to read the book. She is too precise to be para minds of nine contemporary Aboriginal women phrased without butchery, and is willing and very able to speak for who are willing to share their stories of success herself. -Susannah Buckley and survival. They are: Cilla Malone, mother of six, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper: A I J <.. II who lives at Cherbourg Mission in QLD; Debo Novel, Harriet Scott Chessman. Viking, 2002. ISBN HR P rah Mailman, AFI award-winning actress, who \1 n t' !' 1 0 670 04027 4, $29.95 talks about her mixed Indigenous heritage; Frances Rings, talented Aunt Ethel used to say with a mixture of embar dancer and choreographer with Bangarra Dance Company; Kath rassment and defiance (like half a million other ryn Hay, a former Miss Australia from Tasmania who reveals the Australians): 'I don't know much about art but complexities some Aboriginal people face over issues of identity; I know what I like.' Liza Fraser-Gooda, a 21st-century businesswoman and the brains Well, I like Mary Cassatt (1844- 1926) behind the first Indigenous Model Calendar; Rachel Perkins, proud one of the most talented American artists. Her Aboriginal woman, successful film-maker and daughter of the late work appeals as delicate, intimate and vigorous Charles Perkins; Rosanna Angus, community police warden and with warmth. Coming from a wealthy family, tour guide in her beloved community of On e Arm Point, WA; Sha Cassatt studied art not only in America but also in France, Italy ron Finnan, former wing attack and goal attack for the Australian and Spain during the 1860s and 18 70s. In 18 77 her parents and netball team; and Tammy Williams, lawyer and humanitarian, elder sister, Lydia, came to live with her in Paris. Cassatt was asso who aspires to work one day with the United Nations. ciated particularly with Degas as well as Berthe Morisot, Manet Purcell goes to great lengths to get what she wants from the and Renoir. Many of her paintings feature Lydia Cassatt. nine women. She interviews them individually in their homes. This unusual and charming little novel has five chapters each She arranges a dinner for them in Sydney so they can all meet and centred upon a painting in which Lydia posed for Mary (known chat. She has an artist paint a portrait of each of them. in the family as May) in the years 1878 to 1880, when Lydia was Black Chicl Timepieces, Drusilla Modjeska. Picador, 2002. Black Theology and Ideology: Deideological ISBN Q 330 36372 7, RRP $22 Dimensions in the Theology of James H. Drusilla Modjeska is an opener of windows and Cone, Harry H. Singleton III . Michael Glazier a knocker-down of walls. The Timepieces essays Liturgical Press, 2002. I SBN 0 81465 106 2 are about, among other things, honesty, subjec In this book, Harry Singleton, a young theo tivity, reality and the work of writing. Context logian who was brought up in a warm church is important: not only time and place, but the background but reacted against its political confusions of history, politics, family, national detachment, deals with the theology of James ity, age and choice of influences. Cone. Cone, one of his mentors, is the best Modjeska shows a natural relationship known black theologian. between the circumstances of a person's life and He offers a good account of Cone's theol what they write. She advocates a free and deliberate movement ogy, emphasising its critical aspects. Cone showed how the West between different genres and time periods that allows emotional ern intellectual and theological tradition, and its interpretation of connections to be seized by the intellect. She is unusually positive texts, helped the subjugation of black to white and corroded the about the word 'I': finding a valuable honesty and specific context self-respect of black Americans. Singleton uses the insights of the in saying, 'I thought this I felt this I this happened to m e.' At times Uruguayan theologian, Juan Luis Segundo, who insisted on the she takes this further than I, personally, would. But her point is not effect that our changing social reality has on us, and particularly that you should write like this, but that you can write however on the way in which wealth and power shape the way we see our seems most appropriate to you. world and tell stories about it. Timepieces also looks at the evolution of memoir, with its new Blacl< Theology and Ideology is a good and modest book, which possibilities, and the increasing popularity of non-fiction. What marks a personal and intellectual journey. -Andrew Hamilton SJ 38 EUREKA STREET O CTOBER 2002 BOO KS:l jOANNA MARET H New tools, old tactics breathless pronouncem ents of not too long recommends for online activists include ago- was going to deliver us into a new imagination, wit and a willingness to work century of active, engaged citizenship. All harder and longer than the opposition. we had to do was log on. Some tactics work better online than Does anyone still believe that ? N ot others, as anyone who has received multi really, and that's a good thing. We've been ple copies of an email petition can attest. guilty before of trying to change the sub All these online iterations from the exist stance of politics by changing the process ing armoury of protest gestures might of participation. Most of us com e back tempt us to dismiss internet activism as a down to earth when we realise that, even poor substitute for the 'real thing'. But the dressed up in the latest gadgetry, politics is case studies spea k for themselves, remind still a content-driven enterprise. ing us that the web combines low-cost pub But we'd be wrong too to dismiss the lishing with low -barrier access, immediacy web as just another corporate outpost, more and intimacy to powerful effect. There's akin to shopping mall than town square. the case of B92 (www.b92.net) , Belgrade's The internet connects all kinds of people independent radio station, which switched in new and different ways. The real story its broadcast to the internet after Slobodan of what goes on online is more complica ted Milosevic seized control of the airwaves. than the reductive headlines-positive groups of people to organise their opposi Stations around the world picked up and or negative-concede. Luckily, Graham tion to the global reach of capital. What played the netcast, enlisting musicians Meikle has boiled it down to a compel is incongruous is how much the 'Battle in and DJs to hold virtual 'FreeB92' benefit lingly simple idea in his well-written book Seattle' resembled its sister protest m ove gigs. Another site contributed the Kosovo on internet activism: it's the ideas, not the m ents from the 1960s. The success of the Privacy Project, which m asked the online technology, that matter. anti-globalisation movement was meas identities of locals sending and receiving Meikle, a lecturer in media and com ured not by how many hits its various web news from abroad. munications at Macquarie University, sites got, but by the coverage it received Then there's the McSpotlight web identifies three forms of internet politics. from mainstream newspapers and televi site (www.mcspotlight.org), with its vast There's the evolving drama of how the sion and by how m any World Bank digni repository of information that the Golden internet will be governed. Will open-source taries got held up in traffic snarls caused by Arches would prefer you not to see. The software continue to exist ? What consti street protests. site provides case studies fo r community tutes spam and what can be done about it? Meikle calls this backing into the groups trying to keep out the chain How about hackers? Closely related, there's future: the use of new technology to exploit including a successful block by residents of the question of how existing debates about old tactics. He writes: Katoomba in N ew South Wales-and hosts ownership, control and censorship of radio an active discussion forum for McDonald's and television will translate to the inter The whole repertoire of tactics developed workers. By hosting on several different net. And finally, there are the various polit throughout the twentieth century, from servers around the world, the site has so ical uses of the internet as a tool to effect the Suffragettes to Civil Rights, fro m far eluded McDonald's bullying tactics to change in the offline world. Greenpeace to ACT UP, fro m Gandhi to shut it down. It's this third use that most interests Greenham Common, have found their dig Sydney's Independent Media Centre Meikle, and his book is part scholarly prob ital analogues, as social activism moves (sydney.indym edia.org) creates fr ee web ing of the em erging fi eld of internet activ into cyberspace. Letter-writing, phone publishing software and bills itself as 'part ism, part primer for activists. and fax trees, petitions. Newsletters, news of the software liberation movem ent'. The use of the internet to organise the papers, samizdat publishing, pirate radio, The software allows people to publish 1999 anti-globalisation protests in Sea ttle guerilla TV. Ribbons and badges, posters, their own online newspapers, filled with is perhaps the best-known case of internet stickers, graffiti. Demonstration, boycotts, links to noteworthy item s and comments activism at work. For Meikle there is noth sit-ins, strikes, blockades, sabotage, mon from readers. These do-it-yourself pages ing ironic about the fact that the web made keywrenching, outing. Even online benefi t also known as weblogs- are now hugely it possible for disparate, globally dispersed gigs and virtual hunger strikes . popular and have sparked considerable OCTOBER 2002 EU REKA STRE ET 39 discussion about who controls the news Meikle is an internet enthusiast and it's based politics, we'll have to tackle the gathering and editing processes. hard not to share his zeal for the impact a politics of the internet. • Word Perhect (sic) (www.e-2.org/word_ few creative, committed people can have. perhect.html), a WordPerfect spoof devel The problem is that stricter regulation Joanna Mareth is an associate editor at Aus oped by a UK digital arts collective, is more may make Version 1.0 websites increas tralian Policy Online (www.apo.org.au). inward-looking, asking us to think criti ingly difficult to pull off- Meilde is not She is the former director of the Electronic cally about how word-processing programs entirely optimistic about the prospects Policy Network in Boston and was recently impose a 'standardized corporate language for an open web in the post-September 11 a visiting fellow at the Institute for Social onto our writing'. Click the 'undo' but world. Before we can talk about internet- Research at Swinburne University. ton on tlus version and a pop-up window appears, chiding you to take responsibility for what you've written. Another icon sug BOOKS:2 gests it may be time for a cup of tea. PETER MARES Meikle contrasts these examples with the passive websites offered up by corpo rations and media oligarchies. He labels the two kinds of user experiences (do-it yourself versus pre-programmed) Version 1.0 and Version 2.0. The taxonomy is tricky, since 2.0 suggests an improved ver Who gets here sion of 1.0, but Meikle would have it the other way around. Version 1.0 sites, with Don't Tell the Prime Minister, Patrick We ll er. their unfinished, anything-goes ethos, are Scribe Short Books, 2002. IS BN 0 908 OJ 176 8, RRP $ 14.9.'1 far more interesting than their slick and From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigrat ion, James jupp. unspontaneous 2. 0 counterparts. Cambridge University Press, 2002. IS BN 0 52 1 53 140 3, R RP $29.95 Some sites resist categorisation. Amazon.com is classic 2.0, but the site's use of reader-contributed book reviews is very 1.0. Other sites that talk up interac tivity, like those of political candidates, WNGOVeRNMENT the direction of Indonesia. turn out to confuse 'interactivity' with ministers failed to correct He described what was 'fundraising'. Most candidate websites are the false report that asy going on to Silverstone, remarkably dull and formulaic. Meikle lum seekers had thrown including how an asylum points out that there's little incentive for children overboard prior to seeker held aloft a child in politicians to deviate from a closed, or at the November 2001 federal a lifejacket as if threaten least tightly controlled, system of broad election, their excuse was ing to throw her overboard. casting. A notable exception was One that they had not received Silverstone says he came Nation's website. The party capitalised 'formal' advice that the away frorn the conversa on its supporters' mistrust of the media: story was untrue. If this tion with the impression 'You are on the web page the media do not were not so sad, then it that a child had actu want you to know about' was the message might be funny, since the ally been thrown into the that greeted web visitors. The site featured original 'advice' that gave water. The Brigadier then sprawling discussion forums, occasionally life to the kids-overboard reported this to his supe visited by Pauline Hanson herself. Meikle affair was the fifth-hand rior, Air Vice Marshall writes that 'it's one of the many ironies of reporting of a brief early Titheridge in Canberra, One Nation that a social movement rooted morning telephone call. who in turn rang Chief so deeply in conservatism and nostalgia On 7 October 2001, of Defence Force Admiral should simultaneously make so much of a distracted Commander Chris Barrie, the Defence their use of new technology'. N onnan Banks a board Minister's chief of staff, Future Active, like the websites it pro HMAS Adelaide had a short telephone Peter Hendy, and the civilian bureaucrat at files, is Version 1.0. Meikle raises several conversation with his Darwin-based supe the head of the government's people-smug open-ended questions without claiming rior, Brigadier Michael Silverstone. The gling taskforce, Jane Halton. By the time to have all the answers. How can inter purpose of the call was to find out the latest the matter was discussed at a taskforce net activists work with established media from Operation Relex, so that the Defence meeting later that morning, 'child' had without being misrepresented or margin Minister could be briefed before appearing become 'children'. During the course of the alised? Does dialogue on the web worlz? on Sunday morning television. During the taskforce m eeting, Immigration Depart What is alternative medial Th ough he phone call, Commander Banks was super ment Secretary Bill Farmer took a call on reminds us that internet activism should vising efforts to turn around an asylum his mobile from Immigration Minister be only one part of a larger media strategy, boat called the Olong and send it back in Philip Ruddock. Farmer shared the kids- 40 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 overboard story with the Minister, who substantial than the public comments of sceptical and alert to warn'. They failed to wasted no time in sharing it with the rest the Prime Minister and m embers of his speak clearly the truths that ministers did of Australia. cabinet. (In Robert Manne's mem orable not want to hear. Those dedicated few who have closely phrase, 'the dog had caught its tail'.) In these Weller suggests that there are a number followed the progress of the Senate Com situations it is hard to see how public serv of factors that have brought our political mittee of Inquiry into a Certain Maritime ants were observing the requirement of the system to this point, and he calls for their Incident will not find a great deal that is Public Service A ct 1999 that they provide urgent reform. First, he notes that the shift new in Don't Tell the Prime Minister, 'frank, honest, comprehensive, to employing senior public servants on but Patrick Weller has done the rest of us accurate and timely advice'. contracts of five years or less means that a favour. He cuts through the swathes of 'the trapdoor is an ever-present threa t if the obfuscation and arse-covering that consti W LER DOES NOT pursue other issues minister has become unhappy with their tuted much of the evidence to the com that have come up at the Senate Inquiry, performance'. As a result, some advisers mittee, to winnow out kernels of essential such as murky questions about why the huge may decide that 'if the ministers do not detail. The result is a concise and lucid surveillance effort mounted under Opera want to hear bad news or contrary advice account of what happened, and of who sub tion Relex failed to spot the overloaded Sus they will not give it'. Second, the intense sequently said what to whom and when. pected Illegal Entry Vessel (SIEV) X before it pressure on modern public servants to be For example, when the photos purportedly sank and claimed 353 lives. Nor is he par flexible and responsive means that they are showing 'kids overboard' were shown on ticularly interested in the rights or wrongs no longer able to maintain 'a paper trail' the 7.30 Report on 10 October 2001 , senior of Operation Relex and the 'Pacific solution' of their actions. 'Combined with email, defence figures realised immediately that (though one can guess where his sympathies yellow stickers and m essage banks, the they depicted a different event. Admiral lie). Weller's specific intent is to investigate changing culture is producing a new style Barrie was told this by two of his top offic the following proposition: of record keeping.' Detailed file notes are ers- Chief of N avy, Vice Admiral David becoming a thing of the past. Future histo The Australian public was told a story that Shackleton and Commander Australian rians may have loads of material, but 'little was untrue. That story was not corrected Theatre, Rear Admiral Chris Ritchie. The that tells us how the significant decisions before the election, even though a wide next day Barrie had a 'testy' telephone were made'. range of people in and around the gov conversation with Defence Minister Peter Finally, Weller says we need a new sys ernment knew it was untrue. If everyone Reith. In describing this call to the Senate tem of accountability for ministerial staff acted properly and professionally, and we committee, the Chief of the Defence Force ers, who have increased enormously in were still not told, something is seriously said: 'I told him [Reith] I had been advised numbers and influence, but who remain wrong with our system of government. that the photographs he had put out did 'in a constitutional sense ... out of con not describe the events as he portrayed on Unfortunately, a Senate inquiry is trol'. Under established practice, ministe the 7. 30 Report.' Yet, astonishingly, in the rather inadequate for this purpose. Minis rial staffers are seen as an extension of their course of this talk, the two men managed ters cannot be called to give evidence, and ministers and ministers are accountable for not to broach the topic of what should be nor, by convention, can their ministerial their actions. This means that information done to correct the public record. staffers. Public servants can be compelled given to a staffer is, to all intents and pur This is an example of the many selective to appear, but they cannot comment on poses, information given to the minister. discussions that characterise the kids-( not) government policy. As Weller puts it: 'Con Clearly this is no longer adequate, since overboard affair. As when defence adviser sequently Senate committees examine one in the kids-(not)-overboard affair, minis Mike Scrafton told the Prime Minister that group of people, the public servants, in ters were able to claim that advice never the video from the Adelaide was 'in con order to discover what another group of reached them . It is habitual now for minis clusive' but 'did not m ention the doubts people, ministers and their staff, actually ters to preface almost every statem ent with about the whole affair that he had heard did.' What Weller extracts from his inves the words 'I am advised ... ', and to defend one month before'i or when international tigation is not a conspiracy to withhold the inaction with the words 'I was not advised affairs adviser Miles Jordana provided John truth-at least not on the part of bureau ... ', giving the impression that they are 'in Howard with an 'intelligence' report from crats-but an 'attitude of mind'. Public the hands of officials'. Yet these are the the Office of National Assessm ents, but servants were 'too keen to serve' the gov same officials-the advisers-for whom failed to raise with him the likelihood ernment of the day (and the government of the minister is supposed to take respon that the report was based on nothing more the foreseeable future) and 'not sufficiently sibility. So where does the buck stop? In Imprints Booksellers- Adelaide's leading independent bookshop committed to justice, equity, peace, reconciliation .. . Imprints an active contributor to the culture. BOOKSELLERS 107 Hindley St, Adelaide ph. 8231 4454 fax 8410 1025 email [email protected] www.imprints.com.au OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 41 Weller's words, ministerial staffers have the term was coined) is less about 'cultural services. This trend has accelerated since become the 'black hole of government'. All maintenance' than about smoothing the the election of the Howard government, the more regrettable then that the Labor process of settlement for new migrants. which has cut family intake m ore sharply Party shied away from testing the con Implied in this is an element of social jus and given preference to skilled and busi vention that ministerial staff cannot be tice and equity; if migrants are to become ness migrants. compelled to testify before the effective members of society, then they N evertheless, what emerge most Senate. should have adeq uate access to social serv strongly from Jupp's history are the con ices and an adequate understanding of their tinuities in policy across governments, IFWELLER GIVES us the detail of the kicls social responsibilities. At times this will rather than the differences: (not)-overboard affair, James Jupp puts the require spending on the kind of targeted the redu ction of famil y reunion, the denial event in its historical context. His sur programs, like language services, that crit of welfare for new arrivals, the stress on vey of the last 30 years of immigration ics label 'ethnic payola'. business and skilled migration, and a in Australia-From White Australia to Jupp also dismisses those who would stronger policy towards undocumented or Wo omera- traces the shift from 'police portray multiculturalism as an attack on illegal arrivals were common to the Coa man' to 'parson' and back again . The fundamental Australian values, or as an lition and the previous Labor govern 'policeman' controls entry across the bor endorsement of cultural relativism. Sure, n1ent. der while the 'parson' looks after the wel multiculturalism defends the decision of a fare of those who have arrived. After the Muslim woman to wear (or not to wear) a Alarmingly, this 'bipartisanship' extends abolition of the White Australia policy, the headscarf; but the primary intention of the to policy proposals from One Nation. The influence of the parson steadily increased, policy is not to defend her rights, it is to temporary protection visa and the excision reaching its peak under Immigration Min make her a more productive citizen. As Jupp of Christmas Island from the migration isters Michael MacKeller and Ian Macphee, notes: 'Government policies have normally zone were both recommended by One appointees of Malcolm Fraser who were been directed at improving human capital Nation before they were introduced by the both Liberals and liberal. MacKeller and or enhancing commercial contacts, rather government and given La bor's parliamen Macphee emphasised family reunion and than supporting immigrant cultures.' tary noel. humanitarian settlement in immigration In the years since Macphee was Min Jupp's chapter on refugees and asylum and extended the policy of multicultural ister, the immigration parson has been seekers is not the strongest section of the ism initiated by Al Grassby under Whit eclipsed by the immigration policeman, book and includes a couple of minor errors. lam. Policy was characterised by a high a shift Jupp sees refl ected in departmen There is some confusion about the arrival degree of bipartisanship, so that when tal restructures and changing budget of refugees from East Timor, for example, Macphee went out to explain and defend priorities. The process was given a major suggesting that they were boat people. A multiculturalism at sometimes hostile kick along by the 1988 FitzGerald Report, few were, but most came as 'plan e people' public meetings, he was frequently accom which was 'the most important single during a brief period in whi ch the Aus panied by his Labor 'shadow', Mick Young. influence on the Immigration Department tralian consulate in Bali was in explica Jupp mounts a vigorous defence of mul for the next decade'. The FitzGerald Report bly generous in granting visitors' visas to ticulturalism, swatting away the myth that criticised multiculturalism and famil y applicants from East Timor. Jupp is also the policy is evidence of the subterranean reunion, 'shifting emphasis from human incorrect in stating that 'Port Hedland pro influence of some 'powerful ethnic lobby'. ist concerns ... to an economically rational vided adequate space' for the detention of In fact, as Jupp notes, the specific Austral focus on the "quality" of immigrants' and unauthorised boat arrivals from 1991 until ian version of multiculturalism (quite dif presaging the introduction of a 'user pays' 1997 . In fact, the Curtin airbase near Derby ferent from the version in Canada, where system in immigration and settlement was first used as an immigra tion detention H e could be in school if his community wasn 't impoverished Ca ri La s Aust ra I ia he Ips so me of Lhe most ma rgi n:1l ised communi Li es arou nd l he globe by addressing the iss ues of poverry. Through lo ng term deve lopment program s we enable people to take grc Caritas Australia The Cath olic Agency for Overseas Aid and Development 42 EUREKA STR EET OCTOBER 2002 centre in 1995, when Nick Bolkus was view that policy could change for the bet Of a Boy is the story of a primary Immigration Minister under the Keating ter. Indeed, he predicts optimistically that school boy, Adrian, whose mother, Sookie, Labor government. It was recommissioned it must: is incapable of looking after him and whose by Philip Ruddock in September 1999 and father can't be bothered. Adrian has been As long as Australia continues to recruit Woomera was opened soon after. Jupp is placed in the care of his grandmother, Beat immigrants and to be open to student, tour right to emphasise that 'the need to regain tie, a responsible battleaxe who feels too ist and short-term arrivals in large numbers, the 1 million votes which went to One old for the task but does it anyway. it will continue to be multicultural and to N ation in 1998' was a primary motivation Adrian is not especially bright or witness large numbers of Asians in metro of Coalition policy on refugees and asylum troublesome, but he is a sensitive child politan streets. It cannot, therefore, enj oy seekers. In doing so, however, he risks let in danger of being torn asunder by the the luxury of xenophobia. • ting Labor off the hook too lightly. After lovelessness he partly intuits and partly all, Labor's introduction of mandatory Peter Mares is a journalist with Radio Aus imagines. On the sidelines, there's an intel detention prepared the ground for such a tralia's A sia Pacific program and a visit ligent, sensitive, agoraphobic uncle in his hardline approach. ing fe llow with the Institute for Social 20s, who is haunted by a car accident. These are minor quibbles. Overall, Research at Swinburne University. A There is also the apparitional presence Jupp has written an instructive and engag revised, post-Tampa edition of his book (which works with the force of symbol ing history that serves as a timely correc Borderlin e, on Australia's treatment of ref though it's also integral to the realism of tive to the m any myths that surround our ugees and asylum seekers, is due out this the plot ) of a group of children who have immigration program . His book affirm s the m onth from UNSW Press. gone missing and made h eadlines, and have possibly m et with terrible deaths. Just near Adrian's hom e there is a group of children, new arrivals, who form BOOKS: 3 what looks like a fearful symmetry with PETE R CRAVEN the kidnapped children. The hypothetical atmosphere that shadows them gives the novel part of its mysterious propulsive power, so that a 1970s story of schoolyard disturban ce and getting into trouble with grandma takes on the looming spectral quality of a first-rate thriller. Dark glasses Hartnett m anages to work symbolically and realistically at the sam e time. The Of a Boy, Sonya Ha rtnett. Viking, 2002. ISBN 0 670 04026 6, RRP $26 action of the novel (which is in no way fa n ciful) is full of intricate Catherine wheels of miniature drama, while the overarching plot is ravishingly shaped and the language Evm O CTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 43 Christina Stead, even though one might Of a Boy is a book of transfixing a sea-monster and dives into the depths of query the note of stark elegiac lyricism enchantments, though its vision is ulti himself. Hartnett's vision is constantly lit that Hartnett hits right at the end of the mately very dark indeed. Sonya Hartnett by comic lights but ulti matcly has an effect novel, which contrasts with the wrenching has a bit in common with Helen Garner, of elegy and tragedy. power of what has preceded it. in the clairvoyance of her dialogue and And Sonya Hartnett is ultimately I should emphasise that Of a Boy is not the effective flawlessness of her prose. She unlike anyone else. The grea t writers of the a highbrow novel, difficult of access. It is a works in deliberately small compass, close American South would have understood short novel in which a likeable quiet boy to the consciousness of people not bent on her, but she's not netted by their influence. pines mutely for love while a dark imp-like articulation. She has something in com If a Martian possessed of literary judgment girl next door pushes and punishes him by mon, too, in the patina and formal finish of were to fall on this book he would find pas bending him to her will. It recapitulates her work, with the photographer Bill Hen sage after passage that didn't simply read the earthiness and livableness of the recent son: she is dramatic and poetic in the way like the work of a fine Australian fiction past with such embodied sensuousness and he is painterly, and she has the same air of maker, but like the work of one of the great sharpness of eye and car that Australia in driving almost to the point of violence at a writers of our age. • the 1970s takes on a kind of transfigured thing of beauty or innocence in order to feel painterly reality (all the more real because the hot brea th of what you could die for. Of Peter Craven is the editor of Quarterly so deeply imagined). a Boy is the story of a boy who drea ms of E say and Best Australian Essays. BOOKS:4 PHILIP HARVEY Searching high and low Angli canism in Australia: A History, Bruce Kaye, Tom Fram e, Co lin Holden, Ccoff Treloar (e ds). Melbourne Umve rstt y Press, 2002. IS BN 0 522 85003 0, IUU' $69.95 THIS BOOK IS the first of 1ts kind. No odium of churchmanshipZ Is all the source take the soft option, whereas an attempt complete history of the Anglican Church material readily available? Where does one to describe the interchanges and subtleties in Australia exists, or has ever been start? of individual practice would give a deeper, attempted, leaving a void often commented One contributor starts with the first cohesive picture of Angli canism. on by Anglicans, who have an intense church, a wattle-and-daub structure des- The narrative half of the book covers, understanding of their own traditions. troyed by arson in 1798. The next was of really for the first time, 200 years of diverse The parish history is a standard produc- more durable stone and we are told also church history. Strain shows; the scale tion, ranging from the most modest pam- that 'meanwhile a church of better pro- of the undertaking forces selectiveness, phlct and reverent roll-call, right through portions, named St John after the second m ea ning we hea r more about bishops' bar- to highly wrought analyses of personali- governor, had been constructed at nearby neys than we do about parish life, for many tics and vestry meetings. The oral record Parramatta'. I beg your pardon? Fortunately the heart of Anglicanism. More statistics, is a continuous buzz, and it is true to say this is the only howler in the book. There less colourful humanity. Some givens in that the practices of the church week by are, however, many assumptions treated the narrative do bring into relief, though, week admit an historical grasp that goes far as simple facts. Prime among these is the again for the first time, the special circum- beyond books. The diocesan history enjoys persistent use of differences between Evan- stances of the English Church on this con- a respected place, frequently teetering just gelicals and Anglo-Catholics as a natural tinent. First among these is the essential this side of triumphalism. Biographies of divide in our understanding of how Angli- fact in Australian history that the Church bishops and legendary clergy meet a mar- cans think and act. This easy recourse of England has never enjoyed the true sta- ket, yet any comprehensive presentation graphically delineates doctrinal stand- tus of an established church, as it did ba ck remains elusive. offs or liturgical attitudes, but creates the home. Although the Angl ican Church A book written by a committee looks false picture of two teams in their own was identified with the co lonial establish- modishly postmodern. In this instance, guernseys toppling about with the foot- ment powers, Governor Richard Bourke's there was probably no other way. The ball of Correct Interpretation. Experience Church Act (18 36) m ea nt the church had historical agreements and divergences of teaches that religious practice and belief to vie with the other denominations for those same traditions cause us to ask, can is much more open to choice and change, adherents and funds. Anglican hegemony any single author be found whom everyone that humans are infinitely adept at throw- was never assured. agrees is impartial to the variations within ing off things that don't work any more and A second crucial fa ctor was the creation the Anglican Church? Is any history sure at finding the 'mansion' that suits their of dioceses. Australians were probably the to be bound by a thesis or prejudiced by the needs. Historians in this book also often first in the world to form local synods, and 44 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 although Anglicans know themselves to E., and even the nominal ones had absorbed here who have done too much work. Be be 'of Australia', their identity is fo rmed the life of the Church of England in some it protector of respectability or home to within local regional practice, to such an fashion. The mea ning of this for historians radicalism, the symbol of an old world or extent that Ballarat is sometimes viewed has been ignored for too long. Its m eaning the fo rger of national futures, the Anglican a the last refu ge of the spikes, while for the national character should not be lost Church carries weighted meanings and som e Sydneysiders are branded 'Anglo on anyone. The attempt to address issues of is not easily defined. The other half of Baptists', barely Anglican at all. None of Angli can identity and national character is the book fo regrounds the know ledge these caricatures helps relationships, but the genius of this book, its real original that an y history of a church is about they do indicate a history that is not just ity. Bruce Kaye points to William Grant culture and tradition. Bruce Kaye's view one of preference. Diversity of belief and Broughton, the one and only 'Bishop of is that 'Australian Anglicanism 's social church life is the norm. There are Anglican Australia', who in 1839 fo ught for a distinc manifestation is a community of people', churches filled with the outward display tive Anglican school system, the results of and that the way to treat the tradition is of sacramental imagery, others where which stretch across the landscape. Kaye '[not as] a snapshot of the detritus from the the congregation won't let a cross into points also to the ambivalence toward ecu past, but rather the dynamics of the habits, the building. Local dioceses continue to m enism of a church that puts high value values and beliefs sustained over a period contain all the conflicting ambitions of the on its own distinctiveness, a desire for of time by a community of people'. The Tudor Church, with m any of sense that we are concerned its concomitant squabbles with much more than the as well as its more gracious story of an institution is forms of reconciliation. From keenly fe lt; it is a guiding out of this diocesan character principle. Relations with comes the resistance to, even the Communion and the the fa ilure of, a national other churches, relations church. There is a General with the Aborigines, gender Synod, but where disputes are issu es and art history are irreconcilable the decision is among the subjects given left to the local synod, which closer study. I would have is why a handful of Australian hoped for more about the dioceses, for example, still spiritual life of Australian do not ordain women. There Anglicans, their worship is a General Synod Office, and prayer life, more of their comprising a secretary with spirituality as expressed support, but when in the early Anglican Archbishop Rayner and the first women in sermons, poetry and ordained as priests, 13 December 1992. 1980s a research officer was other writings-a seriously appointed, there were, as David Hilliard union always checked by a need to main neglected area in our self-understanding. records, cries of 'galloping bureaucracy and tain traditional continuity. The Anglican Anglican definitions of sacred space would centralism '. Unsurprisingly, then, regional Church owns its share of fault in regard to start revealing conversations. It is a delight, collaboration remains not only a feature sectarianism , while itself being a conciliar though, to read Bill Lawton's piece on but also an essential. ist church with synods that are dem ocratic. Australian theology, compulsory reading Whether you are Elizabeth I, Eliza beth It is an inclusive body that has never been for anyone who doubts that theologians II, or any of the monarchs in between, you dominated by its clergy. It has always been have had a significant impact on Australian don't like extremists. The Anglican 'mid cautious of nationalism . Another formative life. Lawton selects four churchmen whose dle way' between Roman-s tyle authoritari characteristic is the inclination of Angli theology he uses as paradigm s of different anism and Puritan zealotry has, at its best, cans to go their own way. Brian Fletcher Anglican ideals. been the means to a widely diverse and quotes Bishop George Long of Bathurst Bishop Ernest Burgmann of Goulburn welcoming Christian practice. The book stating that the Anglican Church is the saw God as indwelling creation. His incar touches throughout on the possibility of 'roomiest ... in Christendom ', 'possessed of national theology finds Christ 'in all of understanding between conservative and a "wise and liberal spirit" and an " evangeli nature, in other religions and in the land liberal positions, sacram ental and evan cal witness".' According to the A ustralian of Aboriginal possession'. Burgmann was gelical emphases, the encouragem ent of Churchman, also quoted by Fletcher, it is a social activist who contended that 'God private and public forms of life and wor 'tolerant and indulgent beyond is not interested in the church as a pri ship-all thing that have been brought to example'. vate society existing for the welfare of its Austra lia by the Anglicans. m embers'. Similarly, Bishop John Moyes When Leicester Webb said in 1960, A JOURNALISTIC cliche is to place of Armidale, a broad churchman distrust 'by the test of numbers Australia is next church and society at odds, as though ful of party, promulga ted enculturation and to England the most Anglican country in they were polar oppo it . It take too appealed against individualism in religion the world', he was not dealing in delusions. much work to ee church as integral to and in national life. Moyes even challenged Until recent times it was taken for granted Australian society, an essential part of the the Labor Party to develop 'a philosophy of that a goodly half of Australians were C. of equation . We are fortunate to have writers man as a doctrine ... The other crowd just OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 45 have a doctrine of property. ' In the 1940s, David Penman, Archbishop of Melbourne, Moyes m oved to liberalise immigration who wrote one of the first theologies of laws and abolish the White Australia multiculturalism, and with the fact that policy. Dr David Broughton Knox of Moore the first use of the word in federal parlia College, Sydney, placed preaching at the m ent came in a speech written by an Angli centre of ministry, the charismatic call to can clergyman, Jim Houston . 'repentance and rededication'. For Knox, the If the national disgrace which is the church is an interactive community based Europeans' trea tment of the Indigenous in obedience to Scripture. Australians can in part be traceable to This Reformed influence has resulted the church's neglect and cultural blind in what Colin Holden elsewhere describes ness, we also have to consider the sorts of as a 'tendency to m aintain a definite dis activities described by the excellent John tinction between the community of the Harris. In som e parts of Australia the mis faithful and " the world" as opposites'. sionaries' m ain task, achievement even, This and other analyses in the book help was to protect Aborigines from extermina elucidate that unique phenomenon, m any tion by the settlers, and in latter days the would say quandary, within the Anglican church worked in a more self-question Communion- the diocese of Sydney. A ing way with government programs and profound contrast is the theology of Arch reconciliation. bishop Peter Carnley of Perth, the current If the church can be seen as stuffy and Primate. For Carnley the Bible is a con irredeemably patriarchal in its attitudes struct of 'tradition and design' edited 'to toward women, promoting bourgeois forms make a theological point'. Justification of domestic Christianity and consciously isn 't just about human salvation but 'has denying them their expressed vocational to do with the putting right of the world ... calling, we have then to explain the enor A just and equitable sharing of the world's mous number of leaders, activists and other resources and a just distribution of well women in social roles who have attributed being is also part of God's justifying activ their achievements to their Anglican reli ity in the world.' It is notable that all four gion. And we have to reason out how an theologies are shaped by a common passion internal debate over women's ordination for justice. achieved a balanced outcome that placed Another journalistic cliche is that the the church in a better pastoral position and New Directions Sabbatical church is in decline. One reviewer of this avoided a major split. These and other issues New spirit for a new world book even argued that this is its one theme, have been opened up for yet more challeng Renew a position reached by fo llowing the rule ing and adventurous exploration. your spirit in a flexi ble program, a global of that 19th-century clergyman Sydney Yet a deeper question about religious community, an d the scenic Smith: 'I never read a book I am review history in Australia is hinted at by Colin San Francisco Bay area. Wh eth er you ing, it prejudices one so.' This book is not Holden, when he refers to Drusilla Modjes want to take a break or take on new a history of decline but of creative adapta ka's study of the artist Grace Cossington experiences, you will enjoy a wide tion, of listening to the spirit. It initiates Smith. He observes that while Modjeska range of spiri tual, recreational , and a more varied appreciation and deeper 'referred to a sense of vocation', and academic resources. internal questioning of a community of 'acknowledged that Cossington Smith faith. It touches on several subjects that was a devout and regular worshipper, she N ew Directions deserve full-scale studies of their own. For did not invite the reader to consider that a sabbatical for one or two semesters example, a history of the Australian paro the contemplation that lay behind her art chial clergy, their behaviour, attitudes and might have been an extension of her life JESU IT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY values, is long overdue. Again, I watched as a regularly worshipping Anglican'. Life at Berkeley High and Low for reports of worship, one as a regularly worshipping Anglican, the thing we can safely say all Anglicans have faith life of humans generally, could be a member of the in common. A practical history of worship seen as the fo undation of religious history. Graduate Theological Union that is m ore than reportage or sociology A challenge to the future historian is how 1735 LeRoy Avenue would tell us much generally about C hris to present this life and its multiple mani Berkeley, CA 94709 tianity in this country. festations, how to learn and extract mean (800) 824-0122 If, with Louis McNeice, we are to see ings from the private and public lives of the (510) 549-5000 the world as 'incorrigibly plural', this too is Australians described as, in the book's best Fax(510)841-8536 how we should read the Anglican Church . oxym oron, 'ordinary Anglicans'. • E-mail: [email protected] If multiculturalism is something that the www.jstb.edu church is thought not to have com e to Philip Harvey is a poet and librarian at the _I terms with, we then h ave to reckon with Joint Theological Library, Melbourne. 46 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 FICT ION W AYNE MACAULEY Wilson's friends O NE HNE DAY m w ly 'pdng, by accident that took place and these records or design, a choolboy who was working Saturday could then be matched against m ornings pricing canned goods in a supermarket got the previously agreed quotas and a $2.25 sticker stuck to the sleeve of his shirt and notices might then be placed in headed off hom e after work without realising. On the the tram s informing the public tram the man opposite asked him was he for sale and whether or not these targets had the schoolboy for a joke said he was. The man gave been reached. him $2.50, the schoolboy gave him 25 cents change, This was all very well for the and the man took him home to his house, which was tram operator and the public, but not very far away. the parents were up in arms. We've The man set the schoolboy to work straight been deliberately putting our chil away, hardly believing his luck at having com e across dren on this tram , they said, at such a ridiculously good bargain on the tram like that. great personal cost to ourselves, This m an, whose nam e was Wilson, had never been so that they can work under Wil one to count good luck am ong his blessings and was son's friends' houses, and now you determined to make the m ost of this. The schoolboy tell us there are quotas set that was put to work restumping Wilson's house and was will limit the number of children taken ? What sort found to be m ore than adequate to the task. Wilson of high-handed tactic is this? In protest the parents brought the boy glasses of cold cordial and invited his occupied all the tram s they could until they were friends around to watch the boy work: they all lay on hanging out of the doorways and scooting along on their stomachs, Wilson shone the torch, a beast could the running boards and given that no business could have taken them all and they would not have even be conducted while this protest continued Wilson's known. Everyone asked Wilson to please tell them friends began looking elsewhere for children to help where they could get this kind of help for such a ridic with the restumping of their houses and this is how ulously good price, but Wilson did not want to tell the arrangement with the schools cam e about. them . If they fo und out which tram these boys were A child of school-leaving age and of average on they would have been riding it every day and Wil intelligence fr om the mid to low range of the socio son himself would not be able to get a second when economic scale has little chance of finding gain the first one died on him, which it surely would. ful employm ent, much less of starting a 'career'. It But of course no such secret could be kept for was on this basis that Wilson's friends approached long and soon these bargain-hunting friends of Wil the authorities with their new and in som e ways son's were riding that tram every day and impolitely revolutionary idea of setting all these schoolchildren inspecting the shirtsleeves of every passenger on it. to work under people's houses. The government Because there were no tram conductors any m ore to didn't take much convincing, for reasons too obvi temper this kind of activity Wilson's friends could go ous to explain. Wilson's friends form ed a cartel and at it wholesale, which they did, carrying off teenagers secured exclusive operating rights. Everywhere old who were not even for sale and installing them under houses were restumped and made ready for renova their houses for long hours and with fe w scheduled tion; everywhere the parents of wayward teenage breaks. children breathed a collective sigh of relief. Wilson's There seem ed to be som ething really wrong original schoolboy who had since died of pulmonary with the whole situation, something dare we say pneumonia became som ething of a folk hero to the even m orally repugnant, but thankfully the public newly invigorated citizens of the city and a statue transport operator eventually saw fit to do some was erected to him in the old supermarket car park thing about it. It was announced via a press release holding a can of baked beans in one hand and a short that people would no longer be allowed to be taken handled shovel in the other. from the tram and set to work under Wilson's friends' That all happened som e y ars ago now, but the houses unless these people fi rst registered with the statue is still there today. • operator and paid a sm all administrative fee. Clear records could then be kept of all the transactions Wayne Macauley is a freelance writer. OCTO BER 2002 EU REKA STREET 47 get the decision reversed, and brings in his relationships with friends and family and his love of writing. There arc a surprising number of cameos: Kevin Kline as a famous author; John Lithgow as Shaun's divorced millionaire father; Lily Tomlin as a loopy careers counsellor; Chevy Chase as the school principal. There is a wonderful per formance from Catherine O'Hara as Shaun and Lance's mother, perpetually at the end of a short tether, and dangerously prone to seeking comfort in booze. All the performances are good, but any one who casts Ja ck Black had better make sure the rest of the cast measures up: he is a rampant and hugely enjoyable scene stealer. There is no violence, and hardly any sex unless you are desperate enough to lust after Jack Black in well -worn Y-fronts. I enj oyed it: harmless, amusing, occasion ally sharply observed for a mainstream American movie. If you miss it in the cine mas, it'll be a grea t video hire for the whole family, as long as they don't mind laughing a bit. - Juliette Hughes by how each of them deflects the blows. Fami ly snap Yi Yi, in its bones, is about love. The Landscape view sort of love whose beauty lies not in heav Yi Yi (A One and a Two), dir. Edward Yang. ing heroics but in the uncertainties and The Tra cker, dir. Rolf de Heer. The Tracker, Eight-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang, fragility of ordinary life. Not everything in set in 1922, follows a party of white police above right) takes photos of the backs of the film works: it has its clunky moments hunting down an Indigenous man accused people's heads in order to help them see and uncertain performances, but its central of killing a white woman. The Aboriginal what they cannot. A moving notion and thread is exquisite. tracker of the title (played by veteran actor arguably a not too shabby definition of art. Wu Nienjen, as NJ Jian (the father), David Gulpilil) leads the party. Though the Yi Yi is a simple story about complex gives a performance as quiet and aching as film's treatment of white brutality towards ity-an irony not lost on the director, any I can imagine. Directing that perform the Indigenous people of Australia is obvi Edward Yang. Tiny mistakes and endless ance alone makes Yang a deserving winner ously significant and important, the film is uncertainties, small joys and heartbreaking of the Best Director prize he won at Cannes really about the Europea n response to the revelations crowd his film with a life that in 2000. But Yi Yi is full of this quiet ach Australian landscape, both in painting and is uncanny and true. ing; whether a character is waiting for lift in film. At significant points in the film, NJ Jian (Wu Nienjen, above left) works doors to open or mourning the loss of a first especially those showing the murder and for a computer company that is staring love, it is there, disarming every frame. massacre of blacks by the white police, down the barrel of bankruptcy. Min-Min's -Siobhan Jackson de Heer uses paintings (painted on set by mother has just had a stroke. Yang-Yang local artist Peter Coad) to depict events, needs McDonald's to feel better about rather than show them directly on screen. being bullied by a bunch of flower girls. Family hi ghs Though one could argue that white Aus And Ting-Ting is afraid she might be tralia's inability to look directly at its own to blame for her grandmother's stroke Orange County, dir. Jake Kasdan. This is violence towards Aboriginal people is one because she forgot to take out the rubbish. more than just a teen movie. It has Jack of its problems, this aestheti c choice at the NJ, Min-Min, Yang-Yang and Ting-Ting are Black in a supporting role as Lance, the very least asks us to consider the role of art, all m embers of a middle-class family living doped-out brother of brilliant student and film, in the representation of Australia in a small Taipei apartment-all negotiat Shaun, played by Colin Hanks, son of Tom. for and by the white imagination. ing life in different ways for the same ends, The plot is light but not flimsy. Shaun's A theme that runs through much of each looking for the clarity one hopes that school is shown up as inefficient and bum white Australian painting and film is the love (in all its manifestations) will bring. bling when he fails to get into Stanford sense of the Australian landscape as some The plot is meandering and rich but not because the poor results of another student thing alien, horrific and dangerous to Euro the point. Yang's characters are not shaped are entered instead of his excellent ones. pean 'civilisation', the sense that 'we' do by what the world throws up at them, but The rest of the fi lm is about his efforts to not belong here. Th e Tra cker draws on this 48 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 tradition both visually and thematically, dents. She is icy, unsmiling, uncompro drug use and regular masturbation. But then and identifi es the 'natives' so completely mising, brutally uncaring in her criticism they meet Luisa (Maribel Verdu): married, with this alien and dangerous landscape of her students' playing. We do not have sexy and ten years their senior. Boldly they that they are oft en literally invisible in to wonder why because the film opens invite her on a road trip to 'Boca del Cielo' the fi lm. When the white party comes with her mother confronting her furiously (Heaven's Mouth)-an idyllic beach, which under attack, the spears that assault them because she has com e hom e late. You real to the best of their knowledge doesn't exist. appear to com e out of nowhere, out of the ise that we are far beyond the boundaries When Luisa discovers that her husband has landscape itself. De Heer identifies Abo of healthy family relationships in the ugly had yet another affair she astounds them by riginality absolutely with the landscape physical fight that ensues, to be fo llowed agreeing to com e along. and draws our attention to the hostile and by an even more unbearable reconciliation. By turns bemused and annoyed by her frightened response of the white imagina With love/hate thus established as the basis travelling companions, Luisa looks upon tion to that landscape. Yo u could argue that for Kohut's relationships, we see her abuse them like puppies-adorable but not yet he i in this oblique way asking us not to others and herself, oft en horrifically. trained. When she does eventually have sex look at a specific event of violence on film She has dark and distasteful routines of with them it is over so quickly she doesn't (this massacre that happened over there, self-gratification: she spies on a couple cop know whether to laugh or complain. over then ), but rather the inherent violence ulating in a car at a drive-in, while urinat Cuaron uses this basic plot to create a in the white European imagination of' Abo ing beside the car. She goes into a sex shop film of rare depth. He rejects the comedy riginality' itself. to wa tch porn fi lms in a private booth. (Be of embarrassm ent that infuses films like I'm not absolutely convinced that this warned if you are likely to be offended: American Pie-his sex scenes are exuber works. The fi lm uses schematic, stereo there are short examples of hard-core por ant, unasham ed and trutWul. Then, just typical characters (the 'Fanatic', the 'Fol nographic films in this scene.) as importantly, he surrounds the central lower', the 'Veteran', the 'Tracker'), relies A young male student, Walter Klem menage a trois with a vivid portrait of Mex on less-than-subtle reversals (though the m er (Benoit Magimel ), falls for her and ico in a time of political change. As our lusty Fanatic has the Tracker in chains, the has enough presence and talent to make trio drive to the ocean, protected by their Tracker's really the one doing the leading), an impression on her. But she demands wealth and class status, they encounter and uses Coad's paintings to aestheticise that he read a letter in which she details Mexico in all its tumultuous strangeness. and distance. Any genuinely political edge what she requires him to do: it is the usual And finally, Cuaron allows Luisa's story to the film is left in the realm of generali dreary litany of m asochistic minutiae, and to dominate. At its end, when the true ties, no more than a fab le or parable, and he is revolted. The tables are turned, as his nature of her motivation is revealed, the as such easily ignored. The soundtrack (by rejection transmogrifies into the powerful whole film instantly takes on new colour. Archie Roach) is pretty good though. sadistic abuse that she wants. The ending -Brett Evans -Allan James Thomas is abrupt and inconclusive. Some people will love this film, and there is no doubt that its bleak, bright cin Too little Performance issues ematography and Huppert's extraordinary performance are commendable. Bu t som e Stuart Little II, dir. Rob Minkoff. I loved La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher), dir. how the self-abuse, one nasty incident after Charlotte's Web as a child. It made m e Michael Haneke. When I started to describe another, seem ed to be like som ething fro m cry. I never read Stuart Little (a lso by E. B. the plot of this movie to my husband, he a psychology casebook rather than a deeply White) but if the fi lms are any guide I am said, 'I don't think I'm old enough for this.' felt piece of art. -Juliette Hughes now retrospectively nervous that all that I'm not sure I am either. A lot of people buttermilk and wise spiderly advice was will feel either too young or too old for this just a cover for saccharine twinset philoso fi lm. It certainly requires a wide frame of Chile con carnal phies and revoltingly soppy love stuff. How reference, and I'd advise against taking in could I have been so stupid? popcorn and choctop; you'll need a strong Y Tu Mama Tambien (And Yo ur Mother But perhaps I am too hard on myself and stom ach for som e of the scenes. There is a Too), dir. Alfonso Cuaron. The teenage sex E.B. White. After all, how oft en is a book discourse going on in the m ovie, and it cen comedy follows a simple but reliable narra translated gently to the screen by a Holly tres around what reactions we have when tive: horny boys com e of age via the min wood studio? And, to add insult to injury, we see women appropriating behaviours istrations of an older woman. Thankfully, this is a sequel. that are usually peculiar to men. But the the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron is a Stuart Little II has too m any gadgets problem is that the behaviours seen in the cinem atic alchemist. In Y Tu Mama Tam and not enough belly laughs. Snowbell movie are peculiar in the other sense: weird bien he has taken these worn-out conven (voiced by N athan Lane, who could make and dysfunctional by any standards or for tions and woven them into a golden work Kafka sound funny) gets all the best lines either sex. of art that commem orates the joy and m el but can't rescue the fi lm from the rubber Erika Kohut (brilliantly played by Isa ancholy of life. duckie plot and bubble- bath humour. Kids belle Huppert) is fortyish, and a highly Having farewelled their Italy- bound deserve more, and their adult companions regarded pianist who teaches at a conserva girlfriends, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio should dem and m ore. Films can rem ain torium. Her specialty is Schubert, and she (Gael Garcia Bernal) are fa ced with a long suitable for children and be insanely funny; guards him jealously from mediocre stu- hot summer of teenage ennui, recreational Shrek did it. -Siobhan Jackson OCTOBER 2002 EUREKA STREET 49 At bleeding edge I,YOU WANT TO UARN humility, take a leadlighting cou,e. you care to mention that isn't Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen or Dragged along by a loved one who wanted company, I have had Bronte. The ABC is showing the BBC's latest version of The to get used to coming last. You buy, for about 40 hard-earned Forsyte Saga and in a curious and felicitous juxtaposition, dollars, a thing that looks like a large biro and that claims to Optus cable is showing the version that was made in the mid cut glass. You fill it with kerosene and roll the tiny tungsten '60s. Looking up the old cast list on the net (www.imdb.com) wheel over the sheet of glass. 'No, you're not making that nice made me gasp; it was a who's who, an Olympus of fan tastic scoring noise,' says the teacher, and takes it off me and does actors, many now of course dead. Try these for starters: Nyree it with one hand tied behind her back. I used to think I was a Dawn Porter as Irene; Susan Hampshire as Fleur (Hampshire rather nifty type in the yartz department: a spot of singing here, was later the pluperfect Glencora Palliser); Kenneth More a soup<;:on of pottery there, a dab of painting, a snatch of dog as Jo; Fay Compton; Margaret Tyzack; June Barry. The cur gerel. But I'm typing this with a fistful of Bandaids, a renewed rent version is much shorter, brisker, compressecl -er than the sense of my limitations and a boundless admiration for Dale earlier one. But there is a lovely Irene in Gina McKee, and Chihuly, albeit he blows glass and I try to cut the stuff. Damian Lewis is an excellent Soames, although I remember The ABC rescreened a documentary about Chihuly in that Eric Porter in the same role had a kind of heavy, September, and I was open-mouthed with respect. Granted, he threatening presence that Lewis lacks. wasn't doing much with glass himself any more: one eye gone and a dicky shoulder mean that he delegates, much as do the ITwAs A SHOCK TO SEE the 1960s version of Marjorie Ferrar's likes of Jeff Koons and Mona Hatoum. But somehow he feels slander trial, however. It demonstrated that the differences more real than straight conceptual artists, coming as he does between the two versions went deeper than simple casting or from a solid background of craft and making. Glass is bloody even script adaptations. Caroline Blakiston as Ferrar was mag minded stuff to work with and often bloody anyway if you nificent as she stood in the witness box in the 1960s at the make a mistake. His pieces are flowing, huge, glorious, phan cusp, the intake of breath the West took before women's lib tasmagorical, organic, ethereal. Mine are all done in straight eration, and argued for sexual freedom as a valid moral choice. lines because I can't cut curves without threatening my current It was of course set in the 1920s, and the micl-'60s minclset tally of fingers and thumbs-and although I'll never play the was much closer to that than to 2002. The cross-examination violin again anyway, it would be nice to know I still could if my was brutal, making m e think of Richard N eville's real-life Oz family hadn't burned it while I wasn't looking. obscenity trial not much later. Most families have some sort of serial night-class taker in The 21st-century Forsyte Saga is very different, because their ranks, and I keep mine in order by threatening to take the there is an inescapable flavour of those battles having been won one that helps you write the family saga. in the very way it treats Soames' rape of Irene. All sympathy is Sagas are strange mixtures of comedy, tragedy and just (rightly) with her; one expects her to leave; it is the clone thing plain story. Perhaps in olden days they were the precursors if one's husband abuses one. Things were not so clear-cut in of the soap opera, except that sagas eventually come to an the book, which, as I remember, rather ironically referred to end and soaps never do. When John Galsworthy wrote The Soames' 'assertion of his marital rights' or some such construc Forsyte Saga, he was working in a firm tradition: a fam tion of thought. There was some sympathy for him, even while ily establishes itself and the cast of characters gradually he was depicted as the tight, unattractive personality that he is. increases as marriages are contracted, children grow up and The 1960s Forsyte Saga was discreet about the rape, and much themselves marry and reproduce. Names persist: Jolyon in more conscious of the social threat to Irene as she fled her mar all its different forms: Jo, Old Jolyon, Young Jolyon, Jolly. riage. Maybe the ABC could get hold of that version and give I read the books along with other, less well-regarded sagas everyone the opportunity to compare. when I was a teenager: the Canadian writer Mazo de la Roche But as I look around at the freedoms that baby boomers' and her vividly readable Whiteoak saga; the Anne books; daughters enjoy, it's nice to reflect that some, if not all, babies Trollope's Palliser series, with its wonderful BBC adaptation; have come a long way since The Forsyte Saga was written, or Sergeanne Colon's fascinating Angelique series. Galswor first screened. • thy's work was of much higher order than these, of course, although some of de la Roche could stand beside any book Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer. 50 EUREKA STREET OCTOBER 2002 Eureka Street Cryptic Crossword no. 107, October 2002 Devised by L..=:::.___;:-===::..__--.:.o.-==------' Joan Nowotny IBVM ACROSS l. Wandering, without responsibility, he is not a collector of flowerless plants. (7,5) 8. Capable of giving repeated thanks for musical performance. (7) 10. Fighter has speed enough to fly to another country. (7) 11 . Did one's bit in preparing to dine- incongruously-on the cricket wicket ! (7,2) 13. Parsimonious paralytic? (5 ) 14. Appropriate sort of food. (4-4) 15. Rather stupid to point out unpleasant scent on the wine producer? (6) 18. Make a wine offering to the gods- politician consumed it. (6) 19. Footballer, perhaps, so limber and lithe that he should not suffer from this. (4,4) 2 1. For short time, payment for lodging was m ade to the church council. (5) 23. Feeling miserable I sat a long time, pining for the past. (9) 24. Silhouette often seen in disgracefully unlit old English capitals. (7) 25. Revolutionary twice went north, seeking citizen of former Solution to Crossword no. 106, Soviet territory. (7) September 2002 27. Sort of stationery, possibly, to which Elia responds- maybe! (12) DOWN 1 As a summary of the main points, I turn to a place I recollect? (1 4) 2. Girl turns up with nothing, reportedly. Why, say, replace one? (3) 3 & 20. Watchful spirits for this day in October? (8, 6) 4. Regulating actions to produce the best effect ? Perfect ! (6) 5. Close to the end of twilight? It fo llows! (5 ) 6. N egotiating for profit in baring one's soul, perhaps, to the market. (10 ) 7. N ot light-headed but just rather foolish. (7-7 ) 9. Essentially, perfect pitch; you cannot confuse that ear! (2,5) 12. Som etimes, baker at the production level needs to pause, rest and inhale! (4,6) 16. Musical work (with note) performed at function? (7) 17. Napoleon, when asked if h e could defeat his enemies, replied 'Course I can.' (8) 20. See 3-down. 22. Square and mature? What rot! (5) 26. Possesses chaste heart. (3) Thi s subscripti on is: Your Contact Details: Gift to: (Please also fill in your own contact details, left) D New D Renewal D Gift IM rs/Miss!Ms/Mr F1rst Name First Name Length of subscripti on: Surname Surname D O ne year (1 0 iss ues for $63, $54 concession for IStreet No. Street Name Street Name pensioners, students and unemployed. In c. CST. ) D Two years (2 0 iss ues for $11 5, $98 concess ion. In c. CST.) ICrtyfT own/Suburb State Postcode State Post code overseas rates on applica tion: tel +6 73 9427 73 7 7 Faxlema1l email: [email protected] esuit.org.au '-'1( _ayt-lm _e..L; •_Ie-ph-o-ne_N_o_. ------Faxl-em-a-il ____ _.ll( aytlme ; •lephone No. Send to: Payment Details D Visa D Bankcard D Mastercard 0 Eureka Street Subsc ription o l;nclose a r :~~~~~~y::>;e ;:~:sf~: I I I I II I I I II I I I II I I I I Reply Pa id 553 1. . Publications ,.-----,ICardholder·s name I Ri chmond VIC 3121 D Please debit my credit card fo ~ $ I . (No postage stamp required if S1gnature Exp1ry/ date I posted in Australia.) D Please send me direct debit forms I. _ . D Mai ling list: I would like to remove my name from the mailing list when it is used for outside adverti si ng. Terrorism and Justice Moral Argument in a Threatened World Edited by Tony Coady and Mi cha el O'Keefe Unsatisfied by the level of discussion and debate about war and terrorism at the moment? Then you will find both substance and coherence in this timely and informed collection of essays. Terrorism and fu stice is edited by philosophers Tony Coady and Michael O'Keefe and is the first book published since September 11 to address philosophically the moral and political underpinnings of terrorism and anti-terrorism . It explores the following questions: Can terrorism ever be justified? If not, what are the grounds for condemning it? What are the morally appropriate responses to ter rorism diplomatically, militarily and ethically? Other contributors are Sir Ninian Stephen, Robert Young, Igor Primoratz, Seumas Miller, Aleksandar Pavkovic, Abdullah Saeed, Janna Thompson and Raimond Gaita. Thanks to Melbourne University Press, Eureka Street has 10 copies of Terrorism and Ju stice to give away. Just put your name and address on the back of an envelope and send to: Eureka Street October 2002 Book Offer, PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3121. See page 8 for winners of the July-August 2002 Book Offer. • C'1 tholic Study at home and be connected to a dynamic learning community Theo logic'1 1 Diploma in Ministry College A flexible course in biblical studies, Christian though t and history and practical ministry studies. Graduate Diploma in Theology An integrated introduction to theological studies, for those who hold a university degree in any discipline. Courses accredited by The Melbourne College of Divinity New studen t applications close early February Further subject and enrolm ent details available from: www. trinity.unimelb .edu.au/TCTSOnline or phone Deborah Guess on (03)9348 7127 N 1036- 1758, Woomera. Austra lia Post Print Post approved the boat now known as SIEV X. How pp349181 /003 14, is published ten limes a and why? asks Tony Kevin. 43 Dark glasses year by Eureka Slree t Magazi ne Pty Ltd, Peter Craven reviews Sonya Hartnett's 300 Victoria St reet, Richmond VIC 3121 16 Trouble in Belfast PO Box 553, Richmond VIC 3 121 North of Drogheda the conflict Of a Boy. Tel: 03 9427 7311 Fax: 03 9428 4450 continues, as Anthony Ham discovered. 44 Searching hi gh and low emai l: eureka@jes pub.jesu it. org.au http://www.eurekastreet.corn.au/ 19 Uncivil wars Philip Harvey explores Anglicanism in Responsibility for ed itorial content is In Weipa Melissa Lucashenl