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AustrAliA’s secret WAr HoW unionists sAbotAged Ten our troops in World WAr ii HAL COLEBATCH’s new book, Australia’s Secret War, tells the Years shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions — against their own society and against the men and women of their of The own country’s fighting forces during the perils of World War II. Every major Australian warship was targeted by strikes, go-slows and besT r33011 renodesign.com.au sabotage at home. Australian soldiers fighting in New Guinea and the Pacific went without food, radio equipment and ammunition because 487 pOems by 169 auThOrs of union strikes. “It has been known for decades”, Les Murray writes in his introduction to this Photographs © australian War memorial verse collection, “that poets who might fear relegation or professional sabotage from the Waterside workers disrupted loading of supplies to the troops and It seems to me the best such occasional critical consensus of our culture have a welcome and a refuge in Quadrant—but only pilfered from ships’ cargoes and soldiers’ personal effects. Other strikes collection I have ever read; better, for if they write well.” by rail workers, iron workers, coal miners, and even munitions workers instance, than ‘The Faber Book of Modern From the second decade of his 20 years as literary editor of Quadrant, Les Murray and life-raft builders, badly impeded Australia’s war effort. Verse’; which is saying quite a bit. here presents a selection of the best verse he published between 2001 and 2010. — BOB ELLIS, Table Talk For you, or As A giFt $44.95 Order This Landmark bOOk $44.95 ONLINE ONLINE www.quadrant.org.au/store www.quadrant.org.au/store POST POST Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia Quadrant, Locked Bag 1235, North Melbourne VIC 3051, Australia PhONE FAX PhONE (03) 8317 8147 FAX (03) 9320 9065 (03) 8317 8147 (03) 9320 9065

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Letters 2 Gerry Worsell, Paul Monk, Rex Dale, Henry Ergas & Jonathan Pincus, Stephen Due, Michael Giffin, Kerry Boulton editor’s column 6 The Vandals Take the Handles Keith Windschuttle asperities 8 John O’Sullivan ASTRINGENCIES 10 Anthony Daniels western civilisation 12 Strauss, Bruckner and the Dying of the Light Brian Sully east asia 14 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma Peter Rowe 21 Inside a North Korean Commando Raid Anthony Paul history 26 The Myth of Bolshevism Dies Hard Paul Monk society 32 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum Keith Windschuttle, Greg Walsh, Shimon Cowen, Michael Kowalik 40 How to Lie with Sexual Statistics William D. Rubinstein 44 The School of Pro-Islamic Studies Tony Thomas philosophy & ideas 48 Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism Alberto Mingardi 54 The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren Noel Weeks politics 62 The Para-Government Subverting Our Democracy Patrick Morgan 66 o Time t Clip the Senate’s Wings James Allan aborigines 72 Recognition Roulette Nicholas Hasluck books 77 Black Flag Down by Liam Byrne Daryl McCann 80 On Murray’s Run by Joe Dolce Lin van Hek 82 Hidden in Plain View by Paul Irish Robert Murray 84 The Crystal Ballroom by Libby Sommer Penelope Nelson theatre 86 The Merchant of Nowhere Michael Connor literature 90 Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance David Martin Jones & Lana Starkey 97 The Rightful King and the King Innate Alan Gould 102 A Brief Note on Poetics in Cormac McCarthy Ivan Head stories 104 Two Removals Gary Furnell 109 A Tale of Two Pities Derek Fenton sweetness & light 111 Tim Blair Poetry 5: Poetry Joe Dolce; 13: Alcove Hal G.P. Colebatch; 20: The Hippocampus Dennis Haskell; 24: Maidenly; Titanium Where My Hipsters Rub Alan Gould; 43: Scintillae Catherine Chandler; Two poems Kitty Donnelly; 47: Brick Ken Stone; 52: Belief’s Possibilities Dennis Haskell; 53: The Vigil; Interrogation; Carers Required Elisabeth Wentworth; 60: Mama Amazonica; Musician-Wren; Macaw Mummy Pascale Petit; 65: Playground Triumph Graeme Hetherington; 71: Morlocks; Talking to Dead People John Whitworth; 85: Two poems Damien Balassone; 89: I Dreamt I Saw St Augustine Joe Dolce; 95: Casualty Rod Moran; 96: Two poems Hal G.P. Colebatch; 101: Ag Joe Dolce; 103: Two poems John Whitworth; Two poems Damien Balassone; 108: Christmas Eve Dan Guenther; 110: Two poems Graeme Hetherington Letters leaders responsible for establish- ing USAFA designed an academic curriculum for the aerospace age. As a fully accredited institution of Editor A Proper Defence higher learning, USAFA offered a Keith Windschuttle four-year degree course conducted [email protected] Academy by eighteen departments within Editor, International SIR: Your article “Gender Diversity four major divisions: Basic Sciences, John O’Sullivan in Khaki” (September 2017) con- Engineering Sciences, Humanities

Liter ary Editor firms the serious misgivings of and Social Sciences. A co-opera- Les Murray those who, more than three dec- tive graduate program with care- ades ago, feared placing the study fully selected universities enabled Deput y Editor of humanities and social sciences exceptional students to study for George Thomas at the proposed new Australian a masters degree in Astronautics, Editor, Qua dr ant Online Defence Force Academy (ADFA) Economics, History, International Roger Franklin in the hands of the University of Affairs, Management, Applied [email protected] New South Wales or, indeed, any Mathematics or Physics. other Australian university. Even The essential difference Contributing Editors Film: Neil McDonald a cursory review of the way many between ADFA and USAFA was Theatre: Michael Connor academies within those universi- that every USAFA academic was ties were teaching Australian his- a serving officer, either American Columnists tory should have sounded alarm or from an allied nation. As a Anthony Daniels bells. Australia’s future military young squadron leader lectur- Tim Blair leaders need to understand and ing in history and international appreciate the quality of the her- relations at the Royal Air Force Subscriptions itage they are trained to defend. College, I was seconded in 1967 Phone: (03) 8317 8147 Impressionable young officers can to USAFA’s History Department. Fax: (03) 9320 9065 do without uncritical exposure to My American colleagues were Post: Quadrant Magazine, the virus of identity politics which exceptionally well qualified both Locked Bag 1235, infects the study of humanities in terms of doctorates from lead- North Melbourne VIC 3051 and social sciences in Australian ing universities such as Princeton E-mail: quadrantmagazine@ universities. and Yale, and active service in data.com.au Sadly, the founding fathers the Second World, Korean and of ADFA failed to appreciate Vietnam wars. Furthermore, Publisher the excellent model that already in contrast to the situation in existed in the Rampart Range of Australian universities and of Quadrant (ISSN 0033-5002) is Colorado’s Rocky Mountains: the great benefit to USAFA cadets, published ten times a year by Quadrant Magazine Limited, United States Air Force Academy considerable emphasis was placed Suite 2/5 Rosebery Place, (USAFA) which had opened in on the quality of teaching. Balmain NSW 2041, Australia 1958, almost thirty years before Incidentally, not one academic ACN 133 708 424 the ADFA. While drawing on at the United States Air Force the experience of West Point and Academy conducted research into Production Annapolis which had been edu- Gender and Sexuality Studies. cating professional officers since Gerry Worsell Design Consultant: Reno Design 1802 and 1845 respectively, the Tweed Heads, NSW Art Director: Graham Rendoth prominent military and civilian Printer: Ligare Pty Ltd 138–152 Bonds Road, Riverwood NSW 2210 Cover: Colours of Australia “Water Lily” www.quadrant.org.au

2 Quadrant October 2017 Letters

that the magnificent paintings in ders f even o one’s own life. Roger Wonders by Torchlight the Chauvet Cave were discov- Shattuck’s books on Proust, not ered by archaeologists, after hav- least Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to Sri : I thoroughly enjoyed M.G. ing been immured for some 27,000 In Search of Lost Time (2000), not Kile’s letter (July-August 2017) years. When the cave was fully only open up the riches of Proust’s about Melissa Coburn’s lack of explored and dated, it was realised writing, but make available to oth- appreciation for Marcel Proust’s In that there were, on the floor along ers the cognitive process implicit in Search of Lost Time. That she failed the side of the painted walls, the Proust’s perception of things in the to find it engaging puts her among fossilised footprints of a boy, per- context of time. Melissa Coburn the great majority of people, pre- haps twelve years of age, and his might like to start by setting aside sumably. They lack both the wolfhound, going back to before the time to read Shattuck. stamina and the imagination to the cave was sealed by a landslide Paul Monk immerse themselves in its extraor- all those millennia ago. He had Melbourne, Vic dinary riches of perception and walked through with a torch, pre- expression. Having done so myself, sumably gazing in awe at the stun- I can testify that, far from being an ning paintings of Ice Age beasts Arthur Cotton ordeal, it was the experience of a that were already, when he looked in India lifetime. at them, some five thousand years During 2014-15, under treat- old. Sri : The quoted statement by ment for metastatic melanoma and All this is set out in Jean Shashi Tharoor that the British often forced to rest, I read all six vol- Clottes’s Return to Chauvet Cave: colonial rulers “had no interest in umes (some 4500 pages altogether) Excavating the Birthplace of Art: the well-being of the Indian peo- in the famous English transla- The First Full Report (2003). As I ple” (September 2017) may be true tion by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and contemplated the image of that of some, but not all. One person Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. young boy with his torch walk- who stands out in the history of Enright, published by the Modern ing through Chauvet Cave, I felt India is Arthur Cotton, who initi- Library in 2003. I found myself that he embodied the very idea of a ated irrigation projects in the south utterly enchanted and read every reader deciphering signs placed on of India, which were widely copied word. My first thought at Proust’s a surface by someone else. Reading in other areas and brought great famously serpentine sentences Proust while seriously ill, I identi- benefits. was how exquisitely balanced and fied with that Aurignacian boy of Arriving in India in the early coherent they were. My second was long ago. But whereas he gazed at 1800s, Cotton immediately saw to wonder how a man afflicted by paintings of animals by torchlight that there was a huge problem degenerative lung disease can have and had to decipher their meaning with the monsoonal rains deliver- found the energy to compose such with a mind unillumined by any ing great amounts of water most of sentences and to read them back to history or written records, I was which was lost in the ocean. The himself. gazing upon immense galleries of rains sometimes arrived in greatly People talk vulgarly of the signs in the Roman alphabet and reduced amounts or not at all. “bucket list” of things to do before interpreting them in the light of The chief projects on which he you die. I was teetering on the all that has occurred in France and worked, or which owe their exis- brink of mortality and it occurred around the world since the Ice Age tence to his initiative, were works to me that reading Proust might be ended. on the Cauvery and Coleroon riv- a fine way to round out a lifetime Picasso reportedly marvelled ers, Tamil Nadu, and later, a much of reading—a fitting Swann song, at cave paintings found before bigger project on the Godavari and as it were. I was not disappointed. those at the Chauvet Cave and Kistna rivers, Andhra Pradesh. On the contrary, I found myself exclaimed, “We have invented Both areas were prone to famine, in awe of Proust’s mastery of lan- nothing!” Reading Proust, one leading to miserable deaths. In guage and his stunningly varied realises that, on the contrary, “we” spite of obvious difficulties, a sys- nuances of expression. Time and have invented a great deal—a very tem of irrigation seemed the solu- again, in astonishment, I would great deal. The privilege of a liter- tion. Cotton encountered much re-read whole passages, highlight ate inhabitant of the contemporary resistance from the British govern- them, share them with anyone who world is to be able to go in search of ment. And according to an Indian would listen. lost time and absorb its wonders by friend of mine, there was even There was a third thought, torchlight. But, as Alain de Botton resistance from the Indians them- which is worth sharing in such a pointed out, Proust showed how selves. But these were overcome. context as this. It was only in 1994 one can absorb in depth the won- On the Cauvery there was an

Quadrant October 2017 3 Letters existing system which dated from on two levels. He notes first that it ancient times, but which had Cartel Capers Observed has conspicuously failed to provide become seriously impaired. Using the necessary ethical depth needed expertise from ancient dam-build- Sri : Having read our chapter for meaningful political debate; ing techniques, Cotton was able to on the economy during the post- and second that it has been used master the difficulties of building war Menzies governments, Tony repeatedly and predominantly in on unstable sandy river beds. The Thomas (July-August 2017) con- the late twentieth century by pow- scheme was a great success and cluded that we were “seemingly erful states and interest groups to permanently prevented the fur- unfamiliar with pre-1974 cartels”. justify their oppression of the weak ther occurrence of famine. Indians Not true. Pincus’s 1963 honours by force or by tyrannical legislation. watched the values of their lands thesis discussed price fixing in the Anyone familiar with the recent increase! oil industry, of which he had direct history of the UNHCR would rec- Cotton then turned his atten- knowledge: his job included hand- ognise this failure. tion to the Godavari delta region delivering BP’s tender documents John Witte, whose vast intellec- which had recently endured a ter- to Shell House before the tender tual output has generated an entire rible famine, and which experi- deadlines. And Pincus is co-author discipline in the study of the rela- enced precarious rainfall. When of Government and Capitalism tionship between religion and law, the rain did arrive, the river would (1982) with a large section titled has also noted the failure of human overflow its banks and flood the “All the restrictive practices known rights to resolve the problems fac- surrounding country. The proj- to man”. As for Ergas, he has ing legislatures in modern plural- ect involved the building of a been involved with trade practices istic societies. While human rights huge dam and about 1100 miles law since the 1970s and served as have been touted as an alternative of canals. It was a huge success. an adviser to the (then) Trade moral framework that is capable Having been continually plagued Practices Commission. of providing for all the needs of a by extreme poverty and distress, Moreover, the statement Tony “secular” state, this has been shown the district was now one of the Thomas attributes to us seems to in practice to be a delusion. most prosperous in India. It was make the point succinctly: restric- Human rights have been used able to send food to areas of India tive practices were widespread, as an intellectual vehicle to drive affected by drought. favoured producers at the expense religion out of the public square. Few tourists visit Andhra of consumers and encouraged However, two points should be Pradesh. They prefer to visit the inefficiency. noted. First, human rights dis- north of India where there are But yes, we did not write what course is not adequate to deal with such sites as the Taj Mahal, a Tony Thomas would have writ- moral conflict in the political arena. structure built to commemorate ten on the Menzies era, and so we In so far as politics does actually a favourite wife! And it seems failed on his standard. involve discussions about ethi- that few historians visit Andhra cal issues, human rights cannot in Henry Ergas & Jonathan Pincus Pradesh either. Again and again principle solve or effectively medi- via e-mail I pick up a history of India and ate in these disputes. Second, in the there is no mention of Arthur post-Christian era, the pluralistic Cotton. He just does not fit into Human Rights societies of the West are faced with how colonial history should be and Moral Failure the problem of integrating compet- written. He does not fit the picture ing moral frameworks into secular of the grasping colonial, and so is Sri : Human rights talk, now so political and legal structures. The left out of history. But the benefi- evident in the discussions on same- solution is not a crass and tyran- ciaries of Cotton’s well-executed sex marriage, has dominated pub- nical “secularism”. Rather what is schemes know better. The Oxford lic discourse throughout the West needed is a different paradigm for Dictionary of National Biography since the 1970s. Samuel Moyn, the pluralism that transcends the delu- says that in south India, Cotton is great modern historian of human sory utopia of human rights, and still revered. In Andhra Pradesh rights, has described human rights genuinely provides for freedom of he is a folk hero. In many a home, as “the Last Utopia” (his book of conscience. with no anxiety about water short- this title was published in 2010). Witte and Moyn in differ- age or crop failure, Cotton’s por- Anyone familiar with the his- ent ways note the importance trait hangs in a prominent place. tory of political ideas will know of Christianity in the history of that utopias do not have a good human rights. Moyn notes the Rex Dale track record. Moyn documents the rise specifically of human rights Brunswick, Vic failure of human rights discourse in the immediate post-war period

4 Quadrant October 2017 Letters on the foundations of a predomi- the Church needed to return to that Windschuttle 1, Garton 0. nantly Christian worldview in the the Christ of first-century Judaism, Windschuttle then refers to two West that privileged the idea of rather than confining Christ to of Garton’s books inspired by the the innate dignity of all people. the zeitgeist. One of the virtues of French “post-structuralist, anti- However, he also notes that it has process philosophy and theology is humanist and gay theorist”, Michel since been disconnected from its the idea of creative becoming over Foucault. Garton agrees but refers Christian foundations and is, as it static being. In other words, God to other books he has written were, in free fall. Witte sees human is a process, not an event, so is on other topics. Windschuttle 2, rights more as one strand in a long his Son, and so is the mystery of Garton 0. Garton then wonders tradition of rights in general, going our salvation. It is theologically if Windschuttle has actually read back thousands of years. In partic- incorrect to deny God, or our life his books. I would be extremely ular he notes the evolution of polit- in God, access to the future tense. surprised if he had not but let’s ical rights in the hundred years or To think otherwise is to deny the call that one even. Garton then so before the Reformation, when physical and metaphysical reality refers to Windschuttle’s “regret- rights became part of the polemic of flux and change, and deny us table exaggerations”. By way of of religious (Christian) freedom. the hope on which our faith rests. confirmation, Garton then refers It is this tradition, rather than the to a number of blandly named Michael Giffin false hope of “human rights” and a courses offered in the Faculty Paddington, NSW superficial secularism, that has the Handbook. Well, unless one does moral depth and intellectual appa- not live in the postmodern world ratus necessary to find a way for A Pointless Effort (think “Safe Schools”) this makes pluralist societies to flourish. it Windschuttle 3, Garton 0. Sri : Having re-read Keith Garton concludes with a glow- Stephen Due Windschuttle’s observations on the ing tribute to the Sydney University Belmont, Vic state of Arts and History depart- Department of History which he ments in Australian universities, rather revealingly asserts is “one of A Process, Not an Event (“A Disaster of the Active Kind”, the few [History] faculties in the May 2017) I read with inter- world” that can claim to be reason- Sri : n I his response (Let­ est the rebuttal by Dr Stephen ably unbiased. ters, September 2017) to my Garton, Provost and Deputy Vice- Despite his efforts, Dr Garton essay “The Future of Christianity” Chancellor, University of Sydney, has failed to land a glove on Mr (July-August), Phillip Turnbull in the September issue. Windschuttle’s original article. makes an error of fact. The I am not an academic or his- Kerry Boulton term AahYah is used forty-three torian. I began my Arts degree at Brisbane, Qld times in the Old Testament, where Sydney University in 1961. I still it is often translated as “I will be” remember that year fondly. I stud- or “I shall be”. I did not mean the ied English Language under a truly Church’s future would be revi- inspirational lecturer. Quadrant welcomes letters talised “by going back to a mar- Coming to Dr Garton’s reply: to the editor. Letters are subject ginalised, persecuted catacomb Windschuttle attributes a “paltry” to editing unless writers community”, precisely because the four books to Garton, who seems original Jesus movement existed to agree but refers to three other stipulate otherwise. before the catacombs. I meant books he co-authored. I make

Poetry Is Like Looking

Poetry is like looking for a haystack in a needle.

Joe Dolce

Quadrant October 2017 5 t h e v a n d a l s take the hand l e s

Keith Windschuttle

he Coalition Government will not stand by Thomas Woolner, funded by public subscrip- by and allow vandals to rewrite or tear tion and erected in February 1879 before a crowd down our history,” declared a Liberal of 60,000 people), the body in charge is the City “PartyT e-mail sent last month by Environment and of Sydney Council. Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, after a protes- Thanks to a gerrymander which allows inner- tor had painted anti-Australia Day slogans on the urban leftists to decide who gets elected to the City statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde of Sydney Council, Lord Mayor Clover Moore and Park. Frydenberg’s e-mail also linked to a radio other councillors treat green, gay and indigenous interview where Malcolm Turnbull said Australians issues as holy writ. When the Captain Cook statue should be proud of their history and should not controversy erupted, Moore said she would pass tamper with historical monuments by rewriting the issue to her own Aboriginal advisory panel for their inscriptions to satisfy recent demands by a determination. This is due some time in October Aboriginal political activists and the ABC’s Stan but there are no prizes for guessing the outcome. Grant. Turnbull also criticised municipal councils The advisory panel is composed of fourteen in Melbourne and Perth who decided, because of members, all of them either indigenous activists hurt Aboriginal feelings, to no longer celebrate or indigenous bureaucrats, two from the Torres January 26 as Australia Day. “We should be proud Strait Islands, and none of them with any qualifi- of Australia and its history,” Turnbull said, “and on cations in history. The co-chair, Tim Gray, is lead Australia Day we celebrate all our achievements.” singer in a reggae band and a board member of the When Frydenberg entered this fray, polls were Tribal Warrior Association. If this panel’s advice is showing that a strong, patriotic stand on these accepted by council, the Captain Cook statue will issues would be popular. Newspoll found 58 per be vandalised again, this time by an official plaque cent of voters wanted the statues to be left alone, or inscription far more indelible than graffiti spray- while only 32 per cent wanted change. Bill Shorten paint, proclaiming the Aboriginal political class’s originally proposed an additional inscription to perspective on Cook. Frydenberg will find this the Hyde Park statue, which says Cook “discov- very difficult to prevent, and impossible to reverse. ered this territory, 1770”. He wanted it to add that He can already read the kind of text Cook’s Aborigines got here thousands of years before that. statue will bear by inspecting any one of the However, Shorten soon recognised popular sen- memorials around rural Australia—several bear- timent and changed his view to fall in line with ing recent vice-regal names of those who unveiled Turnbull. them—which commemorate massacres allegedly This was obviously a minor victory for Turnbull committed by white colonists on the colonial fron- at a time when he needed one, but his problem tier. Monument Australia lists thirty-six existing is that the federal government is not responsible massacre memorials on its website, but there are a for the statues in Hyde Park, or any other local lot more in the pipeline, according to the University government area. Despite Frydenberg’s confi- of Newcastle, which has gained Commonwealth dent declaration, the best he could do was ask funding to establish a Centre for the History of the Australian Heritage Council to review exist- Violence. The new centre has attracted a number ing legal protections for historical monuments. He of what it calls “internationally renowned schol- will find that, legally, they are a state government ars”, one of whom is Professor Lyndall Ryan, who concern and, in terms of practical administration, has found no less than 150 massacre sites from our real responsibility lies with local government. In colonial history and publishes their location on an the case of the Captain Cook statue (a great work electronic map.

6 Quadrant October 2017 the vandals take the handles

ete n m give a idea of the quality of scholarship real massacre of twenty-eight people in 1838, the on which these memorials rely, and how easy alarm was raised by the station overseer when he iLt is for Aboriginal activists and academics to per- returned to the property after a week’s absence to suade politicians to endorse their claims, no matter find the local Aborigines missing. Even though how implausible they might be. the convicts who killed them tried to burn all the During the Captain Cook and Australia Day corpses, some individual bodies could still be per- controversy last month, the federal Treasurer, Scott sonally identified. The killing site itself was adver- Morrison, in an opinion piece for the Australian on tised for miles around and for weeks afterwards September 4, wrote how his own First Fleet con- by the birds of prey and carrion circling overhead. vict ancestor had helped make Australia a great But we are expected to believe the much bigger place. We should commemorate him and his kind, Hospital Creek Massacre went completely unre- Morrison said, by preserving January 26 as our ported at the time and remained unknown until great national holiday. However, Morrison quali- well into the twentieth century. fied his case by saying Australian history had not The first mention I can find of it is in news- been without its shame and tragedies for indig- papers published between June and August 1914, enous Australians, writing: including the Glen Innes Examiner, the Lismore Northern Star, the Dorrigo Gazette, and the Catholic North of Brewarrina, not far from the ancient Press. The text in each story of just 194 words is fish traps where I was just over a week ago, is exactly the same, which means it was probably the site of the Hospital Creek Massacre, were circulated by the news agency Country Press. It 400 indigenous Australians were slaughtered gives no author and the only source it cites is an in 1859. Unforgivably just one of many such Aboriginal man called One-Eyed Peter who was episodes that is part of our difficult past, that reportedly one of the survivors of the massacre, should be, and is, rightfully taught in our and who lived at Brewarrina until his death in 1911. schools. He said 300 were killed nearby in 1859. “He was a noted character in the district,” the story says, Now, even though I have done a fair bit of “and spoke sorrowfully of the bad old days, when research on frontier conflict, before I read this I his countrymen were shot down like wild beasts.” had never heard of the Hospital Creek Massacre. A different version of the story appeared in the So I looked up Monument Australia and found it Sydney Mail, September 12, 1928, by G.M. Smith, has the text of the inscription Morrison saw, con- who attributed it to a tale a drover told him in 1882 firming the scale of the incident: about an event he heard about. That is, his version derived from hearsay recalled some forty-six years When the station stockmen found the carcass earlier, about an incident that occurred twenty- [of a cow], they tracked the killers back to three years before that. Hospital Creek, where they massacred every The story later emerged in a historical study in Aboriginal they saw. It is unknown exactly how 1976 of the Aboriginal fisheries on the Darling- many were killed but generally it is agreed at Barwon Rivers by Peter Dargin. This time, the about 400. source was a memoir written in his old age by William Emanuel Kerrigan, born 1861, the son I p looked u Trove to see if any of the country or of the local postmaster and publican, also named metropolitan newspapers of the day had reported William Kerrigan, who said his father told it to the incident, but found no mention of it. I couldn’t him when he was a child. Dargin’s version of find anything about it in New South Wales parlia- Kerrigan’s story now informs the New South Wales mentary records in 1859, or any year thereabouts, Heritage Council and, in turn, online histories of either. This was surprising since the killing of 400 Brewarrina and district. Aborigines, or anything like that number, would In short, the story is nothing better than an have amounted to the worst single case of indige- old bush legend, based on nothing more credible nous slaughter in the history of Australia, or indeed than hearsay piled on hearsay, with no plausible in the history of any British colony to that time. origin. Unfortunately, if this is the quality of story It was an incident that would have been impos- our politicians think fit to be enshrined on monu- sible to keep quiet, since there were too many bod- ments and taught to school children, then Captain ies to burn or bury. Someone was bound to find Cook’s statue, adorned with a revised, politically and report them sooner or later. At Myall Creek correct inscription, is eventually doomed to the in northern New South Wales, where there was a same ignominious fate.

Quadrant October 2017 7 a s p e r i t i e s

John O’Sullivan

dentity politics is the order of the day, it seems, live, let me live it as a blonde.” The charm of this whether you approve of it or not. But what is principle for constructing a new identity is that it identity politics? Do we mean the politics of is almost infinitely accommodating. It enables us to Ipersonal identity or sexual identity that we see play- say to ourselves: If I have only one life to live, let me ing out in America’s universities? Or the politics of live it as … (fill in the blank). national identity versus European identity that we All that sounded highly theoretical when I wrote see in the Brexit debate? Or the politics of racial about it first twenty years ago. I doubt that Hume identity throughout the advanced world, including or Pirandello would have imagined young intellec- the US and Australia? tuals taking their theories to the extent of believ- About twenty years ago I got very interested in ing that their sexual identity, indeed their biological that question, then just beginning to be a political identity, was entirely a matter of their own arbitrary one. It seemed to me that all these different iden- choice. (Tom Wolfe is a different matter—he might tity disputes offered roughly the same choice: do we well have imagined just that.) Yet that is the situa- think that identity is something that we get handed tion we see today in some of the best universities in down to us by our parents, society, sex, class, nation, America or the world. Moreover, the choice of the race, and then take for granted as we grow up? Or is identity-bearer, however seemingly arbitrary, is then it something we think about and choose voluntarily? enforced on his fellows by college administrations It was clear then that a “postmodern” (though it has that insist we all address him or her by whatever been in the air for two hundred years) concept of neologism he or she has invented to express their identity was advancing in psychology, the neuro- new identities. (This also plays hell with traditional sciences, the media, the theatre, film, the world of rules of grammar.) culture generally, and above all in the universities, As Richard Neuhaus observed in a different con- the intelligentsia, and the young. This was the the- text, “Once orthodoxy is optional, it sooner or later ory that the self is almost infinitely malleable and becomes prohibited.” Professors who resist this new that we may choose our identity (or identities) rather fashion in elective identities and continue to refer than simply receiving them from either our genes or students as “him” or “her” (and related atrocities) society or wider environment. Its spiritual godfather are threatened with serious penalties, including the was David Hume, who wrote: loss of their positions. This must be an especially tricky judgment for anyone of precise judgment The mind is a kind of theatre, where several because the rules governing the protection of new perceptions successively make their appearance; identities keep changing and are anyway beset with pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite contradictions. variety of postures and situations. There is properly For instance, it is held to be morally wrong to no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in assert that someone who is a man biologically but different; whatever natural propension we may have a woman by choice and surgery is not genuinely to imagine that simplicity and identity. female. At the same time as sexual identity was becoming a voluntary matter, however, sexual ori- Consequences flow: if there’s no hard, given entation was being decreed to be a hard-and-fast core central to our personality, then our identity is certainty that brooks no alteration. Again, it is a malleable, maybe infinitely so, and we can choose secular sin to argue that someone who is gay might several identities on different occasions (as both be able to change his sexual orientation to a het- Pirandello and Woody Allen have suggested, in erosexual one by either religious commitment or plays and films like Zelig). Indeed, the principle on psychiatric treatment. Indeed, so-called “repara- which we choose an identity has been laid down tive therapy” that promises to do just that is now by the greatest living American psychologist, Tom outlawed in some jurisdictions—generally the same Wolfe, in his essay “The Me Decade”. It began life jurisdictions that encourage and even finance sex- as an advertising slogan: “If I have only one life to change operations. Desire is fixed, it seems, but not

8 Quadrant October 2017 asperitieschronicle the object of desire. And Harvey Fierstein’s defiant by geography from its neighbours, an ethnic nation hymn to a gay identity, “I Am What I Am”, must be finds it hard to sustain its distinct character in a replaced by “I’m Not What I Was”. world of travel, migration, cultural exchange, liberal political ideas and sentiments, globalisation, and f personal identities as seemingly fixed as one’s international rules on human rights. Ethnic nation- sex are malleable, however, then surely collec- alism gradually becomes civic nationalism, wid- Itive identities of nation and religion must be more ens its notion of the national community to admit so. After all, there may be disagreement about minorities fully, and becomes by degrees a nation the degree to which a personal identity is socially united by a common culture rather than ethnicity. constructed, but there can be no real doubt that a Ideological nationalism, on the other hand, fractures national identity is a social and collective one. That when its citizens reject or dislike the political ideas belief was the foundation of several ideologies in the it is supposed to exhibit. Hence the fragility of the last century that sought to replace the taken-for- USSR and the serious tensions that exist within the granted national identities of Britain, Australia and European Union. the US with new post-national identities that looked Cultural nations, on the other hand, are able to beyond the nation to new collectivities rooted in ide- unite people on a pre-political basis so that their ology—whether ideologies of class or race. political differences are softened and accommodated Today we see the same impulse to replace nation- within a broad culture. Orwell makes the point hood with something else in the “Europeanism” of that the “fairness” rooted in the English identity the European Union, in multiculturalism, in global- encompassed even the professed enemies of society. isation and global governance, and even in jihadism A Marxist professor of law, for instance, criticising (which, viewed from a certain standpoint, is Islam’s some new proposal for legislation, would forget what umma transformed into a new post-national global he was supposed to believe and write to the Times identity). These new post-national identities were denouncing the measure as a violation of the high- even seen as “inevitable” since according to German est standards of Britain’s proud tradition of freedom. professors, nations and nationalisms were withering Cultural identities influence even those who reject away and would need replacement institutions. some of the nation’s core ideas. Recent elections have shown, however, that eth- As communications improve and cultures mix, nic, national and religious identities have revived in we can expect these cultural differences to shrink Europe and the United States even though the intel- but never to disappear. And if they are ignored or lectual consensus was that such identities were at suppressed, as the advocates of new post-national best nostalgia and at worse fascism of one kind or identities advocate—promising great leaps forward another. Brexit, the support for Trump’s “America into a Brave New World of consciously chosen iden- First” in “the white working class” in America, the tities—massive problems will follow in their train. rise of what is called “populism” in much of Europe, Obvious examples of this are the attempts to create most significantly the upsurge of anti-immigration New Soviet Man, Aryan Man, Maoist Man, and sentiment in countries like Germany and Sweden (more respectably) Kemalist Man in a Turkey which (which had been strongholds of the new intellectual is returning by degrees to its pre-Kemalist identity. post-nationalism) illustrate the stubborn persistence Kemalism was an ideological definition of Turkey of traditional identities. that did not reflect its social reality and so its genu- This strengthening of national identity is not a ine identity. It didn’t “take”. Brexit has shown that simple thing, however, because a nation is not a sim- another identity didn’t take either—at least not for ple thing. There are at least three kinds of nation and the majority of Brits. nationalism: (1) Ethnic nationalism, which sees the Will the identities of those who choose to take nation as an extended family. (2) Cultural national- the far harder step of adopting a sexual identity ism (also known as civic nationalism) in which the contrary to their biological one survive better? It’s nation can be composed of several ethnicities held hard to be optimistic. Those who take this step have together by a common culture. The UK is such a a high rate of suicide. They find that their trans- nation, and so is the US—even though Americans formation into women—90 per cent of such opera- think they are the third of kind of nation, (3) An tions are from male to female—is less persuasive ideological nation held together by a self-con- to themselves and others as they age. And all their scious set of political principles: the Soviet Union, other problems remain. It’s not something we should Yugoslavia, the European Union, the multicultural permit a child or adolescent to undergo until they post-Australian Australia dear to the Left. are of an age and maturity to understand what they Cultural nationalism has the most staying power are choosing. A mistaken identity is harder to bear in the modern world. Unless is it clearly separated when you’ve chosen it yourself.

Quadrant October 2017 9 astringencies

Anthon y Daniels

ans o i wolf t Man, of course, but in France, Since sheep farmers cannot kill wolves, at to which the wolf in its most literal form, least not openly, they must resort to other ways of Canis lupus, has recently returned (from protection, but these are costly in both time and IMtaly, as it happens), Man is definitely not wolf to money. Night-time enclosures, electrified fences, wolf. In fact the penalty for killing a wolf in France powerful sheepdogs, expensive to keep and lengthy is a fine of up to €150,000 and imprisonment for to train: these are some of what wolves have made up to seven years. Murderers escape the fine and necessary. Warning shots—warning to the wolves, sometimes spend less time in prison. that is—are the last resort; and a precarious living I suppose this tells us, or at least it tells econ- has for some become an impossible one. omists, who are not the same as the rest of us, The ecological party to the argument can hardly something about the scarcity value of wolves as deny this; but they claim that there are compensa- against men. There are estimated to be approxi- tory advantages to wolves. mately 300 wolves in France at the moment, and The wolf has returned to France because of they are increasing in number by a fifth every year. Man’s flight from the countryside, abandoned for Of course, a projection is not a prediction, but if the delights of discos and supermarkets. Because this trend continued, there would be 11,500 wolves of modern agricultural productivity, permanent in twenty years’ time, killing nearly a third of a overproduction is now our problem, not scratch- million sheep a year. In early modern France, there ing a bare living from the grudging soil. The less were thought to be 15,000 wolves in the country. fertile areas of France, considerable in extent, have I first became aware of the wolf question when been abandoned, then, and returned to a more or I noticed a slogan panted in large white letters on less wild state. Without predators, wild boar and the road about two miles from my house: Mort aux deer have multiplied, to the point of becoming a loups, death to wolves. They had recently returned severe nuisance for those agricultural or silvicul- to our department, after an absence of just over tural activities that remain (to say nothing of our ninety years. The last wolf in the Ardèche had been garden). Wolves will help to keep them down, killed in 1922, only fourteen years before the last and when they were re-introduced into Yosemite known Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo in Hobart. National Park, biodiversity did markedly increase. Everything that happens these days is grist to Now it so happens that my house is in an area someone’s ideological mill, and of course there is ripe, so to speak, for colonisation by wolves. There now a conflict over the highly-protected status of are few people, but many boar and deer. I ask the wolf in France. Is the presence of the wolf on myself, “Do I want the wolves to come?” national territory a sign of a welcome return of Though I now live half the year in almost total biodiversity, or is it a threat to the livelihood of isolation, I am city born and bred, and my answer is sheep-farmers, whose income does not generally essentially a frivolous one: yes, I want the wolves to match that of, say, traders in futures or cosmetic come because they have such intelligent, dog-like surgeons? faces, and because I would be thrilled by the idea There is general agreement that wolves are not that there were wild animals all around. I want good for sheep. They sometimes go on killing to hear them howl at night while I am tucked up sprees, doing to death far more sheep than they in bed. And I would love to see some fluffy wolf- can ever eat. But that is not all. It was said that cubs gambolling in the meadow at the back of my once you have been tortured, you remain tortured; house. and a flock of sheep that has been once attacked remains attacked. Its milk yield declines, the ani- utf s i Man i no longer a wolf to wolf, is wolf a mals lose weight, they have fewer lambs and more wolf to Man? For several centuries it was the miscarriages. Bambition in France to rid the national territory of

10 Quadrant October 2017 astringencieschronicle these dangerous and predatory vermin, but more Abbé François Fabre says in the very last sentence recently the wolf has enjoyed a better press, and of his book about the beast, La Bête du Gévaudan, somehow it had seeped into my consciousness that, “It is not right to judge other times and other places really, wolves are darling creatures, who kill almost by the standards of here and now.” His book was apologetically and only though physiological neces- published in 1904. sity. The viciousness of wolves was supposedly a There are records of children eaten by wolves in myth, fairy tale, or Jungian collective memory, like the villages all around me: cannibalism. Moreover, we owe an immense debt of gratitude to wolves: they gave us the dog, which On October 13, 1812, Marie Chat, aged only is, if not the greatest consolation known to Man, three, playing near her house and parents, was the greatest consolation known to me and many devoured by a wolf. A year later, on October 13, others like me. 1813, it was her brother, Alexis Chat, who was However, I discovered that there have been devoured by wild beasts near his house … 3000 recorded attacks on Man by wolves in France, though many of them at a time when the standard m, I then, still in favour of the return of wolves of reportorial accuracy was below that of White chez moi? They might keep the boar away who House reportage today. In the early 1800s, wolves Arepeatedly ruin our flowerbeds with their power- were particularly ferocious, and this was attributed ful snouts, but which (I speak here of the flower- to an invasion of Spanish wolves beds) we do not want to disfigure accustomed to the joys of human with protective but unsightly net- flesh on the battlefields of Spain. hat should be ting or electrified fences. If they Native wolves would never dream W increase biodiversity, that would of being so nasty. our policy with be a charming thing. And it must I began to read of the Beast of regard to the be remembered that the statistical Gévaudan, a wolf of monstrous size chances of anyone being killed by and cunning, or possibly (accord- immigration of them are infinitesimal, certainly ing to rumour or some writers) a wolves? Do we need by comparison with other dangers. hyena or other hideous carnivorous them, do we not Let us not forget that, when Marie creature, who, in the mid-1760s, and Alexis Chat were eaten by terrorised many of the villages need them, do we wolves, their chances of reaching through which I pass on my way need them not to be adulthood were in any case much to my house from England, by reduced, and incomparably more maiming, killing, decapitating, present? Perhaps the young children were carried away eating and stripping naked many question is too late. by disease and even accident than victims, principally young girls by wolves. Why, then, worry about while tending their flocks. At one wolves, as if they were the only time, 20,000 people were out hunting for la Bête threat to our existence? féroce, as it was known at the time, and though two What should be our policy with regard to the large wolves were eventually killed, it is still not immigration of wolves? Do we need them, do we certain that these were not scapewolves, to employ not need them, do we need them not to be present? a neologism. Perhaps the question is too late: they are coming In fact, as I read accounts of the depredations whether we like it or not. We can only hope that of the Beast of Gévaudan, I could not help but wolf is not really wolf to man. think that the beast was a serial killer acting under cover of a generalised fear of wolves. The Beast, Anthony Daniels’s most recent book is his first whoever or whatever it was, had a predilection for collection of short stories, The Proper Procedure and little girls, whom he stripped and mutilated. This Other Stories, published in August by New English sounded (to a modern, urbanised ear) more like Review Press under his nom de plume, Theodore Jack the Ripper than Mother Nature: but as the Dalrymple.

Quadrant October 2017 11 Brian Sully

Strauss, Bruckner and the Dying of the Light

am currently wrapping up a two-week visit to in his diary of “12 years of the rule of bestiality, the 2017 Salzburg Festival. Every performance ignorance and illiteracy under the greatest I have attended has been of the very first class, criminals, who brought about the destruction of but I heard a few days ago a concert which touched 2000 years of German civilization and through I a criminal rabble of soldiers, razed irreplaceable me deeply. The concert was played by the Vienna buildings and monuments to art”. Philharmonic Orchestra, undoubtedly one of the most splendid orchestras in the world. The conduc- Later and in the concluding words of this part tor was Herman Blomstedt, celebrating this year of the program notes, the heading of which I have his ninetieth birthday. He conducted seated. He borrowed for this article, this: “one does not have had in front of him a miniature score, but he did to understand the quotation to understand the mes- not open it throughout the concert. He used no sage: something glorious, rich, ecstatically inspir- baton. The concert was akin to an intimate con- ing, has been brought to nothing”. versation among people who really did have some- Those of us who have been so fortunate as to live thing to say about, relevantly, two masterworks of out our lives in Australia, and especially in post- German symphonic music. war Australia, have not yet been brought quite to All of that would have sufficed to make for a Strauss’s nadir, but we are certainly well on the profoundly moving experience. There was for me, way. The steady incremental growth of 2000 years however, a sensation that what this music was say- of Judeo-Christian civilisation is being deliberately ing had, certainly as to the first of the two pro- undermined at every turn, and without more than grammed pieces, a real relevance to the sorry state token resistance. of current public life, at all levels of government, in The undermining might not, or at least might not Australia. yet, be the work of “a criminal rabble of soldiers”, That first programmed piece wasMetamorphosen: but it is plainly the work of a totalitarian rabble Studies for 23 Solo Strings, written by Richard Strauss of academics, who have no excuse for not grasping in 1945. His frame of mind at the time is described the potentially terrible consequences of what they in the excellent program notes: are hell bent on unleashing upon society; of power- hungry, overpaid, poisonously narcissistic journal- The destruction of Germany’s great cities ists who do not even pretend to maintain a clear shook Strauss to the core. “I am in a mood distinction between reporting facts for the public of despair!” he wrote to a friend. “The information, and putting forward merely subjective Goethehaus, the world’s greatest sanctuary, opinions as though they were infallible; of sullen, destroyed! My beautiful Dresden-Weimar- discontented “students” whose idea of rational dis- Munich, all gone!” … cussion is to close down any free expression of any Whatever one thinks about the rights and opinion they happen to dislike; and of what seems wrongs of the Allied bombing campaign, for to be fast becoming an absolutely entrenched gen- anyone who revered German high culture, as eral demand for equality of outcomes rather than Strauss did, the sense of something of almost for equality of opportunity. religious significance irretrievably lost would A friend recently told me that the following have been overwhelming. It is also important proposition is abroad on the campus of the univer- to stress that by this stage Strauss was in no sity where she teaches: “To those used to privilege, doubt about where the blame really lay, writing equality always feels like oppression.” Assuming

12 Quadrant October 2017 Strauss, Bruckner and the Dying of the Light for the moment that that smart-alec throwaway view, one of the greatest of the late Austro-German line has general validity—and I have seen no evi- composers. He had a hard life, especially since he dence put forward to support the assumption—why was a contemporary of Brahms, who was immensely would it not be equally valid to say, and to say upon successful. It was the Seventh Symphony that got the basis of what is currently going on in society, Bruckner the recognition so long denied him. “To those avid for privilege, oppression can always The relevant part of the program notes is headed be passed off as equality”? “Paradise Regained”. The notes say, among other And now comes a new imbecility: we are to things: have, not yet a burning of the books, but a cer- emonial erasing of our Australian history. Have Yet somehow, in the midst of this, Bruckner we learnt nothing from the destruction of which found the strength to continue. His fervent Strauss spoke so heart-rendingly? First cull the stat- Roman Catholic faith was a major support. ues. Then cull the books and similar monuments to But it was not simply the forms of religion our civilisation? And then what? Cull those irritat- that sustained him. In a moment of anguish, ing people who refuse to see their country reduced Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard to the level of, shall we say, Zimbabwe? Perhaps cried out, “God in heaven, if there were not it is not yet quite time to borrow “bestiality” from some inward strength in a man where all Strauss, but “ignorance and illiteracy” we can cer- this could be forgotten, who could hold out?” tainly see, if only we care to look. In his darkest moments, Bruckner always And in the midst of this sorry state of affairs seems to find his way back to that “inward where is the informed and courageous political strength”. leadership? At the Commonwealth level, a govern- ment that began its life in treachery and deceit is And that, I suggest, is exactly what we must do, fair set to end it in farce. Its possible, indeed likely, we who will never go quietly while everything that replacement will drag this country into a new we know to be good and true and honed by time is dark age of class warfare, constitutional instabil- swept away by the forces of darkness. ity, moral decay and spiritual bankruptcy. As to the Alaric and Attila cut a swathe through their state governments, they seem to be in roughly, and times. Attila, indeed, is said to have boasted that in some cases precisely, the same sorry state. the grass never grew again on a spot where the All of these thoughts and feelings swept over hooves of his horse had trodden. And where are me as I read and listened, and they remain with they now, those seemingly invincible barbarians? me still. To borrow from Kipling, “one with Nineveh and Tyre”. nd yet. The second piece on the program was Brian Sully has been Adjunct Professor of Law at the Bruckner’sA Seventh Symphony. Bruckner is, in my University of Western Sydney since 2007.

Alcove

If there is still room in his fond memory For the one he broke up with After they had spent five years together There is a special alcove For the one Who comforted him afterwards For five days.

Hal G.P. Colebatch

Quadrant October 2017 13 Peter Rowe

Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma

hina’s regional expansion is coming at a to us, like winding back the foreign-policy legacy growing security cost to its neighbours. But his hardline colleagues bequeathed him, in particu- its rise still depends on the economic and lar on North Korea, threats towards Taiwan, and Ctechnological co-operation of the West, and on our aggression in the South China Sea. asymmetrically open markets. Further complacency in going along with China’s economic development n the CCP’s vade mecum, The Art of War, the and we are likely to pass the point at which we can ancient author Sunzi advises never to fight on rein in China’s aim for regional dominance. That tIhe enemy’s terms, and never to expose one’s short- might be before the contradictions in China’s eco- comings. All too often when visiting China, our nomic policy consign it to low growth and begin to mesmerised leaders highlight the West’s critical constrict its military expansion. Our weaker venal dependence on its trade and growth. A more sophis- neighbours are already adjusting. ticated sales rep would be showcasing the contribu- First we need to understand what we are deal- tion our collaboration has made to China’s progress. ing with. It’s difficult to do. China enjoys immense What would the cost be to China if it didn’t have advantages in its dealings with the outside world reliable access to the quality and competitiveness of through the image it projects of ruling-party unity: our iron-ore exports, let alone to the predictability Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi and reliability of our trading regime and legal sys- Jinping sitting securely at the apex of a harmoni- tem? Or more importantly without the unimpeded ous leadership committed to his program of reform, access to the open markets of the US since the end revanchism and national purification. of the 1970s? Or to the benefits it has gained from But rivalry and factionalism are endemic WTO membership on terms it has seldom had to among the CCP’s leaders. In a party of 88 million honour? members this should hardly be surprising. This This entranced chanting by our leaders shouldn’t constant contention limits Xi Jinping’s options. He matter much. But it does. When Chinese leaders has had to spend half his ten-year term battling his visit, they don’t play up our importance. They praise rivals, rather than tackling his “unbalanced, unco- inessentials, like our clean cities, or our green parks, ordinated and unsustainable” economy. and highlight mutual benefit, but never highlight Xi now looks unlikely to deal with the dilemma what they depend on us for. Our deference feeds the CCP faces: either reform the economy and see Chinese leaders’ preconceptions that we are all power slip away; or maintain party control and biddable, too dependent on China to put up any watch China underperform and fail to solve its eco- resistance to the unequal trade and investment rela- nomic problems. The former would see a country tionship it holds out, or ever seriously to put principle more amenable to international co-operation. The or strategic concern ahead of economic advantage. latter would see an eventual cap on China’s mili- They have a point. What else could one conclude tary development at some point, especially vis-à- from Xi Jinping’s reception at the Hamburg G20 vis the innovative and dynamic capacity of the US summit, even as the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo economy. was dying back home? Xi will muddle through, seeking to keep the But we can now see real harm to our security from West onside and feed off its technological advances. our focus on economic advantage, both in China’s We would be foolish to collude further in his eco- failure to curb North Korea and in its expansion nomic plans until he demonstrates that he is strong into the South China Sea. Too often realists and enough to make concessions on issues of importance apologists will justify China’s actions as natural to

14 Quadrant October 2017 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma a rising power, that we should accord China space The factions infect not only the party but also its to protect its expanding security interests. It’s after domestic control apparatus and its armed wing, the all only doing what big countries do. To get such People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Even after sixty- special pleading into perspective, one only has to six years the PLA is still a party army, not a national substitute 1930s Japan, or fascist Italy, or even apart- defence force. Linked to civilian party bosses, the heid South Africa for China. Somehow it suddenly various elements of the PLA act in a sense as their all becomes less reassuring. If we should be relaxed private armies. These links were crucial during about China occupying all the outcrops in the South the Cultural Revolution when party bosses had to China Sea, why did we get so alarmed when Japan rely on their old field-army affiliations for survival. was busy bringing the region to our north under its Deng, for instance, had been political commissar control? After all, with a political system no more of the second of the field armies that defeated the rebarbative than the CCP’s, it was only doing what nationalists in the final phase of the civil war. Mao big powers do when they’re feeling their oats. had the fourth field army behind him. Maybe such special pleading would have some Like New York’s mafia bosses, the CCP’s god- merit had China risen independently of the frame- fathers co-exist in a finely calibrated balance. A work of laws and co-operation in place, had it strongman may emerge, but he won’t have free rein. somehow done it on its own terms. But China has Throw-away lines about the immense power of Mao grown strong courtesy of Western or Deng ignore how constrained institutions and conventions. The even they were. Neither was able system of patronage and favour i inherited an to nominate his successor. Mao lost which it prefers would work well X Lin Biao to factional opposition, for China at the centre, but not for economy that the and he was subsequently too weak us. Keeping China onside would former premier, to push his wife Jiang Qing’s claims, become a full-time occupation for despite all the political manoeuvring us, sapping our independence and Wen Jiabao, had and all the rectification campaigns freedom of action. described on stepping of his final years. The compromise To be sure, it’s easier to take down as unbalanced, candidate, Hua Guofeng, was no China at face value than to take match for Deng, who quickly took a deep dive below the surface at unco-ordinated and centre stage once Mao was out of its byzantine workings. China is unsustainable. the way. Mao’s far-Left legacy, less opaque and impenetrable. And how entrenched than the People’s Daily does one argue convincingly against would have had you believe, had the Chinese propaganda picture of Xi Jinping as been rolled back in less than two years. the most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping or Deng similarly failed to consolidate either of his Mao? Certainly he’s stronger than his predeces- preferred nominees. Both Hu Yaobang and Zhao sor, Hu Jintao; whether stronger than Jiang Zemin Ziyang proved too liberal for Deng’s hard-line col- in his later years is debatable. The Western press leagues. Jiang Zemin, who improbably emerged has bought into this image-making. After all, Xi as the beneficiary of the leadership showdown in Jinping holds all the main positions in the party and 1989, was neither a protégé of Deng’s nor a sharer the state, plus a growing list of new less formal bod- of his vision. He was a compromise apparatchik. ies. But in CCP politics power doesn’t just reside in Not a leftist, Jiang nevertheless was brought up in positions. Party rank counts for far more. Deng pro- the heavy-industry Soviet-style school of economic gressively shed his formal positions after 1977, while development, and his saving grace was a commit- shedding none of his power to influence decisions. ment to high growth. Why would we believe that Xi was going to be he deep volcanic forces at work in the CCP have more powerful than either Mao or Deng? broken the surface too often for us to ignore tThem—the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen i draws his power from his father Xi Zhongxun’s massacre being only the most spectacular. Well key role in backing Deng Xiaoping. A comrade here’s a go at trying to give a bit of nuance to this fXrom the liberation struggle and ally in the Cultural view of Xi unchained. Revolution against Mao, he had protected Deng Xi is one player in the deep factional and policy when Mao and his henchmen toppled him a sec- divisions that operate in the CCP central leadership. ond time in 1976. He protected Deng’s early reform These fractures have existed since the party’s birth, experiments in dismantling collectivist agricultural and reflect economic and organisational policy, policies in places like Guangdong province. regional power bases, and the urban-country divide. The younger Xi has inherited, in a system that

Quadrant October 2017 15 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma operates mostly vertically, a network of support put on a show of orderly retirement and succession. among those around Deng and their successors. Of But for all his networking skills and his popu- the majors who survived the Cultural Revolution lar liberal political and economic preferences, Hu upheaval, Deng was the last strongman standing. Jintao shared the fatal weakness of most who rose A possible rival, Chou Enlai, died in 1976. Other to the top of the CYL: lack of a power base in the party leaders like Liu Xiaoqi, the president who was PLA. This had also been the civilian Jiang Zemin’s Mao’s main rival and the main target of the Cultural Achilles heel. To shore up his position, he had had Revolution, had died in disgrace years before. And to assent to ever-increasing resources for the army although he and others were rehabilitated subse- and security apparatus. His ten years as general sec- quently, their networks of supporters were by then retary had also afforded him enormous opportuni- no match for Deng’s. ties for patronage and appointment, which extended None of them had had the vision of renewal or his influence. promise that Deng had been able to put together. Hu Jintao failed to assume the chairmanship of One survivor often pointed to among Liu’s associ- the party’s Central Military Commission (CMC) ates was the long-lasting Bo Yibo, who prolonged for two years into his party general secretaryship—a his relevance by advancing his son Bo Xilai’s career. sure sign of his weakness. All the senior appoint- But the elder Bo was a second-tier leader who ments in the army and security in those crucial two never breached the inner sanctum of the Politburo years owed their advancement to Jiang Zemin, who Standing Committee (PSC). Bo Xilai was over- stayed on as head of the CMC. They owed no debt reaching when he sought to crack the PSC at the to Hu. So hardline army and security leaders had last party congress, and paid the price. the opportunity to consolidate gains that Xi Jinping Xi has had his hands full consolidating power has had to spend his time over the past five years over the past five years, even though his destruction trying to prune back. This pruning exercise has of Bo was a strong signal to Bo’s hardline backers left Xi no time to pursue the ambitious economic that they were in for a fight. His opponents were reform program he announced for himself, even if deeply entrenched. They had established themselves that was his intention. He inherited an economy in the Jiang years, and then in Hu Jintao’s time, in that the former premier, Wen Jiabao, had described the old party bastions of army, security and heavy on stepping down as unbalanced, unco-ordinated industry, especially the energy and construction and unsustainable. portfolios. Xi had been strong enough to assume the CMC Economic development under Jiang and his chairmanship immediately, unlike his predecessor. successor Hu Jintao was more a party-led, state- This was again because of his father’s military cre- enterprise-dominated affair, a CCP variation on dentials rather than his own meagre claims. But he the development models of Japan and South Korea, faced formidable opposition. It took him two years than the market-oriented model of the West that to neutralise former politburo and central military Deng’s protégés, Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang, commission member General Xu Caihou and his had pushed. The policy works well for scoring high colleague General Guo Boxiong. levels of growth early on, and can lift a country out of poverty. But once it’s entrenched, the economy is he big prize, former security tsar, Zhou hard to wean off its dependence on export-process- Yongkang, followed. Zhou had been a petro- ing and government-directed financing. The con- Tleum-industry executive before going on to take stant pump-priming pays short-term dividends but control of the national security apparatus. Heavy- eventually, as in Japan, more and more investment industry leaders, military and security bosses form delivers less and less. a close-knit group with an interest in preserving Hu Jintao came to power a weak reed after Jiang the old economic order of state-led investment and Zemin. He was a congenial figure who enjoyed cross- construction. It affords them immense resources to factional support. He came from the Communist buy support and loyalty. They oppose Xi’s proposed Youth League (CYL), a stronghold of the more lib- transition to a consumer and service economy, and eral elements of the party. He had been successful in have been the main targets of Xi’s anti-corruption cultivating supporters across the factions, including purge. the hardline head of the party’s nomenklatura, Song Xi has been waving the consumer-led-economy Ping. Indeed he was trustworthy enough to be put banner since the third plenum of the present central in charge of the unruly Tibetans, which like gov- committee, but from recent signs this looks more to erning Xinjiang is a test of the steel for an ambitious weaken his opponents than to advance the policy. contender. This put him in a strong position to take The interplay of policy ideology and personality is the reins from Jiang Zemin, as the party sought to a neat illustration of the contradiction that China’s

16 Quadrant October 2017 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma rivalry-ridden politics remains mired in. Contenders ship of it—can save and advance China. This allows trade labels in a bid to gain and signal ascendancy, for no liberal political adornment, no political oppo- but can rarely consolidate enough personal power to sition, nor the emergence of any elements of civil realise their policies. society that might challenge party rule. Now, even if Xi were to consolidate sufficient Tibetans had had early hopes of a beneficent Xi. influence, we shouldn’t count on his really know- Xi père had a favourable reputation from his role in ing—or allowing—what would be needed eco- the occupation of Tibet—he even sported a watch nomically to be successful. His time spent in the the Dalai Lama had given him. Tibetan exiles would US doesn’t seem to have taught him what makes also tell you early on that Xi’s wife was secretly a a free-market economy tick. He would first need Buddhist. But Tibetans’ hopes soon ran up against to order the party and the bureaucracy out of the the harsh reality that Hong Kong is learning: party economy. But as a product of the bureaucracy, he control, dressed up as national unity, is all. wouldn’t be able to imagine a system where it didn’t Still, do Xi’s leadership and policies hold out dominate. Indeed the party has just published new the possibility of crafting a policy that might yield rules to write the party into compa- a more acceptable foreign policy? nies’ articles of association. Policy at the highest level is not In a system with no checks and i has been waving too nuanced. Foreign and domestic balances, bureaucrats will always X policy come bundled. The economic find ways to make themselves cen- the consumer-led- reform banner comes hand in hand tral to decision-making. Even a economy banner since with a greater openness to the out- party decision that the bureaucracy side world, a pragmatic recognition should not be making commercial the third plenum of that to advance economically China decisions would be an opportunity the present central needs international co-operation, for the bureaucracy to make deci- foreign technology, and needs to sions on what is a commercial deci- committee, but from bide its time on many so-called sion that it shouldn’t be making recent signs this looks core issues. Thus it argues that decisions on. Massive bankruptcies more to weaken his China should refrain from pursuing would occur if the authorities were reunification with Taiwan because to get out of the business of direct- opponents than to the use of force would at best alien- ing loans to otherwise unprofit- advance the policy. ate essential US co-operation, and able state enterprises, the backbone at worst trigger war with the US. of the economy as Xi still defines China still can’t be sure it has made them; while the recession that would follow would the cost too high for the US to intervene to protect be so destabilising as to bring frightened govern- the island. China should similarly avoid other dis- ment decision-makers back in. tracting entanglements that might have unforeseen Psychologically, too, the ferocity of the anti- consequences. corruption campaign that Xi has had to launch to The army-security-heavy-industry nexus on the fell his opponents damages the initiative and drive of other hand favours a more muscular, adventur- those he needs to advance reform. So arbitrary is it, ist foreign policy. It believes there’s still plenty of and so unclear are the rules about what is acceptable mileage in present pump-priming policies at home, and not acceptable, that it’s getting safer to sit tight enough to support China’s meeting its revanchist than take risks. The accusations and counter-charges goals, especially in the vulnerable South China Sea. that have been surfacing ahead of the party congress It also believes—with some justification in recent this year indicate the intensity of the resistance Xi years—that it can make incremental advances that faces. His opponents have been trying to publicise fly just under the radar of retaliation and create facts corruption among his supporters, none of whom, on the ground or water. miraculously, does the party’s central disciplinary So far the prospects of a more amenable foreign commission find likely to be corrupt. policy don’t look good, especially to judge from China’s high-handed behaviour in the South China his opposition to the entrenched hardline Sea. Still, that has been explicable at least in part combination of party-security-heavy-industry because China hasn’t faced serious pushback from Tleaders is not of course to say that Xi Jinping is a the one country that might oppose it, the United closet liberal just waiting for the right moment to States. But even there, US patrols around Second lead China into the democratic uplands. Like Deng Thomas Reef seem to have deterred the PLA navy Xiaoping, he’s a committed, dogmatic Leninist who from knocking off the Philippines marines on believes only the party—and no doubt his leader- the sinking hulk there that symbolises Philippine

Quadrant October 2017 17 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma sovereignty. The Philippines has even been able to But China could plausibly argue that its policy of do some repair work to keep the wreck above water, deepening economic relations and integration was which the Chinese had earlier defined as a red line. advancing the goal of reunification. Early in Xi’s term, hints of greater tractability China’s ally, North Korea, was meanwhile doing were encouraging, suggesting that the country’s its bit testing US and South Korean resolve on the foreign-policy course had its origins in factional peninsula, first with the torpedoing and sinking of plays and could be amenable to modification, as the Chonan in 2010. It then went on to fire off an Xi consolidated power. Most important was the artillery barrage on Yongpyong Island near Seoul. Sunnylands summit between Xi and Obama soon For good measure it kept up some regular skirmish- after Xi’s accession. There Xi confided to Obama his ing with the South Korean navy about lines of control ambition that China achieve middle-income-nation in the West Sea. The Beijing–Pyongyang relation- status by the middle of the century. He further con- ship has always been preponderantly in the hands of fided that the only obstacle that could stand in the the PLA and the party’s liaison department. way of that goal was the United States. That was So perhaps it was a good time for China to test acknowledgment that positive economic co-opera- things in South-East Asia, which had long been a tion with the US was essential to Xi’s vision. lesser priority for the US than North Asia, as China But it was also acknowledgment of the reverse. could infer from the US withdrawals from Vietnam This was almost handing the West influence in and the Philippines. By the time China began to shaping China’s future and behaviour. So far we’ve alarm its neighbours, its activities were meeting seen precious little use of it. That the US has held little but rhetorical resistance from Washington. out on concluding negotiations on a bilateral invest- Obama was too focused on not doing anything ment treaty is one good sign of its intention not to stupid, or anything at all. He also wanted China’s give in in negotiations that aren’t yielding enough co-operation on climate change. That culminated in for the US side. Maybe Trump’s emphasis on dis- getting China’s signature on the Paris agreement. advantageous trade deals may harden US resolve to This was cost-free for China: for an undertaking hold out for a deal good for a US business commu- that its energy-intensity levels would plateau around nity increasingly disillusioned with China. But US 2030 with any luck, it looked as if it might get a free resolve on security and strategic issues is as neces- hand in the South China Sea. sary as on the trade side—indeed more so. Could it have been different? Could it still be? To be fair to Xi, China’s advance into the South To hark back to the possible connection between China Sea was taking place long before he took factional battles and security policy, some curious over. True to Sunzi and its guerrilla origins, CCP coincidences were evident as the struggle played foreign and security policy has a strong opportunist out. Soon after the disgrace of General Xu Caohai, element. When the US departed Vietnam in 1973, a major target in the PLA, China moved to patch China took advantage of the vacuum to snatch the up relations with Japan. Before Xi’s accession, as Paracels from South Vietnam. Similarly, after the China was advancing into the South China Sea, it US withdrew from the Philippines in 1995, the PLA had been making incursions into the waters around navy wrested Mischief Reef from its underpowered the Japanese-controlled Senkakus/Diaoyutai in the neighbour. Mischief Reef lies perilously close to East China Sea. China claims sovereignty. Having the Philippines, as does Scarborough Shoal, which controlled them since before the turn of the twen- China subsequently helped itself to. tieth century, Japan had refused to acknowledge China’s claim, or that a dispute even existed about hy was China pursuing territorial gains in the rocks’ sovereignty. Till Xu Caohai fell, China the South China Sea in the early years of this had made Japan’s recognition that a dispute existed Wcentury? Again it looked like opportunism, espe- the precondition for improving relations. cially as the more open, reform-minded general sec- After Xu that precondition melted away. Xi and retary Hu Jintao had been powerless to moderate Shinzo Abe met, and relations improved. Perhaps the the hardline security policies of his colleagues. The role of Japan in China’s economy was more impor- US was tied down on two fronts, in Afghanistan tant than the heavy-industry hardliners had allowed and Iraq. It was a good time to be testing how much for. It had been fun mobilising the party’s agitprop will it had left over to respond to Chinese expan- apparatus to trash Japanese factories and cars. But it sion in South-East Asia. No point in stirring things had had a disastrous impact on Japanese investment up with Taiwan, the usual pressure point. Relations in China, and consequently on jobs. Investment is were good under Taiwan’s president Ma Ying-jeou. still to recover, especially among Japan’s small and Ma didn’t dispute that there was one China, even if medium-sized enterprises, which had been gain- he didn’t want to join the mainland’s version of it. ing the confidence to enter the difficult Chinese

18 Quadrant October 2017 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma investment market. Investment probably won’t pick it more susceptible. Rather than miss out, Malaysia, up much while China continues to challenge the too, seems to be increasingly willing to ignore the Japanese in the air and on the water around the danger of China’s claims to territory so close to its Senkakus. But China had backed down unilaterally shoreline. on a key publicly enunciated precondition. Was Xi Vietnam see-saws between resistance and climb- admitting that if his economic reform goals were to down. As feisty as it is, Hanoi learnt from the long make progress, he had to draw China back from the war of attrition with China between 1979 and 1989 threatening posture he’d been bequeathed? that China can outwait it, while making life intoler- Similarly, almost as a last-ditch stand against Xi able in the meantime. Lamentably, joint Australian- by Zhou and his colleagues in the heavy-industry Indonesian patrols don’t seem to be going ahead in sector, a Chinese oil-rig owned by China National Indonesian waters which China claims as traditional Offshore Oil Corporation had anchored itself in fishing areas. waters 120 nautical miles from the Vietnamese coast. The stakes are high for Australia. Our security The day Zhou fell, China’s press announced the rig’s will suffer if all our neighbours to the north are con- return to China. The press gave no reason. Certainly stantly looking over their shoulders at what China it wasn’t because the exploratory work was complete, wants. Security, and our freedom of action, will suf- and it wasn’t the justice of Vietnam’s case. Was there fer further if we no longer enjoy unimpeded access a signal here that Xi recognised China needed to be through the South China Sea. China has a vastly more tractable on the South China Sea if it was to different conception of freedom of navigation, in so focus on economic co-operation? far as it has one. Even our warships visiting Chinese ports at China’s n i all this X isn’t repudiating any he stakes are high invitation find they are not free to of the outlandish claims to sov- T sail back into or through the straits Iereignty that China makes in the for Australia. Our of Taiwan, waters we have always region. As a nationalist he no doubt security will suffer assumed were free to international believes them. But he may be will- navigation. ing to wait longer for their realisa- if all our neighbours tion than his rivals. He would be to the north are he main actors on our long- able to justify this by reference to constantly looking term security will be the two Deng, who set aside resolution of cTrisis points in North Asia, the the Taiwan question till China was over their shoulders at Taiwan straits and the Korean stronger. It’s worth testing. Time is what China wants. Peninsula. Defeat in conflict or a strategic asset for us. even a backdown by the US would But we shall all need to push signal the end of the post-Second back against China’s bullying to persuade Xi that World War order. Japan could have no confidence he is jeopardising his economic goals by China’s that the US would defend it if the US didn’t defend conduct towards its neighbours. The trick is not to the two proximate countries which Japan defines go easy to give time to Xi to strengthen himself as key to its security. China’s main military goal is domestically. That will only offer Xi and his col- to make the price too high for the US to defend leagues time to consolidate and add to their gains, Taiwan. Achievement of that goal looms. But to and persuade them they can have their cake and test US resolve too soon would be to jeopardise eco- eat it. Rather the West should be applying pressure nomic development. now to demonstrate to China that it can’t get its way For the same reason Xi has an interest in keep- without better behaviour. This may in fact help Xi ing a check on North Korean adventurism. There by enabling him to argue how high the costs are of is no good way to solve the North Korean problem its bullying behaviour. and its weapons program. Xi seems to want to rein There is urgency in all this. China is already the North in, if only in the interests of economic beginning to win by default. In a quandary over the and trade co-operation with the US. But he hasn’t previous US administration’s irresolution, China’s tried very hard. Or as probably, he’s had little suc- weaker and more venal neighbours are adjusting to cess against his military and security opponents who looming Chinese hegemony. Cambodia and Laos run the strategic relationship China has with North are furthest down the track. The Philippines, which Korea. They laugh off the foreign ministry’s games was looking firm under Aquino, now seems anxious in the UN Security Council signing up to sanctions. to capitulate in exchange for what might be elusive In their view, a hostile North Korea is too useful an Chinese money. Thailand’s internal problems, and asset against the US to sacrifice. In the event of a the US’s ambivalent attitude to the generals, make showdown, say in the Taiwan straits, North Korea’s

Quadrant October 2017 19 Chinese Political Rivalry and Xi’s Great Dilemma response would be a further element that the US slowly, including China’s. Now may be a chance to would have to take into consideration. Its nuclear get off and take stock of our longer-term strategic weapons don’t worry the Chinese. Kim Jong-un interest. would never use them against China. Trump’s performance so far is too mixed to pre- Financial sanctions against North Korea and any dict how he will respond. An element of the mer- institutions that co-operate with it are probably the curial won’t be out of place, if it keeps the Chinese only and most effective means. They would bring guessing. But Trump will also need focus and con- immense pressure to bear on China to restrain it. centration, and an attention to the importance of It’s North Korea’s only friend and a key economic the region which was lacking during the Obama and financial partner. But the West would need years. We can see enough in Xi’s reaction to events to implement sanctions on China’s corresponding so far to infer that he’s amenable to pressure. Maybe banks, financial institutions, defence and other application of the stick might work. Certainly the trading companies comprehensively and vigilantly. many carrots have only emboldened China to The answer is engaged strategic patience, with threaten its weaker neighbours—and to ignore how co-operation measured against China’s willing- fragile its economy would be without foreign invest- ness to develop according to the current strategic ment and the openness of all our markets since its arrangements which have benefited it. If Xi is as reform began. With the trajectory China’s on, bet- strong as most seem willing to estimate him, he’ll ter to apply the stick now before it’s too late. be able to comply. If he’s as inflexible on pursu- ing China’s current expansionist aims as so many Peter Rowe worked in Peking and was senior China claim, let him see if he can do it without Western analyst in the Office of National Assessments. He co-operation. We have all willingly been riding was also Australian ambassador to South Korea and the tiger, but all our economies are growing more North Korea.

The Hippocampus The hippocampus is a major component of the brains of humans and other vertebrates … It plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation.

I imagine a university where the students come to lectures keen on transformations, concepts and conjectures about the brain’s capacities, and professors vie to teach the studious hippopotami, lumbering students so curious no-one derides, academic gowns on their pachydermous hides; spatial navigation so special, they would tramp thus through the riverish, idea-strewn, synapsed hippocampus and all the instructors would there fast find ideas shift from short- to long-term mind, while smart tutors carefully consider their marks: more people are killed by hippos than eaten by sharks.

Dennis Haskell

20 Quadrant October 2017 Anthony Paul

Inside a North Korean Commando Raid

hun Chung-nam had tried to kill himself The NKSOF has existed for many years. by biting off his tongue. The first time I met Western military observers first became familiar him, faint traces of his failed attempt were with it on January 21, 1968, when a thirty-one- sCtill evident on his face—a healing cut on his left man commando unit infiltrated Seoul in a foiled lip where a South Korean soldier had forced his jaw attempt to assassinate the South’s President Park open. Chung-hee. All but two of the commandos died in Chun, twenty-seven, was the leader of a two- gun-battles that followed their assault on the Blue man North Korean commando squad intercepted House, Seoul’s presidential palace. while trying to contact one of the communist Over the years northern commandos have inter- North’s resident agents near Tadaepo, a seaside mittently terrorised southerners. Perhaps their most resort west of Pusan (also spelled Busan), South successful exploit was in Rangoon in October 1983 Korea’s largest port. Minutes after he and his com- when a three-man squad succeeded in exploding a rade-subordinate, Lee Sang-gyu, twenty-three, bomb that killed seventeen people, including four landed from a semi-submersible submarine, South South Korean cabinet ministers in Burma on a state Korean soldiers captured them. Earlier encoun- visit. ters with northern commandos’ suicide-by-tongue Understandably, the NKSOF stays most of the training had prepared the southerners: they shoved time in the North’s murkiest shadows. In August into their captives’ mouths special gags designed to this year, however, Pyongyang suddenly publicised lock their teeth apart. the appearance of a large detachment of fierce- Through a South Korean intelligence officer looking black-and-green-camouflaged elite troops whom I had befriended in Hong Kong, I requested wielding AK-47 attack rifles equipped with gre- interviews in Seoul with both men. My encounter nade-launchers. The NKSOF commandos goose- with them was one of the oddest experiences of a stepped through downtown Pyongyang together long career as a foreign correspondent in Asia. It with a vast array of other military units taking part offered strange echoes of the Second World War, in the nation’s annual Day of the Sun tribute to especially Japan’s god-emperor cult and its suicidal the late “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung. Alongside kamikaze warriors, and of the tumultuous self- them canisters were paraded containing what was destruction with which Islamist jihadists are now reported to be two kinds of nuclear ICBM capa- confronting us. ble of reaching the US. Analysts believe that this reminder of NKSOF potency is linked to the crisis ensions created by the apparent advent of a created by the new ICBMs’ advent. North Korean nuclear-tipped intercontinental Pyongyang will have noted Washington’s effec- Tballistic missile (ICBM) have reached an ominous tive use of its SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) comman- plateau. Perhaps we have just got to adjust to the dos in a clandestine strike in 2011 against fugitive idea of a nation given to blood-curdling threats al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Senior voices becoming one of the world’s nine nuclear powers. in Washington’s ruling Republican Party have We are left, though, with a dangerously milita- been advocating a similar assault on North Korea’s rised peninsula. This is, of course, especially con- Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Ohio’s Governor cerning for South Koreans. Their more immediate John Kasich, a rising anti-Trump Republican pros- threat than nuclear annihilation is the North’s pect for the 2020 presidential election, told a public recent expansion of the Korean People’s Army meeting in August: “The North Korean top leader- Special Operation Force (NKSOF). ship has to go and there are ways in which that can

Quadrant October 2017 21 Inside a North Korean Commando Raid be achieved.” Restrictions on movement in this area were severe, A military analyst with South Korea’s Yonhap even for Pyongyang. Party orders regarding secu- news agency says the NKSOF’s appearance at the rity were treated as absolute. Once when a forest fire parade is Pyongyang’s declaration that the force swept through the mountains here the Pyongyang is on standby to repel “elite US soldiers who are fire brigade sent eleven fire-engines to fight it; all practising to ‘remove’ Kim Jong-un from power were stopped at a checkpoint between the city and should war arise”. The North has complained vig- the suburb. Even though the fire eventually caused orously about US plans to move a squadron of mis- much damage, guards refused to open the barri- sile-capable Gray Eagle attack drones to Kunsan cades because, says Lee, “the firefighters were just air base near Seoul early next year. Said Sung- ordinary people”. Yoon Lee, Korea expert at Tufts Shinmi’s commando graduates, University: “One intended message however, were clearly considered for the Kim Jong-un regime must hey were taught special. According to Lee, the be: ‘Watch out. We may track you T ordinary North Korean workers down and take you out’.” that Kim Il-sung were paid seventy won per month; (who remains the a one-star general, 250 to 300 won. heny m interviews with Says Lee: “We were given almost Chun and Lee took place in de jure leader of the as much as a general—226 won. SWeoul, the men had been in custody Korean Workers’ Party We earned much more money than for about five months. A sceptic we could spend.” could rightly point to the interval despite having died in In return, such young men between capture and our conversa- 1994) was and is the were expected to be the Great tion as time enough for successful world’s most respected Leader’s most loyal acolytes. They South Korean brainwashing. But were taught that Kim Il-sung (who the southerners are open about their statesman, and it remains the de jure leader of the standard operation procedures for would be wrong to Korean Workers’ Party despite “reorienting” new northerner arriv- having died in 1994) was and is the als. Not long after their capture, endanger his image by world’s most respected statesman, both men were taken on a tour of being captured alive. and it would be wrong to endanger Seoul and the capital’s abundance his image by being captured alive, of well-stocked supermarkets. and that capture alive would any- Their jailers have found that the shock of seeing way endanger state secrets. thousands of ordinary citizens buying locally-made Central to this indoctrination was the Great goods of a quality and variety not even remotely Leader’s theory of two lives. Says Chun: matched in Pyongyang is the best antidote for a lifetime of Kimilsungist propaganda about the The Party cadres taught us that every person “impoverished” South. To this extent, reindoctri- has two lives—his physical life and his political nation—at least enough to cure the urge to bite life. One’s political life was lived in service to through their tongues—had clearly taken place. the Great Leader and the Party; our physical Their stories, nevertheless, were as convincing in life was therefore less important. If captured by the telling as they were disturbing in content. the South’s authorities, you would be protecting The two men were members of a commando/ your political life, continuing to live politically, espionage/terrorist force. According to Lee, a com- by killing yourself. mando must undergo six years’ training before being sent to South Korea. Preparation began with three Anyone disloyal enough to remain physically years of academic work—ordinary tertiary sub- alive after capture—and thus politically dead— jects, Marxism-Leninism and Great Leader Kim created special problems for any immediate family Il-sung’s Juche (self-reliance) ideology. Then came they might have in North Korea. “We understood,” Taekwondo (Korean karate); long-distance under- says Chun, “that if we failed to kill ourselves, our water swimming; handling of small arms; meth- families would not be fit for normal human society ods of disguise; how to get rid of such obstacles and would be excluded, isolated.” as barbed wire; clandestine communications; and United Nations officials estimate that between crewing the semi-submersible twenty-man mother 80,000 and 120,000 people are imprisoned in North ships in which the North sends its men south. Korea’s political prison camps. Apparently resigned The school from which the two terrorists gradu- to their fate as “physically alive, politically dead” ated was in the Pyongyang suburb of Shinmi. defectors, Chun and Lee feared that these camps

22 Quadrant October 2017 Inside a North Korean Commando Raid now held their families. Contact point for the agent was a small hill Wouldn’t the state allow for the fact that Chun about 150 metres from the seashore. They skirted did try to kill himself by biting off his tongue? The the fence and made towards a public lavatory young man was not sanguine. “Anyone captured between the shore and hill. But the South Korean alive is regarded as ideologically imperfect and army had prepared an ambush: sentries had spotted therefore a traitor,” he told me in a flat, matter-of- the infiltrators. As the North Koreans entered the fact tone. “We are taught that a traitor’s family is toilet block, rifle butts knocked them unconscious. not fit for normal human society and must be iso- For days, Chun and Lee were strapped to beds in lated for the rest of their lives. There is no allow- Pusan military hospital before their South Korean ance for failure.” Counter-Infiltration Operations Command inter- rogators felt able to let them move freely around he final pre-mission ceremonies were held in their rooms. South Korean army and navy units the Party’s Regional Liaison Office in Wonsan, found and destroyed the infiltrators’ launch. Three Tan east-coast port. All twenty crew-members were commandos aboard it were believed to have been assembled. Cadres led them in a final review of killed. The agent the team failed to pick up, a man their mission, a discussion frequently interspersed in his mid-forties, was thought to have escaped. with exhortations to be successful for the Great Leader’s sake and to glorify their political lives ations other than North Korea have been by suicide if failure seemed imminent. Standing known to teach death-before-dishonour to before Kim Il-sung’s portrait, Chun, as leader, sang yNoung soldiers. In the twentieth century, however, a self-destruction oath on behalf of his five-man the concept has usually been reserved for periods commando squad: of intensive warfare. Death by one’s own hand before dishonour, in circumstances other than war, So o dear t all our hearts is our Leader’s glorious is behaviour which only the world’s more peculiar name: societies—Japan under a militarised emperor sys- Kim Il-sung!—of undying fame. tem, for example—have encouraged. And therein is probably the explanation for Some hours later Chun, the four subordinates North Korean agents’ willingness to self-destruct. in his commando squad and fifteen crewmen of As Nam Jae-hee, a South Korean constitutional the semi-submersible spy ship set off for Tadaepo scholar, told me, “The North may be understood from Wonsan. Although designed to look like a when you remember that Northerners have known Japanese fishing trawler, the eighty-ton vessel car- nothing other than such discipline for many gen- ried four heat-seeking ground-to-air missiles, two erations.” For thirty-five years to 1945, he said, twin-barrelled 107mm rocket-launchers, four twin- all Koreans were brought up in a colony which barrelled machine-guns, two radars, a healthy demanded that the individual honour the Japanese arsenal of small-arms and a five-ton launch, also emperor with absolute obedience, including sui- heavily armed. cide, if necessary. At 5.20 p.m. off Japan’s Tsushima Island, Chun, Nam continued: Lee and three other squad members climbed into this smaller spy ship and headed for Tadaepo. Some Since 1945 the South has been evolving as an five hours later, Chun and Lee donned wetsuits, industrial nation with more or less modern dropped into the water and, using snorkels, swam political and economic forms. In the North, below the surface towards a beach near the resort. Kim Il-sung replaced the emperor with himself. The area seems to have been a popular infil- His personality cult has meant that in many tration spot for the North. Chun had been there important ways and especially with regard to before to land an agent; now their mission was to military discipline, the system Northerners pick one up. This time, Chun found himself uneasy. inherited from the Japanese has not changed Since his previous visit, changes had been made. very much. There was a fence which had not been there before. From the moment he came ashore, Chun had the Anthony Paul is a former Editor-at-Large Asia/ feeling they were being watched. Pacific for Fortune magazine of New York.

Quadrant October 2017 23 Maidenly (Solveig’s Song, Peer Gynt)

(Sulur is the mountain above Akureyri in Northern Iceland where my mother grew up. The word means “shawled woman”, in Icelandic.)

The Akureyri girls are out on Sulur. The midnight sunset’s pallor whites each 1940’s pinafore in which they gather the ripe blueberries. And Mum, so maidenly, here you’re othered, your English years to me ungathered, and do you wonder what you’re for? Preposterous Captain G. has come. Your loveliness knocks him sideways from his English puddings, Baptist regimen that under-light this Oxford gentleman, who fresh from Blitzkrieg France, now mauls Icelandic to decode his hopes where girls are chattersome on Sulur’s slopes, and war so oddball in his circumstance. Maybe there’s song that steals up fjord and ness; to gleam and slide with inwardness, let’s say Grieg’s Solveig’s Song, as it ascends these pastures where the township ends, and you, now cherished by your township friends, could not be more immersed in North. How might pure song, free-vowelling voice, trick your need for further earth and stranger choice? How might a local girl transcend her localness to quit a friend if not by music wildly cued to offer her its amplitude, music on its wavelengths making strange where memes and cells impel exchange in air outlandishly renewed, this charm, in-dwelling in deep space that gives to strangeness its inchoate face.

24 Quadrant October 2017 Atom and atom clinch to molecule to trick from time its inmost impulse, What else is here? What else, what else? Atom, bridegroom, bride, the purposeful takes Sulur down to favour Dehra Dun, first of your army habitats. You’ve wived a life of never-fixed-address. Your photos home show Hindu dress and Colonel G. bedecked with sundry cats, as, Mum, you sound the opportune, finding pals in amah and kaboon, and colonels too, for friendship was your good to seize how someone else’s feelings stood. Five decades on, while raking leaves, down you go from heart. You made good lives, good motherhood, yet still, what were you for so whited on that hill in pinafore? When someone raking leaves goes down from heart, she goes from life that has no counterpart, and ditto every speck that’s caught in any midnight sunset’s net, to go the way it finds, not where it ought like a woman, vowelling melody finds the free flow through necessity.

Titanium Where My Hipsters Rub (For Doc Michael Gillespie and his team)

I kept my two Icelandic hips through infancy and Uni. and nursing teams with their regimes They walked and bucked with witty loves, to rebuild buttock muscle, both medallist and looney. came gliding wards with sprightly words; They served through my home-making years I heard vocation’s bustle a soccer parent’s frolics, direct me not to cross my legs or lugging babes and bricks upon or gyrate on my pelvis. synovial hydraulics. Goodbye to my Mick Jagger days, Then came my time of cartilage, Hello to Dalek Elvis. my deeply personal hobble. They sent me home, I healed, and praise Masked surgeons disinfected knives blue nous that gathered round to probe that gyro-wobble, my drone of pain, reminding me, life points to the unfound.

Alan Gould

Quadrant October 2017 25 Paul Monk

The f Myth o Bolshevism Dies Hard Reflections on the Centenary of Lenin’s Seizure of Power

t the halfway point in Warren Beatty’s need to go back again and again over the language 1981 film Reds, about John Reed and the and history of modern revolutions. One of the most Russian Revolution, Reed and his wife enlightening observations in the literature is still ALouise Bryant march in a joyous candle-lit pro- Hannah Arendt’s remark, in On Revolution (1963) cession through the streets of Petrograd in late that: October 1917 and stroll into the Winter Palace as if it is already a quiet museum; all to the stirring It was the French and not the American sounds of the Internationale. It would be difficult Revolution that set the world on fire and to better encapsulate the notion that Lenin’s seizure it was consequently from the course of the of power was an event to celebrate and consisted in French Revolution and not from the course the popular overthrow of a reactionary few by the of events in America or from the acts of the liberated masses. The following year, 1982, Sheila Founding Fathers that our present use of the Fitzpatrick’s book The Russian Revolution enshrined word “revolution” received its connotations and this myth by describing the Bolshevik coup against overtones everywhere. the Provisional Revolutionary Government as “the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat”. At a time when the American republic itself is It was nothing of the kind. It was the seizure of struggling under the strains of ideological and social arbitrary power by an unscrupulous coterie who let confrontations and when its constitutional system is nothing stand in their way and then imposed their being seriously tested, it is more important than ever rule ruthlessly on the majority of the population, not to reflect on this. For it was the French Revolution, least the workers and peasants. not the American, that gave us the polarising terms There is a long-running and, alas, still unresolved “Left” and “Right” and gave us the guillotine and debate about modern revolutions which typecasts the terror instead of the division of powers and the them in terms of the “progressive, radical Left” attempt, at least, to set the principles and processes and the “reactionary, counter-revolutionary Right”, of republican government on lasting foundations. with everyone in between cast as waverers or petit Hannah Arendt had, of course, come to the bourgeois opportunists. The language is Marxist- United States as a refugee from Nazi tyranny in Leninist, but the dichotomy dates back to the French Europe and appreciated the American republic’s Revolution and it bedevils democratic politics in the virtues, even while being critical of its flaws and West and around the world even now. We badly the dangers of its subversion, as she spelled out in need to be rid of it. The Russian Revolution, even Crises of the Republic (1973). An earlier European more than the French, entrenched the dichotomy in observer of the United States, a century before political discourse and despite all the terrors and pri- Arendt, was Alexis de Tocqueville. His classic study vations caused by Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism Democracy in America (1835) should be getting widely in the decades after 1917, the pernicious dichotomy read right now. It was an extraordinarily percep- persists. It has the grievous consequence that many tive piece of work and remains illuminating still, of those whose philosophical and political views are despite the immense changes that have occurred in decidedly enlightened, responsible and moderate America and the world since he wrote it. Twenty can be dismissed as “reactionary” or “right-wing” years later, he wrote his mature reflections on the in the name of the most hare-brained or bigoted of French Revolution—The Old Regime and the French causes, merely because the adherents of these causes Revolution (1856). It was and remains a beautifully style themselves “left-wing” or “progressive”. nuanced and perceptive reflection on the causes and If we are to get these matters tolerably clear, we course of the revolution, the ironies of history and

26 Quadrant October 2017 The Myth of Bolshevism Dies Hard the tragedy of the radical violence that swept France was surely reached in the late 1970s, when Pol Pot between 1789 and 1794 only to end in the establish- and his cronies inflicted an unprecedented catas- ment of Napoleon’s dictatorship. trophe on Cambodia in the name of “revolution”. It is a symptom of the failure of far too many The Khmer Rouge founders were not only inspired scholars (and activists) to absorb the lessons drawn by the French Revolution and its avatars, but actu- by Arendt and Tocqueville that Timothy Tackett, in ally taught by Stalinists and self-styled theorists of his The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution “liberation” in Paris itself. Khieu Samphan (Brother (2015), still repeated like a mantra the tired old asser- No. 5 and the Khmer Rouge head of state) actu- tion that all “major” revolutions necessarily follow ally took a PhD from the Sorbonne in 1956. Philip the course of the French Revolution because they Short’s Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare (2004) is involve the mobilisation and enactment of: the outstanding biography of Brother No. 1, Pol Pot.

intense convictions that the society must and his month being its centenary, the Russian can be changed, convictions that easily breed Revolution badly needs to be put into a frame- impatience and intolerance with opposition. Twork of historical and even counterfactual perspec- All revolutions engender counterrevolutionary tive that the “progressive Left” somehow seem never opposition among those whose interests and to contemplate. The great myth of the revolution is, values are threatened … All revolutions can be broadly speaking, that Lenin’s “workers and peas- pushed in unanticipated directions through the ants” overthrew the old regime, established a radical influence of the popular masses. And it may well communism that was emancipatory and visionary, be that all major revolutions are beset by periods but were then set upon by Whites and foreign inter- of conspiracy obsession, of intense suspicion and ventionists, forcing the poor innocent Reds to defend lack of trust, of agonizing uncertainty as to who themselves, which alas led to regrettable excesses. are one’s friends and who are one’s enemies … The capitalist powers attempted to strangle the “revolution” in its cradle by denying the Bolshevik One cannot say that this is an “eccentric” inter- regime investment or credit or even diplomatic rec- pretation of the French Revolution as the very model ognition. This was all deplorable. Stalin then pulled of a modern major revolution. It is, alas, the con- things together and “made the best of a bad job” ventional interpretation and one repeated again and by building “socialism in one country” through again by those who style themselves forced collectivisation and state- “progressives” and see the Jacobins led heavy industrialisation. These and, all too often the Bolsheviks things worked, even if things got and Maoists, as the “impatient” Bolshevism was in nasty along the way, and Stalin was agents of “progress”. Yet they were no sense fated to win, vindicated when his newly industr- not. They were, in each case, politi- and the Russia that ialised state beat off the Nazis after cal conspirators who created a form June 1941. He should not, therefore, of government that was far more it took over was far be too severely criticised and those tyrannical than the “reactionary” more civilised than who denounce his rule are simply governments they overthrew— reactionary “Cold Warriors” who something that was not true of the it then became. don’t “get it”. American Revolution. As Sean McMeekin has It does not appear to have laboured to point out in The Russian occurred to Tackett that “intense convictions that Revolution: A New History (Profile Books, 2017), society can and must be changed” constitute a form this myth is a delusion at virtually every point. In of fanaticism and that such fanaticism is inherently the two decades before 1914, under the last Tsar unlikely to result in constructive or even durable (Nicholas II), Russia had begun to develop and change, much less in liberty and social peace. It industrialise rapidly. Its growth in the 1900s and is, moreover, simply untrue to assert that the so- early 1910s resembled that of China in recent years called “major” revolutions have been the bringers at 8 to 10 per cent per annum. Foreign investment of progress. Tocqueville pointed out in 1856 that was pouring in and exports were growing, railroads the French Revolution had destroyed stability and were being built, industries were sprouting up, oil legitimacy in France and had swept away not only was being discovered. That there were inequalities in much that was genuinely corrupt and decadent, this process, that there were still high levels of pov- but a great deal that it would have been better to erty and that the system of government was monar- maintain. The Russian Revolution did far worse, chical and often genuinely “reactionary” is all true. the Chinese Revolution worse again, and the nadir But as the Tsar’s great prime minister of order and

Quadrant October 2017 27 The Myth of Bolshevism Dies Hard development Peter Stolypin declared to the Russian policies may be, there are approaches to rebellion Leftist deputies in the Duma in 1907: “You people against these things that we should not only be want a great upheaval. We want a great Russia. Give wise enough to avoid, but prudent and firm-minded me twenty-five years of peace and you will not rec- enough to suppress if it comes to that. Had the ognise Russia!” Provisional Revolutionary Government, a century Stolypin was assassinated four years later. ago, been wiser and more prudent, it might have Twenty-five years after 1907, in 1932, Russia was pulled together the forces that would have made it being ground beneath the Stalinist jackboot, fam- possible to suppress Bolshevism. Its failure to do so, ine and terror stalked the country and there was closely analysed by McMeekin, opened the door to no Duma, no liberal intelligentsia, no freedom of dreadful things. dissent. Russia had become a nightmare of despotic “Ah,” one can hear the “progressives” intoning, state-dominated “development”. The alternative had almost in a chorus, “so you are an extreme right- been a constitutional monarchy with a diverse leg- wing reactionary! You actually believe Bolshevism islature and thriving economic relations with the should have been suppressed!” Others, styling outside world—Stolypin’s great Russia. themselves “realists”, will respond by saying, with At a time when fewer and fewer of our students an affected (or, let’s be charitable, a sincere) wea- elect to study serious history and those who do are ried worldliness, that Bolshevism was fated to win often taught by ideologues of “intense conviction” and that the system of government the communists like Timothy Tackett, no such understanding of the built was simply “Russian” in character, since the colossal tragedy of the Russian Revolution enters muzhiks (Russian peasants) had only ever responded into the minds of the populations of the Western to the knout (scourging whip). It seems to me ter- democracies. This needs to be corrected. But here is ribly important that we not settle for or succumb the thing: such correction is likely to be dismissed to such cant. Bolshevism was in no sense fated to by all too many as merely being a “reactionary” or win, and the Russia that it took over was far more “right-wing” version of events. This is pernicious. It civilised than it then became. We need to dwell on is the very problem that the Left–Right dichotomy this, because it is the lesson we all need to imbibe has entrenched for about two centuries or more. It and share in the interests of civilised and liberal is neither “Left” nor “Right” to point out that Lenin government—here and elsewhere—in the twenty- was illiberal, that his catastrophic economic policies first century. The old regime had Bolshevism well led to the collapse of trade, investment and industry in hand before 1917. Its victory in 1917 was highly and to an appalling famine that killed millions; that contingent and the revolutionaries it overthrew his terror killed more people by two orders of mag- (for it overthrew the Provisional Revolutionary nitude in five years than had been executed under Government, not the old regime) were far more the Tsars in the last hundred years of their rule; civilised than Lenin and his minions—as indeed that he dispersed the elected Constituent Assembly the old regime itself had been. and replaced it with an arbitrary dictatorship which never sought an electoral mandate and that Stalin heres i a moment in David Lean’s famously then took all this to the next level of repressive total- romantic film Doctor Zhivago where Victor itarian government. These are checkable empirical TKomarovsky says to Yuri Zhivago that he admires the facts. The question is, What do we think about poli- Bolsheviks because “they may win”. This is around tics and “revolution” in the light of such facts? Christmas 1913, eight months before the Great War McMeekin addresses all these matters of his- began. The screenplay is by Robert Bolt and the torical fact and others besides at book length. He words he put into Komarovsky’s mouth in the mid- expresses concern that historical ignorance and 1960s were flagrantly anachronistic and historically increasingly intense convictions about the “one per misleading. By 1913, the Tsar’s secret police, the cent” and inequality in the context of globalisation Okhrana, had Bolshevism pinned down, with Lenin have led various people to start talking again of Karl and many of his leading followers in exile abroad or Marx having been “right”—which is to say “Left”, in Siberia. Both then and almost until the Germans of course. He points to the popularity of Thomas shipped him to Petrograd in April 1917, with bags Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and full of money to make mischief, Lenin himself had the rise of rancorous populism of various stripes not believed Bolshevism could overthrow the old and says that those who seek “revolution” ought to regime. Seeing that it had been overthrown for him, be careful what they wish for, since they just might but that the Provisional Revolutionary Government get it. He means that however much the Gini co- (PRG) was making every kind of tactical and efficient may point to rising levels of inequality political error in its inept attempt to govern, Lenin and however unjust or corrupt certain practices or saw an opportunity to seize power. His colleagues,

28 Quadrant October 2017 The Myth of Bolshevism Dies Hard including Stalin, argued that this was a dubious idea, as McMeekin points out, they declared the outright even in terms of Marxian historicism. Undeterred, confiscation of all the savings and bullion deposits he led them to an attempted putsch in July. When in Russia’s banks above 5000 roubles in the name of this did not succeed, he had another crack at it in “revolution”, repudiated the country’s international October and this time knocked Kerensky and the debt obligations and initiated a process of unilateral PRG off their perch in Petrograd. disengagement from the war. By these means they McMeekin’s coverage of the German gambit— effectively abolished private property, brought the using Lenin as a “catalyst of chaos” to break Russia economy to a halt, alienated Russia’s wartime allies and drive it out of the war—is a study in contin- and capitulated to Germany. And that was just the gency and cynicism. Anyone who believes that the beginning. October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks In Doctor Zhivago—the film, not the novel—the was in any sense “fated” to occur, or that it was a voiceover of Alec Guinness, as Yuri’s half-brother matter of a popular uprising by the fabled “work- Yevgraf, a Bolshevik, declares as the war begins, ers and peasants” needs to read McMeekin’s book. “Our task was to organise defeat, because from defeat Had the PRG been willing or able to assume legiti- would come revolution and revolution meant victory macy from the Tsarist regime and for us.” But this, again, is anach- to keep its secret police and army ronistic. As McMeekin argues in in working order, it could very eas- liberal detail, the war right through to ily have suppressed Lenin and his A the end of 1916 was far from being crew, as the old regime had done. constitution requires the disaster for Russia that popu- That it was unable to do so was not the defence of a lar and “progressive” opinion has a matter of “historical necessity”, long seen it to have been. Bolshevik but due to the fact that the PRG number of civil and penetration of the ranks did not consisted of an unstable coalition of political liberties. occur in any serious manner until constitutional monarchists, liberals, The American after Lenin returned to Petrograd socialist revolutionaries and social in April 1917 with piles of German democrats who simply could not Constitution was an money to spend on propaganda and agree on what to do. The irony of attempt to define and agitation. German military opinion their overthrow is that it was pos- before 1914 had been that Russia sible precisely because they would institutionalise those was rapidly developing and was on not act to suppress violent fanatics liberties. Leninism the verge of becoming a formida- when they could and then found ble military power. The course of that their emasculation of the forces systematically the war actually demonstrated this of order and the army made sup- and violently and Russia, while struggling to deal pression impossible when the chips abolished them. with the German military, had the were really down—in October. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Bolsheviks didn’t overthrow “reac- empires very much on the back foot tionaries”. They overthrew genuine, democrati- by 1916. The PRG, from February 1917, however, in cally inclined but disorganised and inexperienced the name of “revolution”, undermined the officer revolutionaries. corps, even though it wished to prosecute the war This was confirmed in November 1917 when, vigorously. This was a serious error of judgment and, despite the Bolshevik seizure of power and dec- in combination with the German use of Lenin as a laration that they were the government of Russia, wrecking ball, opened the door to the Bolsheviks elections for a national Constituent Assembly that and crippled the Imperial Army as a fighting force the PRG had arranged went ahead. The turnout, by late 1917. in the circumstances of war and growing chaos, was remarkable: fully 50 per cent of eligible vot- owhere was the ineptitude of the PRG better ers or almost 42 million people participated. The illustrated than in the Kornilov affair of August- Bolsheviks, with all the advantages of “incumbency”, SeptemberN 1917, in which Alexander Kerensky won 175 seats out of 707, or just under a quarter. The mistakenly and fatefully undermined and removed Socialist Revolutionaries won 410, of which the Left from office General Lavr Kornilov, commander in SRs won forty. The Bolsheviks refused to ratify the chief of the Imperial Army, who might otherwise vote until “electoral abuses” could be investigated have held the Army together and protected the PRG and, when the Constituent Assembly was finally against the Bolsheviks. Kornilov, as McMeekin convened, in the Tauride Palace, Petrograd, they points out, “represented the Russian Imperial Army derided it, then dispersed it by force. In the interim, at its best, ascending from the humblest of origins

Quadrant October 2017 29 The Myth of Bolshevism Dies Hard

[with a peasant-soldier father and a Turkic mother in Kerensky bent over backwards to leave this path Kazakhstan] to the top of the officer corps on talent open to them. They did not take that path. They alone”. He was multilingual, an explorer, a scientist took power and within six weeks (on December 7, and a military intelligence specialist. Succumbing to 1917) Lenin created the Cheka—the Extraordinary fears that Kornilov was party to a “right-wing” coup Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, plot, Kerensky had him arrested. Kerensky would Speculation and Sabotage. Counterrevolution, it later state that he believed the danger he faced was soon became apparent, meant everything from from the Right rather than the Left. He was wrong. seeking to defend one’s private property to being Kornilov, after being released, would join forces with a Socialist Revolutionary, never mind a liberal, a his senior colleague General Mikhail Alekseev in an monarchist or for that matter an anarchist. attempt in 1918 to raise a force that could defeat the Bolsheviks and restore the Constituent Assembly. ouldt i have been an extreme reactionary right- He died in that attempt. wing thing to have suppressed the Bolsheviks McMeekin’s coverage of this matter is meticu- iWn 1917 and prevented them from ever taking power? lous. This is important, because earlier accounts To have prevented, therefore, the dispersal of the differ and the official Soviet view for decades was Constituent Assembly, the creation of the Cheka, that Kornilov had been a monarchist intent on over- the unleashing of civil war and the Red Terror, the throwing the PRG and restoring the Tsar or becom- abolition of private property by decree and the col- ing a dictator in his own right. This, it seems, was lapse of the Russian economy, the armed confisca- not the case. What Kornilov sought to do was to tions of grain from the peasants and the consequent stiffen the resistance of the PRG to the Bolsheviks famine and epidemic which took an estimated five in the wake of their attempted putsch in July 1917. million lives? Would the restoration of some form of Kerensky, jumping at shadows, had him dismissed constitutional monarchy or fledgling democracy that and arrested, which completed the demoralisation of put Russia more or less back on the path of growth the officer corps. In an extraordinary move, which and liberalisation envisaged by Peter Stolypin in proved fatal to his government, he had dozens of 1907 have been “right-wing”? Would a regime that Russia’s most patriotic and professional senior offic- was based on private property, trade and the rule ers thrown in jail and, at the same time, released of law, with considerable civil liberties and freedom from jail Leon Trotsky, who had been so instrumen- of the press have been “right-wing”, compared with tal in the abortive July putsch. He also abolished what emerged in monstrous form in the 1920s and the very counterintelligence organisation that had 1930s, under first Lenin and then Stalin? Are there conducted the investigation into the events of July not, to say the least, numerous gradations of politi- and the Bolshevik use of German money. Let off cal constitution and opinion between what actually the hook, the Bolsheviks proceeded to seize forty happened and being an outright reactionary? thousand rifles from a government arsenal. A month Of course there are. That is the whole meaning of later, they overthrew the PRG and Kerensky fled an open society—the ideal of the modern liberal. It from Petrograd. was in order to make this clear and defend the idea None of this might matter very much had Lenin of such an open society against Leninism that, dare and the Bolsheviks truly been a “progressive” force, I say it, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was set which is to say committed to a regime in which up and Quadrant founded under its auspices, in the the actual, tangible well-being and civil rights of 1950s. If public policy and related matters are to be human beings mattered and in which deliberation discussed in a constructive and intelligent manner, and accountability in politics were to be institu- it is necessary that there be voices that cover a wide tionalised. Had they been so inclined, they might spectrum of opinion. In any matter of significance, have left us the Russian equivalent of the Federalist this is rather likely to be the case. Attempts to pre- Papers, debating how best to achieve these things vent the expression of such diverse opinions in the in a country that had been heavily damaged and name of a “truth” proclaimed by some party or other traumatised by the Great War. They would, surely, of, shall we say, “intense convictions” intrudes on have sought to form a coalition with the PRG liber- intelligent and civilised discourse. What this means als, socialists and others, perhaps with the Socialist is that a liberal constitution requires the defence of a Revolutionaries who had an actual majority anyway number of civil and political liberties. The American (370 out of just over 700 seats) and campaigned for Constitution was an attempt to define and institu- greater support in the years that followed among a tionalise those liberties. Leninism systematically newly enfranchised Russian public. Or they might and violently abolished them. They are, in our time, have accepted minority status in the Constituent under attack from many quarters—as the current Assembly, adopting the role of a loyal opposition. trial of Jiang Tianyong in China testifies, even in

30 Quadrant October 2017 The Myth of Bolshevism Dies Hard the f wake o the death in jail of Liu Xiaobo—and criminal and political executions. That figure might must be defended by all means. be contested, but it is almost certainly close to the It has been estimated that the average longev- right order of magnitude, as Russia was, paradoxi- ity of creative individuals—novelists, poets, artists, cally, at the forefront in civilising penal codes in the composers—who left Russia to escape Bolshevism nineteenth century. In the first five years of Lenin’s was seventy-two, while that of those who stayed rule (until he was cut down by strokes), with the behind was forty-five. Vitaly Shentalinsky’s Arrested Cheka under his direct control, it has been esti- Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the mated that between 200,000 and 250,000 people Soviet Regime (1996) is the classic account. Among were executed on political grounds without anything the many who fled after October 1917 were the resembling the kind of trial most of those executed Nabokovs. Andrea Pitzer’s The Secret History of under the Tsars had received. In an Appendix to her Vladimir Nabokov (2013) tells the story exquisitely history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum addressed and poignantly. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the question of how many people died unnecessarily the father of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, was as a consequence of the Bolshevik revolution. It is a a leading liberal political figure in Russia in the scrupulous and sobering attempt to reckon with a years before war and revolution threw it into chaos. grim and controversial subject. Rather than being He worked for democratisation, argued against the simply an appendix to a book, it might well serve as death penalty and in favour of lib- the introductory text for a course, eralisation of laws against homo- provoking students to inquire into sexuality. He was threatened by sources, methods and meanings. monarchists before 1917 and by the The creation of Timothy Tackett seems pre- Bolsheviks both then and after 1917. the Cheka was the pared to accept that “intense He was a senior member of the signature of the convictions” are a reasonable expla- PRG. His property was seized by nation and even excuse for political the Bolsheviks after October 1917 Bolshevik “revolution”. terror. He would not agree that this and he was driven into exile, only to It led almost at once held in the case of the Nazis, but he be assassinated in Berlin by a mon- appears to suggest that it did do so archist. His son’s novels are haunted to the creation of in the case of the French Revolution by this and what followed. what would become and other “major” revolutions. Yet The creation of the Cheka was the notorious Gulag what those revolutions wrought the signature of the Bolshevik “rev- was political regression of the worst olution”. It led almost at once to Archipelago. kind. Education in their malfor- the creation of what would become mation of Russian, Chinese and the notorious Gulag Archipelago. Cambodian (or Ethiopian and from We now have good histories of the Gulag, notably 1979 Iranian) society ought be part of a core curricu- those by Anne Applebaum and Oleg Khlevniuk. lum in the West. There should be a mantra among Applebaum’s Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps all of us that says of this history, as of the Holocaust, (2003) and her Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern “Never again! Never again!” Whatever our differ- Europe 1944–56 (2012) should be core reading in a ences of opinion, we should be united in our com- mandatory course in modern history and the nature mitment to civil liberties, constitutional checks on of political liberty at our universities. Her Epilogue the abuse of power and willingness to defend these to the book on the Gulag is poignant in drawing things against those who are programmatically attention to the fact that there seems to be a per- committed to destroying them. For there are such vasive amnesia about the matter—wilful in Putin’s parties or organisations still, and well-ordered lib- Russia, neglectful in the West. Putin has long openly erty is far from being the natural or default setting called himself a Chekist and still honours the Soviet of human societies. It requires informed, principled and KGB past. Unless that past is understood in the and active exercise to maintain. The centenary of West, the myth will persist that the Cold War was the Bolshevik coup d’état is a good time to reflect somehow due to an unjustified paranoia about com- on all this. munism and that the communist revolutions were, in fact, “progressive”, so that efforts to prevent or con- Paul Monk is the author of Thunder from the Silent tain them were unjustified and merely “reactionary”. Zone: Rethinking China (2005), The West in a McMeekin argues that the total number of peo- Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009) ple executed in Tsarist Russia between the reigns and Opinions and Reflections: A Free Mind at Work of Nicholas I (1825–39) and Nicholas II (1894–1917) 1990–2015 (2015). His latest book, The Secret Gospel was about six and a half thousand, including both According to Mark, will be published late this year.

Quadrant October 2017 31 Keith Windschuttle, Greg Walsh, Shimon Cowen, Michael Kowalik

:The Same-Sex Marriage Debate A Forum

unions, except it does not sanction them with the Keith Windschuttle term “marriage”. What difference would a change here make? Would it dignify the relationship, as The Debate So Far the Phelps commercial maintains? Hardly. If a homosexual couple enjoy a dignified relationship, t e should b now clear to everyone that, in the as many have long done, they have created it them- debate over the looming plebiscite on same-sex selves. Dignity in personal relationships cannot be marriage, those advocating a Yes vote have a conferred by the state and its impersonal bureau- vIery weak case. At best, they are putting forward cracy. The best a state can offer is legal protection, an anti-discrimination argument: homosexuals which it does already. Dignity is beyond its reach. who want to marry should not be denied because The slogan that claims gay marriage would con- that would perpetuate the discrimination they have firm “equal love” is another abuse of terminology, long suffered under the law. To give this a positive derived more from the lyrics of popular songs than spin, as their PR people have obviously advised, any depth of thinking about the subject. Marriage this translates into a demand for equality: “mar- is not just about love. Many people love one another riage equality” and “equal love”, or as the Kerryn without wanting or needing to marry. Parents and Phelps television commercial puts it, marriage grandparents love their children and grandchil- would “dignify” a same-sex relationship, as it does dren, who mostly love them in return. There are for heterosexuals. many other long-term loving relationships, most Some conservatives have also offered a John but by no means all based on kinship, between Stuart Mill libertarian argument, claiming that people for whom marriage would be unthinkable. since homosexual marriage is between consenting Marriage is something else. It long predates the adults in private, and does no public harm, then rise of civilisations and the great religions. It origi- there is no good reason to deny it. Other liberals nated not in theology or politics but in nature, and and conservatives have argued that since political the unique needs of human children for sustained change is inevitable, it is better it were done now nurturing during their long rearing from infancy by the Turnbull government, which would preserve to adolescence. Marriage is about procreation and the rights of religious interests, than later by Bill is designed to transform the romantic love of two Shorten, who would give full rein to the demands people of the opposite sex into a union for the rear- of radical activists. ing of children. It is essentially a heterosexual insti- However, none of the Vote Yes arguments are tution. It binds a man as family provider, especially sound. The anti-discrimination case is impossible at the crucial time when children are babies and to sustain at a time when the legal position of all demand constant care from their mother. Through homosexuals in stable relationships is that they have its insistence on sexual fidelity, marriage also long had the same rights as heterosexual couples. ensures that the child for whom the man provides Since 2009, same-sex couples have been protected, is his genuine offspring. The fact that these ideals along with all de facto couples, in terms of taxa- are not always preserved—some men are feckless tion, superannuation, social welfare, immigration, providers, some women cuckold them, some moth- employment, workers’ compensation, veterans’ ers now rely on the state or even another woman as affairs, and the legal right to have and retain chil- provider—does not alter the principles that define dren. They even have access to the Family Court. the institution. Our federal state fully recognises same-sex Of course, some people marry and never have

32 Quadrant October 2017 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum children. But if this kind of relationship was all married couples in emergency housing, retreat, the institution meant, there would be no need conference and aged care centres are only the for marriage as we know it, with its legal bonds most obvious examples of where Christian to offspring and property, its public promises of beliefs about marriage could collide with public sexual fidelity, and its strict incest taboos. Marriage policy on anti-discrimination which prioritises is something far more important that providing the equal treatment of same-sex marriage. love, pleasure and companionship to a couple. It is an essential institution for the survival of the The final point from the Yes camp that I want to species. In logical terms, homosexual marriage is a respond to here is the claim by former New South category mistake. Heterosexuals who endorse this Wales Premier Nick Greiner and the Victorian MP error are allowing radical sex activists to lead them Tim Wilson that same-sex marriage is inevitable by the nose. Intelligent gays who go along with this and therefore those like George Pell who worry charade should know better. about religious freedom should support the move On the other hand, the Vote No campaign has to get a quick decision so it can be introduced presented a powerful case. The television commer- in the current term of the Turnbull government, cials by the Coalition for Marriage went straight which is more likely than a future Labor govern- to the issue of the Safe Schools program and its ment to insert some appropriate guarantees in the indoctrination of school children with radical gay legislation. This, however, should not count as an propaganda. The commercials immediately imply argument in the debate. It is simply a crude politi- that there is a wider issue involved here, that activ- cal tactic by supporters of the change, designed to ists are engaged in a campaign to exercise their deflate rather than debate the case of opponents political influence by persuading children to exper- who believe same-sex marriage is wrong in itself iment with gender change, getting boys to try on and must be opposed, not appeased. Rather than an dresses, girls to pretend to be soldiers, and children appeal to evidence and logic, it is a call to surrender. of both sexes to role-play their opposites. In short, there is a great deal of potential public harm buried Keith Windschuttle is the Editor of Quadrant. within this issue. “Marriage equality” is a front for more radical changes to social mores, especially an assault on the right of parents to have the principal say in the moral education of their children. The Coalition for Marriage’s campaign is backed Greg Walsh by a list of twenty-eight partners, most of them religious organisations, including the Anglican Same-Sex Marriage Diocese of Sydney, the Catholic Archdioceses of and Religious Liberty Sydney, of Hobart and of Broken Bay, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia, the Sydney ny attempt to introduce same-sex marriage Chinese Christian Churches Association and must show appropriate respect for those Australian Baptist Ministries. The full range of with a conscientious objection to facilitat- consequences for religious freedom that these Aing same-sex marriages. groups have identified are formidable but unfortu- As the recent proposal by Senator Leyonhjelm nately most of them have not yet been advertised to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to protect to the public. Beyond church circles, few attempts conscientious objectors to same-sex marriage have yet been made to spell out for those who will demonstrates, one of the central issues in the vote in the plebiscite what these consequences are. deliberations about whether to introduce same-sex However, in an illuminating article in Quadrant in marriage is the protections that should be provided to January-February 2010, Cardinal George Pell listed conscientious objectors. Such individuals may have a number of them. He wrote that if same-sex mar- a conscientious objection on the understanding that riage became public policy “the consequences for marriage is a pre-state institution that is inherently religious freedom could be enormous”: heterosexual, that the change may not be in the best interests of children, that the redefinition of Marriage preparation, relationship counselling, marriage will harm members of the community or decisions about medical treatment by next of that the redefinition of marriage is contrary to their kin, school enrolments, sex and relationship religious beliefs. education in secondary schools, the hire For those who understand marriage as a of parish, school and church facilities for religious institution established by God, the issue functions and events, and arrangements for is of particular gravity. Requiring these individuals

Quadrant October 2017 33 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum to facilitate same-sex marriages forces them to who would be willing to provide services for same- affirm an understanding of marriage that violates sex marriages. The actual number may even be their religious beliefs and for which they will be higher considering the financial benefit involved in accountable to God. The seriousness of the issue providing the service and the potential for protests for conscientious objectors is demonstrated by those and boycotts if it became widely known that the who have refused to facilitate same-sex marriages business was unwilling to provide their services despite suffering grave adverse consequences for same-sex marriages. Further, with support for including being fired from their job, denied same-sex marriage significantly higher in younger government benefits, forced to close their business generations, the number of individuals with or sentenced to prison (which occurred in the US concerns about facilitating same-sex marriage is case involving Kim Davis). likely to continue to decrease. Conscientious objectors to facilitating same-sex A critic of the merits of protecting conscientious marriage should be protected. A failure to do so will objectors could argue that we should not permit violate the right to religious liberty. The importance discrimination against same-sex marriages, as we of this right is strongly affirmed under international would never permit discrimination against inter- human rights law and the right has been interpreted racial marriages even if the objection were based as protecting both religious and in religion and that the religious non-religious convictions. The adherent would suffer grave harm if Commonwealth government is he greater harm legally required to facilitate the inter- clearly obliged to respect religious T racial marriage. Although such an liberty in the laws and policies that typically suffered by argument may appear persuasive, it adopts and a failure to provide religious adherents an important distinction between adequate protections will violate its the two positions is the legitimacy commitments under international compared to same- of viewing marriage as inherently a law. sex couples provides relationship between one man and However, as international strong support for one woman. Such an argument was human rights law makes clear, the made in the US Supreme Court right to religious liberty can be protecting those decision of Obergefell that affirmed limited when necessary to protect with a conscientious the right of same-sex couples to other important rights. The right to marry. Although the majority of equality is obviously central to the objection to facilitating the justices were in favour of same- same-sex marriage movement and same-sex marriage. sex marriage they nevertheless is frequently relied upon to argue declared, “Many who deem same- that there should be no, or very sex marriage to be wrong reach that few, concessions made for conscientious objectors conclusion based on decent and honorable religious to same-sex marriage. Same-sex couples who are or philosophical premises, and neither they nor denied services relating to their marriage often their beliefs are disparaged here.” On the rational experience such rejections as an assault on their basis for understanding marriage as an institution dignity or emotional well-being and in some cases between one man and one woman, Chief Justice their economic security and health. Roberts wrote:

here are some important responses to such a the universal definition of marriage as the criticism. As with religious liberty, the right to union of a man and a woman is no historical Tequality can also be limited when necessary to pro- coincidence. Marriage did not come about as tect other rights. The harm that same-sex couples a result of a political movement, discovery, may suffer from a service denial must be acknowl- disease, war, religious doctrine, or any other edged, but this will often be outweighed by the moving force of world history—and certainly greater harm suffered by the conscientious objector not as a result of a prehistoric decision to who loses their job, is forced to close their business exclude gays and lesbians. It arose in the or is required to defend themselves against costly nature of things to meet a vital need: ensuring and lengthy litigation. that children are conceived by a mother and It would be rare for a same-sex couple to father committed to raising them in the stable encounter a service provider who was unwilling to conditions of a lifelong relationship. provide services to them. National polls routinely identify majority support for same-sex marriage, In contrast, attempts to prevent inter-racial which should closely correspond to the number marriage were motivated by irrational views that

34 Quadrant October 2017 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum assessed the worth of individuals according to skin individuals, companies and religious bodies with colour and aimed at subjugating those considered a conscientious objection to decline to facilitate inferior. The skin colour of individuals is irrelevant a same-sex marriage and provide them with to whether their relationships constitute a marriage, protection against discrimination by government while the reproductive capacity of heterosexual bodies, companies and individuals for holding and relationships is the essential reason why the acting upon their beliefs about marriage. institution of marriage was ever established. The The importance of providing such protections legitimacy of the position that marriage is between should be apparent to everyone, especially a man and a woman and the respectful attitude of parliamentarians committed to introducing same- conscientious objectors towards same-sex couples sex marriage in a manner that is respectful to all effectively distinguish their position from those members of the community. Unfortunately, the who would refuse to facilitate an inter-racial same-sex marriage bills that have so far been marriage. introduced have failed to demonstrate adequate The claim that a state committed to respecting respect for conscientious objectors. It is particularly the right to equality must introduce same- disappointing that most (but not all) Liberal sex marriage is also contestable considering politicians have failed to show leadership in this international jurisprudence on the right to equality area, especially considering that the Liberal Party’s and same-sex marriage. International bodies such constitution claims the party believes in “those as the Human Rights Committee in Joslin v New most basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy— Zealand and the European Court of Human Rights the freedom of thought, worship, speech and in Schalk and Kopf v Austria have held that the right association”. Considering how these freedoms are to equality is not violated if a state decides not to threatened by poorly drafted same-sex marriage redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. legislation it is easy to understand why so many Considering the current lack of certainty regarding Australians have lost confidence in the Liberal the meaning and applicability of the right to Party and have joined other political parties, such equality in current international human rights as the Australian Conservatives and the Liberal jurisprudence, any claim that a failure to facilitate Democrats, that are more committed to respecting same-sex marriage is a clear violation of the right all members of society. to equality under international human rights law cannot be supported. Dr Greg Walsh is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame Australia lecturing in a range of units urther, the right to equality is a broad right that including human rights law. This article is an edited protects a range of different grounds includ- version of an article published in the University of ingF the grounds of religion and political opinion. Tasmania Law Review. A failure to protect conscientious objectors can be regarded as a violation of their right to equality as it unjustly subjects them to a detriment that they only suffer because of their religion or political opin- ion. The ability of both sides to rely on the right Shimon Cowen to equality indicates a need to go beyond a mere rhetorical appeal to equality and for law-makers to A Struggle of Worldviews assess the actual impact of the different approaches that the law can adopt. The greater harm typically he f issue o same-sex marriage is one—and suffered by religious adherents compared to same- a major—battle between two worldviews. sex couples provides strong support for protecting One draws on the Abrahamic faith tradi- those with a conscientious objection to facilitating Ttion, known in our society as the Judeo-Christian same-sex marriage. ethic. It understands the human being as possess- Considering that conscientious objectors can ing a conscience or soul, made in the image of its rely on the rights to religious liberty and equality Creator. That means that it resonates with a set of (as well as many other rights such as freedom of objective and eternal ethical values for the redemp- association, freedom of expression and the right tive actualisation of which the Creator fashioned to privacy) any law that introduces same-sex this world. This spiritual dimension or inner con- marriage should provide strong protections to science may be culturally and personally repressed these individuals so that they are not required to in individual human beings but, conscious or violate their deeply held beliefs about the nature unconscious, it is the foundation of our humanity. of marriage. Such protections should permit The soul or conscience sits together in the

Quadrant October 2017 35 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum person with body and mind. The latter two are parent. termed the “psycho-physical” dimension, from The same-sex-marriage movement presents which many impulses contrary to our inner moral itself as compassionate, but in fact expresses a sense can arise. The essentially human conflict corrupted and inverted compassion. Compassion, of our psycho-physical and spiritual selves is the as any good parent knows with regard to his or source of our freedom: to follow either. It is also the her child, does not mean demolishing rules and source of our responsibility to make the spiritual- boundaries in response to mere wants and desires. moral sense prevail over the psycho-physical True compassion acknowledges and defends impulse. The boundaries, purposes and distinct boundaries while at the same time making a gesture identities set up through these universal ethics are of love and care. The balanced consideration of the there to actualise and manifest the Divine within other is the beauty of compassion. Corrupted com- the creation. Traditional heterosexual marriage is a passion turns this beauty of consideration of the key form and agency in the Divine plan, which the other into a narcissistic and vainglorious concept Abrahamic faiths have transmitted. of one’s “compassionate” self. This purported com- The second worldview is that of contemporary passion is imperious: as it breaks down boundaries hedonistic materialism, an aggressive secularism— in its misguided “love”, it enforces the boundary- though multitudes of its fellow travellers (includ- breaking with an extraordinary harshness. From an ing some liberal religious sects) do not comprehend essentially unfree conception of the human being it as such. It is the attempt to and the inverted compassion of eclipse the Creator and His like- the same-sex-marriage movement ness within the human being, the his purported come, as we now note, a number soul. It sees the human being as T of wrongs. a psycho-physical being without compassion is a soul upholding an objective (its imperious: as it breaks he first area of wrong, coer- Creator’s) moral compass, with its cively applied through boundaries and purposes for the down boundaries hTomosexual marriage, is upon specific beings, including men and in its misguided generations of unborn children. women, within creation. Without Since the human being uniquely any inner spiritual review or resist- “love”, it enforces knows himself or herself as the ance, the psycho-physical human the boundary- offspring of its parents, homosex- in its quest for sentient gratifica- breaking with ual marriage with its commitment tion is encouraged by this world- to reproductive technologies with view to morph received values and an extraordinary donor gametes and/or surrogacy boundaries, identities and pur- harshness. creates generations of orphans. In poses. It grasps the human being addition to this it imposes dysfunc- as driven and identified by his or her tion into these relationships due to morphing impulse. Freedom—which is the choice the same-polarity of the partners, with resultant between impulse and conscience—is absent in this known generic forms of instability in male and worldview. Absent too is responsibility, which is female homosexual relationships. Moreover, the the moral imperative to recognise and engage in ethos of demolition of traditional boundaries in the struggle involved in that choice. The same-sex- human relationships, enshrined in the deconstruc- marriage movement is a species of this worldview. tion in marriage, itself weakens commitment—a Its unfree concept of the human being is the seed boundary—in the institution of marriage gener- of its systemic coercive manifestations. ally. Both are trends of the same thing. The outlook The moral compass of the soul or conscience which places “love” and sex ahead of the interests defines boundaries not only in the interpersonal of children is of a piece with the de facto culture, sphere, where people are capable of, and so must which does the same, by placing the cohabiting be prevented from, harming each other physically relationship ahead of a stable structure into which or materially. It applies also in the private realm, children are born. Both are symptoms of the cul- which includes sexuality. Sexual relationships do ture of hedonistic materialism. not become moral simply by “consent” of adult par- Perhaps the profoundest victim of the ideology ties. The consent of adult siblings to an incestuous of same-sex marriage is the homosexual person. relationship does not make it moral. Nevertheless, In reality, there is a wide spectrum of homosexual the flagship society of contemporary hedonistic tendencies: from deep-seated physical dispositions materialism, Sweden, has legislated for the inces- through to less deep-seated tendencies which may tuous marriage of adults who are siblings by one have psychologically treatable causes, through to

36 Quadrant October 2017 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum individuals who can have heterosexual relation- gerous. A girl’s passing crush on another girl could ships but make a “lifestyle” choice to enter or be identified and confirmed as lesbianism. Quite experiment with a homosexual relationship. apart from the ethical wrongness of this program, The attempted ban on reparative or conversion significant psychological harm could be imposed therapy tars all of these with one brush, where in by presenting sexual options to young children fact—as documented by Robert Spitzer, Stanton for their selection and identification. The program Jones and others—therapy can and does work suc- not only uproots the moral culture of the Judeo- cessfully for a significant range of the spectrum. Christian or Abrahamic tradition, it also endan- The homosexual is locked in by the ban on therapy, gers children’s normal development. his or her destiny sealed. The diversity of sources of This trend has been backed up in Victoria by homosexuality and its treatment makes this “fate” supplementary measures: the exclusion of optional imposed by the same-sex-marriage movement the traditional religious education during school hours, more poignant. The opposition of the psychologi- and attempted legislation to prevent religious cal associations to therapy is no more than a cor- schools from selecting staff who model the reli- ollary to the political—non-scientific—statement gious ethos of the school, where this conflicts with that homosexuality is a “normal” variety of human the “same-sex marriage” agenda. Fortunately, this sexuality. In the United States this led to a travesty failed. Finally, it has introduced a program into of justice in the refusal of a court, which shut down the school syllabus throughout the school years, to an agency offering this therapy, even to hear expert relativise religions as a comparative general study, evidence of the success of reparative counselling. alongside secular humanism (the option of non- The ban operates not only through peer-mar- belief) in place of the traditional instruction of shalling and threatened deregistration of profes- children in their actual family beliefs. sionals who offer counselling. It has emerged in It is not only the education of children that legislation in Australia through new devices such has been affected by the wider ideology of same- as the Victorian Health Complaints Bill of an sex marriage, hedonistic materialism, but also the inquisitorial Health Commissioner, who has been freedom of debate and inquiry in the universi- politically charged, with the assistance of third- ties. One of the most disturbing features of the party helpers, to search out and eradicate all such movement to institutionalise homosexuality is the counselling. intensity of the attempt made to silence reasoned and critical discussion of it. The ideology of “mar- he most concerning impact and coercion riage equality” as part of hedonistic materialism worked by the same-sex-marriage movement is a credo of the politicised culture of the univer- Tis the attempt to educate young children in “sexual sities. From the universities come cadres of jour- diversity”. This posed originally as a movement to nalists, schoolteachers, bureaucrats, lawyers and stop the bullying of homosexually inclined chil- health professionals all steeped in the same credo. dren, though it was clearly intended (as one of its From kindergarten to the university and its profes- designers admitted) to validate homosexuality to sional graduates, the coercive culture of hedonistic young children. While bullying of any kind and materialism has corrupted education in the widest for any reason is cruel and must be stopped—and sense. there are a variety of ways to do this—a specific Our task is not simply to inveigh against the program, the “Safe Schools” program (with differ- darkness of this momentary eclipse of the human ent names in different states) has been introduced spirit. It is also to reaffirm and reassert the human to schools. Its agenda is to win acceptance for spirit: that it—not the psycho-physical torrent homosexuality as a norm in childhood education, within the human—is sovereign; that authentic the best place to accomplish an overall cultural pleasure and good come with the actualisation shift. of objective and universal, Divinely-given values. The Labor Party in Victoria declared before the Traditional marriage is prescribed by those univer- state election in 2014 an intention to impose this sal ethics and it is the great vehicle for the trans- program on every government school, which hav- mission of those ethics. It should be an ideal which ing been elected, it is now carrying out. The pro- illuminates us all. gram invites young children to identify themselves sexually (heterosexual, homosexual and so on) and Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen is the founder and director thereby to lock themselves into a sexual identity. of the Institute for Judaism and Civilisation. This At an age where, according to some paediatric is a modified extract from his book Homosexuality, opinions, up to 26 per cent of children experience Marriage and Society, published by Connor Court fluidity in their sexual identity, this is plainly dan- in 2016.

Quadrant October 2017 37 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum

in Joslin v New Zealand (2002). Some commenta- tors (for example P. Gerber, et al., “Marriage: A Michael Kowalik Human Right for All?” Sydney Law Review, 2014, pp. 643–67) nonetheless argue that this interpreta- Same-Sex Marriage and Human Rights tion is too narrow and overlooks the more general principle of “equality before the law” stipulated in he question of human rights is at the core of Article 26 of the ICCPR: the same-sex-marriage debate. Proponents argue that same-sex marriage is a human All persons are equal before the law and are rTight, citing Article 16 of the Universal Declaration entitled without any discrimination to the equal of Human Rights (UDHR). I argue that Article 16 protection of the law. In this respect, the law not only provides no support for same-sex mar- shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee riage but in fact implies that creating such a law to all persons equal and effective protection could be a violation of a human right. against discrimination on any ground such as Article 16 states: race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, (1) Men and women of full age, without any property, birth or other status. limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. Although discrimination on the basis of the sex- They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, ual composition of a family is not explicitly prohib- during marriage and at its dissolution. ited under Article 26, it is alleged that the relevant (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the prohibition is implied by the reference to “other free and full consent of the intending spouses. status”. I do not think this argument succeeds, as (3) The family is the natural and fundamental there are obviously good reasons to discriminate in group unit of society and is entitled to the relevant context on some grounds—for exam- protection by society and the State. ple, against incestuous family composition, even if the related couple consists of opposite sexes. See also the similarly worded Article 23 of The principle of equality before the law evidently the International Covenant on Civil and Political prohibits only unjust or arbitrary discrimination, Rights (ICCPR). which in turn begs the question whether the con- The text of Article 16 arguably refers only to a tested kind of discrimination is objectively unjust union between opposite sexes, “men and women or arbitrary. More generally, prohibition of dis- ... without any limitation due to race, nationality crimination on the basis of some status does not or religion”; not “men and men”, or “any human preclude cases of justifiable discrimination on the with any other human” or “men and women with- basis of some other status. In the present case it is out any limitation due to sex or gender”. The omis- also important to differentiate between discrimi- sion of a reference to sex or gender as a prohibited nation on the basis of “sexual composition of a ground of discrimination leaves little doubt that family” and “sexual orientation of partners”: sexual “marriage” is intended to mean that of a man with orientation of partners does not preclude access to a woman, to the exclusion of all others. This is con- legal marriage between a man and a woman and sistent with the further provision about “founding is generally of no concern or interest to the state. a family”, the most direct interpretation of which is In that sense, marriage equality already exists: that of parents having children with one another: every man can marry a woman and every woman something that same-sex couples are biologically can marry a man, irrespective of sexual orientation, precluded from achieving. Point 3 of Article 16 pro- provided that they are not relatives. The same-sex- vides further insight about the intended meaning marriage debate is therefore not just about indi- of “family”: a natural and fundamental unit of soci- vidual rights but, primarily, about changing the ety. It makes little sense to regard same-sex union meaning of marriage: whether to decouple the as a “fundamental unit of society” since same-sex legal protection afforded to marriage from the sex- partners cannot create life with one another, while ual norm of procreation. it makes total sense for opposite-sex couples to The natural, fundamental social unit consisting be considered as such: humanity depends on the of a man and a woman is singled out in Article 16 union of opposite sexes for procreation, even if it as entitled to protection by society and the state. does not always result in procreation. By equivocating between same-sex union and the This interpretation reflects the standing prece- union of opposite sexes under the common rubric of dent established by the Human Rights Committee “marriage” we may be undermining the very sense

38 Quadrant October 2017 The Same-Sex Marriage Debate: A Forum of “natural family” as the vehicle of procreation, in a natural way, and that is of critical existential deprioritising its life-giving function in favour of importance. On the other hand, if the social unit other values. The sexual norm, the fundamental possessing the natural capacity for procreation is condition of human existence, thus stands to be indeed the main focus of the right to marriage then legally effaced in favour of normalising all possible it makes no sense for any other social unit to claim sexual combinations. that right on the ground of “equality before the On this interpretation, legalising same-sex law” without also possessing the natural capacity marriage under the same statutory provisions as for procreation. One cannot justifiably claim legal the marriage of opposite sexes would amount to a protection for a function of a unit that cannot be violation of a human right stipulated in Article 16, performed by that unit. namely, that the natural family consisting of a man Lastly, proponents of same-sex marriage accuse and a woman, the fundamental unit of society and the “traditional” marriage of being increasingly the only combination of sexual beings capable of dysfunctional, but that does not entail that chang- producing offspring, must be given ing the meaning of marriage or special protection by society and watering down the sense of “natu- the state. Some may object that e all come into ral family” would be beneficial to the supposed threat to traditional W the implied functionality. On the family posed by same-sex marriage the world the same contrary, the traditional family is too vague, but even if that is the way, by means of a arguably needs more protection, case the accusation cannot be sim- more self-respect and a more dig- ply ignored. natural father and nified treatment by the state and There are clearly two legitimate a natural mother. society. After all, we all come into sides to this debate and therefore This life-giving the world the same way, by means a more rigorous examination of of a natural father and a natu- the matter from psychological, union deserves to ral mother. This life-giving union sociological and philosophical per- be protected and deserves to be protected and cher- spectives is necessary before com- ished above all other social groups mitting to the change. Is there a cherished above all because it is a necessary condition broadly normative dimension asso- other social groups of humanity, freedom, rationality, ciated with sexual differentiation and of valuing anything at all. that is being impinged on by same- because it is a There may be good reasons to sex marriage? What are the social necessary condition judge the present interpretation benefits versus the risks associated of humanity. as objectively wrong, but the rele- with rejecting this norm? vant question is evidently far more I believe that the individuals complex than most proponents of in same-sex relationships ought to have as many same-sex marriage are willing to admit. If I have rights and protections as practicable to lead ful- missed some important reason in favour of same- filling, dignified and fruitful lives, perhaps all the sex marriage then perhaps one day the UN General rights that we already grant to families composed Assembly will apply superior reasoning and agree of a man and a woman. This is the view shared on a new, more explicit formulation of the relevant by a growing number of nation-states. We ought human right. nonetheless to preserve the distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex couples in regard to Michael Kowalik is a philosopher working in the the institution of marriage because only a man field of normativity, metaethics, value theory and and a woman can bring new life into this world economic reasoning.

Quadrant October 2017 39 William D. Rubinstein

How to Lie with Sexual Statistics

n 1954, a freelance American writer named 71 million Catholics in America, compared with 5.4 Darrell Huff published How to Lie with Statistics, million here. Adherents of fundamentalist Christian a book which sold 1.5 million copies, introduced churches are actually an insignificant component of tIhousands of people to the abuse of numbers, and, the Australian population. According to the 2016 if it achieved its purpose, prevented many conmen Census, only 1.1 per cent of the population describe from fooling the gullible. I was reminded of this themselves as “Pentecostals”, with only 0.7 per cent work recently when considerable publicity was given members of minor fundamentalist denominations to two pieces of apparent survey research, “‘Submit like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The two authors have to Your Husbands’: Women Told to Endure not studied these fundamentalist denominations Domestic Violence in the Name of God” by Julia here, and have provided no evidence at all as to how Baird and Hayley Gleeson of the ABC, and Change common domestic violence is among these groups. the Course: National Report on Sexual Assault and Nor have they provided any comparative data on Sexual Harassment at Australian Universities, drafted how this compares with mainstream Christians, by eight members of the Australian Human Rights with adherents of non-Christian religions, or with Commission in Canberra. While both have already non-believers. been widely and rightly criticised on a variety of Perhaps only three pieces of actual Australian grounds, I doubt that even the critics realise just research relevant to their report are cited by them. how dubious the two studies actually are. One is a 2010 book by Dr Lynne Baker, Counselling With “‘Submit to Your Husbands’”, the main Christian Women on How to Deal with Domestic problem for a critic is where to start. The conclu- Violence, which found that 22 per cent of the perpe- sion of this report is that “the men most likely to trators of domestic violence and abuse go to church abuse their wives are evangelical Christians who regularly. In other words, 78 per cent of the perpe- attend church sporadically”, and that, more gener- trators of domestic violence did not go to church ally, fundamentalist Christians in Australia have a regularly—the great majority—which hardly bears great problem with domestic violence, which church out the authors’ claims. Moreover, this was not a leaders are “both enabling and concealing”. In fact survey of all Australian church-goers, but “a study the report shows nothing of the sort. As difficult as of Anglican, Catholic and Uniting churches in this may be to believe, the two authors who com- Brisbane”, a single city. The authors also cite a 1992 piled the study have, in fact, done no research them- study of 1704 Anglican and Uniting Church women selves of any kind on the Australian situation. The undertaken by Glenys Conrade of the University of few Australian studies they cite show, if anything, Queensland, which “found that 3.3 per cent reported the very opposite of what they claim. they had been abused in the past 12 months”, while The authors depend almost entirely on a hand- “22 per cent of the perpetrators went to church regu- ful of American studies, which are themselves of larly”. Thus, 96.7 per cent of these women had not dubious quality. But the religious situation in the been abused in the past twelve months, and 78 per United States is categorically different from the reli- cent of the perpetrators did not attend church regu- gious situation in Australia. Church-going is vastly larly—surely the more salient way of viewing the greater there than here, among both mainstream evidence. If anything, by their figures church-going and fringe denominations. There are, for instance, acts as a deterrent to domestic violence. 2.1 million Jehovah’s Witnesses in America, com- Finally, the authors cite “an anonymous [2016] pared with 54,000 here; 2.7 million Seventh Day survey of 148 Sydney Anglican rectors”, “which Adventists there compared with 67,000 here; and found that, on average, each rector had seen 2.25”

40 Quadrant October 2017 Howo t Lie with Sexual Statistics casesf o domestic violence “in the past five years”, In considering the astronomical rates of domestic or one case every two years—surely not evidence violence among Aborigines, their poverty and mar- of an epidemic, regardless of how deplorable each ginality would assuredly be posited by Left-liberal case was. The same page on the ABC News site on commentators as the main cause of this violence. which they reported this also stated that “police in But in the case of evangelical Christians, the two Australia” deal on average “with 433 cases of domes- authors fail to consider any causal factor apart from tic violence each day”. Of these, presumably 100 their supposed religious beliefs. or so take place in Sydney each day, or 73,000 in In a later publication on ABC News (“What two years, compared with the one case known to Does the Australian Research Say?”, July 24), the these Anglican rectors (or 148 among all of them) two authors do make a claim with which one can in the same two-year period. How on earth can it agree: “There is very little research on the nature be said that church-going increases the likelihood and prevalence of domestic abuse in church com- of domestic violence, as the two authors claim? munities, unlike other countries, and most is dated On the ABC site, there is also repeated innuendo ... Comprehensive, independent Australian data about Australia’s churches, such as “Australian regarding domestic violence within the churches Churches Risk Becoming a ‘Haven’ are long overdue.” This highly for Abuses, US Seminary Professor original way of approaching the Says”, which quotes Ruth Tucker, he two authors who subject makes extravagant, perhaps “a seminary professor living in T defamatory claims about domestic Michigan”, without stating whether compiled the study violence in the churches, and then she has ever set foot in this country have, in fact, done no hopes that someone will do the or knows anything whatever about research which will prove that their the situation here. research of any kind claims are true. The researchers also apparently on the Australian This examination of domestic do not understand the difference violence and Australian churches between a cause and an association, situation. The few appeared in instalments on the a distinction fundamental to any Australian studies they ABC News website. Anyone famil- social research. It may well be the cite show, if anything, iar with this site will know that, case that married men who eat two apart from straightforward news or more meat pies at AFL matches the very opposite of reports, a common hallmark is beat their wives more often than what they claim. to carry planted stories, a propos married men who eat one meat pie, of nothing in the news, on issues or none. Eating several meat pies favoured by the Left, and invari- may well cause these men to reach for their Zantac, ably from a Left-liberal perspective. A gratuitous, but it does not, so far as anyone knows, cause them unsubstantiated attack on evangelical Christians to reach for a cricket bat to hit their wives. Much in Australia, needless to say, fits right in with the the same is almost certainly the case with evangeli- agenda of “your” ABC, and should be seen in this cal Christians, even assuming that they are more light. likely than others to beat their wives. Who are these Australian evangelical Christians? he second survey, about sexual assault and sexual This basic question is not addressed by the authors. harassment at Australian universities, is no less It is almost certainly the case that these evangeli- Tdubious in its methodology and findings. Sponsored cal Christians are not drawn randomly, but dis- by the Human Rights Commission (HRC), it found proportionately from specific demographic groups. that 51 per cent of all university students were sexu- The majority, or a significant minority, are almost ally harassed on at least one occasion in 2016, and certainly of Eastern European, Pacific Islander or 6.9 per cent were sexually assaulted on at least one African background, ethnic groups among whom occasion in 2015 or 2016. To produce these find- domestic violence may well be more common ings, an invitation was sent to no fewer than 319,959 and more entrenched than among Anglo-Celtic students at thirty-nine Australian universities via Australians. They are very likely to be less well edu- e-mail to participate in a survey about sexual har- cated than the population as a whole and, in par- assment. A total of 30,930 students (9.7 per cent of ticular, poorer, with more children’s mouths to feed, those invited to participate) replied. The conclusions and more financially insecure than the general pop- of the HRC were thus based entirely upon this ulation. If they also engage in domestic violence at sample of students who voluntarily participated. a higher rate than the average, these factors are very It then weighted this sample by gender, domestic likely more important than what their minister says. versus international students, undergraduates versus

Quadrant October 2017 41 Howo t Lie with Sexual Statistics postgraduates, and claimed that their findings were findings,s a exaggerated as they probably are, is that subject to a standard error of only plus-or-minus 0.4 there are very low levels of alleged harassment and per cent. still less assault at our universities. Ninety-four per This is nonsense. The entire design of the survey cent of students who claimed to have been sexu- is wholly flawed, and its findings are virtually use- ally harassed, and 87 per cent of those who claimed less. The proper way to conduct a survey of this type to have been sexually assaulted, did not make a is to take a random sample of the 319,959 students formal complaint or report it to their university. sent e-mails, based on a computer-generated table of Among students who witnessed another student random numbers, and survey say 5000 of them. If being sexually harassed and did nothing about it, a student so selected does not participate, one then the most important reason was because they did not finds another randomly selected student to survey. think it serious enough. Among witnesses even to a This is the methodology employed in all election sexual assault—133 persons—only eight called the polls, and usually produces numbers which are police. Among students who claimed to be sexually within 3 to 5 per cent of the actual election results. assaulted—a serious crime which should be reported The methodology employed by the HRC, con- to the police—only twenty-six women and two men sisting entirely of voluntary respondents, omits over actually called the police. 90 per cent of all students from the survey, and is The most common forms of “sexual harass- virtually certain to overstate, perhaps wildly, the ment” were “inappropriate staring or leering” (14 percentage of students who claim to have been sexu- per cent), “sexually suggestive comments or jokes” ally harassed, since it will be they in all likelihood (11 per cent), and “intrusive questions about an indi- who reply. Their procedure would be like asking vidual’s private life or physical appearance” (9 per 300,000 Americans by e-mail what they think of cent). The only reasonable conclusion from this is Donald Trump: 20,000 reply, of whom 14,000 think that sexual harassment, let alone criminal assaults, he is a monster, 3000 the greatest thing since sliced are extremely rare. Many of these take place in halls bread, and 3000 have no opinion. Such results are of residence, or at parties where the alcohol flows, obviously invalid as a random sample, which, if con- just as they would among non-university youth, ducted in a valid way, is likely to find a more even and what does one expect from normal eighteen- division of opinion. The methodology employed by to-twenty-two-year-olds? Expecting there to be no the HRC in their survey would not be recognised as sexual undercurrent among them is like hoping that valid by any professional polling agency. water will run uphill. Change the Course then compounded their mis- Moreover, the claims reported in the survey take by—believe it or not—including in their find- are, without exception, unsubstantiated accounts ings alleged sexual harassment which occurred on set out in e-mail responses to the HRC, and are all public transport to and from a university, a fact made without evidence. The HRC apparently did buried on pages 224 to 226 of the report. In other not investigate a single claim made to it, let alone words, if some ratbag in Preston, three kilometres contact the alleged perpetrators for their versions of from Melbourne University, makes a lewd remark these events, which might be very different. to a female student travelling to the university by One might expect the Australian Human Rights tram, this is included as an example of sexual har- Commission, of all institutions, to be cognisant assment at Melbourne University. This is just pre- of the rights of the accused; it would be the first posterous. The ratbag in question has no connection body to scream if, say, Aborigines or asylum seekers with the university, and Melbourne University has were not allowed to defend themselves from serious no control over what occurs on trams in Preston. It accusations. But as with the ABC and its report on is obvious that harassment on public transport has domestic violence, the HRC has a track record of been included simply to pad out the negative fig- partisan advocacy, exemplified by the pronounce- ures. In fact 22 per cent of all students who claimed ments of its former head, Gillian Triggs. In this to be sexually harassed said it had occurred on pub- case, it appears to have resorted to highly dubious, if lic transport. And if sexual harassment on public not overtly fraudulent means to find what it wanted transport is included, why not the harassment of to find. university students in pubs, off-campus parties, or on the beach? William D. Rubinstein was Professor of Social and Without minimising the impact of sexual har- Economic History at Deakin University and Professor assment on young and vulnerable students, the of History at the University of Wales, and is now an impression gained from carefully considering these adjunct professor at Monash University.

42 Quadrant October 2017 Scintillae

Skyf o verdigris. Ocean of slate. Threadbare clouds shapeshift, scatter, then disintegrate, their essence gone the way of plans which, once discarded, drift from consciousness. She puts the coffee on, lights a cigarette, attends the morning denouement, the daily snare of memories that give rise to regret for what was real: a creaky seventh stair, an ivy-patterned wall, a simple oaken Morris chair, a ceiling crack, a chifforobe behemoth in a hall, By the Herengracht Canal a red Formica table, bric-a-brac, umbrellas by a door, Seats are threadbare velvet. a bowl, a grass-green Pontiac; A lion’s mouth coat-hook how beveled beams grips my dripping jacket in its jaws. of gold leaf inch across a kitchen floor ... In stained glass lit with brown light from behind, but not this one. An overspill of dreams a footballer in 1920’s kit has come once more to whelm, bursts through a bolt of blue lightning inexorably, as streams perhaps onto a floodlit pitch are drawn into somewhere in Northern England on a the sea. And from that pure and loving realm, winter’s evening. her fountain pen with ink of peacock blue.

Catherine Chandler After the Solstice

The longest day swings on its hinge. Newspapers smoulder with division. The lick of political flames won’t be drowned by this flash summer flood so fierce our enemy rabbits hutch together, fur on fur. We listen to the downpour counting the seconds from flash till thunder in our half-finished, half-purchased house. What future lies in ambush for your sons, my daughter?

Kitty Donnelly

Quadrant October 2017 43 Tony Thomas

The School of Pro-Islamic Studies

ust about every Australian university now has understanding not fear and loathing”. its Islamic studies centre, relentlessly spread- His team set out to discover if Muslims’ warmth ing the word that Muslims are the nicest people towards their host community was enhanced by Jaround. If a minority of them aren’t so nice (sui- their public practice of Muslim faith rituals. The cide blasts, beheadings) it’s of course the West’s surveys covered “a broad cross-section of practis- fault for being mean to Muslims historically or in ing Muslims in the West”, namely in Melbourne, failing to throw enough welfare at Muslim arrivals. Detroit, Lyon, Grenoble and, to a minor extent, Griffith University even sports a centre educating Paris. journalists on how to do Islam-friendly reporting “Muslims in the West” is a bit of a stretch. The of gory Allahu-Akbar events. Sydney University’s study involved only 384 Muslims in a three-coun- law school has a course, “Muslim Minorities and try survey and interviews, including 237 who took the Law”, using a textbook authored by the lectur- a questionnaire online or face-to-face. When the ers and calling for elements of sharia law to be rec- US Pew Research Group surveyed global Muslim ognised in the mainstream legal system—including opinion between 2008 and 2012, it did 38,000 face- polygamy and a lower age of consent. to-face interviews in eighty languages. Victoria’s Deakin University is another case in Mansouri says Muslims in the West want to be point. On June 22 it put out a 140-page study, Islamic “good citizens and be just, open and caring people”, Religiosity and Challenge of Political Engagement and demonstrating a need to “reshape public discourse National Belonging in Multicultural Western Cities. As and policy attitudes towards Muslim communities”. the heading of the press release explained, “Muslim His study “enables a better understanding between faith not at odds with Western beliefs, Deakin study the West and Islam that could alleviate tensions shows”. It elaborated: and prevent outbreaks of violence by Muslim youth who feel disenfranchised by a dominant major- Public debate that paints a negative picture of ity culture”. But why don’t alienated Hindu and Muslims and Islamic religiosity is at odds with Aboriginal youth also go on murderous rampages? the peace-driven lens through which much of [my Other jarring notes in the Mansouri symphony emphasis] the Muslim communities view their include: faith … The findings challenge the dominant • Those coming to Australia from a Muslim- public commentary that portrays Islamic beliefs majority nation “often produced one of three as a potential security problem at odds with responses: assimilation, incorporation or extrem- Western norms of democracy, secularism, liberty ism”. Mansouri doesn’t define what he means by and individual rights. “extremism”—conceivably just intense religiosity— but the term is now the official euphemism for vio- Those hundreds of bollards now protecting lent Islamism. Melbourne and Sydney pedestrian-ways must be to • “Official discourses predominantly emphasise thwart homicidal Buddhists. dominant images of radicalisation among youth that The study found that Islamism wasn’t at odds places all young Muslims under scrutiny. This has with “Western norms of democracy, secularism, the effect of producing anger and outrage, which liberty and individual rights”. The study leader, are expressed in different ways in the cities that were Professor Fethi Mansouri, who also holds the the focus of this project.” UNESCO Chair on Cultural Diversity and Social • 8 to 10 per cent of the Muslim respondents in Justice, wants his study to promote “solidarity and Melbourne, Detroit and three French cities said

44 Quadrant October 2017 The School of Pro-Islamic Studies they followed sharia exclusively rather than national 61 per cent of Mansouri’s Melbourne sample were legal codes. Some respondents conceded that their graduates or higher (in France the proportion was sharia observances involved practices “often thought 38 per cent, in Detroit 40 per cent). At least five in to be incompatible with domestic laws”. But really, the Melbourne group were members of the handily- some Melbourne Muslims said, such sharia codes located Islamic Society of Deakin University, which were essential in “promoting ethical behaviour as provided one of the four Melbourne focus groups. well as virtuous and participatory citizenship”. Imams were a go-to source for partners. The study The study was silent on which aspects of sharia involved three imams in Melbourne, five in France don’t fit Western laws. At the mildest end, I could and four in Detroit. Other partners in Melbourne nominate female subservience and polygamy. The included various mosques, the Islamic Council of least Western aspects of sharia and its prescribed Victoria, the Muslim Women’s Centre for Human punishments might include honour killings, hand- Rights, Hume Islamic Youth Centre and Deakin’s loppings and the stoning of rape victims. Islamic Society.

he Deakin study raises questions about its reatedn i academia’s Left bubble, Mansouri’s methodology. First, for the five cities, the team study makes eighteen references to Tmustered under 100 questionnaire replies each in C“Islamophobia”. Phobias are irrational fears; fear of Melbourne and France, and forty-eight in Detroit. Muslim terror is perfectly rational, given globally These included online responses, which are generally there were 152 Islamic attacks killing 1125 people considered lower-grade material. in July 2017 alone. Second, the team did four focus Much of the study concerns groups in Melbourne of half a he 384 Muslim France. We learn from Mansouri dozen clients each. These people T that there is “an increasing rate of were selected for Deakin by Muslim respondents seem ethnically-motivated crime, and organisations. In Grenoble they did remarkably well more specifically a sharp spike in one focus group of six clients and in Islamophobic incidents, evident, Detroit, none. educated. Half were for example, in the weeks following Third, in the five cities, the graduates and another the Charlie Hebdo attacks”. This team did a total of 115 interviews, or 10 per cent had sentence seems to equate Islamists about thirty to fifty per country. The with AK47s killing and wounding authors can at best only describe the professional diplomas twenty-three Charlie Hebdo work- interviews as “semi-structured” and and certificates. ers, and some reprisal vandalism of claim they provide “rich qualitative mosques and some shots not tar- data” (no detail on interview ques- geted at people. No one was hurt in tions was appendixed). As icing on the cake, the any of these “Islamophobic incidents”. team noted “ethnographic” inputs, namely “partici- The day after the Brussels suicide bombings pant observation, visual methodologies” and “photo- on March 22 last year, when thirty-two people elicitation techniques”, whatever that means. died and 300 were injured, Mansouri, interviewed Fourth, “Survey participants were recruited with by ABC Radio’s Religion Report, remarked that the assistance of partner organisations in each of émigré Islamists were becoming “slightly more the three cities.” These partners I assume to be the violent”. He largely blamed second-generation twenty-five Muslim organisations plus imams cred- youth alienation because of unemployment and ited by the study, whose PR goals would include poor housing: approbation from the broader community. In France the selectors of people to take the survey included a What conditions did we have that produced group called the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en young people who are really easily targeted by France, and in the US, an un-named group that had the ISIS message and narrative? Why do we set up a think-tank to combat “Islamophobia”. allow our schools and local organisations and Fifth, the 384 Muslim respondents seem remark- leadership structures to produce failed policies ably well educated. Half were graduates and another which are therefore tapped into by ISIS and al 10 per cent had professional diplomas and certifi- Qaeda? cates. Only a third had secondary schooling or less. Yes, we are seeing right now the ugly face of A possible explanation arises when looking at the terrorism in Europe. In many ways perhaps we Melbourne cohort. Of those, twenty-two out of are normalising these terrible atrocities across the ninety-six had masters, doctoral or professional a number of countries, not only within a few degrees, and thirty-seven others were graduates. So Western urban localities.

Quadrant October 2017 45 The School of Pro-Islamic Studies

He acknowledged that some second-generation Observatory” monitoring anything offensive said or North African youth had problems integrating: done against Muslims, as fodder for complaint and legal redress. The Observatory director is Abdallah Really the picture we paint is one of a deep Zekri, a prominent public figure with influence sense of alienation among youth, with shrinking stretching to President Emmanuel Macron. But M. possibility of educational outcomes and access Zekri is not a shining example of the nice Muslims to the labour market. Housing is extremely sub- hailed by Mansouri. Zekri expresses his contempt standard and there is fragmented leadership in for integration and assimilation in France, and the community. Historical contacts with radical his primary loyalty to his native Algeria. On Al Salafists from the Arabian peninsula took root Janoubiya TV, he says social integration has failed in Belgium and produced a new version among because the government hasn’t provided enough émigré Islam, more conservative, more radical, jobs and housing, and assimilation is a far worse and now we are finding out it is becoming option that destroys Muslims’ original cultures and slightly more violent … Unfortunately all the civilisations. Not mincing words, Zekri says, “I am emphasis has been on law enforcement and not assimilable. I am a Muslim poison. If you want much less on social integration. to assimilate me, whoever wants to assimilate me, if he eats me he dies.” Onef o the Mansouri study’s co-authors is One can sympathise with the study’s travails in Deakin’s Dr Amelia Johns, who did her PhD and a Detroit, the largest US city by Muslim population, book, Battle for the Flag, on the so-called Cronulla with fifty mosques. The Detroit study could get only race riots of 2005. She’s an authority on “whiteness” forty-eight survey responses and thirty-three inter- among other things. Her academic jargon made her views, making the exercise pretty useless. book for me nigh on unreadable, but I did notice The Muslim supporters in Detroit of the various her reference to Mansouri’s view that the root cause factions in Syria were at daggers drawn (I hope not of Islamic terror is our own sins of imperialism and literally). African-American Muslim converts in the colonialism: Nation of Islam further complicated the inter-sub- urban strife. “Participants noted that the commu- As Mansouri and [co-author] Marotta remind nity had to be vigilant,” the report says guardedly. us, terms of this discussion too often involve a The subjects were also traumatised by the cor- reduction of Islam to a religious theology that ruption, racketeering and criminality of ex-Mayor is “intrinsically fundamentalist and intolerant Kwame Kilpatrick, an African-American Democrat. and as such has a tendency to support terrorism” He stole millions while the city collapsed into bank- rather than considering the “global and root ruptcy. Kilpatrick is now doing twenty-eight years causes” of political Islamism that can be traced in prison. to western Imperialism and colonial projects, among other things. he study illustrates the leftist bubble in which academics recycle popular myths. Mansouri But didn’t Islam have its own centuries of impe- wTrites, “President-elect Donald Trump has rialism and colonialism via the Saudis, Iranians and attempted to legislate a ban on Muslim immigration Turks? to USA.” In fact Trump has sought only a ninety- As a lad I was immersed in the wartime tales of day ban on arrivals from seven terror-prone coun- the French Resistance, so I was surprised to find tries while “extreme vetting” procedures are put in via Mansouri’s study that bearded Muslim men and place against likely terrorists. The Trump proposal hijab-wearing ladies now hold high the resistance was country-specific, not Muslim-specific. I assume banner: Mansouri will issue an appropriate correction. The study also worked hard—without much suc- In the French context, especially among the cess—to elicit tales of Aussie racism against Muslims 18–24-year-old cohort, non-obligatory practices, in Melbourne. A twenty-two-year-old Dandenong such as wearing the hijab, a beard, or specific woman called Saba, a Hazara from Afghanistan, types of clothing, took on extra significance as encountered serious racism and bullying but said visible signs of resistance to secular state policies it was entirely from earlier-arriving ethnic groups. and the Islamophobic gaze. Aida, a Pashtun with a Dandenong market stall, laughed off a crass Aussie woman’s insult—“Aida’s The previously-mentioned organisation involved overall positive experience of the Dandenong com- with the Deakin study, the Collectif Contre munity enabled her to brush off incidents like these”. l’Islamophobie en France, has an “Islamophobia One fifty-year-old Ghana-born man in Melbourne

46 Quadrant October 2017 The School of Pro-Islamic Studies was chuffed that in his workplace there was a “well- exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow being” room for himself—“I’m the only one”—that of the sword! People cannot be made obedient he uses for his prayers. The other workers took care except with the sword! The sword is the key to not to schedule meetings that clashed with his Paradise, which can be opened only for Holy prayer times. Warriors!

he unstated issue in the study is, “Whose ver- Mansouri’s report highlights one Muslim sion of Islam is most authentic?” Mansouri respondent saying that vested interests in the anti- pTicks the nicest version to Western ears. But the Muslim industry had raised hundreds of thousands official version for the 75 million people of Iran, for of dollars, if not millions, “by frightening people example, is the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s. As long about Muslims and immigration and takeovers and ago as 1942, he wrote: creeping sharia and all those things”. I note that this study scored at least $280,000 in Research Council Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that grants and Mansouri’s profile shows a career total of Islam counsels against war. Those who say this $2.2 million in grants. are witless. Islam says: Kill the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! ... Islam says: Kill Tony Thomas’s book of Quadrant essays, That’s them, put them to the sword! ... Islam says: Kill Debatable: 60 Years in Print, is available from the in the service of Allah those who may want to publisher, Connor Court. A footnoted version of this kill you! ... Islam says: Whatever good there is article appears at Quadrant Online.

Brick

Time rots one, but they don’t break rank— not English bond. One frets to its spade of earth, abandons neat geometry, but the walls hold— the Empire faltered as flesh, not brick. Bricks, like fire and water, are happy serving. Goad them with bombs and their tumbling kills all the King’s men— bricks lose respect for flesh and crush to the bone. Winston Churchill was a hobbyist bricklayer. He knew that brick upon brick was like winning a war—gradually. Let your opponent wear himself thin planning cold cities of marble, while you consolidate with barrow and trowel. A cathedral can be made multiplying brick towards the infinite, until physics cries enough and caps it. A forest falls and shapes so congregations might praise into rafters; each rafter high enough, brick upon brick, to be glimpsed as a perch in heaven.

Ken Stone

Quadrant October 2017 47 Alberto Mingardi

Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism

o the astonishment of many, conserva- missed students. He loved and regarded highly the tism often reflects a sceptical disposition. activity of teaching, which he also practised in the Conservatives are typically dismissed as form of public conferences. Not surprisingly, then, Tunqualified admirers of the past, people who tend to he was a passionate defender of the traditional confuse the two notions of “old” and “good”. Such a concept of academia, as a place for dispassionate cliche seems hardly plausible. Among political thin- inquiry and reflection where “no one has to come to kers worthy of the word, as well as among common a conclusion upon which a decision must be based” people, it’s rare to find any trace of nostalgia for sla- (The Concept of a University, 1973). very, open-air latrines or therapeutic bloodletting. This hardly means that Minogue had no politics Some political thinkers, and common people and no preference for some rather than other politi- too, call themselves “conservatives” not so much cal figures. He certainly did. The editor of a book on because they are unaware of the marvels of progress Thatcherism, he admired and supported Margaret but because they deem a blind faith in the future to Thatcher. He exercised a benign influence on con- be as dangerous as a blind faith in the past. Theirs temporary modern conservatism, together with is not an idolatry of bygone ages, but a kind of pru- other thinkers who coalesced around Shirley and dence. And yet, in a time when enthusiasm gains Bill Letwin in their London salon. Bill Letwin was you followers, being prudent requires true courage. an economist and an LSE colleague of Minogue’s, Kenneth R. Minogue (1930–2013) was a master of Shirley Robin a philosopher who graduated at the fearless arguments for political prudence. Minogue venerable Committee on Social Thought at Chicago. was born in New Zealand and lived with his family In London the Letwins bonded with Oakeshott and in Australia, where he studied at the University of became among the dearest of Minogue’s friends. Sydney without completing his degree. He later Dinner parties at the Letwins were memorable; moved to England, resuming his studies at the their influence on the development of contemporary London School of Economics, where he was to British conservatism of the Thatcherite blend is a teach for forty years after Michael Oakeshott invi- matter historians might profitably explore. Though ted him back as a lecturer. It was a fortunate intu- Minogue was not a “joiner”, he generously helped ition. Minogue was a brilliant thinker and a gifted and supported like-minded think-tanks, in England writer. He published fourteen books and more than and abroad, and ended up being President of the 280 articles and papers, twelve of which are now Mont Pelerin Society, the group of libertarian scho- properly collected in On Liberty and Its Enemies, lars established by Hayek in 1947. He died on the which includes a much needed bibliography. way back from a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in The London School of Economics provided a San Cristobal, in the Galapagos Islands, in 2013. congenial environment for Minogue. Professors Were he to be labelled a “conservative”, Minogue tend to complain about teaching and students, would not have complained. By the time of his considered by many a duty to pay to pursue their death, he was hailed as “one of the world’s foremost own intellectual interests. From conversations we conservative thinkers”. But while reading On Liberty had during his retirement, I gathered that Minogue and Its Enemies, it is hard not to wonder if perhaps another word is needed. These essays prove that, in a felicitous harmony of thought and character, Ken On Liberty and Its Enemies was an individualist. He, as Timothy Fuller notes by Kenneth Minogue, edited by Timothy Fuller in his Introduction, exemplified an approach to life Encounter Books, 2017, 352 pages, $47.99 that Oakeshott identified with “a disposition to

48 Quadrant October 2017 Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism prefer the road to the inn, ambulatory conversation dragon. More precisely, liberalism is a “St George, to deliberation about means for achieving ends, the in the guise of Rationality” that: rules of the road to directions about how to reach a destination”. Minogue reached England by the appearedn i the world somewhere about the sea, from Australia, working his way as a sailor. sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom In his adopted country, he climbed the academic he turned his lance were those of despotic profession without the now indispensable requisite kingship and religious intolerance. These battles of a doctorate. It was a simpler and less formal world. won, he rested a time, until such questions as But it took exceptional talent and determination slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the to sail from New Zealand to the LSE, smiling at poor, began to command his attention. fainting snobs. Such distinction between “a disposition to But, unlike St George, liberalism couldn’t just be ‘self-employed’” and “a disposition to iden- be pleased with the mission accomplished, and tify oneself as a partner with others in a common searched for newer dragons to slay: enterprise” parallels Oakeshott’s dichotomy of non- instrumental rules that regulate interactions among He could only live by fighting for causes—the citizens and rules that are instrumental to achieving people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially some particular purposes. The two have merged fre- oppressed, the underprivileged and the quently in the modern state, an ambiguous mix of underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew what Oakeshott labelled the civic and the enterprise breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller association. dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by. or Minogue, the free society is one in which the government acts as a “civic association”, a traffic The morphing of liberalism—that is, the philo- Flight of sorts that minimises conflicts among indivi- sophy of limited government—into something diffe- duals but doesn’t tell them where to go, nor pursues rent, essentially another justification for ever bigger autonomous projects. Our Western societies: government, wasn’t unnoticed. Joseph Schumpeter famously observed that “as a supreme, if unin- differed from other cultures by the moral tended, compliment, the enemies of the system of practice of individualism, in which the wants private enterprise have thought it wise to appropri- and beliefs of individuals are recognised not ate its label”. Before him, Herbert Spencer conside- as disruptive, but as valuable in themselves … red that “most of those who now pass as Liberals, Custom, rank and religion continued to be are Tories of a new type”, for they contributed to the powerful elements in life, but alongside these proliferation of new rules, instead of sticking to the universals of human experience something new old liberal method of repealing bad ones. had emerged: the recognition of difference as Unlike many St Georgian liberals, Minogue having a value of its own. thought a free society was not a destiny, but rather (“Individualism and Its Contemporary Fate”) the fragile result of a historical evolution which could have followed other paths. The free society Freer societies see a transition “from status to “has emerged from an immensely complex set of contract”, as Herbert Spencer never grew tired of social and moral contingencies, and even to ask pointing out in quoting Henry Maine. In “status” about its ‘causes’ is hopelessly to simplify the remar- relationships, individuals can’t but occupy the layer kable thing that has emerged” (“The Self-Interested of society they’ve been assigned to. In contracts, Society”). Freedom developed from clashes between they’re up to what they signed up for. We can powers, from exchange between countries and peo- thus say that the fundamentals of freedom lie, for ples, from practices being slowly and inadvertently Minogue, in individual responsibility: societies in institutionalised. It wasn’t a simple story, nor the which individuals can account themselves responsi- triumphant march of an idea. To get a glimpse of ble for their choices are free, societies in which they this process, however vague, cannot are not. Fuller calls Minogue “a friend of liberty and the we must imagine a vast range of face-to-face liberal tradition in its classical sense”, very aptly. encounters between Europeans, over a long This may surprise some readers, because Minogue’s period under many varied circumstances, best-known contribution is still The Liberal Mind. changes of demeanour which sometimes In its unforgettable first lines, that book compares evolved into doctrines or explicit practices— liberalism with the story of St George and the such as chivalry—but which were more

Quadrant October 2017 49 Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism

often commonly slight variations in manners a certain type of character to be sustained, to grow and moral assumptions, feeding slowly into and to flourish. A modern free society, understood institutional practices. as an “association of individualists” where the law is silent more often than not, needs self-reliant indivi- estern free societies are places which “found duals to endure. A lavish welfare state typically pro- a way of combining ambivalence with social duces welfare dependence. Such a state of continual Worder” (“Individualism and Its Contemporary reliance on government money may reflect a certain Fate”). The key feature of the modern European shrewdness in navigating the system, but will also civilisation, as we have seen, is that it allows “the affect habits and mores. wants and beliefs of individuals” to be recognised Understanding a certain set of institutions “not as disruptive, but as valuable in themselves”. without considering the culture it produces would People have different preferences, and these change be meaningless for Minogue: like describing the too. But such changes aren’t considered weakening scene in an opera without referring to the characters. or wicked: they become an accep- When it comes to the “conditions table part of life. Free societies are, of freedom”, Minogue points out for Minogue, associations of indivi- that they have “given birth to oppo- dualists: their members can chal- A modern free sitionality; a new ideal of a ratio- lenge authority, they develop mores society, understood nal man as one who exercised an of independence and self-reliance, as an “association independent judgment on matters their historical champion is the fic- which members of his community tional character Robinson Crusoe, of individualists” would previously have foreclosed” ever-resourceful and eager to fight where the law is (“The Conditions of Freedom and for his lot against mother nature the Condition of Freedom”). This and fate. And yet these individua- silent more often habit of questioning everything, lists are not atomised individuals; than not, needs self- submitting it to close scrutiny, is the movement from status to con- reliant individuals indeed a feature of Western socie- tract changes the nature of social ties, but it is worth “distinguishing relationships but doesn’t equate to endure. between piecemeal oppositionality with their demise. “Life for a free which has become an integral part individual is a sequence not of duties of the modern Western world, and or customs but of commitments: to work, marriage, total oppositionality, which construes the modern social arrangements, and so on” (“The Conditions world as an evil system that must be destroyed”. St of Freedom and the Condition of Freedom”). Pace George is a glorious dragon slayer, but if he never its communitarian critics, “the conditional and con- accepts that the big beasts are gone he may end tractual relations associated with capitalism directly up slaughtering kids dressed up like dragons for stimulate social association”. Halloween. It should be pointed out that what today is vaguely called “social criticism” is an actual part of he f theme o the fragility of the free society is Minogue’s philosophising. This may shock aficiona- the real leitmotif of these essays and, perhaps, dos of most contemporary philosophers, with their Tof all of Minogue’s work. Minogue’s understanding acquired taste for abstractions, as well as other social of the history of freedom is in part a cautionary scientists, for example economists who tend to pre- tale for liberals. He dismisses the idea that freedom fer to deal with the problem of designing good rules “is a universal human aspiration”, as “most people of the game, assuming individuals would invariably have never lived in free societies, nor exhibited any respond to incentives following cliches of rationality. desire or capacity for freedom” (“The Self-Interested Minogue didn’t aim to debase the findings of eco- Society”). On the other hand, the longing for a nomic science, which he held in great respect. But in status society is a deep-rooted sentiment in human his perspective rules and culture are so intertwined beings. The most interesting feature of the modern, that either they’re understood at once, or they’re not. relatively free society, for Minogue, is that it created Let me quote again Herbert Spencer, an author Ken a new dimension for the moral life: “the individua- didn’t like very much, who noted that “institutions list as moral agent was concerned not only with the are dependent on character”. According to Spencer, question of whether such-and-such act was right people needed to develop the moral habit of liberty, or wrong, but also with what the act might reveal for a free society to stand. This point, purged of about his own character” (“Individualism and Its any remaining trace of determinism, is central in Contemporary Fate”). Individualists are people who Minogue’s thinking. A certain kind of society needs choose, not people who are chosen by their religion,

50 Quadrant October 2017 Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism rank or social order. A free society adds in com- positions on public affairs”) are taking such a pose, plexity to the moral life, which is not “any parti- subscribing to dreams of social perfection (“The cular moral system, but the daily flow of thoughts Intellectual Left’s Treason of the Heart”, originally and desires we experience as we respond to a sense published in Quadrant). that there is some right thing we ought to be doing” Thus the “conviction that we suffer from conce- (“Two Concepts of the Moral Life”). aled forms of oppression which destroy our freedom This perspective informs Minogue’s criticism of unless they are unmasked” (“The Irresponsibility democracy, which he developed in The Servile Mind of Rights,” also originally published in Quadrant) (2010), the last and most powerful of his books. The becomes widespread. St George ends up confusing Australian philosopher came to consider “democra- liberty with “liberation” of some specific groups tisation” as “the most dramatic of all the corrup- from the ties of past oppressions. Attempts at histo- tions of modernity in which the inherited practice rical understanding are wiped out by what Minogue of balance is to be replaced by a single ideal believed calls “historical perversity”, a sort of ideological ana- to solve all problems”. In a dialectic twist, Minogue chronism which compares the past with the stan- pointed out that modern free societies are not only dards of utopia. remarkably tolerant, but also (and perhaps for this This is of course incompatible with a parsimo- very reason: for their nourishment of dissent and nious view of state powers. A traffic-light kind of new perspectives) highly successful, in technologi- government should not undertake any specificendea- cal and economic progress. Therefore, they tend to vour—and, most notably, should not dare to believe develop an attitude of considering also social prob­ that perfecting society is at hand. lems on par with the sorts of problems that can be solved merely by applying a technique. This is what orality changes too. “Our basic moral duties F.A. Hayek called “constructivism”: the idea that today are owed not to those we encounter society can be bettered, changed and moulded by all dMaily but to those who on a utilitarian calculus are powerful individual minds. in most need of them” (“Two Concepts of the Moral Hayek saw constructivism at work in twentieth- Life”). The little gestures of our daily life appear century social engineering: constructivism was the mean and petty, if compared with the grandiosity fundamental building block of socialism, both in its of world problems. If we can attempt to solve the authoritarian and its democratic variants. Minogue latter, how important could be the first? So moral- points out that the “dominant aspiration of our con- ity escapes the realm of individual choice to become temporaries” is “perfecting society” (“Two Concepts political posturing: it has “liberated itself from the of the Moral Life”). The sort of attitude Hayek merely personal element of being true to oneself and detected with attempted organisation of supplies in become a program for perfecting the world”. The the planned economy is now spreading to the con- contemporary world is marked by the emergence of creteness of the lives of individuals. what Minogue labels “politico-moral”: a hybridised To engineer moral perfection in society, you condition, in which morality is politicised and poli- need first to identify imperfections which need tics is moralised at the same time. to be straightened up. This happens through a You can see, once more, how for Minogue poli- process by which the achievements of free society tics and culture are mutually reinforcing, one way are systematically debased. These days “the whole or another. He didn’t consider either institutions idea of Western civ is assumed to be reactionary and or habits omnipotent, but saw them as siamese oppressive”, as David Brooks recently observed, and twins—they couldn’t go in opposite directions. as such it is continuously narrated. Since freedom is Developments in one area are matched by develop- understood as “a universal human aspiration”, the ments in the other. fact that it came to be realised in this or in that Sometimes “progress”, is not actual progress. part of the world appears but a fortuitous event. A In an echo of Hayek’s discussion of social justice, fortuitous event it was, Minogue would easily agree, Minogue argues that “politico-moral society but this precious historical happening would need resembles traditional societies in that the rulers are to be studied and celebrated. Such an attitude is using their authority to implement the one right hardly in agreement with the dominant view. The way of life, a perfect society, into which each person dominant view sees as freedom as a universal right must fit” (The Servile Mind). In primitive, small of mankind and, on the contrary, Western history groups, political leadership was entitled to make as a collection of abuse and exploitation. Victims of substantive choices for its kinship. In the extended such abuse and exploitation need to be indemnified, order, individuals are supposed to be responsible for society to be eventually just. Intellectuals for their own moral choices. Minogue uses this (“people who have read a lot of books and take up polarity, underlining the moral nuances of the two

Quadrant October 2017 51 Kenneth Minogue and Responsible Individualism poles. Sometimes the reader may get the impression reviving the discussion on inequality. The essays that Ken was himself happy to occasionally épater les published in On Liberty and Its Enemies have no bourgeois, as when he claims that “feminists … are specific answer to Piketty’s arguments, but address well on the way to reinventing the harem, special their cultural background: a preference for equali- quarters in which women traditionally lived entirely tarianism, the lack of appreciation for the capitalist separate lives untainted by the lusts of men” (“The system and the culture of “perfectionism” that mark Goddess that Failed”). Indeed, he loved paradoxes, the thought of social planners. and a contagious sense of humour was among his When he died, Ken Minogue was thinking of many gifts. He found reality often entertaining and a new book, the theme being the nature of liberty. smiled at “the occurrence of folly and illusion among Could he have completed it, some of the arguments the intelligent” (“The Intellectual Left’s Treason of sketched in these articles would have certainly sur- the Heart”). But this does not mean his message faced there. Some of Minogue’s readers may think doesn’t need to be taken seriously. that such a systematic book was not his sort of thing. Like Oakeshott, Minogue had little patience inogue was a splendid writer. His articles are with system builders, and was at his best exposing lucid and carefully crafted, full of bon mots, the follies of ideological thinking. And yet, this col- Meach brilliant enough to make a journalist’s career. lection proves that Ken constantly revolved around a His prose is rhapsodic and voluptuous and can be certain number of themes, the condition of Western appreciated by the philosophically untrained as well liberty being the central one. He was consistent and as by the scholar. Sometimes simplicity is the form rigorous in building upon his previous reflections, clarity of thought takes. This was the case with improving his own long-standing intuitions. We Minogue. should be grateful to Timothy Fuller for giving us Reading On Liberty and Its Enemies in 2017 makes the best possible surrogate of a great book we shall one think of another adjective for its author: pre- never read. scient. Minogue was writing well before “identity politics” became the holy grail of American politics. Dr Mingardi is a Lecturer in the History of Political He died the same year Thomas Piketty’s Capital in Thought at IULM University in Milan and the the Twenty-First Century was published in English Director General of Istituto Bruno Leoni, Italy’s free- and made it to the club of international best-sellers, market think-tank.

Belief’s Possibilities

Your father insists he talks to you inside his head. It’s a compulsion I resist because it seems a way, two years on, not to believe you’re dead; yet when I put pen to paper it’s “you” who insists on being addressed. I could no more write you third person than live guilt free, more or less, and at night I roam amongst images where no words need be said. In truth I can’t believe you living and I cannot believe you dead.

Dennis Haskell

52 Quadrant October 2017 Interrogation

I’m examining my shortcomings. I lay them out like socks, in pairs Packing for a postponed trip I’ve never taken. Now’s the time! Carers Required. Apply Everywhere. I’ve been at standstill, stopped In tracks I didn’t see were mine, Ift i takes a village to raise a child, Licking self-inflicted wounds It requires an army to care That turned to scabs, then silent scars For the child grown old. And brought me to my knees. Come in your multitudes Toss or keep? Recycle or repair? There’s a war going on. Take them to the Salvos, hand them on? Basic fitness. Essential. Hang on to them for one more year? The ability to wait with patience In long hospital corridors. A must. The words to express respect And to show that you know The Vigil For John This is not a reprise of childhood, But something much deeper, a slow Its i years now since you learned to breathe and wait Reluctant unwinding of attachment While the surgeons took my body in their hands To the world. And hours passed and time would not stay straight Preferred. And no-one came, and prayers became demands. I know you are out there, waiting for the You waited long days more until the news was known call There’s more to do we haven’t caught it yet. For the whistle to blow On that day the seeds of fear were sown For Samaritans And so was born the strength that fear begets. To walk tall. You might, right now, be huddled This day, I want to find the words to speak Of your great virtue, that quality of mind In some call-centre hell, thinking That saw me through that first, that worst of weeks You could wait forty shifts for a thank When I was lost in fear and you, your fear confined you, And then not hear it above the second Stayed by my side. And though we’re waiting still By second ticking The strength is in the vigil, the love, the vow fulfilled. Of your targets. Wanted: A manifold brigade Of heroes, devoid of heroics, Competent, strategic, Reliable, kind. Apply now.

Elisabeth Wentworth

Quadrant October 2017 53 Noel Weeks

The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren

ts i commonly believed that Marxism effectively Ultimately Marx’s materialism followed its own died with the collapse of the Soviet Union. logic into saying that only the economy and what it Actually Marxism in a very modified form has did to people mattered. Isurvived and is surprisingly influential in the form There was an additional minor part of the posi- of what I will call its stepchildren. The mixture of tion, which was in time to prove very important. In enduring Marxist features with contradictory and spite of what the theory said, many early Marxists alien elements means the stepchildren’s lineage is were not of working-class origins. The movement not always obvious. found an explanation in saying that certain intel- lectuals could see the truth of Marx’s analysis and arx taught that the progress of history would choose to side with the eventual victors. A less flat- show an increasing polarisation of people into tering possibility would emerge in time. Since all Mtwo groups, Capitalists and Workers. The develop- alternative positions were forbidden by the logic of ment of this polarisation was to be a matter of his- the movement, to be in the forefront of the move- torical determinism. Socio-economic forces would ment conveyed enormous power. push people into the respective groups. There was also a very strong utopian side to This determinism creates one of the fundamental the movement: if the socio-economic perspective and enduring contradictions of Marxism. If I am explained and encompassed all of human reality, determined—that is, forced—by factors beyond my then solving socio-economic problems must solve control into a certain position, I cannot be morally all basic human problems. Were Marxists power- responsible for my actions. Yet Marxist rhetoric is hungry or utopian? Or could motivation change full of attacks on evil capitalists. This form of con- over time in individuals? tradiction emerges repeatedly in the subsequent The belief that the triumph of the work- history. ing class and the overthrow of the existing social A second fundamental plank of Marxism was order would solve society’s fundamental problems that Marx’s socio-economic analysis explained meant that a different form of determinism went every­thing. In part this follows from his materi- along with Marxism’s historical determinism. If the alism. All religious, philosophical and ideological structures of society changed, then life for people positions are socio-economically explained. People would change because it was those structures which may think they have religious or moral objections shaped and determined people. Thus, as Marx’s to Marxism but, whether consciously or not, they historical predictions proved false and fell away, are really contending for the tyranny of the capital- so Marx’s historical determinism was abandoned. ists. It is important to realise that the new moral Later Marxism, and indeed the Left in general, and legal order brought in by Marxism means that became more characterised by situational deter- anything which is not Marxist is reprehensible and minism: people are deterministically shaped by the effectively a crime against the people. situations of their lives and therefore a government Having abolished any moral structure based on a that could change those situations must also change non-material foundation, Marx then sets up an even people for the better. more rigid moral order. Marxism must negate all other religious, humanitarian or idealistic principles. n the aftermath of the First World War it seemed For example, there can be no abstract, general idea for a time that Germany might become a Marxist of justice but only justice for the working class. Any Istate. It did not, and over time Marxism became less general idea of justice could be a disguised attempt and less a political factor in Western Europe and to produce a result contrary to Marxist theory. North America—areas where, according to Marx,

54 Quadrant October 2017 The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren industrialisation and capitalism should lead to the an ideological structure which exhaustively defines communist victory. The dynamic of history, instead right and wrong. That of itself makes them no worse of vindicating Marx, had disproved him. Or had it? than any other theological system. However, the Whatever their motivation, and in most cases characteristic of these materialist systems is that they we will never know, many of Marxism’s advocates move evil from something within men to something were not prepared to accept that the great materi- in an impersonal structure, whether a structure of alist social philosophy had been discredited. They society or a structure of genes, which “good” men had to recast it so that its historical failure did not then must take action to counteract. Hence it is hard discredit it. Two developing factors made this an for them to acknowledge that evil may be within the even greater necessity. One was that the state that very people who are fighting “the evil”. The bibli- did become Marxist, Russia, proved a great embar- cal admonition, “Look to yourself lest you also be rassment. Looked at objectively it confirmed the tempted”, cannot be heard. possibility that Marxism for some people repre- Determinisms, because they say that people are sented a road to power. If the socialist utopia actu- made to be something or do something without ally appeared, those who saw Marxism as a way to their own conscious and deliberate choice, remove power would lose their claim to power. Hence there all basis for moral judgments. Yet the “counter-rev- must always be counter-revolutionaries to fight. olutionaries” and the “evil races” were most cruelly The sad and bloody history of the Soviet Union punished. Millions died for what their murderers’ does not prove there were no utopian Marxists. It system said could not be their fault. This contra- just makes it more likely that they diction is built into the structure of perished under the charge of being Left and Right campaigns against counter-revolutionaries. he characteristic the enemies their own systems The second disaster was the rise T have identified. If the motive is the to political power of racist and fas- of these materialist lust for power, then it is impera- cist movements. The dictatorship systems is that they tive that there are always counter- which came to power in Germany revolutionaries. If the motive is to was not the dictatorship of the pro- move evil from achieve utopia, then its failure to letariat but the dictatorship of the something within arrive seldom leads to reconsidera- Nazis, with working-class support. men to something tion. Rather, the common response What had gone wrong? is that what failed must be pursued Marxists struggled to cope with in an impersonal more vigorously and more enemies Nazism because they could not rec- structure, whether a must be found and destroyed. ognise that racism was their mir- An observable feature of Centre- ror image in an important respect. structure of society or Right and Centre-Left parties is a Marxism meant historical and a structure of genes. tendency to see themselves less in social determinism. Nazism was terms of their principles and more also a determinism, but a genetic in terms of their supporting con- determinism (Germans were genetically good and stituency. Usually this constituency has been socio- Jews genetically bad). To attack racism as determin- economically defined, but tendencies to define it istic would expose Marxists to the counter-attack ethnically are emerging. As this happens, those con- that they too rested on a completely unprovable stituencies are seen as more like the blocks imagined determinism. by both Marxists and racists: either totally good or There was a second mirror image feature: not all totally bad. Nazi leaders were tall blond Nordics. Just as with the Is it any wonder then that the larger political Marxist movement, the extreme Right is a way to groupings prove unable to refute their more radical power. Could the Marxists say this without expos- cousins and risk drifting into holding their positions? ing their own propensity to encourage dictators? If the Left see themselves as the champions of the victimised workers, can they allow that within this ommunism in Russia, China and Cambodia group are those who are enemies not just to the had a shameful and distressing history of bru- capitalists but to each other? If the Right believe that Ctalising and murdering millions. Nazi racism had a there is a naturally superior group, of which of course similar history. Yet both tend to persist. The persist- they are a part, is this not genetic determinism? And ence is not symmetrical: racists until quite recently does not that same genetic determinism teach us were pushed to the margins of respectable society, that all Jews are evil, all Arabs are terrorists and while Marxism had a more sympathetic hearing. all Mexicans are murderers and rapists? This essay The absolutisms of the Left and the Right have concentrates on Marxism, but structurally racism

Quadrant October 2017 55 The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren has very similar characteristics. A crucial factor in suffered under colonialism and those oppressed the survival of the doctrinaire Right and Left is that racial minorities in Western countries. The former the centrist parties are promoting similar ways of colonies were a logical choice for a Marxist because thinking. Marx had incorporated European colonialism into his theory of capitalism looking for new groups to ather than accept the failure of Marxism, the oppress. Further, the American Blacks furnished influential German Marxist think-tank the plenty of evidence of victimisation. Women were a RFrankfurt Institute turned to Freud and his psycho- second category and once again evidence of oppres- logical determinism. They argued that the propen- sion was easy to find. The third group was men- sity of the German populace to support right-wing tioned a little more guardedly, given that the book dictators was because of traditional German child- (Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation) was published in raising, which had conditioned them to look to 1955, before general attitudes changed, but it was authority. An attack on authoritarian child-raising quite clear that Marcuse was referring to those was also a useful stick with which to beat traditional whose sexual activities were outside the norm. Christian society. Originally that looked like wishful thinking. As an argument it was useful yet it was effectively However, things were to change. an admission that Marx’s all-determining determin- ism was not the only factor shaping human nature. n the late 1960s and early 1970s a wave of discon- To save Marxism, the Marxists had to move away tent struck many societies in the West. It would from Marx. If the working class could be shaped by Ibe inaccurate to call it a Marxist revolution as in other determinisms, could it bring the revolution? some respects it was quite alien to Marx. What I All arguments that rest upon discovering the call Marx’s stepchildren become more comprehen- determinisms behind one’s opponents are hand- sible when we see that they are a combination of grenades which can be caught and tossed back. If the concerns of the 1960s and 1970s revolution with psychological determinism is valid it should also some Marxist features. The contradictions of these explain why Marxists believe what they do. This use movements are more explicable when we see that of arguments, which should undermine one’s own contrary factors have been combined. position if really believed, becomes a common fea- After the Second World War, in the era of ture in the history that follows. It is evidence that Eisenhower and Menzies, society was socially and the issue is power rather than truth. economically conservative. I suspect that this con- When the Nazis came to power in Germany, servatism was less ideological and more a reaction the Frankfurt Institute was threatened because it to the traumas of the Depression and the war. In as was politically far to the Left and because its leaders far as that conservatism was a moral conservatism, were Jewish. Hence it moved and became attached especially in matters of sexual and family ethics, to Columbia University in New York. There it faced it was supported by the influence of the churches. another question. How was the lack of wide appeal However, church positions lacked firm foundations. of Marxism in America to be explained? The answer Mainline Protestant churches had largely adopted was that the working class had been bribed by the the teaching of liberal theology and biblical criti- material benefits of capitalism, aided by the success cism that the Bible could not be assumed to be true. of the mass media in reducing culture to a low level That meant that church teaching had no more for general consumption. Notice again that to save authority than tradition and placed those churches Marxism the intellectual foundations of Marxism in the same dilemma as churches that rested on the are being abandoned. If material bribes and the authority of tradition in a modernising world. pabulum of mass media can sway the masses, what A factor dear to the ethos of the West was to has happened to Marx’s irreversible determinism? come into collision with this conservatism. “Choice” Notice also that the Marxist is again the one who and “freedom” had become part of the Western stands apart from the herd, gazing with superiority, ethos. Western propaganda against the Soviet as one who is impervious to the dynamics which Union depended largely on appeals to freedom. control ordinary men. Democracy was promoted as the right to choice. Yet such disdain was of little consolation in the However, conservative morality limited freedom post-war atmosphere of surging capitalism and and denied choice in marital and sexual ethics. anti-communism. The surviving Marxists, notably A new generation, to whom the Depression and Herbert Marcuse, were forced to look for alterna- the war were not living memories, found themselves tives to the working class that could be seen as vic- denied choice when it came to conscription for the timised and needing liberation. One possibility was unpopular Vietnam War. They saw the hypocrisy of non-European groups, both those who had once the treatment of America’s Black population. They

56 Quadrant October 2017 The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren reactedn i the name of freedom against their par- moral categories. ents’ moral norms. In turn their parents’ generation The three stepchildren to which I refer are those discovered how flimsy were the bases of those rules that Marcuse looked to as the victimised groups and that they themselves secretly chafed against to which Marxism might appeal: non-Europeans, them. Here was a revolution of sorts, and revolu- women, and those of different sexuality. The issue tions are beloved in Marxist theory. here is not one of whether we can find instances Yet consider some features, especially if we con- of wrong done to these people. To varying degrees centrate on the influential American form of the their victim status is not the issue. Rather it is the movement. It was largely a movement of college and conceptualisation of them as homogeneous blocks university students. In the America of the 1960s ter- and the mixing of beliefs in determinism with com- tiary students were overwhelmingly from the middle mitment to the supremacy of choice. and upper class. This was not a workers’ movement. Further, let us take the notion of “choice”. It is ts i not hard to find instances of mistreatment of contrary to the determinisms which have been the other peoples during the era of European coloni- basis of both Marxism and racism. It is a Western, Ialism and imperialism. However, it is not the indi- and particularly American mantra, because practi- vidual cases of abuse that are in question here. It is cally you need to be rich to have choices. Most of the doctrine that the non-Europeans were always mankind are prevented by practical circumstances the abused and the Europeans always the abusers. from exercising choice. Yes, Marxism would com- It requires massive simplifications and distortions bine with and utilise this movement but in doing so of history to reach these conclusions. However, my it moved further from its foundations. Or perhaps concern is the present consequences. we should say that this movement adopted certain A clear example is the great difficulty the Left Marxist axioms and allowed them to shape it. In has in coming to terms with the terrorist move- reality, if it were not for certain features that have ments emerging from certain teachings within a very Marxist flavour, connecting the result with Islam. Marxists cannot see their mirror image in Marxism would be absurd. Islam. Islam allows no distinction between church In time many of the “revolutionaries” would give and state. Since the religious should rule the coun- substance to the Marxist critique of American soci- try, being pious in the Muslim sense conveys huge ety. They would accept the bribes of capitalism, find potential power. The most religiously correct have lucrative employment and “settle down”. However, the right not just to command the religion but also they did not end their reaction against conservative the country. Historians of Islam have been aware of family and sexual norms, and their commitment to this dynamic ever since Ibn Khaldun in the Middle choice. Public (commercial) and private (family) life Ages drew attention to it from within Islam. ceased to be governed by the same rules. Marxism also allows no distinction between church and state. The consequence is once again the ts i the coming together of Marxism, modified by assumed right to total power. All non-materialist, rejection of historical determinism and the aban- non-Marxist ideology is a defence of the evil groups Idonment of the working class as the instrument of against which Marxism is fighting and therefore revolution, with the revolution in favour of choice should be suppressed. Once Marxism has declared and freedom, that has produced the stepchildren I a group to be the victims, crusading for whom gives will describe. They do not have the two great influ- the Marxist moral superiority over everyone else, ences in equal proportions or the same proportions. any disagreement with Marxist views marks one as Often the two influences produce quite contradic- an oppressor. tory results, sometimes sadly contradictory, some- Further, if there can be no real religious motiva- times absurdly contradictory. tion, because materialism tells us there are no tran- Marx, in a crucial respect, was more realis- scendent truths, then to accept that some people are tic than his stepchildren. He taught a polarisation really motivated by Islam would be to treat religion between two groups but knew that that polarisation as real and therefore to undermine materialism. To was not total in the present. It was the operating of take Muslims at their word might mean Christians socio-economic forces over time which would make had to be taken as genuine, even if in Marxist terms it total. The stepchildren differ in the tendency to they are misguided. Yet Marxism holds them to be posit a present polarisation, even in some cases one of the uniformly evil groups. reaching far into the past. What is consistent with The simple reality is that Islam is not uniform. Marx is the tendency to see people on the “wrong” When I state that certain radical movements have side of this polarisation as evil, even when the mate- found their basis in some aspects of Islamic teach- rialist philosophy of recent Marxists relativises all ing, I am not claiming that is true of all Muslims.

Quadrant October 2017 57 The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren

The great danger of the absurdity that refuses to However, there are elements in those countries acknowledge that radical Islam is indeed in some who will appropriate that aid to enrich themselves. sense Islamic, is that it gives cover to the racists who Can we face that fact if we believe those groups are conclude that all Muslims are potential terrorists. homogeneous? We see the result of the belief that all once-colo- nised people are victims, who must be treated as all he historical and present mistreatment of good while Europeans are all evil. Racists can take some women is not in question. The issue is that same belief in homogeneous groups and con- Tonce again whether all women are victims and all clude that since some Muslims are dangerous, all men are oppressors. Even if most women are vic- Muslims are dangerous. tims and most men are oppressors, the Marxists The mess that is the present Islamic world is have not proved their point. If it is just a matter of to a large degree the creation of the secular West. majorities, then judgments and official actions must The potential for religious groups in Islamic coun- discriminate. tries to claim and seize political power encouraged Although some sanity is returning to historical governments to be heavy-handed in their retention studies, there was a period in which history, espe- of power. The invasion of Iraq under a Republican cially ancient history, was read in terms of all women president was carried out without serious planning as victims, and hence the fact that some women in of what would happen when the authoritarian gov- some periods were prominent actors in society had ernment was removed. Believing that the gift of to be suppressed. Teaching that all women were democracy and the right to choose would be seized helpless victims until we arrived depreciates femi- with alacrity by those they liber- nine achievement and ability. The ated, the invading powers saw no reaction to that unhappy period need to take Islam, with its bitter of scholarship has been over-con- Sunni–Shiite division, seriously. Marxists have to centration on these examples of Under the lead of a Democrat insist that the groups prominent women. Actually the president, the West proceeded big picture looks more like women to take the same approach with they champion are in the upper strata of society doing Egypt, Syria and Libya. Egypt has uniformly good so that reasonably well, as compared to come out of the mess by re-estab- anybody who disagrees both males and females in lower lishing military dictatorship, with groups. That is not to deny that wide popular support. The reality is can be persecuted. these upper-class women may have that people facing chaos may prefer had problems of their own. It is just stability over choice. (Unless the to try to introduce some balance Centre-Right and the Centre-Left can overcome into the discussion. their bickering and face our growing social and eco- It may seem curious that a Marxist discussion nomic problems, the same may happen here.) It does could not appreciate the reality of social differences, not matter whether secularists lean to the Right or so perhaps there is something additional here: the Left, their view of the world makes them poorly choice. It is curious that the Left in many Western equipped to deal with religion. Marxism in its lack countries, including our own, is quite supportive of of reflection on the dangers inherent in its ideology, prostitution, when all the careful surveys point to even with Stalinism as such an obvious example, is victimised women sentenced by corruption or pov- poorly placed. erty to a miserable existence, often attempting to The demonisation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an survive through drugs. In an analogous way easy excellent example of the absurdity of the Marxist divorce and de facto marriage have produced a large position. She has been a victim, she is an atheist group of the new poor: single mothers with chil- and she is fighting real examples of oppression, dren. Where is the feminist voice in these issues? including the oppression of one of the groups that Surely evil men are a factor in many of these situ- the Marxists claim to be defending. Yet by showing ations. How can such situations be defended? The that there is victimisation within Islam she under- answer is “choice”. If some women want to be pros- mines the fundamental doctrine that those claimed titutes, that is their choice. To make divorce harder as victims are homogeneous. would take away choice. Is choice a practical reality The fact that non-European groups are not in those situations or an excuse? uniform has significance for the debate over for- I mentioned earlier that, historically and speak- eign aid. Western countries, spurred by guilt and ing very generally, upper-class women tend to be internal pressure, give large amounts of money to less affected by victimisation. I suspect that, though poorer countries. That they do so is commendable. the emotional toll of divorce is horrendous, women

58 Quadrant October 2017 The Marxist Resurgence and Its Three Stepchildren from wealthy groups can survive it better finan- victimising those who are already victims. It is cru- cially. Wealthy women probably do not need to cial that the victim group be homogeneous because fear being pressed into prostitution. “Choice” as I if there were evil people among such groups, criti- mentioned before is a mantra with those who are cism might be justified and the “Marxist” basis wealthy enough to choose. Is the great irony the for persecution would be undermined. Once again fact that these “stepchildren” are very far from the there are mirror images. It is crucial for racists that impoverished working class Marx claimed to be the groups they target have no good people. If there defending? are good people among the target group then the If we take the issue of divorce as an example, whole basis for uniform persecution of that group such social issues are difficult to solve by legisla- is lost. Marxists have to insist that the groups they tion. Of course politicians, whether out of vanity or champion are uniformly good so that anybody who political calculation, claim to solve every problem, disagrees can be persecuted. generally by overburdening the school system with irrelevant tasks. Yet the reality is governments are t has been my privilege to live in a Muslim com- blunt instruments for solving social problems. The munity in the Middle East. I deeply appreciated institutions of civil society are needed. Yet these are tIheir kindness and hospitality. Yet the present evil the institutions both Left and Right hate because within Islam grieves me. I owe my professional they interrupt their aim of total control and they are level and hence social standing to the philanthropy often religiously based. of that very generous people, the Jews. Yet the set- tlement policy of the State of Israel concerns me arcuse was careful and circumspect in iden- greatly. To appreciate and respect is not incompat- tifying his third group, and things have ible with disagreement. That is because there are cMhanged greatly since he wrote. Yet strange things moral standards: there is right and wrong. When have happened in this area. The revelation via the both the Right and Left say that we cannot have AIDS crisis that homosexual practice was danger- moral standards that lead to their being criticised, ous produced a curious defence. Homosexuality then we must learn from history. An ideology that was claimed to be genetic. Historically genetic thinks its classification of human society into good determinism belongs to the Right and the Nazis. and bad may not be questioned is dangerous. Besides, if it was genetic, natural selection should Less dangerous governments and political par- remove it from the population. ties are keen to tell us that their government will Even stranger notions have followed. It is now solve every social problem. But government is a blunt proclaimed that gender is a matter of choice. Those instrument for solving social problems. It tends to who choose to be of the opposite gender must be lead to treating people as blocks without the neces- respected and facilitated. We were once told we sary discrimination. Of course crimes and acts of must believe in the genetic basis of homosexuality, injustice need to be dealt with, but below that level even when the genes had not been identified. We is a mass of complicated situations. I dare to suggest are now told that the visible chromosomal basis of that the doctrine of “choice” is making that worse. sexuality is totally irrelevant. And both claims are When it comes to relationships with other people coming from the same group. Perhaps I should use we are not free to suit ourselves. We are bound in “Marxist” in quotes from now on. a network of mutual responsibilities. If the teach- Here we see clearly the older ideology with its ing of those responsibilities has a Christian back- basis in determinism, even when the sort of deter- ground, so what? Society still needs it. When the minism is switched. And we see how the right of Left and Right, correctly fearing moral and logical the individual to choose overwhelms everything. criticism, combine with the doctrine of individual The strange mixture clearly illustrates the mar- selfishness, then we are in real trouble. Morality riage of the Marxist ideology of the victim with discriminates within groups and thus threatens the the upper-class revolt in defence of their right to road to power for the ideological groups and the choose. right to victimise for the “free” individual. That is Yet there is another feature that is very Marxist. why the right to have a moral code and to live by it Choice is forbidden to those on the “wrong” side. is so offensive in our time. The people who will not celebrate a homosexual wedding have to be driven out of business. At the Noel Weeks is a retired Senior Lecturer in Ancient moment, the penalty for questioning the “Marxist” History at the University of Sydney. He has degrees in lack of logic is social stigma, but that may change. zoology, theology and Ancient Near Eastern History Always the charge against dissenters is that they are and languages.

Quadrant October 2017 59 Mama Amazonica

1  

Picture my mother as a baby, afloat on a waterlily leaf, a nametag round her wrist— Victoria amazonica. She hears the first roar There are rapids ahead of the howler monkey, the doctors call “mania”. then the harpy eagle’s swoop, For now, all is quiet— the crash through galleries of leaves, she’s on a deep sleep cure, the sudden snatch a sloth clings to the cecropia tree, then the silence in the troop. a jaguar sniffs the bank.

My mother on her green raft, 3 its web of ribs, its underside of spines. Haloperidol, I’ll sing her a lullaby, phenobarbital— tell her how her quilted crib they’ve tried them all has been known to support those witch doctors, and still a carefully balanced adult. she leaps up in her green nightie My newborn mama and fumbles to make tea, washed clean by the drugs, slopping the cup over her bed a caiman basking beside her. like the queen of rain. See her change from nightclub singer 2 to giant bloom

All around her the other patients snore in the glow of the nightlight— while her eyes open their mandorlas. a mezzo-soprano Now my mother is turning under the red moon. into the flower, She’s drawing the night-flying scarabs she’s heating up. By nightfall into the crucible of her mind. her bud opens its petals Over and over they land to release and burrow into her lace. the heady scent of pineapple. By dawn she closes her petals. How the jungle storeys stir in the breeze from the window behind her.

60 Quadrant October 2017 4

All the next day the beetles stay inside her, the males mount the females, their claws hooked round forewings. There is pollen to feed on— no need to leave their pension. Musician-Wren Night after night, my mother replays this—how the white My mother, who today is just a coat hung on the line— lily of her youth let that scarab of a man let me be a musician-wren and nest in your pocket scuttle into her floral chamber before she could cry no. to sing you these fluted notes straight from the forest’s throat. She flushes a deep carmine, too dirty to get up.

And her face releases them— Macaw Mummy the petals of her cheeks spring open. Black beetles crawl out, up the ward walls. Soon they will unwrap her. Soon it will be over— only five hundred years to go. What did he put in her drink? Whatever it was has given her a dream she can’t escape from, however much she wills the bandages to unwind, her eyes to open, however much she promises never to cry again. Her scarlet feathers lie bravely under the ice of his deep-frozen duvet.

Pascale Petit

Quadrant October 2017 61 Patrick Morgan

The Para-Government Subverting Our Democracy

The temporary possessors and life-renters, unmindful cials were forced out. Within a week the AFL had of what they have received from their ancestors, swung from a trendy embrace of politically correct or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if policies, including Muslims, to enforcing traditional they were the entire masters; that they should not Christian morality. The AFL claimed they acted think it amongst their rights to commit waste on the because the two Muslims and the two affairs were inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole trashing their brand, but in fact the AFL hierarchy original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave had already trashed their own brand by radically to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an changing the nature of their organisation, from one habitation. By this unprincipled facility of changing devoted to football to one ridiculously aspiring to a the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways be a moral guardian to the community, moving the as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain AFL in Burke’s terms from an organic towards an and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. artificial organisation. —Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution Each activity in life has rules intrinsic to its in France nature which govern its behaviour, and damage occurs should these rules be changed or blurred. t’s o hard t keep up with fast-moving develop- Journalists should report the news, and academics ments, which are at present creating an alarm- should conduct dispassionate research, but many ingly flaky and unsettling atmosphere. The in both professions want to become political actors PIhilippines President supports extra-judicial kill- themselves. The wild swings in AFL behaviour are a ings; the US President loves WikiLeaks, which sign of a lack of any firm belief at its core. The ground aims to disable his own country. There seem to be on which such bodies attempt to stand—diversity, no firm rules left. We need to resist being carried tolerance, inclusiveness, multiculturalism—are not away by sudden wild mood swings in public opin- values or beliefs in themselves, but admirable dis- ion. Edmund Burke’s reflections help us orient our- positions only after you have firm beliefs and val- selves today. He distinguished between two types ues. Otherwise these become mere buzzwords used of organisation: organic ones which rise naturally by the politically correct to enforce their opposites, in civil society over time, in contrast to artificial, intolerance and non-inclusiveness. This is because instant, top-down structures, like the Committee postmodernism is based on anything-goes and all- for Public Safety, conjured into existence out of is-equal, not fixed, deeply held beliefs. Today we nowhere. have identity politics, which puts each identity in A panic attack recently suffered by the Australian a silo (Muslim, Aboriginal, feminist, fluid gender) Football League (AFL) is an instructive example and privileges it over others, the exact opposite of in microcosm of the weaknesses today’s institu- multiculturalism. tions are prey to. The AFL’s designated role model Most institutions grow naturally. Tennis clubs for youth, Bashar Houli, and its diversity manager, in nineteenth-century Victoria after some time Ali Fahour, were both caught out bashing fellow gradually came together and formed a state co- players on the field, hardly tolerant or inclusive ordinating body, the LTAV. Then some time later behaviour. Weakened by this debacle, the AFL’s these state bodies formed a national body above bigwigs panicked when two office affairs involv- them, the LTAA. The LTAA exists per favour of ing senior male officials were revealed. Though the the state bodies; it is a natural federation like our sexual affairs were consensual, no complaints were Commonwealth. If the state bodies dissolved there made and nothing unlawful happened, the two offi- would be no LTAA; the LTAA would be like a

62 Quadrant October 2017 The Para-Government Subverting Our Democracy roof o with n building underneath to hold it up. But meetings are, like the Senate, often deadlocked. So if the LTAA disappeared, the state bodies would much for a federal system. continue to exist and function. The AFL, having Commentators are now attempting to get around gone nationwide, is in danger of losing touch with democracy and the civil society which gave it birth. its local supporter base. In the Age/Sydney Morning Herald of June 23, four The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, artificial fed- “silvertail subversives” called for radical changes in erations of disparate parts, did not emerge over time our system. Richard Walsh, believing “our system from civil society, as our democratic structures did. is broken”, called for “what amounts to a revolu- Both came into existence in the chaos after the First tion”. Our system is not broken—these silvertails World War, when supernational political structures are trying to break it. Walsh wants an unelected were created out of nothing by powerful unelected advisory council of “national treasures” supporting a forces in order to control, that is to suppress, the president, which sounds like elitism gone mad. Our legitimate national aspirations of their constituents, legal system is now used in some cases to bypass the northern and southern Slavs, who were not parliament, for example on refugee issues. When asked their opinion. Under pressure with the col- Minister Dutton tried to deport an Iranian fam- lapse of communism in 1990, and with no real glue ily who had taken a holiday in Iran while claiming underneath to bond them together, both federations a justified fear of persecution, he was overruled by disintegrated overnight. The speed of their going the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. In both the was the giveaway, no civil strife, no supporters even, republic and Aboriginal referendum issues, we are though “polls” had regularly shown over 90 per cent being asked to agree to a motherhood proposition, support. Today we have a mixture of organic and only to find out later that there is “unfinished busi- imposed structures, so we need to understand and ness”. In the Aboriginal case it is a body to negotiate internalise the rules of the former, and to be wary of a treaty, which implies the Aboriginal negotiating the behaviour of the latter. party is itself a sovereign entity. Some Labor sup- porters of the republic favour, after abolishing the n the past, domination by one group—army, position of governor-general, also abolishing the king, revolutionary activists—precluded free- Senate and the states; Bob Brown wants a world Idom for citizens. In our democracy we have fine- government. No matter what is conceded, the thirst tuned our institutions over centuries so that no for more change is never assuaged. Supporters of the one group has absolute power. We are ruled by the independence an Australian republic would suppos- lower house of parliament, the prime seat of power, edly bestow on us are the same people who enthu- but one restrained by a system of checks and bal- siastically support our signing UN treaties which ances—separation of powers and balance of power. diminish our independence. The lower house is advised and curbed by the upper In Double Take (1996) Les Murray wrote of the house, by the opposition, by the governor general, creation in Australia of “an unelected para-govern- by the states, by the legal system, by international ment made up of the media, humanities faculties in treaties, by civil society, and by, most importantly, the universities and a system of semi-governmental elections, all of which are sanctions on absolute boards and authorities”. This para-government, the power. So no one group, including parliament, has public voice of the new establishment, is the con- absolute sovereignty. veyor of the current mindset to the wider public. It But recently these review bodies have been seek- creates a misleading impression of what public opin- ing power in their own right, by choking the proper ion is by constructing a one-sided narrative on, for workings of government. The gridlocked Senate is example, border protection, Muslim immigration, the most publicised case, but other balance-of-power same-sex marriage, the republic, welfare recipients, bodies now compete with the federal government as educational policies and climate change, issues on rival centres of power, launching pads against the which media grandstanders are often well out of government they were inaugurated to help. The sync with pub talk. The true role of public bodies federal opposition, having got us into massive debt should be to listen as well as transmit, but they have during their years in power, now blocks about $13 ceased listening. As a result the state cannot hear its billion in savings designed to remedy this situation, own citizens. calling them zombie bills. In fact, blocking the bills Large, well-funded public institutions persuade is the zombie behaviour. The British House of Lords ordinary people they are victims of social injustice, a is obliged to eventually pass budget bills for the form of grooming of prospective clients. These peo- proper working of government. By going it alone ple then become vexatious complainants, join the on its failed energy system, South Australia makes grievance queues and apply to these same bodies for a national energy system hard to achieve, so COAG financial compensation, a closed system. People are

Quadrant October 2017 63 The Para-Government Subverting Our Democracy forcedo t remake themselves, for their own short- threatening the former satellite countries of Eastern term benefit, as victims of the system, rather than Europe, and interfering in the Middle East. China citizens of society. In the past, organisations repre- dominates Tibet, Hong Kong, the Uighur areas in sented their members and argued to a wider audi- its west and the South China Sea to its east. Both ence on their behalf. Now this direction has been agglomerations project “soft” and economic power reversed, and new bodies try to convert their mem- backed by the threat of military force, using cyber bers, whom they consider old-hat, to their unrepre- disinformation and hacking to act as a spoiler. sentative agendas. China is more dangerous because more rational in its aims, with a rapidly growing internal economy, he UN, the EU, quasi-government bodies like whereas the Russian economy is in recession, and its the Human Rights Commission, and many infrastructure neglected. With the other overarch- Tgovernment bureaucracies and NGOs, are elitist, ing superpower blocs—the UN, the EU, the USA fashionably progressive in their views, uncontrol- and Russia—faltering for various reasons, the way lable, and most important, undismissible. The EU is open for China to become even more dominant. revealed its nastiness and true colours when one When lobbyists and schemers, such as Anthony member wanted to leave. These bodies are outside Scaramucci and Paul Manafort, and those who met democratic structures and beholden to no one, not with Donald Trump Jr, rise to the surface and come even their own members. Self- close to power, you fear deep-seated aggrandising and with untram- social instability. When President melled power, their main mission is n the past, Trump said, “We are killers too,” to extend their grasp, as the EU puts I and “I love WikiLeaks,” he revealed it, “ever closer union”, even when organisations himself not as a patriot making Brexit, the Greek meltdown, euro represented their America great again, but as a typi- weaknesses and immigration over- cal New York liberal Democrat load showed the unified system of members and argued who believes in moral equivalence “one size fits all” was not working. to a wider audience and excoriates his own country. The Volker Turk, an Austrian who CIA rightly claims WikiLeaks is is a senior UNHRC official for on their behalf. Now the prime conduit through which the protection of displaced peo- this direction has been Russia spreads its cyber disinfor- ples, told the world our government reversed, and new mation, trying to wreck what it had broken an agreement, a serious can’t control, yet the President sup- charge. When you drilled down bodies try to convert ports it (until his next change of it amounted to a matter of seek- their members to mind). The US liberal media has ing ministerial discretion over a until lately been acting as cheer small number of individual cases, a their unrepresentative leader for Assange, Manning and minor everyday occurrence in inter- agendas. Snowden, and was soft on Russia. It governmental matters, not a formal is now suddenly anti-Russian, hold- agreement. It was the insolence of ing hands with the McCain Right, Turk’s attitude that was the real problem. After hav- since it hopes to skewer Trump over his pro-Russian ing made a bogus claim, he berated us for our border stance, his great weakness. The New York Review protection policies, which, unlike those of the EU, of Books (July 13) ran an article correctly pointing are effective. Allowing unorganised refugee flows out all the contradictions and deceptions in the into Europe goes against the UNHRC’s own policy behaviour of Julian Assange. Good, but opportun- of orderly dispersal of the many refugees waiting for istic because the sudden swing from one view to its years in its own camps. opposite betrays an absence of permanent under- Russia and China are the worst forms of top- lying beliefs. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the masses down artificial structures, not totalitarian but barrack one night for Eurasia and the next, after imbued by the mindset of their past, and much more a sudden change of political alignment, barrack on malign than the UN and the EU. They are not so cue for Oceania or EastAsia. As with the AFL, we much nations as aggressive imperialisms, forcibly should notice, not the present “position” taken, but yoking together disparate regions and swallow- that the enthusiasms are confected. ing unwilling parts, both internally and externally. The US has had a long and wonderful track Elections, free speech and an open economy are all record, initially freeing itself from British impe- curtailed. Russia hopes to set up a new CIS with rial overlordship, then abolishing slavery, saving its reluctant neighbours, meanwhile taking Crimea Europe in both world wars (including ourselves in and bits of eastern Ukraine and Georgia, as well as the second), and preserving freedoms by winning

64 Quadrant October 2017 The Para-Government Subverting Our Democracy the Cold War. If the undefined phrase “draining an area not controlled by Manila. (A caliphate is the swamp” refers to the workings of Washington, the most extreme form of artificial, top-down, as it seems to, it is completely the wrong metaphor. non-elected structure you can imagine.) When the Our consolation is that long-established and sensi- Madawi insurrection persisted, the Philippine army ble US institutions now continue to run the coun- chiefs called in US military help without informing try, without and to some extent against Trump. The their leader, and are now working in co-operation swamp is the para-government consisting of East with the terrorist outfit, the Moro Liberation Front, and West coast liberals, the universities and parts not a sensible strategy. As with Trump, Duterte’s of the media, which don’t love America. We must unpredictable behaviour has sidelined him. The wait to see how the Trump adventure turns out, Madawi caliphate problem is now linked to a sud- but things don’t look promising. His election held den Muslim extremist insurgency in Indonesia, as out hope that the politically correct Left, the real the Indonesian legal system caved in to outrageous swamp, might be reined in. But if, as looks possi- demands to jail the mayor of Jakarta. ble, he discredits himself, it will also discredit the At some periods popular opinion creates a sud- attempt to de-authorise the progressives, and give den tsunami of charged ideological attitudes. The them a new lease of life. playwright Eugene Ionesco once warned against these “mental mutations”, which cause people to nsteadf o focusing on Trump we should be alert adopt regressive herd instincts, charging around like to a developing problem in our region. The rhinoceroses. We need to retain a sense of propor- IPhilippine President Duterte is like Trump on ster- tion and to work through the civil society bodies so oids. In a hissy fit he announced he was dropping as not to succumb to the dangerous mood develop- the US alliance and was turning to, of all partners, ing in various parts of the world. China, which itself was reprimanded by the World Court for illegally commandeering maritime areas Patrick Morgan’s most recent book is The Vandemonian near the Philippines. Next came the attempt at a Trail. This article is based on a talk he gave in August caliphate at Madawi in the southern Philippines, to the Turks Head Club in Melbourne.

Playground Triumph (2)

“Getting the dirty water off Your chest” was derelicts’ and red- Neck miners’ slang for having sex, And not just the police, but wives Were called “the filth”. Such idioms, As naturally as mother’s milk, Fed up with inner turbulence, Helped form the fabric of my soul, Its yellow coating, partly from And when today I poked my tongue Keeping the half-loved, tabooed side Out in the mirror at myself, Of my verbal identity Under control reminded me Of how I won a school-yard cheer, The trophy for foul language which If printed here would without fire Reduce the paper to black ash.

Graeme Hetherington

Quadrant October 2017 65 James Allan

Timeo t Clip the Senate’s Wings

t might surprise a good number of Australians, Australia opting for a Swiss-inspired direct-democ- and perhaps even the odd Australian legal aca- racy section 128 which requires amendments to be demic, that by far the biggest influence in draft- passed in at least one house of the national parlia- Iing the 1901 Australian Constitution was the US ment and then to win a two-pronged referendum Constitution. We copied and mimicked big chunks needing a majority of voters nationally and a major- from the Americans. Indeed, I’d say that ours is the ity of voters in a majority of the states—and second, most American constitution in the democratic world, they rejected the US model when it came to having with the possible exception of the Philippines. So a Bill of Rights. ours is certainly therefore the most successful exer- There have been forty-four constitutional refer- cise in plagiarising the US Constitution, and let’s be enda in Australia and thirty-eight have failed. All clear that when it comes to drafting a constitution but five of those failures lost on the first prong of not there is nothing wrong with plagiarism. Only a fool garnering a majority of voters nationwide, meaning would not look around to see what already works. the majority rejected change. The framers of our Constitution—and by the But it does not follow that our Constitution is way, ours is one of the world’s oldest written consti- a procedurally difficult one to change. I differ with tutions, which is a sure sign that it is a good one— Professors Anne Twomey, George Williams and a were extremely well acquainted with the American few others on this point. A system like ours that model. Albeit in the context of the inherited British asks you to get one person over half the voters to Westminster parliamentary model, they opted for agree, with a nod towards a federalist component of a US-style elected Upper House, rather than the also asking for half the voters in over half the states, Canadian or UK options which in practice are basi- is not a comparatively difficult constitutional proce- cally unicameral—though I should note that at the dural hurdle. Just look at what you need in the US or time of federation the US’s Senate was indirectly Canada if you want to see tough procedural hurdles elected, its members being chosen by state legisla- to constitutional change, and ones that never, ever tures, which explains bits of sections 7 and 24 of our ask the regular voters but only ask the political class. Constitution (the sections so egregiously misused And notice that the constitutional amending by the High Court majorities in Roach and Rowe). requirement in Canada sometimes, on some issues, The framers also copied the American model requires unanimity of all ten provinces’ legislatures of federalism rather than the Canadian one, basi- plus the national legislature in Ottawa—includ- cally opting for “one list of the centre’s powers, all ing on the issue of changing the monarchy. Ever else to the states” rather than Canada’s “two lists of wonder why no one talks about republicanism in powers”, on the assumption that any fair interpreter Canada? It’s because it cannot happen given the would take that to mean that a lot was being left to Constitution’s amending formula. That post-1982 the states, as opposed to relentlessly gutting state Canadian Constitution is a procedurally hard one powers on behalf of the centre. And the framers to change or alter, a few orders of magnitude harder left the choosing of the top state court judges to the than ours. states, as in the US, not to the centre, as in Canada. So claims that Australia’s Constitution is hard Australia even copied the US in opting to create a to amend are factually wrong as well as elitist and national capital city not part of any state. undemocratic, in that they imply that the majority As far as important matters go, the Australian of Australia’s voters in the thirty-eight failed con- founders only rejected the US model when it came, stitutional referenda were somehow wrong, unin- first, to the constitutional amending provision— formed, stupidly misguided and not as enlightened

66 Quadrant October 2017 Timeo t Clip the Senate’s Wings as some self-styled constitutional experts. constitutional method to resolve the impasse. You You can explain the low hit-rate for constitu- just have to wait for politics to run its course. Think tional change in this country simply by assuming about the now fairly regular inability to pass a budget that voters like our Constitution and think it does in the US and the concomitant, and not infrequent, not need much changing. I agree with that posi- threats of closing down government services. This tion and I almost always agree with the voters’ past is resolved simply by waiting to see who blinks first choices in all forty-four constitutional referenda. under the political pressure that builds up as a result Moreover, I am prepared to bet right now that the of such threats and their implementation. indigenous recognition proposal will also fail. It But here in Australia we have section 57, a care- will fail because it is a bad idea—which admittedly fully calibrated mechanism for resolving disputes makes me almost (not quite, but almost) unique between the two houses of parliament. This is the amongst constitutional law teachers in this country. double-dissolution provision. It ties in to section 24 that requires that the number of MPs in the House eteo m g back to what we copied from the “shall be, as nearly as practicable, twice the number American constitutional model and focus on of the senators”. That is obviously deliberate and the Lthe Senate. Yes, we also copied federalism but that is intention is to favour the House over the Senate if a separate topic, one that my colleague Nick Aroney a gridlock-busting section 57 double-dissolution is and I wrote about at length in a Sydney Law Review called—though as Mr Turnbull can attest, if you article and one which I will here only say a few do badly enough in the election it does not work things about in passing. because you have too small a majority to prevail at In the bluntest of terms my view is that federal- the joint sitting that section 57 ultimately allows. ism in this country has been ruined by the High Note yet again just how unusual it is to have a Court virtually always siding with Canberra even strong Upper House, one that can block money bills when that requires bizarrely far-fetched approaches and bring down governments. In New Zealand there to constitutional interpretation (think WorkChoices, is no Upper House at all; they’re unicameral (which think the Tasmanian Dam case, the list goes on and is why reform, for good or for ill, is so much easier on). The High Court has gutted competitive feder- over there). Canada and the UK do have Upper alism, the only kind that clearly works (see Canada, Houses but in both countries they are unelected. see Switzerland, see Germany, see the US, and note There is a small fringe of hereditary peers in the that federal democracies are wealthier and have UK but the preponderance of the House of Lords fewer public servants per capita than unitary states) is now appointed for life. In Canada all senators are and has left us with the democratic federalist world’s appointed: a few gold medallist Olympians, a Nobel only states with no income tax power, the world’s laureate or two, a television personality, and then worst vertical fiscal imbalance, mendicant states, the other 90 per cent are political hacks. an idiotic GST distribution formula (this one is not As a result of the Canadian and UK Upper the fault of the top judges) and woolly talk of “co- Houses having no democratic legitimacy, they operative federalism” when the engine that makes almost never veto anything. They have no legitimacy. federalism work is competition. Sure, they may delay here and there—though never, But the topic here is bicameralism and the ever, money bills, which explains why governments Senate. Our Senate looks much like the US Senate. can at least attempt budget repair in Canada, the The similarities include the fact that here too there UK and NZ. And every single provincial legislature are the same number of senators from each state (at in Canada is unicameral, like Queensland’s. Many the moment twelve from each state in Australia; Australians seem to think that having a strong in the US it has always been two per state); like- Upper House is normal in a democracy. It is not. wise here too senators are elected for an extra-long When you compare the Senate to the House of period of tenure (twice as long as the House of Representatives, the Senate looks democratically Representatives MPs here and three times as long deficient. In the House you basically take all the as House of Representatives Congress people in the voters in the country and divide them into equally- US); and here too our Senate has full-blooded pow- populated constituencies. So each person’s vote ers of review, to the point that it is unmatched in the counts for more or less the same as anyone else’s. In democratic world outside the US and Italy. the Senate that is emphatically not true, again fol- There is one way in which our framers fine-tuned lowing along American lines. or tweaked the US version of bicameralism. When Because each of the original states is guaran- copying the US Senate our framers foresaw the pos- teed the same number of senators, with New South sibility of gridlock between the Upper and Lower Wales and Tasmania getting a dozen each, that Houses. In the US when this happens there is no means that your vote for the Senate in Tasmania

Quadrant October 2017 67 Timeo t Clip the Senate’s Wings is worth about fifteen times more than it is in New By contrast, the other plausible justification for South Wales. It’s not strictly a gerrymander, but our Senate is very much one that defends the Senate rather a special weighting for voters in some states. as a good-in-itself, rather than as a necessary evil. The key point is that the democratic credentials This second justification is the type that my col- and legitimacy of the Senate are much less than the league Nick Aroney at the University of Queensland House of Representatives’. The Senate still has far would offer, Nick being a staunch supporter of better democratic credentials than the High Court strong bicameralism. Let me call this second poten- and the top judges, but the Senate fails when put in tial justification the “James Madison defence”. The the democratic scales with the House. “checks and balances” defence of bicameralism was This was no mistake. It was one of the trade- very much in the mind of Madison himself, who offs the framers made in creating a strong federal more than anyone else was responsible for drafting jurisdiction. But while federalism has slowly been the US Constitution. strangled to death in this country, we still have an The thinking here starts, as with Madison’s own extremely powerful Upper House where some peo- thinking, with a distrust of the majority. We need ple’s votes are worth fifteen times constraints and counter-balances what others’ are worth. on the power of the majority lest Bear it in mind next time some cannot understand it turn to tyranny. So the fact that prime minister wins a handsome I the Senate has noticeably fewer majority with a clear manifesto why a prime minister democratic credentials—less legiti- based on gaining some 9 or 10 should have to macy in the democratic scheme of million votes and the press then things—is not such a concern if in clamours for this prime minister to negotiate and bargain return you can temper majoritari- negotiate with some independent with such democratic anism. With a strong Madisonian senator from, say, Tasmania who Senate, goes this second justifica- gained a thousand first-preference minnows as the tion, we are buying the checking votes—someone who almost liter- independents who hold and constraining of power. “Better ally could have been voted into the the balance of power to limit and prevent some good Senate by his or her extended fam- things that might otherwise happen ily. Perhaps I am poisoned by my in the current Senate. in return for preventing bad things Canadian upbringing, but I cannot and abuse of power.” understand why a prime minister After all, the Senate can only should have to negotiate and bargain with such block and veto things. It can never force a bill democratic minnows as the independents who hold through the more democratic House. Hence the the balance of power in that sort of Senate. downside that comes with a US-style Senate is gridlock and the inability to enact what the House here are really only two plausible justifications wishes to enact; the danger is never that the Senate for this sort of potent Senate arrangement. One can have enacted what it wants and what the House Tis a sort of counsel of despair, that this is the price does not want. Yes, the less democratic chamber can we had to pay in order to persuade the small states veto and block and cause gridlock and even chaos, to join the new federation. This claim is a backward- but it cannot push through what the House itself looking one, that the costs the deal imposed were rejects. (and are) outweighed by the benefits of creating this So for Madison, and for Nick Aroney, that sec- continent-wide country. ond sort of justification is persuasive. They want the The historical and empirically descriptive side to checks on power and are prepared to pay the costs that claim seems correct to me. And as I do not live in a way that does not exist in Britain, in Canada, in Western Australia I think it is easier to say, too, in New Zealand, and in a lot of other democracies. that the cost-benefit analysis component is correct as well, the benefits having outweighed the costs, y n view o Australian-style bicameralism is and by a fair bit. But this is not really a justification a gloomy one. Its costs keep rising while at for the Senate’s existence in its current form, not in tMhe same time it simply does not deliver the sort of the sense that one is claiming the Senate is a good- “keep us free” or “keep tyranny in check” benefits in-itself, some sort of wholly legitimate legislative that its proponents claim. body deserving of the full-blooded powers it pres- If you look at other Anglosphere jurisdictions ently possesses and somehow deservedly immune without strong bicameralism they look every bit from reform. It’s more of a jaundiced, imperfect- as free as Australia. Britain and New Zealand and world type of justification. Canada are no more free and rights-respecting than

68 Quadrant October 2017 Timeo t Clip the Senate’s Wings

Australia—but they are no less so either. And if, Upper House is no longer a house of review—it is a unlike me, you put that down to an entrenched or house of governing. “tied to the European Convention” bill of rights, In good times the costs of a potent “checks and that still doesn’t explain New Zealand, which has balances” regime might be absorbable. In bad times a weaker statutory bill of rights even than Victoria. give me the British, New Zealand and Canadian Put differently, the supposed benefits of strong form of functional unicameralism any day, not the bicameralism look to be massively oversold. American-inspired gridlock-fest with the inevitable Meanwhile the costs or downsides of our Senate compromises that no voter—and certainly nowhere seem to grow by the year. Any cut in spending— near a majority of voters—wanted. I mean an actual cut in government spending, not an increased tax that is dishonestly badged as a ts o i hard t be optimistic about possible ways for- cut or implied to be such under the guise of being ward that any of today’s leading politicians will part of “budget repair”—just cannot get through Ibe able to bring about. But the options are clear and today’s Senate. Meanwhile our deficit is big and well known. the trajectory of our increasing government debt is First, use section 57 properly. By that I mean frightening. that once it becomes clear that the Senate will block In 2007 when the Howard government was multiple manifesto pledges just end all negotiations. defeated there was, uniquely in the democratic The government under this scenario proceeds to pass world, no government debt. Today, a decade later, through the House of Representatives all the bills it the net debt is $355 billion, or about 20 per cent of thinks desirable and to send them to the Senate. GDP, with no end in sight to the upward trajec- Once blocked there the House re-passes them. And tory. All attempts to do anything about that on once the government has built up thirty or forty or the “restraining government spending” side of the fifty bills it calls a double-dissolution election and ledger simply cannot get through the Senate. puts its policies to the voters. By contrast, in Canada several decades ago the Our Constitution was designed to favour the left-wing Liberal government took a worse debt and House over the Senate in all such double-dissolution deficit and fixed them, partly by some hefty cuts elections as section 24 mandates that the numbers to government spending. It did this by winning an of MPs in the House be “as nearly as practicable, election and just making the cuts. There was no twice the number of the senators”. It was designed Upper House to block budget repair and no inde- to favour the more democratic chamber in any joint pendent senators to negotiate with. Or look at New sitting that might follow one of these elections. Zealand over the last decade. This time it is a right- Usually when a government wins a double-dissolu- of-centre political party that has fixed an awful tion election it will have the numbers to prevail in deficit-and-debt scenario. Again, once an election any joint sitting. is won on the issue the governing party can get on Only if you squeak back in with the narrow- and do what it campaigned on and then at the next est of wins would this not be true, as Mr Turnbull election see what the voters think. It affords a gov- demonstrated last year. But the sort of insipid dou- ernment time to do painful things, and hope that ble-dissolution election Mr Turnbull ran, on a rela- its remedy brings better times before it next has to tively obscure piece of labour relations law that he face the electorate. then essentially did not mention during the entire Compare that to the US, where budget repair election campaign, was a terrible use of section 57. has proven to be very, very difficult. Yes, in the US Instead, if you use it at all, use it to try to drive you have not just two legislative chambers to get on through an entire big package of the key bills you side but also the President. But their budget position had promised in the preceding election. is bad, and the headline figures do not include all Of course this still makes life harder than in the unfunded liabilities such as social security. Canada or New Zealand or Britain because a gov- And it is not just budgetary matters, though ernment here has to put its policies to the voters they are crucial. I am an avid proponent of John twice, not once. It gives those opposed extra time to Stuart Mill-type free-speech positions. I believe it build an alliance of the disaffected. But in my view is an absolute disgrace what happened to the three it can work, and might at least be attempted. QUT students, and to the cartoonist Bill Leak. A second option is to change the voting system When a political party makes it a central plank in used to elect the Senate. I do not mean the piddling its campaign manifesto significantly to amend sec- peripheral changes made recently, I mean getting tion 18C—the so-called hate-speech laws—and rid of proportional voting altogether in the Upper then finds it cannot get that core platform policy House. through the Senate, then it is plain that such an I have written before on why I dislike proportional

Quadrant October 2017 69 Timeo t Clip the Senate’s Wings voting systems. They force all decision-making which voters would be able to hold obstructionism and compromising to happen after elections, in in the Upper House accountable. And this change the coalition-building and negotiating stages, not can be done without the agreement of the Senate before elections, putting policies to the electorate. itself, assuming the government took it to the voters So the voters are taken out of the picture much in a double-dissolution election. more than they are in majoritarian voting systems Here is my last suggestion (other than despair). such as the preferential system used in our House This involves resorting to section 128 and constitu- of Representatives or the first-past-the-post system tional amendment. Here you take a proposed con- used in the UK, the US and Canada. Likewise, with stitutional amendment (which would not ultimately proportional voting systems little parties, or wacky need Senate approval) to the voters and ask for a independents, become too powerful. And it becomes change to the Constitution. impossible for voters to know who to punish for bad In my view there is next to no chance Australian legislation. voters would agree to the elimination of the Senate In that sense our bicameralism is even worse and a move to unicameralism. But there is a chance than the version it copied, the American model. In you might get through a proposal to remove the the US they have a first-past-the-post voting system Senate’s veto over money bills, say. Change things that delivers majoritarian outcomes. so that the Senate could delay but In the US Senate this means you not veto any money bills, which will have two parties and occasion- n good times the costs has been the British position since ally maybe one independent (out I before 1911 and the Canadian one of 100). And that means that when of a potent “checks and for almost as long. Alternatively, a bill is favoured by the President balances” regime might you might ask the voters to consent and passed in the House, but then to some tinkering with section 57 to blocked in the Senate, that all voters be absorbable. In bad make it easier to make use of joint know that it was done by the other times give me the sittings. big party. If the Republicans want British, New Zealand Either of those ideas has a good it, then it was the Democrats and deal of appeal to me. Indeed the only the Democrats that blocked it. and Canadian second one could simply adopt one And vice versa. So the voters can form of functional of the two proposals of the 2003 decide whose side to be on and if Department of Prime Minister they are unhappy with such Senate unicameralism and Cabinet Discussion Paper on obstructionism it is plain who they any day, not the “Resolving Deadlocks”. That paper should punish. mooted two options that might be But here in Australia we use an American-inspired put to the people in a referendum, STV (or Irish-style) voting system gridlock-fest. namely: (i) the prime minister can in the Senate. It is strongly pro- ask the governor-general for a joint portional. And so, as a voter, if I sitting after a bill has been blocked am unhappy with Senate obstructionism who do I twice by the Senate during the life of the parlia- hold accountable? Team Xenophon do not exist in ment, with the required three-month interval (this Queensland. Jacqui Lambie and Derryn Hinch are one dispenses with the need for a double-dissolution immune to any voter frustration I might have. These election and indeed any new election at all); or (ii) people are not part of a political team I can punish the prime minister can ask the governor-general for or hold accountable. They are immune to my and a joint sitting after a bill has been blocked twice in indeed to most other Australian voters’ frustration. the previous parliament by the Senate, there’s a reg- Accordingly, and in the context of an American ular election, and the same bill is blocked again in constitutional set-up with an uber-powerful Senate, the new parliament (this one requires another elec- the voting system here makes things even worse tion, but not a double-dissolution election). than in the US. That’s my take on strong bicameralism in I would move back to the pre-1949 voting system Australia. I think our Senate is now a big problem; we used in this country. Yes, it would leave us with it’s become too big for its democratically deficient mostly two-party representation, and yes, it would boots. lead to big swings in party representation in the Senate (though that would be partly off-set by the James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at the senators’ double-length terms of office). But those University of Queensland. He edited and contributed to costs would be outweighed by the benefits of the the essay collection Making Australia Right: Where To change back to the pre-1949 voting system under from Here?, published last December by Connor Court.

70 Quadrant October 2017 Morlocks

Oy m children, ware the morlocks. Shut your windows, lock your doorlocks, Lest when you are soundly sleeping, Morlocks should come creeping, creeping, Up your drainpipes, down your gutters, Talking to Dead People Crepitating on your shutters, This is the voice of the boy Cole Sear from the Crouching in your mossy niches movie “The Sixth Sense”. Like a parliament of witches, Shrieking spells and chumbling curses, I see dead people walking round. Muttering filthy scraps of verses I talk to them. They talk to me. In your blameless little lugholes, They leave their houses underground Slithering through the bathroom plugholes, And try a second time to be, Boiling, buzzing in your brains, But just to me, yes just to me. Winding in your counterpanes, Pallid bodies, seamed and sweated, I am a child, a little child, Rancid breath, fermented, foetid, And other children think I’m odd, Huddling in your cribs like babies, Not meek and mild but fierce and wild, Giving puppy dogs the rabies, I sometimes think I must be God, Fashioning a hangman’s noose, And that is why they think I’m odd. Pissing in your orange juice, My mother cannot understand. Pissing in your breakfast milk, I did not ask to be like this. Sliding, gliding, smooth as silk, She tries to take me by the hand Shimmering, glimmering everywhere, And calm me with a mother’s kiss. Hovering in the heavy air, I did not ask to be like this. Inundating every part, Insubstantial as a fart, I am not right. I am not whole. Till at last they reach the heart. Better to be a little fish Swimming round a little bowl. Children, should you meet a morlock, A little fish is what I wish, Grab him by his greasy forelock, A little gold and silver fish. Whirl him round and round your head, Bash him, smash him, kill him dead. The Dead are good. The Dead are wise. Then you can go back to bed. I am an ordinary boy. I see it in their shining eyes. They long for peace. They long for joy. But I am just a little boy. Like sentinels they come and go, Like shadows locking out the light, Like footsteps in the melting snow, Like shadows locking out the light. Show me the way to make it right. Show me the way to make it right.

John Whitworth

Quadrant October 2017 71 Nicholas Hasluck

Recognition Roulette A f Sense o Things Going Round in Circles

he current push for recognition of indig- eral public and the prospect of disharmony if a spe- enous Australians in the Commonwealth cial entitlement based upon race is entrenched in Constitution is unrealistic and therefore the Constitution. uTnwise. Before looking at these matters, however, I must There have been various proposals for “recogni- turn to a fundamental objection: an Aboriginal tion” in recent years, ranging from statements of advisory body will complicate the structure of fact for inclusion in the Preamble to the removal responsible government—the system in which the of references to race in certain substantive pro- governor-general acts on the advice of the prime visions (such as sections 25 and 51 (xxvi) of the minister as the leader of a party holding a majority Constitution), and even to proposed new clauses in the lower house, and with ministers drawn from rendering discriminatory conduct unlawful. that party being in charge of the various depart- It now seems, however, in the aftermath of a ments of state. convention at Uluru, and a Final Report submit- My objection is illustrated by some controversial ted to the Turnbull government by the Referendum events in the history of Western Australia, where Council, that the proposals mentioned earlier have an ill-fated attempt was made to confer special enti- been replaced by what one Council member called tlements upon the indigenous people of the state. “a relatively new development”, namely, that the For the sake of historical accuracy, I will use the Constitution should provide for a representative language of the colonial era, although I am con- body that gives indigenous people a voice to the scious, of course, that certain terms are now being federal Parliament and the right to be consulted on questioned by contemporary commentators. matters that affect them. The details of this proposal have not yet been he word Australia first appeared in the Imperial worked out, even after widespread consultation Statute Book in the Act of 1829 providing for with indigenous delegates. This has caused con- T“the government of Her Majesty’s Settlement of cern. Labor MHR Linda Burney described the Western Australia on the western coast of New Referendum Council’s recommendations as “limit- Holland”. In the absence of any specific instruc- ing” and as providing “no clear line of sight to a ref- tions concerning the indigenous inhabitants of the erendum”. Liberal MHR Ken Wyatt observed that new land, the first Governor, James Stirling, simply a representative body of the kind proposed need not reiterated the principle of protection applicable in be enshrined in the Constitution, but could sim- other colonies. The rights of the Aboriginal people ply be enacted in legislation. Labor Senator Patrick as British subjects were fully acknowledged. Dodson called the proposed body “a bolt in the The steps by which Western Australia achieved dark”. He said also that the whole thing seemed to responsible government under the Constitution be “going round in circles”. Act of 1889 mirrored the process followed by the This took me to the Concise Oxford Dictionary other Australian colonies. However, in the end, and the word roulette. It means: “Gambling game unlike any other Australian colony, the state’s new on table with revolving centre.” I have called this constitution included a special provision in section paper “Recognition Roulette” accordingly. The title 70 placing Aboriginal inhabitants of the colony evokes the elements of chance and uncertainty hov- under the care of a board independent of the local ering over the Referendum Council’s report. parliament. An annual grant equal to 1 per cent of I will enlarge upon my criticisms in due course. the colony’s gross annual revenue was to be passed They go to a paucity of consultation with the gen- to the Aborigines Protection Board for “the welfare

72 Quadrant October 2017 Recognition Roulette of the Aboriginal Natives” and “the education of usual rule of responsible government. Aboriginal children (including half castes)”. A figure of 1 per cent of the state’s gross revenue Section 70 was entrenched by “manner and form” was simply a rough guess as to the amount required. provisions. It could only be amended or repealed It was quickly overtaken by a changing economy with the approval of the British government. These and other significant events, including an influx arrangements were inconsistent with the usual con- of “t’othersiders” during the gold rush of the 1890s ventions concerning responsible government and and a commitment to the federal system created by suggested that ministers in the colonial government the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act couldn’t be trusted to deal with Aboriginal people of 1900. fairly. The elected government had no control over The policy of “protection” reflected in the name funds set aside for Aboriginal welfare. There was of the Aborigines Protection Board appointed to no clear link between the 1 per cent formula and distribute the special funds was superseded in due the needs of the Aboriginal people. course by the move to “assimilation”—the idea that In due course, after considerable agitation in the Aborigines should have the same rights and oppor- colony about these matters, section 70 was repealed tunities as other Australians. Some years later the by the Aborigines Act of 1905 with the approval policy of assimilation was denigrated as paternal- of the British government. Since that time funds istic by would-be reformers. It was supplanted by for Aboriginal welfare have been a miscellany of policies echoing subject to ministerial supervision the international emphasis upon in Western Australia in a man- dealism is not enough “self-determination” for indigenous ner consistent with responsible I people. government. of itself to quell all This kaleidoscopic series of In the post-war era, critics of doubts about the events suggests that any attempt governmental policies such as the to create a special constitutional white activist Don McLeod que- wisdom of creating entitlement for indigenous peo- ried the repeal of section 70, but a special entitlement ple is fraught with hazard because the High Court has now held within the framework social conditions and proposals in Yougarla’s case that the repeal for improvement are constantly effected by the 1905 Act was valid. of a democratic changing. Legal opinions have established constitution, especially Nor can it be said with any con- that steps related to the repeal fidence that the hardship which did not give rise to any actionable an entitlement Aboriginal people in the west breach of fiduciary duty. based upon race. undeniably experienced would have The section 70 controversy must been removed, or even substantially now be seen as part of a broader alleviated, if the Protection Board social and political picture: a scene that has been and special fund had operated in the manner envis- transformed by a range of different policies and aged by the section 70 provision. The governance practices over the years and by allowance for native of indigenous affairs has proved intractable from title to land in the aftermath of the High Court’s one generation to the next, and the funding pro- decision in Mabo. Nonetheless, this ill-fated vided never seems to be enough. This is undoubt- attempt to create a protective clause for the ben- edly because administrators in every era, including efit of Aboriginal people in the Constitution Act of Aboriginal leaders on land councils and other bod- Western Australia points to significant flaws in the ies in contemporary times, have been confronted by Referendum Council’s proposal. I will deal with certain fundamental issues which have never been each of these in turn. satisfactorily resolved. These basic issues were summarised by the irst,n a obvious point—changing times weigh former Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, in against the use of constitutional provisions to his book Shades of Darkness covering his involve- Feffect social improvements. ment in Aboriginal affairs over forty years. Are The 1889 protective clause was designed by ide- Australians of Aboriginal origin to live together alists in London with a virtuous belief that some- with other Australians, or apart from them? Are thing had to be done to improve the situation of they to have the same opportunities or different Aboriginal people. A supposedly enlightened view opportunities? Are they to bear the same responsi- was then entrenched in the West Australian con- bilities and be subject to the same laws? Is Australia stitution, but without any clear plan of action as to to have one society or two societies? what exactly should be done, and contrary to the Let me now ask: Did the Referendum Council

Quadrant October 2017 73 Recognition Roulette give sufficient weight to the need for resolution of suggested that in the absence of a right to veto leg- these fundamental issues? islation the advisory body proposal is a comfortable According to the co-chair of the Council, fit with the structure of responsible government. Mark Leibler, various “indigenous-designed” dia- They envisage that this quasi-parliamentary body logues culminated in the National Constitutional will simply make useful recommendations to the Convention at Uluru in May 2017. This led to the government of the day and quietly abide by what- making of the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” ever resolutions are passed by the parliament in which favoured the advisory body idea. It called Canberra. also for the creation of a Makarrata commission To my mind, such a view is unrealistic. The to supervise the making of treaties with “first advisory body has been described by its proponents nations”, and with provision for truth-telling about as a means of “empowerment” and “not as a shield the dark side of Australian history: Aboriginal but as a sword”. So long as the fundamental issues dispossession. mentioned earlier lie unresolved the proposed advi- sory body will become a lightning rod for debate he Referendum Council was not in a position about a vast array of current policies. to make a specific recommendation about the Some of these will fit the co-chair’s descrip- MaTkarrata proposal because it lay outside its terms tion of matters that “affect” indigenous people, of reference. The Council made the single recom- for example, the provision of services in remote mendation mentioned earlier: that there be an advi- communities. Others will be debatable, especially sory body giving indigenous people “a voice to the where people claiming to be of Aboriginal descent federal parliament”. The co-chair acknowledged are living in urban areas in much the same way that “there’s significant work to be done to flesh as other Australians, and with declining links to out the details of how a constitutionally enshrined indigenous traditions. body would operate”. The report concedes that “the concept of pro- The unfortunate history of the section 70 pro- viding advice on certain matters requires defini- tective clause in Western Australia shows that tion” and seems to accept that some laws of general idealism is not enough of itself to quell all doubts application may well be interpreted as having an about the wisdom of creating a special entitlement “impact on or significance to” indigenous peoples. within the framework of a democratic constitution, In other words, it may turn out that nearly every especially an entitlement based upon race. Nor is matter of current concern is seen as having an it enough to point to a consultative process shaped indigenous component of some kind. essentially by the prospective beneficiaries and The inability of federal governments to gov- their friends. ern decisively—often due to the vagaries of cross- The Council’s report says that the general public benchers in the Senate—is a constant talking point were “encouraged to share their views through our these days. I doubt that voters will be pleased to digital platform”. Nonetheless, as Council member see the structure of government burdened by a new Amanda Vanstone noted in a qualifying statement, advisory body which, pursuant to a constitutionally the consultative process “cannot be said to have entrenched mandate, may claim the right to talk captured the imagination of the broad Australian incessantly about matters of interest to it, causing community”. This is probably because the idea is further indecision and delay. It may become, to use new and the details haven’t been worked out. Amanda Vanstone’s words, “an inbuilt dissonance Australians, Vanstone contended, need to see a within our system”. largely agreed plan as to what they would be vot- It is true that in the case of the Aborigines ing for in the first instance. And yet, in a sabre- Protection Board the frustration felt by the elected rattling tone, Mark Leibler announced that there is government was exacerbated by the fact that really only one way for our leaders and our nation the board was entrenched by the authorities in to respond to the report: “to accept the destination London—as a caveat upon the grant of responsible and work together to chart the best course to get government, and in a manner that was thought to there”. be coercive. It might be thought that if the pro- Unlike the Aborigines Protection Board in the posed advisory body is approved at a referendum in ill-fated section 70 provision, it seems that the the manner allowed by the Constitution—approval proposed Aboriginal advisory body would not be by voters in a majority of the states and by a major- administering policies or related funds. Its role will ity of the Commonwealth electorate—then such a supposedly be limited to exercising its right to be criticism, referable to outside interference, would consulted on matters affecting indigenous people. be removed from the equation. Several widely respected commentators have I admit the force of this argument in logic, but

74 Quadrant October 2017 Recognition Roulette

I doubt that logic will be sufficient to override any the f idea o a declaration of recognition inserted deeply-rooted controversies in which the govern- as a preamble to or within the Constitution ment of the day is seen to have no control over a was rejected because delegates were concerned quasi-parliamentary body with its own constitu- that it might undermine, rather than ency, and especially if doubts arise, as they have in bolster, the status of first peoples who never the past, as to the range of people being described ceded sovereignty and have not yet had the as indigenous. opportunity to negotiate a formal agreement The language used in the ill-fated section 70 with the Commonwealth. suggested that over a century ago the term “half- caste” was thought to mark the outer limit of abo- Treaty talk is divisive. The Preamble asserts riginality. That term was thought too restrictive that the Constitution of the Commonwealth of by changing policies and is now seen as offensive. Australia is founded on the will of the people The range of eligibility has been opened up and is whom it is designed to unite and govern. The word steadily expanding. constitution in this context connotes the idea of a A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics fundamental law couched in general terms: a law report noted that a 93,000 increase in the count which is not easily changed, although social habits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait and policies for improvement may Islander people between the 2006 change. and 2011 Census was larger than ustralians of It differs from a treaty because can be fully accounted for by natu- A an agreement between independent ral increase and migration. While goodwill can probably regimes is terminable at the will of 70 per cent of the increase was due be persuaded to the parties involved. The Australian to natural population increase, the Constitution was designed to remaining 30 per cent was due to support a case endure and is binding on every an increased propensity for people for change they member of the community. to identify themselves and their understand, but they children as being of indigenous s a consequence of statutory descent. This propensity will com- are likely to reject a reforms since the Constitution plicate the work of an advisory claim that smacks Awas enacted, indigenous people body. now have essentially the same sta- The consultative process hosted of special privilege tus as other citizens. The handi- by the Referendum Council has or coercion, or is caps which they continue to suffer created another complicating fac- tainted by virtue- today are social rather than official. tor. The advisory body proposal It follows that what is proposed by is being presented to the nation signalling and a way of recognition—the setting up in conjunction with talk about sanctimonious tone. of an Aboriginal advisory body as Makarrata and the making of a a quasi-parliamentary entity—can treaty, or perhaps many treaties. best be effected by statute, not by The former Prime Minister, John Howard, constitutional amendment, if indeed, after wider noted some years ago that the indivisible nation consultation, it is seen as useful. This would at least of Australia could not make a treaty with itself. avert the risk of creating a permanent forum for Discussion since that time seems to have led to a dissension based upon race. more flexible usage in which the term “treaty” has Is the proposed advisory body likely to be of any been equated to other forms of agreement between real use? Policies come and go. Missionaries are independent parties, bearing in mind that large replaced by anthropologists. Descriptions of iden- tracts of land have now been vested in various tity are varied and expanded. Proposals for recog- indigenous communities under the Native Title nition are canvassed and rejected. There is talk of Act. Whatever the usage, the term suggests sepa- treaties while solutions to fundamental issues are rate development of some kind. pushed back and forth. There is indeed a sense of In these circumstances it is not surprising that things going round in circles, as Senator Dodson some commentators have seen the push for a treaty, noted. This suggests that the process of recognition or series of treaties, as essentially a stalking horse is still evolving and it would therefore be unwise to for an eventual claim to sovereignty by indige- have a potentially divisive proposal crystallised in nous communities. Indeed, in his account of the the Constitution. Referendum Council’s consultation process, the At a time when public opinion seems to be sym- co-chair observed: pathetic to indigenous aspirations, the energy of

Quadrant October 2017 75 Recognition Roulette those involved would surely be put to better use by to advance the indigenous desire to “hold our tradi- looking for answers to the fundamental issues men- tions while embracing the future” than the creation tioned earlier. It may well emerge from a broader of an extraneous advisory body bogged down in consultative process that these aspirations can be debate fostered to a large extent by international achieved by constructive collaboration on all sides. ideology. The nature of indigenous aspirations can be gleaned from a piece published in the Australian ustralians of goodwill can probably be per- by three leading figures associated with the Uluru suaded to support a case for change they convention, Megan Davis, Noel Pearson and uAnderstand, but they are likely to reject a claim Pat Anderson. They approved the Referendum that smacks of special privilege or coercion, or is Council’s report, but certain passages in their col- tainted by virtue-signalling and a sanctimonious umn seemed to open up other possibilities: tone. The future will be a troubled one if we do nothing but assert rights against each other and Letse u b a modern version of ourselves. We forget our common responsibility to work for a know we need education, economic development common future. and individual freedom as well as communal Law must ultimately be tailored to the society culture and the gifts of our heritage. Give us the it serves. It follows that would-be law reformers space to enjoy the best of both worlds, to hold to should always keep in mind not only the entire our traditions while embracing the future. range of Australian history, indigenous and non- indigenous alike, but also the strengths of their There may well be support in the general com- own system, including the Westminster style of munity for aspirations of this kind so long as they government. In our haste to atone for past wrongs are not obscured by divisive talk about swords or we must not forget that we are still part of Western treaties or claims to sovereignty. The reality is that civilisation. the aspirations voiced by the three authors can be With this in mind, let me close by quoting a pas- achieved within the framework of the Constitution sage from Paul Hasluck’s autobiography in which in its present form and they seem to be compatible he speaks of his understanding of men and women with the aspirations of the Australian people as a of all races who love their land and are comforted whole. by memory of their own past. He said: Paul Hasluck completed his book Shades of Darkness by saying that in the 1950s an earnest In f love o our own country each of us realises effort was made to change Australian indifference a common humanity coming from deep wells. towards Aborigines, to improve their conditions Patriots are only understood by patriots. A and to raise their hopes for the future. He and his feeling for one’s own country is the clearest contemporaries strove for the full recognition of way to feel deeply for men and women in other the entitlements of Aborigines “legally as citizens, countries. The folly and the failure of so many socially as fellow Australians”. It is entirely con- internationalists to do good comes from the sistent with that objective, and pleasing to note, fact that they lose sight of the true goodness in that the first Aboriginal member of the House of other countries when their senses are blunted to Representatives, Ken Wyatt, was elected in the the goodness of their own. seat of Hasluck. He has been joined in the federal Parliament by Senator Dodson and Linda Burney. Nicholas Hasluck is a former judge. His latest They and others like them in times to come will be novel, The Bradshaw Case, concerns the impact of a significant voice for indigenous people—a voice Aboriginal rock art on a native title claim. This article to speak of their stake in the future and of a people is an edited version of a paper presented to the Samuel who love their land. Griffith Society in August. A footnoted version Voices to parliament of this kind will do more appears at Quadrant Online.

76 Quadrant October 2017 BOOKS, ARTS & LIFE

Defeating Islam in the Battle of Ideas Daryl McCann

Black Flag Down: Counter-Terrorism, al-Sharia and Boko Haram, is straight-out wrong. Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas Additionally, it can only be unhelpful in the Battle by Liam Byrne of Ideas, the key to winning our confrontation with Biteback Publishing, 2016, 272 pages, what Byrne does, at least, agree is a global insur- £12.99 gency (if not a global jihad). Not that Black Flag Down undervalues the role iam Byrne, former British Labour cabinet min- of the military, security and counter-intelligence ister and author of Black Flag Down: Counter- in defeating terrorism. Byrne champions the role LTerrorism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of of security agencies in monitoring the terrorist Ideas, has been a harsh critic of President Trump, recruiters and thwarting attempts to co-opt young describing him as a megalomaniac “trumpeting Muslims in the United Kingdom for their nefarious anti-Muslim hate speech”. Byrne, who sought the cause. By February 2016, the Islamic State group, opinions of Muslims in his inner-city Birmingham according to the statistics in Black Flag Down, was constituency, extensively interviewed British intel- boasting that it operated 10,000 Facebook accounts ligence and police officers and even spent time and 5000 Twitter profiles. The sheer scale of digital in Iraq, prefers the softly, softly PC approach in communication among the British general public is “bringing down the black flag of extremism”. His overwhelming, with Scotland Yard’s figures indi- Black Flag Down is an almost plausible account of cating that every minute of the day some 3.3 million how the Battle of Ideas might be won in this era of Facebook posts, 342,000 tweets, 41,000 Instagram the global jihad. photos and 120 hours of video to YouTube are Black Flag Down positions itself as a sensible uploaded. As Byrne says: “Try policing that.” The and practical response to radical Islamic terror- longer-term answer, in his opinion, is not polic- ism, although Liam Byrne would not label the ing but self-policing. It is more important to train phenomenon beyond calling it “violent extremism”. Muslim parents “to spot the warning signs in their Any attempt to connect Islam with the atrocities children’s online habits” rather than “fight the last perpetrated by Salafi jihadism, from the Islamic war against extremist preachers in the backrooms State group and Al Qaeda to Al Shabaab, Ansar of mosques”.

Quadrant October 2017 77 Books

This will obviously come as cold comfort to universities, on the internet, in our prisons and the British victims of radical Islamic terrorism—I wherever it takes place … mean violent extremism—in the short period since the publication of Black Flag Down. In March this Byrne refers to a “leaked” 2008 MI5 report that year, we recall, a jihadist drove a four-wheel-drive disputes the idea that there was any “single path- into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge, way” to the committing of atrocities. Black Flag killing four people, before going on a knife ram- Down employs this detail to argue that it is “a sense page and slaughtering a policeman. Two months of grievance” transmuting into something more like later, a suicide bomber killed twenty-two people “moral outrage” that drives a young person into the and injured dozens more at the conclusion of an arms of the terrorist recruiting networks. Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. On June 3, three radical Islamic terrorists drove into a crowd here is something of a Catch-22 in Black Flag of pedestrians on London Bridge, before going on Down’s line of reasoning—Don’t associate a knife rampage resulting in eight dead and dozens Tmy religion with violence or I will turn violent wounded. And then, on June 19, an anti-Muslim on you. There is, also, the problem that Byrne, fanatic drove his car into a crowd of worshippers Labour member for Hodge Hill, a constituency outside a London mosque, killing one person and in East Birmingham with a high proportion of injuring nine others. People have a right to know Muslim voters, is quick to malign any critic of why this kind of carnage is happening in Britain, Islam as “Islamophobic”. Furthermore, because not to mention the atrocities perpetrated in Nice, the neighbourhood mosque is invariably a place Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Sydney, San Bernardino, of “social justice”, the more that young Muslims Orlando and Barcelona. frequent it, the less likely they will be lured into Liam Byrne has been a leading figure in calling bogus do-it-yourself violent organisations that have for the British government to crack down on global distorted the message of peace and reconciliation: tech companies that allow terrorist organisations that is, genuine Islam, as espoused by the local to spread their propaganda. He might even be able imam. to take some credit for Prime Minister Malcolm One of the tenets of the Islamophobia charge, a Turnbull, in July this year, announcing plans to concept first devised by the Muslim Brotherhood, introduce into Parliament laws that would compel is the assertion that anyone who criticises any facet businesses such as Apple and Facebook to release of Islam makes the mistake of treating Islam as a encrypted data to assist urgent counter-terrorism single monolithic entity. Ironically, this censur- operations: “Encryption is vital for information ing of a Western-style or scholarly examination security but the privacy of the terrorist must never of Islam, which requires the freedom to discern trump the personal security of Australians. We can- and discriminate based on facts and reality as they not allow the internet to be an ungoverned space.” emerge, means treating Islamic practices as a sin- But even Byrne—if not Turnbull—would acknowl- gle monolithic entity. It is an absurd proposition, as edge that increased security, online and off, is not anyone who has not lost their common sense to an all-encompassing remedy for terrorism. PC rectitude knows. Most of us, these days, have Paradoxically, perhaps, the central contention in friends and colleagues with a Muslim background; Black Flag Down is not what people in Britain (and some frequent a mosque and some do not, while the West) should do but rather what we must avoid others are apostates and, in certain cases, Christian doing. For Liam Byrne, the thing we must shun is converts. The one unmistakable common denomi- making a connection between any aspect of Islam nator, at least amongst the Muslims and former and violent extremism. Thus, in one of the cru- Muslims of my acquaintance, is that (a) they are cial chapters in the book, “The Fork in the Road”, fully assimilated into Australia’s modern Western Byrne derides former British Prime Minister David societal codes and (b) they are not, to put it mildly, Cameron’s opinion, expressed in the aftermath of apologists for every aspect of Islam. Does that the slaughter of Lee Rigby in 2013, that there is a make them Islamophobic? connection between “conservative” Islam and vio- The Pakistani-born comedian Sami Shah lent extremism: is an instructive example of a Muslim-born immigrant now integrated into Western mores. His For some young people, it is as if there is entertaining and accessible new tome, The Islamic a conveyor belt to radicalisation that has Republic of Australia, calls into question the case poisoned their minds with sick and perverted for mollification advanced by Liam Byrne. First ideas. We need to dismantle that process up, the local mosque, according to Sami Shah, at every stage—in schools, colleges and is not necessarily a bulwark of social justice, the

78 Quadrant October 2017 Books treatment of women being a case in point: “Every known to sharply rebuke Islamic preachers express- Muslim man I interviewed ... brought up women ing sympathy for “violent extremism” but this, like and feminism on his own, and none offered his call for greater digital security, or Malcolm promising points of view.” Second, Sami Shah, not Turnbull’s new crowd-safety protocol, does not get a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, to the heart of the matter in the Battle of Ideas. turns out to have a better take on free speech in a Our danger is compounded by the fact that money Western society than a politician who sits in the from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE House of Commons: “Free speech is meant to be has been flooding the world with a hard-line version for all Australians—and this means everyone gets of Sunni supremacism/separatism. India’s intelli- to say what they want to say, whether many of us gence agencies, according to a report prepared in want to hear them say it or not.” July by Tom Wilson for the Henry Jackson Society, Liam Byrne also acknowledges the importance “Foreign Funded Islamist Extremism in the UK”, of freedom of speech, and yet he levels the charge estimate that between 2013 and 2015 Saudi Arabia of Islamophobia at anyone wishing to critique facets “sent $250 million dollars, as well as thousands of of Islam. The Labour parliamentar- clerics, to India with the purpose of ian’s belief in freedom is manacled establishing Wahhabi mosques and to his notions of “mutual respect” seminaries”. The same pattern has and “tolerance” that allow “people Liam Byrne been replicated in countries as dis- to be what they want to be” in our acknowledges the parate as Indonesia and Australia. current politically-correct land- importance of freedom Wahhabi-Salafism and the scape. Because Byrne treats Islam Muslim Brotherhood emphati- as a single monolithic entity—truly, of speech, and yet cally differentiate themselves from the Religion of Peace—any scepti- he levels the charge Salafi jihadism (the Islamic State et cism about the intentions of those al) and, in many ways, they are in who fly under the Islamic banner of Islamophobia competition with each other. But can only be “hate speech”. It is at anyone wishing their biggest difference is of tac- also, according to Black Flag Down, tics, not goals. The Wahhabis and counter-productive in the Battle of to critique facets the Muslim Brotherhood mostly Ideas. Since religious strictures per of Islam. pursue civilisational jihad while, se have nothing to do with terror- for the Salafi jihadists, violence is ism, to suggest otherwise, as David a sacred duty. In all cases, however, Cameron (and Donald Trump) do, only encourages everything fundamental to the West, from equal young Muslims to feel aggrieved and, as a conse- opportunity for women and homosexual rights to quence, susceptible to the siren call of Islamic State freedom of speech and secular governance, is on recruiters. their hate list. Salafism, in all of its manifestations, is at war with Western civilisation and yet, as Tom ut what about the Religion of War? Black Flag Wilson’s report shows, the authorities in the United Down demonstrates an awareness that Salafi Kingdom have been largely blind to foreign-funded Bjihadists, such as the Islamic State, use Koranic Islamic extremism in the United Kingdom and, we justification for violence: “One analysis found that could add, Australia. justifications from the Quran, Hadith (stories from But how do we distinguish between “conserva- the life of Muhammed) or other scholarship appear tive” Islam and “Islamist extremism” when, as in almost all its propaganda.” He also notes that Robert G. Rabil argues, Islamic revivalism “cloaks the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb has been itself in the sanctity of the sacred and the history of recognised as “the philosopher of Islamic State”. ‘authentic’ Islam as applied to the first four rightly He also has misgivings about the outsized presence guided caliphs”. Liam Byrne’s denigration of any- of Wahhabi Islam worldwide, which included the one attempting to address this complex problem building of some 1500 mosques across the globe in as “Islamophobic” is no help at all in the Battle of the aftermath of the oil crisis in the 1970s and the Ideas. Rabil, in the article “How Muslim Extremists dramatic increase in Saudi wealth. Nevertheless, Exploit European Liberalism”, acknowledges that Byrne reassures us, all these movements are not Islamic extremism has a hold on only a minority authentic, traditional or even “conservative” Islam of British mosques, but that its influence contin- and proof of this is that they are more of a peril to ues to grow and can be felt in a religious landscape Muslims living in the Middle East than Westerners. that is not a single monolithic entity. There are, for That may be so, but does it mean we should have example, 121 Salafi and eight Muslim Brotherhood- to tolerate them in our midst? Liam Byrne has been associated mosques: “a significant number of these

Quadrant October 2017 79 Books mosques have a capacity of over three thousand, you can’t wear an England shirt in the bus … you making them not only large religious venues, but can’t speak up about these things because you’ll be also centres for social and cultural activities”. There called a racist.” To prevent “a sense of grievance” are also missionary organisations such Hizb-ut- turning into “moral outrage”, Byrne recommends Tahrir that openly seek to “restore the caliphate as that St George’s Day be celebrated in England as a prerequisite to unify Muslims and apply Islamic a special holiday based “on the successful example law”. of Australia’s annual Australia Day”. He appears Not to be overlooked are the many Saudi-funded unaware that our local PC brigade is turning on schools in the United Kingdom. The sectarian- Australia Day with a vengeance. Not only have the ism of these institutions—that is, their capacity to Islamic revivalists declared war on the West but generate “a sense of grievance” in young Muslims our very own ruling elites have joined them. This is rather than ameliorate it—can be found in recent the arena in which the Battle of Ideas will be won disclosures about the disconcerting history of our or lost, and not through Liam Byrne’s version of own Islamic College of South Australia (ICOSA). appeasement. The authors of a state government report claim the ICOSA based much of its curriculum on Saudi text- Daryl McCann is a regular contributor. He has a blog books which, among other things, malign Western at http://darylmccann.blogspot.com.au, and he tweets civilisation and insist that Islamic law is superior to at @dosakamccann. Western law and that it should be implemented. As for the status of women: “Man and woman are two distinct species created by Allah.” The idea of Sunni supremacism is contrasted with the moral inferiority of Western civilisation: “Islam is based upon values Lin van Hek and spirituality whereas the other is based on mate- rialism and rationalism.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is Verse at the Breakfast Table no ally of the Saudis—in fact, he’s quite opposite to them—but are we surprised that his lurid regime On Murray’s Run has used Saudi-Wahhabi texts for “educating” the by Joe Dolce young in his would-be caliphate? Ginninderra Press, 2017, 210 pages, $30. The Battle of Ideas will not be won by shutting (Available from bookshops, Ginninderra down debate. Sami Shah emphasises that freedom Press, or [email protected].) of speech means not only allowing one side of the argument to speak. British Muslim Maajid Nawaz, hen writing about this collection of poems, founder of the Quilliam Foundation, an organisa- I am aware of the long tradition of critical tion pledged to combat extremism among Muslims responseW from the inner sanctum of a poet’s life. in the United Kingdom, would endorse that senti- These early responses to the work can be savage ment. Nawaz, who might be described as a small reminders to the poet that someone is listening “l” liberal, has been criticised from every politi- very closely and with none of the distance of the cal direction. He is against typecasting Muslims wider audience that may or may not become the as a single monolithic entity but asserts that PC readers. pandering does a very good job of achieving that When Emily Dickinson wrote “My Life had end on its own. It was the Left, in the form of stood—a Loaded Gun”, it was to her sister-in-law, America’s Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Susan Gilbert, who lived next door, and who knew that last year placed him on a list of fifteen “anti- the reckless turmoil that existed in that towering Muslim extremists”. Charging an independent citadel of nervy sexual restraint engulfing those thinker, Muslim or otherwise, with the crime of two adjoining households in rural Amherst. The Islamophobia seems decidedly Orwellian. Nawaz wife of her adulterous brother, Austin, had a com- recently signalled his intention to sue the SPLC, a plex love relationship for thirty-five years with prospect that presages a genuine Battle of Ideas in the poet and was the first reader of the work that a way that Black Flag Down never does. Dickinson called “blossoms of the mind”. Decades At least Liam Byrne concedes, in the chapter of scholarship have revealed her work as being “The Home We Build Together”, that “a sense of anything but this over-sentimentalised descrip- grievance” exists not just among Muslims. He cites tion. This monumental confrontation of the great- a report that purportedly captures the complaints est poetic potency, a synthesis of penetrating erotic of UKIP supporters: “You can’t fly a St George’s yearning and enforced passivity—the wind is like flag any more; you can’t call Christmas Christmas; hungry dogs, her dark visions and contemptuous

80 Quadrant October 2017 Books witticisms are often reserved for the son who came hair loss. This is not a Protestant Wordsworth, or a to justify the ways of God to man. Her cynical sur- pagan Coleridge, but a man of stupefying energy, realism and anti-religious stance are unparalleled with a combative spirit, not a man likely to stand among great poets. down. Ted Hughes was the first to write admiringly When a poet makes contact, it can be like a about his wife Sylvia Plath’s artisan approach to her tick bite on one’s vitals, or a funeral procession of work. Leaving no work unfinished, she persisted thoughts and a distancing of self and world. It can until a completed verse had been achieved. “If she also be a cinematic mirage surrounding you with a could not get a table out of the material, she was vapour of entrancement. happy with a chair, or even a toy.” Do not expect a slim elegant volume with each The congenial companionship of Wordsworth poem melting into the last. Nor is it a work of and his sister Dorothy, roaming the pastoral land- modest scope. Conceptually vast, he sometimes scape for inspiration: takes his imagery from the domestic arts, the “Listen, Dorothy. I wandered lonely as a cow ...” disclosures of daily custom, like the shopper “Perhaps, dear, you may like to try cloud.” picking through tomatoes at the market. Always “Yes, that’s it! I wandered lonely there is the awareness of the as a cloud!” relation of form and content. When Vita Sackville-West His mind is a calm well-ordered called Virginia Woolf a genius in There are many desk; he delivers his American public, she was admonished by her poems to choose from, experience with a sharpened friend, “O God, don’t say that—no coming comet-like, pencil in the “J Effen K” poem, one will ever believe a word I say continuing the riff of Ferlingetti’s, again.” sometimes with the I’m waiting for them to prove that Dylan Thomas returned from dangerous radiance God is really an American. yet another tremendously successful In the What if poems, what if tour of America with no money in of art kept under Sylvia had actually killed Ted? his pocket, confirming his wife quarantine. The Bequeathing The Poetess three Caitlin’s belief that his scribbling volume teems with grandchildren, turning the scan- was rubbish and would not feed dal on its head. In “If Hitler Also their children. At home in Wales, personalities. Spelled Hiedler”, what if Hitler Thomas wrote in the boathouse, in had actually been accepted to the between his drinking, and spent Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna? all the money he made from touring by shouting The beautiful “Green-Eyed Boy of the Rain”, everyone in the bars to free drinks. Caitlin regularly almost a murder ballad, the destruction of a human heard his poems, read aloud in the bath, but could objet d’art: only ask, “And how much would that one be worth?” But Thomas’s performances in America are I wanted to kill him to tear him apart, the nearest any poet has come to rock-star status. Until nothing of him would remain, He was feted and adored everywhere he went and When I thought of him kissing her mouth, provided with the drugs and alcohol that would The green-eyed boy of the rain. take him to an early grave. T.S. Eliot took to his sick bed during the writing At twenty-three, he came into the orbit of a of The Waste Land, and his wife, Vivienne Haigh- gifted literary mentor in Montreal, Matthew von Wood, took up the running of his affairs, including Baeyer. Von Baeyer taught English at McGill the finishing of the poem. She wrote forty lines, University, and was legendary in those parts for which he later claimed were the best in “the whole his love and knowledge of poetry. One of his short bloody thing”. After a while the marriage went bad inscriptions to Dolce sums up his unique teaching and he joined forces with her brother to have her philosophy: All REAL teaching is done personally, committed into a mental asylum where she spent deeply—and mutually. the rest of her life. Though the forty lines remained, Von Baeyer also happened to be a brilliant live no one mentioned her name again. poetry reader, with an evocative voice and timing that rendered poems impossible to ignore. He asked t times, I have listened to Joe’s raw verse in the young Dolce to compose music for the poetry, the breakfast hour and admired his ingenuity. and to accompany him at readings. It was in this IA have been there for the metaphors that spring up manner that some of the greatest poetic works ever around life’s flotsam, births, deaths, marriages and written, repeatedly heard and performed, became

Quadrant October 2017 81 Books ingrained in his sensibilities. This apprenticeship languages, never masquerading as poetry, merely of sorts stayed with him and though he later testimony, understood across the world, no barriers immersed himself in the musical opportunities of of language, instantly recognisable by the unset- the 1970s, this early literary experience remained tled, the relocated. The women, with nothing but a as a heady romantic overture to his life. One of his small suitcase holding their wedding sheets, called first recordings, in 1980, was of “Return”, a poem by wogs for a few decades, before uneasy acceptance. the Greek-Egyptian poet C.P. Cavafy, that he had Above all, the fathers and sons accepting shit work, set to music in 1969: while living ten to a room, until they saved enough money to send for wives and mothers to join them Return often and take me beloved sensation, in this “a nice-a place”. return and take me, If you have any doubt that this book could be a when the lips and the skin remember. fascinating read, then consider the coupling: this country’s most important poet, untethered by the There would be many detours before Dolce boundaries of country, culture or language; and the returned to where he started. Like an old man who other, the composer, today seventy years old, who marries his childhood sweetheart, he has taken has himself wandered the corridors of international up where he left off with determined passions popularity. ramming against each other. This volume is not There were many knock-backs; self-inquiry that a record of all the poems and song lyrics written said: Is that all you can summon up from the dark heart in the last seven years, but rather the ones chosen of existence? Then, occasionally, editorial encour- by the poet extraordinaire and literary editor Les agement to lift the spirit. As Les Murray once told Murray: more than 150 to date. him: When you do it well, you are Zowie! There are many to choose from, coming comet- like, sometimes with the dangerous radiance of art Lin van Hek and Joe Dolce live in Carlton. kept under quarantine. The volume teems with per- sonalities: Mr Q the hometown paedophile; bush- ranger Harry Power; Albert Tucker building his caravan from a bedsit in Paris. His palette drifts into psychedelic amber with Robert Murr ay “The Big C Word” and “Da Vinci Was a Bastard”. The balefully grave understudy to a love poem, The Sydney Success Story “Apparition”, stands alone, naked. A small trans­ fusion of untamed fear if you believe that our life is Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People reshaped in our art. of Coastal Sydney There’s that cinematic time capsule standing by Paul Irish whole and intact, “Little Grandpa’s Train Ride”, NewSouth, 2017, 240 pages, $34.99 an entire immigrant story captured on one page. Great-grandfather cut in two by the silent steam ne conclusion from reading this good, con- train, the small grandson taken on board for a ride cise history of the Aboriginal people of the on the choo-choo, carried home in sooty arms, OSydney coastal region is that white settlement from scarred cap hung on the kitchen hook, the older 1788 was a great success. Archaeologist and his- man finally sitting, demented, in the garden, while torian Paul Irish shows descendants of the local grandchildren knock his cap off and play choo- Aborigines still living there and remembering choo themselves. some of their family history and old culture. “They This same deep well-of-recollection served him did not go away,” he says. amply when he wrote: Nor were they “forced off”, other than by land development. This is a false charge ignorant com- When I was a boy mentators on white settlement often make about about the eighth grade Aborigines in many other contexts too. There was mama used to say certainly calamitous tragedy, though, in the lethal don’t stay out late impact of introduced disease and a collapse in with the bad boys population. always shoot-a pool ... Paul Irish presents a story of amicable give and take, mutual acceptance, and of the indigenous It was this simple verse set to music, selling on people over a long time peacefully and gradually vinyl, in fifteen countries, translated into as many integrating their old ways with the modern world

82 Quadrant October 2017 Books that the well-intentioned British colonists brought, favourite haunt, the Domain another. while generally the newcomers recognised that the As time went on they built bush shacks but also Aboriginal people belonged there. camped regularly at traditional harbour-side spots This is not what a lot of people want to hear such as Double Bay and Rose Bay—today’s zillion- these days, but it accords with the substantial, if dollar real estate. Often they used European boats inadequate, recorded information, as well as the for longer trips, say to the Hunter, sometimes given additional material that Irish has unearthed: an a free ride, sometimes paying the fare. experienced colonial power proclaims “amity and Irish says the Aborigines shrewdly worked kindness” towards the indigenous people, mostly out quite early where power and influence in the follows it through and earns acceptance. Black colony lay and cultivated it. Elite old families Armbanders usually find it a hard slog to damn like the Wentworths reciprocated with a paternal the Sydney settlement. interest, which was often handed down. This was Irish himself seems embarrassed and defensive eventually a factor in Billy Wentworth becoming about the good news story he tells, peppering his the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the 1968–71 accounts with vague, unsubstanti- Gorton Coalition government. ated references to frontier violence The Aborigines did not seem and so on, and avoiding any criti- he Aborigines did awed by white authority. They cism of Aboriginal ways, as if the T often assisted the police in catching politically correct thought police not seem awed by criminals, and approached gover- were looking over his shoulder. white authority. nors and government with requests Nevertheless, he paints a picture and grievances, sometimes assisted of friendly relations between the They often assisted by white well-wishers. two peoples—often they played the police in catching together as children—in the coun- criminals, and his friendly intimacy became try-town atmosphere of Sydney at more difficult after about 1850 least until about 1850. They knew approached governors Tas the white population swelled each other’s names and characters, and government and with it urban development, and mixed-race children began to and generations changed. But arrive. with requests and Irish suggests things still went Most Aborigines stayed in grievances. along fairly well until about a hun- their age-old clan groups but dred years after Governor Phillip some farmed or went to work for landed. Suburban development and partnered with whites. A few slid into white inhibited the old ways much more after that. There slums. Most still trod their historic beats along the was increasing government intervention in the lives coast, with a headquarters camp the base for semi- of indigenous people, and more Aborigines arrived nomadic roaming. They might also travel to more from outside Sydney (as well as white immigrants) distant “affiliated” indigenous people as far away to further complicate things. The local Aborigines as Port Stephens or the Shoalhaven, as presumably began to concentrate at the La Perouse settle- they always had. ment—where many of their descendants still live, They took European names, learned English, and helped with the writing of this book. Irish fancied European clothes and some converted to suggests that after 1890 the protection and welfare Christianity. Always a fishing people, with the authorities oppressed the Aborigines, but does not waterways their primary sustenance, they earned give much detail. money by selling fish to the whites. Extra money Irish acknowledges that the inland area west of came from selling artefacts, by displays in town, Parramatta was different. The indigenous people by acting as guides or trackers, or from bush and there spoke a different dialect of Dharug and kept other work for whites. their distance. This was the main food-producing While keeping mostly to their old ways they area of the colony; nearer the coast most land was often visited Sydney town, walked its streets and too sandy or rocky to farm or clear much. In the drank in its pubs, had their favourite friendly pub- years around 1800, therefore, the west saw more licans. Paul Irish suspects they did not drink more early competition with the Aborigines for water than anybody else, though their drinking could and good land, leading to a baffling stew of violent sometimes seem conspicuous in the town. They conflict, often enough deadly, mixed with friendly held corroborees, spear-throwing contests—and acceptance, good intentions and Aboriginal tribal fights—in the future parks and in the streets. The politics. It culminated in one massacre, at Appin Government Boat House at Circular Quay was a in 1816—the only one in the Sydney region and

Quadrant October 2017 83 Books more likely to have been the result of panic or error than the strategic blow for the settlement that Irish Penelope Nelson implies. Television personality Stan Grant says in a Dancing in Hope and Fear foreword that the Sydney Aborigines were “written out of history”. The reverse is truer; somebody has The Crystal Ballroom to write history in; most history is never recorded, by Libby Sommer especially when, as with coastal Sydney, the avail- Ginninderra Press, 2017, 158 pages, $25 able information is scanty and scattered. No news can be good news. Early white history gets atten- ave you ever heard Latin American music tion because the colony was so unusual. Copious coming from an upper room over a shop, and printed and indexed records of government activity lingeredH briefly at the sign about dancing classes? until the 1840s are easily available. Interest from Perhaps you have seen people—a man in built-up historians fades after that. shoes or a woman with a surfeit of silver bangles— Irish gives an estimated Sydney indigenous coastal heading for an old town hall after dark. The world of population in 1788 of 1500—low by world standards ballroom dancing and tango lessons has its own eti- but normal for hunter-gatherers, as it is as many as quette and hierarchies. Libby Sommer’s new fiction, undeveloped land can support. He says that for most The Crystal Ballroom, lifts the lid on the delights and of the period he writes about, though, the popula- pitfalls of this fascinating sub-culture. tion collapsed to about one hundred or even lower. In elegant, pared-down prose, Sommer’s sto- It did not return to the 1788 level until the 1930s. ries create a vivid portrait of a woman who loves to He gives the main reason as the 1789 smallpox epi- dance. Sofia has special dancing shoes from Bloch’s. demic, which was estimated at the time to have She has been to dancing classes. No longer young, killed half the indigenous people of Sydney and she takes care with her appearance. What could has since been estimated as killing half of them possibly go wrong? continent-wide. Many of the nineteen linked stories in The Crystal Irish mentions this disaster quite briefly. He Ballroom bear the names of men, and it is no surprise does not mention a second, equally calamitous epi- that these dancing partners, Henry, Gary, Aravind demic, suspected as smallpox, about 1830. Nor does and Jack, among others, often turn out to be disap- he mention the effect of other diseases or the small pointing. Sofia yearns for more than someone who size typical of Aboriginal families at the time; knows how to salsa: venereal disease is thought to have gravely inhib- ited their fertility. He does not mention, either, the She was feeling pretty dreadful, as she usually extreme vulnerability to infection of a population did at weekends. No one seemed to understand isolated for thousands of years. but she just didn’t fit in any more. The children Irish says, but only briefly in a footnote, that grown up and left, the business finished, the the 1789 smallpox “most likely” came from the house gone. She looked out on to the street to Sydney settlement. There he quotes only one remind herself there was a world out there. source, a partisan article in a historical journal. This seems a strangely off-hand way to treat the Confessing over coffee to her friend Ingrid, greatest known calamity in Australian history. In Sofia relates the latest instalment of her ballroom fact, there has been huge debate over the source for adventures. The two women meet at a harbour pool about two hundred years. There is strong evidence or a beachside café, or take a stroll together. From that Indonesian fishermen visiting the north coast time to time Ingrid asks a question or says some- of Australia were the most likely source; evidence thing tactless, but most of the stories flow from implicating the Sydney settlement is controversial. gallantly hopeful beginnings to rueful endings. Lesser writers on Aboriginal history seem often Ballroom dancing is a competitive arena, but not in to be swayed by the Black Armband big guns who the Strictly Ballroom sense of competing for prizes. exclude anything that does not make colonialism Women compete for partners, looking for men look bad. Perhaps the “great Australian silence” who can dance and men who could become lovers these writers complain of is not about frontier mas- or close companions. Few of the men prove suit- sacres but about frontier disease. able for more than a few encounters on the dance floor or a brief fling elsewhere. Some are married Robert Murray is the author of The Making of or claimed by other women. One is regarded as far Australia: A Concise History (Rosenberg). too young by Ingrid and other judgmental friends. Others, adrift in the world, are looking for financial

84 Quadrant October 2017 Books or emotional rescue. Occasionally Sofia ventures pulled up, chest up and out, and with a partner beyond the ballroom, to a music festival in the bush again, always there’s that special connection or a suburban swingers’ spa concealed behind metal with a partner. doors. And inevitably her well-intentioned friends give a dinner party to introduce her to someone Yes, always there’s that special connection with they consider more suitable than the men from the a partner. I found Jack, for whom this chapter is Crystal Ballroom. named, an endearing but exasperating character. Sommer has great skill in creating atmosphere. I enjoyed the eastern suburbs settings in this The music, the swirling scents of aftershave and book, the scent of the sea, the birds in the gully, the sweat, the décor of ballrooms, flats, motels and noise of traffic, the cafés and beaches. The book’s shared tents are powerfully evoked. She is also design and layout are attractive, and the only edito- good, perhaps too good, at describing what people rial lapses I could spot were Leichhardt with just one wear. Those descriptions reminded me of captions h, and the fairways of a golf course termed “rolling from the social pages of many years ago. freeways”. Some of the best passages in the book express Although this is a book of linked stories rather the joy of dancing. Sofia has a lesson from an than a conventional novel, I found myself caring Argentinian teacher, Alberto: deeply about Sofia and her fate. When, oh when, I wondered, would she escape from the cycle of hope We’re practising walking the length of the hall. and despair? Surely her energy and resilience would Alberto says that in Buenos Aires students of eventually be rewarded? tango spend two years just learning to walk I don’t want to give away the ending, but rest properly. assured that there is some emotional development “Extend forward,” he says, “step forward, and progress on the friendship front. And the con- only placing the weight on the extended leg at cluding paragraph is a joy. the last moment, toes pointed, sides of the feet staying connected to the floor.” Penelope Nelson reviewed Robin Dalton’s One Leg Then backwards with a straight leg, torso Over in the July-August issue.

The Lotus Looters

The children of the garden are afraid of bees that wish to share the summer shade; but no one in that garden cares to notice that the bee collects its nectar from the lotus.

Strange Dismissal

It sounds silly but it’s harsh to be caught Lillee bowled Marsh, but that’s what happened to me the over prior to tea.

Damien Balassone

Quadrant October 2017 85 Michael Connor

The Merchant of Nowhere

wo effeminate young men in dresses prance tumes, masks and disfiguring glasses. Beneath their onto the stage. When the laughter and legal gowns the audiences may have been given cheering stop one of them agreeably lisps to glimpses of overstuffed codpieces. Tthe other, “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is The great speech, “The quality of mercy is not aweary of this great world.” When King James saw strained, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from The Merchant of Venice in 1605 this is probably what heaven / Upon the place beneath”, may have been Portia looked and sounded like. In Shakespeare’s humour with Doctor Balthazar suggesting to the all-male theatre actors in drag could be serious rep- audience that even without straining something far resentations of women—or men in dresses funny. different from rain was about to droppeth on the The Merchant was a comedy, with Shylock as a comic villainous Jew. villain (see Quadrant, March 2017) and Portia and Antonio’s supposed sexual hankering for her maid Nerissa comic heroines. Imagine a young Bassanio is excitedly explored in modern pro- seventeenth-century Frankie Howerd as Portia and ductions. In an all-male cast, as in Shakespeare’s her words, when she speaks of Bassanio, are not theatre, there is an even stronger element of hetero- quite what we are used to: “He of all men that ever homo comedy between the male role players and my foolish eyes looked upon was the best deserving the boys playing the women. Though here not all of a fair lady.” the female characters are treated equally. Portia and Approaching the trial scene, Shakespeare Nerissa are comic but Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, is prompted his boy actors for their roles. The young handled respectfully. All three will appear in male men playing girls pretending to be men would attire—Portia and Nerissa for comedy, but when need to speak “between the age of man and boy Jessica dons trousers Lorenzo acknowledges the / With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps / transformation “even in the lovely garnish of a boy”. Into a manly stride”. Yet for hundreds of years vain Shakespeare released the player from his drag role Portias have ignored their creator’s directions and and restored his masculinity, as if giving him, mid- stepped into fetching judicial attire before destroy- way through the play, a chance for his performance ing Shylock with their poetry and law. as a male actor to be acknowledged by the audience. Those original performers came on stage for This week he is Jessica but next week, who knows, the trial scene with their exaggerated manly stride, he may be Romeo. their little bodies cloaked in over-large borrowed The play’s ending, the happy ring scene when all legal gowns. When Portia asks the villain, “Is your is revealed to the surprised husbands, is particularly name Shylock?” there seems to be, even in modern bawdy. The word ring, generally supposed to allude non-comic productions, an unexplained joke. The to female genitalia, is repeated over twenty times. humour may be that when Portia first looked on In an all-male production the word refers to a dif- Shylock she was staring out of thick, heavy-framed ferent part of the anatomy of the men in dresses spectacles. The reason that Bassanio and Gratiano and is crude hetero-homo humour. The profoundly do not recognise their wives in Doctor Balthazar anti-Semitic play ends not with what may seem a and his clerk may be that Portia and Nerissa were rather tame conclusion by Gratiano but with a final meant to be performed in commedia dell’arte cos- boisterous vulgar leer: “Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring.”

The Bell Shakespeare production of The Merchant t the Theatre Royal in Hobart the Bell of Venice was performed at the Theatre Royal, Shakespeare (BS) touring production of The Hobart, on August 24. AMerchant of Venice was nothing like that: it was a

86 Quadrant October 2017 The Merchant of Nowhere typicalS B production of mutilated Shakespeare. and the Jews, Shylock and Jessica, isolated over The subsidised company is Australia’s leading there. It begins. The cross-wearers fall to their knees Shakespearean theatre group. This is where most and say the Lord’s Prayer. Australians will see Shakespeare on stage. Its mis- Modern anti-Semitism does not live in the treatment of the texts is cultural vandalism. Vatican. It’s not because of the local curé that Jews This Merchant, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, are streaming out of France for safety. This anti- is not Shakespeare’s play. Scenes are cut, mis- Catholic prejudice excuses real anti-Semites in the placed, created. Laughter comes from added bits, audience—the BDS supporters and the Left apolo- funny faces, exaggerated diction, physical busi- gists and allies of Islamic fundamentalism and Jew ness, new words. The second-rate has been grafted hatred. The failure to acknowledge what is happen- on to Shakespeare and it is this that entertains the ing in Australia as in Europe is an intellectual cop- audience. out that also insults Christians in the Middle East When Portia reveals her plan to dress as a man, and South-East Asia who are being murdered by the incident has been cut adrift from its author’s Islamists. construction and moved to just before the trial At the front of the stage is a sign with electric scene. She says to Nerissa that they will appear “in letters, “The Comical Historie of The Merchant of such a habit / That they shall think we are accom- Venice”. Pre-play publicity advertised an “uncom- plished / With that we lack.” Nerissa screams out, promising and dark production”. Antonio (Jo “Dicks!” The Australian praised the production as Turner) seemed terribly depressed when he stopped “an intelligent close reading of the praying and seemed about to cry play”. when he spoke: “In sooth I know The story itself is changed. aving given the not why I am so sad.” Mitchell Butel, who performs a H After a bit, the depressed heroic un-villainous Shylock, said, play a new beginning man kisses Bassanio (Damien “It is one of the greatest stories ever and messed up the Strouthos). The Australian [Left] written, so you can’t go wrong.” Book Review was impressed: “This The director has gone wrong and middle bit, the director [the homosexuality] is no kowtow- the new play is a contemporary, added a new ending. ing to modern sensibilities; on the dull-witted collection of feminist The play Shakespeare contrary, the homoeroticism works and fashionable audience-pleasing so well within the drama of the play prejudices with a new sentimental- built was renovated that one wonders at not having seen ised ending. with poor taste, it before.” At the back of the stage is a simple silver backdrop. Before it to chipboard walls he gay interpretation of the side is a single green tree. Low and false ceilings. Antonio’s love for Bassanio benches are arranged in a semicircle Thas been on stage and film since facing the audience. The actors sit the 1980s. Absolutely de rigueur in here when they are not performing. Golden leaves modern performances, this time around it’s closer to fall from the flies, without reason. After inter- rigor mortis, for with the kiss there comes a sudden val, they float down again but this time coloured underlining freezing of action and horse-frighten- brown. On the far sides of the stage are standing ing music from above. I’m not making this up. It is clothes racks for costumes where the actors change. very Menzies-era. Towards the back, mounted on a tall wheeled table, Gay kiss number two occurred as Shylock pre- are the famous boxes for Portia’s suitors to choose. pared to cut into his victim. Antonio turned to The stage setting is pleasant, attractive and blandly Bassanio and placed a sloppy kiss on his friend’s meaningless. lips. Poor Bassanio reacted as though an asp had Director Sarks asks, “How can you make a play bitten him. No organ music, no wedding bells here. from the sixteenth century, that was speaking to a The homo attraction theme itself is based on very different climate, speak to 2017?” Simple: let only a few lines that could represent idealised male the actors speak the lines that Shakespeare wrote. friendship in Shakespeare’s time. Directors who Let them put together the words, keep them from play the gay scenario ignore an equally warm- running into each other and walking into the set, hearted line from Gratiano (Fayssal Bazzi): “I tell and leave the audience alone. Then accept the con- thee what, Antonio—I love thee and it is my love sequences for staging an anti-Semitic play. that speaks.” Perhaps it’s one of those open gay rela- The actors enter, in modern dress. They stand tionships Fairfax Media will tell us about after the about, Christians here, wearing small gold crosses, same-sex plebiscite is concluded.

Quadrant October 2017 87 The Merchant of Nowhere

When Antonio approached the moneylender actor sitting still on the bench, a hat on his head for the first time he cried out what sounded like and a small bag at his side. It was a striking image. “Shyyyylooock”. Even Shylock seemed to find He seemed in his stillness like a sad figure from the it odd. What strange thoughts get into directors’ Holocaust, a lonely Jew awaiting deportation. heads. Shakespeare’s Shylock is big and brutal, Butel’s The comic scene with Old Gobbo is cut, possibly is small. The part isn’t large. Seeing Shylock at because Shakespearean verbal comedy eludes the the side of the stage throughout the performance company. Launcelot (Jacob Warner), the clown, gets reduces his impact. A villain Shylock who enters laughs from additions to the text. When entrusted and exits the stage grows larger in our imaginations with letters to deliver he produces a notebook and by his absences. A victim Shylock we see all the needs assistance spelling out the names of recipi- time remains little. ents. This went down very well with the audience In this production the strongest part of the and was repeated. Shylock performance was an invented moment Portia and Nerissa (Catherine Davies) are flighty when he is attacked by the Christians and “con- young feminists from other BS comedies. Their verted”—though, despite some added church music, lines are added to and care has been taken to give none of them actually seem very clear about how them extra business. A male play butchered to make this is done. A limited interpretation of Shylock as a feminist play is not a pretty thing. only ever a victim was confining. Poor Morocco (Shiv Palekar)—his intelligent Jessica Tovey occupied Portia and her dress, with and sensitive speech on racism is perverted by liveliness, but did little to illuminate the role. Even imposed feminist silliness. The lines, “And let us before Bassanio has selected the winning box and make incision for your love / To prove whose blood made her his wife she kisses him roguishly. Later, in is reddest, his or mine”, is accompanied by an exag- well-cut male legal attire as Balthazar, she is more gerated pantomime of cutting his own arm. Not staid. The “quality of mercy” speech was pedestrian only is it poor stuff, it is a waste of a young actor because with Shylock as the victim Portia was no who later, doubling in the role of Lorenzo, gives a longer making an impassioned appeal to a villain. romantic and elegant reading of “The moon shines Nerissa competed with her mistress with enthu- bright”. However, when Morocco picks the wrong siasm and vulgarity and was spoiled with extra lines box he saves Portia from a life under a burka. This and busyness to build her part. tone-deaf production then allows an offensive rac- Having given the play a new beginning and ist comment by Portia to pass as humour: “A gen- messed up the middle bit, the director added a new tle riddance! Draw the curtains, go. / Let all of his ending. The play Shakespeare built was renovated complexion choose me so.” with poor taste, chipboard walls and false ceilings. The Prince of Aragon (Eugene Gilfedder) is effete The feminist makeover was based on words writ- and drunk. And Antonio, holding an empty bot- ten for boy actors, not twenty-first-century gender tle, is drunk when he tries to reason with Shylock. warriors. Perhaps alcohol abuse is a generational wowserish To get to the newly invented ending the ring thing on the part of the director. scene was scampered through, and little if any of The villain in the play seems to be Antonio. Shakespeare’s bawdiness emerged. There was a rush When Shylock collapses at the loss of his daughter, to arrive at the point where a letter is read with not his ducats, the merchant who is in debt to him Shylock’s promise to Lorenzo and Jessica of “a spe- seizes the opportunity to spit on the floored Jew. cial deed of gift / after his death of all he dies pos- sessed of”. itchell Butel’s Shylock was muted. Neither The Christians celebrate this joyful ending and he nor Jessica Tovey (Portia) gave memo- one cruelly places the kippah that had been torn Mrable performances because they were no longer from Shylock’s head during his conversion on his Shakespeare’s characters but were owned by the daughter’s head. Jessica, who had robbed her father, director. Shakespeare’s Shylock is a great figure in breaks down and cries out, “I am ashamed.” Her our theatrical traditions. He is never entirely clear, husband, Lorenzo, drops beside her and tears into neither completely black nor white; there is room for pieces the letter that has brought the good news. In an actor to create within the tradition. This Shylock Shakespeare’s text he had called it “manna in the had been pre-packaged for victimhood, constrained way of starved people”. to suffer from Christian hatred and the loss of his None of the new ending comes from Shakespeare’s daughter. Butel occupied the dark suit and wore a text. Jessica and Lorenzo are performing newly prayer shawl, quietly. Having the players always on invented words and business. The fabricated ending stage meant that from time to time one noticed the is television-drama deep.

88 Quadrant October 2017 The Merchant of Nowhere

The applause was loud, long and sincere. Well another answer. Don’t. Instead, write a brand before we took to tumbling statues we destroyed new play. Arnold Wesker did with his Shylock. monuments of our literary heritage. There was some Shakespeare’s play is sixteenth-century Jew-hating. stamping of feet in approval. Civilisations end years Maybe write The Merchant of Lakemba to explore before the bloody finis sign descends. modern anti-Semitism with Mohamed (Antonio) To Sarks’s question, “How can you make a play and his friends as a Middle Eastern drug gang, and from the sixteenth century, that was speaking to Jewish Shylock as the shylock—an eastern suburbs a very different climate, speak to 2017?” there is loan shark.

I Dreamt I Saw St Augustine (St Dominic, As Well)

I dreamt I saw St Augustine, (St Dominic, as well), brothers in Christ and Light, but from both men the shadows fell. St Dominic’s Dominicans, St Augustine was patron Saint, Pope Innocent adored. of brewers and of printers, A play on Dominicanus— he argued for Just War Theory, Latin: Dog of the Lord. Original Sinners. St Dominic’s advice was sought Latin was his childhood language, to root out the Cathars, a hedonistic youth, the only Crusade within the faith, the most sexual of all the Saints, a Christian civil war. thieving and lust uncouth A score of years in Southern France inspired his oft repeated prayer, to put heretics down, (soon, he’d be celibate): a victory apparent but Lord, please grant me chastity and the Cathars went to ground continence … but not yet! and practiced outlawed beliefs to His arguments against magic the Feminine above, formed the core decisions, with songs to Ladies of the Crown, for persecution of witches, in veiled Courtly Love. during the Inquisition. St Dominic’s lost troubadours, I dreamt I saw St Augustine, romantic harbingers, (St Dominic, as well), through musing Ladies of the Court, brothers in Christ and Light, but in presaged our folksingers. both men the shadows fell. I dreamt I saw St Augustine, (St Dominic, as well), brothers in Christ and Light, but on both men the shadows fell.

Joe Dolce

Quadrant October 2017 89 David Martin Jones & Lana Starkey

Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance

nthony Powell is little read these days. Ask a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and for his nine-volume saga of English life and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t manners, A Dance to the Music of Time, in any include every conceivable circumstance of what Australian bookshop and all you encounter are blank happened. The novel can do that. The novelist A himself lays it down. His decision is binding. stares or a suggestion you try the music department. In the UK, the Anthony Powell Society keeps his memory alive, but its demography is not encourag- Later Trapnel says, “Naturalism is only ‘like’ life, ing. Yet Powell, a contemporary at Oxford of Evelyn if the novelist himself is any good.” Waugh, wrote the twentieth-century’s masterwork Powell observed that he had of English literature. What accounts for his neglect? The problem begins with Powell’s comparison no talent for this … sort of self-revelation … with more critically acclaimed modernist writers. it’s a very particular sort of talent, but people Commentaries on the Dance sequence generally talk as if every writer had it. You’ve only got to assume that a European tradition of novel writing see the number of books in which people bore and, in particular, Marcel Proust, influenced him. you to tears with very detailed revelations about Critics, when they consider him at all, refer to him their sex lives to realize that this isn’t so. as “the English Proust”. The comparison, of course, is odious. The academic determination to reduce Given Powell’s view of naturalism, how we might Powell to a poor imitator of Proust rests primarily wonder is the representation of character handled in on the fact that both authors wrote novels about the the Dance, a biographical novel about the life and passage of time. encounters of Powell’s alter ego, Nick Jenkins, and However, interviewed about his roman fleuve, how does this depiction affect the work’s overarch- Powell insisted that although he admired Proust, ing themes of time and contingency? “the essential difference is that Proust is an enor- Given that Powell was himself a biographer of mously subjective writer who has a peculiar gen- the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey, ius for describing how he or his narrator feels”. The and that Nick Jenkins writes a biography of the great modern novelists, Powell continued, showed anatomist of melancholy, Robert Burton, and that how their protagonists thought and felt. Emile Russell Gwinnett, a key protagonist in the later Zola, James Joyce, Henry James and Robert Musil novels, is the biographer of Trapnel, adds a further all in different ways shared “this very particular sort dimension to the question. In fact, character in the of talent” that came to define the modern novel. Dance evolves, not in accordance with modern, natu- Powell, by contrast, is a very English exception. ralist preconceptions, but according to Powell’s own He admitted that he had “no peculiar genius for highly original engagement with a seventeenth-cen- describing how his narrator feels”. Indeed, the Dance tury English view of “charactery” and its relation- explores this difficulty in the novel about post-war ship to time, experience and change. literary life, Books Do Furnish a Room, where the novel’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, and Xavier Trapnel, the author of Camel Ride to the Tomb, discuss the art Seventeenth-century character and the of writing. Trapnel contends that “there was no such music of time thing as Naturalism in novel writing”. He explains: eferenceo t John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the poetry of People think because a novel’s invented it isn’t PRhilip Sidney, Abraham Cowley, John Wilmot true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because and George Herbert and the Jacobean tragedies of

90 Quadrant October 2017 Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance

Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Beaumont Time (1634), from which the novel sequence takes its and Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton title, and that he expands on Poussin’s image as the and Thomas Dekker litter Powell’s literary output. work passes through the spring, summer, autumn Nick Jenkins writes Burton’s biography, Borage and and winter stages of Jenkins’s life. However, they Hellebore, in the immediate aftermath of the Second ignore the conclusion to the final novel, Hearing World War, while Russell Gwinnett, the biographer Secret Harmonies, which concludes with a “torrential of Death’s Head Swordsman, is also writing a passage” from Burton’s Anatomy. Jenkins channels monograph on The Gothic Symbolism of Mortality Burton, observing how he “hears every day rumours in the Texture of Jacobean Stagecraft. Powell himself of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, revived Aubrey’s Brief Lives, wrote a biography, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, John Aubrey and his Friends, and considered Aubrey apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in the founder of modern biography and a superior France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland”. The pas- exponent of the form than later sage and the novel end: “Today we proponents like Lytton Strachey. hear of new Lords and officers cre- Powell believed Aubrey “might elancholy had ated, tomorrow of some great men have been a novelist if he had lived M deposed … one is let loose, another at a different date”. achieved something imprisoned, one purchaseth, Immediately before the war, of a cult status another breaketh; one runs, another Powell had begun researching a rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, etc.” work on Aubrey. After the outbreak in seventeenth- Burton’s view that he “wrote of of hostilities, circumstances he century England. Melancholy, by being busie to avoid found unconducive to novel writ- “Lowness of spirit” Melancholy”, moreover, permeates ing, he discovered in seventeenth- the post-war “winter” sequence of century works by Aubrey, Aubrey’s became known as novels. Books Do Furnish a Room sometime collaborator Anthony the “English disease”. finds Nick at his old Oxford college Wood’s Athenae Oxoniensis and at forty recapturing “all the crush- Narcissus Luttrell’s Brief Relations One of its myriad ing melancholy of the undergradu- “vistas of the past, if not necessar- forms was literary. ate condition”. Burton had observed ily preferable to one’s own time, at that students leading “a sedentary least appreciably different”. How, and solitary life” were more “subject we might wonder, did English seventeenth-century to this malady than others”. Jenkins is researching vistas on character influence Powell’s treatment of Borage and Hellebore, his biography of Burton, and personality and plot in the Dance? finds in the solitude of “archaic folios, a soothing Powell observed in 1978 that Burton’s Anatomy drug”. War, had: of Melancholy “just stands for my book on Aubrey”, first published in 1948. It is clear, however, that … n left o the one hand a passionate desire to Powell had read both works along with other sev- tackle work: on the other, never to do any work enteenth-century studies of character and adapted again. It was a state of mind Robert Burton his approach to the novel in accordance with them. … would have well understood. Irresolution Nick Jenkins considers Burton’s style of writing appealed to him as one of the myriad forms “as the subject required” worthy of emphasis and of Melancholy, although he was, of course, imitation. He cited approvingly Burton’s practice of concerned in the main with no mere temporary not composing: depression or fidgetiness, “but a chronic or continued disease, a settled humour”. Still, neatly … but to express myself readily and post-war melancholy might have rated a short plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs subsection in the great work. sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then winding … doth my style Melancholy had achieved something of a cult flow now serious, then light; now comical, then status in seventeenth-century England. “Lowness of satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the spirit” became known as the “English disease”. One present subject required. of its myriad forms was literary. The melancholic disposition prompted wider disquisitions upon Commentators generally note the fact that character, as commentators witnessed “the endless Powell opens his first novel in his roman fleuve, janglings and perplexities” that beset the troubled A Question of Upbringing, by referencing Nicolas kingdom from 1603 to 1688. These perplexities were Poussin’s allegorical painting, Dance to the Music of not so different from the ones that troubled Powell’s

Quadrant October 2017 91 Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance post-war English world. relationship between character and event, but also A vogue for writing set “characters” swept with the maxim that, in a sentence, illustrated a through the Jacobean and Carolingian court. character type. A maxim offered “the outlines of Satirists remarked upon the peculiarities of English a picture at which a common spectator will gaze character as obedience to the authority of the crown without knowing what is intended … though a in church and state declined. Bad habits led to skillful eye will immediately perceive … the beauty hardened hearts. It was not difficult, in the English of the painter’s design”. By contrast, the character context, to connect tender conscience to habit, and must be animated and realised by the force of the habit to humour and character. reader’s imagination. Ultimately, the precise, but The Anglican Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, “distinguishing differences between one man and England’s first satirist, taxonomised contemporary another which the … refinement of a life immensely character types and established a genre that led both different from the simplicity of nature has brought to Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and the early into view … requires a discriminating judgment and English novel. In the literature of characters, from extensive knowledge”. Hall’s Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608) to Samuel It was John Aubrey, in particular, who turned Butler’s Characters (1667–69), there is an efflores- this discriminating judgment of character in the cence of character types, from twenty-six in Hall to direction of biography. In capturing the lives of his almost 200 in Butler, together with a growing satiri- contemporaries, Aubrey, Powell maintained, con- cal and moral intent in their composition. templated “the life around him as in a mirror— Hall’s virtues include characters like the wise, scarcely counting himself as one of the actors on the humble, valiant, honest and patient man, whilst stage, caring for things most when they became part the vices involve hypocrisy, inconstancy, flattery, of history. He was there to watch and record.” presumption and ambition. As the genre develops, Powell further observed of Aubrey’s style that: however, characters become more diverse and pre- cise. For Thomas Overbury, a character was not only … the words are often half humorously written a “picture (reall or personal) quaintly drawne”, it also like a remark made in parting conversation, a “signifieth to ingrave, or make a deepe impression”. characteristic that his writings always retain. It was an “imprese, or short embleme; in little com- The method is all part of his presentation of prehending much”. Character sketches over time life as a picture crowded with odd figures, became personified. Thus, Overbury characterised occupying themselves in unexpected, sometimes generic types like the whore or the flatterer as well inexplicable, pursuits. He wrote down what as more specific types ranging from a French cook to appeared to him the truth, but it is often the a “braggadochio Welshman”. Similarly, John Earle’s truth of poetry rather than the truth of science. Microcosmographie (1628) offers characters that range from weak, plausible, sceptical, blunt and worldly This,f is o course, the way Powell discloses his wise men to a handsome hostess, a tobacco seller world and the characters that inhabit it. and a grave divine. Among the developing cast of English characters some were obviously more con- scientious in their attention to duty and obligation Character, time and the dance than others. he discriminating judgment of the character Disquieting for social order, but stimulating for sketch, combined with the “masterly stroke of the satirist, were characters that dissembled and dis- tThe maxim” in the context of time passing, informs simulated. The hypocrite, for example, who “cometh Powell’s depiction of characters dancing and inexo- nearest to virtue and is the worst of vices”, infected rably falling prey to the English disease. the English body politic. There were more specific The seventeenth-century treatment of character manifestations of this infection in the character of offered Powell a creative escape from the dilemma the puritan, who, “should the church enjoyne cleane the modern English novelist faced and which Nick shirts, hee were lousie”, or the “she precise-hypo- Jenkins broods over in The Acceptance World. Jenkins crite”, “who accounts nothing Vices but Superstition considers “the complexity of writing a novel about and an Oath, and thinkes Adultery a lesse sinne, English life, a subject difficult enough to handle then to sweare by my Truely”. Different, but equally with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, disturbing to the civil peace, were the zealot and even more to convey the inner truth of the things the fanatic. The latter, Samuel Butler explained, conveyed”. More precisely, it is the “intricacies of “chooses himself one of the elect” and was “mad social life [that] make English habits unyielding to with too little” learning. simplification, while understatement and irony—in As the genre developed there evolved not only a which all classes of this island converse—upset the

92 Quadrant October 2017 Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance normal emphasis of reported speech”. of a man chronically overburdened, absolutely Even to describe his own character was “hard borne down by sensitive emotional stresses. … even the bare facts had an almost unreal, almost All the same in contrasting the two of them satirical ring” when presented in the manner of the there was something to be said for Moreland’s great nineteenth-century Russian novels: over-simplification.

“I was born in the city of L—— , the son of an Prejudice and the “imprese” are particularly at infantry officer …” To convey much that was work in the portrait of Kenneth Widmerpool. The relevant to the reader’s mind by such phrases name itself derived from a particularly officious new was in this country hardly possible. Too many model army officer described in Lucy Hutchinson’s factors had to be taken into consideration. English Civil War memoir The Life of Colonel Understatement, too, had its own banality … Hutchinson. Recalling Widmerpool’s early interest encourag[ing] evasion of unpalatable facts. in golf many years later, Jenkins observes:

Jenkins speculates about how he might describe he made not the smallest acknowledgement of the difference between the poet Mark Members, his the feat of memory on my part … The illusion Oxford contemporary, and himself. Viewed from a that egoists will be pleased, or flattered by interest sociological perspective, both “might reasonably be taken in their habits persists throughout life; considered almost identical units of the same organ- whereas, in fact, persons like Widmerpool, in ism”. They “were both about the same age, had been complete subjection to the ego, are, by nature of at the same university and were committed to the that infirmity, prevented from supposing that the same profession of literature”. The way out of his minds of others could possibly be occupied by any difficulty comes via the seventeenth-century notion subject far distant from the egoist’s own affairs. of character capturing its essence in an “imprese or short emblem”. In Jenkins’s case, the writer’s Later, Jenkins’s own prejudice prevents him from prejudice: appreciating how Widmerpool’s status altered over time. Thus, Jenkins’s Eton friend Peter Templer, might prove the very element through which describing Widmerpool’s place in the City’s accept- to capture and pin down unequivocally the ance world, no longer views him as a figure of school- otherwise elusive nature of what was of boy fun, but “crystallised” into “a City acquaintance interest, discarding by its selective power the … as a normal vehicle for the transaction of busi- empty unprofitable shell making up that side ness; perhaps even one particularly useful”. of Members untranslatable in terms of art; The prejudicial sketch extends to minor char- concentrating his final essence, his position, as it acters. Powell captures the figure of the Field- were, in eternity, into the medium of words. Marshal in Normandy in 1944 through eccentric self-presentation: Powell captures all his characters in this manner. Thus the painter Ralph Barnby belonged “in a the eyes were deep set and icy cold. You thought group” defined by will and power. He enjoyed “the at once of an animal … Did the features, in fact, uncomplicated, direct powers of attack that often suggest, some mythical beast, say one of those accompany a gift for painting”. More precisely, encountered in Alice in Wonderland full of “Like Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, he set awkward questions and downright statements? store ‘upon what terms’ he possessed a woman seeking a relationship in which sensuality merged Referenceo t English wars fought in Flanders in with power, rather than engaging in their habitual the Tudor–Stuart period, not Proustian recollec- conflict.” Hugh Moreland, whose character is tions of Balbec, further reinforce the English char- defined in antithesis to Barnby, asks him, “if he did acter and context. Jenkins recalls that Philip Sidney not find most women extraordinarily unsensual”. had died at Zutphen, his character like a monk Barnby replies that he “never noticed”. “I suppose,” who “submitted himself to the military way of life, said Moreland, “had you asked Lloyd George, because he thought it right rather than because it ‘Don’t you think politics rather corrupt?’ he might appealed to him”. have made the same reply.” Barnby, as Jenkins However, it is the Field-Marshal’s concern with explains: fashion, another theme of Burton and of character writers more generally, that establishes the figure. would n not i the least have endorsed this Introducing a group of allied officers to the Field- picture of himself. His own version was that Marshal, Jenkins observes:

Quadrant October 2017 93 Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance

There was a moment’s pause when we stood at a writer “who reminds one that human life always ease. Then the Field-Marshal appeared from remains the same”. one of the caravans. He had his hands in his In the post-war, winter novels, the melanchol- pockets, but removed them as he approached. ic’s love of death becomes an all-pervasive theme. It was instantaneously clear that he no longer Burton offers the means to anatomise Trapnel’s chose to wear his pullover showing under his doomed passion for Pamela Widmerpool. Pamela battledress blouse. Indeed, he had by now, it Widmerpool loves death, makes love like “a corpse” was revealed, invented a form of battledress and the thanatic impulse eventually overwhelms particular to himself, neatly tailored. her. Trapnel joins “the dynasty of Pamela’s dead lovers”. Sex and death were conjoined in her char- In fact, “from the very beginning of his fame, acter. Her death could “only be looked upon as a the Field-Marshal had never ignored Chips sacrifice—of herself to herself”. Lovell’s often repeated reminder that it was a tai- Trapnel’s American biographer, Russell lor’s war”. Lovell’s aphorism highlights, too, the Gwinnett, shares Pamela’s melancholic habit and role that maxims play in Powell’s ironic definition this forms the basis of their mutual attraction. of character. Thus Peter Templer, himself not averse Gwinnett was “more than a little taken with mor- to the practice, avers that, “Adulterers are always tality”. Indeed, “had he been an English under- asking the courts for discretion … when as a rule graduate, his rooms would have been equipped discretion is the last thing they’ve been generous with black candles, skulls, the odour of incense. He with themselves.” Barnby observes likes Death. The atmosphere is not of the novelist St John Clark that the American tradition. The taste he “fell in love with himself at an has told against him.” Gwinnett early age”, to which Jenkins replies: Barnby observes of prefaces his biography of Trapnel “The trouble with self-love is that it the novelist St John with an ambivalent quotation from seems so often unrequited.” Barnby Clark that he “ fell in Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy. contends: “All women are stimu- Jenkins observes, “Tourneur, as lated by the news that any wife has love with himself at Gwinnett himself, was obsessed left any husband”, whilst Moreland an early age”, to which with Death.” The subject “enrap- finds that “Seduction is to do and tures” Gwinnett; commenting say / The banal thing in the banal Jenkins replies: “The on his biography of Trapnel, he way”. Charles Stringham cap- trouble with self-love observes, “Death as well as Life tures his relationship with Peggy is that it seems so can have its beauty.” Gwinnett later Stepney in the phrase, “Coronets quarrels with Scorpio Murtlock, a on the table napkins, but no kind often unrequited.” character equally preoccupied with hearts between the sheets”. Dicky death, over their conflicting inter- Umfraville finds that “growing old pretation of death’s representation. is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you One of the tenets of Murtlock’s occult sect, which haven’t committed”. Meanwhile, Chandler captures took its understanding of hearing secret harmonies the minor figure Rupert Wise in the phrase, “He from the seventeenth-century alchemist Thomas may have a profile like Apollo, but he’s got a mind Vaughan, was that “Harmony, Power, Death, are all like Hampstead Garden Suburb.” more or less synonymous—not Desire and Death”. Gwinnett disapproved. He resented “Death being, axims determine Powell’s conversational so to speak, removed from the romantic associations approach to character development. Equally of Love … to be prostituted to the vulgar purposes JMacobean is the role that melancholy plays in char- of Power—pseudo-magical power at that”. acter development in the Dance. Minor and major characters suffer from melancholy as a habit, in he Jacobean influence further extends to the Burton’s precise sense, of “a chronic and continuate role time plays in the construction of the novel. disease, a settled humour”, not a passing “disposi- HTilary Spurling writes that “the deepest satisfac- tion”. Stringham, Moreland and Johnny Pardoe all tion” in the novel “comes less from character and succumb, the latter sitting “in the library for weeks incident than from the structure that supports at a time just brooding”. Stringham by contrast them both”, namely, time. In the Poussin painting, finds release, if not relief, in the alcoholic indul- Spurling maintains, Time “smiles a sinister smile gence of “an afternoon man”. Moreland thinks he as well he may considering that in life as in art he might die of nostalgia. He had always been fond of has the upper hand”. Time is to Powell “what space The Anatomy of Melancholy and found in Ben Jonson is to the painter. Almost any character will serve to

94 Quadrant October 2017 Anthony Powell’s Very English Dance illustrate time’s role.” erly time. Nothing could be more Jacobean. This is persuasive, but inaccurate. It overlooks To conclude, Powell creates a fictional memoir- Powell’s distinctly seventeenth-century approach ist (Nick) and the Dance is an imaginative creation to time. Time for seventeenth-century writers and depiction of his memory. Nick has to order his was circular and contingent. Time is tyrannical, memories and interrogate them sequentially. Thus but ultimately beholden to the arbitrary march of rather than plot driving the narrative, character “events”. Jenkins observes that friendship and love and events determine the dance of time. Character bore within them “something more fundamentally emerges and allows patterns to be discerned—“but destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, in a sense nothing in life is planned—or everything the all-obliterating march of events”. This was, as is—because in the dance every step is ultimately Jenkins later observes, “a writer’s time rather than the corollary of the step before; the consequence of a painter’s time”. Indeed, the seventeenth-century being the kind of person one chances to be”. Such understanding, as Jenkins explains, comes from an understanding of character eschews the mod- Ariosto. This conception, in fact, is diametrically ernist, introspective approach found in the work of opposed to Poussin’s “unhurried” image of Time. Joyce or Proust and instead demonstrates the influ- Instead Ariosto’s, and by extension, Powell’s time ence of Aubrey, Burton and the Jacobean preoccu- is “far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless”. pation with character, time and death. “The naked ancient” is “in an eternally breathless scramble with himself”, collecting “from the Fates David Martin Jones is Visiting Professor in the small metal tablets … then mov[ing] off at the War Studies Department, King’s College, London. double to dump these identity discs in the waters Lana Starkey is a postgraduate student in the of Oblivion”. While the Dance opens in Poussin’s School of Communications and Arts, and the unhurried time, the mood “genial and composed”, Centre for the History of Emotions, University of it ultimately closes in a Burtonian torrent of writ- Queensland.

Casualty

My father arrived safely home From the carnage of Korea, Surviving the frigid fox-holes, Lunar shadows like bayonets, An acetylene ice of starlight, Where any silhouette was lethal, A luminous bleed on the snow-drift, A stark landscape mortar-pocked, Screaming tsunamis of infantry In shock-waves across the Yalu. It was the dark nicotine stain Along his gaunt trigger-finger, Like an ironic campaign tattoo, That finally ushered in death, Years on in the marl of History, Killed by the fume that warmed him, Like cruel shrapnel in his breath, In an under-belly of the world, A deadly sub-Arctic of politics, In his teenage years to heaven.

Rod Moran

Quadrant October 2017 95 Two sides to my head

I invited two lots of acquaintances to my party, The saner and more hygienic writers that I knew And also some lawyers that I knew. Complete Apartheid ruled. Afterwards, members of both groups Came to me and said: “We didn’t know there were still people like that.”

The tourist has instruction

In Hamburg, one fine day in 1973 I was sitting at a sidewalk café table drinking coffee. I saw an elderly gentleman looking for a seat, And invited him to join me. He spoke good English, though accented, And had old-fashioned good manners. We got to talking, ranged over a number of things, and he Plainly had a learned, intellectually lively mind, A professor, I thought. I was too tactful to talk about the war (“Don’t mention ... etc” Thank you, John Cleese) But our conversation drifted that way (I swear, I didn’t start it!) Hitler, he said, knew in his heart it was lost When the first great assault on Russia failed. “We all knew the Wehrmacht had to keep advancing or it was finished. And then America came in.” After that, he said, Hitler was behaving like a prisoner, Without hope or free-will, “And I know how prisoners behave. On top of that, Himmler was irrational. He wanted an SS State, With fuel from fields of dandelions and bakehouse chimney fumes, And as soon as we dared dabble in nuclear research, He, very fortunately, had the Party press denounce it: ‘Jewish physics raises its head again.’” “We?” I asked, and “Very fortunately? How do you know these things?” “Oh,” he said, with a strange expression. “I know them well. I’m Albert Speer.”

Hal G.P. Colebatch

96 Quadrant October 2017 Alan Gould

The Rightful King and the King Innate

he good king will have a character symbiotic raises for all beholders an expectation of spectacle with his rank, the very reflexes of his intel- only to disappoint anticipation at the last minute by ligence will govern a disposition to cultivate converting the penalty to differing terms of exile. So tThe unitary in his realm, quell the divisive when he the pomp is witnessed to be frivolous. is in exchange with his subjects. And when these “Some apparent danger,” Gaunt has told him. In reflexes are awry in his nature it is immediately fairness, one might ask how any ruler would decide apparent because his behaviour is inalienable from for the best in such an awkward crisis where the seat its civil effect. This is as true for Elizabeth II as it is of malice is unclear but the insecurity is very real. for Shakespeare’s Plantagenets. Might a shrewd ruler like Henry V, or Claudius of Richard II begins when the young king chal- Elsinore, have sent one lord off on embassy here, lenges his uncle, John of Gaunt, to bring forth his the other there, letting the air settle at home mean- son, Bolingbroke, to make good a charge of treach- while? Richard is confronted with the intractable ery against another lord, Mowbray. Here is a tricky detail by which crises arise and instead of practical- accusation that will grievously harm the Realm’s ity chooses the course of onus. For the effect of exile concord from the outset of the play. The king must is to push discord beyond the sea so that, Freudian arbitrate in circumstances where the accuser is his fashion, it rankles by being put at remove. own cousin, and the energy of vilification between Both the banishment penalty, and the gratuitous the two lords suggests animosities transferred from manner by which it is applied, form the wellspring the foreplay. It is rancour between patrician families of Richard’s troubles and downfall and, with great and, for all the evidence of actual treachery seems nicety, Shakespeare places before this sovereign a slight, the crisis nonetheless combines being dire very real dilemma with which authority has to deal with being murky. In addition, John of Gaunt is and an equally particularised depiction of the weak- the Realm’s most venerable counsellor, but now frail ness with which this authority responds. Bad king- with age: ship is on display, effective kingship is present by inference. The inalienable requirement of Richard’s Richard: Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded office was that his intelligence should recognise the him, specifics of the crisis, and his imagination encom- If he appeal the Duke on ancient malice, pass an effective resolution for them. Why so? Or worthily, as a good subject should, Because that is what kingship does. The young king On some known ground of treachery in him? lacks character for this, where the unstated prem- Gaunt: As near as I could sift him on that iss of Richard II is the indissolubility of character argument, and kingship, and the critical edge of our watch On some apparent danger seen in him on how the drama unfolds is this witness of how Aimed at your Highness, no inveterate malice. Shakespeare illumines the pathos of mismatch in (I.i.9–14) Richard to a nicety. At the heart of this mismatch is Richard’s uncer- “No inveterate malice,” counsels Gaunt. In rais- tain self-possession. This young man, strangely ing the issue, Richard botches its resolution. Worse, distrait from the actuality of his Realm, lacks a cen- he plays for an effect on his beholders that is gratui- tring purpose. Summoned to Gaunt’s deathbed, he tous. By decreeing Bolingbroke will fight Mowbray cynically tells his cronies how he hopes they will in mortal combat at Coventry, by allowing much arrive too late and, in so doing, discloses himself pomp to attend preparations for this fight, the king to be not waggish but paltry. Arrived, he cuts short

Quadrant October 2017 97 The Rightful King and the King Innate

Gaunt’s admonitions where regal tact might have Richard is called degenerate by Northumberland heard out the dying servant of his forefathers. Next, (II.i.262) though it is intriguing to pin down the and stupidly, Richard sequestrates the dead man’s pathos in which this degeneracy lives. His cajoling, estate to pay for his Irish war. Being a king, all this his seizing upon advantage as with Gaunt’s estate, imprudent behaviour is witnessed, so all must effect seem wrong-footed more than malevolent. His his power to draw allegiance. quizzing of Aumerle over Bolingbroke’s emotions suggests a man puzzled and intrigued by how others he mismatch might be well illumined by com- express love towards their homeland. This voyeurism paring three reactions. The first is Gaunt’s cele- is a shrewd piece of life-drawing on Shakespeare’s Tbrated paean to England, and the old man’s patriotic part in the depiction of insecurity. But it is Richard’s passion is one of the decisive emotions of the play. soliloquy in prison at Pomfret Castle that I single as Here Gaunt centres himself, discloses the value my third reaction and the sharpest counterpart to from which his entire life’s service has depended. Gaunt’s paean: It is precisely this value one expects as the foremost badge of kingship, namely a complete identification I have been studying how I might compare with Realm, as we will see in Henry V. But here This prison where I live unto the world: that identification is found, not in the monarch, but And for because the world is populous, in the state’s most eminent trustee, and there is no And here is not a creature but myself, doubting its sincerity: I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out: My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, My soul the father, and these two beget This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, A generation of still-breeding thoughts; This other Eden, demi-paradise, And these same thoughts people this little world, This fortress built by Nature for herself In humours like the people of this world. Against infection and the hand of war, (V.v.1–10) This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea … Thiss i the victim-king’s finest speech. It dis- (II.i.40ff) closes an intellect as enabled by a fabulist imagining as it is disabled in its power to resolve practicalities. The second reaction we find in Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son, who is observed (by a jealous Richard) Thus play I in one person many people, to show a “humble and familiar courtesy” to the And none contented. common people: (V.v.31–32)

As were our England in reversion his, The pretended life suits his nature and makes it And he our subjects’ next degree in hope. entirely unsuitable for kingship because he cannot (I.iv.35–36) integrate that “many people” into a singular person that carries authority. He has the self-absorption of Certainly, when Bolingbroke meets Percy we the child, fanciful, small in its compass but intense note the usurping king’s knack of allowing another in its fancifulness. We have seen his distraction in to know he values them: how he gives more attention to the formalities of the joust than to the deadliness of the dispute between Andsy a m fortune ripens with thy love, Bolingbroke and Mowbray. We have seen his cal- It shall be still thy true love’s recompense: low prying in quizzing Aumerle on Bolingbroke’s My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus emotions at the point of exile. And in the two first seals it. scenes of Act III, Bolingbroke before Bristol Castle, (II.iii.48–50) Richard before Barkloughly, Bolingbroke’s peremp- tory attendance to policy may be usefully contrasted Here,f o course, Bolingbroke’s sincerity has the with the king’s attendance to his own sensibility. ambiguity of one already campaigning for office, Most pathetic is the collapse of spirit when he again, this ambiguity noted by Richard himself in accepts defeat: his cousin when, voyeur-like, he presses Aumerle for Bolingbroke’s emotions as he passes into exile. Let’s f talk o worms and graves and epitaphs … Let us recall, it will be Bolingbroke’s son, Hal, who For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground will skewer Percy at Shrewsbury in the ensuing And tell sad stories of the death of kings: Plantagenet play. … For you have but mistook me all this while:

98 Quadrant October 2017 The Rightful King and the King Innate

I live with bread like you, feel want, chief of a constituted authority when it is upside Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, down. How can you say to me, I am a king. Then Richard himself is brought before Boling­ (III.ii.145ff) broke at Westminster Hall for a public affirmation of his decision to abdicate office. His image of the Its i worth recalling how, before Agincourt, crown as a “deep well / That owes two buckets” Henry V gives voice to similar sentiments. “O hard (IV.i.183–84) shows an intelligence poetically ingen- condition”, this “model” king says, mediating the ious. It owns a resource of wit by which to feed his tension between his human vulnerability and the self-pity until, as it were, his self-pity is able to feed qualities required by his rank. But the crucial dif- on itself. It is an intelligence most vibrant when it ference between his meditation and Richard’s here sounds the depths of his own misery, as though is that Henry’s is private to himself, and his fitness downfall were his natural place. With shrewd, to be king lies in the knowledge that this agonising affecting argument he draws our compassion for tension must be borne alone by all men who accept his plight, likening himself to Christ delivered up rank; his spirit does not quail before the burden, he to the Cross, but he makes no hint he wants actual needs no witness to the fact he bears it. By contrast, restitution of his office. He seeks to be affective that Richard must demonstrate his sensibility to an he might be seen to be affected. This is a very par- audience on the topic. One of his listeners, Carlisle, ticularised victim. His defence of solemnised king- grasps the problem of morale immediately: ship does indeed have its effect, not in restoring him to rank, but in successfully planting an ill-morale My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes, that will possess his successor, Henry IV, through- But presently prevent the ways to wail. out his reign, and also unnerve Henry’s successor, To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength of whose princely japes we get a first glimpse in Gives in your weakness strength unto your foe. this play (V.iii.1ff). The deposed king’s gift lies in (III.ii.178–81) fomenting ill-morale.

The scene that follows at Flint Castle where hen Gaunt farewells his son into exile he Richard places himself in the usurper’s hands is suggests to him he should “pretend” in a peculiar one indeed, and might well fascinate Worder to make the absence more tolerable: “Think a modern animal behaviourist. Bolingbroke, the not the king did banish thee, / But thou the king” strong party, places himself in the obeisant posture (I.iii.278–79). The son’s reply shows an intelligence before Richard, the weak party. Simultaneously impatient with the fanciful: Richard, the anointed power, places himself in the submissive posture before the strong party and, O who can hold a fire in his hand in their exchanges, Shakespeare follows finely the By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? guardedness of Bolingbroke as he deals with effec- … O no! The apprehension of the good tive, but unsolemnised authority, and the exhi- Gives but the greater feeling of the worse. bitionist prostration of Richard as he asserts his (I.iii.293ff) formal but empty authority. So my tribute to the dramatist extends to how finely in the poetry he Then,s a events unfold, Bolingbroke returns, has comprehended the pathos in two very distinct England polarises, Richard’s allies either desert psyches in an era of unstable state power. He offers him or lose their heads. Bolingbroke’s level appreci- grist for the animal behaviourist in the same breath ation of the real, his decisiveness, and our sense that he offers grist for historian and psychologist watch- policy is ever before his attention, whether overt or ing the very dynamic by which rigid protocols of covert, place him unequivocally as the fitter king. authority are getting tested against natural chal- But Richard, inescapably, is the anointed king and lenge in a drama lifted closely from actual history. we are not allowed to dismiss his legitimacy in this. Carlisle’s stalwart argument defending the cause When Bolingbroke summarily beheads Bushy and of rightful kingship (IV.i.114ff) casts prophecies Green at Bristol, he disturbs our natural sympathy of insurrection and civil disorder that will prove for that fitness. To redeem his sequestered property accurate in the six plays for which Richard II is the was a fair pretext for his return from banishment, opener. But Carlisle’s defence comes immediately but to appropriate a judicial authority at Bristol after its champion, the reigning king, has ceded his (III.i.1ff) is to exercise a state power he does not throne to the usurper. It earns the old lord prompt have, being un-anointed. arrest for treason by an authority incompetent to We should be clear what this term “anointed” ordain this. Truly Shakespeare shows us the mis- signifies because both Richard and Bolingbroke

Quadrant October 2017 99 The Rightful King and the King Innate believen i it. A monarch has the powers of state for- to pardon her son’s intended treachery while the malised in his person by state ceremony, a procedure father pleads for his punishment. The new reign has that stabilises them in a general recognition and commenced with plots of assassination implicat- thereby prevents judicial process from being arbi- ing the Realm’s leading family very similar to that trary. At Bristol we witness the moment of usurpa- Richard confronted in the play’s first scene. tion. Both Bolingbroke and his son, Hal, know this More treachery and insurrection will follow in to have been the case, and it will trouble them for the ensuing plays, their theme an unrest in how the ensuing three plays, culminating in Hal’s prayer loyalty towards a ruler who is both rightful and in Henry V that the usurpation not be used by for- naturalised to the job might be at ease with itself. tune as a nemesis for his chances at Agincourt. It is clear England needed a change of monarch. So this theme whereby an individual courts But Richard has been foolish rather than vicious, the pretended life as a fanciful overlay to make and while his foolishness might merit being his dismal situation more bearable bears also upon deposed, does it merit his physical extinction just the central issue of the play, namely the distinc- because no satisfactory resolution of his rightful- tion between the anointed and the ness to the throne can be made pretender, between the rightful while he lives? Thirty-three years and the fittest. Across his plays, after Shakespeare’s death, England Shakespeare scrutinises the idea of Bolingbroke’s level did indeed behead its anointed kingship as it touches ten different appreciation of the king and lived in unease for a dec- British kings. These include the five ade thereafter. Richard’s murder is Plantagenet monarchs from Richard real, his decisiveness, vile. The new king deals summar- II to Richard III, as well as Lear, and our sense that ily with the murderer, and is not to Cymbeline, Macbeth, John and policy is ever before be ingratiated by the crime’s con- Henry VIII from their respective venience. The play concludes, not dramas. In each, there is the ten- his attention, whether with a prospect of peace, but with sion between character as it arises overt or covert, place anguished conscience. among laity in the chance dramas of life, and character as it matches him unequivocally as e read a Shakespeare play for or does not match the special cir- the fitter king. But its poetic power, which is to cumstances of rank at this kingly Richard, inescapably, Wsay the wholeness of Life that arises summit of the human order in The from its compass of personae and the Chain of Being. is the anointed king. situations that draw out their char- Richard II was first performed in acters. Implicit in these characters 1595. At the time England’s Tudor in Richard II is the attitude to hon- queen was growing old and lacked a clear successor, our, whether that of personal reputation or blood- so this play, and the histories composed at around kindred. Bolingbroke, for instance, holds reputation the same time, suggest Shakespeare meditated as an abstract ideal, a value higher than the pos- acutely upon that adaptation of human character to session of life itself. He will risk mortal combat at the clinching office of sovereign. Like Richard III, Coventry to prove he tells no lies in his devotion Richard II is denominated a “tragedy”, and again to his monarch’s security, and the cancellation of like that play, we understand the tragic misfortune the fight cheats this dearly cherished estimation of to belong to the Realm rather than the ruler. When himself, nourishing the underpinning animosities England got Richard III as king, the Realm’s trag- of the play. Similarly the Duchess of Gloucester’s edy was to endure the man’s fascination with his appeal to Gaunt to avenge her husband’s murder own daemon. When England got Richard II the illumines this rigidity as it applies to blood-kindred: Realm’s tragedy was to secure in that office an intel- ligence distrait from any instinct for judgment or Ah Gaunt, his blood was thine, that bed, that decision at a time when its powerful families were womb, in unrest. That metal, that self mold that fashioned thee, Can one detect a small element of didacticism in Made him a man, and though thou livest and Richard II? I think so. The play abounds in premo- breathest, nition. Carlisle and Richard tell us of the disorder Yet art thou slain in him; thou dost consent that will come to the Realm as a result of a subverted In some large measure to thy father’s death, solemnised authority, and hard upon Bolingbroke’s In that thou see thy wretched brother die, coronation we witness this in the locked chamber at Who was the model of thy father’s life. Windsor. Here a mother pleads with the new king (I.ii.9ff)

100 Quadrant October 2017 The Rightful King and the King Innate

The argument is shrewd; you lose presence, a o court t calmly weigh evidence. The effect on both for yourself and your paternity, for so long society therefore is that civil order can be so as you outlive an unavenged wrong done to your easily subverted when forces polarise on either kin. Reputation and kinship allegiance serve to side of a perceived breach of honour. So the sheer perpetuate difference rather than reconcile party. rigidity and clumsiness of dynastic change that Richard II begins an epoch of cruel social schism, Shakespeare depicts in Richard II might well have the Wars of the Roses, that Shakespeare will left its Elizabethan audience wondering whether a follow over five plays, and this further story is less fraught and more naturalised process for the finely incipient in this play. continuity of state authority might be possible, Cherished the ethos may be of personal and particularly as their much-loved monarch aged family reputation coming out of the medieval with no successor. mind, but its rigidity meant that once you introduce questions of honour to a quarrel you Alan Gould’s ninth novel, a picaresque titled The make it impossible for either side to step back. Poets’ Stairwell, is published by Black Pepper Press Bolingbroke and the Duchess of York both needed in Melbourne.

Ag

Argentum. Seventh metal of antiquity. Noble metal of alchemists. Represented by crescent moon. Less malleable than gold, high polish. Thirty pieces sold Jesus. Muhammad wore it on his little finger. Da Vinci, Durer and Raphael drew with it. Trembles in photographic film, x-rays, mirrors, bandages, dental amalgams, catheters, solder, infrared telescopes, reactor control rods, solar cells, flutes, trumpets. The greatest of all electrical conductors. Eatable flakes known as Vark. Too much taken internally produces argyria: blue skin. Kills bacteria in vitro. Three forms of deterioration: black tarnish (in air), pale yellow (in water), purple (in light). Dissolves in cyanide.

Joe Dolce

Quadrant October 2017 101 Ivan Head

A Brief Note on Poetics in Cormac McCarthy

ormac McCarthy is best known for No to re-arrange the layout of McCarthy’s paragraph to Country for Old Men (made into a film show its poetic force. Here is the experiment: that can genuinely terrify the audience) aCnd The Road, a bleak tale of perseverance in post- Trout at End-time apocalyptic America. I simply wish to draw attention to one feature of Once there were McCarthy’s writing: his minimalism and cut-down, brook trout in the streams cut-back style. It is a poetics akin to Lincoln in the in the mountains. Gettysburg Address. It is as if he is a sculptor of You could see them standing in the amber current words, excising excess to give a bare-bones text that where the white edges of their fins wimpled is the more powerful for being spare. softly in the flows. As I finished reading The Road, that story of They smelled of moss in your hand. a journey across a greyed-out America, I felt that Polished and muscular and torsional. the last paragraph had morphed into a poem and On their backs were vermiculate patterns I wondered how intentional this was, and whether that were maps of the world in its becoming. McCarthy had deliberately camouflaged verse in Maps and mazes. this way. Of a thing which could not be put back. Here is the paragraph, as presented at the very Not be made right again. end, inviting, as it does, mental images of colour and In the deep glens where they lived all things design into a destroyed world. were older than man and they hummed of mystery. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing I suggest that the readability of McCarthy lies in in the amber current where the white edges his poetics of excision and the brilliance achieved by of their fins wimpled softly in the flows. They not wasting the reader’s mind with endless wagon- smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and laden words that descend to the chatter of excess. muscular and torsional. On their backs were His minimalism is a fine poetry and a stanza as vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world much as a paragraph. in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right Dr Ivan Head retires at the end of this year after again. In the deep glens where they lived all twenty-two years as warden of St Paul’s College at the things were older than man and they hummed University of Sydney. of mystery.

This paragraph also contains a densely compacted Neil McDonald has been unable to complete his film theological vision. At the end of the novel of apoca- column for this issue owing to computer trouble. lypse it can be read as the negativity of Cain’s mur- He will resume his column in the November issue. der of Abel re-invented as end-time loss wired into the genes. I don’t wish to pursue that. I want to try

102 Quadrant October 2017 Tinnitus

Im a the bug in your brain The Woes of Ganymede that shatters your peace with syncopated violence. I am a catamite of Jove’s. I am the noise of the world; He likes me best wivout me cloves. whoever hears me He likes me lithe. He likes me lissom. will never walk in silence. He likes ter grab me balls ter kiss ’em. He likes ter grab me balls ter bite ’em. That’s why we first became an item. A Day in the Lie At dinnertime, before we dish up, He doesn’t want ter bash the bishop. Thissr i ye suit and yer tie. He wants me prone wivout a stitch on, This is yer glimpse of the sky. Up on the table in the kitchen, This is yer walk in the rain. And sets up such a frantic rhythm This is yer dash for the train. I can’t say no or reason with ’im. This is yer train to the city. This is yer town without pity. John Whitworth This is yer piece of the pie. This is yer day in the lie.

Damien Balassone

Little Chris in the Garden

Thiss i the boy in the sun in the garden and These are the sights and the sounds of the summer, The sighing of grasses, the tinkling of water, The murmur of flowers, the creaking of beetles, The buzzing of bees and the flutter of butterflies. These are his sisters and friends of his sisters and This is the song of them singing, the song of The wheels of the bus going round, going round, going Round, going round, going round, going round In a sussurant pattern of sound all around in a Sussurant pattern of sound. This is the boy in his shadowless summer and This is this sight and the sound of forever, The boy in his garden of gold.

John Whitworth

Quadrant October 2017 103 S t ory

Two Removals Gary Furnell

got the trolley for the body out of the van while Rhonda, at the nursing home’s front door entry console, buzzed the night staff. In the daytime we’d go to a side door, but it was after 11 p.m. and the elderly were unlikely to be around. Rhonda leaned close to the speaker. “Hi, funeral home staff here to remove a resident.” A young Filipina woman—more like a girl—met us at the door. I looked at her badge: Maria, Registered Nurse. I pushed the trolley as we followed her through the Iquiet c orridors. The ancient citizenry were tucked safely in bed. The occasional room had a television on; I could hear the murmur behind the closed doors. “Any family?” Rhonda asked, sotto voce. “One brother. He’s arriving tomorrow from Canberra.” Maria tapped lightly on a door, and we went in. I glanced at the name on the door. I closed the door behind us. The room looked a little like a shrine: on a dressing table there was a half-metre-high plastic statue of Mary, lit from the inside. A wooden cross was mounted over the bed- head, and a statuette of Christ, crucified, was on the bedside chest of drawers. An older woman, small and neatly dressed in black slacks and a green cardigan, rose from a chair on the other side of the bed. She closed a book; it looked like a collection of prayers or psalms. She bent over the deceased, kissed her forehead, said “Adieu, Sister,” smiled at Rhonda and me, then left the room. Hanging from the back of the door, in a dry-cleaner’s plastic wrap, was a grey skirt, white blouse, grey jacket and headscarf. “Was this woman a nun?” Rhonda asked Maria. “A Josephite Sister.” The deceased woman was old and pale. Her eyes were closed. Her shoulder-length white hair had been parted in the middle and brushed smooth, wisps of her long fringe tucked girlishly behind her ears. I guessed that her face had been washed and maybe a little face powder had been applied. If she had false teeth, they were in, which helped the face to look normal. Her pale pink nightie had long sleeves and her hands were clasped on her chest, outside the clean blanket and the crisp white sheet. A rosary was entwined in her fingers, together with a crimson hibiscus flower. She looked merely asleep, yet ready at an instant for a rigorous inspection or a defining appointment. Maria had her hand on the dead woman’s shoulder. “She looks beautiful,” Rhonda said. I was glad Rhonda was good at the personal stuff; it freed me to focus on the physical work. I put on disposable gloves and passed a pair to Rhonda. I wrote the nun’s name on

104 Quadrant October 2017 Story a plastic band and wrapped it around her wrist. There was still a little warmth in her arm. Rhonda lifted the nun’s collar: there was a silver necklace with a silver cross set with blue stones. “Any other valuables?” she asked. “No, the rosary and necklace is all. She wanted to be buried holding the rosary and with the necklace.” I wrote those details on our form. Maria gave me a post-it note with the brother’s name and telephone number. I stuck it to our form. Tomorrow, Baz, our boss, would contact him and start arranging the funeral. We wouldn’t take the clothes with us tonight; they could be picked up, or delivered to the funeral home, in a day or two. I unzipped from end to end the trolley’s tough velour cover, took out the grey plastic body bag and moved the trolley parallel to the bed. Maria—a smart girl as well as pretty—had anticipated what we would do and raised the bed so it was just slightly higher than our trolley: it’s easier to shift a body across and down than across and up. Rhonda and I spread the open body bag on top of the trolley. Rhonda pulled the bedclothes aside. The nun wasn’t obese or big, but her weight was concentrated around her midriff, hips and thighs. “How about we move her to the side of the bed first, then go from there?” I said. Rhonda, at the end of the bed, clasped the nun’s white fleshy ankles. Maria stayed on the other side of the bed, but got partly up on the bed to gain leverage. I pushed away the pillow as I extended my arms under the nun’s neck and shoulders. I was careful to cradle her head so it didn’t flop. It was like I was giving her a hug. “On three. One, two, shift.” That was easy enough. I pulled the trolley hard against the bed and put my knee behind it so it wouldn’t move. “And after three, onto the trolley.” It was smoothly done. Maria was slim but strong. I zipped up the body bag and strapped it firmly to the trolley, then zipped closed the velour cover while Maria and Rhonda checked details on the Life Extinction form. “Good to go,” Rhonda said to me. She turned to Maria, “We’ll take good care of her.” We went back through the quiet corridors and out the door. Rhonda opened the van’s back door and I pushed the heavy trolley hard inside so the trolley would collapse but still slide fully into the van. I drove, and Rhonda organised the forms to be left on Baz’s desk. “That was straightforward,” Rhonda said. “Yeah. It makes a difference when the death is expected and everyone is organised. I assume the funeral service’ll be a High Mass.” “What does that mean?” “They’ll have communion with the service.” “Are you Catholic?” Rhonda asked. “No, but I’m heading in that direction.” Rhonda didn’t comment. After a minute or two, she said, “You don’t see nuns around any more.” “There’s one less now. Unfortunately, they’re dying out—literally. Can you imagine today’s young woman taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience?” “Is that what they do?” “Yep. That’s real counter-culture. I admire her.” “You could tell she was loved by the way they’d cared for her body. You don’t see that very often.” “I noticed that too.”

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We drove to the funeral home a few kilometres away. We opened the rear gates and unlocked the service doors as quietly as we could so we didn’t wake the neighbourhood. I got the nun out of the van and pushed the trolley to our desk beside the coolroom. We filed the paperwork to be attended by Baz in the morning. I used a black texta to write, in large letters, the name on the body bag and then added a sticker on which I detailed the valuables: a silver cross necklace and rosary beads. In the coolroom, a low shelf was vacant; there were seven other bodies in their bags keeping cold on the tiered metal shelves. We lifted the nun off the trolley into place. A final push on the hips slid her fully onto her “bunk”. Rhonda passed me a plastic block which I placed under the nun’s head to prevent egress of fluids from the lungs or stomach. Her head was next to someone else’s feet. “It’s getting crowded in there,” Rhonda said as she turned off the light and shut the door. “We’ll all be in trouble if they start fussing and fighting.” We put the trolley back in the van. We turned off the lights, locked the doors and shut the gates. It was after 12.30. Rhonda’s phone rang, loud in the quiet night. She saw who the caller was and swore. I waited, sure it was Baz with another removal for us. I listened to Rhonda’s responses and put the scene together: we had a coroner’s case, in a unit in a suburb with lots of older Housing Commission houses and flats. “Giddy-up, cowboy, here we go again,” Rhonda said, as she put the address in her phone. We got back in the van and left for our next job. “I prefer removals like we just did,” Rhonda said. “The coroner jobs make me anxious.” “Don’t worry, Rhonny. We can handle it.” Rhonda was older than me; late middle-aged. She was a softie but competent and professional. I liked her and thought we made a good team. We drove through the night and arrived at a street where people had multiple dinged-up cars in their front yards but, apparently, no lawn-mowers. We went slowly and Rhonda spotted a police van outside an older, red-brick two-storey block of flats. There was no front fence or garden, so if we needed to we could drive the van right up to the doors. “We’d better see if the police have finished their work first,” I suggested. “They must love it when we arrive: we take the body and they can leave the scene.” “This late in the night they’ll be so excited to see us they’ll fire their guns in the air.” As we walked to the open double-front doors I saw a woman lying face down in a hallway. A policeman was taking photographs of her hands; another policeman was writing in a blue folder. Rhonda introduced us. The police were expecting us; they said they were nearly finished. The forearms of both young officers were covered in tattoos. The unit wasn’t a mess, but had worn-out furniture and far too much of it. We’d have to move a torn lounge chair and a pile of Hollywood blockbuster DVDs to get the trolley beside the woman. The police had already put a yellow plastic tag on her wrist. She didn’t especially smell. I watched as they checked her arms and ankles for needle marks. The woman was wearing a big man’s T-shirt and a pair of grey grubby trackpants. She was barefoot. “Anything we need to be careful of?” I asked. “We haven’t found needles, but probable hepatitis.” “What’s her story?” Rhonda said. “Long-term addict. We know of her. Put anything into her body she could get her hands on. The bloke who rents the place said he met her at the pub, asked her back here.

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He says he went to work this morning and came back in the evening to find her lying here. He’s at the station. We can’t rule out foul play so we treat it as a crime scene and she goes to the coroner for investigation.” “Any family to contact about the funeral?” Rhonda said. “It seems not, but we’ll explore that further at the station.” The police pushed her shirt up—no bra—to her armpits and her trackpants and underpants down to her knees. They took photographs of her back, buttocks and thighs. I assumed sexual assault was part of the foul play they couldn’t rule out. They pulled her clothes back into approximate place and rolled her over. “Oh, she’s young!” Rhonda said. “Thirty-five,” one officer said. They took a few more photographs. The woman had brown shoulder-length hair, a slim figure, and could have been good-looking, but her face and neck had a crimson pallour that concerned me. “Why is she that colour?” “She’s been lying face down for six to eight hours. The blood has pooled and started to break down.” The two policemen stood. “I think we’re done for that part of it.” “Yep, she’s all yours.” Rhonda conferred with one of the policemen and got our paperwork started. I went to the van, drove it across the grass to get close to the doors, unloaded the trolley and pushed it inside. I didn’t see any of the block residents but I’d noticed lights upstairs and thought for sure we’d be watched once we were outside. I closed the doors behind me so anyone walking or driving past wouldn’t see the indignity of the woman or us at work. Rhonda and I put on gloves. “Can we move this chair?” Rhonda asked the police. We didn’t want to mess with their crime scene. “Yeah, no problem.” We made room for the trolley and lowered it. We spread an open body bag along the length of the woman. I took hold of a cold arm and rolled her onto her side as Rhonda pushed the bag under her shoulders, ribcage, hips and legs. I let gravity roll her back and with a little more lifting and shifting we had her centred, face up, on the bag. We zipped it up, making sure the zipper was near her head to make access easy for the hospital emergency doctor who would inspect her and provide the death certificate. We lifted the bag, using its tough loop handles, onto the trolley and strapped her in. A policeman gave Rhonda a Search Form that stated there were no valuables on the deceased. We loaded her and drove across town to the hospital where we’d start the process that allowed us to leave the woman in their morgue before she was moved to the coroner’s. We wouldn’t get back home to our beds before 2.30 or 3 a.m. In the van, Rhonda asked me, “How’re you going?” “I’m tired.” “Dead tired?” I put my hand on my cheek and then the side of my throat. “Nah. I’m still warm and I’ve got a pulse.” “Let’s hope they’re not busy at the hospital and we can get in and out quickly.” “Even when they’re not busy some of them seem too busy to help us,” I said. “The police are busy. Those cops told me they’ve all been flat out with assaults, domestic violence, burglaries, home invasions, ice freakouts, drug busts and drug deaths. This is the third one that team’s done today.” “The third? Jeez, they’ve got a tough gig.”

Quadrant October 2017 107 Story

“Makes you wonder where our society is going.” I tapped the sealed panel that separated the cabin from our cargo. “This part of society is going to the morgue. In a way, we’re witnesses to the consequences of a growing confusion about life.” We drove through dark streets where people, mostly asleep, were oblivious to our presence, our work, and the things we saw. Rhonda yawned as we pulled into Emergency. The good old girl was tired too.

Gary Furnell, a frequent contributor, lives in rural New South Wales.

Christmas Eve among the Bristlecone Pines

You traverse the snow-swept switchbacks following the trail of your Norse grandfather, a back country skier fascinated by the bristlecones, the ancient pines that shelter bighorns from the winds. Far below Denver’s lights stretch away to Colorado Springs, and on Christmas Eve the traffic flow westward on I 70 brings winter pilgrims from as far away as Chattanooga. In times past the liturgical day started at sunset, with the faithful gathering at a high place to give thanks while the heavens swung around the North Star, that celestial body your grandfather called Odin’s eye. Over in Aspen and Telluride yuletide feasting has begun, and the snow angels, with all their certainties and style, mix with mere mortals who came to leave behind their year of regrets. Your grandfather said that the business of living had to do with simplicity and that wasn’t simple, and that the beauty of the Rocky Mountains reflected the glory of its maker. You came here yearning for answers beyond your reach, for everything within the cycle of faith and the firmament, to an alpine grove already a thousand years old when the Emperor Titus laid siege to Jerusalem.

Dan Guenther

108 Quadrant October 2017 S t ory

A Tale of Two Pities Derek Fenton

he two incidents were separated by over sixty years and yet the elastic which connected them was as strong as a steel cable. The first one took place when he was only eight years old. He was riding his bicycle home from swimming training and saw a policeman ahead of him on the cycle path. The black constable signalled him to stop and as he got closer he saw the body on the path. It wasn’t covered, and as he stopped, he stared at it, fascinated. THe wouldn’t have been able to articulate why he was fascinated or the emotions he was feeling, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the black body’s face. It was the first dead person he had seen, but it didn’t horrify him as much as a white person’s body would have. When he was very young, he had been cared for by a black woman who always bathed him in love and care. He returned it in a way that his conditioning permitted, but when other white people were around, it was as if a barrier had been raised between them. Now, as he stared at the greying face resting on a crimson pillow, he felt small waves of pity which were overlapped by larger ones of detachment and horror. “Go home baasie,” the constable said softly, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “This is not good for a young boy to see.” “Ja okay boy, ngiyabonga,” he said. He remembered, after many years, the Ndebele word for “Thank you”. He had climbed onto his bicycle and ridden off unsteadily, his mind a jumble of thoughts and emotions. He never told anyone about the incident although it often visited him over the years.

The second incident occurred in Australia, sixty-three years later, at a coloured friend’s birthday picnic beside the Swan River. He was good friends with her family and their friends, who were also from Zimbabwe, and they had often discussed the chasm that had existed between his white tribe and the no-man’s-land the coloured people had occupied in the days when it was Rhodesia. He liked to think of himself as having shed the skin of prejudice he had worn as a child and teenager. His coloured friends had often said how comfortable they felt with him and his wife in discussing how hard it had been for them living in Africa under the whites. He often winced when white Africans had unwittingly hurt them by what they said, or by the demeanour they were unaware they still possessed. He sat in his camp chair drinking beer and eating the wonderful food brought to the picnic. In the background, a group of coloured and white people played boules

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animatedly, while children scampered around laughing. He was wandering around in his mind when a little dark-skinned boy of about three rushed up to his mum, his face aglow with joy. He was transfixed by the little boy’s face, when suddenly a wave of conflicting emotions washed over him. A feeling akin to revulsion welled up from somewhere he didn’t know existed and, at once, he lost his breath. He was engulfed by a feeling of abject horror and shame at this feeling, which had only lasted a millisecond, but which took him far, far back. Instantly it was replaced by a deep empathy for the boy and all he represented. His eyes filled with tears and the shame he felt crushed his shoulders and chest. “Why didn’t I cover his face with my towel?” he whispered. “Why didn’t I cover his face?” “What did you say?” the boy’s father asked. “Nothing, nothing. It’s just too many beers talking!” The incident would stay with him, just as the other one had.

Derek Fenton, who lives in Perth, is a contributor of some years’ standing.

Household Scenario

One y way m father ruled the roost Was to sound threatening when he said To questioners “you want to know The ins and outs of a magpie’s arse- Hole”, or asked God to stiffen crows. My mother, never quite inured To these outbursts, though frequent, could Van Diemen’s Land Road Be roused from moods dark as their plumes To claim they cleaned up road-kill from Strange moment on the road today His car. Aware it wouldn’t work When I discovered that the stone To be close to the wives of men I’d nicely judged to kick along He as mine manager employed, Was tissue paper in a ball. She made a pet of “Jim” who’d lost Instead of meeting, as it struck, A leg and stumped, a pirate tamed Resistance to its weight, my foot By tit-bits from her brimming hand, Kept going, light as air, as though Companionably near, and drew At last I’d walked free of my un- From the bread-winner, keeper of ­Loved self, discarded, flown off like The cheque book and sole signatory, The wad of rubbish out of sight. “What wicked waste!” She must have felt In that male-shrivelled, carping world Graeme Hetherington As cursed as his black birds, and quipped In anger to him that she wished, If only it were possible, To fly away at meal’s end with Her friend before he was wiped out.

110 Quadrant October 2017 sweetness & l i g h t

Tim Blair

f you were a child of the 1970s—especially if Ford, GM and Chrysler simply slapped the crud- you were a car-obsessed child from Melbourne’s est pollution-limiting tackle on their enormous V8 western suburbs—Detroit, Michigan, held a engines, resulting in cars that simultaneously deliv- pIowerful allure. ered woeful mileage and miserable power outputs. That was the city where Ford, General Motors Seven-litre V8s of that period typically returned and Chrysler were born, and produced vehicles nine miles per gallon and generated less than 200 that seemed magically potent and advanced com- horsepower. pared to anything on Australian roads. In truth, Honda, then a global automotive minnow, took this was a triumph of marketing over reality. The a different, far more detailed approach. Its wily first time I drove one of my hero cars, a 1968 Ford engineers reshaped and re-sculpted their engines’ Mustang, I discovered that Detroit engineers of the combustion chambers—a tactic largely overlooked era evidently measured steering play in yards rather by Detroit. Those mid-1970s Honda engines turned than millimetres. Porridge was apparently a crucial out to be so clean-burning that they didn’t need component in those cars’ suspension design. any power-sapping anti-pollution equipment. But no matter. Detroit was the place. And buyers responded. They loved Honda’s Note the past tense. Detroit’s automotive indus- zesty, free-spinning little power-plants. In 1972, try and Detroit itself have been in steep decline Honda sold a total of just 20,355 vehicles through- ever since the 1970s. Both the city and General out the US. By 1979, that annual sales figure had Motors declared bankruptcy at various points. climbed to 353,291. Last year Honda showrooms Before the 1970s even ended, Chrysler required sold 1,476,582 new cars to happy customers. To government loan guarantees worth $1.5 billion just give that number a local perspective, it is nearly to keep running. From a population peak of nearly half a million more cars than were sold in total in two million in 1950, Detroit’s population has since Australia during 2016. fallen to below 700,000. A few years ago, following When they couldn’t compete technically, the global economic crisis, you could buy an entire Detroit’s Big Three sought government assistance. street of houses in Detroit for just $10. Seriously. Again, this ended in disaster. A 25 per cent tax on Motor city became motionless. Motown went imported light trucks was intended to protect the down. Some of this was due to events beyond products constructed by Ford, GM and Chrysler. Detroit’s control. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo— They didn’t anticipate a countermove by Subaru, essentially an anti-Jewish act of economic ter- however, which simply bolted a pair of small seats rorism, and a hint of things to come from Arab into the cargo beds of its small Brat utilities. Under nations—sent US petrol prices soaring and pre- the law, those cheap and easily-removed seats con- sented challenges automotive manufacturers could verted the Subaru from a light truck to a passenger not meet. The mighty (at least in terms of straight- vehicle—and rendered it ineligible for the truck line speed) Mustang gave way to the economy- tax. themed Mustang II, an atrocity people mainly As with Honda, the market responded posi- purchased just so they could drive it directly from tively. In 1977, the year before the Brat was intro- the showroom to the wrecking yard. duced, Subaru sold just 80,826 vehicles. One year Other wounds were entirely, and sometimes later that figure improved by nearly 30 per cent hilariously, self-inflicted. Nimble Japanese manufac- (one Brat buyer was future US President Ronald turers frequently wrong-footed Detroit’s larger and Reagan). Last year Subaru sold more than 600,000 much wealthier car-makers. Take the Big Three’s new cars in the US—about three times the number response to mid-1970s anti-pollution legislation. sold by former leading GM brand Pontiac during

Quadrant October 2017 111 sweetness & light its final year, before the nameplate was discontinued into the yard. He’s resorted to simply walking up to in 2009. her and handing stuff over, which is useful practice When a city is as dependent upon a single indus- for paying her future university fees. try as is Detroit, its fortunes rise and fall with that His case recalls that of former New York Mets industry. Today Detroit is attempting the latest in a baseball catcher Mackey Sasser, who couldn’t return series of revivals. The base for my automotive hajj in the ball with any immediacy or accuracy to his August was a symbol of that revival, Westin’s excel- pitcher. “It’s unbelievable,” Sasser told the New York lent Book Cadillac Hotel—the tallest hotel on earth Times in 1991. “I mean, it’s just weird. It’s been a when it was opened in 1924, and lately treated to a living hell.” At the peak of his difficulties, Sasser $200 million refit following two decades of closure. received this note from a well-meaning ten-year-old The downtown area surrounding the Book softball player: “Just get it and throw it. That’s what Cadillac could do with a refit itself. Detroit fre- I do.” quently tops lists of the most dangerous cities in Another friend, an excellent cook, once suffered the US. By the end of July, 136 people had been through six months of the egg-cracking yips. Her murdered this year in Detroit or its suburbs. Before previously celebrated omelettes became an ordeal hitting Michigan’s beleaguered capital, I’d told a involving eggs that were either not cracked at all or drinking companion in Houston of my travel plans. were smashed all over the kitchen. “Why the hell would anyone go there?” he asked. During winter, I came down with the car park- Given my companion was previously homeless and ing yips. The onset of this was inexplicable, particu- now makes a living delivering pizza by bicycle, his larly considering my daily driver is a car so small disdain provides a decent idea of where in the US it barely counts as adult transport. Yet there I was, social structure Detroit presently fits. taking two or three shots at lining the thing up in Yet it is impossible not to like the place. The supermarket carparks and drawing pitying stares people are friendly and talk Detroit up at every from fellow shoppers. opportunity. A constant theme is the city’s gigan- Every case of the yips has one thing in common: tic contribution to armaments manufacturing in the they do not occur in any endeavour requiring sig- Second World War. At one point Ford alone was nificant force. All are to do with low-input, subtle churning out B-24 bombers at a rate of one per hour. tasks. Sasser could belt a baseball out of a stadium Say what you will about Detroit’s collapse, but with- but couldn’t lob it a few yards. My cooking friend out those bombers there’d be even more German could disassemble a crayfish but was stymied by and Japanese cars on roads worldwide. eggshells. And I never suffered a moment of indeci- The Henry Ford Museum is a particular sion or awkwardness on a freeway. delight. It’s a two-day deal, at least, and rivals the Indecision and awkwardness … what Prime Smithsonian in its scope. I suppose it says some- Minister do those words bring to mind? Malcolm thing when a city’s primary attraction is dedicated Turnbull proved very adept at the brutish aspect of to examining the past, but put that aside. Detroit politics, expertly undermining Tony Abbott and has a past that deserves examination. knifing his way into leadership. Since then, how- Or even more than that. Detroit built the ever, we’ve had two years of policy yips. Turnbull industrialised free West and then saved it. Detroit is a twenty-four-seven yipping machine, rendered deserves eternal honour. incapable by any situation calling for deftness of touch. He’s still the same politician who in opposi- he “yips” are an anxiety-related condition most tion gave us the Godwin Grech debacle. commonly associated with the game of golf— As it happens, most of Turnbull’s woes might be Tspecifically the putting green, where players who solved not by subtlety but by impact. Instead of yip- are otherwise confident and free-swinging suddenly ping around with Snowy River modifications, take find themselves unable to cope with golf’s more a hefty swing with new coal-fired power plants and delicate requirements. free-for-all fracking. Take a chunk out of our debt But the yips also occur in other fields. A friend by halving the ABC’s budget. Do the same with lately developed the yips when tossing soft toys to welfare. his infant daughter. Instead of landing in her hands, There are probably more areas where Turnbull various objects are either falling several feet short, could liberate himself of the yips. I’ll list them just smacking her in the head or flying clear past her and as soon as I get out of this damn carpark.

112 Quadrant October 2017

3 A 3011_V5F 3 R renodesign.com.au

Thee- Br ak Up of Australia THE Real agenda Behind Aboriginal recognition Keith Windschuttle

The Hidden Agenda of The Academic Assault Aboriginal Sovereignty on n the Co stitution

Australian voters are not being told the truth University-based lawyers are misleading the about the proposal for constitutional recognition of Australian people by claiming our Constitution was indigenous people. The goal of Aboriginal political drafted to exclude Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists today is to gain ‘sovereignty’ and create peoples from the Australian nation. This is a myth. a black state, equivalent to the existing states. At Federation in 1901, our Constitution made Its territory, comprising all land defined as native Australia the most democratic country in the world. title, will soon amount to more than 60 per cent The great majority of Aboriginal people have always of the whole Australian continent. had the same political rights as other Australians, Constitutional recognition, if passed, would be including the right to vote. Claims that the its ‘launching pad’. Recognition will not make our Constitution denied them full citizenship are nation complete; it will divide us permanently. political fabrications.

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